Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killers Revealed

by Robert Graysmith

  “We did not search the residence at his mother of 32 Fresno Street in Vallejo,” wrote Armstrong later. “We relied on his brother, Ron, who was cooperating with the investigation, to look through Allen’s room in the basement of this residence. . . . Ron had informed us that he had observed some cryptogram-type materials, but was unsure if they were related to Zodiac. No further action was taken regarding a search of 32 Fresno and the basement there.”

  Whoever Zodiac was, he had a cellar where he did his secret and devilish work. “What you do not know,” he said in an November 9, 1969, letter to the Chronicle, “is whether the death machine is at the sight or whether it is being stored in my basement for further use.” Police, dumbfounded by the bizarre threats of the “death machine” letter, said at the time, “We have reason to believe he’s a maniac. It appears to us that he’s killing just for the thrill of killing.” On April 20, 1970, Zodiac complained he had been “swamped out by the rain we had a while back.” Rain might flood a basement room. A burst pipe or water heater would cause a similar inundation. No one checked to see if the house on Fresno Street had been flooded. But what if Zodiac had not meant a proper basement? Mobile-home dwellers call the area beneath the trailer a “basement.” While it is illegal to store things there, it is done all the time. Sometimes a rain puddle on the road becomes a swamp under a trailer. Leigh had a trailer off-wheels in an another county, and for over a year had been squirreling away things under it. The problem was that Toschi and Armstrong were not only unaware of the trailer’s location, but its existence.

  “Allen’s got to have someplace where he can stash and hide things and be certain no cop will ever know where he has everything,” Mulanax told Toschi.

  “What he’s going to show us is just things on the surface,” replied Toschi. “And we know that he’s laughing at us on the inside.”

  Mulanax nodded.

  Monday, November 22, 1971

  Leigh was approved for his Red Cross Certificate for Standard First Aid. Since he was constantly boating in a sailing club, and considering taking up air jumping over water, it was a useful skill. Meanwhile in San Francisco, Toschi and Armstrong had made scant progress in the three and a half months since the questioning at the oil refinery. “Apparently,” Toschi told me, “Allen’s family still harbored grave misgivings about him. The brother and sister-in-law were very concerned because they see that Allen is still walking around and don’t know how thoroughly the Vallejo Police Department went into the investigation. What we didn’t know was that they were building up courage to speak to us.

  “I could always tell Ken Narlow was a little disturbed because San Francisco was getting all the big play in the media. We were getting more work too. Which we didn’t need. But it was because Armstrong and I were getting so much media attention that Ron and Karen later felt right in calling us. And it put me in a very precarious position. I didn’t want anyone thinking we were trying to monopolize the case. My God, we had enough work to do on our own without making more work out of another jurisdiction. We were getting so many tips and phone calls just from San Francisco. People calling him ‘the San Francisco Zodiac killer,’ when there’re multi-counties involved. Zodiac came to us for more attention. He wanted to see his name there.” More than once Toschi wondered, “Why?”

  The situation was worse than on the surface. Every three weeks Toschi and Armstrong also had a load of brand-new homicides to crack. Unknown to them, at that time, Allen was no longer in Vallejo. The morning of November 22, he had traveled south to Torrance, where Don Cheney lived, perhaps for a confrontation. Long after, I asked Cheney, “Do you have any idea why Leigh visited Torrance on November 22, 1971?” There was a gasp of surprise. “If I had known about it at the time, it would have worried me,” Cheney said. “And yet, though I was always listed down in Southern California, I never got one crank phone call or threat after police interviewed Leigh.”

  Tuesday, November 23, 1971

  Panzarella never realized Allen was in Torrance. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Panzarella was a cool customer. He hadn’t been scared when Zodiac wrote the L.A. Times, even though he suspected Allen was the author. While he was in town, Leigh got into enough mischief on Hawthorne Boulevard to be arrested for disturbing the peace. Cheney still considered Zodiac’s connections to unknown murders in Southern California as possible and Zodiac’s connection to Allen as “very probable.” Though Allen had ties to the area, most of his movements down south were a mystery, at least to the police.

  Wednesday, November 24, 1971

  At times the Vallejo P.D. had a sense that the SFPD was trying to freeze them out and collar Zodiac all by themselves. “Vallejo is small potatoes compared to San Francisco,” Detective Bawart told me, “but when you take and look at the homicide division in San Francisco, they’re like anything else in police work. They divide up all the murder cases. One homicide detective there is working about the same amount of cases as one homicide detective in Vallejo. It’s grueling.”

  And in San Francisco, Toschi was equally unsure he was getting everything Vallejo knew. “My thoughts were,” he explained, “when they would say, ‘Well, we talked to this person and that person,’ my mind was always like a minute ahead. I was saying to myself, ‘Did you really?’ Because when I said I talked to somebody, you can bet all your good money on it I did. I would never lie about that.” He began to fear the Zodiac information highway might be a one-way street. And that was just the way Zodiac liked it. The killer preferred to strike in zones of confused jurisdiction—different counties, on borderlines, and in unincorporated wilderness areas. He counted on adjoining departments working against each other, not sharing information—the more the merrier. It was a big case, a competitive investigation. Everyone wanted a piece of it and whoever solved it would be the Ace of Detectives. Zodiac, with his huge ego, counted on the egos of policemen to allow him to continue his deadly work.

  Armstrong and Toschi could not get Leigh Allen off their minds, and sought to jump-start their investigation. They needed another tip. After such a promising beginning, Toschi studied the growing face of the moon. He could almost hear Zodiac’s laughter—the laughter of Satan. And the rustle of that terrible black costume.

  4

  arthur leigh allen

  Arthur Leigh Allen, born in Honolulu, Hawaii, December 18, 1933, was a Sagittarius (November 22-December 21). His zodiac sign was The Archer, and he became an expert with a bow and arrow. While Zodiac wore glasses, possibly as a disguise, Leigh rarely did (though the DMV required he wear lenses to drive). In 1964 Leigh weighed 185 pounds, but within three years his weight had ballooned drastically. The photo on his driver’s license [#3B672352], taken on October 13, 1967, depicted a moonfaced thirty-three-year-old whose weight now yo-yoed between 230 and 250 pounds. Allen, in 1967, listed his address simply as a post office box in Burson.

  As for Leigh’s checkered educational record, he truly was a “professional student.” He attended Vallejo Senior High School, which shared the same building on Amador Street as the junior college. Across the street at 801 Nebraska Street stood The Plunge, a Vallejo community swimming center also shared by high school and junior college students. There, a slender, good-looking Allen, a member of the wrestling team, toiled at the pool as a popular lifeguard from 1950 through his graduation in 1951 and a short time after. “Leigh was a hell of a diver,” one student recalled, “and drove a Cadillac.” Allen, during this period, became intensely jealous of his friend, Robert Emmett, who was not only captain of the Vallejo High School swimming team, but Leigh’s diving coach.

  “I knew Leigh my last two years of high school and part of my junior college year,” his close friend, Kay, told me.“I lived in Carquinez and my folks, about that time, bought a house in town and I became a ‘townie.’ My dad worked as a fireman, then at Mare Island. Leigh started offering me a lift to and from school and soon was taking any number of our friends in his Cadillac. In fact, I learned to change
my first tire on that car. Leigh came out of the house one time from visiting. He says, ‘Kay, have you ever changed a flat before?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, there’s no time like the present,’ he said, then sat and supervised.

  “Other times we’d go to the pool. Leigh going up the ladder for a high dive would cause laughter because he was built sort of pear-shaped and he would go up the ladder like a woman would. There would be a lot of snickering in the crowd. And so he would walk to the end of the board like he was going to make his dive. He called it a ‘Change Your Mind Dive.’ He would go up, hit the board, turn and do a back flip, landing back on the board as if he had had second thoughts. Then he would suddenly shoot up in a two and a half forward somersault, cutting the water below without a ripple. That gymnastic dive got the crowd’s attention fast. They didn’t laugh anymore! He could also start a front dive, do it backing up from the board and end up doing a back dive, but that was really hard and he missed that quite often.

  “Leigh cut quite a figure with his Cadillac, his trick dives, his white dog, Frosty, and Petunia, a skunk who was not de-scented. What he really liked to talk about with me was music and plays, anything from comedy to farce, mysteries to Gilbert and Sullivan.” Kay assumed Leigh was gay as he rarely dated. When he did go out, he brought along his father. “Leigh would give a call and we’d take off to the movies together,” she recalled, “Leigh’s father was very gracious and took me to symphonies and plays with them. I knew the father from ’53 through ’56, a very, very gentle man. I met Leigh’s mother only a couple of times. She never made herself visible. I saw her at swim meets. I liked to go and look at the guys. Leigh was extremely intelligent, almost scary sometimes. He was a bright fellow, but his brother Ron was the golden boy. His mother wouldn’t have much to do with Leigh. I wasn’t ever privy to the fights, but I was privy to the cold shoulders. Commander Allen would ask her if she wanted to go along with us and she’d snap, ‘Why?’ Sometimes Ron went with us and I would have thought she would have been glad to go. Sometimes Leigh spoke of a girl named Bobbie who had ‘broken his heart.’ Bobbie was Leigh’s first big love, and he used to just talk in glowing colors about her. She was the love of his life.”

  Bobbie’s daughter later told me of her mother’s friendship with Leigh Allen. “She was a diver whose picture often appeared in Vallejo papers in the sports section between 1952 to 1957,” she said. “Sometimes Allen’s picture was alongside hers in the paper. I think he was a platform diver and a wrestler. Very clumsy walk when walking down the diving board, he looked terrible until he left the board and dove. Then he was very graceful. But when walking he was terribly lumbering. He had a funny hip. In case you don’t already know.” Harold Huffman, Leigh’s childhood friend, thought Leigh’s fluctuating weight caused the limp.

  Leigh attended Vallejo Junior College, majoring in the liberal arts, and became All-American Diving Champ there. On September 18, 1954, he enrolled at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. During the 1950s and 1960s Cal Poly San Luis Obispo was affiliated with Cal Poly Pomona, where Don Cheney, Sandy Panzarella, and Leigh’s brother, Ron, studied. Leigh’s pal, Harold Huffman, was already down there attending USC and coaching every sport he could. For awhile Leigh had difficulty choosing between an engineering or physical education major. Since his math skills proved too meager for engineering, he decided to focus on physical education. Ultimately, he settled on elementary education as his major. On June 16, 1956, at the end of his term, he used his summer break to enlist in the Navy.

  He received his associate of arts degree from Vallejo Junior College in 1957. He returned to Cal Poly from January 1959 until June 13, 1959, and excelled. He became the State College Trampoline Champion for Central California and Central California Spear Fishing Champ. On July 27, 1959, Allen applied at the State Department of Education in Sacramento for a position, but by January 4, 1960, was back studying at San Luis Obispo. He remained until June 1960, when he began work at Hemet Mental Hospital only twenty miles from Riverside. One good thing had resulted from his brief Navy stint—he was able to study on the G.I. Bill at Cal Poly from January 1961 until March 1961.

  On June 19, 1961 he applied at the State Personnel Board in Sacramento as a psychiatric technical trainee, Department of Mental Hygiene, and briefly became a psychiatric teacher at Atascadero. There he became friendly with a convicted murderer who had been jailed for several years. He later said they exchanged samples of code. Allen graduated from Cal Poly with a bachelor’s in education (B.E.) on December 15, 1961. Only six units shy of a master’s degree, he seemed unable to finally sever his ties with college life. During this time, he owned hunting rifles, at least two .22-caliber pistols, and, true to his Zodiac sign of Sagittarius, a hunting bow and arrows.

  From 1959 to 1963, Leigh, still in the process of obtaining his teaching credentials, had various jobs. He taught fourth grade and P.E. at Santa Rosa School in Atascadero just north of Cal Poly. “I really enjoyed teaching elementary school kids,” he said. “My kids did well—one little girl in the third grade knew tenth-grade math by the time she graduated. My entire class could read at seventh-grade level. I sure loved working with elementary school kids.”

  Meanwhile, Panzarella, Cheney, and Leigh’s brother, Ron, were attending the Cal Poly campus in Pomona together. Panzarella’s major field of study was electronic engineering, Cheney’s was mechanical engineering, and Ron’s, landscape architecture. They shared a rented house to cut costs. “In 1961-1962,” Cheney afterward told me,“we all were living in a four-bedroom house with two students named Bill and Joe. We had two guys in the one larger bedroom—Ron and I slept there. Those were good times.

  “Ron had a good sense of humor, he was entertaining and a fun guy. Everyone liked him. He was a very easygoing guy and a notorious underachiever. He was very well laid back. He was brilliant in his landscape architecting work at school, but he didn’t keep his grade point average up. He passed some courses, but not with flying colors, so he had to stay at Cal Poly for quite a while so that he could get his average up to graduate. He would do very well in other courses, but he could never get around to taking the final. He dragged on and on. He never made it to early morning classes. He had an alarm clock—one of those Big Bens with the great big gongs on the top of it—that thing would ring, would run down and stop ringing, and he wouldn’t twitch.

  “Cal Poly Pomona was about two miles away to the west, and I rode a bike to school each day. Sandy graduated in the spring of 1964, but I never actually graduated. I should have graduated in the winter of 1964. I finished up and had a problem with my senior project and I wimped out on that, didn’t do it.

  “That house is where Sandy and I first met Leigh. It was 1962. I was still single then, and married Ann later that year. I remember that one time especially. Leigh had just rolled in there from Riverside. He had been attending sports car racing. He went every year for the big race they held down there in the early summer. I went with Ron and Leigh together one time. In fact, the only sporting events Leigh and I went to together were road racing. He frequented Laguna Seca, Vacaville, and Riverside. He was a student there. Leigh owned an Austin Healey and used to go to a driving school in Riverside; after taking those lessons he kept commuting down there for the races.”

  Friday, May 30, 1963

  Leigh Allen paid an unexpected visit to the house in Southern California. “I remember Leigh came down to visit us,” Panzarella told me. “Leigh was not living in the Pomona area, but had just come down to Pomona that weekend. I thought it was odd at the time. And he had a machete in the car. For no particular reason, he walked in without a word and slammed it into the counter and tried to scare everybody. One of my roommates, Joe Dandurand, was there. My ex-wife was there when it happened. Ron was somewhere in the house. That was just before I left at the end of the semester and Ron and I went and got a place together in Walnut. I still think about Leigh coming to Pomona to visit just before the boy and girl were murder
ed. That’s creepy.”

  Monday, June 3, 1963

  In the morning, Leigh curtailed his visit and started back to Atascadero, where Santa Rosa Elementary School was closing for the summer. He intended to pack up, then return to Vallejo that day. Heading north on Highway 101, on a direct line to Atascadero, he climbed from Ventura to Santa Barbara, passing Goleta, then El Capitan Beach, and closing on Refugio Beach. The Santa Ynez Mountains loomed to the northeast, and further east and far beyond—Los Padres National Forest. Sand blew across the divided blacktop and gulls wheeled in the sky. In places the north and south lanes were neighborly, running side by side with each other, but in spots they widened away. A gray mist swept in from the sea. “They’ve got me searching my memory for blank spots, for lapses,” Allen would say years later. Ahead he saw a turnout, just at the point where 101 leaves the beach. His eyes strayed over the divide to 101 southbound. Beyond was the beach. He was now three miles south of the Gaviota Tunnel.

  5

  robert domingos and linda edwards

  Monday, June 3, 1963

  Three miles south of the Gaviota Tunnel, an attractive teenage couple, Robert George Domingos and Linda Faye Edwards, swung onto an oak-lined turnout just off southbound 101. Domingos pulled his gray Pontiac over and the laughing couple piled out, radiant in their youth and promise. They had left home, ostensibly for a Lompoc High School seniors’ “Ditch Day” graduation party. Instead, the couple intended celebrating at the seashore. Thick bushes hid their car from passing north-bound traffic. However, any auto cruising southbound could spot the vehicle, an indication someone was down on the isolated beach.