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

by Robert Graysmith

  Monday, March 23, 1970

  At 3:00 A.M, forty minutes after she escaped from her kidnapper, Kathleen Johns filed a report with Stanislaus Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Ray Lovett. The pregnant woman and her baby girl had been abducted en route to Petaluma from her Compus Way, San Bernardino home. As with Bates, the interloper had gimmicked her Chevrolet wagon to trick her into his car. He conveyed Johns on a terror ride until she and her baby leaped from the moving car and hid in a field. He searched for them until the timely arrival of a passing trucker. Deputy Lovett later located her blazing auto on Highway 132, about one-quarter mile west of the Delta. The abductor had taken the time to replace a sabotaged tire, drive the car elsewhere, and torch it.

  The kidnapper drove a tan late-model vehicle, wore glasses, a dark ski jacket, and navy-blue bell-bottoms. Johns had recognized him as Zodiac from a wanted poster tacked to Lovett’s wall. He was thirty, stood five feet nine inches, and weighed 160—too light for Zodiac. “It was twenty-eight years ago,” Johns recalled recently, “and I perhaps wouldn’t know him now. . . . The calm voice—I remember it like it was yesterday. I don’t think you could live through something like that and forget.”

  Friday, July 24, 1970

  Zodiac belatedly claimed responsibility for the Johns abduction in a letter not published until October 12. On June 26 he had claimed to have shot SFPD Officer Richard Radetich, and that was a downright lie. It made Toschi wonder about his claims of a Riverside murder.

  6

  avery and the dark alley

  Saturday, October 24, 1970

  The Zodiac case was already affecting Chronicle reporter Paul Avery’s health. It would eventually destroy it. In the early morning hours he drove his car onto narrow little Mary Street. Mary lay in the shadow of the Chronicle and continued on northwest, running behind the Old Mint. Avery parked where Mary intersected Minna, the dank alley separating the Chronicle from the Examiner. It was a rough area and Minna at the time held a dubious honor. It was the site of more murders than any other place in the city. He was not gone long—from 12:40 A.M. until 1:40 A.M., but long enough. During that time he traversed a long, dimly lit corridor into the city room. The Chronicle was a huge three-story barnlike building with a tower at the Mission and Fifth Street corner. The quality of light was yellow-greenish at best. Beneath his feet Avery felt the tremble of tremendous presses grinding out an early morning edition. Teletype keys rattled nervously in a little room to his left—a ghost was on the line. Lines of rubber-cement pots, rows of battered old Smith-Coronas, and stacks of used photo zincs, copper-backed and etched with acid, crowded desktops.

  Avery filed a story, then returned to his car. The right vent window was smashed—the mark of an experienced booster. Only a few things were missing. His Wells Fargo checkbook, containing checks numbered 118 to 125, had been taken. His expensive Sony cassette tape recorder, which held an interview with a Zodiac tipster—a man with a muffled voice—was gone. Avery was concerned enough to call the police. Officers Gerald Derham and William Thiffault reported.

  It was then Avery noticed that his large gray briefcase, emblazoned with his initials, “P. A.,” had been stolen. He had stuffed that briefcase with a complete clipping file on Zodiac. He looked up and down the darkened street. It began to dawn on him how close the killer was. He seemed to be privy to reporter’s notes and Sunday features before they were published; he used newspaper Teletype paper and supplies that might had been purchased from Woolworth’s down the street. What if Zodiac were getting into the building late at night? The paper was a twenty-four-hour operation, but manned by a skeleton crew at night. Security in the building consisted of a guard at a tall desk on the Fifth Street entrance, but there were two sets of back stairs and two elevators that led to the editorial floor. Additionally, there was a passage between the Examiner and Chronicle that spanned Minna Street and allowed people to walk from one paper to the other. Zodiac was not just watching the hunters; he might be entering the paper at night.

  A Chronicle printer believed Zodiac actually worked there. “Many of the Zodiac cipher symbols are also printer’s proofreading marks,” he told me. “The Zodiac symbol itself is a proofreader’s mark used to line up corrections on a tissue overlay and for color registration. His method of numbering pages is also the printer’s method: 1/6, 2/6, one of six, two of six, etc. . . . to alert the typesetter and proofreader to follow the flow of copy. The arrows used on the bus diagrams are also printer’s arrows. Not just a line with an inverted ‘V,’ but with the ‘V’ filled in.

  “When Zodiac began writing his letters, the paper was attempting to enter the electronic age with a computer system known as the ‘Braegen.’ Rather than generating tape-punched copy for the Linotype machines on Fairchild TTS machines, copy was typed on IBM typewriters, then single-sheet-fed into scanners, which in turn generated tape sent to the Linotypes. The paper used for typing was narrow fan-fold cheap bond such as Zodiac used. Blue felt-tipped pens were provided to us (they would not reproduce on copy fed through the scanners) and used by the copy cutters for instructions and the typesetters for notes questioning spelling, continuity, and so on.”

  Chronicle editors eventually cast a jaundiced eye upon two former employees. The editors went over their employment records to see if any days off corresponded with Zodiac crimes and letters. One worker, suffering bouts of severe depression, had disappeared during the night shift, leaving behind a note for four years’ sick leave. The other vanished, leaving behind four payroll checks he never picked up.

  Monday, October 26, 1970

  In North Sacramento, two days after Avery’s files were stolen, twenty-eight-year-old court reporter and juvenile court aide Nancy M. Bennallack failed to show up at work. Friends discovered her bloody body, throat slashed, in her second-floor flat. The unknown killer had entered by a sliding glass door Miss Bennallack had left open so her cat could get in. She was engaged to be married on November 28. She had not been sexually assaulted. Her apartment was a half mile from Nurse Judith Hakari’s apartment. Hakari, twenty-three, had been kidnapped from in front of her North Area apartment after leaving her job at a local hospital. Her badly beaten body was found in a shallow grave in a remote section of Placer County. She too had not been sexually assaulted. Like Miss Bennallack, she was engaged to be married.

  Tuesday, October 27, 1970

  The next afternoon Zodiac mailed “Averly” a garishly decorated Halloween card signed “Your Secret Pal.” My comparison of an unaltered card demonstrated Zodiac had done considerable redrawing. He had carefully cut out and pasted a skeleton and an orange pumpkin to the card, painted staring eyes, and skillfully added brush lettering. It had taken him at least a day to prepare. “You can see how Zodiac must have taken delight in putting his own markings on the card,” Toschi told me.

  “Also, the ‘PEEK-A-BOO’ and the added printing on the card. All done by Zodiac.” The card, illustrated with a smiling skeleton giving Avery the high sign, was signed “Your Secret Pal.” Zodiac had painted a small number 14 on the skeletal right hand. Inside, he claimed victim “4-TEEN.” News of Bennallack’s death would not appear in the Chronicle until the following morning.

  Avery wrote Chief Al Nelder:

  “Due to the death threat mailed me by the so-called Zodiac killer, I whole-heartedly agree with the advice I have received from Armstrong and Toschi that discretion is the better part of valor and that I should carry a gun in order to protect myself should need arise. Therefore this is my formal request that your office issue me on a temporary basis a permit to carry a concealed weapon.”

  Nelder concurred, not only granting Avery authority to pack a .38-caliber revolver, but permission to practice on the police target range. Nelder’s consideration got Avery in hot water immediately. Around 9:45 P.M., patting the reassuring weight of the .38 in a concealed holster under his jacket, he waved good night to Night City Editor Steve Gavin. Avery retrieved his car from the multistory lot on Fifth Street and turned onto
Minna. At the corner of Sixth Street, twenty derelicts, peering from dark doorways and gloomy barroom entrances, watched intently. Avery’s headlights illuminated a one-sided struggle. Only ten feet away, two men were grappling. The first, making hard, thrusting motions from the waist, was armed with a hunting knife. The second, wounded in his chest, had doubled his belt around his fist as a shield and was backing up, warding off blows with his arms.

  Avery frantically honked his horn, but the fight continued. Worried about his own safety, he made a quick U-turn to the opposite side of Sixth. The knife man moved in as his victim finally toppled into the street. Avery, still honking and yelling, observed a drunk lurching up Sixth, supporting himself close against the dirty building fronts. As the wino weaved by, the knife man wheeled, rushed the drunk, and stabbed him too. In a pathetic attempt at self-defense, the drunk folded his arms over his heart. Anyone who crossed the knife man’s path was in peril.

  “Someone is going to be killed,” Avery thought, and slipped from his car, drawing his weapon as he crept closer. Halfway across Sixth Street, he shouted, “Drop the knife and get against the wall!” The knife man froze, then faced Avery. He raised his arms above his head and took a few halting steps in the reporter’s direction, fixing him with a glassy stare as he came. Avery repeated his command, locking eyes with him and leveling the gun until he heard, rather than saw, the bloody knife land at his feet. The knife man placed his palms against the front of 125 Sixth Street, a hotel. Avery yelled into the lobby to the desk clerk: “Call the cops!” In a minute a relatively well-dressed pensioner tottered to the door and said, “The police are on the way.” For the next five minutes Avery kept well back from his prisoner. Finally he heard the wail of a siren, a police car appeared, and two officers climbed out.

  “This guy just stabbed a couple of people—will you take over?”

  “Whose gun do you have?” said the senior officer.

  “It’s mine,” said Avery, producing his special police star. He explained the circumstances leading up to authority being granted for him to carry a gun. “You can check this up by giving the chief a call,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. I’m supposed to call Chief Nelder at ten o’clock on a Sunday night.”

  “Why don’t you call Armstrong or Toschi?”

  “You do it,” said the cop.

  Toschi vouched for Avery and everything was fine, except that the two victims had limped away into the night.

  “No victims,” said the cop, shrugging. “The best we can do is book him for brandishing a knife in a rude and threatening manner. Just misdemeanors.” No one was questioned and, since Avery ended up being the only witness, he signed a citizen’s complaint. Next morning, he got to the Hall of Justice by 10:30, but the knife man, sentence suspended, had already been released. “I didn’t exactly enjoy the role of policeman,” he told Nelder. “I’m worried how close I came to killing the guy. I kept looking at him and thinking if he comes at me with a knife, if it comes down to it, if it’s a matter of survival, I’m going to have to pull the trigger. I don’t think I ever really paused to consider before that by carrying a gun, I was putting myself in a position where sooner or later I’d have to use it. I’m going to get rid of it, Chief. The weight of that gun has gotten too heavy.” When Avery returned to his houseboat in Marin County, he hauled down the sheet of steel plate he had installed in the one window that faced a shadowed Sausalito street next to Gate 5. He felt sick and Zodiac had made him that way. Over time his lungs began to fail.

  7

  arthur leigh allen

  Friday, November 13, 1970

  A San Rafael graphologist analyzed Zodiac’s handprinting. “He is five feet eleven and one-half inches tall, sharp but not creative,” she speculated. “His hair is sparse and he may sometimes wear a wig or false beard. He may wear lenses on occasion. He may have a malformation or fault such as finger damage on his right hand. He puts himself under self-hypnosis consciously or unconsciously, and may know something of this in actual fact. He always believes that he is drowning, either by emotional pattern or literally by water or being overwhelmed by unpremeditated circumstance. May have boat or houseboat. Has probably scuba dived. Brain damage. Tissue damage from oxygen lack at birth or later, maybe from diving too long and running out of oxygen . . .” Zodiac had written, “Please help me I am drownding.”

  In the fall Leigh had begun attending Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, and rented a slot for his trailer in Santa Rosa. On Friday the thirteenth, Allen had a motorcycle accident while returning from Sacramento where, earlier in the day, someone murdered Santa Rosa resident Carol Beth Hilburn. She had last been seen at the Zodiac, an after-hours club on West Capitol Avenue frequented by members of motorcycle gangs. She had been wearing a jacket with the large yellow letters SANTA ROSA on the right side. Hilburn had been staying in Santa Rosa with her sister while studying to be an X-ray technician. On the left side of her slick, hip-length black jacket was her name, CAROL. She was the third attractive young woman to be killed in less than a year in Sacramento. Her nude, severely bludgeoned body was found in an isolated field near Dry Creek on the city’s northern edge. A car had dragged her into a field and left her face up. Her throat was then cut and she was beaten so savagely she was unrecognizable.

  That afternoon, both Paul Avery and Detective Sergeant Dave Bonine requested Sherwood Morrill conduct a comparison between handwriting samples from Zodiac and the Riverside printing received in the Bates case.

  Sunday, November 15, 1970

  Over the years a white Chevy Impala would make many appearances in the Zodiac case. A victim’s baby-sitter saw a round-faced watcher on Wallace Street in an “American made sedan, white with large windshield and out of state plates.” Three women at Lake Berryessa the day of the stabbings observed a suspicious man in a Chevrolet, “silver blue or ice blue in color, 1966, two-door sedan, full size car, quiet, very conservative, with California plates.” The Impala showed up again in Santa Rosa on November 15, 1970. At 4:00 A.M. a woman driver saw “a 1962-63 White Chevrolet” following her from a Santa Rosa post office. Shortly after, a “white Chevrolet Impala, sedan 1964,” followed a second woman on Mendocino Avenue and Chanate Road. At 5:10 A.M. a “white Chevy, 1963-64” tailgating a woman on Fourth Street was stopped by police and tried to speed off. The driver, a twenty-five-year-old Vallejo man, said he was lost and looking for way out of town. The officer escorted him out of town. The next day came a break in the case.

  Monday, November 16, 1970

  Morrill found a match, linking Zodiac’s printing with three “BATES HAD TO DIE” letters and a wavering blockprinted poem discovered in the Riverside College Library. Zodiac had carved a ghastly verse into a plywood-board study desktop with a blue ballpoint pen. The poem was probably written as early as January 1967, when the desk was stored in an unused college basement. “Sick of Living . . .” it began. Beneath the gory poem were the incised lower-case initials “R H.” Morrill checked over six thousand handwriting samples searching for a killer with those initials. “Most of those exemplars came from the Riverside College and military installations,” he told me. “They were all on microfilm, blown up, and I had a magnifier that I just slipped them under one after another. Now this is the weak link in the case—some of those registration certificates were typed.” Captain Cross was encouraged. “Well, it looks like we’re in business,” he said. The hunt for Zodiac was now statewide.

  In the early evening of November 16, Allen stood in the doorway of his trailer nursing his wounds, physical and emotional, past and present. He listened. The roar of traffic on Santa Rosa Avenue filled his head. He put on his white hat and locked the door to his trailer. He limped to his car and started the dusty old clunker. Night was falling.

  At 6:00 P.M. an employee at the Los Guilucos School for Girls, about eight miles from Santa Rosa, returned from shopping. She slowed for heavy oncoming traffic at the corner of Pythian Way and two-lane Sonoma Highway. Approaching the
narrow road for her turn, she flicked on her turn signal, slowed, and waited for two cars at the corner. As the second car passed by, a hand shot from the bushes. It fastened on her door handle. A face glared at her from the brush. It looked familiar. The features resembled the Zodiac wanted poster. “My impression was of light-colored hair, somewhat receding, though not bald,” she recalled. “He was dressed in a navy-blue jacket and I judged him to be about thirty-five and wearing dark-rimmed glasses.” She stepped on the throttle, executed a sharp left turn, and raced another quarter mile to the apartment complex where she lived. “I feel,” she said, “that the man at the corner and the man sketched in the paper are one and the same.”

  Thursday, November 19, 1970

  The Riverside P.D. held a secret Zodiac conference. While Armstrong remained behind, Toschi, Narlow, and Nicolai flew southward. “Sometimes we split up,” said Toschi. “‘Do you want to do this?’ Armstrong would ask me, and we would take turns in order to accomplish different tasks at the same time.” Toschi was shocked to discover Avery on the same plane to Riverside. “We saw him right away. He had his name stenciled on the back of his carry-on. Narlow and Nicolai looked at me, and I said, ‘Hey, I don’t know anything about this!’ They thought Bill or I might have told him. I asked Avery, ‘Paul, how did you know we were going down? You have to tell me. These guys think I’m a snitch.’ Avery said, ‘Captain Cross told me.’ After we landed and were waiting for our Rent-A-Car, Avery had the balls to ask to ride with us to headquarters. Of course the answer was no. I liked Avery and had been able to trust him on cases where a lot of guys thought he was a little sneaky. He was never that way with me at any time.”