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

by Robert Graysmith

“Yes, it was. It just arrived.” He searched his desk. A bright shaft of light cut through the grimy window. Traffic crawled sluggishly along Bryant Street. The old sign flashed its red neon in bright sunlight, “OK BAIL BONDS—OPEN 24 HOURS—WE SPECIALIZE IN TRAFFIC.” Toschi found the letter and read aloud: “If I can ever be of any help to you just let me know. I’m sorry I wasn’t your man, but I’m out now and I’ve paid my debt to society. [signed] Leigh Allen.”

  “Sorry I wasn’t your man!’” said Toschi in wonderment. A note like this, with its mocking tone, was exactly the kind of letter Zodiac would write. “He’s the one,” I said.

  Back at the Chronicle, a sick, unpostmarked letter signed with a Zodiac symbol arrived that afternoon. Even crank letters like Old Tom’s were treated seriously. Actually, any Zodiac letter, no matter how obvious a hoax, always created a stir. No possibility could be dismissed. Police lavished attention on each because Zodiac’s handprinting may have changed over the years.

  “ILL DO IT BECAUSE I DONE IT 21 TIMES I CANT STOP BECAUSE EACH THAT I KILL MAKES IT WORSE AND I MUST KILL MORE MAN IS THE MOST PRIZED GAME ILL NERVER GIVE MY NAME. . . .”

  What perversity drove anyone to copy Zodiac? Future copycats had darker motives and bloodier hands. They went further than imitating writing—they acted on the Zodiac crimes themselves.

  Tuesday, January 3, 1978

  Allen returned to Vallejo. Water Town had changed little—lying clean, sprawling, and mysterious as always. Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “Vallejo typical of many small California towns—a blunder.” First thing, Leigh applied as a fleet mechanic to Benicia Import Auto Service. He was honest about his past. “I served two years and a half at Atascadero,” he admitted. After they hired him at $6.15 an hour, he roved the hills trying out his wings. He was seemingly unaware the search for Zodiac had not abated in his absence. The same hounds were still howling and leaping all about him and across the waters in San Francisco. But on a national level, the FBI focused on new Zodiac suspects:

  “At Buffalo, New York. Will question an informant regarding his knowledge of and basis of his allegation of Zodiac’s activities, and why he considers him a suspect in the ZODIAC case,” read a bulletin. “At Jacksonville, at Tavares, Florida. Will advise Lake County as a possible ZODIAC suspect. Will obtain photos of subject and furnish to Sacramento, and also to Buffalo. ARMED AND DANGEROUS.”

  The gray straits appeared icy in the morning. Leigh parked where a causeway across the Napa River and the straits joined Vallejo at the west to an island. He gazed toward Mare Island. In Water Town’s early days, a barge transporting a herd of livestock had overturned. General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, an early California land baron, had rescued a white mare swimming for the island and christened the cay Isla de la Yegua—“Island of the Mare.”

  Across the water, battleships moored alongside three-tiered warehouses with brick smokestacks. The Naval Shipyard was Vallejo’s principal industry, served by third-, even fourth-generation workers. During World War II it returned a thousand repaired ships to duty and manufactured three hundred submarines, destroyer escorts, sub tenders, and landing craft. The West’s oldest Naval installation assembled battleships like the California, cruisers like the Chicago. It was the first Pacific yard to build atomic-powered subs. The shipyard, completely self-contained, manufactured everything it needed from bricks to rivets. Allen was equally self-sufficient. He gazed longingly toward the sea, drove into work, and got bad news. Import Auto Service was laying him off. “So soon?” said Leigh. “Business has just been too slow,” said the manager. Allen clenched and unclenched his fists at the hopelessness of it all.

  Friday, April 28, 1978

  On Monday, someone had dropped a letter with too much postage and signed “Zodiac” into a mailbox. Its postmark designated a Santa Clara or San Mateo County origin. On Friday, April 28, the Chronicle received its first Zodiac letter since 1974. If it was not a hoax, the killer had been elsewhere for almost four years. The letter met all the usual requirements of a genuine Zodiac communication. But it had a forced look about it, and quite quickly cries of “Hoax!” went up. Sherwood Morrill in Sacramento ruled it authentic. For a while so did John Shimoda, Director of the Postal Crime Laboratory, Western Regional Office, San Bruno. Eventually Shimoda reversed his position and sided with expert Terry Pascoe, claiming it to be a clever hoax. I wanted it to be authentic, but as time went by, my doubts about the letter increased. The cunning forgery would cause agony for everyone.

  “He’s lurking somewhere,” Toschi told the press, “and it scares the hell out of people, including my wife. The case has put considerable strain upon my family. My three little girls were not big enough in 1969 to appreciate the magnitude of the case, but they were old enough to hear stories from their schoolmates that their daddy was working on a case about a dangerous murderer. They would come and tell me they were afraid that something horrible would happen to me. They lived with this fear. Of all the cases I have handled, this one is really a personal case. . . . He’s playing the ego game, trying to taunt us. . . . I try not to let this bother me, but it’s frustrating. We have not given up. The case is worked upon anytime something is forwarded to us and we act upon it. The surrender box is still open.”

  Monday, May 15, 1978

  “I wasn’t surprised a popular film like The Exorcist drew Zodiac out back in ’74,” Toschi told me. “This guy is a real nut on movies.” I showed him an anonymous letter sent to me—exactly the kind the egotistical, publicity-mad killer might write: “To Editor, or who ever is in charge of the Zodiac,” it said. “Have you ever considered making a short film about the Zodiac?

  “Like some of those Hitchcocks, you know where you have to come to your own conclusion for an ending as to who is the killer? If a muvie could be made, it can be shown in one of those small theaters where mostly sex muvies are shown so that it will look like some unknown thought of the idea just to make money on something that sells. . . . As I look at it, since the Zodiac takes so much pride in himself for his work, He’ll probably love the thought of a muvie about himself, and since he feels shure knowbody knows him, there is no reason for him not to go and admire himself. . . . Thank you—no name . . . sorry for the mess, but I’m kind of in a hurry, I have work to do.”

  Tuesday, May 16, 1978

  Because of furor over the April hoax letter, cries for Zodiac’s capture intensified. San Francisco residents put Police Chief Charles Gain under terrific pressure to solve the case. He asked FBI Director William H. Webster to analyze six Zodiac cryptograms mailed to local papers in 1969. Gain wrote:

  “Three of these were subsequently broken but the others remain unsolved. We request that a new attempt be made to break these ciphers—ENCLOSED:1. Photo copy of ‘Zodiac’ letter with 13 characters. ‘My name is——.’

  2. Photo copy of ‘Zodiac’ letter with 31 characters. 3. Photo copy of cryptogram excerpt from letter. 4. Copy of three broken cryptograms.”

  FBI attempts to decrypt, using the old key as part of a combination cryptosystem, failed, as did linear and route transposition. Experts examined the first and last halves for a cyclic use of variants, did hand anagramming with the message as written or backwards or written columnarly. They read it as first line forward and second line backward. They ran a sliding word through the messages. They tried concentrated anagramming—“took, look, book, cook, shook, hook . . .” All endeavors were non-productive. Toschi was not too surprised. Like many policemen, he had no great faith in the elitist bureau.

  Friday, May 19, 1978

  In the meantime, Gain obtained FBI lab results on his petitioned comparison of the Zodiac letters. The Questioned Documents examiner considered sixteen manila folders containing the letters between October 13, 1969, and April 24, 1978. The expert renumbered them Q 85 through Q 99. (The Riverside letters, including the desktop, were studied separately in photographic form and labeled Qc100.) The report, in longhand, read:

  “The handprinting on t
he Q 85-Qc100 letters show a wide range of variation and various writing speeds. Additionally, portions of the material, particularly the three Riverside letters, may have been disguised or deliberately distorted. For the above reasons, the handprinting examination of these letters was inconclusive. However, consistent handprinting characteristics were noted in the Q 85-Qc100 letters which indicate that one person may have prepared all of the letters including the Riverside letters and the message found on the desk top in the Riverside case.”

  A month later Gain requested the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico review the letters’ contents and develop a psychological profile of Zodiac. Later I called to see if Cheney ever wrote any letters to Leigh Allen. “I couldn’t help but notice that your printing resembles Zodiac printing,” I said. “Could Zodiac be copying your handprinting?” “Maybe!” said Cheney. “Before changing to permit microfilm, upper and lowercase lettering was standard drafting practice.” Cheney, an engineer, referred me to Technical Drawing (Geisacke, Spencer, and Mitchell, Macmillan, 4th edition). “Though I never got a letter from him with double postage,” he said, “Leigh typed his letters and recipes, misspelling certain words on purpose.”

  Allen began meeting with his parole officer, Bruce R. Pelle, Deputy Probation Officer, County of Solano. Pelle noticed that Allen consistently wore old-fashioned pleated pants to their conferences. Their first monthly meeting was troubling to Pelle and uncomfortable for Allen. The parole officer attempted to see just what would set him off, threatening him with a return to jail if he did not cooperate more fully. This brought a lowering of his head and a refrain of “I wouldn’t like that at all.” Allen’s improper relationships with children had not concluded either. When Pelle first visited Allen’s home with his partner, Lloyd, the parolee had all the neighborhood children out front riding bicycles. Leigh had them circle their car waving red flags to direct the officers into the driveway. He also maintained a friendship with a nine-year-old that would only cease when she reached sixteen.

  One evening, Pelle gazed out his apartment window at the Bodega complex where he lived. Two stories below, the smell of chlorine and suntan oil drifted upward. Next to the intermittently sparkling pool Leigh was holding hands with a little girl—a direct parole violation. Pelle realized that Leigh had followed him home after their session. For some reason the ex-convict was trying to intimidate him or taunt him by his close proximity to a child. Why? Pelle made some calls, learned the girl was Leigh’s cousin, and ultimately let the matter pass. Shortly afterward, he learned that Allen was a serious Zodiac suspect.

  “In fact the day I found out,” he told me, “I was home looking at copies of the Zodiac letters. All evening I kept getting these calls where someone would just breathe. I kept telling my girlfriend, ‘I think that Allen knows that I know and that he knows that I know he knows.’ I told him:

  “‘Arthur, you’re suspected of being the Zodiac.’

  “‘I know,’ he said.

  “‘What do you think about that?’

  “‘I think that was a real misnomer to do that to me. I think it was unfair.’

  “‘It was?’

  “‘Yeah.’

  “‘Have you read the reports?’

  “‘Yeah, I know what they’re talking about and that’s all a pack of lies.’

  “‘Wouldn’t the person who was the Zodiac feel that it was a pack of lies?’

  “‘Probably. Who in hell is going to admit to being the damn Zodiac.’”

  He told Pelle that on the day of the Hartnell and Shepard stabbings, he was supposed to be at Lake Berryessa catching ground squirrels to dissect. “Amazing coincidence,” Pelle remarked. He was also disturbed by Leigh’s mental evaluation. “Basically, Arthur is an extremely dangerous person,” he told me later. “He is sociopathic and possesses an incredibly high I.Q. Allen is repressing very deep hatred and is incapable of functioning with women in a normal way.” Apparently, after his 1971 oil refinery questioning, Leigh, at the urging of his family, had been evaluated by psychiatrists at U.C. Berkeley and Langley Porter. They had worked up mental reports on the prime suspect from May 1973 until September 26, 1974, when he had been first considered “capable of murder, dangerous.” Doctors had looked for indications of self-mutilation drives and a disregard for the sanctity of human life. They noted his impulsiveness.

  I asked Pelle if he had seen a light table or enlarger at Leigh’s house on any of his visits. I suspected Zodiac had projected grids through an enlarger onto his blocks of cipher to align them so perfectly. “Yes,” Pelle said. “I recall seeing an enlarger in his home.” But of course there had to be one. Whoever Zodiac was, he had to have access to a light table, grids to position his symbols, a T-square and triangle and other drafting tools. Ethan W. Allen had been a draftsman for the city of Vallejo. Such items were the tools of his trade. As a professional artist, I knew that the Zodiac letters, the 340-symbol code in particular, would tax the most experienced craftsman.

  “Leigh’s got a new motorcycle now,” Pelle told me, “apple-green [a color close to Cheri Jo Bates’s lime-green VW ]. It’s not registered in his name, but a friend’s. And he’s got a new job too. Leigh told me how much he hates working for a living. Told me forcefully. But when he chooses he can project a calm and reasonable front. He’s working part-time at the California Human Development Corporation [1004 Marin Street] as a senior-citizen aide. ‘For $4.00 per hour,’ Leigh explained, ‘I take seniors to and from hospitals, inspect and install security devices in their homes.’ Security devices—that’s mighty interesting. As for Leigh’s brother, Ron, he’s now a city planner. He’s still worried about his brother, but rarely has any more contact with the police.”

  One evening sometime later, I drove out to the first Vallejo crime scene—Lake Herman Road. Other visits had been at midnight, the time of the murders. Tonight the wind trembled the trees along the road. The landscape, lost and found in every curve, was finally swallowed up in white fog. After Allen’s release from prison, gossip again mentioned a big man roving near the water pumps and lake. He scouted, practiced his shooting, and climbed through quarries where he could dive. All of Zodiac’s murders had been water-oriented—Blue Rock Springs (eerily reminiscent of Allen’s old school, Valley Springs), Riverside, Lake Berryessa, Lake Street (his requested first destination in Paul Stine’s cab), and Lake Herman Road. Though I found the Lake Herman double murder site virtually unchanged, one alteration had been made. The little gravel lane just past the chain-link fence leading to Pump House #10 now had a name. A brisk wind rose, ruffling the standing water as I made my way to the gate to read “Water Lane.” That told me that a decade ago Zodiac had been extraordinarily familiar with Vallejo. He had selected an unmarked path that fit his mania for water-named sites. He knew all the secrets of Water Town.

  Tuesday, June 27, 1978

  And still we received tips portraying “what sort of guy Zodiac might be . . .” “I feel that he might have a bike or motorcycle,” a San Francisco art director suggested. “. . . is bordering on genius . . . untapped and untrained perhaps, but mentally superior to the ways in which he has been able to make a living . . . that he is hardly an accepted individual at all, but considered curious, temperamental, and a socially limited personality. His split personality is fed daily by insults and fringe knowledge . . . of which he is a miserable spectator, not participant. He is, in my imagination, 35 to 40 years old. He is deathly afraid of women or impotent. He is, if the man is guilty of the wasteful, senseless crimes you’ve had to report, in dire need of love. He also needs help. Unfortunately, he also needs to be caught.”

  Assistant FBI director Thomas Kelleher, Jr., advised Chief Gain on Tuesday that they had been analyzing the unsolved Zodiac ciphers since their acquisition, particularly the 340-symbol cipher. “The Laboratory will continue analysis of these ciphers as time permits. You will be notified immediately of any positive results.” Cryptographers searched for hidden ciphers and messages. “Initial lette
rs of words, first, second, third last letters of words; line beginnings, line endings,” they reported, “did not spell anything.” There were no extraneous markings, no indentations, no invisible writing. As for Zodiac, he was invisible too.

  Monday, July 17, 1978

  After controversy over the April Zodiac letter, Inspector Toschi was reassigned to Robbery Detail. An unfounded allegation that he had written the letter caused his transfer. “Police officials emphatically denied reports that Inspector Dave Toschi, who has investigated the Zodiac case for nine years, ever was suspected of forging the latest letter attributed to the murderer,” reported the Associated Press.

  “Now Mr. Toschi will know what it feels like!” Allen told Pelle through clenched teeth after he read of the transfer. Leigh still remembered his dismissal from the refinery bitterly. As for Toschi, a great weight was lifted from his shoulders.

  Wednesday, July 19, 1978

  Avery was among the missing too. “Paul Avery and Kate Coleman who wrote the sizzling expose of Black Panther violence in the July 10 New Times, have gone ‘out of the area’ after receiving the predictable threats,” wrote Herb Caen. The bogus letter reopened old wounds, driving the populace to seek closure on the long-unsolved case. Zodiac tips quadrupled. “The Zodiac was shot to death by San Francisco police in March of 1976,” a reader informed Caen, “about four months after he set the Gartland Hotel fire that killed thirteen people.” Next day, an anonymous typewritten letter from Los Angeles also arrived at the Chronicle: