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

by Robert Graysmith

  “Sexual Sadist ’61-’62 white chevorlet Impala Stocky man five-foot, ten-inches, paunch 220 pounds. Watched 2nd victim Vallejo-Darlene Ferrin.”

  Friday, September 1, 1989

  Bawart retired from the Vallejo P.D., but was retained on a contract-type basis to follow up any new Zodiac leads that trickled in. A well-respected detective, he had been lead investigator on the 1989 Hunter Hill Rest Stop murders. “During the span of my career, I don’t think the Zodiac is the most interesting,” he told me. “Back in ’79 a guy on the most-wanted list came to Vallejo, shot a grandmother in the head, and was going to kill a seven-year-old kid. I tracked him all over the United States. The one I’m thinking of is the Fisher Case. It was involved with a syndicate gang out of Kentucky. It was supposed to be the most corrupt city in the world. I went back there and worked with cops who made a thousand dollars a month and lived in mansions. You knew they were on the take. But they knew their business. It really had a twist in the end and if I were going to write a story, I would write a story about that.”

  Wednesday, October 11, 1989

  Toschi had worked a variety of security jobs since his retirement—Mount Zion Hospital on Divisadero, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital on Army. At work on October 11, he opened his morning paper to Herb Caen’s column.

  “ANNIVERSARY: Today, retired police inspector Dave Toschi will drive to Washington and Cherry, park and observe a few minutes of silent contemplation. At that very corner on Oct. 11, 1969—20 years ago—the serial killer who called himself The Zodiac committed his last murder, shooting a Yellow Cab driver and disappearing into the Presidio, never to be seen again. . . . The Zodiac’s last taunting letters to Toschi always ended with ‘Me—37. S.F.P.D.—0.’ A blowout.”

  Meanwhile, amateur detectives, undistracted by the grim procession of other murders that police faced, kept after Zodiac:

  “I hope that you have been curious as to who is writing these stories and lessons in deciphering the Zodiac code,” a San Francisco man wrote. “First, I’d like every one to know there is a purpose for my writing in this way. I know that there is a God, and he chooses me to do his work. The Zodiac Crimes are not just another mass murderer gone bezerk, and on rampage, no, everything about his murders suggests someone who has planned every detail carefully, step by step. In every communication, he has displayed a clever, even satirical style of writing. This would seem that someone of extraordinary intelligence is committing the murders.”

  After twenty years some of that confusion was about to be dispelled.

  Thursday, November 30, 1989

  “I wonder if you ever heard of the name Arthur Leigh Allen?” City Hall reporter Bob Popp asked me.

  “Yeah, sure. What happened?”

  “Nothing, except there’s a woman who called in yesterday. She’s the daughter of a woman who started to talk to you several years ago and then got panicked and hung up. Scared. But now the daughter wants you to know that the mother is willing to talk about an Arthur Leigh Allen. And that name kind of rang a bell with me a little bit. She wanted to know how to get in touch with you.”

  “I wouldn’t mind hearing from her,” I said.

  “Where do I remember that name from? He lived up north, didn’t he?”

  “Right. A scary guy.”

  “That’s what she said. She sounded lucid.”

  Karen Harris called. “I’ve waited I guess years to contact you,” she said. “Partly because my mother’s so afraid of anyone finding out about it. She’s very afraid of this person. My mother knew the district attorney in Santa Rosa, John Hawkes. I grew up with his children. He said, ‘Yes, that is the man we’re watching.’ I can understand your curiosity in wanting to solve it. I’d like to find out as much information as I can to give you without letting my mother know. She never really knew anything about him until he was arrested for molesting a young boy who was the son of a friend of his, a woman.

  “Then, while he was in Atascadero, he did write to us and say, ‘They suspect me of being the Zodiac killer.’ I remembered he looked like Burl Ives to me. Just last weekend, over Thanksgiving, I did drive by his house. I heard he had been working at Ace Hardware but had lost his job. I don’t think he’s working now. I had been to his house as a child (I was an only child) when I was about seven. I remember him drinking the big bottles of beer. My mother was concerned because he was diabetic.

  “He lived with a roommate for a while in Vallejo—an Oriental man. I remember feeling more uneasy about him than Leigh Allen. He was of medium build and busy doing small household chores. Based on some written notes by my mother, I think [the roommate] worked for the phone company. . . . And I’m not sure if we were at [Leigh Allen’s] mother’s house or some other location. I remember him cooking a large pot of chili and we ate that while were were there. We went sailing with him on a catamaran. He does know how to make sails and all that stuff.

  “Your book is at home. Mother has all kinds of notes in it of every instance where she remembers incidents. He had the Wing Walker boots—the whole bit. She knew Leigh throughout the time he was in the Navy. The only writing sample she has is from a yearbook and that’s the only sample I could get hold of. He was a teacher at an elementary school.

  “My mother called you once and hung up. She got scared and didn’t want to give her name. But I want to see him again for some reason. I want to watch him.”

  “You be very careful,” I cautioned. “It’s a very hypnotic, obsessive, and all-consuming project. That case just eats at you. It just doesn’t let go.”

  “My mother is terrified of this man. He drives by her house sometimes.”

  “Recently?”

  “Probably around the time he got out of Atascadero. She got an alarm system in the house. He still has the Karmann Ghia and a Skylark over by the house in the back of the driveway. They’re watching him again according to the sheriff’s department. My parents know someone who works there—he’s a deputy. Two fourteen-year-old girls have disappeared and now they’re watching him again. If he’s the one . . . Oh, why can’t they catch him? I wish they could catch him.

  “Leigh used to write to my mother with these Navy flag semaphore symbols. And she threw all that stuff away—I’d show you, but if my mother were to find out . . . He looks pretty much how I remember him looking. I went by to try and see him from a distance. But he would recognize me. I’m thirty years old, but when I was a child my face looked the same. I look like my mother. I thought for a moment, ‘Oh, no. He’s sees me!’

  “During the holidays, such as last Thanksgiving, my mother was very nervous for fear that Leigh was in the area visiting his brother. He used to drive by my parents’ home and stop and stare in the windows from the street. That’s when my mother put in an alarm system in their home. . . . She was always extremely protective, especially when she began to hear from Leigh Allen again while he was in Atascadero. She used to get mysterious phone [hangup] calls so she got an unlisted number.

  “While I was home over last Thanksgiving, my mother brought out your book with all kinds of papers in it. She pulled out an auto accident report that Leigh had recently gotten into. He hit some woman in her car . . . [in Mendocino] the accident was his fault and he had a suspended license. [He was not fined, but his State Farm premium was substantially increased.] As I said, I drove by his house in Vallejo the day after Thanksgiving. It was daytime, but the house was dark inside. Only in one brief moment did I think I saw a figure move by the window, but it could have been my eyes playing tricks on me.

  “There were a couple of times my parents would see Leigh Allen walking long distances down roads in the Bay Area. They would offer him a ride, but he would always refuse. There was one point in time, either when my mother had just gotten married or when she had visited him alone, that he said, ‘I’ll never forgive you for what you did.’ My mother told me, ‘I was too afraid to ask him what.’ She let it drop and never pursued what it was. She had never threatened to turn him in
or anything like that. I believe he’s homosexual, so I don’t know if it’s because she married my father. I don’t think so. That’s always puzzled my mother. However, I think Leigh always cared for her a great deal.”

  “It’s an ‘outdoor chess match’ between an intelligent sociopath and the police,” I told her. “I always hoped that someone would be reading my book, bells would go off, and we’d get that name. I was at a dinner party with some professors Sunday and I said, ‘Someday somebody is going to call with that name—out of 2500 suspects, the name that I’m waiting for will come. And here’s that call.”

  “I’ve waited ever since your book first came out. I tried to get ahold of you once, but you’d quit the Chronicle. The Vallejo Police Department told me they bought fifty copies of your book to use as their case file. They gave all the policemen a copy to bone up on the case. You found a lot of information for them.”

  “I found it all over the state. I was at the Chronicle one day when they were remodeling. They lifted this box up. It was just about to go down one of the chutes out the window. It was full of Zodiac stuff. I’ve had that kind of luck all the way through. As for Leigh, I think as long as he is being watched by the police you should just keep your distance.”

  “But when I go by his house, I don’t see anybody watching him.”

  “The important thing is that he thinks he’s being watched.”

  “When the kids at Blue Rock Springs were shot,” she asked, “did Allen use diving as an excuse, an alibi?”

  “Yes. Allen was the first or second suspect they came up with—a major player right from the very beginning. Lynch took Allen’s alibi at face value: ‘Where were you at the time of the murder?’ asks Lynch. ‘I was scuba diving,’ says Allen. ‘Can you prove it?’ asks Lynch. And Allen goes over to the back of his station wagon and points to the tanks. And Lynch says, ‘Fine.’ Thereafter, every time Allen’s name came up, Lynch would say, ‘I cleared him.’ Leigh’s a formidable guy. He’s no dummy.”

  “Allen’s very intelligent. And an excellent marksman.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My mother knew him all through the Navy. My mother’s father worked at Mare Island and she used to go to Allen’s house all the time. His mother was very domineering, very formal. But my mother always liked it there, because she grew up in a very poor family and she loved going to his house because everything was so nice. And she used to like Leigh Allen. I don’t know what happened. My mother will tell me if I ask questions innocently. I’ll try and find out more. This case has fascinated me forever. I guess some of it is curiosity, but I would like to see if he’s the one and can be brought to justice. He’s never admitted to my mother that he was the Zodiac killer, but kind of closely hinted. God, I wish she had kept the letters he wrote her. But she burned them. She got so scared one day, she said, ‘I threw them in the fireplace. . . . ’ And where is Zodiac now? Don’t serial killers usually want notoriety? That’s what puzzles me.

  “I don’t think of him as dangerous now—heavy and losing his sight. And I recall Leigh was so good with children,” she said.

  “Don’t be fooled. I covered the ‘Trailside Murder Case’ in San Diego. David Carpenter was such a confidence man—he looked like somebody’s grandfather—he stuttered—wore thick glasses—it allowed him to manipulate his victims, to play on their sympathies. That’s the way a lot of them work.”

  “I drive by his house,” she concluded. “It’s very enticing. I just want to watch him. Next time we speak, I’ll tell you how he and my mother met and more about his letters.”

  23

  arthur leigh allen

  Tuesday, October 31, 1989

  “A friend of mine runs a DNA lab,” said a close friend of Cheri Jo Bates. “He says that technology is a year or so away from being able to match a hair sample that has been stored away for over twenty years. I do not know how, and if, the hair that was found was stored, but this could be the key to solve her murder.” Bud Goding, another reader, echoed her sentiment. “Your report on the Riverside murder stated that traces of skin and tissue were removed from beneath the victim’s fingernails,” he told me. “Since that case is still open, that evidence should still be available. If it has not been preserved in formalin, it should be enough to perform DNA replication analysis (PCR) and provide a DNA profile of the Riverside killer.” However, in order to provide a DNA profile, the follicle of the hair, the root, must be present.

  A decade later, the Riverside suspect returned briefly from out of the country. Police got a DNA sample as he touched down at the airport. “The hair is a long shot,” said a spokesman, “because we’re not sure whether that was the suspect’s hair or not.” In December 2000, an astounding thirty-five years after Bates’s murder, they got results of a DNA analysis from the Department of Justice DNA Lab in Berkeley. The hair was not their suspect’s.

  Had Zodiac committed the Bates murder? As at Lake Berryessa and Gaviota Beach, the overkill had been horrendous. But there were perceptible sexual undertones—Bates’s clothes had been disarranged. If Zodiac was not the killer and had simply taken responsibility in a “confession” letter, how had he known facts “only the killer could know”? “The big thing in Riverside back in 1966,” a source explained, “was drag racing. I used to go drag racing every week and since a lot of cops took part, I found out a lot of details about Bates’s murder. Leigh Allen was down that weekend for some sort of auto club. Maybe he was there with his little car and heard some of these same details that I did. Who knows?”

  Monday, March 5, 1990

  Leigh Allen, doing some writing of his own, sent a letter to the young son of a friend. He dated it military-style “5/mar/1990.” He said:“Dear___: Yer mean ol’ dad has been keeping me informed of your progress. congratulations on all the neat things you’ve accomplished. And I have another accomplishment for you—a gift horse, so to speak. Namely I am giving you a foam Fiberglass ultra-light. I am been squeezed into a smaller area, due to having to rent out the upper part of my house, and simply must have the space. So, if you can come up with a U-haul or such, you may haul away a ($2,500 invested) aeroplane for free. I will include a slug of associated paraphernalia.

  “I have mentioned this to yer dad and he said he’d pass along the infor. He seemed to approve but sometimes he forgets, hence this letter. So if you can inform me as to your interest, I would appreciate it. I’ll have to move on it very soon. I have all the paper on the plane, and there is a folding wing option. I also have some ideas on finishing it. You can’t live with a project all the time I have without getting a few ideas. Hope to hear from you soon.

  “Leigh Allen.”

  Tuesday, March 6, 1990

  Karen and I finally spoke again. She was very fearful. First she laid out a little family history—her grandparents had come to Vallejo during the Depression and endured “some tough times.” Her grandfather worked as a ship welder on Mare Island, while her grandmother drove a school bus. I recalled Zodiac’s vendetta against school buses. Bobbie, Karen’s mother, was a diver whose picture often appeared in the Vallejo sports section between 1952 and 1957. Sometimes Allen’s picture ran alongside hers. “My mother met Allen when she was about twelve or thirteen,” said Karen, “when she had first begun diving. He served as a lifeguard at The Plunge, a Vallejo community swimming center, in 1951-52. I think he was a platform diver and a wrestler. She dove with Leigh and trained daily. She almost made the Olympics in Helsinki, almost a runner-up, but she dove out of order and lost the chance. He dove as well. He had that lumbering walk, very clumsy walk when walking down the diving board. My mother always talked about that. When he was a diver, he looked terrible until he left the board and dove. Then he was very graceful in the air. But when walking he was terribly lumbering because of a funny hip. I’ll try and get a picture of Leigh from his diving days in Vallejo.

  “She started dating him when she was about twelve. He was always a good friend. He never attempted to kis
s her—a kiss-on-the-forehead kind of thing, and never made any sexual advances. I do know that while ‘dating’ him, it was more of a very deep friendship. [Allen admitted that he had never had a successful relationship with a woman.] Bobbie married Mark, a gymnast for the University of California at Berkeley, in 1957 and her diving trailed off. They met while they were both practicing on a trampoline. Mark studied criminology and wanted to be a policeman, but was just a quarter inch too short. Toward the time she met my father and married him, Leigh Allen was rejected by the Navy, a deep blow to him.

  “Leigh Allen definitely always wore the Wing Walker shoes. He did wear pleated pants all the time. He was very clean cut. He used to use a bow and arrow for hunting, and was also an excellent marksman in the Navy, one of the best in his group. My mother said he did know code. He not only sewed well, but was a sail maker. He was definitely ambidextrous as I’ve watched him make fishing flies. He was a good typist too.

  “Another time we visited him, he took us sailing on his Hobie Cat in Half Moon Bay. Both times I noticed how overweight he was. I knew he was a diabetic, yet he drank beer heavily out of large bottles. Both times [we visited], my mother was very tense. I was born in 1959 and when we visited Leigh, I think I was around nine or ten. If so, this was during the time he may have been allegedly murdering people.