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

by Robert Graysmith

  “My mother visited him alone. It was the first time she did feel some fear for her life because he asked her, ‘Does anyone know you’re here?’ She answered, ‘Yes. My husband, knows I’m here.’ She told him my father knew, which he did. And then nothing happened. But after that she never went back. And I don’t know why she went to see him in the first place. I just wish I knew why she had such concern about Leigh at the time. Something was going on and she felt she had to see him.” She called my father the moment she left his house so that he knew she had gotten out safely and was on her way home.

  “As I understand his incarceration at Atascadero, it was for molesting the son of a female friend of his. The boy was maybe anywhere from eight to thirteen years old. He told my mother the woman was just jealous of his relationship with her son. I believe he was dating the woman. He said that was why she had turned him in—jealousy. I think he spent about three years in Atascadero.

  “While in Atascadero, I think that’s when my mother first became aware he may be the Zodiac. He wrote to her that they suspected him of the crimes. At one point, I think my mother called him there and spoke to him. She asked him directly if he was the the murderer. I believe he was somewhat jovial about it, but never admitted to the crimes. He [Allen] often wrote to my mother and used the signals used by the Navy [semaphore] flags at the bottom of the letters. The notes he wrote her were done in blue-ink-type pens—felt-tip pens. She threw away most of the early letters. I wish she had kept them. She burned the rest after her knowledge of Allen being sent to Atascadero. My mother also told me after reading your book, that it fit that his brother and sister-in-law did try to turn him in. There was a bloody knife in his car and that’s what really got them concerned—that’s what I was told. Some of Leigh’s friends were also aware of what was going on.

  “I will continue giving you any information I can get. I want to try and get definite dates or general times of certain situations and find out more details of his relationship with family members and my mother. I wish I could get my mother to come forward to the police, but it’s doubtful. But maybe she remembers more about the letters he wrote to her. Something that points to him as the responsible party. He told my mother he always picked up hitchhikers especially while attending Santa Rosa J. C. and Sonoma State University. This always bothered her. He picked them up on the highways. I remember the two girls disappearing from the skating rink and the other murders. Those bodies discovered on Franz Valley Road and in Calistoga weren’t far from my parents’ home.

  “Oh, and another thing. He always did talk about ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ to my mother. In fact I have read the story as young girl, never realizing that this was a big part of Leigh’s life. As for a possible hiding place of evidence, my mom mentions that Allen put up paneling in his trailer—it must have been the Vallejo one or Santa Rosa one. My mother notes she saw white gloves in his trailer in Vallejo and that he did have another trailer in Bodega Bay, an area he knew well.”

  Toschi and Armstrong had never been told that.

  Monday, April 2, 1990

  Two Bernal Heights gardeners digging at 1114 Powhattan Avenue struck metal about six inches down. They unearthed a rusty metal box and pried it open with their shovels. Inside were two hundred sticks of crystallized dynamite that had been buried for years. The SFPD transported the explosive to an isolated site and safely detonated it. Had Zodiac’s stash for his threatened bomb projects been discovered at an address he had once had some connection with? I doubted it. But somewhere, Zodiac still had bombs. One day, he’s going to die and the police will go through the basement and find guns and bombs—and the case will be solved. Perhaps one person wrote the Zodiac letters and one person killed—only a slim possibility. Zodiac seemingly acted alone at Berryessa. As far as police could tell, one man, the killer, had written in felt-tip pen on the door of his victim’s car and that printing matched Zodiac’s.

  Sunday, April 1, 1990

  “You wanted to know who he was,” another Zodiac buff, Daniel L. Kleinfeld, offered. I wanted to know why he was.

  “Zodiac’s mother was very protective . . . affectionate, but extremely moralizing. His father—more passive did not have a great deal of contact with him. To show affection the mother fed him copious amounts and the stocky child became fat, tormented by classmates. In adolescence he became suffocated by his mother, unable to break away. He would continue living with her. Condemned by his mother as evil, he grew to hate her. His feelings of superiority over his peers intensified. He is a military fetishist, like those who impersonate police officers or soldiers. Zodiac was raised with a very clear sense of justice, of righteousness prevailing. Thus he came to his ‘slaves’ concept. To him, the way his peers treated him was a grave injustice, which could only be repaid by them doing him service in ‘Paradice’—an afterlife with slaves is always, to Zodiac, a paradise. He gained a great deal of weight between the shootings on July 4 and stabbings on September 27. He ate, then murdered. Then ate more.”

  Zodiac’s imagination was a slave to popular culture. All the pieces of the Zodiac persona had been fitted together on the public stage. One incredible inspiration to him—beginning August 16, 1969 (two weeks after the Cipher Slayer christened himself Zodiac), Dick Tracy began pursuing the “Zodiac Gang” on the comics page. The Zodiacs, in black hoods emblazoned with white symbols of the zodiac, had drowned an astrology columnist. Tattooed across the face of their leader, Scorpio, was an astrological symbol of Scorpio. Light-haired and moonfaced, he not only resembled the prime suspect, but a description of Zodiac as “very round-faced . . . hair combed up in a pompadour.” On August 20, the Zodiacs raid the police morgue. “Masked torpedoes came in,” says the bludgeoned attendant, “demanded the corpse’s shirt.” Later Zodiac would steal a victim’s shirt and mail portions to the police. The gang is told, on September 24, “Scorpio has spoken. He is ready for operation west branch.” Three days later Zodiac stabbed two students at Lake Berryessa while wearing a black hood with a white symbol. “The ‘Zodiacs’ have done it again!” Scorpio crows. The day of Stine’s murder, October 11, Scorpio drunkenly toasts his success. “To jolly li’l old us—T’ jolly li’l old Zodiac gang.” The story line ended November 4, 1969.

  But how could Zodiac have seen Dick Tracy’s encounter with a Zodiac criminal before publication? Chester Gould drew Tracy six weeks in advance to allow time for the Chicago Tribune Syndicate to make changes and mail proofs to subscribing papers to size, retouch, engrave in metal, and print. Pre-printed color Sunday sections with the same storyline were delivered weeks before that. If Zodiac worked at the Chronicle then he might have had an advance look. He was a long time reader of the strip—“The Purple Cross Gang” in a 1936 sequence wore black hoods with white crosses on them. Like Tracy, Zodiac used the archaic spelling, “clews.”

  More importantly, Dick Tracy provided Zodiac with a way to avoid leaving prints. “Put a coating of this liquid cellophane on your fingers,” says a gangster. “It prevents fingerprints and it don’t clutter up your sense of touch either.” On February 9, 1969 Tracy explained blood type analysis on a toothpick left at a crime scene. “As you know, salivary secretion often is used in place of blood for type determination. Your subject had a blood type AB.” Though DNA testing had not been introduced, there was a primative version—ABO-PGM testing. Saliva could speak volumes about Zodiac and he knew that. Even in 1969, Zodiac would no more have licked a stamp than he would have forgotten to wear his gloves.

  A comic strip and Zodiac watch had provided his name and symbol. Movies such as The Most Dangerous Game and Charlie Chan at Treasure Island had inspired and influenced him. One prompted him to hunt humans, the other, set on Treasure Island, provided the black hood and salutation for his letters, even inspired Zodiac’s duel by mail with the Chronicle. But if Zodiac could be motivated by popular culture, others could be influenced by Zodiac himself. It was the most shocking byproduct of the entire case. Someone claiming to be the San Fran
cisco Zodiac Killer was shooting people in New York City. Somehow he knew their birth dates and promised one victim for each of the twelve Zodiac signs. We feared it was the original Zodiac, returned at last with guns blazing.

  24

  zodiac II

  Bold headlines said it all in the summer of 1990: “GUNMAN TERRORIZES NEW YORK—CALLS SELF ZODIAC. SHOT 3 MEN, ONE FATALLY, WOUNDED A FOURTH IN CENTRAL PARK.” Zodiac was shooting people in an eight-block section of Brooklyn and in Central Park on Thursdays at twenty-one-day intervals.

  “When I was a detective sergeant,” Mike Ciravolo told me, “I ran the the Zodiac case here. At that time they gave me and my forty-nine detectives the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Let me tell you how the case developed. But before I go into detail—when we were working on our case you know what we did? We went out and bought a case of your book, Zodiac. I had all my detectives read it to see if they could cull anything that might be of help in our investigation.

  “Let me go into 1990 for you. At that time I was a commanding officer of the crimes-against-senior-citizens squad in Queens. I had a small unit—eight detectives on the beat. I came in at seven o’clock one morning. A detective [Andy Cardimone] from night watch (which works out of the Queens homicide squad right down the hall from us) came up and says, ‘Sarge, we had a shooting of a seventy-eight-year-old man last night and he’s expected to live. You gonna take the case?’

  “‘Sure, we’ll take the case,’ I said.

  “‘Something funny,’ he says. ‘I found this note on the step and it had these rocks.’ He hands me the fuckin’ rocks—three stones. ‘This note was next to it.’ It was the first Zodiac note we became aware of. It said: ‘This is the Zodiac the twelve sign Will die when the belts in the heaven are seen.’ It had a round circle with three pie shapes in it and a little scribble. We didn’t really know what it meant at the time.” The killer had followed the victim, Joseph Proce, a retired ice delivery worker, for ten blocks and into his front yard. He asked the old man for water and if he could go inside. “Why do you want to go inside?” Proce asked. “Because I’m cold,” he said, then shot Proce with a homemade zip gun and ran toward Eldert Street.

  “So when we get to the scene that morning,” continued Ciravolo, “uniform officers and the detectives who worked the midnight-to-eight shift have responded. There were some clothes in a heap on the first stoop—this brown stuff where Joseph Proce was shot in the back, and I told Detective Bill Clark, ‘Billy, check those clothes over there.’ As he’s going through he says, ‘Sarge, a round just fell out.’ ‘Let’s get it to the lab,’ I said. We canvassed the block. It was a very residential block [87th Road in Woodhaven, Queens], and we came up with a witness who saw a guy in an Army fatigue jacket—the witness believed him to be black—running down the block towards Brooklyn. That street sat right on the Brooklyn-Queens border.” In California Zodiac killed on town borders in an effort to create confusion and competition between authorities over jurisdiction. “So the old man was taken to the hospital. He was expected to survive. I kept sending detectives back there every day to interview him.”

  The New York Zodiac murders occurred at the height of the crack wars in East New York, and the 75th Precinct, where two of the victims were shot, averaged a hundred murders annually. Ciravolo continued. “Zodiac said, ‘All shoot in Brooklyn,’ in some of his subsequent notes. He also used to write ‘380’ or ‘9m’ [nine-millimeter], ‘RNL’ [round-nosed lead], ‘no grooves on bullet—no grooves on bullet—’ By the way, there was never any grooves on the bullet. Zodiac never, ever lied about what he said in any of his letters.”

  “Was he making his own ammunition?” I asked.

  “No, he wasn’t, but I feel he may have made his own gun.” A zip gun, made of duct tape, wood, and pipes of various sizes for different calibers. Ciravolo laid out this chronology for me: “This attack on Proce happened on May 31. So now what happens—I take a copy of this note and I go to Chief Menkin, Chief of Detectives for Queens. ‘Chief,’ I say, ‘I had a strange shooting last night—one of my senior citizens got shot. I think we’re going to be able to interview him when he gets off the respirator. ’ (But he ultimately died three weeks later from infection from the bullet. But we did interview him.) I said, ‘I think we got a nut going around here. I hope we don’t have a second Son of Sam.’

  “‘Well, keep me posted on this,’ the chief said. That was May 31. On June 19, I get a call from the New York Post that a reporter [Anne Murray] got a letter sent down there. They faxed me a copy. It’s our guy—it’s obviously the same handwriting—claiming responsibility for three prior shootings. He says he shot a man with a cane in the street on March 8.” At 1:45 A.M., Mario Orosco, forty-nine, an immigrant from Medellin, Colombia, finished work at a midtown cafeteria, and left the J train at Crescent Street. He paused at the corner of Atlantic and Sheridan Avenues and noticed a man in a beret and bandana, dressed all in black, walking behind him. He was holding a homemade nine-millimeter gun. Alarmed, Orosco began hobbling away on his cane, but was shot in the upper back.

  “Then,” Ciravolo went on, “Zodiac says he shot another man [Jermaine Montenesdro, thirty-four] in his left side in front of his house [at Nichols and Jamaica Avenues in Queens] on March 29 [at 2:57 A.M.]. Then he said he shot an old man with a cane on May 31—which matches my case, the Proce shooting. Then he says, ‘All shoot in Brooklyn. ’ So I said, ‘He was wrong about my guy being in Brooklyn. He didn’t know the way the map gets a little crazy right on the border. Obviously, when he shot this guy in Queens, he thought it was in Brooklyn, but he was about two hundred yards out of Brooklyn on the Queens side. We started checking all the homicides in Brooklyn. None of them matched up. Then we checked all the first-degree assaults—and boom! We got two guys who were shot and they survived. So we looked into these, and the next morning the Chief of Detectives summoned us all down to his office and he decided to give me the case with nine detectives to look into this.

  “I’d stayed up all night along with a couple of other detectives and we had come up with a theory. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘he shot March 8, then he shot again March 29. Twenty-one days apart, all on a Thursday, by the way—and all in the early morning hours—between 1:45 and 4:00 A.M. So there was twenty-one days in between the first and second shooting. Then sixty-three days in between my old man getting shot—which is three intervals of twenty-one.”

  The New York Zodiac wrote notes taunting the task force, which ultimately numbered fifty men. He vowed to kill one person born under each of the twelve astrological signs. So far he had shot a Scorpio (Orosco, born October 26, 1940), a Gemini (Montenesdro, born May 28, 1956), and a Taurus (Proce, born May 20, 1912). “So now here we are,” Ciravolo proceeded, “sitting in the Chief of Detectives’ office on June 20. I said, ‘Chief, I think he’s going to shoot again. Tonight, after midnight is Thursday and it’s twenty-one days since my old man got shot.’ So he gives me thirty detectives and everybody only gets two square blocks—’cause all of the shootings are within half a mile of each other. We got the streets blanketed and then all of a sudden—six o’clock in the morning, I call off the detail and I’m back at the station house. I’m signing everybody’s overtime slips and I get a call. He saw us in the neighborhood and jumped on the train.” On the nights of the Zodiac’s first three attacks, three star clusters—Orion, Taurus, and Pleiades—were all visible. The three would all be seen again on June 21, 1990. The police waited, dreading the outcome.

  Thursday, June 21, 1990

  Zodiac struck in Manhattan on the first day of summer. The heat was on in Brooklyn. To dodge the tightening police net, he took the subway to 59th Street and went to Central Park about 7:00 P.M. It would be quiet there. He walked around a few hours until he saw Larry Parham, thirty, a former janitor, now homeless. Zodiac had approached his victim days earlier to ask his astrological sign—Parham, born June 29, 1959, was a Cancer. He slept nights on a park bench behind the Central Park band shell. Zodiac sat down a few be
nches away and waited until a few people still there left. Parham made a mattress from pieces of cardboard and a pillow from his duffel bag. Five hours after the start of Parham’s astrological period, and on the cusp of Gemini and Cancer, Zodiac shot him in the upper chest. He folded a note covered with astrological signs under a rock amidst Parham’s meager possessions. “In the letter I left,” the killer said later, “I used the phrase I read from the encyclopedia. It was to throw you off the track. . . . I just wanted to increase the fear.”

  Astrologists found themselves baffled in developing a coherent, star-based theory to predict the shooter’s next move. Previously, they had linked the attacks to the first and second phases of the moon, but on June 21 the moon had been in its last quarter. Then came a startling headline: “Expert: Copy Cat Attacker Goes by West Coast Book.” “N.Y.P.D. Combs ‘Zodiac’ Thriller for Clues,” a second headline read. The New York Zodiac was using the San Francisco Zodiac as a guide. Psychologist Candice Skrapec, a professor of criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, theorized that the gunman was imitating the California killer:“He’s following an account in the book Zodiac written by Robert Graysmith,” said Skrapec. “He has seen the book and read parts of it. The scope sight, the circle with the cross inside, the drawings, the name Zodiac, the astrological components . . . come from the book. We are looking at an individual who is thinking the same thing he read in the book. . . . With this kind of behavior it would not be uncommon for the crimes to escalate, and there will be shorter time between incidents.”

  Friday, June 22, 1990

  Chief of Detectives Joseph Borrelli (“That’s Borrelli. Two r’s. Two l’s, boys.”) once led the “Son of Sam” probe. “The strange circumstances seem to fall under the zodiac signs of the dates of the shootings,” he said. “In the beginning when we looked at that, it was pure happenstance. But when you get four out of four, you began to look at it more closely.” The day after Parham was shot, the New York Post received another note from Zodiac:“This is the Zodiac. I have seen the Post and you say