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

by Robert Graysmith

  Lynch and his partner, Ed Rust, arrived next. “Mike was lying at the rear of the car, said Lynch, “and she was still behind the wheel. I remember she was trying to say something, and I put my ear over her like this to try to understand, but I just couldn’t.” “First came firecrackers, then gunshots,” Rust added. “One patrol got there before us—around midnight. It took us ten to fifteen minutes to get there. She died at 12:26 A.M. She kept trying to talk, but we couldn’t distinguish anything. In fact, we sent one of the officers with her in case she could say something. I think it was Dick Hoffman. He was the patrol officer who was there first. Mike said he thought it was a police officer come up to check. He pulled up behind them at sort of an off line from their car. He said that he had been parked in the same place before, and Darlene had a police officer that came up the same way [a cutoff technique] and shined a light just the same. It had happened before that way, and he had the impression it was a police officer when he first came up. Mike got out after the guy left, pushed out the right side of the two-door car. He said he had climbed over the seat trying to get away. The guy shot him several times. This was the only avenue he had was to get in the backseat.”

  “Shortly after, the ambulance arrived,” Lynch said, “and I helped the driver take her out of the car. Then Dick Hoffman followed the ambulance to the emergency hospital.”

  “We took Mike up to the Queen of the Valley Hospital,” concluded Rust, “Lynch and I saw that out front of the hospital they’ve got a little monument . . . it’s got a zodiac sign on it.”

  When she was shot, Darlene had been reaching for her quilt-pattern leather drawstring purse on the rear floorboard. It was as if she was getting identification out for the police. With the photo envelope inside her purse was a notebook with two names, “VAUGHN” and “LEIGH,” underlined. I consulted Darlene’s three personal directories and, under M, found the following entry crossed out: “MT. Shasta SK. Bowl Inc. (NRT) (VAUGHN) Area Code 916/ Mt. Shasta Ski Bowl NR 1.” Leigh was not listed. Police dismissed it as the name of Dean Ferrin’s employer, Bill Leigh.

  The time of the murder concerned Darlene’s sitters. “What time did they say she was murdered,” Janet Lynn said, “12:05 P.M.? [Darlene was shot at 12:00 A.M.] Because that was a big discrepancy. At one point we figured that she couldn’t have had time to even get to that parking lot. We kept telling the police that she didn’t leave the house until then . . . ’cause we were watching some program that doesn’t come on until almost midnight and she hadn’t even left the house yet. And then they are telling us she was murdered like five minutes later, when how could she get out to Blue Rock Springs in five minutes? And we kept telling this police officer [Lynch]. That was the biggest thing I never liked about that was the time discrepancy. It was right before midnight and you just can’t get out there that quick. And we did mention that time thing again to them. I do remember them asking us to come in. They didn’t even write it down.”

  “I was at Berryessa that day [of her murder],” Steven Kee told me. “I was to meet her that night, but when I got home I learned that Dee was killed.” Why had Mike rushed out and left all the lights in his house burning, the television blaring, and front door standing wide open? In the aftermath investigators asked themselves other questions:“Why was Mike wearing three pairs of pants and three sweaters? What about the alleged argument in Terry’s restaurant parking lot shortly before the shooting and then being followed by the same man to Blue Rock Springs where argument continued and ended in shooting? Other Questions: Did Mageau not, in fact, know the man who committed the attacks. Did he witness Darlene arguing with a middle-aged man either at the crime scene and/or earlier that evening at Terry’s . . . ‘There was an argument between occupants of DV’s car and another individual at Blue Rock Springs parking lot minutes before her murder.’ DV argued with likely Suspect in presence of SV several hours before her murder. (SOURCE: SV [Mageau] as related to family friend.)”

  At Blue Rock Springs that night, Officer Hoffman admitted he feared the killer might return again any minute and shoot him too. But at 12:40 A.M. Zodiac was busy elsewhere. He was calling switchboard operator Nancy Slover, VPD, from Joe’s Union Station (which closed at 8:25 P.M.) at Tuolumne and Springs Road to report what he thought was a double murder. “They were shot with a 9-millimeter Luger. I also killed those kids last year.” This booth was two thousand feet to the south from Leigh’s house.

  At 1:30 A.M., fifty minutes later, four phone calls were placed through the operator from a booth at Broadway and Nebraska. This booth was three thousand feet northwest from Allen’s home. One call was to Dean Ferrin’s parents, Arthur and Mildred. They heard “only deep breathing . . . no one said anything, we were certain someone was on the line.” The Dean Ferrin household got two phone calls. The sitter answered and heard only “breathing or wind blowing.” Next a call was placed to Dean’s brother, Gordon (who was in Thailand). Zodiac must have known Darlene in order to place these calls to her in-laws. News of the shooting and who the victims were had not yet been either on the radio or in the papers.

  When I made a map of Allen’s neighborhood I saw how close he was to all the Vallejo victims and how close they were to each other. Zodiac victim Mike Mageau’s house was four and a half blocks from the home of another victim, Betty Lou Jensen. Since the murders, Criminal Geographical Targeting has become a valuable police tool. Geographical Profiling is based on the theory of criminals’ spatial behavior. Criminals strike close to home just as the average person chooses stores where he shops daily. They operate close to areas they are familiar with and have previously scouted. A murderer has a tendency to hunt prey in identifiable areas and the impulse to disguise his home location. Thus, the sites of his crimes tend to radiate on all sides of the offender, like a spider in his web.

  As Zodiac roared away from the Blue Rock Springs lot, he would have reached a fork in the road. Narrow Lake Herman Road to his left offered no place to hide until he reached Benicia. Columbus Parkway (Leigh’s brother lived at the midpoint on Columbus Parkway) to his right led back into Vallejo, but offered the possibility of police cars coming at him on Springs Road. To avoid being trapped, I believe Zodiac took a small road, just off Columbus Parkway, so hidden I had to make an abrupt turn to reach the road. It led me in a dead straight line into the heart of Vallejo. At the end of twenty-four blocks I arrived at a familiar doorstep—the home of Arthur Leigh Allen.

  As far as finding Zodiac’s weapons and hood—the opportunity had long passed. One reason Zodiac used a new weapon each time was that he was discarding them as he went. Surely, after each of the ill-starred searches in different counties, he had destroyed his hidden souvenirs. But as Detective Baker had reasoned, the things he had taken might still be in plain sight, having a symbolic significance to Zodiac alone.

  The Napa Sentinel’s Harry V. Martin long afterward speculated:“Darlene knew a terrible secret . . . because of that secret she was murdered—not randomly, but deliberately . . . planned and executed by a person she knew very well, a person who bought her gifts, a person who visited her place of employment and even her home.”

  Carmela Leigh, pregnant and due three days after Darlene’s murder, was so afraid she had a peephole put in her door. “We didn’t know if this guy was going to get rid of her husband, her friends,” she told me. “We didn’t know if it was one of her goofy friends. It’s too bad they never found him. We were all afraid for a long time. We didn’t know whether this person knew Dee—that’s what everybody thought because she knew so many people. Then we thought Dee knew something about a narcotics bust or something, and the person who killed her knew she knew and got her before it all came out. And then we thought maybe she knew she was going to be murdered, and maybe some of the people in the occult, you know, they’ll sacrifice their life or something.

  “Then we thought maybe she knew. Maybe she did. Maybe she knew the guy was going to kill Mike and that’s why she wasn’t scared. From what Mike said in t
he paper, she wasn’t a bit nervous.”

  “There was the hint of drugs at the paint party—drug dealings there,” said Cheney. The sitters disagreed. “There were no signs of drugs in the house,” they told me. “There’s no indication of drugs in any of the police reports,” said Mulanax. “Some of the people that she associated with were, I think, involved in drugs, but there’s nothing in any of the reports that I have that would indicate that she herself was a user.” “I’ve had investigators come out every year,” said Bobbie Ramos, “to see if I’ve thought of anything. They’d ask if she was selling drugs. Did she make more tips than you? Sure she did. I might have made twenty, she might have made thirty-five. They were kind of maybe saying she sold drugs. . . . I’m not saying she didn’t smoke pot or anything. Smoking and selling is different.”

  “She might have taken marijuana once in a while,” Bobbie Oxnam told me, ‘but selling was strictly taboo to her. The implications that were put into the paper after she was murdered really made a lot of us mad. People forget the good about Darlene. She was not a tramp. She was no angel, but she was not a tramp either.”

  Sergeant Lynch and his partner Rust later interviewed Linda at 400 Brandon Avenue in San Jose. As with many of Darlene’s friends, she had been difficult to find after the Blue Rock Springs shooting. “And they talked to me for over seven hours,” Linda told me. “Lynch thought there were drugs involved. He gave me a typed list and he said, ‘Any names that look familiar to you, circle them.’ Of course I circled all the names I’ve mentioned to you as being at the painting party.”

  “Was Lee’s name on there?” I asked her. “Yes, there was another name on the list spelled different—‘Leigh.’ I circled the ones that Darlene knew. And when I had circled this particular name they wanted, they go ‘mm-huh,’ as if they had already made up their minds. When I had circled the one, they said, ‘That’s enough.’” Linda had circled the name of a middle-aged, round-faced local man who resembled Leigh Allen. And it was at this moment that the police went wrong. Lynch had yet to interview Leigh Allen.

  “Then I helped the police prepare a composite of the man at the party,” Linda told me, “a middle-aged man with a peculiar stare, a cold stare. I sat there with the police and the artist did the drawing from my directions. I kept asking for them to show me photos, but they never did. When the drawing was done, Lynch asked, ‘Do you think she’s ready?’ I say, ‘Ready for what?’ And they open up this black real thin binder. It had cellophane on it and it was another composite drawing. The only thing I had different from it was the chin. It just blew me away.”

  This was a sketch prepared from Mageau’s description from his hospital bed. He had seen Zodiac’s profile clearly when he shot him, and was able to speak in two days after the shooting. Officer Baldino said it was “probably the same individual” who had been frequenting Terry’s, a man he had picked out of “a social situation.”

  “Steve Baldino picked out a guy he saw at the restaurant,” Linda told me. “Steve was pretty shook up over all this. He knew the family and he used to come by. I sat in the cop car one time and he let me feel his club, touch a gun. He was a really good cop and when Dee died he kind of went overboard. I think he might have made a mistake.” The man Baldino eyeballed at an A.A. meeting admitted to visiting Terry’s, but he was not the man at the painting party. Lynch had the right picture, but the wrong name. Zodiac must have felt invulnerable after this. He had grown increasingly bolder.

  “But you know,” Linda continued, “I think Zodiac wears makeup, and has got to be from Vallejo’cause he knows how to get away. The strange thing is everyone left Vallejo [Mike and his brother, Steven Kee, Robbie Lee, Linda herself, Christina, Darlene’s younger sister]. I would think if the guy was from San Francisco they’d stay. They’d be a lot safer in Vallejo. But they all left the city and got effectively lost.”

  Linda’s composite did some good. It was accurate enough for Cheney to later recognize it as his friend, Arthur Leigh Allen.

  “Of course I’ve never doubted that Zodiac was Leigh,” Cheney told me. “And I’ve always been astonished that they never tripped him up. I couldn’t believe it. I kept waiting for something to turn up, to read that Zodiac was arrested. Nothing happened. I believe that the Lake Herman Road and Lake Berryessa were just window dressing, but he killed Darlene Ferrin on purpose.

  “When I finally read your book, Zodiac, and I had purposely not done so until now in order not to affect my recall, I got an idea. Darlene was certainly not a lovers’ lane random killing. I think Darlene was killed on purpose. I suspect she was the target and he threw the others in for confusion. There was the business about Darlene saw him kill somebody, or he just may have wanted to close her mouth. Darlene may have been blackmailing him.”

  George Bawart, at the Zodiac conference, stated he believed Allen to be Zodiac. Captain Roy Conway said in a published interview: “I believe as I always have, that the Zodiac killer was Arthur Leigh Allen.” I asked Toschi the same question. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he concluded, “that Arthur Leigh Allen was, in fact, the Zodiac.” I had written the same in 1977 (when we had an army of suspects) because Allen had offered to help catch himself.

  I recalled the Zodiac Conference and a question Rita Williams had asked: “If Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac, why didn’t he leave some message behind to let everyone know he was the Zodiac? If he was Allen, can you tell me why you think he didn’t?” I remembered that when police showed Allen bomb plans on lined yellow paper with a menu for making bombs, he said, “I’ve never seen that piece of paper before. . . . I’ve never seen these documents before.” And yet it was in his own handwriting.

  “Did he leave some message behind to let everyone know he was the Zodiac?” repeated Conway thoughtfully. “Allen does leave a message by things that are in his basement and at the same time denying everything. From my point of view, he did leave that message. One of [Zodiac’s] letters talked about finding bombs in his basement. Well, in fact, there were bombs in the basement of that house when we did the search warrant—there were pipe bombs. He talked about a particular way of making the pipe bombs, and we found handwriting evidence of him having written that formula that he denied even making. Ultimately, the only handwriting match we have is to him in his writings of Zodiac’s bomb-making formula. So in his own way he did, as far as I’m concerned, leave that message.”

  Conway had indicated to the FBI that he and Bawart would present a full review of the case to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office for an opinion regarding possible prosecution for Leigh Allen. “If the D.A. refuses to fill charges against ALLEN,” he wrote, “the Vallejo Police Department will close its investigation on the ‘ZODIAC’ case.”

  “Once these interviews have been conducted,” the FBI wrote in 1992, “Conway indicated that he and Bawart will present a full review of the case to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office for an opinion regarding possible prosecution for ALLEN. If the D.A. refuses to fill charges against ALLEN, Vallejo Police Department will close its investigation on the ‘ZODIAC’ case. Vallejo has requested no further assistance on this case, and it is therefore recommended that this case be closed at this time.” The FBI, on noting the death of Arthur Leigh Allen, said in a final report, “The San Francisco case is closed at this time. . . . Vallejo has requested no further assistance on this case, and it is therefore recommended that this case be closed at this time. . . .”

  But who was that first tipster, the one who alerted Lynch so many times in 1969? “I got that tip by letter,” Lynch told me without thinking the last time I saw him. In the absence of that anonymous tip, Allen wouldn’t have been a suspect until 1971. The Vallejo P.D. suspected that Allen’s own brother or sister-in-law had turned him into the police as a Zodiac suspect. They did later on. “Lynch told me he was tipped to Allen more than once, maybe three times, by some woman,” I told Toschi. “She was calling up and tipping him. So I’m thinking it’s possibly the s
ister-in-law.”

  “You’re reading my mind,” said Toschi. “I’m thinking it’s Karen too.”

  If Allen had not died, the saga of Zodiac would have had a different ending.

  On Tuesday, March 24, 1992, upon his return from Germany and shortly before Leigh Allen’s death, George Bawart conducted an important interview.

  “What I’m referring to is where I am finally able to recontact victim Mike Mageau,” he told me, “and I show him a six-photo spread. It included Harvey Hines’s suspect. I had a picture of Arthur Leigh Allen in there; the rest were not INS, NIS, and CHP officers, they were just fillers. My wife Jan was down in L.A. at the time for a company she was working for. I had to meet with Mike Mageau at some point in time, so I dovetailed this when she was down there for a week. I visited with her while I was there, stayed at the same hotel room, and saved the city some money. Now this is some twenty years after the Blue Rock Springs thing, so I’m not real hyped up about meeting Michael Mageau and showing him this photo spread. I’m tell you how much credence I took to it—normally if I went down to an airport, I’d get ahold of airport security. They’d give me an office and I’d sit there and talk to the witness and show ’em a photo spread. I thought so little of this, thinking I was going to be there about ten minutes, that I just located him and found a small corner of the airport.

  “There were people milling around and everything, but it was fairly quiet. And that’s why I showed him this lineup.’Cause I just knew that he’d look at this lineup and say, ‘There’s nobody in there that I recognize. ’ Well, I pulled this lineup out and they were driver’s license pictures from 1967 or ’68. Anyway, they were from the era when Zodiac started. They were of Arthur Leigh Allen and of ‘Larry Kane’ and fillers, all fat-faced people. And these were the old-style photos. They were black and white. You got them from DMV in those days. These were blown up larger than a regular license picture. A regular license picture is about maybe an inch and a half square. These were maybe two inches or three inches square. They were not huge pictures, but they were fairly large pictures.