Popular Crime

by Bill James

  But you know why I am absolutely convinced that he did in fact build the bomb? Because he uses the term “ammonium nitrate fertilizer”—and he spells it correctly. The Zodiac can’t spell “machine” or “Christmas”; there is no way in hell he could spell “ammonium Nitrate Fertilizer.” He couldn’t spell ammonium or nitrate or fertilizer; I’ll guarantee you, on his own, he would have misspelled all three words. He spelled them correctly because the words were staring right at him as wrote them. He had bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in his kitchen.

  The Zodiac was not as stupid as the people who taught him in school thought that he was. This, really, was what the murders were about: it was the Zodiac’s effort to prove how smart he was. That’s just my opinion; could be right, could be wrong. I think the Zodiac was a man who had failed at everything, who had been told all of his life that he was stupid, and he started killing people as a way of getting even with the world, and showing everybody how smart he really was. That isn’t the way he rationalized it to himself. He told himself that this was fun, and that he was collecting slaves for the afterlife, but what it was really about was showing us all that he was smarter than we were.

  I don’t mean to speak with too much confidence about the Zodiac. It is possible, in my view, that the Zodiac crimes were committed by two or three people, acting in concert and sharing resources, and acting very possibly as a satanic cult. In some communications there are indications that the Zodiac was an older man, past thirty; in other communications there are indications that he is younger. In some communications there are constant misspellings, whereas the Stine letter—over 100 words—contains only one spelling error.

  But my view of the Zodiac is that he was, for the most part, exactly what he seemed to be. He misspelled things because he couldn’t spell. He used small words and repeated them over and over because he had a very limited vocabulary. His handwriting is the handwriting that he shows us. When he said he was building a bomb, he was building a bomb. When he said he had killed 13 people, my bet would be that he had killed 13 people.

  And when he said that he was going to go on killing people, but just stop telling us whom he had killed, I believe that that most likely is what he did. I don’t believe that the Zodiac ever wrote a letter to a newspaper after March, 1971, and perhaps not after July, 1970. At some point he was probably arrested or killed or died off, and I have another theory about him that maybe I’ll introduce in another book. What his name was … I don’t know. I don’t think it was Arthur Leigh Allen.

  XXIII

  On September 22, 1969, Susan Nason disappeared from her home in Foster City, California. She was eight years old. This was five days before the murders at Lake Berryessa and an hour’s drive away, but I am not associating this with the Zodiac; I am on to another story here. Her body was found ten weeks later, abandoned in a trash pile on public land. Despite massive police efforts, the crime went unsolved for twenty years.

  Eileen Franklin was Susan Nason’s best friend. Twenty years later, in January of 1989, she was overwhelmed with a terrible memory: she had witnessed the crime. Her father, a brutal, abusive alcoholic, had raped and murdered the little girl in her presence, and then threatened to kill Eileen if she ever told. She had repressed the memory and kept silent for twenty years, but when the scene returned to her mind she told her husband, who contacted the police.

  George Franklin had not been a key suspect in the investigation, and there was little independent evidence to tie him to the murder. The police decided that Eileen Franklin’s story was credible, and that her account of the murder was consistent with the crime-scene evidence. The latter is a debatable point; almost everything useful to know about the crime scene had made it into the newspapers, and Eileen’s confirming memories were vague.

  Still, the prosecution had evidence that Franklin was a despicable man who had raped and beaten his daughters. Franklin’s wife in 1969, Leah, said that she had always believed that Franklin had committed the crime, and one of his other daughters had once called the police, as an adult, to report that she was convinced Franklin had committed the murder. Since she had no evidence, the police had put her report in the circular file. Franklin’s only son defended his father, although he had not spoken to him for several years before the accusation, lived many miles away from him, and still slept with a baseball bat under his bed for fear that his father would show up in the middle of the night.

  The jury deliberated for only eight hours. When a monster is on trial, it is easy to vote guilty. The conviction was reversed on appeal, the appeals court ruling that the “repressed memory,” with little or no supporting evidence, was insufficient to sustain a conviction.

  There are two books about the case, Sins of the Father, by Eileen Franklin and William Wright, and Once Upon a Time, by Harry N. MacLean. 60 Minutes also did a segment on the case, as did countless other shows.

  It might occur to the reader that a man so depraved that he would rape and murder a small girl in the presence of his daughter might well have committed other, similar crimes, without an audience. This thought has also occurred to the California police, but the passage of time has apparently left it impossible to make any other charges against him.

  He is a free man at this writing. While it is unfortunate that Franklin cannot be prosecuted for the things he actually appears to have done, it does seem apparent that repressed memories are an insufficient basis for criminal prosecution. The author is far from convinced that Franklin was guilty of the murder of Susan Nason.

  On September 23, 1970, three men and two women held up the State Street Bank and Trust Company on Western Avenue in Brighton, Massachusetts. (For you Bostonians, that’s over by the Harvard football stadium.) The three men were all ex-convicts. The two women were Brandeis University honor students. They escaped with $26,000, but in getting away one of the cons shot and killed a policeman, Walter Schroeder. He left a wife and nine.

  The unlikely gang split up that night. Two of the ex-cons were arrested in a matter of hours. Susan Saxe, Katherine Ann Power, and the third ex-con, Stanley Bond, headed south to Atlanta. When the other two were arrested police got positive identification of Saxe, Bond and Power, who became fearful of traveling together. Bond gave Power and Saxe each an envelope containing hundreds of dollars, and they agreed to meet up in Detroit.

  Bond also gave Power a suitcase, however, which contained a loaded shotgun. The shotgun went off on a baggage carousel at the airport in St. Louis. Power fled the airport, got on a bus, and made her way to Detroit, where she rejoined Saxe. Bond was arrested in Colorado; all three of the career criminals were now in custody.

  Kathy Power drove the getaway car for the bank job. She had been assigned to drive the getaway car because, during an earlier crime, the holdup of an arsenal in Newburyport, she had become violently ill, unable to handle her assignment.

  I wish I could explain the sixties radicals to you, but you kind of had to be there. They were good people, intent on making the world a better place. But, in their intense desire to make the world a better place, a few of them had trapped themselves in a paranoid fantasy about the world in which they actually lived. Few of them had ever suffered anything very much, and, as they were focused on the suffering of the oppressed, they needed suffering to feel authentic.

  Most of us can get past the things that are done to us, but vicarious suffering is different; it’s harder to set aside. I can forgive you for the things you have done to me, but who forgives the things that were done to my people a generation ago? Some of the radicals had slipped inside a prism of unforgivable injustices, and they saw the world through that prism. The rays of the sun turned left when they passed through the radical rainbow, and nothing they said or did made any sense when you got outside their bubble.

  Anyway, Power and Saxe began life on the run. They had been roommates at Brandeis. Saxe, who graduated magna cum laude in the spring of 1970, had been a radical activist for several years. Power got involved wit
h the radicals when she transferred to Brandeis from Syracuse in 1968. At Brandeis she met Bond (Bond … Stan Bond), who was a Vietnam vet and a friend of Albert DeSalvo; the two had been locked up together at one time. Bond had arranged to do a work-release study program at Brandeis, had been adopted by the radicals, and had begun to date Power, among others. When the deranged debutantes’ society started chattering about undertaking radical actions to strike at the heart of fascist Amerika, Bond introduced them to experienced criminals who knew how to do these things.

  After the bank robbery went bad and they found themselves on the FBI’s most-wanted list, Saxe and Power traveled together for four years, living for a while in a feminist commune in Connecticut, moving in 1973 to Lexington, Kentucky, where Power attended a chef’s school. In 1974, disagreeing about how to remain invisible, and probably just generally tired of one another, they split up. Susan Saxe was arrested in Philadelphia in 1975, and served eight years in prison for her part in the crime.

  Power, on the other hand, got to be pretty good at the fugitive dance. The paranoia that characterized and defined the radicals was very useful to a life in the underground: it gave her a hair trigger that Richard Kimble would have envied. Suspicious of everybody and everything, she dropped her life and ran at the slightest provocation, accumulating few possessions, changing her name constantly, working at the kind of jobs and living in the kind of places where nobody asks for references.

  From 1974 through 1977 she hid out in the New York/New Jersey area. In 1977 she acquired the birth certificate of a dead baby who would have been about her age, and began to live as Alice Metzinger. She moved to Oregon, where she gave birth to a son in 1979, and met a man named Ron Duncan in 1980. They hopscotched around Oregon together for a few years.

  In the mid-1980s, as her son entered the school system, their life began to settle down. The FBI took her off the list. She began to get better jobs, building a résumé. Power and Duncan bought a house, and eventually (1992) got married. She helped to start a restaurant in Eugene; the restaurant became a big success.

  Although Power/Metzinger gave the outward appearance of a cheerful, upbeat person, she was deeply depressed most of the time. She had grown up in a large, happy family, and had not seen anyone from that family in many years. She would burst into tears at the mention of the word “mother” or “brother” or “family.” In May, 1992, she entered therapy. Her therapist convinced her that she would never be happy as Alice Metzinger, and Power decided to face the music. A series of intermediary attorneys negotiated a plea bargain, and Power surrendered to authorities in Boston in September, 1993. She had been on the lam just short of 23 years, the entire second movement of her life.

  She was sentenced to eight to twelve years in prison. At a parole hearing in March, 1998, the family of the murdered policeman showed up to protest her possible release. She was so moved by their testimony that she withdrew her request for parole, and asked to complete her sentence. She was returned to prison, but was released in 1999 to complete her sentence on probation.

  There are four famous cases here that involve large elements of the same story, but acted out in different costumes. Those four are Sacco and Vanzetti, the Manson Family, the Katherine Ann Power story, and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

  A half-century earlier, a small group of anarchists had staged a payroll heist in the Boston area—Braintree—perhaps intending to fund their revolutionary activities with the proceeds. In that crime two persons were killed. Sacco and Vanzetti were unquestionably radical activists, although it is unclear whether they were actually involved in the robbery. Anyway, they were convicted of being involved, and, protesting their innocence every step of the way, were accorded the status of demigods by the left. The crimes are eerily similar—a gang of about the same size, of similar composition (half radicals, half ordinary crooks), both crimes committed in broad daylight, in both cases taking a similar amount of money ($15,776 in 1920, $26,000 in 1970) and committing murder in the process. In many ways Katherine Power is a similar person to Vanzetti—highly intelligent yet simplistic, courageous in her convictions but blind to the consequences of the actions in which she participated.

  Yet the fates of the participants are as different as night and day, for while Sacco and Vanzetti became revolutionary heroes by denying their guilt, Katherine Power was horrified by what had happened—and became a non-person. Was there something about 1970 as opposed to 1920 that caused this different reaction, or was it simply the way it all came down?

  In the three cases ca. 1970 (Manson, Hearst and Power), career criminals, a few years older than the baby boomers, adopted the guise of revolutionaries in order to seduce young women—seduce them sexually, but also to seduce them into becoming accomplices, to seduce them into a life sustained by violent crime.

  Charles Manson worked with society’s least-favored, with young girls who had run away from dysfunctional families, or who had been driven away by physical and sexual abuse. He adopted not the central ideas of the revolution, but the marginalia—the clothes, the hair, the music—and used these to build a “family,” a cult of people who had abandoned normal life in order to do whatever Charlie wanted. This cult he then used as a weapon against a bourgeois society that he felt had humiliated him, intending nothing except to cause pain, to cause harm.

  Donald DeFreeze, like Manson, was a career criminal who was born in Ohio. He was superficially different but profoundly the same. He escaped from Vacaville prison in March, 1973, and became involved with Patricia Soltysik, who was for all the world like Susan Saxe, except on the West Coast. DeFreeze and Soltysik co-founded the SLA, the “Symbionese Liberation Army,” which was a small band of losers who kidnapped Patty Hearst to draw attention to themselves. Most of them were killed when the house they were in burned down during a battle with the police in 1974.

  Manson, DeFreeze and the Brandeis radicals all believed that a race war was imminent in America, and that they could trigger that war with a few well-timed acts of violence. I don’t think that was a central idea for sixties radicals; I don’t remember it that way, anyway. I think it was more of a prison-culture idea that, in these three cases, crossed over into the counterculture. None of these three men (Manson, Bond or DeFreeze) had any genuine interest in what was then called The Movement. They used it as a TV huckster uses the Bible. But, more than anyone else, it was these three men who brought it to an end. Being a hippy had had its day; by 1969 it wasn’t really cool to be a hippy, but there were millions of them, and the movement could have stumbled on peacefully for generations. These three men, more than anyone else, made it profoundly un-cool to be a hippy, and thus, more than anyone else, brought the 1960s radical culture to an end.

  On the morning of May 24, 1971, a man who owned an orchard near Yuba City, California, noticed a hole in the ground on an isolated part of his property, a hole about the size and shape of a shallow grave. When he passed the same spot later in the day, after dark, the hole had been filled. The man called the police, who sent someone out the next day to investigate.

  Numerous sources say that the orchard owner called police because he thought someone was illegally burying trash on his property. This seems really unlikely. If I saw a grave-sized hole on my property and then was walking by there at night and saw that it had been filled in, my first instinct would be to pee in my pants. Also, anybody who thinks that you can complain about somebody burying trash on your property and the police will rush out to investigate has been dealing with different policemen than I have.

  Anyway, police found a grave, and, looking around, found others. They found a total of 25 graves.

  Juan Corona was arrested on May 26. Three things focused the investigation on Corona. All of the bodies had been hacked and chopped in an unusual way with a specific pattern of injuries. When information about this was relayed over police networks, police in Marysville sent information that a man attacked in a bar in 1970 had suffered (but survived) a similar wound pattern
. (Marysville and Yuba City are twin cities, one lying on either side of the Feather River, 70,000 people between them.) The chief suspects in that investigation had been the owner of the bar, Natividad Corona, and his brother, Juan.

  Juan Corona ran the work crews of migrant laborers on the two farms where the bodies were discovered. He could come and go freely over those properties, and had been seen there on the day the bodies were discovered.

  On May 21, 1971, Juan Corona had purchased meat from a Yuba City butcher, signing a receipt, then folding it and placing it in his pocket. On May 25, that receipt was found in one of the graves. The discovery of this receipt led to Corona’s arrest.

  On June 4, 1971, nine days after Corona was arrested, the 25th grave was found. This one contained numerous items that could be connected to the Corona house, including another receipt with his name on it. Blood was found in his vehicle, in all of his vehicles, blood from all four of the major blood groups (A, B, AB and O). Human blood was found on his boots, on his knife, on a machete that he kept under the driver’s seat of his van. Corona was convicted of the crimes on January 18, 1973.

  Many questions about the case were never answered, and many things about it remain unknown. The investigation fell upon the Yuba City and Sutter County police and prosecutors without warning, and found them utterly unprepared. Without an hour’s notice, there they were out in that orchard digging up body after body after body, with newspaper and television reporters descending upon them like mosquitoes in a swamp. Perhaps inevitably, the evidence was badly handled—bodies were confused, evidence was lost, injudicious statements were made. Even when the evidence itself was maintained, the chain of evidence was smudged. The prosecutors were handed a nightmare, and then, too, they were just small-town lawyers, whose training and experience had never prepared them to deal with anything this big.