The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

  The newspaper’s readers were intrigued by the postscript comprising 18 apparently random letters. Some wrote in to suggest that, contrary to the killer’s statement, they might be a crude anagram of his name. If they were, it was the closest the murderer came to keeping his promise and revealing his identity.

  For five years the Zodiac Killer (and imitators) continued to pester editors, journalists and police with phone calls, strident letters and increasingly insoluble puzzles. Police found several finger- and palmprints on these documents, together with other clues they kept secret - but they never made a breakthrough. Amid the growing tally of murders (claimed by the killer, but not all of them his) detectives continued to flounder in speculation.

  Was Zodiac genuinely a sub-literate oaf? Or was he - as Jack the Ripper almost certainly had been - an educated man who tried to muddy the trail with misspellings and poor grammar?

  Was he simply lucky? Or the possessor of a powerful, albeit twisted, intellect which left law-enforcers far behind? In one letter he quietly expressed the conviction that he was invincible: ‘The police shall never catch me because I have been too clever for them.’ Perhaps an unconscious slip, but no misspellings there.

  Was there anyone out in the killing fields (a mother, perhaps) who suspected or was aware of his activities, but remained silent? Police made many appeals for such a witness, but without result.

  And was he a Satanist? His behaviour suggested it - and some police worked tirelessly on this line of investigation, hoping to find associates who might lead them to the will-o’-the-wisp himself.

  Desperate Search

  The Zodiac Killer had an odious post-murder habit of writing to victims’ relatives to gloat about the grief they must be feeling - and assuring them there was more suffering in store for the families’ loved ones when they joined him as his slaves in ‘paradice’.

  These outrageous contacts often resulted in police hauling men in for questioning on the flimsiest of evidence. It was imperative, they knew, that they be seen doing something. One of these ‘suspects’ was a former sailor who had boasted in a bar that he had read Zodiac’s letters so often he knew them by heart. He also had an interest in abnormal psychology, having worked in a mental asylum shortly before he became an inmate.

  To the detectives he seemed a perfect theoretical fit. A small problem, however, was that his finger- and palmprints did not match those detected on the Zodiac documents. The murderer’s hands were considerably larger. Another drawback: a minute search of the man’s Santa Rosa property yielded nothing. But the investigators remained convinced that this person - dishonourably discharged from the navy - was their best lead so far. A particularly significant clue was that he was wearing a Sea Wolf watch, from the Swiss manufacturer Zodiac. He insisted that his mother had given it to him as a present, and she confirmed that she had - but police suspicions were not assuaged.

  This letter, believed genuine, was published by the San Francisco Chronicle, 26 June 1970.

  Detectives submitted the shamed sailor to a gruelling 10-hour polygraph test. He passed it. The man’s recently hired lawyer demanded that he be released. Police had no other option - but some continued to confide to journalists that they believed this man was the mass-murderer. In 1992, still traduced by the media, but insisting he was innocent, the man died, legally blind and stricken with diabetes.

  Murders of the Zodiac kind are still being committed in California. But they are deemed either to be imitations or inheritors of a bleak tradition. In 2004 Californian police and the FBI decided they had enough negative evidence to close the case. Zodiac, they announced, no longer seemed to be active.

  Possibly today he lives in open hiding somewhere, relishing the memory of his past obscenities. Conceivably too silent for so rabid a publicity seeker, he might have pined away and died of natural causes. Or perhaps he took out one of his treasured guns and ended his essentially pointless existence.

  Roll-call of the Dead

  Zodiac’s black boasts varied. On some occasions he alleged he had killed 15 people; on others, 37.

  Police compiled a list of seven ‘definite’ victims, followed by four who ‘almost certainly’ had suffered or died at the maniac’s hands. During the era in which he created fear on the streets, many more murders, not listed here, were deemed to be the ‘possible’ work of Zodiac.

  Betty Lou Jensen Shot dead 20 December 1968 near Lake Herman outside Vallejo.

  David Faraday Fellow victim. Shot dead.

  Darlene Ferrin Shot dead 4 July 1969 at Blue Springs outside Vallejo.

  Mike Mageau Fellow victim. Shot, seriously injured.

  Cecelia Shepard Stabbed to death 27 September 1969 at Lake Berryessa, Napa County.

  Bryan Hartnell Fellow victim. Stabbed, seriously injured.

  Paul Stine Shot dead 11 October 1969 in San Francisco.

  Cheri Jo Bates Strangled and stabbed to death 31 October 1966 in Riverside, California. Her connection with the Zodiac was demonstrated in 1970 when San Francisco Chronicle columnist Paul Avery listed similarities between her death and the 1968-69 killings.

  Kathleen Jones Kidnapped with her baby 22 March

  1970 near Modesto, California. Before escaping she spent several terrifying hours in a car with a man who promised he would kill her and the child. He said enough to convince her he was the Zodiac.

  Linda Edwards Shot dead 4 June 1963 at a beach near Lompoc, California.

  Robert Domingos Fellow victim, also shot dead. These two homicides were subsequently linked with Zodiac because of their similarities to the 1968-69 murders.

  * * *

  Donna Lass Vanished from South Lake, Tahoe, Nevada, 6 September 1970. Body never found. On 22 March 1971 the San Francisco Chronicle received a postcard that could be interpreted as the Zodiac claiming a victim.

  * * *

  The Dead Sailor Who

  Invaded a Photo

  Ghost Mysteries

  * * *

  The face of a Royal Navy crewman chillingly appears in an official photograph, taken three days after his funeral. The phantom of a tormented young mother searches the countryside at night, crying out for her daughter who drowned in 1864. The apparitions of two sailors are photographed swimming in the wake of their ship, 24 hours after they were buried at sea. A hooded entity appears on security footage at Britain’s haunted Hampton Court Palace. A long-dead pilot appears to hundreds of witnesses at a decommissioned airfield. Ghosts have awed and frightened the human race since the dawn of history - but only in the past 100 years have photographers, sound-recordists and scientific analysts proved that phantasms are not necessarily figments of the imagination. They form, in many cases, a mysterious part of our physical world…

  THE LOCAL NEWSPAPER CALLED IT one of the most appalling accidents to have occurred in peacetime. Freddy Jackson, an aircraft mechanic on HMS Daedalus, was preparing a plane for takeoff from a Cranwell, Lincolnshire, tarmac when something caused him to stumble. He fell forward into the propeller’s whirling blades - and died instantly in an explosion of blood and flesh.

  The year was 1919, nine months after the armistice that had ended the Great War. Freddy was buried with full naval honours. Then, three days after the funeral, his former colleagues returned to the runway on which he had died. They had reasons, both military and sentimental, for going back. The transport base was about to be decommissioned - and they were required to appear in a commemorative photograph.

  Included in the crew picture, taken by Bassano’s Photographic Company, were all the men who had either borne the coffin or marched behind it. When the picture was developed, the photographic firm returned copies, with the original negatives, to the base commander at Cranwell.

  A copy was pinned up in the maintenance crew’s mess room. It created shockwaves. At the time the picture was taken Freddy Jackson had been lying in the naval cemetery for three days.

  Yet here he was, standing in the back row
of the photograph, smiling [see photo].

  Suspecting that someone had played a sinister practical joke, the base commander employed two independent analysts to study the photograph and original negatives. They could find no evidence that anyone had interfered.

  The Royal Navy managed to keep its ‘ghost’ photo well away from the press…or at least until 77 years later (1 July 1996) when the bizarre affair was finally chronicled in Britain’s Daily Mail.

  The newspaper reported that Bobbie Capel, the then 97-year-old widow of Air Vice Marshal Arthur Capel, had been a WRENS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) driver at the base when the photograph was taken. Neighbours in her Somerset village of Chipstable had persuaded her to make the picture public.

  Naval mechanic Freddy Jackson had lain buried for three days when this photo was taken. [Courtesy Navy News]

  ‘I have no doubt that the face peeping out from the back is Jackson,’ she said. ‘I can recall the general astonishment when the picture was pinned up. And I can’t entertain the idea that this was a deliberate fake. For one, the photographer came from outside the base. He didn’t know any of us - and once he’d taken the picture he left immediately. He just wouldn’t have known about the accident. I can think of no explanation other than that it is the picture of a ghost.’

  A similar view was expressed by Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, World War II hero and a founder of the RAF. In his book Flight Towards Reality he wrote: ‘There he was in the picture, and no mistake, although a little fainter than the rest of the men. Indeed, he looked as though he was not altogether there, not really with that group…What is unusual, to say the least, is that this was an official photograph…also the certainty that there had been no hanky-panky in the darkroom. Not only would Bassano’s not have dared to fake it, the negative was scrutinised for faking and was found to be untouched.’

  Dead Men’s Faces ‘Followed Ship’

  Five years after Freddy Jackson’s image purportedly burst from the grave, an American oil tanker captain took an even more disturbing photograph.

  The strange saga began in December 1924 when the oil tanker SS Watertown was sailing out of New York toward the Panama Canal. Two crew-members, Michael Meehan and James Courtney, were cleaning a cargo tank when they were overcome by fumes. Their bodies were found several hours later.

  In accord with the custom of that time, the men were buried at sea. But they remained close by. The following afternoon, just before dusk, the first mate reported seeing the dead men’s ghostly faces staring up at him from the waves on the ship’s port side. He said that the countenances had remained visible for about 10 seconds, then faded.

  Captain Keith Tracy assumed that the mate, distressed by the deaths, had simply become hysterical - but, knowing how superstitious crewmen could be, instructed him to keep the alleged sighting quiet.

  Captain Keith Tracy’s famous photograph of the dead men’s faces that followed his oil tanker.

  However, that was not the end of it. Over the following days many more sailors reported seeing the phantom faces, usually in the wake of the ship.

  Before long the prolonged haunting was proving so poisonous to morale that Captain Tracy reluctantly reported it by radio to his employers, the Cities Service Company in New York. Tracy’s understandably sceptical supervisor asked whether he had a camera aboard. If so, he should try to photograph the faces - and prove that they weren’t a figment of everyone’s fevered imagination.

  Tracy followed the supervisor’s advice, managing to take six snaps of the faces. He then locked the camera and film in the Watertown’s safe, presenting them to his employers when the ship returned to New York.

  A commercial developer processed the film. The first five exposures contained nothing but foaming waves. But the sixth (on previous page) showed the dead sailors’ faces. The Cities Service Company engaged the Burns Detective Agency to check the negative for fraud. The agency reported that the film had not been tampered with.

  Soon afterward the Watertown sailed again with a new captain and crew. There were no further reports of faces in the water.

  The Ghost Child Lost in Kelly Country

  Many parapsychologists believe that intense emotion can sometimes imprint itself upon the fabric of time. A phenomenon that seems to support that theory has been described by people living in the Beechworth area of northern Victoria.

  At dusk, the rugged banks of Running Creek have reportedly echoed to the distressed calls of a woman believed to be long dead.

  Locals surmise that the entity is a young mother who lost her baby daughter near the creek more than 140 years ago. I discussed the haunting with Alan French, a local farmer of Wooragee Valley:

  For as long as anyone can remember, people around here have heard cooees, the sound of a mother calling desperately for her little girl. I’ve never heard the sounds personally, but they’re believed to come from the ghost of a Mrs Morley, whose one-year-old toddler Rosanna vanished near the creek in 1864.

  The little girl’s body was never found. She was thought to have fallen into a mineshaft. Long after the official search ended the distraught mother kept stumbling through the bush, calling hopelessly. Some people believe the cooees have stamped themselves on the atmosphere like a tape-recording.

  Those cries are virtually all that remains of the Morley family.

  Their house has vanished and the marker that commemorated Rosanna’s death is lost under a mountain of blackberry bushes.

  Farmer Alan French ‘sensed spirits’ in remote bushland.

  Alan French’s fascination with phantoms stems from his father’s descriptions of uncanny bush encounters.

  He was a commonsense bloke. But he was seriously shaken on a local track one afternoon, when his dog and horses suddenly went berserk. He followed their eyes and saw a mist of some kind coming out of an old applebox tree.

  The fog formed itself into a human shape which drifted slowly across the road. Beside that tree there was a grave. In later years my father would say the misty figure had jetted out of the tree like steam from a kettle.

  I’ve never seen a ghost but I have sensed spirits in the bush, both good and evil. There’s one place I’ll never go back to. It’s a clearing containing a rock, like a primitive altar. I broke into a sweat the moment I saw it. Even today, when I glance at the photo I took, I sense a malevolence there.

  That place is the exact opposite of a gully I found in the ranges. It’s an intensely spiritual spot that fills you with peace when you walk through it. I’m sure the Aboriginals own this gully - and I know I must never take a picture of it or tell anyone where it is.

  The Spectre that Almost Stopped

  the Show

  A ‘destructive ghost’ tried hard to sabotage the writing of the musical My Fair Lady. In his autobiography The Street Where I Live, the show’s lyricist, the late Alan J. Lerner, recalls that the problems began when he invited composer Frederick (Fritz) Loewe to work with him at his house in Rockland County, New York. ‘That particular section of the Hudson River is known as the Dutch country,’ Lerner says. ‘Many of its houses are supposedly possessed.’

  Lerner’s house, built in 1732, was reputedly troubled by the spirit of General Anthony Wayne, notorious for his eccentricity and violent nature. ‘On the first night I put Fritz and his lady friend Virginia in the guestroom,’ the lyricist writes. ‘After several hours’ sleep they were woken by footsteps that seemed to pass straight through the door and into the bedroom…’

  Immediately the room became ‘as cold as a freezing chamber’, prompting the assertive Virginia to scream, ‘Go away! What did we ever do to you?’ The protest worked. The temperature promptly rose and the footsteps faded through the wall. Fritz switched on the light, only to find that the door was still locked. But both witnesses insisted they had both heard - and felt - the presence.

  On another night, Lerner recalls, his guests heard the same footsteps shuffle into the bathroom and flush the lavatory. The pair
immediately dressed and packed their cases, Fritz leaving a note saying, ‘Dear Boy, a ghost who wakes me in the night is one thing. But a ghost who goes to the bathroom and takes a crap is more than I can stand.’

  This, reports Loewe’s biographer Avery Armstrong, was part of an unpleasant pattern that had seriously delayed the collaborators’ work. ‘Evil smells infested the house,’ he writes. All attempts at finding a rational explanation (dead vermin in the walls or bad plumbing) failed.’

  But worst was the black sense of depression that seemed to pervade the premises - dampening the joyousness of the musical’s creation to an alarming extent.

  ‘There were moments when it seemed the public might never get to see what was destined to be one of the time’s major theatrical events,’ Armstrong says. ‘But happily, Lerner and Loewe outmatched the ghost in their determination to get the show completed. And they did.’

  An Address that was Fatal to Own

  A similarly gloom-infected house was described to me by an Australian correspondent, Mrs Rosemary Kriz of Templestowe, Victoria. This abode, at least according to neighbours, was actually dangerous to occupy - its four previous owners having died of heart attacks only weeks after moving in. Mrs Kriz wrote:

  The first I heard of the place was when my uncle bought it and invited my husband and me to stay with him. The house stood on three acres of land in the Black Forest, Germany. It comprised two storeys and had been built near the site of a mill that had been demolished in 1818.