Shooting for the Stars

by R. G. Belsky

  “Did you ever see this man before?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Absolutely.”

  I sighed and took the picture of Janson back. I’d found out some stuff from this woman about the case. I had a potential connection to at least one of the deaths on Abbie’s list of victims. But no connection to Laura Marlowe that I could see. Or anyone else on the list.

  Sometimes, when you’re all out of ideas, it’s the simplest thing that works. That’s what happened here. I had a picture of Laura Marlowe with me. I showed it to Easton now just to see if it jogged anything in her memory.

  “Clarissa,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s Clarissa.”

  I stared down at the picture of Laura Marlowe in my hand.

  “She was so beautiful,” she said.

  Suddenly it all made sense. There’d been a girl named Clarissa, who’d spent six months with the group, Easton had told me. And there was a missing period of about that time in Laura Marlowe’s life before she showed up in Hollywood and eventually became a star, according to Sherry DeConde and Jackie Sinclair.

  Laura Marlowe wasn’t some random target of the Sign of the Z. She’d been a part of the group.

  “Clarissa,” Sally Easton said again, looking down at the thirty-year-old picture of Laura Marlowe.

  “Clarissa,” I repeated.

  PART FOUR

  NO SENSE MAKES SENSE

  Chapter 30

  BEFORE I left Sally Easton’s farm, she told me more that she remembered about the girl she knew as Clarissa.

  Like most of the people who’d passed through there, Clarissa had been pretty much of a mystery. No past, no future—just the present. That’s what Zorn used to preach to them, she said. You seize the day, you live for now. But some details slipped out during the time Clarissa was there. She came from New York, she hated her mother, and she hardly knew her father. She seemed very confused, Easton remembered. She also seemed fragile and delicate and ­innocent—like a little girl in a woman’s body. It was as if she’d never really experienced anything about life until she came to Zorn’s ranch.

  “One day we were talking about school,” Sally Easton had told me. “I said I hated it, because all the other kids made fun of me for being different. I asked her if that happened to her too. She said no, because she never knew any other kids. She’d never gone to school. She said her mother had tutored her at home. Her whole world had been what her mother had planned out for her.”

  With Zorn’s group, Clarissa began making up for lost time. She drank, did drugs, and—most importantly—discovered sex. Easton said Zorn had a no-sex rule among the members of his group. That is they weren’t allowed to have sex with anyone besides him—or without his permission.

  Clarissa—or Laura—began sneaking off with one of the men in the group. Sally didn’t remember his name, because he wasn’t there for very long. They went off for long walks together, deep in conversation and almost oblivious to the others in the group. Then one day they were just gone. But people came and went from the ranch like that all the time, Easton said, so she never thought much more about Clarissa.

  Until I showed her the picture.

  I had a couple of questions about Sally Easton’s story. First, how could she not know that the woman she once knew as Clarissa had gone on to become one of American’s most famous movie stars a few years later? Her answer was that she never paid attention to popular culture. Movie stars, TV shows—they meant nothing to her. Of course, if Zorn had put out the order to kill Laura, Sally Easton would have known who she was then. But she said nothing like that had ever happened. Zorn never mentioned Clarissa again. She’d only been with them a short time, and so her absence from the group wasn’t really missed that much.

  She could have been lying to me, of course, but I didn’t think so. She’d already told me everything else. Why lie about this?

  There was also the question of what happened to the guy Laura ran off with. But finding him would be a nearly impossible task at this point. No name, no real description. I didn’t figure he was very significant anyway. He was only in the cult for a few months, according to Sally. He probably just faded off into obscurity.

  * * *

  Which brought me back to the five dead celebrities on Abbie’s list.

  If Zorn really did kill Deborah Ditmar, what about Laura and the other three?

  I drove back to my hotel in Los Angeles. I ordered a big pot of coffee from room service to keep me going, took out my laptop, and went to work.

  First, I downloaded pictures of all five of the people from the web. Then I went through what I knew about each death. Other than the fact they were all celebrities, I couldn’t see any real similarities. Laura Marlowe. Deborah Ditmar. Susan Fairmont. Stephanie Lee. Cheryl Carson. They all died in different places, in different ways, over a span of several years.

  The only concrete connection to Sign of the Z—except for the fact that Laura had once been a member—was what Sally Easton had said about Deborah Ditmar.

  I went online and read as many articles as I could find about the Ditmar murder. There weren’t a lot. Most of the coverage had occurred thirty years ago before newspapers even thought about putting their stories online. But I found one article that had been written just several months earlier as a Sunday piece for the Los Angeles Times. The headline was DEBORAH DITMAR: HOLLYWOOD’S FORGOTTEN TRAGEDY. The piece delved into the long-ago murder of the rising young star, all the unanswered questions about the case, and how her rise to stardom had been cut tragically short.

  In reading it, I was surprised that—like with Laura Marlowe—many of the so-called “facts” of the case turned out not to be true. The fan who everyone thought at first had killed Ditmar was apprehended by police. But it turned out he’d been arrested on another charge in another state—and was in custody there at the time of the murder. No other suspect was ever found.

  The byline on the article was someone named William Crider. I figured he might be a grizzled veteran who covered the original murder. But instead he turned out to be a young guy in his twenties who’d graduated from the University of Missouri journalism school a few years earlier and gotten a job at the Los Angeles Times—first on the Style section and now on the news desk.

  “I’ve always been fascinated by unsolved cold cases,” he said when I got him on the phone. “So I pitched this idea to my editors for a Sunday piece, they liked it, and now I’m up for some nice awards for it. Hell, one day I might even become as famous as you, Malloy.”

  He knew all about me. My triumphs and my disasters. I guess my career was pretty much an open book in the journalism world. To be honest, he seemed a bit in awe of me. Which isn’t a bad thing when you’re trying to get information out of someone.

  “Do you think this might be connected to the Laura Marlowe murder?” he asked me at one point.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “You wrote an article about the Laura Marlowe case for the Daily News. Now you’re asking me about another unsolved celebrity murder from thirty years ago. I don’t have to be Bob Woodward to figure out why you’re so interested.”

  I didn’t want to tell him any more than I had to. I didn’t want him to steal my story. So I said I was just fishing around, looking for any possible angle.

  “What did you find out about the investigation into the Deborah Ditmar murder?” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “After the crazy fan thing fell through, they never found another suspect. The most likely scenario is that it was some other crazy fan. But they were never able to pinpoint anyone. That’s what made it so fascinating for me. A rising star’s life is snuffed out and no one has any idea who did it or why.”

  “So you’re saying the cops back then never really had any other leads?”


  “Well, they thought they had one at the beginning. But it fizzled out too. Someone speculated that the Ditmar woman had tried to write something in her own blood before she died. But then the ME’s office determined she died instantly from the first shot. The authorities decided in the end it didn’t mean anything.”

  “What did they think she wrote?”

  “They hoped it was a clue to her killer.”

  “You mean a name?”

  “Actually, it looked like it was just a letter.”

  “Which letter?”

  “The blood was smeared so badly that they couldn’t really tell for sure.”

  “Any guess?”

  “Yeah, the cops at the time said it looked like . . . well, it looked sorta like someone had tried to write the letter Z.”

  “A Z?” I said.

  “Uh-huh. Weird, huh?”

  “And the cops never made any sense out of it?”

  “Nope. But even if it was a Z, and even if Ditmar had somehow tried to write the killer’s name or initials, no one could figure it out. I mean how many names start with Z? Zeke, Zelda? Zorro? C’mon, now. Anyway, like I said, they determined that Ditmar died instantly and couldn’t have written it.”

  I sat there stunned. Sure, it didn’t mean anything to the cops back then. Or even to Crider now. But they didn’t know what I knew. They didn’t know about Sign of the Z.

  “What if the killer left it?” I said.

  “Now why would the killer do something like that?”

  To leave his signature behind, I thought to myself. So he could brag about it to his followers later.

  “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense at all,” was the only thing I said to William Crider though.

  Chapter 31

  AFTER I hung up, I could barely contain my excitement.

  All serial killers were different, but there were often some similarities in the cases I’d covered. One of them was that a serial killer always walked a fine line between not wanting to get caught and still having the need to leave something behind to let people know what he had done. That was the high for a serial killer, to leave behind his signature. A note. An object. Some kind of sign to show the world he was there.

  The Z could have been that sign.

  Plus, writing the letter Z in the victim’s blood was similar to what Manson and his followers had done in the murders of Sharon Tate and the others. They wrote pigs in large letters on the wall of the actress’s home after killing her and four other people there. Later, at the home of the next victims—supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary—they used the victims’ blood to write Death to Pigs, Rise, and Helter Skelter on the walls and refrigerator.

  “Helter Skelter” was, of course, a reference to the Beatles song of that year. Manson played it constantly and thought it was a signal—a sign for him—of the upcoming war against the establishment that he predicted was coming. The Tate and LaBianca killings were supposed to be the first blows against the rich and famous in this apocalyptic battle.

  Okay, the Manson family left their signature behind at these crime scenes.

  Russell Zorn idolized Manson and tried to emulate him with his own group of fanatical followers.

  So did Russell Zorn write the letter Z in Deborah Ditmar’s blood as his signature?

  And if he did, was there a sign left behind at any of the other four murders?

  * * *

  The biggest problem with my Sign of the Z theory for the five celebrity killings was that the timeline didn’t match for any of the victims besides Ditmar. Laura Marlowe was killed in 1985. Russell Zorn couldn’t have been responsible for that because he was in jail. Sally Easton too. Most of the other members of the Sign of the Z were either dead or incarcerated by then. And the other three ­murders—Stephanie Lee, Susan Fairmont, and Cheryl ­Carson—were carried out in 1988 and 1989. Zorn had already been executed by then.

  Then I remembered something. One of the Sign of the Z members had escaped after the convenience store holdup and the shootout with police at the ranch where the others died or were arrested.

  His name was Bobby Mesa.

  Mesa had been Zorn’s right-hand man.

  I tracked down as much information as I could about Mesa. Like Laura Marlowe, he seemed to be a strange candidate to be a member of a crazy cult like Sign of the Z. Born to wealthy parents in Philadelphia, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as a Phi Beta Kappa and then studied political science as a graduate student for a year at Princeton until he dropped out to travel around the country. He landed in Los Angeles where he tried without success to make it first as an actor, then as a musician. He wound up working off and on as a roadie for different musical groups—but mostly just panhandling on the street and doing drugs.

  Eventually he met Zorn and moved to the ranch in the desert with the others. Everyone said he worshipped Zorn and the two were inseparable. I found a picture of Mesa. He was a burly man with big, bushy, dark hair. After the shootout where the others died or were captured, he remained on the run for several years.

  I cross-referenced that time period against the other murders on Abbie’s list. It matched. All of the other murders on Abbie’s list besides Ditmar—including Laura Marlowe—took place during those years when Mesa was still at large. He was finally captured at a New York City hotel in 1989. Several years later, he died in a prison cafeteria brawl.

  After Mesa was in custody, there were no more celebrity killings. At least none that I knew about. Also, all of the last three murders—after Ditmar and Laura—had occurred after Russell Zorn was executed in early 1988. I wasn’t sure if there was any significance to that, but it seemed intriguing.

  There had to be some kind of a link here. If I could just figure out what it was . . .

  * * *

  I spent a long time trying to find any possible connection between Mesa and Laura or any of the other killings.

  I googled different names in hopes of getting lucky and stumbling across a clue. Mesa’s name. The victims’ names. There was nothing until I typed Sign of the Z. Before I could type another name as a possible link, my screen auto-filled with references to Sign of the Z. A lot of them said sign of the Zodiac. Of course. That’s what Sign of the Z might mean.

  Sure enough, I checked and discovered that Russell Zorn had been a big astrology buff. I had always just assumed Sign of the Z was because of Zorn’s last name. But it was really a reference to Sign of the Zodiac according to those who knew him. Zorn had astrology charts everywhere at the ranch. He never made any kind of decision without checking his horoscope first. He truly believed his fate—and the fate of his followers—was predestined in the stars. Everyone on the ranch was expected to believe and embrace astrology and the secrets of the Zodiac the same as he did. I also remembered something Abbie had written in the notes I’d found in her office. “It’s all about the stars.” I thought she was referring to the fact that all of the victims were celebrities. But maybe she meant stars as in astrology.

  That opened up some new possibilities. I started checking each murder again for astrology connections.

  I found one with Susan Fairmont, the cable TV talk show host murdered outside her Denver studio. Police at first thought her murder was a robbery gone bad and checked to see if any of her possessions—purse, jewelry—were missing. They weren’t. But they did find something very perplexing. There was a necklace around her neck that no one had ever seen her wear. It was a Zodiac necklace with a pendant that had an astrological sign as its centerpiece. It was a bull, the sign of Taurus. The Fairmont woman’s birthday was in September, which meant she wasn’t a Taurus.

  On a hunch, I checked out Russell Zorn’s biographical information again. It turned out that Zorn had been born on May 12. He was a Taurus.

  Not definitive proof of anything. But interesting. I moved o
n to the other cases.

  Stephanie Lee, the New Mexico TV anchorwoman, was tougher. She’d disappeared right after her newscast, and then her body was found, shot to death and dumped into an animal cage at a local zoo in Santa Fe. I read through an article about it until I found the type of animals that were in the cage. They were lions. It was a bit of a reach, I know. But a lion was the astrological sign of a Leo. I found Bobby Mesa’s birth date. August 14. Yep, he was a Leo. Of course, it could have been a coincidence that the victim’s body was found in a lion cage, but I didn’t think so. I was convinced now that astrology was the Sign of the Z connection to all these murders. And that Mesa, or someone else, had left astrology references at all of the crime scenes as their signature for the bizarre killing spree.

  I couldn’t find any astrological connection to Cheryl Carson though. Plus, she wasn’t shot or even murdered as far as we knew. She died of a heroin overdose. People around her said she’d been battling drug addiction for much of her career. But when I dug deeper into the long-ago accounts of her death, I found that members of her entourage said they’d been concerned about a suspicious man who had turned up at several of her concerts and might have been selling her drugs. He was described as a big, bushy-haired man. Which sounded like Bobby Mesa. And Mesa had done part-time work as a roadie for music groups. Maybe he kept doing that to make money while he was on the run during those years.

  So did Mesa sell Cheryl Carson the drugs that killed her?

  Were the drugs what he used to murder her, the way I now believed he murdered Stephanie Lee and Susan Fairmont?

  It all made a certain kind of logic when you put it together like that.

  But if Mesa did kill Cheryl Carson, why didn’t he leave an astrological link behind at her death?