The Most Dangerous Animal of All

by Gary L. Stewart

  Running down the right side of the page, next to the main text, were the words “and i can’t do a thing with it!”

  It was signed with the circle and crosshairs and what appeared to be a tally of his victims: “Des July Aug Sept Oct = 7.”

  Included with the card was another cipher. Upset that his first cipher had been decoded, my father took a different approach to constructing this puzzle. Using the kanji style of writing he had learned as a child in Japan, he began on the right side of the page, arranging letters and symbols in vertical columns. Instead of a coded message, he included his full name, written backwards. This cipher, comprising seventeen columns with twenty characters each, would become known as the 340 cipher. Investigators and amateur sleuths would spend the next four decades trying to find its hidden message.

  Van watched the newspapers and waited to see if someone would discover his name.

  No one did.

  My father indicated in this letter that he had killed seven people, but there were only four known murder victims and two surviving victims that had been linked to him at that point.

  On November 9, The Chronicle received yet another letter:

  This is the Zodiac speaking up to the end of Oct I have killed 7 people. I have grown rather angry with the police for their telling lies about me. So I shall change the way the collecting of slaves. I shall no longer announce to anyone. when I committ my murders, they shall look like routine robberies, killings of anger, + a few fake accidents, etc.

  The police shall never catch me, because I have been too clever for them.

  1 I look like the description passed out only when I do my thing, the rest of the time I look entirle different. I shall not tell you what my descise consists of when I kill

  2 As of yet I have left no fingerprints behind me contrary to what the police say in my killings I wear transparent fingertip guards. All it is is 2 coats of airplane cement coated on my fingertips—quite unnoticible + very efective.

  3 my killing tools have been boughten through the mail order outfits before the ban went into efect. Except one & it was bought out of the state.

  So as you can see the police don’t have much to work on. If you wonder why I was wipeing the cab down I was leaving fake clews for the police to run all over town with, as one might say, I gave the cops som bussy work to do to keep them happy. I enjoy needling the blue pigs. Hey blue pig I was in the park—you were useing fire trucks to mask the sound of your cruzeing prowl cars. The dogs never came with in 2 blocks of me + they were to the west + there was only 2 groups of parking about 10 min apart then the motor cicles went by about 150 ft away going from south to north west

  p.s. 2 cops pulled a goof abot 3 min after I left the cab. I was walking down the hill to the park when this cop car pulled up + one of them called me over + asked if I saw anyone acting suspicious or strange in the last 5 to 10 min + I said yes there was this man who was runnig by waveing a gun & the cops peeled rubber + went around the corner as I directed them + I disappeared into the park a block + a half away never to be seen again. “must print in paper.”

  Hey pig doesnt it rile you up to have your noze rubed in your booboos?

  Van went on to describe his “death machine”—the bomb he planned to place on the side of a road to blow up a school bus—and the materials he had used to build it. He was having fun now. Taunting police and terrifying the public made him feel powerful. He was leaving all kinds of clues for them, but they weren’t getting it.

  My father sent one more letter that year—to San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli, postmarked December 20, 1969, the one-year anniversary of the murder of Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday. He included another piece of Paul Stine’s shirt with this correspondence. On the back of the envelope he wrote, “Mery Xmass + New Year.”

  Dear Melvin

  This is the Zodiac speaking I wish you a happy Christmass. The one thing I ask of you is this, please help me. I cannot reach out because of this thing in me won’t let me. I am finding it extreamly dificult to keep in check I am afraid I will loose control again and take my nineth + posibly tenth victom. Please help me I am drownding. At the moment the children are safe from the bomb because it is so massive to dig in & the trigger mech requires so much work to get it adjusted just right. But if I hold back too long from no nine I will loose complet [crossed out] all controol of my self + set the bomb up. Please help me I can not remain in control for much longer.

  Law enforcement officials throughout California worried that the Zodiac would indeed lose control. Multiple jurisdictions had witnessed his handiwork firsthand; clearly he was capable of anything.

  33

  By the end of 1969, the Fillmore, once a thriving community, had deteriorated into a ghetto filled with unemployed workers who had been laid off from the shipyards that had attracted them to San Francisco and a better way of life. LSD had been replaced with the more lethal heroin, and addicts plagued the Fillmore, pilfering from residents and business owners to feed their growing habits. The hippie movement—and the proliferation of drugs it brought—had left destruction in its wake. The city of San Francisco began implementing a plan of urban renewal, changing the facade of the neighborhood as rows of quaint Victorian homes were smashed by bulldozers and gentrification wiped away the past.

  Slowly, the music that had attracted so many to the Fillmore began to disappear as club owners moved to other, more profitable parts of the city. A few die-hards remained on Divisadero Street, just outside the Fillmore—the Both/And Club, featuring the Ike and Tina Turner Revue on occasion, and the Half Note, where a young George Duke first heard Al Jarreau mimic percussion with his voice. Other legends, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Sarah Vaughan, frequented the Half Note, where Duke and Jarreau had become regular performers.

  Over the years, the Half Note also became a favorite watering hole for police officers, who gathered there after their shifts to discuss their cases, and reporters, who lingered at the bar eavesdropping on their conversations, hoping for a scoop. Barkeep Lionel Hornsby was more knowledgeable than most about the latest developments in the Zodiac case and passed along what he heard from police to patrons and reporters. The conversation was good for business.

  Rotea Gilford liked to stop by the Half Note on his way home from work. There, he often visited with fellow black officers who were similarly discouraged by the discrimination they felt they experienced in the SFPD. Rotea felt as though it was his duty to pump them up and organize the fight for equality.

  But in November 1969, the talk was not about discrimination. It was about the serial killer who had the audacity to taunt them in such a public manner.

  As Rotea sipped on his drink, he listened to the conversations around him, wishing he were working the case. Like many other SFPD officers, he had puzzled over the ciphers, hoping to be the one to discover my father’s identity. He knew nothing about homophonic substitution, a method of creating ciphers that uses more than one symbol or letter for a single high-frequency letter of the alphabet, which experts would later theorize the Zodiac had used for the 408 cipher. He simply scanned the ciphers, hoping that a word, a name, would jump out at him. Though he had worked his way up through the ranks, Rotea had not made it into homicide; still, that didn’t stop him from learning everything he could about the case. He worried about this killer, worried who and where he would strike next. The Zodiac had brought his war to the SFPD, and Rotea wanted to help Toschi and Armstrong take him down.

  But he couldn’t. In the history of the department, a black officer had never been promoted to homicide. Toschi and Armstrong had the case.

  Rotea knew they had pulled the case files from Vallejo and Napa County and were going over them, diligently looking for clues. They had interviewed the three teenagers who had witnessed Paul Stine’s murder. Fouke and Zelms had worked with a police artist to create a composite sketch. They had provided a description of what Zodiac was wearing that night: a dark blue jacket and baggy, pleat
ed brown wool pants, although they had not noticed the blood on the jacket. Fingerprints, some bloody, had been collected from the doors of the taxi, but they had not matched any suspect so far. They learned from Vallejo police that Darlene Ferrin had written Robert Vaughn’s name in her address book; they brought the organist in and questioned him. They recognized the killer’s reference to the Nine Satanic Statements in the message in the cipher and went to California Street to question LaVey. They began to think Zodiac had some connection to the Avenue Theatre, because two of their suspects played the organ there, but they had no other evidence linking the men, and they had no choice but to let them go.

  And they had the letters filled with clues, but even though they tracked down every lead that came in, Toschi and Armstrong had come up with nothing.

  Rotea looked up from his musings and smiled when he saw Earl Sanders walk into the bar.

  “Sit down,” he said, motioning to the stool next to him.

  Sanders had spent his teenage years in the Fillmore watching Officer Smiley (Rotea’s nickname on the street) walking his beat and keeping unruly kids in line. It had been Sanders’s admiration for Rotea that had influenced him to join the police academy after he graduated from Golden Gate University. And when Sanders graduated from the academy with the highest grades in his class, Rotea had been honored at the ceremony as well, with a 1st Grade Meritorious Service commendation. Ten years younger, Sanders often turned to Rotea for advice, and Rotea was happy to mentor the young officer. Together they set out to change the racial climate on the force, becoming good friends in the process.

  “How’s it going?” Sanders asked, taking a seat and ordering a drink.

  Rotea shrugged. “Not bad, School,” addressing his friend by the nickname he had given him because he was always studying something. Rotea enjoyed teasing him about it.

  Sanders could tell something was wrong. “How’s Patricia?” he asked.

  “Good. You know, same old shit,” Rotea said, picking up his drink and downing it.

  Sanders patted him on the back. He knew what that meant. Rotea and his wife were always fighting over something—long work hours, drinking, cute blondes.

  Rotea had met Patricia, a tall, slender, vivacious black woman from New Orleans, while attending City College of San Francisco. They had married in 1951 and had three children: Michael, Steven, and Judy. Patricia went to work as an accountant, and Rotea set out to conquer the world of crime. That required dedication, and although Rotea spent as much time as he could with his family, the demands of his job required more of her husband than Patricia liked to share. The fights had been escalating lately, and Sanders knew that Rotea was very unhappy. He could tell by the way he looked at the young ladies who frequented the bar. Usually, Sanders was long gone before Rotea finally made his way home to Patricia.

  San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery, sitting at the end of the bar, was one of the reporters who observed all the goings-on, hoping to overhear some new information. Avery had written an article in mid-October, quoting Chief of Inspectors Marvin Lee as saying that the Zodiac was a “clumsy criminal, a liar, and possibly a latent homosexual,” and the police had warned Avery to be careful.

  What no one realized was that the Zodiac and Avery had a long history, one that Avery barely remembered but my father had never forgotten.

  34

  Shortly after Paul Stine’s murder, a very pregnant Edith returned to Austria with her two sons, and in 1970 she gave birth to a baby girl she named Guenevere. I will never know the complete truth about what happened between my father and Edith.

  Did she see the blood on Van’s clothes when he returned home after killing Stine?

  Did she threaten to turn him in to the police?

  Did she run for her life?

  Edith raised her children to believe that my father had taken them to Austria and abandoned them there. That, too, is plausible, considering my father’s history.

  What is clear is that something serious must have happened that forced Edith to raise three children alone and without any financial help or emotional support from my father. Although Van made several trips to Austria in the years following their separation, he never bothered to visit his wife and children. Guenevere, Oliver, and Urban grew up without him, just as I did—the pain of being abandoned haunting them throughout their lives.

  Van now had the freedom to prowl for victims whenever he wished. That was part of the fun—the knowledge that he held the life of every person he saw in his hands. It must have been a heady feeling for the narcissistic killer, and people on the California coast had good reason to be terrified.

  On March 22, 1970, Van was driving along Highway 132, which runs through Modesto, in the Central Valley, on his way back from Mexico, when he spotted a woman in a maroon-and-white station wagon. Kathleen Johns, a pretty, blond-haired mother, was on her way from San Bernardino to visit her family, almost seven hours away in Petaluma. She began to get nervous when she noticed that the car that had been following her since she passed Modesto was still behind her. It was late, around midnight, when Kathleen decided to slow down so the car could pass.

  Van flashed his lights and honked his horn, trying to get her to stop.

  Kathleen had her ten-month-old daughter, Jennifer, in the car and was not about to stop. She kept driving slowly, waiting until he finally passed her near Interstate 5. Thinking the driver might have been trying to tell her something was wrong with her car, she stopped to check.

  My father stopped a short distance ahead, then backed up.

  “Your rear tire looks a little wobbly,” he said when he approached her car. “That’s why I was trying to flag you down. I’ll fix it for you.”

  The nervousness Kathleen had felt while driving dissipated. Van was well dressed, harmless-looking. A good Samaritan.

  She watched while he returned to his car and retrieved a tool, then walked back and knelt down by the tire. He pretended to tighten the lug nuts.

  “Thanks,” Kathleen said, feeling grateful to the helpful stranger. Her mother had warned her that driving alone at night was dangerous, especially with a child in the car, and the incident had been worrisome.

  Relieved, she got back into her car and started the ignition. As she attempted to drive away, the car lurched to a stop. She got back out to see what had happened.

  The left rear wheel had fallen off.

  Watching in his rearview mirror for what he knew would happen, Van made a quick U-turn.

  “Come on. Get in my car. I’ll bring you to a service station,” he told Kathleen, pulling his car alongside hers.

  Stuck in the middle of nowhere, Kathleen did not see any other option. She picked up her baby and got into Van’s car.

  Van had not noticed the baby.

  Undeterred, he drove west on Highway 132 until he saw a Richfield gas station on the corner of Chrisman Road. He pulled in, but it was closed.

  He got back onto the highway and began driving down country roads and then through the small town of Tracy. They passed service station after service station.

  “Why didn’t you stop?” Kathleen asked each time.

  “It wasn’t the right one,” Van replied.

  Kathleen was getting nervous again, even though the man seemed friendly enough. She pulled her baby closer.

  “Where do you work?” she asked, trying to initiate conversation to quiet her fear.

  “I usually work for two months at a time, then just drive around, mostly at night,” he said, his answer doing nothing to alleviate the tension that was building in the car.

  “Do you always go around helping people on the road?”

  “When I get through with them, they won’t need my help,” Van informed her.

  Kathleen could feel fear tightening her stomach. She sat there quietly as they drove for more than an hour, waiting for an opportunity to make her escape. She hoped he would stop the car.

  He didn’t.

  She distracted herse
lf by memorizing everything about him that she could: his face, what he was wearing. The backseat and dashboard of the car were covered with books and papers, as if the man worked out of his car. She noticed that his shoes were extraordinarily shiny, spit-shined like a military officer’s.

  Finally, Kathleen noticed a stop sign ahead and began praying her captor would stop.

  He did.

  She jumped from the car with the baby in her arms and began running as fast as she could across a nearby field. Looking back, she saw that Van was still in the car. He had turned off the lights and was sitting there watching her, contemplating his next move.

  Kathleen climbed up an embankment before turning around to discover that he was driving away. Fearful that he would come back, she ran toward a nearby road and flagged down a passing car, whose occupants drove her to the police station in Patterson, a suburb of Modesto about twenty-seven miles from Tracy. It was 2:30 in the morning.

  Van had waited for her to leave. He drove back to her car and carefully wiped his fingerprints from the hubcap he had touched. Enraged that his victim had escaped, he set the car ablaze before he drove away.

  Sergeant Charles McNatt took Kathleen’s statement. As he listened to her story, suddenly the young woman began screaming.

  “What’s wrong?” the startled officer asked.

  Kathleen pointed to a police sketch that had two pictures hanging side by side on the wall. “That’s him. That’s the man who picked us up,” she cried.

  “Which one of those men was your abductor?” McNatt said.

  “That one,” Kathleen replied, pointing to the one that had been amended by Detective Fouke, who had seen Zodiac in the Presidio Heights neighborhood moments after he had killed Paul Stine.

  “Have you ever seen this picture before?” the officer asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s a sketch of the Zodiac,” McNatt told her.

  Kathleen became hysterical, and McNatt spent the next moments trying to calm the distraught woman before calling the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department and asking that a deputy be sent to the area where Kathleen had left her car.