Deputy Jim Lovett found the car on Maze Boulevard about two miles east of Interstate 5. It had been completely burned.
Police were not quite sure how to handle the incident. They did not know if it was actually a kidnapping. Kathleen had told them that the man did not threaten her or her child. She had been scared, yes, but she had not been physically forced at any time to stay in the vehicle.
Later, Kathleen would change her story and tell people that the man had looked at her and said, “You know you’re going to die. You know I’m going to kill you. I’m going to throw the baby out.”
I don’t know if that is true, but if it is, that was certainly something that Van had done before.
The San Francisco Chronicle received another letter from the Zodiac on April 20, 1970. It read:
This is the Zodiac speaking
By the way have you cracked the last cipher I sent you?
My name is ______________
Van was telling police that the 340 cipher contained only his name. Investigators who tried to crack the 340 cipher were destined to fail because the symbols weren’t standing in for letters. There was no message—just “Earl Van Best Junior,” written backwards in plain sight.
My father then included a new cipher with thirteen characters, including letters and symbols—the exact number of letters in “Earl Van Best Jr.”
According to the Zodiac, the number of his victims was now at ten, but police had not yet connected any other murders to him.
Paul Avery also did not connect the fact that this letter was postmarked exactly seven years from the date he had published his article “Love on the Run: Ice Cream Romance’s Bitter End” in the Chronicle.
35
Her mirror told her what she already knew—she looked good. Judy had spent the past hour carefully applying her makeup and choosing the perfect outfit for her date. Although she had her fair share of admirers, she was much more selective now.
Cautious.
She had learned the hard way where her impetuous nature could lead her. She ran a brush through her hair one last time and went into the living room to wait for her date.
Since her return to San Francisco, Judy had turned her life around. She had graduated from high school and taken a job caring for a woman with degenerative bone disease. Although it had been difficult, she had finally forgiven her mother for forcing her to give me up for adoption.
That had not been easy.
Verda had banned the mention of my name, and Judy had been left to deal with what had happened on her own. In silence.
It was like she had never had a son.
As Judy grew into adulthood, the life she had shared with Van influenced her emotional reactions to almost everything. She had a fear inside of her that she couldn’t quite shake. A lack of trust.
But on this night, she determined to let her guard down. She happily contemplated the evening as she waited for her date to arrive.
She waited.
And waited.
He didn’t call. He didn’t show up.
When her sister, Carolyn (or Lyn), dropped by, Judy was busy nursing a bruised ego.
“Don’t worry about him,” Lyn said. “Come out with me instead.”
“I don’t feel like it,” Judy said. She didn’t want to go out and pretend she was having a good time when her feelings were so hurt.
“Come on,” Lyn said. “We’ll have fun.”
Finally Judy relented, and the girls headed off to a nearby club.
“Oh, look who’s at the bar,” Lyn said, making her way over to a tall, good-looking black man she had met through her job at a legal firm.
“This is Rotea Gilford,” she said, pulling Judy closer. “He’s a cop. Rotea, this is my sister, Judy.”
“Hi,” Rotea said, unable to say much else for a moment. Lyn’s sister was beautiful.
Stunning.
“You have lost some weight,” Lyn observed when Rotea stood up to offer his seat.
“Fifty-two pounds,” Rotea said proudly. “High blood sugar. I had to.”
“How did you do it?” Lyn asked.
“High protein, low carbohydrates,” Rotea responded, but he didn’t want to discuss his weight with her. He wanted to talk to the attractive blond woman standing next to Lyn.
“Would you like to dance?” he asked Judy when the band began playing the first notes of a slow song.
She nodded, and Rotea took her hand and led her onto the small dance floor, liking the way the tall girl fit snugly against him.
Judy forgot all about being stood up as Rotea twirled her around the dance floor. She liked this big, strong man. She felt safe in his arms.
They spent the rest of the evening flirting and laughing, learning all they could about each other.
Rotea was forty-six. Judy was twenty-two. He was black. She was white.
None of that mattered.
By the end of the night, Rotea was smitten.
He had no way of knowing that the face that had instantly captured his heart was the very same face that had fueled a serial killer’s rampage.
36
Van wrote five more letters in 1970, using his threats to generate terror while mocking police efforts to catch him. On April 28, eight years to the day since he had kidnapped Judy from the Youth Guidance Center, he mailed what would become known as the Dragon Card to the Chronicle and again threatened to set off a bomb.
On the cover he had placed a Santa Claus character riding a dragon and another character riding a donkey. Written on the card were the words “Sorry to hear your ass is a dragon.”
I hope you enjoy your selves when I have my Blast.
P.S. on back
If you don’t want me to have this blast you must do two things. 1. Tell everyone about the bus bomb with all the details. 2. I would like to see some nice Zodiac butons wandering about town. Every one else has these buttons like, , black power, Melvin eats bluber, etc. Well it would cheer me up considerably if I saw a lot of people wearing my buton. Please no nasty ones like Melvin’s
Thank you
For some reason, Van had targeted attorney Melvin Belli again.
On June 26, he sent another letter to the Chronicle, this time expressing his displeasure that no one was wearing his Zodiac buttons. He also claimed to have killed a man with a .38.
Van signed the letter,
–12 SFPD – 0
At the bottom, he included a thirty-two-character cipher that, coupled with a map he included, was supposed to tell police where his bomb was set. This cipher has never been decoded.
On July 24, Van claimed responsibility for Kathleen Johns’s abduction in a letter sent to the Chronicle that would become known as “Zodiac’s Little List”:
This is the Zodiac speaking.
I am rather unhappy because you people will not wear some nice buttons. So I now have a little list, starting with the woeman + her baby that I gave a rather intersting ride for a coupple howers one evening a few months back that ended in my burning her car where I found them.
Van included his “little list,” which gave the police even more to mull over. Through a variation of verses lifted from a song—“As Someday It May Happen,” from The Mikado—Van listed all of the types of people who could become potential victims. Police were able to deduce from that letter that the Zodiac was a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, that he listened to opera, and that his misspellings and grammatical errors were possibly an act. This killer was learned. Cultured.
Van had included references to preachers, organists, writers, children, and lawyers on the list of people who would not be missed if they disappeared.
Two days later, another letter arrived, this one explaining in graphic detail Van’s fantasies about what he wanted to do to his slaves. It revealed just how sick and out of control he was becoming
This is the Zodiac speaking
Being that you will not wear some nice buttons; how about wearing some nasty buttons. Or any type of buttons
that you can think up. If you do not wear any type of buttons, I shall (on top of everything else) torture all 13 of my slaves that I have wateing for me in Paradice. Some I shall Tie over ant hills and watch them scream and twich and squirm. Others shall have pine splinters driven under their nails + then burned. Others shall be placed in cages + fed salt beef until they are gorged then I shall listen to their pleas for water and I shall laugh at them. Others will hang by their thumbs + burn in the sun then I will rub them down with deep heat to warm them up. Others I shall skin them alive + let them run around screaming. And all billiard players I shall have them play in a darkened dungon cell with crooked cues + Twisted shoes. Yes, I shall have great fun inflicting the most delicious of pain to my Slaves.
He signed it:
SFPD=0 =13
Each envelope, each letter, was tested for fingerprints and searched for clues to the identity of the sender. Numerous law enforcement agencies around California, as well as the FBI, were stumped. They could not crack the codes my father sent, nor could they stop the murders. Their hands were tied, and Van was rubbing it in.
At the time, police still had not connected the latest rash of murders with the murder of Cheri Jo Bates; however, Van had left them a clue in his latest letter. He had misspelled “twich” the same way he had misspelled “twiched” in the confession letter he had sent to police in Riverside.
It was a frustrating time for Toschi and Armstrong. They had the killer’s fingerprints, his handwriting. They had so many clues to his personality. They realized he used British vernacular in his writing. They just couldn’t catch him. They even had the killer’s name, and they didn’t know it.
Van was having the time of his life.
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery was not.
He was as deeply entrenched in the Zodiac case as the police. Avery worked long hours trying to be the first to report any new developments. Van observed his dedication with interest, reading every word the reporter wrote and taking offense at much of it.
On October 27, Avery received a Halloween card from my father.
Avery did not like being singled out by Zodiac and became afraid that he would be targeted as his next victim. He immediately bought a gun for protection.
The reporter also did not realize that his “secret pal” was someone he knew—a man he had met in a jail cell in the Hall of Justice. He had made a mockery of Van’s love for Judy, had insinuated that he was a child molester, and my father had not forgotten.
The methods of killing mentioned in the card prompted further investigation by police. Zodiac had not been linked to murders using rope, although there were many murder cases in the area involving women who were strangled during the years Zodiac was killing. The card made them go back and look at those cases to see if they could be linked to Zodiac, but the pieces didn’t fit. His modus operandi was different.
The Chronicle published the Halloween card on October 31 on the front page of the paper.
Chronicle staff members soon began sporting buttons that stated, I AM NOT PAUL AVERY.
In November, an anonymous tip would lead Avery to make the connection between Zodiac and the Riverside murder of Cheri Jo Bates. Sherwood Morrill, the document examiner who had validated the Zodiac letters, soon confirmed that the handwriting in the Zodiac letters matched the letters and the desktop poem in the Riverside case.
Suddenly Avery, in addition to the police, was being bombarded with leads. He checked out every one, obsessed now with this killer who had singled him out. In a television documentary aired in 1989, titled Zodiac: Crimes of the Century, Avery explained, “At one point, I received a phone call from Anton LaVey, who was the founder and the high priest of the Church of Satan, which was very big in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He thought one of his parishioners, one of his members, might be the Zodiac killer. And he provided me with some material. I mean, the Zodiac killer was so bad that even the Church of Satan didn’t want him.”
Did LaVey’s association with Van prompt that phone call? Unfortunately, I will never know, because Avery never publicly revealed the name LaVey had given him. On March 13, 1971, the Los Angeles Times received its first correspondence from my father. It had been almost five months since he had sent anyone a letter. He wrote:
This is the Zodiac speaking
Like I have allways said, I am crack proof. If the Blue Meannies are evere going to catch me, they had best get off their fat asses + do something. Because the longer they fiddle + fart around, the more slaves I will collect for my after life. I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones, there are a hell of a lot more down there. The reason I’m writing to the Times is this, They don’t bury me on the back pages like some of the others.
SFPD – 0 – 17+
Van’s alleged victim count had climbed even higher. Again, police could not positively link him to any new murders during that time.
Then, just as suddenly as he appeared, the Zodiac stopped communicating. It would be three years before anyone heard from him again.
It is unknown why my father disappeared from the limelight during those years, but I know that he spent some time in Austria forging documents, and he also spent a lot of time in Mexico.
Weary from living in fear, California residents prayed they had heard the last of the Zodiac.
37
In 1971, Rotea finally realized his dream by becoming the first African American officially invited to join the SFPD’s homicide team. He eventually chose Earl Sanders to be his partner, bringing his young friend up the ranks with him. Rotea soon learned that things were different in homicide. In the lower ranks, black officers felt like they could not depend on white officers.
In his book The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights, Earl Sanders recalls a time when he and Rotea were pursuing a suspect, and Rotea radioed for help. “We need some buddies as backup,” he said.
“For a moment, there was silence,” Sanders recalls in the book. “I’ll never forget what I heard next. A man—we never found out who—came on and said, ‘You two ain’t got no buddies out here.’ ”
This was indicative of the kind of racism that Rotea and Sanders had experienced in robbery, but in homicide, detectives had to work together to be able to solve the murders that came across their desks. Rotea recognized that he was a token black, there only to make the department look good, but he was determined to prove he was just as capable as his white counterparts.
He made his point by rapidly solving the murder of a Muni bus driver. This was a major coup for the detective and earned him a place in newspaper headlines.
But that wasn’t the only murder Rotea wanted to solve. Even though it had been two years since Paul Stine was killed in his taxi, Toschi and Armstrong were still following up on the multitude of leads that continued to flow into the department regarding Zodiac. When they were too busy or had time off, Rotea ran down leads for them. That was the way it was in homicide. All of the detectives helped each other.
Rotea knew that the keys to finding the killer were in the letters and in the types of victims Zodiac had chosen. He reviewed the evidence from each case, noticing similarities and writing down crucial points. He knew from the viciousness directed toward the women that they seemed to be the main target of Zodiac’s rage. He observed that they resembled one another. Rotea, like so many detectives across California, hoped, prayed, that they would soon get a lead that would break the case. He knew the answer had to be right in front of them.
It was.
Right in front of him.
All of the victims looked like his new girlfriend.
But Rotea, enamored of the beautiful young woman, missed that clue completely.
Professionally, Rotea was building respect in the department and in the community, but his personal life was in a shambles.
His oldest son, Michael, a college football lineman, had been in a terribl
e car crash that ended all hope of a football career. The young college star now required constant care. The accident had been devastating for the family, driving Rotea and Patricia further apart. The tension in his marriage had gotten progressively worse, until Rotea felt compelled to move into his own apartment in the Upper Haight. He spent the next year moving in and out of the home he shared with Patricia. Reconciling, breaking up, reconciling.
Rotea was not a man who liked being alone. When he was alone, he drank. Sometimes his partner came by to play dominoes, but more often than not Rotea stayed home alone when he wasn’t working, drowning his sorrow in a bottle.
The one bright spot in his life was Judy. After the night they had danced together, he had asked her out for a dinner date, and she agreed to go. She liked his manners, his big, friendly smile. The respect he commanded. He liked her youth, her enthusiasm, her beauty.
They began dating, even though they knew others might not understand. Rotea explained to her the situation with Patricia, sharing his pain over their impending divorce. He talked about his son. Judy held his hand and listened empathetically.
My mother didn’t mention me or my father. It was too soon for that. A police officer might not understand that she had once run away with a criminal who had abandoned their son.
My father, meanwhile, obsessed with reading newspapers to see what kind of press he was getting, couldn’t help but notice the SFPD’s black detective on the rise.
38
Every day that went by without a Zodiac murder allowed the city to breathe a little more easily. During this time, Rotea continued to woo Judy, asking her repeatedly to marry him after his divorce from Patricia became final.
Judy resisted. She was leery of becoming a stepmother. Her parents had not exactly provided a model for how to raise children, and her own experience with a child had been horrific.
But Rotea was relentless. A man needed a wife, and that was that. He was just as determined as Van had been that Judy would be his.
He was equally determined to correct the way of thinking at the SFPD. Rotea became instrumental in forming a group of black police officers named Officers for Justice. In 1973, the group filed a civil suit against the department for discrimination. The good-old-boy network within the SFPD did not take kindly to the suit, and Rotea and Sanders soon found themselves working in an environment filled with hatred and bitterness. The tension boiled over one afternoon when Rotea and Sanders left the Federal Building after giving a deposition. Several hundred fellow officers were waiting on the steps when they left the building, shouting out derogatory slogans, even calling them “niggers.”
The Most Dangerous Animal of All Page 18