Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed

by Robert Graysmith

  Had a gloating Zodiac slyly called attention to the inspiration for his name and symbol? After “a Vallejo cop” had cleared him, Starr must have felt secure. He had gone on wearing his Zodiac wristwatch, at least until Toschi, Armstrong, and Mulanax surprised him. I visualized a tantalizing sequence of events—Starr, obsessed with “The Most Dangerous Game” since high school, received a Zodiac watch from his mother on December 18, 1968, and began wearing a second birthday gift, a ring with a “Z” on it. Thirteen days later, he had a conversation with Cheney, much like earlier discussions in which he mentioned putting a light on the barrel of his gun and hunting couples. He spoke of calling himself “Zodiac” and shooting out the tires of a school bus. This chronology set down a definite time frame for Zodiac’s choice of name, symbol, and M.O.—sometime between December 18, 1968, and January 1, 1969, after which Cheney moved to Southern California to work for a new company. Starr had revealed a monumental secret about himself on New Year’s Day, but then Zodiac always chose holidays for his most important crimes and revelations.

  Cheney’s visit, the symbol on the watch, its exotic trademark, the ring, his favorite story from his youth—all must have been bubbling in Starr’s head. The first two murders occured on December 20, two days after Starr’s birthday. On August 4, 1971, two years after the killer had first signed his name “Zodiac,” he told Armstrong he had received the Zodiac watch “exactly two years earlier”—August 4, 1969. Either scenario presented a fascinating sequence of events and explained the killer’s choice of name and symbol.

  Police, during their manhunt for Zodiac, zealously guarded the prime suspect’s real name. If his name was never publicized, this ensured any subsequent tip about Starr would be valid. As for myself, I made a practice of never writing, until now, Starr’s true name.

  His real name was Arthur Leigh Allen.

  Almost a decade after the oil refinery questioning, I finally located the “Vallejo cop” who had questioned Allen so early in the case. Detective Sergeant John Lynch talked to me at his home on Carolina Street in Vallejo. A slender, solid older man with penetrating eyes, he began speaking the instant we sat down at his dining room table. The room was almost completely dark. I had just mentioned Allen. “Oh,” he said, “Lay Allen.” He pronounced “Leigh” as “Lay.” I realized because of the different spellings Lynch thought that “Leigh” and “Lee” were two different suspects in the case. “Lee” was not a new name in the case—just before Zodiac shot a couple out at Blue Rock Springs on the Fourth of July, an unknown man named “Lee” had already been an object of speculation.

  “I talked to Leigh at great length several times,” said Lynch. “He was up the coast at Bodega Bay [where he had a trailer] . . . he’s a skin diver; on that Fourth of July, 1969, he said he was with three or four other guys.”

  “When did you speak to him—in 1971?” I asked, at first thinking Lynch had been following up Panzarella and Cheney’s tip to Manhattan Beach P.D.

  “Long before that,” he answered. “Within one or two months. Leigh was employed as a janitor at that time at one of the schools here. I went up to the school—I don’t know how I got his name in the first place. You know the way things were going then, there were so damn many people to talk to and we were getting so many phone calls and letters and clues. I got so I almost looked at the guy and said, ‘That’s not him,’ to myself. And when I saw this Leigh Allen. He was bald-headed and he’s a great big guy. Have you seen him?”

  “Yes,” I said. Linda Del Buono, Blue Rock Springs victim Darlene Ferrin’s sister, had prepared a composite drawing for the Vallejo P.D. “They compared Linda’s composite to another Zodiac composite, and told me, ‘Everything but the chin was right.’ This was supposed to be a profile of a guy named ‘Lee’ who hung out at Darlene’s painting party, the same guy Linda observed harassing her sister while she was wait-ressing at Terry’s Restaurant. Did you ever speak to this ‘Lee’?”

  “Leigh Allen?”

  “I don’t know. All Linda knew was the name ‘Lee.’”

  “No,” he said. “Anyway, I was positive it wasn’t Allen. The minute I looked at him, I said mentally, ‘That isn’t Zodiac.’ [Vallejo Lieutenant Jim] Husted liked Allen best. I liked him least. I only typed in five to six lines on the report—only in order to get Allen’s name in. Checked his car and he had his scuba gear in the back of the car. Real old dirty car.”

  Lynch explained that on Monday, October 6, 1969, he sought out Allen about the stabbings at Berryessa ten days earlier. Allen, then thirty-five and an occasional student, worked part-time as a custodian at Elmer Cave Elementary School. At 4:05 P.M., Lynch turned south off Tennessee Street onto Vervais. He reached the school at 770 Tregaskis and immediately saw Leigh across the playground. For his report he scrawled this description: “241 pounds and almost six-foot-one.” As Lynch observed a few children playing tether ball, an intuitive thought about child molesters entered his head. Allen had been suspected of such crimes and Lynch, and later Mulanax, would wonder if they had missed any obvious signs. Lynch turned his attention from the kids back to the suspect—single, unmarried, and living with his parents. He was well educated and not only a custodian at Cave School, but a janitor at Benjamin Franklin Jr. High School at 501 Starr Avenue, very near a Zodiac victim’s home.

  They chatted. According to Allen, he had gone skin diving on Salt Point Ranch on September 26, 1969, stayed overnight, and returned to Vallejo on September 27 at approximately 2:00 to 4:30 P.M. “For the remainder of the day,” Allen said, “I stayed at home. I don’t recall whether my parents were home on that day or not.”

  “Someone thought you might be the Zodiac killer and reported you,” said Lynch matter-of-factly. “Is that a fact,” Allen said with a laugh as if such an accusation was an everyday occurrence. He placed his broom against the wall. Lynch looked him up and down. “Well, Zodiac had curly hair,” Lynch said, thinking of Linda’s description, “and you obviously don’t. So that’s it.”

  Had Lynch’s visit been a flash point?

  Five days after Leigh’s reassuring interview with the easygoing Lynch, Zodiac drove to San Francisco, shot Yellow Cab driver Paul Stine, and fled into the Presidio, police dogs nearly at his heels. He ran in the direction of the huge Letterman Complex. There, at a new ten-story Army Medical Center, future Zodiac victim Donna Lass was working that night. She and her roommate, Jo Anne Goettsche, had been in the practice of going flying with two men from Riverside who lived in the San Francisco area. Leigh, of all the suspects, was a pilot.

  Seven days after Lynch’s questioning, Zodiac dropped the Chronicle a line. He enclosed a bloody swatch of the cabbie’s shirt to provide irrefutable proof he had murdered Stine. Police speculated Zodiac had switched to a bigger city to garner bigger headlines. But wasn’t he simply distancing himself from Vallejo where things had suddenly gotten too hot? Zodiac’s intimate knowledge of Vallejo’s back roads and lovers’ lanes branded him as a longtime resident. Thanks to that bloody swatch Zodiac was now forever identified as a San Francisco killer.

  Eighteen days after Leigh spoke with Lynch, William Langdon White, Allen’s seventy-three-year-old neighbor, died of heart failure at 9:55 P.M., just after seeing his doctor. White, California-born and a twenty-one-year resident of Vallejo, had lived seven houses down from Leigh’s at 45 Fresno. He had been Leigh’s alleged alibi for the Berryessa stabbings. “I recall speaking to a neighbor shortly after I drove into my driveway,” Leigh had said. “I guess I neglected to tell the Vallejo officer. . . .”

  White had also been a possible witness of a bloody knife on Allen’s car seat. As a longtime business representative for Butchers’ Union Local 532, White logically might have paid attention to any knife. Coincidentally, William White’s birthday, December 20, was also the date of the Lake Herman Road shootings. White shared a last name with Sergeant William White, the second ranger to reach the couple Zodiac stabbed at Lake Berryessa. All through October 1969, Ranger White had been high
ly visible in a series of television interviews about Zodiac.

  “Yes, I talked to [Allen] at great length several times,” Lynch recalled. “I spoke to him within one or two months of one killing.” He now recalled a typed three-by-five card addressed specifically to himself had arrived at the Vallejo P.D. on August 10, 1969. It had gone to the FBI, and he could not recall if it had been returned or not. “Dear Sgt. Lynch,” it read. “I hope the enclosed key will prove beneficial to you in connection with the cipher letter writer. [signed] Concerned Citizen.” At that time only a Vallejo resident would have known Lynch was handling the then-embryonic Zodiac case. “Concerned” had included a valid key to Zodiac’s three-part cipher. The key bore handprinted letters and symbols beginning “A-G-backwards S-L.” The FBI reported, “It was a substantially accurate key for decryption of the three-part-cipher mailed by Zodiac.” A solution to the cipher was not published in the Chronicle until two days later.

  In a letter to the San Francisco Examiner a week earlier, Zodiac explained he did not leave the scene “with squealling tires and raceing engine as described in the Vallejo papers.” This was another indication Zodiac was a Vallejo resident who read the limited circulation local paper. So was his instant reply to Vallejo Police Chief Stiltz’s August 1 entreaty for “more details.” It would be a considerable time after the oil refinery questioning before Lynch’s 110-word report on Allen would be found—sandwiched between FBI Flyers #59 and #4316, and a local tip that went nowhere.

  “Another example of a lack of coordination,” Vallejo Police Captain Roy Conway lamented many years later. “Sergeant Lynch, a good personal friend of mine who was assigned to the case for a long time, died in the last couple of years. He has a police report that says on a particular date he interviewed Arthur Leigh Allen about his whereabouts on the day of the Berryessa homicide. Which is all well and good, but he doesn’t have any recollection whatsoever what information he had that made him interview Arthur Leigh Allen.

  “Arthur Leigh Allen told him at that time—it’s just one little paragraph in the police report—it doesn’t say why he went to see him, what caused him to see him, what conclusions he reached—nothing. Just that ‘I interviewed him about what he was doing the day of the Lake Berryessa killing.’ Coincidentally, Leigh had told Lynch, ‘I was on the way to Lake Berryessa that day to go fishing, but I changed my mind and went to the coast.’”

  Detective Bawart also agreed with Conway in hindsight. “There’s a lot of instances that occurred in this case that happened in one area and the other area didn’t know about it,” he said. “The Vallejo Police Department interviewed Arthur Leigh Allen in 1969 about the stabbings at Lake Berryessa. The sergeant who did that interview went down and talked to him as he had talked to probably a hundred other people. Asked him where he was the day of the Berryessa slaying. He said he had not gone to Berryessa but up the coast instead. Now we get back and look at this years later and we go back to this Lynch, a lieutenant retired then—‘I don’t remember why I was talking to the guy,’ he says. ‘Somebody must have called his name in.’ He steps back and says, ‘No, I just don’t recall.’ If we knew who called his name in, that person must have had some reason for suspecting that Arthur Leigh Allen was responsible, had something to do with the case.”

  County Sheriff’s Detective Sergeant Les Lundblad had also questioned Allen. Someone had tipped him too. This interview apparently was unknown to the VPD because the Vallejo Sheriff’s and Police Departments were separate and independent forces. The third week after the teenagers out on Lake Herman Road had been murdered by Zodiac, Lundblad went to see Allen. The stocky man had an alibi for that Zodiac attack too, one considerably similar to that he would give Lynch. “I was out at Fort Point near Big Sur scuba diving,” he said. After each Zodiac murder, Arthur Leigh Allen had been sought out. He was not such a new suspect after all. Someone out there knew something, and who that person was was as much a mystery as Zodiac’s true identity.

  Wednesday, August 4, 1971

  Directly after speaking with Allen at the refinery, Toschi and Mulanax decided to follow up on Ted Kidder and Phil Tucker—the men Allen mentioned he might have shared conversations with about Zodiac. “I think Allen initially assumed Kidder and Tucker had tipped the police,” Mulanax said. “That’s why he volunteered their names so promptly.”

  “Yeah,” said Toschi. “I think you’ve pegged it. It just took him a bit longer to realize he should have been thinking of Cheney and Panzarella.” But a lead was a lead, so the detectives hustled over to the Greater Vallejo Recreation District, where Kidder and Tucker worked. If Allen had predicted Zodiac’s coming to Cheney, maybe he had done the same with Kidder or Tucker. Mulanax slid into a spot right in front of 395 Amador Street, and they went inside looking for Kidder. Tucker might be the General Supervisor for the Recreation District, but Kidder was his boss.

  “Do you know Arthur Leigh Allen?” Toschi asked Kidder. Kidder’s name had appeared on teacher’s applications Leigh filed with the Calaveras Unified School District on December 23, 1965, and June 18, 1966.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Has Leigh ever mentioned the Zodiac case?”

  “To my knowledge, I never discussed the case with him. He was formally employed by the Recreation District as a lifeguard and trampoline instructor.” Cheney confirmed that sometime later. “Allen was going around teaching kids on the trampoline. He liked that. He was very adept on the trampoline and a remarkable swimmer and diver—a champion on the diving board. He was superb at any athletic activity that did not involve walking or running—Allen was not good at running. At that time, well into his thirties, he was still active, at least with the trampoline, while he was in Valley Springs. He would set it up in the front yard and he loved getting a bunch of kids and coaching them.”

  Allen left GVRD for the same reason he had left Wogan’s station—his inappropriate actions toward small children. “I had received numerous complaints from concerned parents about acts he had made toward their children,” said Kidder. “But no formal complaint was ever lodged to the police about Allen’s actions, no formal complaint anyway. As recently as three weeks ago, Phil Tucker and I had a discussion about Allen being a suspect in the Zodiac murders. This talk came about primarily because of Allen’s suspected possibility of being a sexual deviate. That and his physical description. We both considered Allen a loner type.”

  Had either Kidder or Tucker been the original informant to Lynch and Lundblad? Tucker had reportedly gone to school with Allen at Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo. He would know more. Toschi asked for Tucker to be summoned to Kidder’s office so they could ask him the same questions. Tucker related that he had known Allen about five years. Lieutenant Husted of the VPD later told me more about Tucker. “Tucker and Allen often talked with each other about death and about murder for sale,” he said. “I have a 1971 application filled out by Allen for a job as a Rodeo [California] service station attendant, Tucker’s name on it. Tucker’s name is on all of them. I found it in the margins of one application. Very reliable guy, Tucker.”

  Tucker confirmed to Toschi that Leigh was equally proficient with both hands and ambidextrous as an adult. This skill with both hands might explain why Leigh’s handprinting did not match Zodiac’s. Zodiac, a born leftie, was writing with his right hand. “His handwriting is not real good,” said Tucker, “and so he prints most things.”

  “So, Leigh could write and shoot with both hands?” said Toschi.

  “Yes,” Tucker admitted, then added, “For the last two years, Allen has brought up the Zodiac case in conversation. I feel he has an interest in the case.” He sat back and thought. “I remember on one occasion he had told me that police considered him a suspect.”

  “To your knowledge, did Allen have an interest in guns?” Toschi asked Tucker.

  “He said he did have. He owned two handguns. One was a revolver, the other some type of automatic. I don’t know the calibers because I don’t have much o
f a knowledge of guns myself. I think the guns in his home might be .22-caliber revolvers, and I saw at least one automatic. I recall that he discussed having a special light attached to a gun barrel so that a person could shoot accurately at night. On more than one occasion he admitted to shooting with special sights for firing in the dark.”

  Toschi rubbed the back of his neck. Another portion of Cheney’s story had been corroborated. It was even hotter.

  “Another time, about eighteen months ago,” continued Tucker, “my wife and I visited Leigh in his home. He made a remark that he had something he would like to show us. ‘I only show this particular thing to very certain people,’ he said. Or something to that effect. He then took a paper from a gray metal box he had gotten from his bedroom. This paper was handprinted and contained several pages of legal terminology and several pages of letters which had symbols or codes or cryptograms on them. He said they pertained to a person who had been committed to Atascadero for molesting a child. This paper rambled on and on in language of a legal nature, that sort of terminology, this and that. It was about this person having been betrayed by his attorney. I noticed in this script there were various symbols used by Zodiac in his coded messages.”

  Toschi nodded. He didn’t find it unusual that Tucker could recognize the symbols as Zodiac-like. The killer’s three-part cipher had been widely reprinted. On June 29, 1970, the approximate time of Tucker’s visit, the Chronicle had published a new Zodiac two-line cipher. “I only expressed polite interest in the paper,” said Tucker, “but my wife showed genuine interest. She found the symbols or codes or cryptograms unusual. She asked him if she might borrow the paper to study it, but he refused to allow her to take the paper. He did promise to have a copy made to give her.”