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

by Robert Graysmith

  As Avery drove alone to the meeting, he thought back three days earlier to an incident on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. A stocky stranger, “between twenty-five and forty-five years old” had approached two girls and offered them a ride. “No, thanks,” they said, gesturing to a VW at the curb, “we’ve got our own.” They ate at a snack bar, returned forty minutes later, and discovered their car wouldn’t start. Suddenly, the same stranger was at their side, extending his aid. A passerby noticed the man helping a young girl push a Volkswagen, the other girl behind the wheel. When he offered to help, the stocky man, enraged at the intrusion, ran off. The second Good Samaritan checked the engine. “The middle distributor wire has been ripped out,” he told Avery later.

  “The girls filed a report with the local police that may contain the stranger’s license plate number,” the man added. Twelve hours afterward, the Chronicle received an anonymous call. “City desk, don’t bother with general rewrite,” the voice said. “This is the Zodiac and it’s the last time I am going to call.” Avery thought it odd that Zodiac knew newspaper lingo. Berkeley cops searched their files, but could not find the plate number.

  Avery was actually quivering. The pressure was tremendous and he had been increasingly “freaked out” over Zodiac’s threat against him twenty-four days earlier. Ten days ago, when Avery first visited Riverside, he had begged the city desk to call him if any letters came while he was away.

  “Zode—as I call him,” wrote Avery in a memo, “is something like the Viet Cong. [Avery had spent three years in Vietnam as a war correspondent.] You don’t know who he is, where he is, or when or where he might strike next. I am getting cross-eyed from trying to keep one eye directed ahead and the other over my shoulder. I really doubt he intends to come after me, but I am being careful.”

  “I wasn’t pleased with the Riverside visit,” Toschi told me. “I tried to be friendly as the meeting got under way, introduced myself by giving my name, spelling it T-O-S-C-H-I, and saying (as I always do), ‘That’s Italian.’ I’m very proud of my heritage—I spoke Italian before English because my mother was Piemontese and my father Toscano. We spent the whole day in their office and had lunch. We thought we were going to get more information. We got minimal. I was truly disappointed that we weren’t getting a heck of lot of anything. With the exception of [Detective] Bud Kelly, who was always up front with me, we never got much cooperation with Riverside. These Riverside guys aren’t telling us anything. It’s so obvious that they’re holding on to everything for themselves like we’re here to purse-snatch. And that was not the case. We were there to share information.

  “They had confiscated the Riverside desk and kept it in a special evidence room at police headquarters. That desk really got my attention . . . that lettering was so obviously by Zodiac. Later, after we got the tip about Allen, Riverside never even bothered to check on him having been in the region—and I asked, ‘Did you know Arthur Leigh Allen?’ ‘Did you arrest him?’ ‘Has he ever been cited in the area?’ ‘Can we connect him to RCC?’ They were kind of leaning against the fact that it could have been our killer, Zodiac. From that moment on, they developed tunnel vision to any other suspects. Riverside thought they knew who had committed the Bates murder.”

  Captain Irv Cross of the Detective Bureau said, “We are not ruling out the possibility that the killer may have been a local youth.”

  Back in San Francisco, an anonymous typed letter arrived at the Chronicle—“It both angers me and amazes me,” I read, “that a wanton killer like the Zodiac has escaped detection and justice for so long.

  “It is my personal opinion Zodiac has spent time in some type of institution—either prison or mental hospital. . . . Zodiac would not be married. He is unable to function in a relationship with a woman, either sexually or emotionally. . . . The hunt for the Zodiac killer has been a tragic comedy of errors. . . . I know this: every act of horror such as mass killers beginning their ugly business has a starting point which is ignited by what I choose to call a trigger. The beast within them lies quietly most of the time, but then something triggers it or sets it off. In the case of Zodiac I speculate it was due to two things: an episode in his life at the time of the first killing, traumatic to the person known as Zodiac, but not necessarily to anyone else. He seems to have a real hatred for police and enjoys needling them in their failure to catch him. Possibly an encounter with police at that particular time. I don’t personally believe he does his killing according to some astrological timetable. I think he kills on holidays and week-ends simply because he doesn’t work then. I suggest in all probability he has a job which is a forty hour work week and five consecutive days. . . . I shall remain anonymous. I hope you will not stop in your efforts to find this fiend. I wish you good health and good hunting. [signed] Armchair.”

  In the unusual letter “Armchair” mentions he never heard of a mother shooting an adult child. “I suppose I am too suspicious of everyone,” he concluded. “But being suspicious has saved my bacon more than once.” And “Armchair” had not only used Zodiac words (“needling,” “trigger,” “hunt,” “hunting”), but had lived in Riverside at the time of the Bates killing, quoting events and newspaper articles he had read there. I was never able to track him down.

  Friday, December 18, 1970

  On Arthur Leigh Allen’s birthday, a burglar broke into a woman’s home. The thief took pains to conceal his identity—adhesive tape on his fingertips, a white handkerchief tied over the lower part of his face. The sleeping owner awakened to find a man standing over her, brandishing a baseball bat. Snatching up a rifle under her bed, she sent a glancing blow to his arm. Ripping the rifle away, he lacerated her forehead with the bat. Her daughter, awakened by the struggle, glimpsed the intruder fleeing down the hall. “He was dressed in a dark nylon ski jacket, dark pants, navy-blue knit cap, and wearing welding goggles,” she said, “but before I could get a better look, he switched off the light and vanished.” He left a bloody handprint on the wall, but no fingerprints. In the entire time he had been in the house he had not spoken. The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department issued an all-points bulletin for him; they believed he might be Zodiac.

  Friday, February 4, 1972

  Seven long months had crawled by since Armstrong and Toschi had questioned Leigh Allen that sizzling August morning. As far as they knew he was still attending spring and fall sessions at Sonoma State. Probably a hundred new suspects’ names had crossed their desk in that time. Allen’s name lay somewhere at the bottom of that pile. And still the tips poured in. “A lot of people would want to cooperate and forward this or that to you,” Toschi told me. “All the while you get the feeling down deep that they’re trying to pick your brain. The nagging feeling was that the case was a ‘round neck.’ The round neck means the trash basket in your office, which means it’s going to end up in a file as ‘Unsolved.’

  “We just couldn’t handle all the tip calls. The other guys in the office were getting angry at us. ‘Hey, guys, we didn’t write the letters,’ we told them. ‘We just answer the phone. If we turn somebody off, hang up on what could be a positive lead—we’re not going to make this case and we’ve got to make this case. Please don’t hang up on anybody.’” They followed up the most promising tips, but time was on Zodiac’s side. In two weeks, the State Supreme Court would rule capital punishment unconstitutional. Thus Zodiac, if captured, would no longer face the death penalty. Witnesses and surviving victims, fearful of Zodiac, went into hiding or moved away. Physical evidence began to be lost or destroyed. Meanwhile, the detectives could only speculate what the “Cipher Slayer” was doing.

  In Santa Rosa at 4:00 P.M., Maureen Lee Sterling and Yvonne Weber left the Redwood Ice Skating Rink at Steele Lane. The two twelve-year-olds began to walk home, stopping along the way. Sterling, long brown hair parted in the middle, wore blue jeans, a purple pullover shirt, a red sweatshirt with a hood, and brown suede shoes. Weber dressed similarly—blue jeans, lavender and white tweed pullo
ver shirt, black velvet coat, and brown suede boots. Like her companion, she had blue eyes and parted her long blond hair in the middle. Both girls were known to hitchhike. Along their way, they disappeared.

  Leigh Allen quit the oil refinery at 4:00 P.M. each day and left immediately to beat the traffic. His route from Pinole took him west on Highway 37 to San Rafael, where it intersected 101 North. He drove on to Novato, Petaluma, Sonoma, and finally Cotati. A little before five he would have crossed the girls’ path.

  Saturday, March 4, 1972

  Sixteen days before the vernal equinox, at 5:00 P.M., Kim Wendy Allen left her job at Natural Foods, a Larkspur health food store. Twenty minutes later the nineteen-year-old Santa Rosa Junior College student was seen at the Bell Avenue Freeway entrance. She began hitchhiking north on 101, hefting an orange backpack and clutching a straw carry-bag. A beige three-quarter-length coat protected her against the chill wind. Like the little girls from the skating rink, she had blue eyes and long, light-brown hair parted in the middle. Like them, she vanished. The next day, two men discovered her nude body in a creek bed three miles from Bennett Valley Road. She had been strangled with white hollow-core clothesline. Her body showed signs of being bound spreadeagled for some time somewhere else. Superficial cuts were on her chest. The killer had kept her white embroidered blouse, cut-off blue jeans, green cotton scarf, and one gold earring. He’d carried away an unusual twenty-four-inch-long necklace fashioned from driftwood, seaweed, seashells, seeds, and eucalyptus buttons. She might have been raped. That definitely did not match Zodiac’s M.O. However, she was found twenty feet from Enterprise Road in a body of water, and Zodiac had once signed “ENTERPRISE” at the bottom of a letter.

  Tuesday, April 25, 1972

  Jeanette Kamahele, twenty, another Santa Rosa Junior College student, was also hitchhiking north near the Cotati on-ramp of Highway 101 when she disappeared. Her intended destination was Santa Rosa, where Leigh Allen had kept a trailer since 1970.

  Friday, May 5, 1972

  Allen was in a rage—he had just been fired from the Pinole refinery. Though his questioning by the police had been ten long months earlier, he considered his termination a direct result of their prying and innuendo. Leigh’s dismissal would create additional difficulties for Armstrong and Toschi. Now that the prime suspect was a full-time Sonoma State student, studying science and art, he began living most of each week in his Santa Rosa trailer. In the future any serious search required they choose between Santa Rosa and Vallejo—cities outside their jurisdiction. The situation was made more formidable by the fact that Allen was not their only suspect. A couple of others, at least in the beginning, looked good.

  A while back, Larry Friedman, an NYPD cop for two years, rang Toschi. They met at a coffee shop. “I thought you would be interested in this,” Friedman said. “A Crocker Bank employee lived a block away when Paul Stine was murdered.” Toschi already knew. “We had a couple of guys here in San Francisco,” Toschi said, “who were absolutely convinced that the Zodiac was a local bank honcho. All the circumstantial evidence fit perfectly. He originally lived down in Southern California when Bates was murdered. He owned property near Lake Berryessa and went hunting often in Montana, a place where Zodiac said he had been active; where it’s easy to buy guns that can’t really be traced. Their information was so good that we had to check their suspect out. We eliminated the man completely based on his prints not matching those on Stine’s cab.” The FBI went a step further, analyzing a blockprinted note passed by a robber to a Crocker teller to see if it matched Zodiac’s printing.

  Another suspect looked like a bear, but a bear with a shock of red hair and wearing dark glasses. The “Bear Man” was a “kinda scary guy,” Toschi told me, “steel-wool hair, loping long arms. He collected guns and ammo—a rifle carbine, but no .22’s or 9-mm. He was a theater janitor who lived on Hunter Street.” Police theorized Zodiac was not only a hunter, but might be named Hunter or might even possess a wild beast’s attributes. “We put the ‘Bear Man’ on the lie detector three weeks after the Stine killing. I asked the suspect, who volunteered that he was ambidextrous, to print for me. The writing didn’t match. Though he was generally familiar with Lake Berryessa, he didn’t know the side roads and was not intimate with Vallejo. I was unable to find anything locally on the suspect, no wants, nor warrants, nor arrests.

  “Zodiac might have been a cabbie like Stine. I checked the Department’s cab permit bureau back to 1963. If he ever drove a cab in this city, he had to be fingerprinted and photographed as an applicant—I found no such person as the ‘Bear Man.’ If he drove a cab it was under another name. I rechecked with DMV in Sacramento and they had no record of such a person with a current or past driver’s license. However, they purge after approximately seven years. I sent a Teletype to Las Vegas asking for a copy of his driver’s license and his photo—a seven-to-ten-day wait for that. And this was just one suspect—back when the case started.”

  Like Stine, an earlier Zodiac victim had been shot at close range above the ear. Though police often discounted the Lake Herman Road murders of December 20, 1968, as being Zodiac’s, a similar contact wound linked them to Stine. Past the rolling hills, peaceful pastures, and rugged quarries out on Lake Herman Road strange things were seen. Three and a half years before, on that pitch-black and lonely thoroughfare, Zodiac had murdered Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday, two teenagers on their first date. Good kids: Betty Lou an honor student; David an Eagle Scout, recipient of the “God and Country Award.”

  The night of the murders, Robert Connley and Frank Gasser (of the Gasser Ranch on Highway #2) were out there hunting raccoons. At 9:00 P.M. they drove their red Ford pickup just beyond Gate #10 leading to the Lake Herman Pumping Station. They parked the pickup twenty-five feet into a field of the Marshall Ranch, near the pump house. The gated entrance itself was one-quarter mile east of Lake Herman Cottage. As the gate swung inward, an unidentified truck began going out. The hunters observed a white four-door 1959-’60 Chevrolet Impala parked alongside its path. Gasser, sixty-nine, wearing a hunting jacket and shining a three-cell flashlight, ambled over to the Impala. Curious, he peered into the front seat, then the back. The car was empty. “Perhaps its owner is out scouting the area,” he thought.

  An hour later Bingo Wesher, a rancher on the Old Borges Ranch by the Humble Oil Company, began tending sheep just east of Benicia Pumping Station #9. He observed Gasser and Connley’s truck, recognizable by its wood sideboards and bright color, and saw the Impala parked by the south fence entrance. He could not tell if it was occupied. A “dark car, lacking in chrome” had been seen in the area, and between 9:30 and 10:00 P.M. a blue Valiant, driven by two men, chased another couple along Lake Herman Road at “a high rate of speed.” Another witness saw a “White Chevrolet, Impala sedan 1961-63” in the area.

  Two other witnesses passed the pumping station entrance at 10:15 and saw a 1960 four-door station wagon facing toward the gate. The two-tone (dark tan over light tan) Nash Rambler was the victims’ car. Fifteen minutes later the witnesses returned. The station wagon now faced the opposite direction. At 11:00 P.M. Connley and Gasser finished hunting and saw the Impala was gone. The Rambler was parked in the same spot, facing southwest and in a different spot than police found it an hour later. A Humble Oil worker driving home from Benicia after his graveyard shift saw two cars parked at the pump house entrance. “The car parked nearest to the road was a 1955 or 1956 station wagon, boxy type, neutral color,” he said. “The other was parked to the right and abreast of the station wagon. The cars were about ten feet apart. I could not give a description of the make or color of the other car.”

  The Rambler’s motor was still lukewarm when Detective Sergeant Les Lundblad of the Solano County Sheriff’s office arrived at five minutes after midnight. The car’s ignition key was on, but the motor was not running. The kids had been using the heater. The front of the four door brown-beige ’61 Rambler Station Wagon in the entranceway now pointed east.
The right front door stood wide open, the remaining three doors and tailgate still locked, but the right rear window had been smashed. The girl’s white fur coat, along with her purse, lay on the rear seat on the driver’s side. Though a deep heel mark was found behind the pumphouse, the gravel surface produced nothing of great significance in the way of readable footprints and no visible tire tracks were left on the frozen ground.

  Coroner Dan Horan, Dr. Byron Sanford, Captain Daniel Pitta, Officers William T. Warner, Waterman, and Butterbach, and a reporter from the Fairfield Daily Republic, Thomas D. Balmer, were already there. Benicia cops Pierre Bidou and Lieutenant George Little, who photographed the two bodies, joined the bustling scene. Zodiac counted on competing police agencies to hamper the investigation.

  Warner did a chalk outline around David’s body. Horan pronounced Betty Lou DOS. and, after Little had taken as many pictures from as many angles as possible, ordered her body to the morgue. Sergeant Cunningham had Deputy J. R. Wilson go to Vallejo General Hospital to take pictures of David, but when he arrived he learned the boy had been DOA. In the meantime Lundblad ascertained that one bullet had been fired into the top of the Rambler leaving a ricochet mark on the roof. Another had shattered the rear window. An expended .22-caliber casing from the killer’s gun lay on the right floorboard of the Rambler. Nine other expended casings were on the ground, to the right at distances of twenty feet, fourteen feet, eight feet two inches, four feet one-half inch, three feet, two feet three inches, one foot eleven inches, and one foot one-half inch. They showed how the boy had been shot as he exited and how the killer pursued the girl on the run. The fatal bullets that killed Jensen and Faraday were at first thought to be from a High Standard Model 101. Along the road, Benicia police recovered a Hi-Standard H-P Military .22 automatic with eradicated serial numbers. It had been previously disassembled by someone and the firing pin altered. They examined test bullets with six right-hand grooves, as did the questioned bullets removed from the victims. Different guns had been involved. No one could explain how the killer had fired so accurately in the dark unless he had some sort of light on the barrel.