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

by Robert Graysmith

  An irregularly flattened bullet removed from the left frontal lobe of the boy (he had been shot behind the upper right ear) and the bullets from the girl were analyzed. All were Western coated .22 Long Rifle ammo with 6 RH class characteristics. They could only have been fired from a J. C. Higgins, Model 80, .22 automatic pistol. Betty Lou had been shot five times in the back in a “remarkably close pattern.” Three of the bullets had emerged from her front. Betty Lou’s dress had no smoke or gunpowder residue in one hole in the center front. Nor was there any tattooing in the five punctures in the upper right side of her back. However, in the topmost hole in back, a single grain of gunpowder was discovered. That meant that of all the slugs that struck her, only one was fired at a closer range. All the others were fired from at least several feet. Two of the ten bullets fired were never accounted for, lost in the nearby field.

  Lundblad began timing the events of that night. First he drove to the home of Mrs. Stella Borges, the woman who had discovered the bodies sprawled by the roadside. From her ranch to the crime scene was two and seven-tenths miles and that took three minutes. From the crime scene to the Enco Station on East 2nd Street in Benicia where she had flagged down police was three and four-tenths miles. It took Lundblad five minutes at the “safe high speed” Borges had driven. “It is two and one-tenths miles from the intersection of Lake Herman Road and Luther Gibson Freeway to crime scene,” he wrote, “a three minute trip.” Later he also timed the distances between two suspects’ homes and the murder site at various speeds. Lundblad learned there had been a prowler around the Jensen home. Upon several occasions the gate leading to the side of the house had been found open.

  The unsolved murders forever tainted the region. On that forsaken road a man in a white Chevy cruised under the full moon. Residents had taken to calling him “The Phantom of Cordelia.” A big man was also observed roving the territory on foot, stalking over a gravel path to the old pump house, scouting for game, practicing his shooting, and moving through the quarry and watery areas where he could dive like a ghost. The huge man moved in other remote areas of Vallejo too, tracking the watery outskirts of Vallejo as if seeking something. Three astrological water signs—Scorpio, Pisces, and Cancer—determined the timing of Zodiac’s assaults. To prove this, astrologers confidently pointed to his later double shooting at Blue Rock Springs—committed during the sign of Cancer with the moon in Pisces.

  Mrs. Stella Borges’s ranch sat off Fairgrounds Drive and abutted the Syar Rock Quarry on American Canyon Road. To the east was Borges Summit Reservoir, and to the north a creek that rushed year-round with water. The big man swam in the cold water and stood like an apparition at her gate. Mrs. Borges, an important witness in the Lake Herman murders, saw him there herself. Forty-five minutes before midnight, December 20, 1968, she had set out for Benicia along Lake Herman Road. The lights of her car had illuminated the crumpled bodies of two teenagers at the roadside. Heart pounding, she had raced the rest of the way into Bencia and flagged down a police cruiser. For some reason the stranger reminded her of that traumatic moment.

  Her nephew, Albert, had also noticed eerie occurrences a year after the murders. “We grew up on the Borges Ranch,” he told me.“My Aunt Stella saw a lot of strange things over the years and so did I. It was her home her entire life. In November 1969, I was in the military and had a weekend pass. My ride dropped me off at the rest area around 10:00 P.M. My brother proceeded down Lake Herman Road to the rest area with his girlfriend and waited for me. He was familiar with the road and the Zodiac incident the previous Christmas. We all were.

  “He was armed with a pistol in his truck on the way back across Lake Herman Road. Not far from the Lake Herman gate someone had lifted a huge log across the road. It was nine or ten feet long. We could not go around. We stopped. I felt uneasy, looked around, and I told my brother to back up and go around the long way to Vallejo. There I called the police and reported it. Later, [to the south] at wooded Dan Foley Park by Lake Chabot, several teenagers on the hill were shooting BB guns. They observed a large man at a distance watching them. He stayed as long as they did, then left. Many people saw this stalker.

  “In the early 1970s, we used to go shooting and target-practice by the rock quarry. We had done that for years. My cousins told me about a big guy who used to come up and shoot with a whole armory in his car—military-type weapons, .45 Colts, M-16s, and the like. He wore military fatigues, bloused boots, and all. One day I was up there shooting and this guy was also there. When he saw me he immediately came up to where I was and challenged me. ‘What are you doing here?’

  “This guy was a gun nut and had burned up one box of ammo after another. He was wearing a black baseball cap and was about six feet one, large and muscular like myself. But I felt at a disadvantage, uneasy because he had strange eyes and he did not take them off me throughout his questioning, even when I told him I was a member of the family. I drove by Lake Herman the next day, and stopped by the gate where my aunt found that first couple of victims, and what a chill I got. It was like the incident had just happened. I thought to myself what if an old Chevy Impala should pull up alongside—then got the hell out of there.

  “I came to the conclusion that Zodiac was probably in the Navy or at least worked at the Mare Island shipyard. Vallejo police have fouled up in the past, and I wonder if this fellow was closer to the police than we think. I personally believe that after shooting the couple at Blue Rock Springs, Zodiac did drive down Lake Herman Road and since he was a pretty thorough person, had a police car radio so he could keep tabs on all aspects of information being relayed.”

  Mrs. Borges’s nephew was not the only one who had observed bizarre events on the outskirts of Vallejo. An Oakland man’s son had been out at Blue Rock Springs the very evening of Zodiac’s Fourth of July, 1969, murder and seen someone quite like Leigh Allen. “They were out riding their motorcycles along Columbus Parkway,” the father explained, “when they met a huge man walking along the road. My son was going to offer him a ride, but he was so huge and the motorcycle so small he decided against it. Besides, he said, it was near twilight and the man looked kind of spooky. In any event, he appeared to come from a car parked further down the road. My son described a 1950s black Plymouth, but was vague about the license plate number. It had an ‘X’ in it, he’s sure of that. He was very confident about the make and color of the car. My son was about seventeen at the time, and I am sure he did not repeat his observations to the police, especially when he heard a murder had taken place right after. It probably frightened him in the extreme.”

  Zodiac was a watcher—no doubt of that. The lonely always are.

  Saturday, July 15, 1972

  Carolyn Nadine Davis, long blond hair parted in the middle, gray-blue eyes, a fifteen-year-old runaway from Shasta County, left her Grandmother Adelian’s house in Garberville. In the pocket of her black coat nestled a one-way plane ticket from Redding to San Francisco. At 1:50 P.M. the road stretched ahead. She swung her green-print cloth handbag and eyed passing cars. In the bag was a false I.D. that identified her as “Carolyn Cook.” She approached the on-ramp, began hitchhiking on 101 in a southerly direction, and was not seen alive again. The other missing women had been hitchhiking north. If Allen were responsible, the change from a northerly direction to a southerly one was accounted for. He was no longer working in Pinole and traveling north homeward each evening.

  8

  arthur leigh allen

  Thursday, September 7, 1972

  “There was a second meeting with investigators,” Panzarella told me. “Leigh was then living in a house trailer somewhere on the coast and I had been there. The most bizarre thing is that hanging on the wall was a picture of him buffed out, a senior in high school, winning the CIA Diving Championship, and this guy’s totally healthy looking. Only seven, eight years later, he’s a three hundred pound blob.”

  Bill Armstrong contacted Don Cheney in Torrance again. A year had now snaked by since he and Toschi had
questioned Leigh Allen. So many homicides, so many suspects, so many legal hurdles to clear. “Inspector, I was going to call you,” Cheney said. “I don’t know if it’s important, but I thought of something else Arthur Leigh Allen and I discussed in our conversation on New Year’s Day, 1969. When Leigh was discussing his plan, I can recall that he asked me how you could disguise your handwriting. I remember my response. I told him, ‘I guess you could go to a library and get books on writing examination to find out how writing is identified.’”

  Armstrong absorbed this, then asked Cheney again if he was certain about his memory of his conversation with Allen.

  “I am positive,” he said.

  Things were moving again.

  Toschi scanned a photocopy of the first letter signed Zodiac—the dread it inspired two years ago still fresh in his mind. “This is the Zodiac speaking,” it began. Zodiac had firmly handprinted these three pages twenty months after Allen’s conversation with Cheney. After studying the originals and discovering no indented or secret writing, the FBI returned them to Sacramento on August 18, 1969. Thus, Toschi had only a copy for reference. A phrase had stuck in Toschi’s mind, and so he leafed through the August 4, 1969, photostat, rereading it, misspellings and all.

  “Last Christmass—In that epasode the police were wondering as to how I could shoot & hit my victims in the dark. They did not openly state this, but implied this by saying it was a well lit night & I could see silowets on the horizon.

  “Bullshit that area is srounded by high hills & trees. What I did was tape a small pencel flash light to the barrel of my gun. If you notice, in the center of the beam of light if you aim it at a wall or ceilling you will see a black or darck spot in the center of the circle of the light about 3 to 6 in. across.

  “When taped to a gun barrel the bullet will strike exactly in the center of the black dot in the light. All I had to do was spray them . . .” Here Toschi came to the remainder of this last sentence, one he and Armstrong had ordered the press not to print. It read: “as if it was a water hose; there was no need to use the gunsights. I was not happy to see that I did not get front page cover-age.” [Signed with Zodiac’s crossed circle and “no address.”]

  An electric gun sight—exactly as Allen had suggested to Cheney. “Leigh actually constructed such a device,” Cheney told me much later. “He put a penlight on an H&R revolver with tape.” Zodiac, enraptured by his science fiction invention, referred to it again in his November 9, 1969, letter: “To prove that I am the Zodiac, Ask the Vallejo cop about my electric gun sight which I used to start my collecting of slaves.” Vallejo cop? What Vallejo cop? thought Toschi. Had Zodiac, like Leigh Allen, been questioned by an as yet unknown Vallejo policeman at some point before November 9, 1969?

  “The next time we saw Allen was up in Santa Rosa,” Toschi explained. “That’s when we felt we might have something. Leigh’s name was just thrown at us again in a phone call late one morning.” Toschi never did determine the exact date of that call. He recalled only that it was summer (it was still light out at eight o’clock that night) and that enough time had passed for witnesses to grow dispirited about the progress Vallejo police were making.

  “I would really like to talk to you about a case you and your partner are working on,” began the caller circumspectly.

  “Are we talking about Zodiac?” Toschi asked.

  “Yes, absolutely. You’re reading my mind. I’m the brother. I believe you know what I’m talking about.”

  There was caution and concern in his voice. “I do,” Toschi said, recalling the visit he and Armstrong and Mulanax had paid to Ron and Karen Allen’s house one August night.

  “I feel, and my wife feels, a larger police department with more resources could do a little bit more than what the Vallejo Police Department has been doing. I can only speculate what they are doing at the present time, Inspector.”

  “Have you given all your information to the Vallejo Police Department?” Toschi asked.

  “Yes, but we don’t think they have done enough,” Ron said.

  “When Ron Allen called,” Toschi told me later, “he was a very concerned person and really was asking San Francisco to talk to him. He says, ‘I need to talk to you fellows and I’ve already spoken to Sergeant Mulanax and some other officers.’ It was like he wasn’t getting the same officer all the time, that he wanted to pass information on. And right away my brain is thinking ahead like, ‘Oh, God, here we go again because I’ve got to talk to Jack Mulanax. We can’t drop the ball—I mean, it’s his jurisdiction.’”

  “Where are you?” Toschi asked.

  “I’m in the city,” Ron Allen said, and told him where—between Market and Mission on First Street.

  “Can you get away this afternoon for fifteen or twenty minutes so we can talk to you and just see what you have?”

  “Yes, I can take a break. How soon?”

  “Can you spare some time so we can come down immediately?”

  They agreed to meet in the lobby of the PG&E Building in downtown San Francisco in about thirty minutes. “What are you going to be wearing?” asked Toschi. “The two of us will be there.”

  “And that’s how it all started,” Toschi told me.“We naturally went in and ran it by our boss, Charlie Ellis, real quick. I told the lieutenant what we got and he says, ‘Another one, another tip.’ I said, ‘Charlie, this is a brother of the man that he believes is our killer and he lives in Vallejo. This sounds awfully good. He really wants to talk to us,’ I explained. ‘We can’t turn it down.’ He said, ‘OK, get on it.’ Then we ran it by the chief of inspectors, Charles Barca. ‘You usually get your best information from a member of the family,’ he said. I had a smile on my face.

  “Ron was so sincere on the phone, within thirty or forty minutes we’re talking to him in the lobby of his workplace. As soon as he came out of the elevator, we looked at him. He was very slender, wearing a suit, and balding a bit. The strain had obviously worn on him. I could see a bit of relief that San Francisco was involved and I realized he recognized us.

  ‘Thank you, Inspectors, for coming down so quickly,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got to talk to you.’ And we sat down and took some notes. Soon as we spoke to him I could detect the truth coming out of his mouth.

  “Initially, what we did was listen. If you want to learn something, you listen. We asked him if we could speak with his wife. He said, ‘Of course. I’d like you to speak with my wife because she feels like I do.’ And we felt this sounds pretty good, the best that we ever had of any suspect, with a brother coming forward and not being satisfied with what the other sheriffs’ and police departments had been doing.

  “We told him we’d like to come to his home that evening and take in-depth statements with his wife and get some proof and corroboration. ‘I hope you don’t have a problem with that,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘My wife feels the same way. We’re both frightened. I’d like you to talk to my wife.’

  “We called Jack Mulanax to set it up. ‘I talked to the guy,’ Mulanax said. ‘We’ve checked Allen out pretty well.’ ‘I know,’ I told him, believing him to a degree, ‘but Ron’s giving us some more information and we just have to tell you we’re coming into your territory. It’s police courtesy. The brother called us. We can’t put it away.’” The behavior of the Vallejo P.D. had always puzzled Toschi. It was as if a second mystery underlay the watery town of Vallejo, invisibly affecting the investigation at every turn. “For some reason Lynch and Lundblad didn’t want to come to some of our early conferences in Sacramento. And here Bill and I are driving ninety miles up there.

  “We arrived at the Allen home at 7:30 P.M. It was still light out. Karen had expected us, but rambled for twenty minutes not really saying anything. It was corroborated later that evening how serious they took us. ‘I know there are a lot of leads coming in and clues,’ she said. They had consulted an uncle before calling, to be certain they were doing the right thing.

  “Everything was coming out slow,
but every time she would say something of substance, Ron would shake his head, and say, ‘Yes, that’s true.’ They were both in sync with each other out of their fear and concern that he was still out there.

  “‘We’re very frustrated,’ Karen told me. ‘We just don’t know how serious Vallejo took us. I know there are a lot of leads coming in. We just decided to call you because we were seeing your name and Inspector Armstrong’s name in the papers.’ ‘Because of the letters to the Chronicle and the media coverage,’ I told them, ‘we’re getting it all. We sure would like to spread it around a little more.’ That got a little chuckle from both Ron and Karen. ‘When we get a call, we take it seriously,’ I told them. ‘We just decided, you took the time to call, we’ll take the information now and notify the detective from that jurisdiction, see what he knows and maybe it will ring a bell.’

  “I noticed that Ron was speaking with even more emotion than earlier. It was as if a little frustration had entered Ron and his wife since they saw nothing more was coming from the Vallejo investigation. Ron and Karen told us that Leigh had spent time in Southern California and was familiar with the area, but they weren’t too sure exactly what he was doing because he was on his own a lot.