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

by Robert Graysmith

  “You’ll notice,” Toschi told me later, “that in the exemplar that Leigh printed for us we had him use a black felt-tipped pen. We thought since we were going this far, we might as well do it right. There are only a few companies putting out such inks as he uses. Sherwood had always said that Zodiac was probably printing right-handed in his letters. I asked another expert [Postal Inspector John Shimoda] later and he felt the same way—‘the printing was of a right-hand type.’ But Allen was known to be ambidextrous, and I remember him telling us that he ‘usually did things left-handed, but could use both hands in certain activities.’ All his family and friends told us positively that Leigh could write, shoot, and shoot bow and arrow with either hand.”

  Toschi showed Allen the phrase “up until now I have killed five.” “We want you to just print the way you normally print,” he said. “I understand you have some ability with your left hand,” Toschi added. “I don’t do it left-handed,” said Allen. “Who told you that?”

  “We know what you can do and what you can’t.”

  Allen had been born left-handed and forced to be right-handed in elementary school. Everyone there knew that. He cooperated with the investigation and wrote handwriting exemplars with both his right and left hands. Allen appeared to have some difficulty writing left-handed. “I can’t,” he said.

  “He is ambidextrous,” thought Toschi. “Do the best you can. Print capital letters, small letters. Print what we tell you,” said Toschi. Allen didn’t like that at all. “We had him go from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ and from ‘1 to 10.’”

  “Why can’t I print what I want?” he snarled.

  Toschi, impatience showing in his voice for the first time, told him, “Because this is what we want you to print.” “The suspect’s right handprinting and his left handprinting were almost identical,” Toschi told me, “but right-handed his printing was a bit larger. When you see Leigh again you might pay attention to what hand he uses to write with. Allen appeared to be disturbed as he printed. It was not as neat as samples of his earlier writing.”

  Then Toschi asked Allen to print, “This is the Zodiac speaking.”

  “What are you making me say? That I’m Zodiac?”

  Toschi told him no, and promised if the printing did not match Zodiac’s, they would walk away. “We will rule you out completely. But we have to be sure.”

  Right-handed, Allen wrote the phrase in large letters. He was obviously altering his printing. But Allen’s printing had that spacey quality found in the Zodiac letters. Toschi noted, “His printing varied from small, neat, sloppy, then larger in the Santa Rosa trailer. He printed a bit larger. Zodiac’s lettering was quite small.” Toschi laid down Morrill’s second page of quotes. “Print, ‘In answer to your answer for more details about the good times I had in Vallejo, I shall be very happy to supply even more material.’” he said. Allen copied it faithfully, repeating the word “more.”

  Then Allen was ordered to print a phrase from a letter in which Zodiac quoted from memory and paraphrased Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. “All people who are shaking hands shake hands like that.” The last lines Allen wrote tilted toward the bottom right side of the page, as was common in Zodiac letters. He also copied, “I am no longer in control of myself.” On December 20, 1969, Zodiac had written: “I am afraid I will loose control again and take my nineth & possibly tenth victom.”

  But time was running out and the policemen had found no smoking gun inside the trailer connecting Allen to the Zodiac. “Allen seemed to know what to say,” said Toschi. “Not a dumb man. A very wily man. I’ll never forget being in his presence. He mentioned Berryessa. He shook our hands. We left our cards.

  “And I could feel the hatred as we were leaving. He must have been relieved, thinking that ‘I’m not going to get busted,’ but also thinking, ‘Are they going to come back?’ As I left I said, ‘I’ll be seeing you again, Leigh,’ Anything he was planning went on hold. Allen wasn’t cool when we left. There was a lot of frustration when we left the trailer court.”

  The detectives adjourned to the Holiday Inn Coffee Shop at 3345 Santa Rosa Avenue, about six blocks away, to have lunch and discuss the exploration. It was hot. Toschi could tell Dagitz was pretty depressed. The fingerprint expert put down his cup and said, “The prints on Stine’s cab, if they were those of Zodiac, do not match Allen’s. It’s a positive no.”

  “But,” said Armstrong, “there were so many fingerprints in this public cab, that it is unknown that if, in fact, we have Zodiac’s fingerprints at the crime scene or not. In some of the letters Zodiac wrote us, he bragged that he put airplane glue on fingers to obliterate any fingerprints.”

  “So they have a latent print,” Mulanax later told me. “It’s my own personal opinion there’s a lot of doubt this could be a Zodiac print. You dust a cab and you’re going to lift some latents off it. Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the guy who did the job. On the same thing, up in Napa, they have a partial palm print, but how many people use a public phone booth?”

  “When we drove back from Santa Rosa,” said Toschi, “even though we were told we had to have a little bit more, we then went up to see Sherwood Morrill. The refinery where Leigh had worked was not too far from Vallejo. Every time I pass it going up to Sacramento, I’d see the darn thing and it would bring back memories. I would think, ‘I wish we could close this case.’ This is what was on my mind constantly. Constantly. And I felt we did.”

  In Sacramento a heavyset, scholarly man in a three-piece pinstripe suit greeted them. Morrill took the two pages Allen had printed. He studied them through his thick glasses. That night he would put them under his twin microscope. “Morrill, to be honest, shot us down,” Toschi recalled, “He phoned and said, ‘Sorry, Dave. There’s just no match. I’m sure you have the right suspect and I’m sure you’re on the right track.’ Sherwood indicated that the handprinting was similar, but not the Zodiac killer’s.”

  “The thing that impressed me about the handwriting,” Detective Lynch recalled, “every time I’d take a handwriting sample to Morrill, he’d just sit at his desk and I’d hand it to him and ‘No good.’ He did that I don’t know how many times. All I know is that when Zodiac was writing these letters, he was either drinking, smoking pot, or taking some kind of narcotics because it just seemed to me that as he wrote his handwriting would just deteriorate.”

  Terry Pascoe, a Department of Justice Document Examiner, reported to Armstrong. “If the writing had been a product of a mental state,” he said, “the writing of a subject can be different when in a different mental state, or it could be a case of an intentional deception. With the talents that [Allen] has, writing with both hands, this could be done.” He later told Detective George Bawart that “a person of high intelligence could study the methods used to examine handwriting and fool a documents examiner.” Afterward Bawart reported, “Our handwriting expert, Cunningham, confirms that if Allen had the ability to write with his left hand, this could explain the inability to match the handprinting to Arthur Leigh Allen.”

  Armstrong listened intently to Pascoe. “Do not eliminate this subject because of handwriting,” he warned. But Morrill, who had examined all the known writings of Zodiac, told Toschi and Armstrong that he did not feel a mental state would change a person’s handwriting. He was a rival of the younger Pascoe and the two often differed on opinions. Armstrong was never able to reconcile this problem. It was not unprecedented. Peter Kurten, the Dusseldorf Ripper, wrote letters reproduced in the same newspaper his wife read each morning. She never recognized the writing as her husband’s. Kurten’s altered mental state while composing the notes made him a completely different person with a different handwriting. I wondered if Leigh had other personalities. “By the way, Robert,” Morrill confided to me later (November 17, 1980), “I do now note that the printing that Allen is doing is contrived and not natural to his own.”

  Toschi had thought they were really going to find something. “As soon as we started getting infor
mation from the sister-in-law and the brother,” he said, “I felt Allen was the one. It all sounded just perfect, but we just couldn’t find a way to prove that Leigh Allen was the Zodiac killer. We had done everything but stand Arthur Leigh Allen on his head. We found no physical evidence inside the trailer linking Allen to the Zodiac case. Everything he had, according to his brother and sister-in-law, was in that trailer. We checked the Department of Motor Vehicles. He might have some other trailers and vehicles not registered. A very shrewd, very wily individual.”

  The mistake lay in failing to obtain search warrants for Vallejo (in spite of Allen’s ailing elderly mother) and Santa Rosa. The detectives might have had the misfortune to search the wrong place. From the inception of the murders, Zodiac had used the multiple-county strategy, striking in unincorporated sections of Vallejo or areas of confused jurisdiction between sheriffs’ and police departments. Benicia police actually secured the Lake Herman Road crime scene until Vallejo sheriff’s men could be brought in. And of course the VPD wanted part of the action. And so did the Oakland P.D.

  If Arthur Leigh Allen was Zodiac, then after the trailer search, he had only to speed to his Vallejo basement and destroy all physical evidence connecting him with the crimes. And what of Allen’s other trailers? He might have caches in every county Zodiac killed in. “We were always wondering,” said Toschi, “is there another vehicle nearby? We were just wondering if we could find the right one. The right piece of evidence that says, ‘That’s him. Gotcha.’”

  “When Armstrong met with Cheney and I in another meeting,” said Panzarella, “that’s where I learned about the trailer search. Armstrong’s telling us about dead animals, all the vibrators Leigh had for having sex with himself, dildos and all that stuff. But they still couldn’t get anything on him. The more I think, over the course of a lifetime, when I think of the most interesting people I’ve met in my life, Leigh certainly was one of them. And the more we know about him, the more we know he was certainly capable of doing something like that. You’ve got a smart guy who decides his contribution to the culture is he’s going murder people in unincorporated areas mostly manned by small police departments. You know it’s pretty easy to get away with that if you’re smart. It’s all circumstantial, but who else could it be but Leigh Allen. It frightens me, I’ll tell you that.”

  And thus the best Zodiac suspect of all had passed every one of the detectives’ tests and they went on to other suspects. So far Zodiac had sent three pieces of the gray-and-white-striped sports shirt he had torn from Stine after shooting him. Toschi estimated, “That leaves about 120 square inches of the shirt still unaccounted for.” At the San Francisco Chronicle, we all awaited the next scrap of bloodied fabric and the horrifying message wrapped around it.

  9

  policeman and sailor

  Monday, November 13, 1972

  But that blood-soaked letter did not arrive. Zodiac had apparently disappeared. But on the Southern California front, Zodiac’s shadow was not only present, but looming larger. After sleuthing hundreds of hours, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department believed they had finally linked Zodiac to the deaths of Domingos and Edwards.

  In July 1971, when Detective Baker of the Major Crimes Unit sent out a statewide Teletype, he’d asked for similars. “Both Bill Armstrong and Mel Nicolai gave me a call,” he told me, “and expressed their suspicions that our case may be linked to Zodiac. Just on the basis of the description I offered them there was a good possibility Zodiac was responsible. I ended up traveling and talking to most of the investigators in most of the jurisdictions where the crimes were attributable to Zodiac. And just reviewing their cases and talking with them and they in turn reviewing what I had.

  “Mel Nicolai, who I judged to be one of the single most knowledgeable people on all of the cases, told me he felt our case may well be the work of Zodiac. If it isn’t, it amazes me how someone could commit murders like those of Linda and Robert and not be heard from before or since. I’ve worked on other serial-killing cases and the psychopathology involved in our case is no different. When the Lake Berryessa circumstances were described to me, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I’m sure you can discern the striking similarities.”

  Just as in the vicious Berryessa attack, the victims were students, a young couple reclining on a blanket by an isolated shore. A sexual sadist tends to target members of his own race, often chooses victims with specific occupations or similar characteristics. His apparently random victims are chosen because they meet some psychological or symbolic need within the murderer’s system of delusions. A sadistic sociopathic killer like Zodiac, say FBI profiles, “selects his victims for the purpose of venting certain deeply rooted sexual and sadistic urges, such as the need to mutilate parts of the victim’s body to achieve sexual satisfaction.” Once he is captured, the killer’s detailed and grisly confession itself is a brutal assault thrown in the face of the police.

  What if Zodiac was choosing victims who were students like himself? Robert and Linda were targeted because their car on the road above had attracted a roving killer who followed their path down to the water. In both the Napa and Santa Barbara slayings the attacker brought along a knife, a gun, and precut lengths of clothesline. And why tie victims he intended to kill? So he could torture? A serial killer’s pleasure springs from his ability to intimidate, command, and exert power over his captive. Terror and the power it brings are a sexual sadist’s trademarks because he feels terror and is powerless. Such a man as Zodiac kills those, young couples, who share an intimacy he is incapable of sharing. Gratified by the sight of a cowering, whimpering hostage, he is allowed by the rope to prolong the killing as long as he wishes.

  “Both victims were hit in the back (relatively close grouping considering they were running away when hit),” said Baker. That linked Baker’s case to Zodiac’s Lake Herman Road shootings, also accomplished with accuracy and tight grouping. Zodiac had shot a fleeing woman with deadly accuracy while racing behind. He had done it in the pitch blackness of a country road.

  “On the floor of the shack were two empty fifty-round boxes for Winchester Western Super-X .22 long-rifle cartridges,” said Baker. “Spent casings had been found along Robert and Linda’s flight path. They had six lands and grooves with a right-hand twist.” Zodiac had used Super X copper-coated .22 long-rifle ammo in the Lake Herman murders. The double murders had been committed on December 20, 1968, two days after Allen’s thirty-fifth birthday. The recovered slugs, in good condition, also had a right-hand (clockwise) twist with six lands and six grooves—a “six and six.”

  “Stock numbers on the boxes found in the shack could be traced,” Baker explained. “The ammunition lot number was TL 21 or TL 22. Our W-W ammo was probably purchased at Vandenberg Air Force Base Exchange based on the fact that it was the nearest source for that lot number. The only store anywhere within a hundred miles that sold it was VAFB. It was determined to a degree of probability to have been purchased there. However, it could be that the same ammo lot number (metallurgical-common origin/batch) was available at other bases as well. The usual clerk at the base exchange at the time was a man named Summers or Sumner. The SAC unit base near Lompoc is less than an hour’s drive from the crime scene. That was just one more thing that told us that there might be a connection to Zodiac—I was also considering March AFB or Travis AFB.

  “It’s not so much hard evidence that links Zodiac with the double murder here, but the pattern of the slaying. We don’t have any corroborating fingerprints, bullet or casing marks, or eyewitness observations. If there had been any shoe prints, anything identifiable, I would have jumped on that just for the possibility because I was aware of the Lake Berryessa case.” The shoes Zodiac wore at Lake Berryessa in September 1969 were sold through base exchanges only. “Military shoe prints would have been significant. And if there had been anything, I certainly would have remembered that. Whether or not the Riverside case was a Zodiac killing, our case preceded the others
by at least three years, far earlier than would be expected. There appears to be a high degree of probability that this subject is responsible for the double murder in our county. Several significant similarities between our case and the others, as well as other evidence, all tend to connect Zodiac with this crime.

  “When I last talked to Bill Armstrong at a CHIA conference in San Francisco, he told me he’d never think of the Zodiac murders without including our case as one of them. I never had contact with Dave Toschi after our initial meeting at their office in 1972. I’ve felt very strongly about it ever since. It’s not something that goes away over time. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you.” Baker was the kind of cop who would never give up. Outside of Jack the Ripper, there had never been a greater uncaught or more elusive monster than Zodiac.

  “The very real possibility of a connection of our case to the core Zodiac case,” said Baker, “is the impetus that has brought me to believe that my decades-old suspicion of our case being the work of Zodiac was not misguided. Not to overstate the role of the Domingos/Edwards case in the realm of ultimately solving the Zodiac mystery, I will emphasize again that I firmly believe, within the context of what is probably his first murderous rampage, that within our case lies the solution.”