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

by Robert Graysmith

  “[Zodiac] has an evil deity with him who advises him,” an acknowledged mystic explained. “I saw it when I was in that card shop on Market Street.” To give weight to his comments, the seer included copies of his psychic resume and a letter from the Premonitions Registry in New York. Peter Hurkos, consulting psychic on the Boston Strangler and Sharon Tate murders, received threats from Zodiac while he was in Palm Springs. He offered his services to the SFPD to help catch Zodiac (in exchange for a plane ticket to San Francisco), but they turned him down.

  “Did Leigh ever discuss an afterlife?” I asked Cheney much later. “What were his feelings?”

  “Victims to be slaves in the afterlife,” replied Cheney tersely.

  Monday, December 13, 1973

  A broad-shouldered man continued to stalk the marshes, quarries, and lagoons along Lake Herman Road. Winds from the west stirred fields of brittle grass. As evening fell, he stood motionless—indistinguishable from surrounding rocks. The same setting sun that colored the boulders gold enlivened his impassive face. Meanwhile, in San Francisco the wait was maddening. Thirty-four months had passed since Zodiac’s last letter. Why? Zodiac was all we talked about, all we thought about.

  Over on Bryant Street, Toschi fished out a Zodiac letter received that morning. “I assume the writer wants me to think he is Zodiac,” he said with a sigh. “He uses an Oakland address as a return, but the Oakland police building has a zip code of 94607. However, the writer has the San Francisco Hall of Justice code correct, 94103. The word ‘HOMICIDE’ on the envelope is written by a clerk in our mail room.” He held it to the light and squinted. “Notice the obvious crossed t’s and the dots over the i’s. Notice the paper size is 8½ by 11, and a legal-size envelope, different from the odd size of the Zodiac letters. This size envelope and size of paper is consistent with the stationery given inmates in the county jail or in prison. It is different from the Zodiac letters and has a different watermark. Another hoax! As far as phony Zodiac writers, the number would be more like, what, Bill? Fifty so far?”

  Something about Zodiac led to imitation: first hoax letters, then attempted murder, and finally homicide. For ten days in May 1973, a Richmond teacher had been bombarded by menacing calls from a sobbing man identifying himself as Zodiac. “I’m going to kill the lady in the blue house,” he told the teacher. “I went to a Martinez school in search of victims, but left because the police were there.” Afterward, the teacher discovered his back door had been pried open by a prowler. Shaken, he went to the refrigerator. Absentmindedly, he took a swig from an open bottle of cola. A metallic taste filled his mouth and he quickly spat the drink out. Someone had added a lethal dose of arsenic.

  Another Zodiac copycat nearly severed noted lamp designer Robert Salem’s head with a long, thin-bladed knife. Homicide Inspectors Gus Coreris and John Fotinos, called to his posh workshop behind the San Franciscan Hotel, discovered his mutilated body on a bloody mat. In the victim’s own blood, the killer printed on his body and the wall, “Satan Saves—ZODIAC.” Salem’s murder was solved in a horrible way. South of Big Sur, a Highway Patrolman pulled over two young Wyoming men driving the car of a young social worker found floating in the Yellowstone River. His heart, head, and limbs had been severed as if in ritual sacrifice. “I have a problem,” one of the men told the officer. “I am a cannibal.” Both were carrying well-gnawed human finger bones in their pockets.

  Like Zodiac, Paul Avery typed on a manual typewriter, had intimate knowledge of the Chronicle and police techniques, and wore Wing Walker shoes. Like Leigh Allen, Avery had been born in the thirties in Honolulu and raised in a military family as the son of a career Naval officer. He had his own theories about Zodiac. “He might be some sort of merchant seaman,” Avery told me, “because for long intervals we don’t hear from him. For some reason Zodiac’s grown cautious. Whether or not ‘Zode’s’ in prison or has simply stopped killing, I still have to contend with this—” He snatched up a particularly vicious copycat letter:

  “Paul Avery: I killed Erakat [Zuheir Erakat, a victim of the Zebra killers, a case Toschi had been assigned]. The Blind Lady is next, then you. The Grand Finale will be suicide, with TV coverage, from the Golden Gate Bridge. Soon My mission in life is done. Aloha.” Two Zodiac symbols served as a signature to the letter.

  “Scoop. Paul Avery and the Fuzzy S.F. Pigs: a .45 automatic and a plastic bag with a draw-string over his head got his cooperation, but he was yellow and whined. That deal was extra and commissioned by someone now dead. My California activities are unaffected—just on ice presently—you are still there, so say your prayers—the Zodiac cannot be trifled with. Zodiac Claims 17 . . . Paul Avery—Hah!”

  The thirty-nine-year-old former war correspondent found himself buried beneath tips. “This is the half-brother of the Zodiac speaking,” one fretted. “I’m concerned that Zodiac might be using my High Standard .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol.” But of them all, Willy’s3 story was especially tragic. Willy’s family, convinced their son was Zodiac, sent stacks of handwriting exemplars, along with their own handwriting expert’s opinion, to Avery:

  “After lengthy study and consideration of specimens of handwriting done by ‘Zodiac’ and comparison with letters written by him, it is my belief that all of these handwritings were done by the same person.”

  “They don’t seem to be nuts,” Chronicle reporter George Murphy advised Avery, “just a pleasant couple who believe they are acting as good citizens. My first reaction is to go to Oakland and ask their suspect, who’s now out on bail, if he’s the Zodiac. I’ll be around for further interrogation this afternoon, but it doesn’t seem like Zodiac.” Willy had been jailed soon after Zodiac’s letter to Belli, but Avery scanned a few passages anyway.

  “I am sorry for all the people that I have killed and maimed,” wrote Willy. “But understand something if you can, every person that I ever killed actually deserved it. . . . I never wanted to become what I was, it was an accident when I killed that first man in San Francisco, and from then on I had to do what they wanted. Do you know what it’s like to look someone in the face and then pull a trigger. You never get used to it. And I’m not crazy, just always scared.”

  Avery realized “Willie” thought he was a mob hit man. With a shudder, he forwarded Willy’s letters to Sherwood Morrill, who said, “They’re not Zodiac’s handwriting.” The reporter was burning out. Lines etched his face; against the bright blue shirts and red neckerchiefs he often wore, his complexion stood sallow.

  Saturday, December 22, 1973

  Toschi and Armstrong worked to exhaustion, grabbed a bite at Original Joe’s, then rushed back to their office to begin the daily cycle all over again. The Zodiac case was like the tide—hopes lifted, only to be dashed against the rocks. And yet beneath the surface they felt tremendouscurrents—another unsolvable mystery, a hint of deeper crimes as they waded through sluggish water. To the north in Santa Rosa, outside their jurisdiction, bad things continued to happen. At the winter solstice, a day that held significance to Zodiac, Theresa Diane Walsh was hitchhiking on 101 from the area of Malibu Beach to her home in Garberville. A sliver handmade cross swung from her neck, a fire-opal ring and a copper-band ring flashed on her fingers. Ten dollars of colored beads she used for making bracelets rattled in her backpack. Somewhere along the way, she too disappeared. Her strangled body, hog-tied with one-quarter-inch nylon rope, was discovered next to Kim Allen’s in a creek six days later. Zodiac had tied his victims at Lake Berryessa with clothesline, but Walsh, like Kim Allen, may have been sexually assaulted and this was unlike Zodiac, whose pleasure was pain.

  Monday, January 28, 1974

  All month long the world’s oceans had been uncommonly wild, whipping the West Coast with fury. Hurricanes, high tides, and thunder-storms relentlessly beat the shores. A major coincidence of cosmic cycles had occurred. Earth, moon, and sun had aligned in a nearly straight line—a configuration called syzygy. During the new and full phases of the moon, positive ions char
ged the atmosphere and freaky, motiveless murders occurred as far away as Miami.

  Zodiac hunched over a light table, the glow highlighting his intent face. In the past, his desire for notoriety had compelled him to boast. Now a more commanding power, a celestial power, drove him to break his three-year silence. Because of the timing of his killings, experts had long believed Zodiac was “moon mad”—sensitive to the gravitational influences, enhanced luminosity, and electromagnetic field changes of full and new moon phases, changes that affect the human nervous system and increase the brain’s nervous activity.

  “If one considers the human organism as a microcosm,” psychiatrist Arnold L. Lieber wrote, “comprising essentially the same elements as, and in similar proportion to, those of the earth’s surface—approximately eighty percent water and twenty percent organic and inorganic minerals—one could speculate that the gravitational forces of the moon might exert a similar influence upon the water mass of the human being.” Studies on nuclear magnetic resonance demonstrated that biological tissues respond to the interaction between moon and Earth. These biological tides might be sufficient to trigger emotional, psychological, and physiological outbursts in certain predisposed individuals.

  “Ironically, on dark, moonless nights,” Toschi told me, “all my years in Sex Crimes, Aggravated Assault, and Homicide, my home phone was relatively quiet—even when on call. When it was a clear, bright moonlit night, nights of full and new moons, violent crime increased. Inevitably the Toschi home phone would ring—Operations Center reporting marital fights, shootings, stabbings—all night long. Contrary to popular belief, dark spooky nights would be a normal tranquil night for a policeman.” At Stanford, Dr. Lunde suggested another possibility for the timing of Zodiac’s assaults. “Were Zodiac’s nighttime murders always at a time when there was fairly good moonlight?” he asked me. “Always a full or new moon,” I replied. “So he would be able to see at night,” said Lunde. Coincidentally, a Sacramento Bee Sunday article on Morrill had appeared prominently the day before, January 27. So the new letter might in part have been an ego thing, a competition with Morrill for publicity.

  Zodiac bent to his labor. A film had been terrifying San Francisco, much as he used to, receiving as much publicity as he once had. Lines of thrill-seekers stretched around the block, sixty thousand since Christmas, waiting to enter the Northpoint Theater and see The Exorcist. Once inside, after a two-hour wait, a few immediately exited and were sick on the sidewalk. Zodiac had seen them himself—“Disgusting!” his letter commented on this phenomenon and the sickness of the public at large. He had revved his car and rushed away. The postmark, 940, wouldn’t be much help to the police. It only indicated the letter had been mailed from an adjacent county south of San Francisco and picked up before noon on Tuesday.

  Wednesday, January 30, 1974

  For over a month the two-man Zodiac Squad had not seen any real action. Zodiac had mailed his last letter just under three years ago. The number of tip letters dwindled, falling from fifty a week to ten to practically none. Toschi, working ill and out of sorts, had taken to glaring at the sealed five-foot-tall steel-gray filing cabinet crammed with Zodiac artifacts. “One drawer is marked ‘Concerned Citizens,’” he said. “The second drawer is for suspects only.” (Ultimately there would be eight drawers.) “Do I think we’ll ever catch the guy? Of course I do. I have to feel that way, or I’d have given up long ago. To me it’s a major challenge, a major case. Bill and I are the Zodiac Squad of the country.”

  Recently they had been busy tracking down the infamous Zebra killers who slaughtered fifteen and wounded eight random victims over a 179-day period. Though all of the victims were white and all of their assailants black, that was not why the religiously motivated cult murders came to be known as the “Zebra” killings. “The special unit we put together worked mostly at night,” Toschi explained, “because that’s when the killings were occurring. They used a radio channel that was seldom used to keep it available for anyone who called in who might have seen some suspects. They put it on ‘Channel Z,’ which was never used at all. It was ‘Z’ for ‘Zebra’ and the press picked up on it and our killers became the Zebra killers.” Members of this fanatical cult had to pass an initiation that consisted of shooting or hacking to death men, women, and children in order to reach the rank of “Death Angel.” Two nights ago, between 8:00 and 10:00 P.M., another Zebra murder had set off a round-the-clock manhunt. Dog-tired and aching, Toschi had stayed in bed this one morning. He glanced at the clock, studied the sky outside. Everything was out of kilter. As a fuel-saving device, Daylight Savings Time had arrived three months early this year. Toschi, unaware the killer’s unexplained silence was about to be broken, buried his face in the pillow. Over at the Chronicle Carol Fisher slit open a letter, froze, and read the following:

  “I saw and think ‘The Exorcist’ was the best saterical comidy that I have ever seen. Signed, yours truley: He plunged him self into the billowy wave and an echo arose from the suicides grave titwillo titwillo titwillo PS. if I do not see this note in your paper. I will do something nasty, which you know I’m capable of doing”

  This wasn’t the first time Zodiac had quoted Gilbert and Sullivan. Carol recognized the “titwillo” lines from the second act of The Mikado, specifically the aria of Ko-Ko, the fainthearted Lord High Executioner. Three and a half years ago the killer had also paraphrased Mikado lyrics (“a little list he had of all those who would never be missed”). He had quoted them at great length from memory. Divergencies from the original text, primarily Acts I and II, proved that. “And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist” had been changed to “and the singurly abnormily the girl who never kissed.” Various alternatives to lady novelist—lady dramatist, lady motorist, lady bicyclist, etc., were usually suggested by the actor portraying Ko-Ko. I believed that Zodiac’s little list was a roll call of real people he knew and whom he fancied had wronged him—“banjo seranader,” “piano orginast” and “all children . . . up in dates [students].” Police had always believed Zodiac had essayed the role of Ko-Ko professionally. I suggested a college production.

  The night Zodiac hailed cabdriver Paul Lee Stine, the Lamplighters had been rehearsing The Mikado nearby on a stage smaller than a Pacific Heights living room at Presentation Theatre, 2350 Turk Street. During their entire run, from October 18 to November 7, 1969, no Zodiac letter was received. Scrawls at the bottom of the new letter even resembled the rounded ersatz Japanese calligraphy on Ko-Ko’s paper fan. On January 30, 1974, music director Gilbert Russak was still putting Ko-Ko, Nanki-Poo, Pooh-Bah, Pish-Tush, and Yum-Yum through their paces. Carol thought Zodiac might be a member of that cast.

  In the letter’s lower right-hand corner, Zodiac had printed “Me-37 S.F.P.D.-0.” Fisher called Homicide and they rang Toschi at home. The detective, burning with fever, forced himself up. The last time he had felt this bad was on the front lines in Korea. Drafted after leaving Galileo High, he had faced seven months of hard combat with the 24th Infantry Division. Within half an hour, Toschi had parked under the Chronicle tower, ridden to the third floor, and was reading Zodiac’s score. “Thirty-seven!” he muttered, praying the killer was lying. “Another Gilbert and Sullivan swipe and another shot at SFPD,” said Toschi. “Jeez, why does he single us out every time. What is this grudge? And why Gilbert and Sullivan?”

  Dr. Murray S. Miron of the Syracuse Research Institute reached some conclusions on the new letter. In a confidential FBI psycholinguistics report, he suggested “suicides grave” might indicate Zodiac was contemplating suicide. Miron referred to Zodiac’s letter to Attorney Mel Belli in particular. It contained hints of a depression that “frequently overtakes him. . . . It is not entirely unlikely that in one of these virulent depressions, such individuals could commit suicide.” Possibly, the suicide Zodiac references is “the symbolic death of Zodiac . . . the sociopathic personality eventually ‘burns out’ . . . as he ages.”

  “I would agree,” wrote FBI profiler D
ouglas, “that the Zodiac might eventually commit suicide, but I also believe that, even in a depressed state, the Zodiac wrote letters with the goal of manipulating, dominating, and controlling their recipients and the larger audience he knew they would reach.”

  Once a paranoid schizophrenic is into his mid-thirties (if he does not kill himself), the rage may burn itself out or go into remission. If Zodiac had symbolically died, then the killer might lead the rest of his life uneventfully. He might not recall he had once been Zodiac. Miron believed the killer to be a Caucasian, unmarried male . . . “isolated, withdrawn and unrelated in his habits, quiet and prepossessing in disposition.” He thought Zodiac had “good uncorrected eyesight because of the use of minute distinguishers for the differing code symbols.”

  Police had once studied surveillance photos of the Bates burial. Many killers were unable to stay away from their victim’s funeral. For that same reason the Chronicle snapped pictures of the extended lines curling around the Northpoint Theater and stretching up Powell between Bay and Francisco Streets. Photos were taken each night on the chance Zodiac would see The Exorcist again. Perhaps he would wave to the camera.

  The Exorcist letter carried only a single eight-cent Eisenhower stamp. Zodiac usually doubled, tripled, even quadrupled postage. A similar sociopath, the Unabomber, who came after Zodiac, stockpiled large quantities of symbolic stamps long before he began posting his heavy mail bombs. For the bomber, Eugene O’Neil stamps signified a hidden message. Maybe O’Neil’s plays were a grim comment on the Unabomber’s troubled family life. Other stamps indicated the strength of the infernal device or target selected—specific or non-specific. Only the bomber knew what each symbolized.