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

by Robert Graysmith

  “Zodiac is still considered a possible suspect in a series of Sonoma County killings. . . . Zodiac threatened in one rambling letter to torture his victims, and Sonoma County has some murder victims who were tortured to death through slow strangulation and by administering strychnine. . . . Sonoma County’s seven young female victims [between 1972 and 1974] all were dumped in rural areas. A Sonoma County man recently was considered a Zodiac suspect but was ruled out, according to Sonoma Sheriff’s Captain Jim Caulfield. He was a molester of young boys, however, and has been committed to Atascadero State Hospital.”

  “While Leigh was in Atascadero,” a Vallejo source told me, “I think that’s when my mother first became aware he may be the Zodiac. He wrote to her that they suspected him of the crimes. At one point, I think my mother called him there and spoke to him. She asked him directly if he was the murderer. I believe he was somewhat jovial about it, but never admitted to the crimes. She verified that he was the suspect through the Santa Rosa District Attorney, John Hawkes.”

  Leigh, signing himself “Drawer A,” wrote Jim in Sonoma. “If Zodiac writes one letter while I’m in here,” he wrote earnestly, “then that will clear me of being the Zodiac.” The remark was puzzling. Everyone knew Leigh was imprisoned for child molesting, not for being Zodiac. He repeated the same remark to women he knew. In his long outdoor chess game with authorities, Allen seemed always one step ahead. For the second stage of his plan, he hoarded his daily medication and got a job in the dispensary. Like Zodiac, Leigh knew explosives. For his third step, he and a companion began building a bomb to blast their way out of the prison.

  Monday, November 3, 1975

  In order to pass various psychiatric tests during his incarceration, Allen boned up on the proper responses to make. He took all his tests in this fashion: “He would not smile or show emotion and would speak in a low monotone.” He took tests as a man drugged. During TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) evaluations, Allen was asked to make up stories based on simple line drawings portraying people in ambiguous situations. (“Explain what is going on in this picture.”) Indirectly, his answers revealed aspects of his subconscious feelings and personality—“he has a violent fantasy life . . . a hyperthymic (highly emotional) individual unable to establish normal social contact.”

  Finally police decided to give him a lie-detector test. “A polygraph machine is only a stress detector and anxiety detector,” Toschi told me. Lie detectors, a favorite investigative tool, are fallible and register false positives about fifteen percent of the time. Polygraphs measure changes in pulse, blood pressure, and breathing, but can be tricked by really good liars.4 Even the term “lie detector” is a misnomer. Erle Stanley Gardner wrote in his Court of Last Resort, “Lie detection is impossible. What is possible is the detection of stress (and in a few cases the covering up of stress). A polygraph or Psychological Stress Evaluation test should never be used as the sole judge of a person’s innocence. As with all scientific evidence, these tests need to be evaluated. The lie test is not permitted as evidence in court except by stipulation because it is undependable and subject to the interpretation of the operator. As late as 1998 the Supreme Court would rule lie detectors unreliable. Leonarde Keeler, though not the inventor of the lie detector, had done the most to refine the machine. The lie detector is in use today much as he developed it. Briefly, the polygraph records changes in the body’s physiological responses to questions.”

  Details for the test were ironed out, and Leigh agreed. “What happened,” Detective Bawart told me later, “was a guy from the Department of Justice who was working under Fred Shirisago went down to Atascadero and they put Allen on a polygraph. That was Sam Lister—the head polygraph guy at DOJ.” Allen entered a plain soundproofed and air-conditioned room. Lister had him sit in the examining chair. Carefully, he hooked him up to three devices, a procedure alone that usually causes stress in a subject. First a blood pressure-pulse unit—a sphygmograph—an instrument similar to that used to take blood-pressure readings—was connected to graphically record the movements of his pulse. After the blood pressure sleeve was wrapped around his biceps, a flexible corrugated tube, a pneumograph, was strapped around Leigh’s chest to measure changes in his respiration. Finally, an electro-dermal unit, usually metal tubes clenched in both hands or electrodes on the hand (a monitor pinched on a fingertip), measured galvanic changes or responses in his skin. As the prisoner’s reactions to each question were recorded on a moving strip chart, he was observed through a two-way mirror.

  Were he to lie, his heart would beat faster, his breath come more quickly, and changes would take place in his skin moisture. Pens on a moving strip of graph paper recorded reactions. Leigh had already been put at ease in a cordial pre-interview. Leigh kept to a monotone and did not smile, later claiming the test lasted ten hours. “A polygraph will take maybe an hour—max,” Toschi told me. “Allen’s lying about that.” There are usually ten to twelve questions, and those are brief, basic, and easy to understand. Leigh was asked his first name, his last name. After each question there was a pause of fifteen to twenty seconds. Then he was asked if he knew who had killed Darlene Ferrin, the Blue Rock Springs victim.

  “No,” he said.

  “Do you live in California?” asked Lister.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you yourself kill Paul Lee Stine on October 11, 1969?”

  “No.”

  “Were you a resident of Vallejo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have anything whatsoever to do with this homicide?”

  “No.”

  “Are you forty-two years of age?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you deliberately concealing or withholding any guilty knowledge of the homicide at Washington and Cherry Streets?”

  “No.”

  “Is today Friday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you deliberately lied at any time during this entire interview?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s do the test once more completely,” said Lister. It was common practice to talk over results and learn the reasons for responses. “People overreact, underreact, have guilt complexes, are frightened, are angry,” said polygraph expert Chris Gugas. “The examiner has to take into account variables such as intelligence, emotional stability, reaction to shock. The process in never cut-and-dried.” Thus the expert can start again with a revised set of questions, or repeat the same questions so responses could be compared. Lister indicated that Allen had passed his polygraph examination both times. “He is not the Zodiac Killer,” he said. Allen called afterward to tell his family and friends that he had passed and was not Zodiac.

  “And they ran Allen at Atascadero and he came up clean,” Bawart lamented. “That bothered us. Well, we had two other experts read his charts, and they say, ‘He was on drugs during this time.’ Our polygraph examiner, Johnson, examined the charts and said, ‘It’s my opinion that Allen was on some type of drugs while he was taking the test.’ It was also his opinion that Allen did not pass the polygraph exam and that it was inconclusive. And then we served a search warrant at Atascadero and I had a bunch of shit about that, but anyway, he was on Thorazine. Atascadero is a mental hospital and many of the inmates are on different types of tranquilizers. These other guys who read the charts said, ‘Hey, old Lister here didn’t give him any control questions about whether he was on any drugs. We’re looking at this thing—this guy’s loaded. You could’ve asked him if he had a mother and father and he would have said no.”

  Polygraph tests can be neutralized by a subject through drugs or pain, but the subject’s responses would be noticeably high and flat. Allen had reportedly stockpiled his daily medication of Valium tranquilizers and pilfered Thorazine, a drug prescribed for extreme paranoia, from the dispensary where he briefly worked. “Thorazine was for the really psychotic patients,” said Bawart. “It wouldn’t be the common drug they would hand out, but he had access to the dispensary. They were giving Vali
um to him. All he had to do was save it up. This is only guessing. You know you’re going to take a polygraph test—you’ve got your buddies down there. In fact he had a strong buddy—he was going to build a bomb and blow his way out of Atascadero and they caught him. That infernal device was close to lethal quality.”

  Dr. J. Paul De River, in Crime and the Sexual Psychopath, wrote that “disregard for civil or moral law, and the cunning and stealth are also part of the make up of the ‘non sexual’ psychopath. Like his sex-motivated counterpart, he is only ‘mad’ sporadically, and for the rest of the time he might lock the details of his acts out of his consciousness.”

  “Allen had a letter,” Bawart continued, “that he phonied up that was signed by—the guy’s name was [Jim] Silver, an investigator. And Silver had done some correspondence with him [requesting a polygraph examination]. Allen got Silver’s signature from the correspondence. Allen worked in a print shop there at Atascadero Hospital, and he made up a letter that he duped on this guy Silver’s signature with a phony Department of Justice heading on it. He had used a mechanical means to lift the signature of the investigator from a document, placed it on prewritten letters, and printed them up. It was a letter to any law enforcement agency and, as I recall, said: ‘To Whom It May Concern: This man is not a suspect in the Zodiac case and has been completely cleared. He has passed a polygraph examination and law enforcement should no longer consider him a suspect in the Zodiac killings.’ Just a bullshit thing so he could show people. Of course Silver would never write such a letter.” Though he had passed the lie test, Allen had lied about the letter clearing him.

  Monday, December 1, 1975

  Allen wrote a Santa Rosa Superior Court judge, telling him of the lie test results and including “a copy of a letter received from the State Department of Justice” exonerating him.

  “After five years of being the subject of investigation, interrogation, search and other forms of harassment,” he explained, “I was finally subjected to ten hours of polygraph examination, administered by the Justice Department, here at the hospital. I signed away my rights and cooperated fully, in order to finally resolve the issue, and have subsequently been removed from the Department’s suspect list for the crimes specified in the enclosed letter.

  “Since . . . I doubt the Department will take the trouble to distribute their findings to other concerned agencies, and since I do contemplate returning to the Santa Rosa area to live, I am taking it upon myself to impart this information to you, in the hope that it will find its way to its resting place in the proper file. I am hoping that, in the future, I will be able to go in peace, and not get sweaty palms at the mention of another unsolved homicide.

  “The above has been quite a weight on my shoulders for the last five years. Now that I am cleared, I do heartily wish to forget the whole miserable affair. . . . Thank you for your time and consideration, and have a pleasant Holiday vacation. Sincerely, Arthur Leigh Allen, Case #74-0109-68.”

  Though Allen claimed to have been the subject of five years of investigation, he had not become a real suspect until 1971. In his mind he must have dated the beginning of his troubles from Sgt. Lynch’s brief questioning at Cave School. As for the ten-hour lie test—“Allen’s lying about that,” Toschi said.

  All through the rest of 1975, Leigh’s mother faithfully wrote to him in prison, one of the few still corresponding with him. But in counseling, Leigh revealed how cold he felt her letters were and how much he hated her. Leigh felt an even stronger hatred for Atascadero. He feared staying there more than he dreaded the police. At night he could hear strange cries echoing down the highly polished floors. A big man could be afraid too.

  While Allen was locked away, brooding and planning, the Vallejo Sheriff’s Department doggedly pursued their Zodiac investigation. “Zodiac was a certain man,” Les Lundblad told his son, Les, Jr., who had just returned from a golf match. “The only time I played golf,” Les, Jr., recalled, “I played in a foursome with this man. I produced a Polaroid of the foursome to my dad and he pointed the ‘beady-eyed’ man out.” Detective Sergeant Lundblad thought this beady-eyed suspect was protected by a powerful official. Later an ex-Highway patrolman interviewed Les, Jr., and told him that this official had ordered Sergeant Lundblad to back off. The son didn’t think his father would have obeyed that order, but was at a loss to explain why more wasn’t done with the ‘beady-eyed’ man. However, the late Sergeant Lundblad’s interest in this early suspect predated the police interview with Leigh Allen in 1971 and his subsequent visit to Atascadero to see Allen who had by then become the chief suspect.

  Sergeant Ralph Wilson told me that when Lundblad returned from Atascadero, he said, “That’s him!” His remark carried conviction. Three years later, I was in the main sheriff’s office just above the jail—Fairfield, California, Criminal Division. Captain Vince Murphy had arranged for me to look at some evidence. The switchboard operator, a slim, dynamic woman, paused between calls and recalled the late Les Lundblad with admiration. “I was there when he came back from Atascadero,” she said. “He was furious. ‘That’s him!’ he said, ‘That’s Zodiac. That’s the son of a bitch and we can’t do anything about it!’ and he believed this right to the day of his death.”

  The operator was troubled, concerned that she once had spoken to Zodiac when he called the sheriff’s office. Zodiac had told her his real name, but she couldn’t remember it. She’d lost the name in all the excitement. “I worked closer with Lundblad than with Lynch,” Narlow told me. “I always got the feeling that Lundblad knew who Zodiac was. That story [about Cheney and Allen talking about hunting humans] is so bizarre you don’t know whether to believe it or not. Sometimes people concoct things like this for whatever reason. But that story about him talking about those things is so pat, that if in fact he did say it, then he has to be the Zodiac.” And so Toschi, Armstrong, and Mulanax probably had the right man, but somehow were being outfoxed. No one could get around the handprinting, the partial print on the cab, and now the lie test. Those obstacles were the big three. The Sacramento Bee and Santa Rosa Press Democrat’s secret witness programs established a $20,000 reward for Zodiac’s capture, adding to Yellow Cab’s existing reward. So many Zodiac tips trickled into Vallejo P.D. that Detective Bawart was assigned to help track new leads.

  12

  witches

  Monday, January 5, 1976

  Sonoma County Sheriff’s Detective Sergeant “Butch” Carlstedt blinked, then looked again. He perceived links between twelve Jack the Ripper-style murders and the long-sought Zodiac. Zodiac might be arranging his crimes in a broad “Z” extending over the Bay Area. He might be tracing out an even larger “Z,” encompassing the entire West. Sonoma County Sheriff Don Striepeke agreed, pointing to Rodeo; Vancouver, Washington; Seattle; Salt Lake City; Santa Fe; and Aspen-Vail as locations where girls were slain. He surmised this psychopathic killer might practice witchcraft, killing slaves for his afterlife just as Zodiac had boasted. Ultimately, though, the assailant turned out to be Ted Bundy, not Zodiac.

  But Striepeke was not deterred. From the beginning, Zodiac’s occult bent had fascinated him. The sheriff examined diagrams—a series of arranged sticks discovered at a murder site along semi-remote Franz Valley Road. Was this a witchcraft symbol? The sticks formed a square and a rectangle joined together to indicate a human figure. Inside the rectangle were two stones, and outside, two more pebbles. Four sticks ran around the outer edges. Striepeke thought the design might represent the black magic “Seal of Vassago.” Vassago is a mighty prince who declares things past, present, and future and discovers what has been hidden. A local teenager claimed it was a design he made to show his girlfriend the shape of his new trailer, but it still might be a witch sign. Zodiac also used other esoteric symbols in his codes—dots such as those used in astrological horoscopes. The nearly invisible Zodiac scarcely needed witchcraft—the Santa Rosa murderer was powerful enough to heft bodies over a ditch and hurl them considerable distances d
own a hillside. Witches mail bloody swatches of cloth to their enemies. So did Zodiac.

  Berkeley Chief of Police Wes Pomeroy was interested in the occult angle too. He had written to the Department of Justice, OCCIB, on February 14: “Enclosed are five photographs of various signs photographed in a rural (Vallejo) area. Please determine if the enclosed photographs represent signs in witchcraft. If so, please determine what each individual sign’s significance is in mutual cases of interest.”

  “It’s highly doubtful that witchcraft might be involved with Zodiac,” David Rice assured me, “as the Wiccan Rede prohibits harm to anyone, including animals.”

  I drove to Vallejo to ask Sergeant Lynch about Zodiac again, hoping he might recall something new. I recalled how, after the Lake Berryessa stabbings, Lynch had issued a public appeal to Zodiac to surrender. “We will see that he gets help and that all his rights are protected,” promised Lynch. “[Zodiac] is obviously an intelligent individual. He knows that eventually he will be taken into custody. So it would be best that he give himself up before tragedy is written in blood.” I sat down in his darkened dining room. “I think there were five of us in the investigation bureau,” he began softly. “I think what really happened was we were spending so much time and going so many places that I guess they got dissatisfied with the way it was being handled . . . when we first started on this case there was this guy George—he used to go down to the coffee shop [where Darlene Ferrin waitressed]. He was trying to date her, but for some reason Dee [Darlene’s nickname] didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Constantly bothering her and following her. Dee was deathly afraid of him. The whole investigation originally seemed to focus on this guy.” George hadn’t visited his familiar watering hole, Jack’s Hangout, since the July Fourth shootings. Next their search led Lynch and his partner to the Kat Pad on Sacramento Street, Kaiser Steel in Napa, then to the Pastime bar in Benicia. “Me and Ed Rust,” said Lynch, “we found out he quit the Pastime, and went up to Yountville. I got a description of him from his landlady, Mrs. Violet Peeler. He was five foot seven, with a stocky build and a dark complexion. Kind of plump with dark straight hair. Unfortunately, while George had a water-related last name, he had an airtight alibi too.” A December 3, 1964, Solano County Fairfield police report, 242, PC Battery, gave George’s weight then as a mere 127 pounds.