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

by Robert Graysmith

  “In Vallejo, we checked everybody out,” Lynch concluded. “Once I got a call from someone who said Zodiac lived on Arkansas Street. I drove over there and found a man whose only connection was that he’d painted stars on his ceiling, including the Little Dipper. Everyone was a suspect and no one was safe.” Even in the dimness, I saw the toll the case had taken on Lynch.

  Saturday, July 24, 1976

  “I watched Herman die in my sleep for eight weeks,” Inspector Armstrong told the press, recalling Police Officer Herman George. George had been gunned down in the street in November of 1969. “He died a very slow and painful death. . . . When I leave the office at night I forget the job completely. I never discuss my work at home . . . well, I can’t really. I find other ways to unwind.” Armstrong became a man who could never sit still, a man constantly in motion. Finally, he burned out on Homicide. The next day, Armstrong transferred to the Bunco Division, leaving Toschi as the last remaining San Francisco policeman working the Zodiac case.

  “At least a year before he left Homicide, Bill just didn’t want to do it anymore,” Toschi said. “Now that I’m the only one working on it, I never let a day go by without remembering Zodiac. It’s gotten to be more personal. Every day I wonder what became of him.”

  Six cab drivers had been murdered since Stine’s killing in 1969 and six suspects had been arrested and tried. Five were convicted of first degree murder, one of second degree. Just ten days after Stine’s senseless murder, Toschi and Armstrong had investigated another Yellow Cab driver slaying only blocks away . . . “driver shot in the head . . . wallet stolen, cab lights left blazing . . . engine running. A row of brightly colored shirts littering the sidewalk.” Toschi and Armstrong quickly nabbed a Tenderloin busboy in bed with his girlfriend. She had nagged him about money, so he flagged down a cabbie, held him up, and shot him during a struggle. “I took twenty-seven dollars off him,” the chain-smoking youth said, “then threw my .22 revolver down a storm drain. I knew I’d get caught. I left my fingerprints all over the cab. I’ve got a record so I knew it was only a matter of time before you picked me up. Sure, I feel bad about it . . . especially for his wife and little girl. Whatever I get, I got coming. You don’t kill someone and not pay for it. You see, I never wanted to see the inside of a jail again.” Only Stine’s killer still remained at large. It began to look as if Zodiac might win his lethal chess match with the police simply through attrition.

  “My mom and I,” a Southern California resident later told me, “visited Mr. Allen in Atascadero State Hospital almost every Saturday, and when he was released he even stayed at our house just north of Atascadero and west of San Luis Obispo. . . . I remember when he stayed at our house, he stayed in my mom’s room with her. She always said that nothing happened, and I tend to believe her, since I remember him as not a very sexual person. Mr. Allen was very good to all of us kids. He spent a lot of time with my brothers and us girls. He taught us basic values, he was an avid non-drinker and non-smoker. He had a lot of small pets. He especially liked kangaroo rats, and had a permit to keep them and do research. He taught my brother how to drive, shoot, fix cars, and do all of those other guy things. He used to go to his various trailers, and they used to go target shooting in the mountains and river bottoms of Northern California. Mr. Allen was an expert marksman.”

  While Allen was incarcerated, Zodiac refused to die, living on in speculation, in every dark shadow along a lake and in all our hearts. If Zodiac had simply faded away, good men like Toschi, Armstrong, Mulanax, Lynch, Narlow, and Avery had been beaten.

  Tuesday, August 24, 1976

  The 1965 blue Volkswagen van bus had been in and out of the garage on A Street several times. On June 23, 1976, its owner had the motor overhauled for $520.74. In July, Wilfred Roenik, manager of the German Car Center east of Merced, noticed the van back again. A fix-it ticket said the rear lights weren’t working. “The vehicle has ground problems,” Roenik explained, but its owner did not ask to check the headlamps. The owner reappeared on August 2, saying he needed a voltage regulator and battery. Those were installed for $39.05. On Tuesday, August 24, he returned the battery. “It cost too much,” he complained, and that afternoon installed his own new battery.

  Around 8:00 P.M. the van’s owner, a forty-one-year-old Santa Rosa Junior College teacher, climbed behind the wheel. He was tall, six feet three inches, 190 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes. An ex-soldier, he had served at Fort Hamilton, New York. In 1959, he’d received an early release from the Army as an overseas returnee. Six years later, he became an English teacher and part-time art instructor.

  It was a clear night, the road ahead was dry. He was not under the influence of barbiturates or alcohol. He had just eaten. Going only fifty, five miles under the speed limit, he took his van eastbound onto an expressway with no streetlights. Highway 12 began as two lanes separated by a forty-foot-wide divider strip, really only dirt with grass and weeds, then abruptly became a four-lane divided expressway. At 8:30 P.M., just where the highway curved west of Wright Road, the van’s headlights blinked out. At the start of the divided section, the VW eased onto the center divider and drove along there for a distance. The van ignored the curve, kept going straight, and flew across the dirt divider into the westbound lane.

  A man en route to a friend’s home in Sebastopol entered the point where the two westbound lanes merged to one. He could clearly see the headlights of other vehicles in the eastbound lanes. “Oh, my God!” he cried when he saw the van cross straight into oncoming traffic. There was no braking action, only light skid marks about two feet long just before impact. The van collided head-on into a 1972 Toyota traveling west in the #1 lane. Both vehicles bounced nine feet into the #2 lane and came to rest on the north asphalt shoulder less than three thousand feet east of Merced Avenue. Both drivers were pinned in their cars. At 8:50, the fire department extricated them. The woman driver in the Toyota would be OK.

  At 9:00 P.M. they wheeled the teacher into the Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital Emergency Room and doctors began working on him. Deputy Durham spoke with Dr. Larson. The wounds were severe: a tear of the pericardial sac of the heart and left pulmonary vein . . . abrasion of the zygomatic arch, multiple fractures of the right lower extremity, a fracture of the left hip and right arm, multiple fractures of the ankle, laceration left lower leg, radial and ulna on right. They couldn’t keep his blood pressure above 60. At 1:25 A.M. the teacher died on the operating table. Sheriff and Coroner Don Striepeke ruled the cause of death to be: “Shock due to multiple traumatic lesions.”

  Durham retained the teacher’s wallet and personal property. The only address they had on him was a P.O. box in Santa Rosa. The deputy ran a 1028 registration check, and learned that the victim lived in a trailer home in Sebastopol. At 9:30 A.M., Durham spoke with the teacher’s ex-wife and discovered he had been having some epileptic seizures controlled by medication. At 3:00 P.M. Investigator Siebe, interested in items inside the trailer, sealed it. It wasn’t until November 8 that police returned the property, noting for their records: “Landlord and Ex-wife are going to itemize things in his room and store them at landlord’s place to free the room.” Why did police keep the teacher’s possessions so long? Were they connected with the Santa Rosa murders? A decade would pass before I found out.

  Friday, August 27, 1976

  At midnight, San Francisco Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, working late at City Hall, opened the last of her mail. “Did you miss me?” a note read. “Was busy doing some nefarious dastardly work, for which I am very well suited.” She rang the police, they called Toschi, and at 5:00 A.M., unshaven and bleary-eyed, he hustled upstairs to study the letter. “This isn’t from Zodiac,” he explained. “It’s ‘Old Tom’ playing games again. I’ve got an entire file on Old Tom’s bogus letters. Oddly enough, he isn’t drunk when he writes his Zodiac letters. The typing is far too elaborate for a guy who is sauced. And a guy who keeps doing a thing like that when he’s sober has gotta have something wrong wit
h his head. He’s killing himself with alcohol.” The detective arranged for the McCauley Clinic to treat Tom for malnutrition; tried to get him into Napa under a section of the Welfare and Institution Code about being a danger to himself. However, Tom, an old pro, got himself a writ, and eight days later a judge dropped him back into the Tenderloin. I visited Old Tom in his flea-bitten hotel room, found him curled up on a urine-stained mattress. He was totally obsessed with the case. If that made him crazy, then we all were.

  Toschi still had seven years left until his minimum retirement date. “I’m watching the mailbox,” he said, “to see if I get a seventh-anniversary card from Zodiac.” An ad had run in that morning’s Chronicle: “ZODIAC Your partner is in DEEP REAL ESTATE. You’re next. The Imperial Wizard can save you. Surrender to him or I’ll terminate your case. R.A.”

  13

  the voice of zodiac

  Friday, November 5, 1976

  Toschi bumped into Karl Malden (“Lieutenant Mike Stone” on The Streets of San Francisco). The actor was on location at the police identification bureau, shooting a scene with costar Michael Douglas. Malden recalled Toschi from a meeting the previous year and hailed him. “You had that unusual upside-down holster and gun,” he said. “I had never seen anything like it.” They spoke of the job like two cops. “I’ll get Zodiac someday,” Toschi vowed to Malden. “And I’ll bring him to justice. That’s my motivation—justice. I’m not a vengeful type, but when a life is taken, there must be justice. He has taken six lives; who knows how many more? I work with death, sorrow, and tragedy. Yet I like my job because it’s a useful one. I bring in killers for society’s judgment. Ringing bells and knocking on doors, good old-fashioned police work. That’s what does it. I’ve even gotten religious-type letters where they tell me to pray, to talk to God, and then I’ll catch Zodiac, they say. These people don’t know they’re talking to the biggest believer around.” It was a speech he not only gave often, but believed in his heart.

  “The Zodiac case is like the unsolved Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles,” Toschi told me later. “The chief detective in that case always said he would know the killer if he questioned him by means of one secret question he never revealed—I’ve held a couple of things back from the press too. . . . I remember meeting Clint Eastwood while he was making Dirty Harry, an almost shy person . . . faded jeans, a T-shirt, white tennis shoes, and he was a star. And Stu Rosenberg, the director of The Laughing Policeman. Walter Mathau was wonderful, Bruce Dern terrific in that film. Stu took a cab and met us at a murder scene. ‘I don’t know how you do this,’ he said. ‘My God!’”

  Two months later, the House Select Committee sought out the nation’s top investigators and invited Toschi to participate in a second look into the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. He declined. The assignment would have taken him away from Zodiac for two years. As Christmas approached, Toschi’s mood lightened. One of the crime lab people snapped a candid shot of him grinning on the phone and wearing fellow Inspector Rotea Gilford’s Zebra-patterned hat.

  For years, amateur sleuths had groped for any clue that might unmask Zodiac. His use of English was a valuable lead. A U.C. Berkeley linguistics professor, examining Zodiac’s use of vernacular, concluded he was of English or Welsh extraction. English cartoonist Jim Unger, who drew the syndicated strip Herman, was once a British policeman. “The letters from Zodiac show he is a man from the north of Great Britain,” Unger said. “Of course, we know he speaks with no accent, but he may have lived there.” A British police car currently in service was called the “Zodiac,” its hood insignia a crossed circle. Author Nancy Ashbaugh told me: “‘Tit Willow’ is a song sung by English mothers instead of ‘Rock-a-bye-Baby.’ Zodiac mentions peppermint and ‘phompfit. ’ Zodiac means pomfits, a term for candies. ‘Give the child a pomfit [violet squares and lavender squares].’ There are pomfits in Alice in Wonderland.” A mind reader stated, “Zodiac is definitely of German-Irish ancestry.”

  Writing in future tense—“I will . . . I shall,” Zodiac also used purposeful misspellings. Was there a man in the case who, in his daily life, habitually misspelled words in a mocking, taunting, or jocular manner? Spelling mistakes in the three-part cryptogram might not be encrypting mistakes, but a hidden message. Zodiac had used extra letters such as the r in “forrest” and e in “expeerence” and omitted letters such as the s in “dangerous.” Using these divergences, Zodiac buff J. B. Dahlgren was able to spell “Science is mysterious Isis,” but admitted that skilled anagramists might find better combinations.

  Along with oddly spelled words, X’s ran through Zodiac’s letters: “X’mas” and “Super X.” The circled 8 in the letter might be a Taurus or Cancer symbol. Toschi, himself a Cancer, had gotten in the habit of regularly picking up astrology magazines hoping one might provide an overlooked clue. An astrologer, using the dates when Zodiac had struck or mailed letters, tried unsuccessfully casting his horoscope backwards. “That way I can ascertain his birth date.” Another was sure Zodiac was a Capricorn. “Saturn is the ruling planet of Capricorn and Zodiac’s activities are tied to certain events in Saturn,” he said.

  “Look in the Chronicle,” John H. Grove advised, “and see what the horoscope recommended on days he killed. After all, Hitler wouldn’t move without his astrologer’s okay. . . . Cappies are usually good spellers, and his errors could be a ruse to throw everyone off the track. Zodiac appears to be strongly affected by the dice naturals 7 and 11, the latter especially. Apart from gambling and the occult his assumed name may be interrelated with his love of eleven. The word Zodiac is derived from the ancient Greek Zodiakos. The Hellenes had no separate numbering system, each alphabetical letter having a numerical value. I was amazed when I computed the numerical value for Zodiakos and found it to be 1111. Is Zodiac aware of this? He probably is. He may be crazy or a doper or both, but he is neither stupid nor illiterate.”

  If the number eleven was important to the killer, what did twelve mean to him? There were twelve signs to the Zodiac. Zodiac’s nature (and that of most serial killers) was to clip and collect stories about himself. Since buying three papers a day might attract undue attention, he might have home subscriptions to them all. The Examiner had not only buried Zodiac on page 4, but begged him to surrender to them (an unwise suggestion to a madman who enjoyed being in control). Zodiac never wrote them again. Police might look for a man who had many subscriptions, but canceled the Examiner.

  Wednesday, March 30, 1977

  Allen had now served thirty months—two years and fifteen days at Atascadero. He was returned to the Sonoma County Jail to prepare for a May 13, 1977 probation hearing. He waived that right.

  Tuesday, August 30, 1977

  Leigh had spent a total of 150 days in the Sonoma County Jail. Between there and Atascadero he had been behind bars for two years, four months, and twenty-five days. During all that time not one offense attributable to Zodiac had been committed. The attacks in Santa Rosa had ceased; no new bodies were discarded below Franz Valley Road; no genuine letters from Zodiac had been received. Even as late as this nine hundredth day of Leigh’s captivity, a note—a sentence—a single word postmarked from outside Atascadero would have removed Allen from the suspect list. But Zodiac’s last letter had been received three full years before—July 8, 1974.

  In the afternoon, a Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department deputy ushered Leigh downstairs. Their heels echoed in the long impersonal hallways. The deputy arranged white plastic numerals, #4-7-9-3-2, below Leigh’s face for an I.D. mug shot. He was garbed in prison clothes, his mustache and goatee now showing gray. His expression was scowling, though the next day he was to be a free man. A friend of mine saw a different expression in the same photo. “I think he looks sad,” she said.

  California law enforcement authorities, under Section 290 of the State Penal Code, relied on convicted sex offenders to keep tabs on themselves by notifying police when they moved. Since the state had no enforcement program, it was n
o surprise that only a handful of the multitude of discharged offenders were currently registered. Atascadero officials notified the prison registry and the registry notified Vallejo authorities that Allen was on the streets again. The next step was up to him. He returned to his cubicle, his steps echoing down the halls, his image reflected full length in the highly polished floor bigger than ever.

  Wednesday, August 31, 1977

  Liberated from Atascadero, Leigh Allen went to stay with friends in Paso Robles. The following day Toschi received a typed letter from him, the first mention of Zodiac within recent memory. “Killers invariably try to inject themselves into the investigation,” I said to Toschi. “Have any of the suspects ever offered to help you catch Zodiac? With his disdain of the police, Zodiac would be irresistibly drawn to offer to catch himself.”

  “Only one,” he said.

  “And I bet it was typed.”

  “Yes, it was. It just arrived.” He searched his desk. A bright shaft of light cut through the grimy window. Traffic crawled sluggishly along Bryant Street. The old sign flashed its red neon in bright sunlight, “OK BAIL BONDS—OPEN 24 HOURS—WE SPECIALIZE IN TRAFFIC.” Toschi found the letter and read aloud: “If I can ever be of any help to you just let me know. I’m sorry I wasn’t your man, but I’m out now and I’ve paid my debt to society. [signed] Leigh Allen.”