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

by Robert Graysmith

  “I am the ZODIAC and I am in control of all things,” it read. “I am going to tell you a secret. I like friction tape. I like to have it around in case I need to truss someone up in a hurry. . . . I have my real name on a small metallic tape. You see, while you have it in your possession, I want you to know it belongs to me and you think I may have left it accidently. I am athletic. It could be swim fins, or a piece of scuba gear. But maybe you play chess with me. I have several cheap sets in closets all over. I have my name on the bottom of the lid with the scotch tape. . . . My tape is waiting for me all over California. Do you know me? I am the ZODIAC and I am in control.”

  Monday, July 30, 1978

  Allen, while driving with a suspended license on July 30, was involved in an accident in Mendocino involving a car licensed ZEB 577. The State Farm insurance underwriter who insured Allen’s car knew him personally. Several days later, a woman approached the agent’s desk at the Rohnert Park regional office, stood silently for a moment, then asked about obtaining accident file #91505505086. That was Leigh Allen’s file. “Why?” the agent asked. “Because they’re watching any activity going on about this man,” she said. “Be careful not to get yourself involved with information about him. They’ll want to know what you’re up to. Two fourteen-year-old girls have disappeared in the Vallejo area, but I seriously doubt Leigh’s up to anything since he’s being watched so closely.”

  Wednesday August 23, 1978

  A few days earlier, Toschi had slipped and fractured his ankle on an oily spot in the police garage. He chafed at anything that took him from work. Anxiously, he consulted a bone specialist. “Toschi,” the doctor joked, “every cop I know wants to extend his disability time a bit more and here you want to get right back to work.” Toschi only smiled and returned to the job with his special jelly-shoe soft walking cast on. By week’s end, he was limping along on his bandaged foot as briskly as he normally walked.

  Utilizing the content of authentic Zodiac letters, the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU), headquartered at Quantico, Virginia, within the FBI National Academy, attempted to develop a better psychological profile of the killer. “Results will be forwarded to your division for transmittal to requesting agency when completed,” BSU notified the San Francisco FBI Headquarters. This Training Division of the Justice Department had been established in the early 1970s. “But how many serial killer cases has the FBI solved—if any?” said one agent publicly.

  Just as Avery and Toschi were putting Zodiac behind them, Captain Ken Narlow of the Napa Sheriff’s Office was becoming increasingly obsessed. “Many of the leads we were originally blessed with,” he told me in our interviews of August 25, 1978 and August 12, 1980, “have become old and deteriorated to the point where they don’t have much value anymore. I still think Zodiac is out there someplace. I sometimes look out the window and wonder how close we’ve come to him at times. We rattled so many cages and kicked so many bushes along the way, we must have been near him at least once.”

  These days Narlow thought about one particular man. “I’ve always been high on him,” he told me. “We never had enough evidence to bring him in and roll his prints. The more we started leaning on him, the more naturally defensive he got. The first couple of times we talked to him he was very open; then it got to the point where it was ‘Either do something or leave me alone!’ He came down to complain and saw Avery at the Chronicle. The first time we went over to his place by the water, we were there several hours. Very intelligent person, very interesting person. He didn’t mind talking about his past.” The cops sat down and passed him copies of photos of Zodiac’s victims. The suspect realized they were not only gauging his reactions, but trying to get his prints. So he picked up the pictures, looked them over, began to hand them back, then said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I got fingerprints all over them. Let me wipe that off for you.” And he wiped them off.

  From beneath a light brown, reddish-tinted Buster Brown haircut, the animated face of Oliver Hardy peered out at the cops. The eyes darting behind dark-rimmed glasses were pop-eyed as a neon sign, but highly astute. During the prolonged questioning the suspect, though occasionally falling silent on sensitive subjects, dominated the conversation. “He just talked a mile a minute,” Narlow told me. “He had me so confused I couldn’t even write a report when it was over. This guy takes over when you’re around him and talks.” The suspect spoke of his two loves—engineering and show business. He had done bit parts in movies in Southern California and, like Zodiac, could quote Gilbert and Sullivan by rote: “I spent two seasons singing grand opera and I’m a voracious reader. I am one of those singular people blessed with almost total recall. I can remember the exact address and telephone number of the house I lived in in Texas in 1939. I can remember all the old King Kong and Dracula pictures and where I saw them.”

  “He has a [Model 15 Teleprinter] Teletype machine in his little basement theater,” Narlow told me. “That’s a sample of printing from his [Royal portable] typewriter. . . . He did have three months of code school and has got an alias that I think is actually his real name. I don’t think we were able to establish this through a State Division of Public Safety check. A friend of mine I went to the FBI Academy with did some background investigation. He was supposedly born in Lubbock County, Texas. . . .”

  “Where the term ‘fiddle and fart around’ is used,” I said. “And he can sew. He has designed and sewn costumes in Hollywood.” The subject had lost his mother at age five and from then on “was on the outs” with his father, “a wealthy oil man.”

  “There is also a certificate on file for his alias,” said Narlow. “Back in Texas a doctor just filed a birth certificate and that was it, not like today’s date and age. So as we speak, there’s still some question as to whether or not these two are one and the same individual. A delayed certificate was filed in Probate Court showing that he was born in 1928 and 1926.

  “A local guy is so convinced that this man is the Zodiac that he started his own book and then went to the television people and hired an attorney. He was going to blow the whistle on this guy Andrews as a responsible 5 I told him you better be sure—there ain’t no way in hell that I can prove it! You’re just going to leave yourself wide open for a libel suit. And finally the television people backed off too because I haven’t heard any more about it from them. Besides, we weren’t able establish that Andrews had any sort of proficiency with guns.” Nervous, temperamental, the suspect once said, “What I have is better than sex!” He told a Sambo’s Restaurant waitress he was “going to come back and blow her legs off.” “Avery determined that this man was a student at Riverside City College,” continued Narlow, “but I was never able to confirm that. There’s his apartment in San Francisco, the one that was supposedly underwater. [On April 20, 1970, Zodiac wrote that the bus bomb he kept stored in his basement had been a dud. “I was swamped out by the rain we had a while back,” he explained.] He worked at the San Francisco Airport—as a matter of fact he would have been working there about the time of Cheri Jo Bates’s murder in October 1966. Well, I’ll tell you, if he is not the Zodiac, I’ll take one just like him.”

  Two months before the first Zodiac murders, the subject had color-fully remarked, “I felt the smartest thing I could do would be to pull an Anton La Vey. He couldn’t make it as a bar organist, so he looked at himself in the mirror one day and said, ‘I am a character.’ Then he hired a press agent and became Satan. I am a character too, right off the old screen, but I can’t afford a press agent. I am also humble—because I see how absurd this game is!” Zodiac had written, “I am insane, but the game must go on.”

  My friend, Fay Nelson, spoke with Andrews in San Francisco. “His car at the time of the Blue Rock Springs murders was a white Renault Caravelle, a car similar to the Corvair in appearance.” We learned Zodiac was not this man, but there was a link of sorts—he had a vintage movie theater. Police thought so too. They compiled a list of everyone who ever worked there. I discovered the following
: The Most Dangerous Game, a film that inspired Zodiac, had played there in May 1969. After January 1, 1969, the theater had gone to Friday night showings and Zodiac had begun attacking on Saturdays. Darlene Ferrin, the Blue Rock Springs victim, had written two names her notebook—“Leigh” and “Vaughn.” Robert Vaughn was the name of the silent-movie organist at the Avenue Theatre. Both he and Avery’s suspect had worked there since March 1968. Was this a theater Zodiac frequented regularly? I decided to pay another visit there and find out.

  Friday, September 1, 1978

  Classic cars parked on the rain-slick street made the silent-movie palace at 2650 San Bruno Avenue hard to miss. The theater’s large domed ceiling had once been decorated in a Spanish motif. Now, around a chandelier right out of The Phantom of the Opera, an artist had painted all the symbols of the Zodiac.

  Narlow’s suspect managed the theater, existing in genteel squalor to finance his passion for flickering silents and early talkies. He defrayed costs by exhibiting unique contemporary films. The previous week he had shown a 3-D thriller, Man in the Dark. On Fridays “Photoplays and Concerts with full Wurlitzer accompaniment” were featured. Fans flocked to these early Pathe Freres Films, D. W. Griffith one-reel Biographs. They adored stars like Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Doug Fairbanks, and Buster Keaton.

  Waddling like Charlie Chaplin, round-backed, roly-poly, and bandy-legged, the suspect roamed the aisles bellowing “Road to Mandalay.” At any second his two-hundred-pound, five-feet-eight-inch frame threatened to burst from a tux three sizes too small. He recited Shakespeare in a booming voice. The surviving victim at Lake Berryessa had characterized Zodiac’s voice as “like that of a student . . . with some kind of drawl, but not a Southern drawl.” Andrews admitted that though his own voice was moderate in sound, “that is, not high- or low-pitched, I have something of a gift of mimicry—I can imitate W. C. Fields and have done both male and female voices on the radio—and I just enjoy what a pompous ass I am. . . . I may look OK on the outside, but inside . . .”

  While Vaughn, the organist, pumped on a mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ (Zodiac had mentioned the “piano-oginast” on his “little list” of potential victims), Narlow and Avery’s interesting find became the projectionist. After the double feature they ripped down a handprinted felt-tip-pen poster advertising “The Big Parade with John Gilbert and Renee Adoree.” Someone at the theater drew them for the constantly changing bills. I retrieved another from the gutter and took it to Morrill in Sacramento. He studied the handprinting. “With the exception of the three-stroke K it’s a good match,” he said, beaming. “That’s the closest Zodiac lettering I’ve seen!” Not only might the theater’s discarded posters have provided Zodiac with his alphabet of printed letters, but the Academy Standard leader on each strip of film was fittingly a crossed circle.

  Wednesday, October 17, 1978

  I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge toward Santa Rosa in a steady downpour. I stopped along the way and parked amongst the gray warehouses where the theater manager had once kept his warren of connected apartments. The building had been redone and repainted, the old line of mailboxes in the courtyard taken down, and his gadget-cluttered rooms (movie equipment, theater seats, rows of 35-mm monochrome film-processing machines) emptied. Time was marching on and Zodiac was no closer to being caught than a decade ago.

  Leigh was nowhere around his trailer when I got there. Eighteen days earlier he had ceased installing home security devices and quit his job as a senior-citizen aide in Vallejo. “Could Narlow and Avery’s suspect and Leigh Allen be working together?” a policeman suggested to me. “Check out the possibility, however remote, that there is a connection between the two.” The thought of some sort of Zodiac confederate was never far from my mind. I had noticed the odd spacing in the Zodiac letters: “He plung ed him self . . . wand ering.” It reminded me not only of sign painters who did one letter at a time, but someone taking dictation, writing each syllable as they came, stringing them together like a cars on a train and with no regard to sense.

  Thursday, October 18, 1978

  Bill Armstrong retired from the SFPD. “I could feel the fire had gone away,” Toschi said of his partner. “I remember, when he left Homicide in late ’75, he told me, ‘Toschi, I’ve stood over my last body.’ However, the fire was still burning inside me.” The same day Allen begrudgingly began seeing a mental health professional.

  As a condition of his release from Atascadero, Leigh had been required to see Dr. Thomas Rykoff, a Santa Rosa psychiatrist6 Prior to their first meeting, Leigh, as he had in prison, probably combed the library. In the 1960s he asked Cheney, “Are there books on how to disguise your handprinting and change your appearance?” Cheney said, “I’m sure they exist.” It made sense he would now bone up on proper responses to psychiatric tests. Under present law, a fragmented man such as Zodiac could not be considered legally insane. Dividing “sane” from “insane” becomes difficult with “murderers who seem rational, coherent, and controlled,” wrote Dr. Joseph Satten, “and yet whose homicidal acts have a bizarre, apparently senseless quality.”

  Unlike schizophrenics, a sexual sadist such as Zodiac “does not exhibit obvious aberrations, but takes considerable pains to appear normal and avoid capture. Of all murderers, he is most likely to repeat his crime.” After the first killing, these intelligent killers become amazingly proficient at concealing themselves. They take great pains to appear normal, but often perversely throw suspicion upon themselves. The cat-and-mouse game with the police eventually becomes the principal motive for the crimes. Behind a smiling, secretive facade, he feels vastly inferior, hostile, anxious, and persecuted. Yet that perverse urge to call attention to himself as Zodiac is an itch almost impossible not to scratch. Or was Leigh’s secret that he only thought he was Zodiac?

  No one knows what creates a compulsive killer—a missing sex chromosome? —an event during the first six months of life? Whatever the cause, the condition is incurable. Cruel, rejecting parents and peers create pressures expressed in childhood by bed-wetting, shoplifting, and animal torture. With the awakening of puberty, the anger manifests itself in ever-increasing and cleverly concealed acts of sadism. Sheriff Striepeke’s privately commissioned psychological profile stated Zodiac was a white, unmarried man under thirty-five years old “who tortured animals, had a passive father and dominant mother, and may have spent time in a mental institution.” Meanwhile, Leigh Allen continued to day-dream in his trailer and basement. Dwelling in an escapist world of science fiction and the occult, arrogantly intolerant of people, he tended to set his own rules. “I’ve been able to personally study several of these [serial killers] very closely,” Dr. Lunde told me. “Bianchi’s responses on psychological tests are almost verbatim like Kemper’s. The whole sort of thing of seeing animals torn apart and blood and animal hearts.”

  A psychologist working under conditions of Allen’s parole evaluated Rykoff’s tests and findings. When he gave the suspect a projective test, a Rorschach (ink blot) test, Rykoff was warned to look for answers that contained the letter z. “The odds of more than one answer beginning with z are very remote,” the analyst told detectives before the Rorschach test. “I don’t expect any.” The first two mirror images Leigh was shown reminded him of “a zygomatic arch.” The analyst was shaken by this. He went on. “What do you see in this?” At the end of the tests, he found that Allen had given five z responses, far outside the norm. Cabdriver Paul Stine had been wounded in the zygomatic arch by Zodiac.

  A doctor’s report on Leigh had said, “He’s potentially violent, he is dangerous,” and “he is capable of killing.” The same analyst thought Allen had “five separate personalities.” Split personalities would explain how he passed a lie-detector test; why his handprinting did not match Zodiac’s. The psychiatrists’ conclusions were mounting: Leigh “is extremely dangerous and is a sociopath . . . is highly intelligent and incapable of functioning with women in a normal way . . . has a potential for danger.” In the
ir private sessions, Dr. Rykoff discovered the violent side of his new patient’s nature. Any kind of accusation set him off. The subject of his mother or prison enraged him. Leigh became defensive, shaking with anger until he regained control, then became sarcastic. His remarks, icy, though witty, were packed with puns and double meanings. Immature, self-centered, with a strong ego, he had a taunting way of speaking, but was capable of great personal charm. When Allen spoke of Zodiac, he felt persecuted. Worst of all, he cried—long heartrending moans. Between sobs, Dr. Rykoff felt Allen was “repressing very deep hatred.” But on another level Leigh aced every perception test from blocks to puzzles. “This guy can look at something, figure it out in a matter of minutes, and do it with the least amount of energy and effort,” one expert had said. “And he laughed at other people for stumbling through the same task.” Allen took his psychiatric tests under duress and always in the same manner: “He would not smile or show emotion and would speak in a low, measured monotone.” Allen’s parole officer, Bruce Pelle, came to know this menacing, focused monotone well.

  Rykoff’s sessions with Allen were conducted as a favor to Lieutenant Jim Husted of the Vallejo P.D. and Pelle. Rykoff was in the middle of studying Leigh when a new patient was signed on—a young woman. She desired to be hypnotized as part of a training program for a social rehabilitation group she was organizing in Santa Rosa. Rykoff welcomed her, unaware that she was Leigh Allen’s sister-in-law, Karen. Whether or not the police suggested Karen see the same therapist as her brother-in-law is open to speculation. But Husted, head of the Intelligence Unit, was wily. Through his manipulation or not, somehow Karen ended up with Rykoff. During their sessions she remarked about a chemist brother-in-law and his dark side. Rykoff saw the man constantly preyed on her mind. As Karen expounded more of her impressions and suspicions, Rykoff began to realize the character she was sketching seemed familiar.