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

by Robert Graysmith

  “He spoke of man as true game,” she said. “Once he and his brother got in an argument over dinner. He leaped on him and began choking him.”

  “What’s this?” thought Rykoff. “That sounds just like Arthur Leigh Allen. The potential for danger is just the same.”

  Thursday, November 16, 1978.

  Dr. Rykoff had Karen back in. He placed her under a deep hypnosis conducted by Husted and Lieutenant Larry Haynes of the Concord P.D. Haynes, trained by the LAPD’s Law Enforcement Hypnotic Institute, had hypnotized one of victim Darlene Ferrin’s baby-sitters back on June 16, 1977. “Does it matter how much time has passed since the incident?” asked Rykoff.

  “No,” replied Husted, who gently uncovered a number of large crystals he kept swathed in soft black fabric. Each glittering gem hung from a slender chain. Haynes induced a hypnotic trance by swinging or spinning a crystal. This time, when Karen recalled the choking incident over dinner, she saw something new.

  “There was a second figure,” she said.

  “A second figure?” said Husted. The big blond officer leaned forward. Rykoff put down his pen.

  “He was on top of Ron as well,” she said. “I could see a second ghostly figure of Leigh on top of my husband, another identity. It was as if he were a second Leigh Allen. When Leigh stood up, he seemed to change into yet another personality, like Jekyll and Hyde.” A source told me, “Leigh was a twin whose brother died at birth.” Then Karen recalled the paper she had seen in Leigh’s hand in November of 1969. This was the note she had mentioned to Toschi and Armstrong years before. Husted and Haynes were certain she was deeply under and not fabricating the vision. Hypnotists have to careful not to give subtle, unwitting suggestions to a person under hypnosis and create what they want to find. “Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish what is in a person’s mind from what you are putting there,” said Haynes.

  “It was covered with strange lines of symbols,” she said. “‘What’s that?’ I asked him. ‘This is the work of an insane person,’ he replied. ‘I’ll show it to you later.’ He never did, and replaced it in a gray metal box he kept in his room.”

  Haynes, Rykoff, and Husted were desperate to see what had been on that paper. But how? It had been destroyed long ago. They decided to see if Karen could redraw these arcane symbols under hypnosis. In automatic writing, she slowly drew four lines of symbols. Automatic writing was normally sprawling and uncontrolled, but Karen’s was straight, gridlike—like Zodiac’s codes. The symbols closely resembled the third line of the Zodiac 340-character cipher mailed to the Chronicle on November 8, 1969. As the mesmeric session progressed, she spoke more and more about Leigh. Karen began to shake and tremble. Her knuckles whitened. Husted had Haynes bring her out of the trance. Afterward, in his office, he showed me the writing. Though I wasn’t allowed to photocopy possible evidence, I was allowed to copy it down as exactly as I could. Reproduced for the first time here are the symbols Karen wrote:

  Hypnosis was popular at this time, but by the 1980s state law enforcement agencies would rarely use it as an investigative tool. In 1982 the Supreme Court would curtail the scope of testimony from witnesses who had been hypnotized, deeming such accounts inherently unreliable. Later, California law would be shaped to the court’s decision—hypnosis could be used only to clarify information given before a person was hypnotized. Testimony obtained under hypnosis could only be used in court after a judge has ruled that the evidence could not be acquired by any other means.

  “Potential for danger,” Rykoff had thought. Increasingly, the doctor became more apprehensive of his patient and his “dark sense of humor.” At the beginning of the month, he had asked his brother, a San Francisco policeman, to look into the matter. The officer asked Toschi and the reply was anything but reassuring. “I remember Dr. Rykoff’s brother coming up to me,” said Toschi, “a really sweetheart of a guy, really straight up front. No games. He wanted some information for his brother and so I told him, ‘We felt strongly then [August 1971] and now that Allen was our best suspect. We cut him loose in 1972 because we weren’t able to find any physical evidence connecting him to the crimes. We did everything we could with the guy. Personally, my gut feeling is that he is the man. Tell Dr. Rykoff that when he talks to Leigh, do it in a place that he can get out of in a hurry . . . and above all—don’t make him angry.” The officer reported back to his brother. “I’ve found out he’s the prime suspect, in the Zodiac case,” he said. Rykoff blockprinted the word “sociopath” by Allen’s name in their next to last session. The term meant he was “selfish, impulsive, and unable to learn from experience. He felt he was above moral codes and laws and was the most likely type of murderer to repeat his crimes.”

  More unsettling, Leigh had caught me watching him more than once. Later, on March 12, 1980, I was waiting in a darkened car on Tennessee Street as he drove by. He slowed alongside. I turned and looked directly into his eyes.

  Friday, November 17, 1978

  Leigh, as a member of the Pacific Multi-hull Racing Association, sailed only one of the boats his mother had bought him. He stored the second, an adapted boat that “ran on unknown fuel,” elsewhere.7 His tan station wagon, #XAM 469, sat by the curb unused. On December 31, 1975, he had registered a special construction trailer to be “used as a camper.” Where he kept it no one knew. Rumor had it it was stored in a friend’s woods. One of Allen’s 1971 checks, made out to Talltree Trailer Storage, suggested he was renting spaces for trailers somewhere else.

  “You know, [Phil] Tucker was questioned by our department,” said George Bawart, “He was always a pretty straight shooter. When he left GVRD, I wasn’t too much younger than he was. I knew him. I knew his family. If I were to say, just to guess, I wouldn’t think he had anything to do with Zodiac.” When Allen worked at GVRD, next to the police department, he could have had access to reports, police techniques, and day-to-day gossip. Once a police groupie, always a police groupie.

  14

  suspects

  Friday, November 24, 1978

  Though juggling caseloads of robberies, Inspector Toschi still felt an allegiance to the Zodiac case. Between November 20 and November 24, he received a typical number of phone tips on his former case. “The first call was from an unemployed freelance writer who seemed in too much a hurry to get to meet me,” Toschi said. “I thought about not going on my own time to meet him, but I called the guy back and decided he was sincere about giving me information. He was an ex-NYPD man himself, and he said he could see how the Zodiac case after ten years had really gotten to be an ego thing when you’re so involved as I was.

  “‘If anyone in the country deserves to make the arrest on Zodiac,’ he said, ‘it’s got to be Dave Toschi.’ I thanked him, but since I was officially off the case, referred him to Jack Jordan. Next, a lady named Katrina called. She had gotten short shrift at SFPD. To set her mind at ease, she sought me out. She had a suspect in mind, an ex-boyfriend who had accidentally died in 1973. Fortunately, I didn’t have to refer to the files. I had the information in my head and answered her queries in about three minutes. Finally, at week’s end, a D.A.’s investigator stopped me in the elevator. ‘I’ve got some info on an old case of yours,’ he whispered. ‘I want to talk only to you on it.’ I listened and committed the tip to memory. So, I can never get away from the Zodiac case and I do not think I ever will. It’s become part of my life—on and off duty.”

  On the morning of November 24, up at Lake Berryessa, Cindy, a waitress working at Moskowite Corners General Store, watched a strange man enter. He sat down in the rear and stared at her so long he made her nervous. Finally, she approached him. “Can I get you anything?” she asked. “Do you know you’re a very good-looking woman,” he replied. She went back to the counter. After a time he left. Only then did she recall that nine years earlier, on the terrible day two PUC students were attacked, a similar-looking man had been drinking a Coke at the same table.

  Police originally attributed the 1971 murder o
f Lynda Kanes, another PUC coed, to Zodiac’s hand. “I have always been haunted by this maniac Zodiac,” a PUC graduate told me, “because I was attending PUC in Angwin during the time Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard were stabbed. This was a very traumatic thing to happen to anyone . . . but especially when it took place so close to home. I attended her funeral at the PUC sanctuary, which had a massive turnout, and wondered if the killer could be there secretly delighting in the pain of all who were grieving for Cecelia. The police [and FBI] thought so too and took extensive photos of the crowd at Cecelia’s funeral.

  “I also remember very well the Lynda Kanes incident. I remember the day her car was found—radio still on—but no Lynda. I remember the light snowfall the next morning, the barricades, the horseback posses, the bloodhounds, and police asking for volunteers from PUC and others in the vicinity to help search the rugged area by foot. It sent chills through my soul as I remembered the countless times I have traveled windy, lonely Old Howell Mountain Road . . . not to mention the countless times I have driven up to Lake Berryessa alone and spent the day wrapped up in a book while baking in the hot sun. At the time most of the locals believed the killer was ‘Willy the Woodchopper’ at the base of Old Howell Mountain Road where it meets Silverado Trail. Willy got his name because he could be seen most of the time at his house chopping firewood. Lynda used to stop and chat with him on her way back to campus from town via Old Howell Mountain Road.” Zodiac, much to our relief, had not been involved. In 1971, in Napa Superior Court, Walter “Willie the Woodcutter” Williams was convicted of Kanes’s murder. Her bloodstained clothing had been found in his home.

  Thursday, December 7, 1978

  Allen had been driving on a suspended license. In the morning his new driver’s permit (#BO 67-2352) became effective just as Homicide Inspector James Deasy received the keys to that tough little number called Zodiac. Deasy, formally of the SFPD Gang Task Force, hunkered down to take on the job of fielding Zodiac tips. Gathering leads on an unsolvable case was character-building, but futile. An informant rang Deasy from Canada, claiming that a now-deceased Albion, California, public safety officer, retired Fire Chief Ralph Perry, had been Zodiac. He alleged Perry had owned a Zodiac-style hood. The tip became more intriguing when Deasy attempted to check Perry’s prints.

  Monday, December 18, 1978

  “The funny thing about it is,” Deasy said, “we tried to check this guy’s fingerprints through his agency’s print files and found out that they had no prints on record for him. Neither did the State Department of Justice. Neither did the FBI. We came up totally blank on this guy’s prints. Spooky.” Deasy and Captain Narlow knew they had to convince a D.A. to issue a court order to exhume Perry’s body and take prints. He wondered how long fingertip ridges survived underground. “Can you successfully lift prints from a corpse?” Deasy inquired of their print man.

  Without enough information to obtain a search warrant, they conducted two explorations of the home with Perry’s widow’s permission. During the first exploration, they turned up an illegal silencer for a .22-caliber pistol. “The widow said that her husband, right out of the blue, once asked her an odd question,” said Deasy. “‘Aren’t you afraid, going to bed every night with the Zodiac?’” Deasy paused to sigh, then added, “We thought we were getting pretty close at that point. Sometimes you get a feeling in the pit of your stomach and you say to yourself, ‘You just can’t eliminate a suspect who looks good in every other respect just because he’s too old.’ I told her on our second trip that we had only a few more questions that we wanted to check up on, just to satisfy our minds. She wasn’t too happy about it, but she let us do it. I told her that if we didn’t find what we were looking for, we wouldn’t be back, and we haven’t. It just wasn’t there.” In Vallejo, Leigh Allen celebrated his second birthday since leaving prison.

  Wednesday, June 13, 1979

  “Personnel Order: Captain’s Order #21 Effective 0800 hrs., Inspector David Toschi, #1807, presently assigned to Pawnshop Section, Property Crimes Division, is assigned to the Robbery Section. Captain Charles A. Schuler, Commanding Officer, Personal Crimes Division.”

  15

  arthur leigh allen

  Monday, September 17, 1979

  Though Leigh accumulated no more boats, his list of trailers continued to grow. The universal house trailer Toschi and Armstrong had searched was only one of many. Another special-construction camper, #GS8803, was kept in an unknown location. While Leigh lived in his trailers, sailed, and flew his plane, I spoke again with his P.O.

  “Basically, Arthur is that interesting in that he has access not only to the vehicles he owns, but to those of his friends. Almost any vehicle he wants. His mother has a Mercedes. He’s got a white ’62 VW Karmann Ghia now—just like Hartnell’s. I wonder if owning a car exactly like the Lake Berryessa victim’s is a subconscious call for attention.” Leigh had registered the car’s license, #DXW 186, only eight days ago. An identical auto had attracted Zodiac at the virtually deserted lake, signifying to him that potential victims were picnicking on a narrow peninsula.

  During the summer, Leigh’s childhood friend Harold Huffman had driven his VW Dasher by Vallejo to introduce his eight-year-old son, Rob, to Allen. Harold had married Leigh’s friend, Kay. “I had seen Harold play football and swim,” Kay told me. “I knew who he was, but I didn’t know him. At the end of my first year at junior college, a mutual friend introduced us. He had come back to see the coaches. He offered me a lift home and I took it. I offered him coffee and he accepted. I didn’t know how to make coffee and he didn’t drink coffee. He drank it anyway. That was the beginning of the love story.”

  “Leigh was like a grandpa figure,” Rob recalled, “a tall, heavyset, balding man who lived in the basement of an old house.” Rob played with his chipmunks while Leigh loaded wire traps into the trunk of their car. Leigh left the cages at various rest stops on their way to Lake County. “I hope I don’t get caught,” he remarked slyly, “I no longer have a valid trapper’s license.” Rob took a quick liking to him. “He was quite funny,” he recalled. “Leigh told great stories at night when the three of us stared at the stars and treetops cocooned in our sleeping bags. By day, he would entertain me . . . by doing somersaults off an old diving board into the shimmering melted snow below which sprayed in every direction upon his impact. He limped on earth, but was an acrobat in the air and water. Like a fish, he used to sneak up on me underwater in the kiddie section of the lake and grab my submerged legs—he could hold his breath for an eternity, so I never knew where he was.”

  The trio picked up the still-empty cages as they hurtled north to Blue Lake. At the cheap motel where they stayed, Leigh showed off by diving into the motel pool and swimming the perimeter of the pool underwater for nearly two minutes. Toward the end of their stay Leigh slammed the car door on Rob’s toe. The boy began to weep. “You’re tough and brave,” Leigh told him. “Most boys your age would have cried. You aren’t a sissy.” After that they were real friends. Rob visited him at Ace Hardware and ate with him and his father at the corner IHOP.

  Thursday, October 11, 1979

  A major coin shop robbery had occurred on Irving Street and Toschi had been searching for witnesses. He realized it was the tenth anniversary of his most daunting case. At 6:26 P.M., instead of going home, he stopped to relive old memories on the corner of Washington and Cherry. He heard the evening news blaring from a nearby home as file footage of the Stine murder unrolled. As he drove away, Toschi could not escape the sense that he had not been alone on that dark corner among the solemn mansions.

  Wednesday, October 31, 1979

  On Halloween, Leigh registered another special-construction trailer, #ME86336. Why so many in so many places and what did he keep in them? Certainly, he feared a second search, and knew such an inquisition must come eventually. However, he feared something more than any intensive inspection of his dreary basement. Any parole violation might remand him to Atascadero, which he dreaded a
bove all. Recently, I heard, on old Lake Herman Road where the Northern California Zodiac had begun back in 1968, a boy was found shot between the eyes and a girl strangled.

  Monday, January 28, 1980

  Leigh, already wrestling with weight and blood pressure problems, now battled a growing alcohol and vision problem. Haltingly, he strolled the short distance from his Fresno Street home to 1131 Tennessee Street—his new job at Ace Hardware. He later claimed March 19 as his first day, but actually began January 28. Steve Harshman was his new boss; Dean Drexler his supervisor. Drexler immediately put Leigh in charge of selling electrical supplies. Eventually, Harshman would make Allen a buyer for the garden and tool department. Highly educated, the former convict knew he was worth more than the $5.35 an hour they were paying him. Quite quickly, he became dissatisfied in another area. Working every day but Sunday gave him no time for other things.

  A letter delivered to the Chronicle that morning read: “This is the Zodiac speaking, I have moved to higher country for my next victem good luck Zodiac.” The return address on the envelope was “guess?” But the postage was not excessive and the ink red, not blue—another copycat. In Sacramento, I visited Sherwood Morrill, CI&I’s handwriting expert. Morrill had been born and bred to the investigative bureau. His father, Berkeley Police Sergeant Clarence S. Morrill, opened CI&I in 1918. “My father was a little fellow,” Morrill said. “He was five feet eight inches, weighed about 140 pounds dripping wet. When they lobbied the bill to open the state bureau, they set it up with a board of managers. An independent agency—they had a sheriff, a chief of police, and a district attorney who were appointed by the governor for staggered terms. In theory, no one person or board could get control of the office. My dad wasn’t going to take the civil service exam but his boss, Chief August Vollmer, one of the most progressive officers at the time, insisted. Dad came up here, opened the agency (January 1, 1918). He died in 1940 and he’d been at CI&I all that time.”