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

by Robert Graysmith

  “Leigh’s incredibly strong. When he worked at the [Sonoma] auto parts store he was always getting hassled by the guys there and he dared a guy to come at him. Allen picked up the guy and hurled him across the room into a stack of empty cardboard boxes.”

  “A few times when Leigh and I would be coming back from someplace,” Kay Huffman recalled, “we’d see a gang squaring off in a fight and he would say, ‘Oops! Gotta hurry up and take you home so I can change my clothes and get back for the fight! I keep chains in my trunk for such events.’ And so that’s what he’d do.” “One time Leigh took on a whole gang that had earlier harassed him,” Harold Huffman recalled. He had witnessed many of Leigh’s furious, youthful outbursts. “He ground out the leader’s eye with a thumb, sending the other members fleeing.” Sandy Panzarella later told me, “Remember the story of Leigh kicking the shit out of the five marines on a San Francisco street? Well, he had enormous physical strength. That was a true story.”

  In San Francisco a personal ad appeared in the Chronicle: “BIG ‘Z’ Welcomes Big ‘A’. Permission granted.” And in San Francisco Zodiac continued to prey on Toschi’s mind. He recalled the days when Ron Allen would call to express his fears. “He just couldn’t figure out why Vallejo P.D. had ceased looking into his brother,” Toschi told me. “What had happened? I never knew and it bothered me.”

  “By 1980,” John Douglas wrote, “I’d been at Quantico a few years and had some research under my belt when I learned the FBI wanted to take another look at the body of Zodiac literature. I remember getting a file of letters to look at, and I had several conversations with Murray Miron over the finer points of our analytical approaches. Before we could get too deeply involved, however, the letters were pulled. I never did find out what prompted the renewed interest at the Bureau, or what caused our involvement to be canceled.”

  New adventures occasionally took Toschi’s mind off Zodiac. His encounter with San Francisco’s “Human Fly Bandit” was one. “He’s six foot one, 205 pounds,” he told me. “Now that’s one big fly. With all his robbing gear—ski mask, surgical gloves, hooded jacket, and sawed-off shotgun, he was eerily reminiscent of Zodiac in costume. And this big fly is quite acrobatic. We called him and his partner the Human Flies because of their daring mobility on top of elevators and their cunning in maneuvering hotel elevators as they wished. I never saw such an ingenious method of robbery before. With an obvious knowledge of elevator electrical circuitry, they first disconnected the elevator alarm bell and emergency phone. They rode atop the elevators, then trapped their victims between floors. Sometimes there can be as many as twenty-five people squeezed into these elevators and if these Human Flies strike, then they will get a big score. I’ve got to admit it takes guts to ride ‘shot-gun’ on top of an elevator on the twenty-fifth floor. Flinging open the escape trap in the elevator roof, the Flies covered their victims with a shotgun, lowered a mail sack, ordered the guests to fill it with valuables and credit cards, then drew the sack up. They struck at the luxury Holiday Inn and a week later at the Hyatt Hotel. I was kidded by every cop I saw. ‘Hey, Dave, catch any flies today?’”

  Toschi kept tabs on any use of the stolen credit cards. “At one point,” he told me, “I was just two days behind the Flies when I heard from Portland that they had a suspect with one of the stolen cards—the Flies were finally getting sloppy. Then the Alameda County cops picked up two others trying to use stolen cards. It broke the case for me. I notified the East Bay cops that I had another suspect in custody in Portland and suggested they tell the main suspect, in the Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, that San Francisco was going to book his brother for robbery. The plan worked. The kid broke and protected his older brother. So now they’re saying at the Hall of Justice, ‘There’re no flies on Dave.’”

  Monday January 12, 1981

  “I understand Les Lundblad had a guy he liked a lot,” I mentioned to Sergeant Mulanax at his Vallejo home. A cheery fire crackled in the fireplace. Deer heads stared back at us with glassy eyes. “Lundblad had gone to a mental institution at Atascadero in 1975 and come back and said, ‘That’s the guy. ‘That’s Zodiac and we can’t do a thing about it.’”

  “Well, I worked pretty closely with Les,” Mulanax told me. “He was inclined to get real high on a suspect where I wasn’t.”

  “Was this Leigh?” I asked Mulanax.

  “That was the only suspect I ever developed that I had any strong feelings about,” said Mulanax. “His father was a retired commander or lieutenant commander in the Navy, a much-decorated serviceman. In fact, he worked for the city for a while. Old-time family, respected. He was an assistant engineer or some damn thing for the city. I didn’t know him. Allen was down on the first Zodiac murder. Down at Riverside at that college. But this was a long time ago and what was this, 1966? And this is off the top of my head.”

  “He was working at an Ace Hardware store in Vallejo.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to prove now, but at the time I was real high on him. I think Armstrong and Toschi were too. Also Nicolai.”

  “Did you ever have anyone besides Allen?”

  “The only one that ever turned me on was Allen.”

  “Do you think Zodiac is still alive?”

  “We had numerous meetings and it’s the consensus of the group that the guy is either dead or in a mental institution or penal institution.”

  “Of course that’s where Allen was from 1975 until 1977.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “And what I thought was interesting is that after Toschi and Armstrong questioned him in his trailer, we stopped getting letters at the Chronicle.”

  “In Vallejo,” he said, “we wrote detailed reports and Dave and Bill, they didn’t. They’d scratch it on a piece of paper.”

  “How did you personally get onto Allen?”

  “Some people who knew him . . .”

  “Oh! The two guys he told he was going to become Zodiac.”

  “Yes.”

  “What gets me about that is that it’s such damaging testimony. I understand one of the men might have had a motive to lie in that Allen supposedly had made improper remarks to his daughter. That made me doubt it a bit.”

  Wednesday, January 14, 1981

  Allen remained the best suspect. Outside of his admission that he had been in Riverside, police had ferreted out no concrete evidence of his presence in Southern California where Zodiac claimed to have killed others. “Leigh’s family had told us something about Leigh being around the Riverside area in the middle or late sixties,” said Toschi. “I was surprised that [Vallejo Lieutenant Jim] Husted said, ‘Forget about Riverside because we can’t place Leigh Allen in the area.’ Of course, yes, he was there. Allen’s own family had told us that he had spent time in the Riverside area and was familiar with Southern California, but they weren’t too sure exactly what he was doing because he was on his own a lot.”

  “Leigh stayed with families down south before and after Atascadero,” I told Toschi. “He worked in the area, often drove to Riverside on week-ends for car races, and later he flew a plane there. On Monday, Mulanax confirmed Allen was at Riverside City College in 1966 when the murder occurred.”

  Toschi sighed. “We were the first ones to apprise Mulanax of Leigh, very, very briefly, when the family first came to us,” he said. “They had already scanned Leigh very briefly. Mulanax’s eyes really popped. He actually thought we had him. To this day we still may. Mulanax liked Allen very, very much. Jack was so high on Allen in those days we were working with him. He said he had never come across a better-looking suspect. That’s the way I felt also. We left Allen’s file in our metal file cabinet, two manilla four-inch envelopes of material on Allen, and we just put it away with much regret. We just didn’t know where to go. Jack says he has an inch-and-a-half file at his house. Could it be he has information that never got into the file at Vallejo? It’s a bit frustrating to realize that we had to put his folder back in our files.”
Allen’s indelible presence tracked all over the south—in Pomona, Hemet, Torrance, San Bernardino, Paso Robles, Riverside, and San Luis Obispo. Police had no substantial evidence that he was left-handed.

  17

  zodiac suspects

  Thursday, January 15, 1981

  Other policemen besides Toschi and Narlow had cherished suspects. Highway Patrolman Lyndon Lafferty pegged Zodiac as a resident of Fairfield, a town east of Vallejo. Since December of 1969, a Fairfield copycat had been dispatching typed letters to the Chronicle:

  “This is the Zodiac speaking I just need help I will kill again so expect it any time now the [next] will be a cop . . .”

  Two days later he wrote again, enclosing a drawing of a knife titled “The Bleeding knife of Zodiac,” Page fifty-nine of an astrology book, Day-by-Day Forecast for Cancer and a horoscope forecast for Leo. “I just need help I will kill again . . . I just want to tell you this state is in trouble . . .” he wrote.

  Harvey Hines, a former Escalon, California, police officer, believed he had found Zodiac. In November 1973, while taking night-school criminology in Sonora, he stumbled across reports of a flirtatious man who approached two South Lake Tahoe women in 1971. A year earlier, possible Zodiac victim Donna Lass had disappeared from there. Intrigued, Hines inquired at the hotel where she worked as nurse and came up with a suspect who had studied basic codes at radio school. He had been arrested multiple times since 1946, and in 1969 lived near where Paul Stine had picked up Zodiac. Hines later told Hard Copy, “My suspect is the Zodiac. Every fiber, every part of my being tells me he is the Zodiac Killer.” A televised clip showed a pair of slipper-clad feet—the suspect retrieving his morning paper. “Hines’s been chasing this guy through Vegas casinos with a video camera,” a cop told me, “screaming, ‘He’s the Zodiac!’” But Zodiac was six feet tall, 240-plus pounds, and about thirty-five. Hines’s suspect was three inches shorter, ninety pounds lighter, and twelve years older.

  Was there a connection between Lass and someone from Riverside? The theory was that Zodiac had been a former kidney dialysis patient of Donna’s when she worked at Riverside’s Cottage Hospital. Her roommate, Jo Anne Goettsche (Get-She), had also been a dialysis nurse since 1975. “Donna had never told me about any such person,” she told me. “Her family, though, asked me the same question. We worked on the same surgical ward at Letterman General Hospital in the Presidio [where Zodiac had been last seen] and several corpsmen there were giving flying lessons over in Hayward. We used to go flying with two men from Riverside in 1970.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Oh, right here in San Francisco.”

  “San Francisco?” Mulanax had told me that Darlene Ferrin had also gone flying with two men, but he’d never checked them out. Leigh Allen flew. “I don’t know if I can remember their names,” Jo Anne said. “Donna was here in San Francisco from February to June of 1970. She moved to Lake Tahoe to work and three months later vanished. Donna was kind of naive, and not very experienced with men. She was easily drawn away. She was hooked on gambling. That’s why she went up there. She liked to ski and liked to gamble, so she took the job in the casino hotel [the Sahara Hotel, Stateline, Nevada] as a first-aid emergency nurse. I went up alone to meet her over the weekend, having talked to her earlier in the week. She had moved to a new apartment, so that’s why we were meeting at the hotel on Saturday night. That was the first day she had the apartment and I didn’t have the phone number. I was supposed to meet her when she was getting off work, and she would show me where she lived. She was nowhere to be found so I stayed in a motel overnight and then looked some more. I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like her to just not show up. When I came back to the city Sunday night without finding out anything, I don’t know why I didn’t call the police. I was young, I guess.”

  Donna’s older sister, Mary, told me, “Donna was always people’s favorite nurse. She used her credit card on Saturday [September 5, 1970] and went to work that night. She worked from six at night to two in the morning. She was writing the log of the day at 1:45 A.M. (the last people she saw were the Bentleys from San Francisco). As it ended ‘complains of,’ [c/o], her pen just trails down the page, dragged from the last word she wrote to the bottom of the page as if she had been interrupted. It was not signed.” Donna’s car was later found parked near her new apartment.

  An unidentified male caller rang Donna’s landlord and employer and said that she would not be returning because of illness in the family. “They had received a phone call that she had an emergency at home,” said Jo Anne, “and when her boss called home to her mom, she said, ‘There’s no illness in the family. That call is a lie.’ That’s when we knew. And we went there that night.” The family flew out from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “We went to San Francisco and Jo Anne met us at the airport and drove us to Tahoe,” said Mary. “And she had been up there to see Donna. I had been on vacation with Mom and my four little kids and we were there just two weeks before Labor Day. Then Jo Anne went up there to see her for Labor Day, and so we went up Sunday night. We couldn’t get a word out of anyone at the casino—where she was or what was going on. As for the police, they wouldn’t even put it out as a missing person until forty-eight hours had passed. The police had been in the apartment and searched it. We went back up on the third of October and came back on Monday the fifth. There was someone Jo Anne and Donna were dating from Sacramento. There was a phone call South Lake police had received from Sacramento, but he never called back.” Jo Anne said, “Her sister had a private detective pursuing the investigation for years, but they never found her—ever! It was very strange.”

  “What was really strange,” Lynch told me, “is some guy came up to Vallejo P.D. one night and he was drunk. He said he had been trying to report Donna Lass’s disappearance to SFPD, but apparently the guy was a heavy drinker and when he had gone there they’d thrown him out. He knew there had been a previous murder in Vallejo by the Zodiac so he came up here to report. I talked to him for a long time, but I can’t think of that guy’s name. Or the name of the musician he thought was involved, but that orchestra was in Tahoe at the time this girl disappeared. They never found her did they? No.”

  There was a tenuous Tahoe connection with Leigh Allen. A friend of Leigh’s had bought a hotel there, and Leigh might have been visiting him the night Lass vanished. And I found a connection to the 1963 murders of Robert Domingos and Linda Edwards near Santa Barbara. “Donna left Sioux City, went to Minneapolis,” said Mary, “then went to Santa Barbara and worked. They took this doctor east to this big convention, and when she came back she went to San Francisco to Letterman General. The pay was good, but she got awfully tired of the hours—weekends, nights. Her friends from Santa Barbara had moved up there to Lake Tahoe. ‘Oh, we have the perfect job for you. Come on up and join us and live with us.’ And so that’s what she did for the summer.”

  Under “Personals” in the Chronicle I spotted this ad:

  “ZODIAC, We offer a National and interested forum to hear your story as you wish it told. Would like to interview you with complete anonymity. Contact THE AQUARIAN AGE magazine 270 World Trade Center, SF 94111.”

  They gave a local number and stationed a worker by the phone in case Zodiac should call. The worker might still be waiting.

  Monday, January 19, 1981

  As Mulanax and I drove to Blue Rock Springs, I watched storm clouds sweeping in from the San Pablo Bay. “Most of them I’d get a specimen of their handwriting,” said Mulanax, explaining how he processed Zodiac suspects, “and have Morrill check it out. Either that or the physical description was so far off in age or some such thing where it couldn’t logically be the suspect.”

  “You mentioned this Tommy ‘Lee’ Southard?” I said.

  Mulanax laughed. “That Southard,” he replied, “was one of the early suspects. A serviceman at Mare Island, as I recall. I didn’t investigate him. Lynch and Rust conducted the investigation on him. Six weeks or a couple of mo
nths after this [Blue Rock Springs] shooting happened they came up with him. He looked pretty good for a while.”

  “Southard lived at home with his mom,” Lynch added, “and wore thick-lensed glasses. He also lived downtown in an apartment. We had a burglary case on the guy and I tackled him at a restaurant. He was a real oddball. He cut his wrists when I arrested him, and was later killed downtown in a bar shooting on Virginia Street.”

  Zodiac raced down to Napa after the stabbings at Lake Berryessa and rang up the police from a pay phone only four-and-one-half blocks from the police station. Narlow found the location intriguing. “A guy here in Napa is very proficient at making bombs,” he told me, “and happens to trade at the barbershop directly across the street from the booth where the call was made.” Police technician Hal Snook, rushed in his dusting of a wet palm print on the receiver (he was needed at Lake Berryessa), feared botching the job. He used a combination of a hot light and blow-drying to accelerate the process, got some prints from the phone booth8 and sent them to the FBI. Tommy Lee Southard was the first they tried to match. The FBI Identification Division replied on October 23, 1969:

  “Seven latent fingerprints, three latent palm prints and one latent impression which is either a fingerprint or a partial palm print appear in the submittedphotographs and are of value for identification purposes. We compared those prints to Thomas Leonard Southard—no identification was effected. We could not rule him out conclusively since we do not have his palm prints.”

  Latent prints recovered from the Lake Berryessa victim’s Karmann Ghia were compared with the comparable areas of the latent prints. Again no identification with Southard was effected. The FBI tested the Napa phone booth’s prints against Zodiac’s first letter to the Vallejo Times-Herald because someone’s prints were recovered from that letter. The prints did not match the car, cab, or booth fingerprints. Or Southard’s.