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

by Robert Graysmith

  Friday, May 15, 1981

  CI&I in Sacramento became the clearinghouse for all future Zodiac investigations. A decade earlier Paul Avery, in a confidential memo to his editor, Abe Mellinkoff, had suggested just such a centralization. Toschi at the time had already been concerned about Avery. “I think he wants to become more than an investigative reporter,” he told me. “I think he eventually wants to run this investigation.” Toschi was right:“I met with Attorney General [Evelle J.] Younger for 45 minutes,” Avery wrote confidentially, “outlined the Zodiac case in some detail and proposed to him that the State DOJ take over and coordinate the investigation of the case by forming a special Zodiac Squad made up of detectives from the various cities and counties which have actual or highly possible Z murders.” Three days later Avery sent Younger a resume of the case, writing that “I am eager to begin assisting in the formation of your ‘Zodiac Squad’ and to plan its direction.”

  Since a multitude of jurisdictions, counties, and departments were involved, their records had to be gathered and reorganized. Many files were missing, scattered over the state, hidden in basements and attics or taken away as mementos. Inspector Deasy personally drove the SFPD’s files to Sacramento. On May 15, at 7:11 A.M., police and FBI agents arrested David Carpenter as the Trailside Killer at his San Francisco home. This wilderness murderer shot and stabbed hikers on Mount Tamalpais above the Golden Gate, at Point Reyes Seashore, and in the Santa Cruz forests. Interestingly, Carpenter had hinted to accomplices that he was Zodiac—an intriguing possibility. Photos of Carpenter from 1969 with glasses and crew cut bore a striking resemblance to Zodiac’s wanted poster. Carpenter had been in prison when some Zodiac letters were mailed. But during the Trailside attacks police had ruled Carpenter out as a suspect because state computers listed him as being in jail. In reality, he was living in a halfway house and walking the streets of downtown San Francisco.

  Another riddle—the inoffensive ex-convict stuttered badly, while the Trailside Killer did not. However, at his San Diego trial, Carpenter explained, “When I sing [and he sang], I don’t stutter. When I whisper [and he whispered], I don’t stutter. When I get really angry! [he roared] I don’t stutter!” The jury drew back in terror. Carpenter the Trailside Killer was a different person than Carpenter under control. Perhaps Zodiac was someone else too when he wrote his letters—an inoffensive person who, from day to day, no one suspected.

  “Another suspect, Mike, a six-foot-tall, eyeglass-wearing ex-Navy-man, had moved the day of the Blue Rock Springs murder,” Mulanax told me. “He owned a 9-mm and a .45-caliber gun and, like Allen, worked at Union Oil. When he got too excited he would put his thumbs against his nose and scream. Early on, we had been looking for a Taurus and Mike was a Taurus. His neighbor verified he was familiar with Lake Berryessa. But that went nowhere. He did look good for awhile.”

  Thursday, October 8, 1981

  Few outside the FBI guessed the Unabomber existed. At the end of a sixteen-month period of inactivity, the nation’s first domestic terrorist struck. He placed a bomb inside a large paper-wrapped parcel at Utah’s Bennion Hall, where it was safely defused. On an April morning fifteen years hence, when Ted Kaczynski was captured in a remote, snowbound Montana cabin, the Unabomber would become an important Zodiac suspect. It was not hard to see why.

  “I was the first one to do that story,” Rita Williams, KTVU-TV Channel Two reporter, told me. “I did it like a week after he was arrested. I got the fingerprint guy out in Walnut Creek to look at Kaczynski. These FBI guys I knew were laughing at me—‘Oh, there’s no way. It can’t be.’ I said, ‘Come on, he really fits as Zodiac. That strange family, mathematical mind ... chemical bombs ... ’”

  The implication was that Zodiac had vanished because he had become the Unabomber. Here are reasons why that might be true. Both were pipe-bomb-makers. Both mailed police taunting letters with too much postage, boasted of their intelligence, and promised dire consequences if their words were not published. The Unabomber wrote the Times, threatening to bring down a California jetliner with a bomb, then admitted it was “a joke.” Zodiac promised to blow up a school bus with an electronic bomb, but rescinded his promise.

  Kaczynski had been a professor at UC Berkeley from 1967 to 1969, when Zodiac became active. Ted resigned June 30, 1969, and Zodiac first wrote the Chronicle a month later. The Unabomber exploded his first confirmed bomb on May 26, 1978, and a month afterward Zodiac allegedly wrote his last letter. Kaczynski wrote the San Francisco Examiner a month later. The two wore military gear—the Unabomber military fatigues, Zodiac a Naval costume. Both used disguises, a hooded sweatshirt, a hood. Inexplicably, there were times when the Unabomber and Zodiac simply stopped writing and killing. Both were asexual beings with dominant mothers and absent fathers. Both understood the complexities of code. Code is nothing more than mathematics and Kaczynski was a brilliant mathematician. At Berryessa the surviving victim reported that Zodiac claimed to be an escaped convict from either Colorado or Deer Lodge, Montana. Deer Lodge lay sixty miles from where Kaczynski eventually built his isolated cabin in Lincoln, Montana.

  However, equally compelling reasons convinced me that Kaczynski was not Zodiac. In 1978, the Unabomber, in his guise as the “Junkyard Bomber,” was using match heads and rubber bands to create his bombs. Nine years earlier Zodiac had mailed the Chronicle electronic and chemical bomb diagrams far more sophisticated than the Unabomber’s a decade later. Would Zodiac regress and lose the ability to create advanced bombs? More than likely, by 1978, he would be building better bombs. The Unabomber remained unknown for so long because he didn’t write the press. The publicity-hungry Zodiac always used his murders to gain publicity immediately afterward. The Unabomber wrote the Examiner, disguising himself as “FC.” Zodiac, with few exceptions, took pains to identify himself as Zodiac, and verified his identity by providing confidential facts or pieces of bloody evidence.

  The Unabomber targeted groups—computer experts and salesmen, behavioral modificationists, geneticists, engineers, and scholars. But his bombs were delivered in such a way that anyone could have opened them. In 1987, he left a bomb in a Salt Lake City parking lot for anyone to find. Zodiac’s targets were always specific with rigid requirements. He stalked his victims—young lovers, students by lakes on special days—with a different weapon each time. Kaczynski was obsessed with wood and wood-related names, while Zodiac was obsessed with water and water-related names. Kaczynski loved nature—he apologized to a rabbit for shooting it. Zodiac loved to hunt animals and progressed to people as wild game. In 1967 Kaczynski was in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan getting a second doctorate when three Riverside letters were written by Zodiac and postmarked in Riverside. In 1971, Kaczynski moved to Lincoln, Montana, and was living there when Zodiac letters at that time carried Bay Area postmarks. Zodiac’s excessive postage was engendered by a rush for publicity, while the Unabomber’s stamps served two uses. The value and subject of the stamps were a numerical code indicating the type of bomb inside and a symbolic statement. The second use was to direct the flow of the parcel. Overposting made certain the package would not be returned to the fictional sender; too little postage insured that the bomb would revert to the return address—the actual target, a scientist on the Unabomber’s hit list.

  The physical appearance of Zodiac and inner workings of his mind present the biggest differences between him and the Unabomber. Zodiac, “lumbering” and “bearlike,” differed considerably from Kaczynski’s lanky and gaunt frame—143 pounds, five feet nine inches tall. Zodiac, physically powerful, had a paunch, stood close to six feet, and weighed around 240 pounds. Though Kaczynski kept a journal in code (speedily solved by the FBI), it compared in no way with the intricate, unbreakable ciphers of Zodiac nor with his handwriting.

  The Unabomber’s own words offer the biggest difference. His manifesto’s tone is flat, unimaginative. Where are Zodiac’s clever turns of phrase and imagery frightening enough to galvanize a city? The professor in
Kaczynski lectures us, while Zodiac’s colorful expressions and memorable use of popular culture are intended to frighten, bully, and mystify—not instruct. His letters possess an ironic, biting quality that overflows with melancholy, even despair. They chill anyone who reads them. When Zodiac was angry, we felt it.

  Zodiac gave his motives for killing as “collecting souls for the afterlife” and the thrill of hunting people. The Unabomber’s apparent lack of motive made the search for him difficult. Zodiac obviously hated women. Kaczynski, to the end, dreamed of a wife and children, and envied and detested the brother who turned him in for possessing that domestic bliss. Kaczynski’s true hatred was reserved for those in the academic world who had surpassed him. Zodiac was master of all weapons, the Unabomber only of bombs, which he had trouble making lethal. Zodiac had an intimate knowledge of Vallejo. Kaczynski did not. Like a poisoner, Kaczynski imagined the death agonies of his victim from as great a distance as possible. “By gun, by knife, by rope,” Zodiac got as close to his victims as he could.

  18

  arthur leigh allen

  Friday, May 22, 1981

  “I was terminated from Spectro Chrome Graphics in Benicia (with no warnings or conferences) quite by surprise,” Leigh said of his May 22 firing. He suspected he could put his finger on the reason. “I believe my problem started three weeks prior when I destroyed a roll-down door with a forklift. The estimate was $2300.”

  Tuesday, June 30, 1981

  “I am intelligent, hardworking, honest, dependable, and punctual,” Leigh wrote, applying for other work. “I am looking for a job where I can learn and advance myself in the long term and hope you will consider these points in evaluating my application.” He was asked, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor?” “Yes,” he answered, “I committed one count of PC 288 and was sent to a state hospital for two years. I am now still taking therapy as was required by the courts.” His application, received July 1, 1981, was printed neatly—all the g’s were straight and all the d’s cursive. There was even a three-stroke k.

  Wednesday, July 8, 1981

  Allen snared a new job on his old stamping grounds—a Benicia industrial park at the end of Lake Herman Road. Leigh’s friends told me he often parked at a promontory where Lake Herman Road intersects Highway 21, northeast of the Benicia-Martinez Bridge. He popped open a Coors, drank, and scanned Roe Island, Ryer Island, and a hundred sealed battleships dismally riding their anchors in Suisun Bay below. The gray entombed fleet, mothballed remnants of World War II, probably made him think of his father and his own failed submarine career. He still hated working, but the new position gave him ample time to drink, visit his trailers, and make subtle digs at the police. He continued to wear a Zodiac skin-diving watch and a Zodiac ring. He continued to mention Zodiac to his friends, leaving a trail of hints scattered behind.

  He started his car and swung onto the rutted road. At home, a letter had slid down the mail slot into his basement. After a long delay, he was going to receive his bachelor of science degree from Sonoma State. Authorities still had not searched that dank and dreary basement where bombs and a “death machine” might be stored.

  Though diabetic, Arthur Leigh Allen began drinking beer from a quart jar. He rode his green motorcycle, laid out remodeling plans for his home, and bought more books on electronic gear, maps, and the occult. He studied birdhouses, and continued building a plane. Dr. Rykoff reported regularly on Leigh’s progress and rehabilitation. Apprehensive of his patient, the doctor played taped excerpts of their sessions for a Santa Rosa cop. He was shaken too. Eventually, Rykoff fled to a wilderness hospital. Everyone who came in touch with Zodiac was hurt in some way. George Bawart told me the bizarre story.

  “The doctor had come to believe that Zodiac was his patient,” said Bawart, “and made hours of tapes which he wanted to publish. He had tapes that Allen had made claiming to be Zodiac. Allen had talked to his doctor about putting bamboo stakes in pits around his house. The sharpened ends, covered in manure, would both wound and infect, even kill. I went up and interviewed Rykoff at some sanitarium. He was in a wild area and kept looking frantically in each corner. ‘Look out for the snakes,’ he cried, dancing about. ‘The snakes—everywhere.’ I laughed, then jumped. I looked, and there really was a rattlesnake. The biggest rattlesnake I’d ever seen—right by my boot—rattlesnakes all over the joint. God, for a psychiatrist, he was goofier than a bedbug.” Or just frightened?

  In early 1970, long before Leigh began seeing Dr. Rykoff, a rumor circulated in San Francisco that Zodiac had lost a letter addressed to a psychiatrist he was then seeing. Allegedly, it contained a death threat to the doctor’s family. A passerby found the letter and turned it over to the police, who interviewed the doctor. Because of professional confidentiality he refused to name his patient, a Bay Area resident. Within this doctor’s files, some believed, lay the real name of Zodiac.

  “We went down and saw Pete Noyes,” Bawart continued. “He was one of the producers of Johnny Carson or Jeopardy. Somehow this guy got involved with Rykoff, Santa Rosa cops, and all this goofy stuff. It was absolutely bizarre the stuff they were doing. They were gonna protect this Dr. Rykoff because Arthur Leigh Allen was gonna come kill him. They thought one of the lieutenants on the Santa Rosa Police Department was in cahoots with Leigh Allen. After I finished this I wondered, ‘Are these guys pranksters? Are they just that paranoid?’ Crazy stuff. It was to the point when I developed all this—this guy in Santa Rosa didn’t want to talk to me. I was very straightforward. ‘I’m retired. I’m working this as a private contractor for the Vallejo Police Department Homicide Investigation Division and I want to talk to you.’ Well, he wouldn’t talk to me in Santa Rosa. He insisted on meeting me in Petaluma, and he met me with his partner, a young fellow. This guy, this cop, was real kind of superior-acting, as if I were a dummy. That’s fine. To get what I want, I’ll take that tack. And so we sat there and we chatted.”

  “The main guy in this thing is somebody just too big. He’ll get you and he’ll kill you,” he told Bawart.

  “Well, tell me who it is,” Bawart said.

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “Wait a minute, pal,” Bawart said. “You’re a working cop and you’re telling me you won’t tell me something that’s germane to my investigation.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Well, let me tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going to go back and speak to Captain Conway and Captain Conway is going to our chief of police and say, ‘There’s a Santa Rosa cop that won’t cooperate with an investigation.’ Our chief of police is going to call your chief of police and I can bet you dollars to doughnuts, fella, you’ll find yourself sitting in an office and telling me what I want to know. So make it easy on yourself and tell me now.”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’ll hear from me.”

  “Next day, sure as shit, that’s what happened,” Bawart told me. “This guy was ordered in the office. We all sat down. He finally told us who this really bad guy was—who turned out to be [a superior officer]. The reason he was a really bad guy is because his backyard backed up to Ron Allen’s. That’s no big deal. Ron Allen was a North Bay city planner. We interviewed the officer and Ron Allen and there was nothing to it. I got some handwriting out of some guy out of Santa Rosa—not related to the psychologist, that was sent to me by this guy’s girlfriend. I looked at it. It’s a dead ringer. The way he made his [check mark] r’s and everything. But I take it to the handwriting people and this was a letter that says, ‘Hey, honey, I want to get back with you.’ It wasn’t a threatening letter. He was a kind of half-assed stalker and wouldn’t let her go. Anyway I took it to the handwriting guy and he says, ‘Definitely not.’ They must know what they’re doing, but I’ve seen things in Allen’s handwriting that look good to me.”

  Wednesday, February 17, 1982

  Toschi had been having a little discomfort from recent surgery. The month before, an ulcer had brought on massiv
e internal bleeding. He had been rushed by ambulance to Children’s Hospital, but was now recuperating at home—reading, resting, listening to Big Band records on the stereo, and doing a lot of walking and thinking about the unsolved case. For a man who excelled in baseball and basketball, any inaction was painful. “There is no police work being done on Zodiac at all,” he complained. “I know this for a fact.” I spoke to Fred Shirisago at DOJ. “Like I say, I have gotten so many damn calls on this Leigh Allen,” Shirisago said. “I spend my time trying to do background. I don’t want to be left holding the bag, the last person on the case. . . . Look, Allen might be the guy. I’m not saying he’s not. He goes to libraries and does a lot of research on crimes against women. Every investigator I’ve talked with thinks it’s him. I read everything I can about the guy.”

  An Oregon man suggested police could catch Zodiac by creating a fictional story that the killer was already in custody. “Duped by the fictional arrest,” he said, “we could trap him like a blind dog in a meat house.”

  Thursday, May, 20, 1982

  In November 1981, evidence in the sixteen-year-old Cheri Jo Bates murder investigation had “come to light.” Riverside police assigned four investigators full-time and, believing themselves close to a solution, dispatched an outline to the D.A.’s office. “She had a couple of boyfriends and there’s one guy in particular. We’re convinced the killer might be him,” they argued. Since November 1968, they had been convinced one of Cheri Jo’s former boyfriends or rejected suitors was her killer. Allegedly he’d had scratches on his face (Cheri Jo had clawed her assailant’s face) and had bragged about committing the crime. Not only was there not enough evidence to charge him, but friends alibied him. “The D.A.’s office tore [the outline] apart from their point of view,” said Chief Victor Jones, adding, “The person we believe responsible for the slaying of Cheri Jo Bates is not the individual other law enforcement authorities believe responsible for the so-called ‘Zodiac’ killings.” Jones believed Zodiac had been in the area, but taken credit for a killing he had not committed. Captain Irv Cross, indicating the seven-month delay in letters, also suggested Zodiac had been trying to capitalize on the publicity.