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

by Robert Graysmith

  Tuesday, May 25, 1982

  “I called [Detective] Bud Kelly in Riverside this morning,” Toschi told me. He had called in response to Chief Jones’s press conference. “He couldn’t give me their suspect’s name, but they feel they know who killed the Bates girl. Some new information developed in the last three months and the suspect does not check out as Zodiac. This suspect was looked at back when the murder occurred. I asked Kelley if their guy was ever in the Bay Area even for a short time. Answer: ‘NO.’ Their suspect has lived in Riverside all the time.

  “Seems the Riverside P.D. has only a circumstantial case against their local man,” said Toschi. “No physical evidence can tie him to the case. Kelley says the Riverside County District Attorney does not like the case and is very hesitant about issuing a murder complaint. Kelley says the case will probably never go to trial.”

  Riverside P.D. still had a single strand of hair caught in the watch-band of the paint-spattered men’s Timex Cheri Jo had torn from her attacker. Police stored the hair in a refrigerated evidence locker. One day a conclusive test might be developed to either clear or incriminate their suspect. The local man had had frequent brushes with the law. A secret psychological evaluation of Bates’s murderer had been completed eleven years earlier for the Riverside D.A. The chief psychologist of Pat-ton State Hospital described Bates’s killer as: “[So] hypersensitive . . . that virtually any little misperceived act could be blown up out of all proportion to the facts. He is obsessed and pathologically preoccupied with intense hatred against female figures—all the more so if he sees the young woman as attractive. Because of his own unconscious feelings of inadequacy, he is not likely to act out his feelings sexually, but in fantasy. . . . I would like to emphasize that there is a real possibility that he can become homicidal again.”

  Sherwood Morrill showed me a confidential handwriting analysis he had prepared November 24, 1970, for Chief of the Bureau A. L. Coffey and Riverside Police Chief L. T. Kinkead. He had studied examples of the Riverside suspect’s writing.

  “An examination of enclosures [case # 36-F-586] A through E [three envelopes and letters, photograph of a note signed ‘rh’ on desk, photographs of five names beginning with H, two letters addressed to an acquaintance of the suspect, seven pages exemplar writing and material of the prime Riverside suspect] resulted in the following conclusions:“1. It was first determined that the handprinting on the envelopes and letters of enclosure A was by the same person who prepared the handprinting appearing on the desk, a photograph of which is enclosure B of this report.

  “2. A comparison of this material with the Zodiac letters revealed many characteristics which resulted in the conclusion that enclosures A and B were in fact prepared by the same person responsible for the Zodiac letters.

  “3. The five names beginning with H could not be identified with any of the other material submitted.

  “4. The letter postmarked in February of 1968 appears to have been drawn by a lettering set and does not conform with any of the material submitted. The handprinted letter postmarked January 17, 1968 addressed to the suspect’s friend is still in a different person’s handprinting but does not conform with any of the other material submitted. It does, however, contain numerous divergencies from the handprinting of the Riverside Suspect and definitely was not prepared by him.”

  One thing was certain—the RPD’s prime suspect’s handprinting did not match the Riverside letters. Morrill ruled that Zodiac did write those letters.

  Wednesday, June 2, 1982

  At Sonoma State University, Leigh Allen officially received his bachelor of arts degree in biology with a minor in chemistry.

  Wednesday, June 9, 1982

  At his Montgomery Street law office, Belli dropped a tape into his machine. “A pleasant evening to you, Melvin M. Belli . . . (ha, ha, ha, ha, ha),” an anonymous voice cackled. “OK, number one . . . I had thought possibly we might get together and meet and talk. I am at the point in this activity that I have gotten into somehow. How, I don’t know. Why, I have no idea. Now what you should do is pull up a chair and sit down with your coffee or tea . . . and relax because I am about to tell you the Goddamnedest story you have ever heard. Number one, our common interest is the interest of the Zodiac killer.

  “Now this case has been going on for over twelve years. During that time—(the reason my voice is going down is I’m turning this radio down. With this hillbilly music you can’t hear yourself think). Anyhow, at one point in these photostatic copies that I have of the Zodiac killer there’s reference . . . they’re talking of the cop. . . . ‘Over the years the five thousand people he has interviewed, the three thousand tips, the two thousand possible suspects . . . ’ Anyhow, we’re talking there of almost over ten thousand items alone. Now I know where the Zodiac is. I know who the Zodiac is. I know how to identify the Zodiac.

  “For over a twenty-year period I have had a sincere interest in symbols, symbols of all kinds. . . . One week I went to a flea market and saw this ring, which I paid sixty dollars for. The ring has no identification marks of any country. The ring presented a challenge, and so I said, ‘I’m going to find out everything there is to know about this ring and the symbols on it.’ Over a period of four to five months I was laid off and started researching the ring for many hours in the library. I have my own library, about a thousand books.

  “Each symbol on top of the ring corresponded to seven different symbols—a total of thirty-seven symbols that related to chemistry and astrology. The underside of the ring had more symbols. The guy who wore this must have really been something. It had been the ring of a blind Norse god. The things that have happened because of this ring are unbelievable. I’m laying this stuff on ya because I know of your sincere interest the last time the Zodiac was active . . . you’re the very best of attorneys in the U.S. today. Now the reason that this cop could not catch Zodiac or even relate to him is because he has such a spiritual background, such a reasonable amount of intelligence. He is the most intelligent man in the United States today.

  “He comes from fire, he returns to fire. How are we going to identify this guy? He has a ring on his finger decorated with a sign of the Zodiac. That sign, the sign of the Zodiac, is the sign of the ox. Now remember well, my slim friend (heh, heh, heh), his full power consists in the power of words and the jumbling of words. His method of attack on these innocent young people was not of a frontal assault. His attack was first with the knife, then with the gun, the rope, then reverting back to the knife for the blood ritual itself. The Zodiac’s ring is a blood stone, a darkishgreen stone with sprinkles of red, and is governed by Mars. The blood stone and the ox are connected. Darlene Ferrin had seen Zodiac kill someone (a fact not widely known until four years later).”

  The speaker knew of a Zodiac ring such as Allen had worn since the murders began, a ring compelling Zodiac to do horrible things. The unknown voice might not be Zodiac, but his remarks about a Zodiac ring were truly unsettling.

  Thursday, October 11, 1984

  “I really didn’t think this fifteenth anniversary of the San Francisco Zodiac killing would stir up this much interest,” Toschi said.

  Herb Caen wrote:“THURSDAY, OCT. 11, is a special annvy. for Police Inspector Dave Toschi. On that day in 1969, 15 yrs. ago, Toschi, then assigned to homicide, was summoned to Washington and Cherry, where a Yellow Cabbie had just been murdered. Four days later, a bloody swatch of the victim’s shirt and a letter from The Zodiac arrived at the Chronicle—and thus began the string of still unsolved Zodiac killings, most of them accompanied by taunting letters. The last one to Toschi said simply ‘ME-37 (killings). S.F.P.D.-0.’ After slaying the Yellow driver, The Zodiac presumably faded away into the nearby Presidio forest. He could be walking down Market St. this very minute. . . .”

  Wednesday, July 3, 1985

  After thirty-two years on the force, twenty-five of those as a police inspector, Dave Toschi, now fifty-two, quietly retired. He had already realized his life’s d
ream when he joined the force in 1953, spending seven years as a patrol officer in the Richmond District “My dad always said that if I was a cop, I’d always have a paycheck to bring home. He said I’d never get rich, though. He was right.” As a homicide inspector, Toschi won gold, silver, and bronze medals of valor. “I still consider the Zodiac case the most frustrating of all my cases. I really believe it gave me bleeding ulcers.” But he was proud of contributing to the solution of another case that had a “Z” in it—the Zebra murders that claimed the lives of twelve San Franciscans between 1973 and 1974. “I’m gratified that I was part of a team that brought that terrible case to a successful conclusion.”

  Toschi spent five years in Robbery Detail, receiving police commission honors as a “Heroic Officer” on February 22, 1984. Then he transferred to the Sex Crimes Detail where he spent a year. Now, after working every crime against persons there was, including Aggravated Assaults, he was retiring to become head of security at the Watergate apartment complex across the Bay in Emeryville near Berkeley. Within a year he would also be a licensed private detective. What he did not know was that the Zodiac case was only half over.

  Sunday, January 19, 1986

  “Some of the Vallejo police agree with author Robert Graysmith, some do not,” wrote reporter Gene Silverman on my just released book Zodiac: “Vallejo Police Department Detective Sergeant Jack Mulanax—who had inherited the Ferrin case from Sergeant John Lynch, differs from his predecessor on the inclusion of one of the killings. Mulanax believes the Lake Herman, Blue Rock Springs Park, Lake Berryessa and San Francisco taxicab attacks were all done by the same man, that the man was Zodiac, and this is the man [Leigh Allen] to whom Graysmith gave the name ‘Starr.’”

  “I don’t think there is any doubt on those,” said Mulanax. “Although I base my conclusions, at least in part, on a large amount of circumstantial evidence. We might find out when more people read this book. Graysmith did a good job and I agree with him. The book actually provided me with information. I didn’t know what Napa police had. I wasn’t contacted but two times by [Detective Sergeant Narlow].

  “Graysmith mentioned the lack of information-trading among police departments as a problem,” reported Silverman. “He said in his book, ‘I thought to myself that Lynch had cleared Allen because he did not match Lynch’s visual impression of the killer.’ Lynch says this was true. ‘From time to time your mind changes,’ he says, ‘but certain things stick, such as descriptions of the killer given by victims who either survived or survived long enough to talk.’ Lynch also believed there was more than one killer.

  “I believe that Zodiac is probably still alive,” said Officer Richard Hoffman. “If he’d died there would be evidence found in a place where he lived. The coroner would have come into it. So I think he’s still alive.”

  “Why, in that case, have the Zodiac-type crimes seemed to have stopped?” asked Silverman.

  “I don’t know he’s not killing,” Hoffman said. “One of his last correspondences said he wasn’t going to talk about it anymore, take the credit for it anymore. This is Graysmith’s opinion too.”

  Pam, Darlene Ferrin’s sister, subject of threatening calls every year on the anniversary of her sister’s death, said, “Zodiac is definitely alive. I don’t think he’s doing any more killings. I think when he saw the police getting closer, he stopped. I have read Graysmith’s book four times. This book has really jogged my memory—so much. I’d read two pages and think and think.”

  Wednesday, February 12, 1986

  A twenty-year employee of the Sonoma Sheriff’s Department, retired now and staying at her mother’s Vallejo home, wrote me. “On your TV interview,” she said, “you tied in the seven girls who were found murdered in the Santa Rosa Area in 1972-73 to the Zodiac killings. I found this interesting because the Sheriff’s Department in Sonoma County never did. I also agreed with you that the different police agencies did not cooperate with one another or share any information that they might have that would tie in with what another county might have had.”

  On August 25, 1976, while working in the coroner’s office, Sonoma County, she learned of a routine traffic accident fatality, a head-on collision on Highway 12 between Santa Rosa and Sebastopol. The deceased was a forty-one-year-old heavyset male school teacher. He had taught not only at Santa Rosa Junior College, which many of the victims attended, but Napa Junior College and other surrounding counties including San Quentin.

  “I believe he had previously taught in Southern California,” she elaborated, “but his only relatives lived in the East. Among the possessions in his van were drawings of some of the seven victims in the Santa Rosa area, which portrayed them in hog-tied positions. Included with these drawings were their names and sexual preferences. There was also a backpack belonging to one of the victims. Since the sheriff is also the coroner, the deputy turned over his findings to the Detective Bureau where it was placed in evidence and the matter quickly dropped. The deputy said, ‘As long as he’s dead, for his family’s sake, there’s no point in ruining his reputation. ’ Besides, if they declared him dead and a new lead came up across country, the detectives wouldn’t get to go on another trip.”

  She further explained that, as a general rule, the deceased’s belongings are usually itemized and released to the next of kin. In this case, however, not everything was itemized, only what was in his pockets were returned to his relatives. “By now,” she said, “the evidence has long been destroyed. When I left years ago, they were in the process of micro-filming the coroner files and then destroying the file itself. We always kept the driver’s license along with a coroner photograph in the coroner’s office. The file that was open to the general public at that time did not contain everything on file in the County Clerk’s office. However, the County Clerk also wanted to get rid of Coroner files and about 1979 or ’80 we discontinued filing them with the County Clerk. His fingerprints should be on file in Sacramento. . . . I think if he was really the Zodiac that he could also be tied into the Riverside murder because of his employment as a teacher down there.”

  She gave me his name and case file number. Was this the murderer of the young women who passed near Leigh Allen’s trailer in Santa Rosa? Leigh had been a student at Santa Rosa Junior College. Could he have had a confederate all along, writing the letters for him, one that had died in a highway crash while he was in Atascadero and could write no letters exonerating him?

  “When the teacher’s widow was cataloging his property,” a Santa Rosa investigator told me, “she came across drawings of people being whipped. The sketches suggested the husband had been involved in S & M. The instructor had drawn himself as a woman and labeled it with the female version of his own name. Chief Wayne Dunham felt the deceased man might have something to do with Kim Wendy Allen’s death.” Kim, a Santa Rosa Junior College student, had last been seen March 4, 1972, hitching north on 101.

  “I’ve actually got a photocopy of two of the drawings they found,” Sergeant Brown told me years later. “He drew Kim and he drew himself as ‘Freda.’ He drew this other girl and those two girls had classes with him. And he had this hair in his wallet. They tested it, but it wasn’t Kim’s. I don’t think the teacher did it. Maybe, but I doubt it. I read his letters. One investigator thought that the teacher had this sex/slave thing going, whips and chains and all this weird stuff, and he was obsessed with big-breasted women. He probably taught Kim, and when she shows up dead, he became really obsessed with her. A weird dude.”

  Wednesday, May 14, 1986

  Pieces of the puzzle began to fall together for Sergeant John Burke of the Santa Rosa P.D. “We have a ten-man team who have been keeping a two-month surveillance on an individual,” he told me. “Dave Legrow [a friend of Sheriff Butch Carlstedt] and Gary Crenshaw and I have been going through his file. He was booked at the jailhouse in 1975 and was wearing a Zodiac watch. He’s six feet tall, 240 pounds. Born in Honolulu. I’ll give you his name in a moment. . . .”

 
“You don’t have to—he was born in 1933.”

  “Yes, Leigh Allen. It was the weight that threw us at first, but then last night I noticed that at the time of the killings this man weighed 180 pounds. What is unusual about this guy is that we have his 290 sex registrant file . . . these are broken up into an Alpha file and what we call the five-by-eight section, a list of I.D. characteristics. This is the first man I’ve ever seen to have both classifications. His registration is attached to his Alpha file. He gave his address here in Santa Rosa at his brother’s. We might be able to get him for failing to report a move under the sex registration law. In the murders here in Santa Rosa there is something I think no one else knows. On all the bodies were found fibrous hairs. We found matching hairs in Allen’s trunk in his car. You know what they were?”