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

by Robert Graysmith

  “What?”

  “Chipmunk hairs.”

  “Amazing.”

  “I know when I got off work last night—got home a little late at six o’clock—my wife was getting ready to go to work. She can’t put on her makeup standing, so she sits on the countertop in the bathroom with her feet in the sink. When she heard what I said about chipmunk hairs, she fell off the counter. I had to catch her. Allen was using chipmunks to entice kids. Well, It’s not over till the fat man sings.”

  Thursday, May 22, 1986

  With the publication of what I had learned about Zodiac over a decade, an enthusiastic army of puzzle solvers were attracted to the hunt—my intention from the start. As time passed, police files, spread to the four winds, began to show up in the hands of novice detectives. Zodiac buffs dug them from garages and attics, lifted them from trash cans and closet shelves. Each day brought a final solution closer—that moment when someone, somewhere would recognize Zodiac. But after someone mailed me a bloodstained shirt like Stine’s, I discovered I could no longer open a single letter. A Times interviewer thought I “appeared uncomfortable dredging up details” of Zodiac. I admitted to him I had not read a single one of the thousand letters I had received for fear of getting sucked into the case again. “I can’t deal with it—it’s hard to explain,” I told him. “I don’t want to get physically ill again. I can’t do it. Not now.”

  Warily, I studied boxes of manila envelopes forwarded to me—a dozen or so letters packed inside each. I opened them finally, surprised that, with few exceptions, most were thoughtful, ingenious, even clever. This Thursday afternoon Leigh Allen had a minor auto accident. I had to wonder if he was cracking up because of new interest in unmasking Zodiac.

  Friday, August 8, 1986

  Toschi, currently manager of nationwide Globe Security, received a State Senate commendation for long meritorious service. His joy was dampened when he learned Paul Stine’s blood-blackened shirt had vanished from within the SFPD. Three months later to the day, someone got into the Vallejo Times-Herald and stole their entire Zodiac file. I recalled how Avery’s Zodiac file had also been stolen from his car. I kept mine in the safekeeping vault at Bank of America.

  Thursday, April 16, 1987

  Zodiac might be powerful, intelligent, and extraordinarily deadly, but he had always lacked originality. From costume to weapons to motive to code symbols, he drew his persona from outside himself—mostly from films. Movie-mad to the extreme, he had thus far resisted demanding a movie about himself (though perhaps he had, anonymously). Two films had inspired his campaign of terror—the first and most influential movie suggested his entire method of operation. He had seen it at a formative time in his life.

  19

  zodiac’s “dangerous game”

  Zodiac: hooded, secretive, precise—with a predilection for bizarre handmade weapons and unbreakable ciphers. A scent of demonic possession and brimstone clung to Zodiac. Intelligent, compulsive, yet never original, he plagiarized his modus operandi from a watch face, short story, and film. In his deciphered three-part cryptogram he explained his primary motivation—an obsession with Richard Connell’s thrilling adventure story “The Most Dangerous Game.”

  “I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN,” Zodiac had written. “IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL OF ALL TO KILL. . . .”

  Leigh Allen freely admitted he loved Connell’s short tale. “It was the best story I read in high school,” he earnestly told detectives in that hot refinery office. Connell’s story existed as book and film. Which influenced Zodiac—printed story or movie? Subtle differences indicated which. It was possible to learn when “a terrible thought crept like a snake” into Zodiac’s brain. “The Most Dangerous Game,” printed in Variety and published by Minton Balch & Company in 1924, won the O. Henry Memorial Award for that year. The printed version, included in adventure anthologies and high school texts ever since, goes like this:

  Sanger Rainsford, a big-game hunter, falls overboard from his yacht. Stranded, he hears the report of a .22, and thinks the hunter must have nerve to tackle large wild game with so light a gun. He meets General Zaroff, a sadistic Russian expatriate sportsman. Zaroff (a name similar to Zodiac) hunts at night with different weapons to make the hunt more exciting. When Rainsford says he considers the Cape buffalo the most dangerous of all big game, Zaroff corrects him, “No. You are wrong, sir . . . here in my preserve on [Ship-Trap Island], I hunt the most dangerous game. . . . My hand was made for the trigger, my father said. . . . My whole life has been one prolonged hunt. . . . I enjoy the problems of the chase [so] I had to invent a new animal to hunt. I bought this island, built this house [an ancient castle with towers and a gargoyle-shaped door knocker], and here I do my hunting.” Surrounding are jungles with mazes of trails, hills, and swamps. “Every day I hunt, and I never grow bored now, for I have a quarry with which I can match my wits.”

  Zaroff’s “most dangerous game” is people. He provides Rainsford with three hours, head start and “an excellent hunting knife.” He “cheerfully acknowledges” himself defeated if he doesn’t find him by midnight of the third day. If Rainsford wins, the general’s sloop will place him on the mainland. Armed only with a .22-caliber pistol and bow and arrow (Allen’s hunting weapons), Zaroff pursues his quarry. On the first night Zaroff allows Rainsford to escape. Rainsford realizes he is saving him for another day’s sport.

  The final battle is played out in the mad hunter’s bedroom. “You have won the game!” he says. “I am still a beast at bay.” Rainsford cries, “Get ready, General Zaroff,” and Zaroff is killed. But the written story lacked the costume and pursuit of a young couple by gun and knife that had inspired Zodiac. Zodiac’s primary motivation, that galvanizing flash point, was a film, but which one and in what year?

  In a conversation with his friend Phil Tucker, Allen spoke of a 1945 film, A Game of Death.9 With its stalking by crossbow and Zodiac-like title, the film was likely an inspiration. General Kreigner’s insanity is attributed to a wound from a Cape buffalo rather than a need to dispel boredom. Other adaptations of Connell’s story followed.10

  Because Willis O’Brien’s animation of his giant ape, King Kong, took too many months to complete, producer Merian C. Cooper and directors Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel decided to shoot a second movie employing Kong’s existing sets and much of its cast. RKO’s sixty-three-minute-longblack-and-white adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game was shot in 1932, a year after Allen’s birth. Screenwriter James Ashmore Creelman, while retaining Connell’s dialogue, introduced a sexual pathology to account for the cunning Count Zaroff’s mania—hunting inflamed his other passions. The hunt as a precursor for sex had entered the equation. Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea), an American big-game hunter returning from safari, swims to nearby Ship-Trap Island after fake channel lights lure his yacht onto a reef. Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), archer, waltz composer, and self-confessed barbarian in evening dress, is the perfect host. Costar Fay Wray (Eve Trowbridge) recalled, “. . . the actor who played Count Zaroff with a jagged scar across his forehead had something wrong with one eye and it gave him a really scary expression.” Banks’s face presented two dramatically different profiles—the left brutish, the right handsome—the result of a serious wound the actor received during World War I. His Jekyll-Hyde quality depicted the schizophrenic qualities of a cultured man possessed by bestial desires. “God makes some men poets,” Zaroff explains. “Some He makes kings, some beggars. Me, He made a hunter. . . .

  “One night as I lay in my tent with this—this head of mine, a terrible thought crept like a snake into my brain . . . hunting was beginning to bore me. When I lost my love of hunting, I lost my love of life, my love of love . . . what I needed was not a new weapon, but a new animal. . . . We barbarians know that it is after the chase and then only that man revels . . . you know the saying of the Ogandi chieftains—‘Hunt first the enemy, then the woman.’ I
t is the natural instinct. What is woman? Even such a woman as this until the blood is quickened by the kill . . . one passion builds upon another. Kill, then love. When you have known that, you have known ecstasy.”

  “Here on my island I hunt the most dangerous game,” the count tells Rainsford and Eve. “We are going to play ‘outdoor chess.’ Your brain against mine—your woodcraft against mine. When I was only stirrup high [my father] gave me my first gun. . . . It would be impossible to tell you how many animals I have killed.” Allen’s father, a military man, gave his son a rifle and taught him to hunt, and Allen was the only Zodiac suspect who was an archer. The image that opens the film is a castle door knocker of a Dying Centaur, an arrow in his breast. A wall painting above the stairs depicts a similar maddened centaur, armed with a bow and arrow, carrying the body of a woman through the woods. The centaur is the astrological symbol for Sagittarius (November 22-December 21), Allen’s own zodiac sign.

  Zaroff, his Cossack henchman, Ivan, and a pack of hounds hunt Rainsford and Eve. In the film the hunt takes place in one night, not three, and a couple, not a single man, are hunted just as Zodiac hunted couples. If they elude Zaroff in the island’s foggy jungle, they will be set free. With his Satanic black hunting outfit, folds gathered and cinched at wrists and ankles, Zaroff races swiftly through the fog behind a pack of hounds. In a sheath on his left side is a foot-long knife. The scabbard is decorated with rivets. In his right hand is a precision high-powered rifle. Pursued in the watery sections—a swamp, a waterfall, the couple finally reach the ocean’s edge. The wounded count dies when he plunges over his balcony and is devoured by his own ravenous hounds as Rainsford and Eve escape by boat.

  Because of the weapons (especially the bow and arrow), the costume, which so clearly inspired the outfit Zodiac wore at Lake Berryessa, the nighttime pursuit of a couple near water, the concept of outdoor chess, and the image of the Dying Centaur, I am inclined to think this particular film most influenced Zodiac. And it had played at the Avenue Theatre. “Those animals I hunted,” says Rainsford, “now I know how they felt.” With the lonely, unloved archer, the elite exile, Zodiac had found a resonance with his true life.

  Radio drama, at its zenith during Zodiac’s youth, adapted Connell’s tale. The most famous radio version appeared on CBS’s Suspense, September 23, 1943. Its fifty-eighth show starred Orson Welles as Zaroff and Keenan Wynn as Rainsford. Jacques A. Finke wrote the script for producer-director William Spier.11 Augmented by sound effects, full orchestra, and the power of imagination, radio adaptations could be formidable influences. Allen, ten at the time of the broadcast, would have been lying in the darkness listening that Thursday night, lit only by the glow of the dial. The static of the broadcast filled the room. A formative age, ten.

  “I don’t remember which day we had discussed ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ and hunting people,” Cheney told me, “but somebody did a televisionpresentation using that plot and I think that’s what we discussed, that and the fact that there was a book. The plot has been used and used.”

  The inspiration for Zodiac’s gun that projected a beam of light came from a television show adapted from a story by William C. Morrison. A 1950s Alfred Hitchcock Presents starring Myron McCormick featured a young man with a flashlight taped to his rifle. “Just shoot for the dark spot in the light and you will hit your target,” he said—exactly as Zodiac wrote. Hunting small game at night, he chanced upon two lovers—result: accidental murder. A vengeful father says at the conclusion, eyes glittering: “The excitement of a manhunt—the most dangerous game!”

  20

  arthur leigh allen

  Sunday, September 27, 1987

  Arthur Leigh Allen, in spite of financial problems, lacked the willpower to resist a new purchase. He bought a $2,500 foam, fiberglass ultra-light “aeroplane” with a folding-wing option. Likewise, he was compelled to heap on additional paraphernalia, and draw up blueprints for clever modifications. But his deteriorating vision drastically curtailed his active lifestyle. His flagging physical stamina, due to growing diabetes and kidney problems, anchored him close to Fresno Street.

  “Kidney failure is a slow process,” a nurse explained. “It’s only imminent after years and years. You can have it most of your life, but it’s only toward the end of the disease that you end up on dialysis. It depends how bad your hypertension is. Through the years the diabetes destroys the blood vessels, causes them to be less resilient, and so you get high blood pressure. Then the high blood pressure destroys the kidneys and you end up on dialysis. The vision goes.

  “Naturally drinking is harmful. Your skin color has changed because your kidneys are not functioning properly. And so you look sallow. Dialysis is not painful, but it is debilitating. You will get very weak afterward, and usually not be good for anything the rest of that day. The treatment’s for three hours, three times a week, for as long as you live. Sometimes it’s longer for people who drink too much. If they’re large individuals the time might be extended.”

  Against doctor’s orders, Leigh guzzled beer from a quart jar, scanning the newspaper where conjectures about Zodiac’s fate still raged. They were most plentiful on the anniversaries of the attacks, a day such as today. Explanations as to Zodiac’s whereabouts ranged from imprisonment to death to police proximity so close Zodiac dared not act. Ill health had hardly been considered in the equation. Thus far, outside law enforcement, Allen’s name had not been linked to Zodiac in print. No fraudulent informant could target Allen if he hadn’t heard of him. But the prime suspect still flaunted his connection to the case—saving articles about Zodiac and perversely wearing the Zodiac watch and Z-emblem ring. It give him pleasure. Gradually, the genie emerged from the bottle. The leak came not from the media, but the local police department. A substitute teacher in Santa Rosa junior and senior high schools became concerned.

  “My occupation has given me the opportunity to observe how local teenagers have reacted to your book about Zodiac,” he informed me. “I’ve seen copies pulled out at free reading time in classrooms all over town, but I never had much interest in the subject until last spring when, at various times, I overheard students and staff members discussing the book. Apparently one of the students is the son of a local policeman, and word has gotten around that the man you call ‘Starr’ works at Friedman Brothers Hardware in south Santa Rosa. Some of the kids seem to know the man’s real name, or think they do.

  “This caused me to worry on two counts. First the man they think is ‘Starr’ may not be him, and an innocent man’s reputation is being ground up in the rumor mill. Second, the man might really be Starr and he might really be the killer. This raises the unpleasant image of little bunches of junior high kids trooping through Friedman Brothers on safari following a dangerous paranoid. I’m sorry this sounds a bit negative. I thought your book was well done and I hope your work leads to the killer’s capture.”

  Born in 1971, Harold Huffman’s son hadn’t been too familiar with the Zodiac case until his father began telling him about his old friend, Leigh Allen. “After my father spilled the beans,” Rob wrote, “I read Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac. . . . I scared myself to death. I knew exactly who ‘Robert Hall “Bob” Starr’ really was. After digesting this horrific realization, I would brag to my friends regarding all I had learned from Zodiac and my father’s (and mother’s) tales of Leigh’s violent outbursts when they were young. I would make all the connections. I would, in turn, scare my friends to death—then break the ice by telling them how Leigh wanted to make raviolis for my father and I, but instead we went to IHOP. On other occasions my Dad would bring home oranges from Leigh’s trees, and I would offer them to my friends. Once digested, I’d reveal to my pals that they had just eaten Zodiac Killer oranges (and again they would be scared to death).”

  “Craig,”12 a young man, also learned of Allen through the Santa Rosa Police. In the late 1980s, he and his dad visited Allen’s house on Fresno Street. Allen claimed he didn’t know who had turn
ed him in to the police. Craig told him it was Cheney. “I’m very disturbed at the thought of that,” Leigh replied. “Don Cheney is capable of perpetuating these crimes and he even frightens me. Don has a terrible temper.”

  “He seemed to be speaking for Zodiac,” Craig said later. “He claimed that he was the one who created the Zodiac codes, or at least the codes were inspired by him. He showed us his own code, which is the one he apparently showed Ron Allen’s wife. He had others that were different from what Ron Allen’s wife saw.” Craig recognized a lot of the symbols as being Zodiac’s. Allen told them that the Zodiac ciphers he had in his possession were the original work of a convicted murderer he had met at Atascadero. “It was while I was working there in the early sixties,” he said. That much was true. “Yeah, Zodiac got this from this inmate and it inspired his ciphers.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Craig. “What do you mean? How do you know that unless you’re Zodiac?”

  Allen continued to draw suspicion to himself with such sly comments and appearances at crime scenes. And time was running out for the investigators—nineteen years had passed since Zodiac’s last confirmed murder, thirteen years since his last letter. Would that unsolicited lead linking Leigh Allen to Zodiac ever come?

  Tuesday, October 28, 1987

  Clairvoyant Joseph DeLouise claimed he’d been tuned into the hooded executioner’s thoughts for nearly twenty years. He had once psychically envisioned a box in the Zodiac’s possession and advised him to rid himself of it. I wondered if Leigh still had the mysterious gray box he allowed no one to open. DeLouise thought the killer might be a Scorpio or Aquarian because of the figures 11-2 and 2-11, which he kept receiving. Transmissions registered on DeLouise’s mind: a white dog and horses, loneliness, and an intense hatred of the police.