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

by Robert Graysmith

  The Chicago-based psychic, known as the “Prophet of Specifics” because of his accurate predictions, had recently had a second vision. “Zodiac is living near Berkeley,” he said on Monday. “I recently got a call from a Bay Area woman who believed she was dating Zodiac. A few weeks after the woman called, I got an anonymous call. ‘I’m back,’ it said. The woman promised to call me back but never did. She may be dead. I see danger around her. I don’t feel that she was putting me on. He’s out there now. He’s dating and he’s killing, but he isn’t taking credit anymore. What he’s doing now is personal. He feels rejected by the women he’s seeing. I think he’ll call me soon. I can feel it.” As if in response to the psychic’s entreaties, a gloved hand dropped two letters into a San Francisco mailbox on the morning of October 28. Addressed to the Chronicle and Vallejo Times-Herald, both carried Zodiac’s familiar salutation.

  Wednesday, October 29, 1987

  The Times-Herald received its letter and passed it on to Fred Shirisago, who had it dusted for prints. “Our guy has never left a print in the past,” he said. But the FBI had once gotten a print similar to the cab print on one letter. I asked Shirisago if he believed in the bloody print. “I don’t know myself,” he said. “There were some witnesses indicating that he wiped it all off.” A handwriting expert analyzed the printing on the new letter immediately. The first three sentences read like the April 1978 letter. The text said:“Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking I am crack proof. Tell herb caen that I am still here. I have always been here. Tell the blue pigs if want me I will be out driving around on Halloween in my death machine looking for some Kiddies to run over Cars make nice weapons. . . . The pigs can catch me if they can find me out there. Just like in the movie: The car. Tell the kiddies watch before they cross the streets on halloween nite. Tell Tochi my new plans Yours truly: [Zodiac symbol] guess VPD-0”

  Kim Kraus, a Vallejo mother of three, heard about the new letter. “One of the neighborhood boys actually brought a copy of the article down to our house and showed my children. It frightened them.”

  Darlene’s former husband, Dean, had no comment, but his present wife, Kathie, did. “I’m just hoping this is all a hoax,” she said, “but maybe if Zodiac surfaces—hopefully without hurting anyone—he might leave a new track that could lead to him being caught—and seeking help. I can’t imagine somebody being quiet and stay back all this time if he were as batty as [Zodiac] was. A guy as cocky and conceited as him would have let it be known he was busy again.”

  “The only thing that would keep this guy back is the police being close,” I told reporter Gene Silverman. “I think the police are close and I still believe they are going to solve this. From what I saw, the letter looked like bits and pieces of other Zodiac letters. There’s nothing original about it. Zodiac always had a macabre bent to his writing, and I don’t see it here. He misspelled Toschi, and I can’t imagine him doing that. Zodiac, in his way, has a lot of respect for Toschi. But I understand the desire to see the real Zodiac surface. It would be one more chance for him to slip up. I’ll be the first to say so—I think both letters are fakes.”

  “Until Zodiac is caught, this fear will always be hanging over the Ferrin family—over all of us in fact,” said Carmela (Leigh) Keelen, owner of Carmela’s Cafe. In 1969 she had owned Caesar’s Italian Restaurant and employed Dean as a cook. “Every time I get a crank call, Zodiac crosses my mind.” At mid-month, Darlene Ferrin’s sister, Pam, had discovered a Zodiac symbol scrawled in blue felt-tip pen on her front door, and now a threat to Halloween trick-or-treaters was painted on the garage.

  Thursday, October 30, 1987

  DOJ agreed. Captain Conway, relieved the letters were hoaxes, nonetheless put extra patrols on the streets Halloween Eve. Halloween was an important holiday for Zodiac. Vallejo’s “Big Game” was traditionally held that day. Zodiac had mailed a threatening Halloween card, and often mentioned “game.” Spirit Week for the Big Game included symbolic “burial” ceremonies of the Dr. James J. Hogan Senior High School’s football team. Some of Zodiac’s victims had been Hogan High students. Vallejo High students stood watch over a coffin that contained a “body” representing Hogan High.

  Murder suspect Shawn Melton, a police groupie, confessed to police he was re-enacting a Zodiac murder when he strangled Jeremy Stoner. Melton’s first contact with the police had been when he took the results of his own investigation of a Zodiac Vallejo murder to local detectives.

  “Jim Lang, and Captain Conway and I met with Mike Nail,” Bawart told me, “who was a D.A. then and is now a judge. There was a kind of infamous case from our county, a kid named Jeremy Stoner, a six-year-old, was abducted and ultimately found dead in the Delta. The responsible on that was a guy named Shawn Melton. Melton’s father at one time alluded to the fact that Melton wrote letters to the newspaper [like Zodiac] and his terminology was somewhat similar to the Zodiac. Somebody came out with this hair-brained idea that he was the Zodiac. But he wasn’t, I can assure you of that! We were meeting with the D.A. at that time to see if he would refile on Shawn Melton. There had been two trials on him and there had been two hung juries.” Melton was eventually convicted. He was the first murderer inspired by Zodiac. To our horror, he would not be the last.

  Tuesday, November 17, 1987

  “I found it difficult to believe that such a horrifying murderer as Zodiac has not yet been caught,” a reader told me. “Your writings on Starr [my pseudonym for Allen] certainly convinced me he is Zodiac. I believe that if the police had searched Starr’s mother’s house and especially the basement they would have found all the evidence they could possibly have wanted. By this time, Starr has obviously hidden any evidence. He also figures prominently in my mind because Zodiac is obviously an intelligent man who uses deliberate misspellings to throw off the police. Did Starr have a habit of deliberately misspelling words?” A good idea. I checked. Remarkably, I discovered he did.

  Some Zodiac ciphers had never been solved. Buffs had not given up trying to crack them. The eighteen characters at the end of Zodiac’s three-part cryptogram attracted the most attention. Ruth Gerstankorn rearranged them to read something other than the anagram “Robert Emmett the Hippie” most had already discovered. She found “Before I meet eternity” and another possibility—“Before I meet them I pity them.” Another reader said:“The thing that chilled my blood was that one of the symbols used was a circle bisected by a cross, used in the plotting of what is known as a polar co-ordinate. My supposition is this, the last eighteen characters [BEORI-ETEMETHHPITI] in the August ’69 cipher is not a name, but more important a location that pinpoints the murderer’s location. The letters are in actuality numbers laid out in algebraic fashion on a graph with the graph being laid out on a north-south to east-west grid on principle streets or landmarks in the San Francisco area, with random letters being inserted as a filler to make the line come out even in respect to characters per line. Done in mathematical fashion, the accuracy of this graph could easily pinpoint the location to a specific location in a specific room in a specific building.

  “Another point—all eighteen characters are numbers and that both coordinates are followed by numerals after the decimal point. This type of mathematical plotting is widely used in mechanical engineering and would be used by anyone familiar with science. Since the leading suspects had been sailors at one time, the characters could stand for degrees of latitude and longitude. This can be used after compensating for deviation and variation on a magnetic compass to pinpoint a location to within sixty feet, plus or minus. I would, after translation, use an aircraft map of the area of summer 1969 vintage to plot the isogonic lines properly, inasmuch as the location of the earth’s magnetic pole does change slightly from year to year. Latitude and longitude are customarily given as a series of numbers followed by a letter, in degrees minutes and seconds.”

  However, early on, cryptographer Henry Ephron reported to Sergeant Lynch that the eighteen characters were “symbolic dust tossed
into the eyes of any would-be solver” to confuse and delay solution:

  “No one recognized that these meaningless characters [nulls] are standard practice in cryptography to fill out empty space and equalize groups in size (in this case to fill out the space necessary with similar symbols in order to make the third part exactly the same size as the first two, a project obviously dear to the heart of Zodiac).” Ephron explained that repetitions of symbols, digraphs, and longer groups are the means by which ciphers are solved: “On the basis of frequency the value L should have had only two symbols, but because of the frequency of Ls in his message, he switched after the enciphering was begun to using the square both half-black and fully black, thus giving himself another symbol for L and for greater variety in the double L’s he gave up the alternation regularity. But my first discovery on analysis was the identity of the two squares and B (all the symbols for L). Zodiac’s symbol for A appears, seemingly by error, as S and S as A. More dust in the solver’s eyes! There is no mistake there. He was trying to confuse the decipherer and he did.”

  Paul Avery still believed the eighteen characters stood for Robert Emmett.

  “Everybody loves a good mystery,” he said. “People track me down to talk about Zodiac. I’m deluged with phone calls and weird correspondence.” “It’s the stuff legends are made of,” I replied. “In twenty years this case will be like Jack the Ripper. But sometimes I feel like I’ve created a monster by writing about it.” “No,” said Avery. “The real monster is Zodiac himself.”

  To those around him, Zodiac, a borderline psychotic, might appear as well controlled and calm, even reasonable. “He prefers the passiveness of pictures, TV, and the movies,” Dr. Murray Miron wrote. “Zodiac would have spent much of his time in movie houses specializing in sadomasochist and occult eroticism.” One particular movie had been set at the unique place where Allen’s father worked, where Wing Walker shoes were sold, and where Leigh had spent time visiting and going to the movies. This second influential film inspired his letters. It would tell us more about Zodiac. It told us where he had been.

  21

  zodiac at treasure island

  Streets named Sturgeon, courts named Halibut and Flounder intersected, and an Avenue of Palms buttressed the island’s west side. An enclosure of tile and marble had once been the Fountain of Western Waters. It had cascaded before a seventy-foot-high terra-cotta-colored statue of the goddess Pacifica. Then, Treasure Island had been a city of light, floating upon the waves in the very climes where Robert Louis Stevenson once trod. It shimmered briefly at the end of the 1930s as a beacon of peace, flickered, and then went out. But for a while the night had been lit with pastel searchlights illuminating domes and towers; colored lights were reflected in still pools and sparkled in falling cascades.

  Treasure Island began as a series of jagged surf-lashed shoals north of Yerba Buena Island. Prevailing summer winds from the Golden Gate forced workers to first construct a ten-story seawall. They massed thousands of tons of boulders to erect a barrier thirteen feet above sea level around a square-mile area. The resulting lagoon, a mile long and two-thirds of a mile wide, was then filled in with twenty million cubic yards of seafloor mud. A ramp soon connected Treasure Island with centrally located Yerba Buena Island and the Bay Bridge. Finally, San Francisco decided to hold its third world’s fair on the man-made island.

  The Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40 opened in February 1939. Under bright blue skies, visitors drove across the bridge or came by steam ferries to enter Aztec-Inca “Elephant Gates.” The Exposition’s features included Pacifica, her hands raised in benediction; the four-hundred-foot Tower of the Sun; and Benny Goodman’s Swing music rocking an amusement zone packed with roller coasters, ferris wheels, and nude dancers. A few months afterward, Hitler invaded Poland, and France had fallen by the time the fair closed in September 1940. San Francisco abandoned all plans of converting Treasure Island into a city airport. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy transformed it into a Naval base, building upon the detonated fragments of Pacifica, converting the Hall of Western States to a barracks, and turning the river-boat Delta Queen into quarters and classrooms. They made the Food and Beverages Building the “world’s biggest mess hall,” altered the large hangarlike buildings behind the Administration Building, and modified the Exposition’s three permanent buildings at the south end of the island.

  After the war Naval Commander Ethan Allen was stationed at this first U.S. stop for Navy men returning at the rate of twelve thousand a day. In 1947, a fourteen-year-old Leigh Allen wandered the artificial island while his father worked. The Naval Station housed four commands: the Naval Receiving Station, Naval Schools Command, the Naval Station itself (which administered the island), and Western Sea Frontier Headquarters. Movies changed daily and cost only a quarter to see. “He used to watch movies at Treasure Island all the time,” a friend of Leigh’s confirmed. “My mom worked as a secretary on Treasure Island and she saw him there often and may have been his ‘date’ at the movies. The Exorcist was another favorite of his.”

  He saw a film about Treasure Island that became a last blueprint for Zodiac—the 1939 20th Century-Fox film Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, starring Sydney Toler. In the 1960s local KRON-TV screened its seventy-two-minute length cut to fifty-nine minutes. “Zodiac?” asks detective Charlie Chan (who is arriving in San Francisco by plane from Honolulu—Allen’s birthplace). “Yeah, he’s the big shot in the spook racket around here,” says another passenger. Dr. Zodiac, a crooked medium dressed in black robes, uses his guise as psychic consultant to blackmail his clients. He answers the phone, “This is Zodiac speaking,” carries an odd knife, and shoots a crossbow. One of his victims block-prints: “CAN’T ESCAPE ZODIAC—” Eve Cairo reads the minds of assembled suspects at a party and says, “Dr. Zodiac. I hear the name Dr. Zodiac in his thoughts. . . . I can’t go on! I can’t! I hear death among us! I’m frightened! There’s evil here! Someone here is thinking murder!”

  Zodiac, says Chan, is “not ordinary criminal. He is a man of great ego. Criminal egotist find pleasure in laughing at police.” Chan uses the San Francisco Chronicle and its police reporter, Pete (Douglas Fowley), to try to trap Zodiac. “RHADINI CHALLENGES DR. ZODIAC” appears on the front page. A dapper magician, Fred Rhadini (Cesar Romero), of the Temple of Magic on Treasure Island, joins forces with Chan to expose Zodiac. “I accept your challenge. . . .” Zodiac replies in a note pinned to a wall with a knife. In the end, Rhadini turns out to be Zodiac.

  “Favorite pastime of man is fooling himself,” Chan observes. “So far no one has collected [on the challenge], not even the great Dr. Zodiac.” One bet you could be sure of winning was that Zodiac had seen this film and been inspired by it.

  “Charlie Chan at Treasure Island was Leigh’s favorite movie as a kid,” his friend Jim told me, “and his dad worked on Treasure Island.”

  22

  arthur leigh allen

  Tuesday, January 10, 1989

  Allen’s mother, Bernice, died at age eighty-three. “Mrs. Allen was dead by the time I got really involved in the case,” Vallejo Detective George Bawart later told me. “For the longest time I was aware of Allen. As you know, the chief investigator on the Zodiac case until he retired was Mulanax. Then, when Mulanax left, they turned it pretty much over to me. During this span of time, even when Mulanax was working on it, different things would come in. I might be sitting at my desk and it would be something about the Zodiac. I’d either make a few calls or do what had to be done on it. Most of them were goofy things. I’d tell Mulanax, ‘I took this call for you. I don’t think it’s anything but here’s my report on it. Do what you want with it.’ He would file it, but then after he retired I became the receptacle for all those kind of calls. I wasn’t actively working the case at all. When your book came out our calls went up ten thousand percent.

  “I have copies of [Allen’s] handprinting done in the Santa Rosa trailer—where he wrote left-handed. Then I seized a wh
ole bunch of writings he had at his house. Forms, letters to friends—the content of it wasn’t anything germane to the case. It was casual handwriting he wouldn’t be trying to disguise. It was actually his handwriting. We turned those over to our handwriting guy. He looked at it and said it’s not the Zodiac’s handwriting. That’s our biggest stumbling block in that case. There’s a theory that when he went into his Zodiac mode he had a split personality and became a different person.”

  One expert worried Zodiac might be schizophrenic, his Zodiac persona awakened, controlled, or influenced by the lunar cycles and planetary cycles. “What if he doesn’t know he’s Zodiac?” the man said. “There were long delays in those murders and letters,” I told Bawart. “I always chalked it up to the fact that you got real close and Zodiac backed off.”

  “That’s my theory too. They got real close and he said, ‘Oh, oh, I better not do anything.’ Also, there was a span of time when he was in Atascadero and there were no letters at all.”

  “What was important was that after Allen’s questioning at the refinery, no letter ever again began, ‘This is the Zodiac speaking.’ From then on he signed them, ‘Me,’ ‘A Citizen,’ or ‘The Red Phantom.’ After Leigh went into Atascadero, Zodiac never wrote another letter. That’s got to mean something.”

  The next day a woman contacted me. “This is a note that was left for me in a Lyons Restaurant in Antioch by an older man,” she said. “He said he wanted to help me out with the Zodiac. The handwriting looks to me much like the Zodiac’s. SFPD has it. I gave it to Inspector Deasy, along with a tape he left telling me he is my secret admirer.” The message was in excellent Zodiac printing and suggested Zodiac had been a stalker: