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

by Robert Graysmith

  I didn’t correct him. “What’s your next step?” I asked.

  “I want to listen to those tapes.” So did I, I thought.

  “Are you going to pay the guy?” I asked. I never trusted the validity of information that was purchased.

  “I’m not going to pay him anything.” He called back soon after. “Well, I’ve got Vallejo P.D. coming in here. They’re real excited. They say they’re real close to solving the case.”

  I spoke with Jackie Ginley and the Vallejo P.D. because I had gotten a number of calls from NBC and CBS television about Zodiac concerning “some tapes.” “Do you think they do this periodically, call up with a hook on the story and try and sell it?” Jackie asked, referring to the tapes for sale. “I’m getting some calls here from people who knew Mr. Allen back in high school. A lot of people. But you know how it is working on a daily paper, there’s not much time to devote to something like that.”

  Tuesday, June 11, 1991

  Bawart and Conway studied Mulanax’s files from 1971, then went and talked to some of the same people he had. “A lot of what the informants were telling Conway and Bawart in the early nineties,” a source told me, “they didn’t tell Mulanax. Maybe they were afraid back then to come forward, but now in 1991 they’re not so afraid anymore and just want to get the guy.”

  “Captain Conway and I re-interviewed Phil Tucker,” Bawart told me. “Tucker worked for GVRD. He wasn’t really a friend of Allen’s. He was an associate, as many other people were [who were] involved in any kind of athletics in that period of the time. This interview was in the infancy of when I was doing background work on Allen.”

  Bawart’s seven-page report, Circumstances Which Indicate Arthur Leigh Allen Is, In Fact, The Zodiac Killer, would grow to thirty items. 17 “During our interview Phil Tucker was unable to remember that Arthur Leigh Allen had told him that he [had] special [electronic gun] sights for shooting in the dark. He did, however, indicate that Allen told him he was proficient in shooting and proficient in shooting in the dark. Arthur Leigh Allen had told him he had read a book . . . about hunting people with a bow and arrow.”

  Tucker recalled, “Allen was fascinated with the concept of stalking people rather than game. He indicated a number of times that it would be great sport to hunt people as they had intelligence. We were on our way to the beach to go scuba diving when he started discussing hunting trips and ended up talking about hunting people with bows and arrows. I felt he wanted my reaction to these statements. I told him I would never consider hunting people. He tried to make it seem like this was an idea for a book he was going to write. I got the idea that he was really saying, ‘Is this something you’d like to do with me?’ I just ignored him. I think he told me the name of the book he had read.”

  “Was the name of the book The Most Dangerous Game?” asked Bawart.

  “I don’t think so.” Possibly Allen had mentioned not a book, but a 1945 film, A Game of Death, a remake of The Most Dangerous Game. “This conversation took place prior to September of 1966 as that’s the month and year I married my first wife. That is why I recall the time easily. I did not see Allen to any great degree, nor go out on hunting and fishing trips with him, after my marriage.”

  “Do you know Donald Cheney?” asked Bawart. Stalking people at night with a gun had been part of the conversation Cheney said Allen had with him New Year’s Day, 1969. Zodiac had also alluded to hunting people in his cryptogram.

  “I do not,” said Tucker.

  “Why didn’t you give this information to Toschi and Mulanax in 1971?”

  “I only answered their questions. They did not ask me so I didn’t tell them. I was not asked about any fantasies Allen may have related to me.” Tucker also indicated that during the span of their conversation, he saw Allen had a Zodiac brand watch with a Zodiac symbol. Tucker also repeated that he had seen Allen write with both hands. “He uses both hands equally well when handprinting, but his handprinting is not real good.” Tucker also mentioned that Allen had an interest in codes, and repeated that he had seen a handwritten Zodiac-type cryptogram at Allen’s house. “This was prior to any cryptograms being published in the newspaper,” he said. “Allen was the kind of fellow who loved to try and outsmart the other guy.”

  Tucker related, as he had for Mulanax and Toschi, that in 1969, he owned an older brown beat-up Corvair. Allen had driven this Corvair, but Tucker could not specifically indicate whether Allen drove this Corvair on July 4, 1969. Mike Mageau had described an older brown vehicle, “similar to a 1963 Corvair, older and bigger, old plates,” as being the killer’s vehicle.

  Thursday, July 25, 1991

  Now Allen became more than a name in the police files—he was the subject of the nightly news. “My first occasion to meet Arthur Leigh Allen was in July of 1991,” reporter Rita Williams recalled. “We had gotten wind that Captain Conway and his folks had served a search warrant back on Valentine’s Day of that year and it was about to be unsealed. We first talked to the captain.”

  “Why,” Williams asked Conway, “haven’t there been any charges brought against Allen when you found pipe bombs in his residence?”

  “I’m not going to comment on an ongoing investigation,” replied Conway.

  “Do you think you are close to getting the case solved . . . any closer than you were twenty years ago?”

  “Honestly, I don’t think so,” he concluded.

  “Then,” recalled Williams “just on a lark, my cameraman and I went to Allen’s to see what we might get. It was late one evening. It was summer and still light outside, but beginning to get dark. My cameraman and I walked up to his door, and Nick sort of hid in the bush while I knocked on Allen’s door. Allen was not clothed. He had on his bathrobe and yelled out the window, ‘Just a moment.’ Finally he came to the door. When I told him what I was doing, he surprised me by saying I could come in.”

  Williams had interviewed both the “Night Stalker” and the “Trailside Killer.” “I was alone in their jail cells,” she recalled, “but of all the people I’ve ever interviewed, none had ever given me chills like Arthur Leigh Allen. That was the thing that got me. He had this demeanor about him. He was just so big and so kind of apelike—just scary. It’s hard to describe, but you could see the strength. And that some of things he was accused of doing, you could see he could, in fact, accomplish. He was the kind of man that, even though he was very sick—at that time he was on kidney dialysis and had high blood pressure, was taking all sorts of medication—he was still a frightening presence.

  “When he had agreed to my request for an interview, I paused. I had second thoughts. He had not seen my photographer some distance away, and I was not going into that house alone. Finally, the photographer was allowed to enter too. At first Allen told us we couldn’t take any pictures. He just wanted to see what we were doing there. But over the course of the next hour and a half, we sat down and had a discussion with him.

  “He had that sort of barrel chest, huge shoulders. He wasn’t all that heavy, because he was on dialysis then. Even though he was sick, everything about him was ominous. He had on a housecoat and combat boots—big heavy boots—‘clomp, clomp, clomp!’ Then later, he changed clothes in the midst of the interview.” Allen donned a transparent blue sport shirt, vertically ridged with two filigreed designs and unbuttoned to show his broad chest. His herringbone pants were old-fashioned, pleated and a grayish brown. On his right wrist a Band-Aid covered a needle mark made that morning.

  Williams, blond, attractive, and long-legged, was dressed in a short red jacket over a black tailored suit, accented by gold jewelry. They made an odd couple as Allen led her through a tangled, disorderly garden. A chain-link fence reinforced with wood and wire ran along the perimeter. Allen pointed out where the police had retrieved bombs from beneath the house. “Allen talked about how the police had robbed him of stuff,” recalled Williams, “harassed him and taken things he had never gotten back—sentimental stuff from his mother. He was quite
upset.” A hot wind rose against the pearl-gray sky.

  They descended into the dusty basement room. It was warmer there. Williams sat with her back to a rugged homemade bookshelf of unfinished wood. She studied the items on the wall. Was that a Boy Scout felt band with every badge they awarded? Was it Allen’s? A local child’s? Dust covered an audio device—sounding machinery used in diving; a few diving, swimming, and spear-fishing trophies lined a shelf. Various photographic supplies were above her head. A Dustbuster (covered with dust) hung from the wall. On the floor a gallon container with a handle sat next to a small table. On that table, captured in the glow of a swivel lamp, lay a clutter of electronic equipment—a stereo, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, video games, a VCR, audio cassettes, and a black-and-white phone. A copy of Zodiac was under one of the audio cassettes. Near a clock sat an almost empty stein of beer though Allen was not supposed to drink. There was a glass ashtray, though Allen did not smoke. An empty dinner plate had been tucked under one shelf. She returned her focus to Allen. Police had taken away many items; none of the things Williams was most interested in were present—Zodiac watch, guns, bombs, clippings.

  As they spoke, Allen sat rigidly upright, hands folded in his lap, like a reprimanded student, and perched on the edge of what Williams took to be a rumpled couch covered with a blue blanket and two white pillows. Only later she realized, “That was where he slept.” His bald head was framed by tan curtains painted with a design of bonsai trees and a blue sea stretching beyond. Allen’s elderly tan dog lay against his left hip, striking out with his hind leg occasionally.

  “I’ve lived in this house since I was eight,” said Allen. “My mother died three years ago and ever since I’ve lived here—alone—in this room. I began taking kidney dialysis in April of 1991. First two times a week, then three times. I blew up like a blimp. My weight shot up to maybe 280 pounds. Finally, I was taking ten injections of insulin a day. Eventually I returned to my present weight of 220 pounds.”

  Williams told me later, “Though he was an obviously ill man, Allen was still a powerful, frightening presence. In his prime he would have been terrifying. I had read the book and I knew some things to ask. I started out by acting as if I knew nothing about the case, and getting more specific during the interview, and just let him just talk. He said it was all circumstantial evidence, that there was never anything to pin him to be the killer, or, in fact, Captain Conway and the Vallejo police would have arrested him and charged him. He talked about some pipe bombs found under his house.”

  “I didn’t know the bombs were there,” Allen explained. “An ex-con friend, now dead, asked me to store some things more than a decade ago. They must be his. They told me my fingerprints were on the bombs. I don’t believe that. I wouldn’t be sitting here if they were and there’s really no way they could get on there. . . . I think there probably is a Zodiac still out there and he’s just laughing himself to death.”

  “Allen lived with his mother,” Williams said. “He never married. He was arrested once for molesting a small boy and served time in Atascadero. He broke down and choked up on that. ‘I realize now how horrible that was,’ he said, ‘and what an impact I may have had on that child. I’m not the kind of person to hurt anyone.’

  “I asked for a response to the fellow [Cheney] who had gone to authorities about his remarks about hunting people—but first I quoted Zodiac—‘I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all to kill. . . . ’

  “Allen tells me that he read that story, ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ back when he was in the eleventh grade, and it had such an impact on him that he then was shooting jackrabbits and that was the only thing he could ever kill, and that he indeed had not said that recently. ‘Well, he built this into something much, much grander,’ said Allen, ‘and remembered other conversations that we didn’t have and decided, well, I must be the Zodiac. That was something that we talked about back when we were in high school together and he’s mistaken. Everybody’s trying to get publicity. In fact I had never said that.’ Allen never went to high school with Cheney, and did not meet him until 1962.

  “Allen has all sorts of explanations for everything,” Rita recalled. “Three or four times throughout the interview, he mentioned that he had never read Zodiac, yet he would mention things that are in that book that he would not have known simply from interviews that Captain Conway and others have done with him. And then he would start back and say, ‘Wait a minute. No! I’ve never read that book. I heard that he said that.’ And he took great liberties with the truth there and that was not true. [Zodiac is visible under papers on his desk in the filmed interview.]

  “And I used the summation that was in the book—about Allen’s mother being very domineering and that he was not the favored one in the family, that his brother, who looked more like his mother’s side of the family, was the favored son, and that Leigh had been under the dominance of his mother all his life. Very crass—[Allen] said several things about bodily functions of his dog and other things, I think more for shock value and to see how I would respond. But certainly throughout the interview, he denied that he was the Zodiac. He said in fact that he was another victim of the Zodiac because he was a victim of more than twenty years of police harassment for being an innocent man.

  “‘They’ve offered me many opportunities,’ he said, ‘the most recent last Valentine’s Day, to confess because then I’d be at peace with myself. Well, you don’t get peace with yourself by confessing a lie. And this is what it would have been. . . . The little kid who lives next door, fifth grade, they’ve they’re studying the Constitution and she got ticked off. “Haven’t they ever heard of innocent until proven guilty?” she told me. Well, bless her . . . They haven’t arrested me because they can’t prove a thing,’ concluded Allen, his voice quavering dramatically. ‘I’m not the damn Zodiac. Excuse . . . excuse me.’ He lowered his head and seemed to weep. ‘Twenty-two years of this . . .’

  “Having done this for almost twenty-five years of interviewing all sorts of killers, you just kind of get feelings. I can tell you my cameraman, as we got in the car that night, turned to me and said, ‘Gosh, I think we just interviewed the Zodiac.’ He was so convinced.”

  Williams’s interview ran that night: “For more than two decades,” said anchor Dennis Richmond on the Ten O’clock News, “police have suspected a Vallejo man of the unsolved Zodiac serial killings. Tonight we’ll hear from that man. It’s been more than two decades now since the infamous Zodiac shocked the Bay Area and the nation. Police are still working to solve those crimes. On Monday, authorities in Vallejo will unseal the results of one bit of that investigation. The search of the house of a man who’s been called the number-one Zodiac suspect. Now for the first time that man has told his side of the story in a television interview. He spoke with us on condition that we not show his face.” Allen’s face was electronically concealed and shown in silhouette to mask his true features. It had to make viewers even more curious.

  “Is this man the notorious killer known as the Zodiac?” asked Rita Williams. “Or he is a victim of more than two decades of police harassment? His name is Arthur Allen. He’s fifty-eight now, diabetic, and had just come back from kidney dialysis when talked with him at his Vallejo home last night. Back in the late 1960s, when Zodiac terrorized California, Allen was in his late thirties, sixty pounds heavier, strong, a biology graduate student. And in this book, considered the definitive study on the Zodiac [shows the book Zodiac], Arthur Allen, known fictionally in the book as Bob Starr, is considered the investigators’ number-one suspect. . . .

  “One widely quoted letter from Zodiac said he likes killing people because it’s much more fun than killing wild game, because man is the most dangerous animal of all. And in the early seventies, a friend of Allen’s went to police, telling them Allen had told him virtually the same thing just before the killings began,” said Williams.
“From then on Allen was a suspect. In 1971, police searched two cars and a trailer he was living in in Santa Rosa. But for some reason they never searched the Vallejo house he shared with his mother until her death three years ago. ‘Every time, I thought it was laid to rest, it would come screaming back,’ said Allen on camera. ‘The last time was St. Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day!’

  “Armed with a search warrant, police spent two days in February going through the house and garage. They dug up part of the yard, took Allen’s Zodiac diver’s watch, which he says his mother gave him, and pulled pipe bombs out from under the house. Allen took a lie-detector test back in the seventies while doing time for molesting a nine-year-old boy. He says he passed it, but authorities told him he was a sociopath and could cheat. Still, he’s never been charged with any of the Zodiac crimes and he says he’s lost jobs, friends, even medical care now, because police imply he’s a killer.”

  The filmed interview ended with Allen collapsing and sobbing. Rita Williams told me later, “However, he didn’t really cry. In looking at the tape, he kind of turned it on and turned it off. When Allen lifted his head his eyes were dry. I definitely felt he was pretending.”

  Allen next showed up on KPIX, Channel 5, the local CBS affiliate.

  “I’m not the Zodiac. I’ve never killed anyone,” he said. “They have me questioning myself. I search my memory for blanks—blank spaces—there are none. I was first questioned by police in late 1969. The cop said that someone thought I might be the Zodiac killer and reported me. At the end of the interview he said, ‘Well, Zodiac had curly hair and you obviously don’t.’ So that was it.