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

by Robert Graysmith

  Bawart theorized Rodifer might have been aiding Allen. “I didn’t know if there were actually two killers, but there might have been two individuals who got their jollies doing this. We couldn’t talk to him at the time of search, although he did talk to me quite a bit. He volunteered to. Rodifer was a small man, five six at most. Kind of a bubbly kind of guy. He had been a number of places. He worked with the Department of Defense and he ran their Dependents’ Activities Program. If you’re a sergeant or something and you’re going to be overseas long enough, you get to bring your family over. The families sometimes don’t relate to the new country, so the Army has community centers and he ran those community centers where your kids could go there and learn to wrestle and play basketball and shoot pool and just have different functions. It was so kids could occupy their time while in a foreign country. He had been doing it a long time. He was in Japan. In fact he was married while in Japan. I was never able to locate his ex-wife.

  “We had to ultimately go before a German judge. We served the papers on him, and a day or two later we went to the courthouse and all the questioning [of Rodifer] was done before this judge. It was an extensive questioning and he was under oath and he had to answer truthfully. I don’t know how much that means. He gave us a story about him knowing Allen. He was never real close friends with him. ‘I was really popular in school and Leigh was not,’ he told me. ‘He was jealous of me.’ There was apparently some animosity between him and Allen because of this. Then after that he volunteered to talk to me at length, and I jammed him pretty good. In fact he had a German-appointed attorney who got upset with me. I tend to believe him. I came back and I interviewed a lot of classmates who were in that era when they were together—junior college. We interviewed them and I’m satisfied that ‘Robert Emmett the Hippie’ is a guy that Arthur Leigh Allen didn’t like.”

  “Did you get handwriting samples from Rodifer?”

  “It was one of the things we went to talk to Rodifer about. We got samples of Rodifer’s handwriting from the Department of the Army, where he was filling out requests to go here, there, and everywhere. There was both printed and cursive matter on it. He wouldn’t be disguising his handwriting to fill out an application. We had our guy who was doing all our handwriting analysis, Cunningham from San Francisco, and he looked at it, compared it to the Zodiac letters, and said, ‘No, he didn’t write these.’”

  “Where was Rodifer in 1968 and 1969? All those Zodiac letters then had had local postmarks on them.”

  “He was out of the country, I think. Oh, wait a minute. He was going to school in Berkeley.”

  “How about 1974-1977?” That had been the period when no Zodiac letters had been received.

  “He was out of the country, but I don’t want to say that for sure.”

  “Did Rodifer have a lie-detector test as well?”

  “No,” said George, “Germany doesn’t allow it. And as for Rodifer, he was not useful to testify.”

  The detectives retooled and began once more looking for evidence. If they were to interview Allen again they would need some expert guidance from the FBI. When Toschi had gotten in trouble, Allen had said to his P.O., “Now he’ll know what it feels like.” Toschi had this to say about him: “Allen had a great resentment anyway, but after all that public humiliation—now he’s really going to start hating cops.”

  Tuesday, February 4, 1992

  The media storm blew over and Leigh went on with his life. His good friend, Harold Huffman, one of the first to offer solace after last year’s search, visited to check on his health. “When he and Leigh made contact again,” his wife, Kay, told me, “they agreed to never talk about what he went to Atascadero for. If Leigh was going to speak about any of his perverted feelings or what had led him to do it, Harold could not be his friend. Those were the rules that were laid down. Harold said, ‘I can deal with Leigh all right, but I do not want to know the particulars and I don’t ever want to talk about it.’ Leigh tried to discuss it a few times. He made a couple overtures, but was met with silence. When my husband said ‘no,’ people listened. The Leigh that Harold knew was not necessarily the Leigh I knew. When my son Rob got a little older he said, ‘Mom, did you know Dad took me out with the Zodiac?’ I said, ‘Dad took you out with Leigh?’ He said, ‘Yeah, Mom.’”

  Harold and Leigh went on day trips, shooting and diving around the North Bay. Though lame and legally blind, Leigh could still shoot accurately. In the water he was almost his old self. Harold told his son how Leigh had recently visited the coast to dive for abalone. A party of frog-men, decked out in expensive gear, were taking lessons. Before they could dive, Leigh appeared in his trunks, knife clinched between his teeth, and plunged into the surf. “In a few minutes,” Rob recalled, “he returned with the legal limit suctioned onto his large belly. He loved to gloat in the surprise of bewildered spectators. He shined when the spotlight was on him.” While Leigh even drove on occasion, he let Huffman take the wheel, only forbidding him to drive them near Blue Rock Springs or Lake Herman Road. “If the cops are tailing me, they might use it against me,” he said. “They’ll go, ‘What were you doing cruising Blue Rock Springs with your friend?’ I don’t want to see you hassled.”

  Leigh was very familiar with Lake Herman Road. Once, he and Kay were driving around the outskirts of Vallejo when they stumbled on a bleeding man by the road. It was a scene much like the Lake Herman Road attack. “In 1956, Leigh and I were coming back on American Canyon Road,” Kay elaborated, “and saw a man standing outside his little car pulled off the side of the road. He was waving his arms. We got out. He and his wife had been drinking a lot of wine out of a jug and some kids had come along and asked him for a match. When they rolled down the window, the kids pulled him out, called him a wino, and beat him up. So Leigh took the jug and he threw it far as he could out into the field. I never figured out how come I agreed to this—when you’re young you do dumb things—I sat in the car with the doors locked with these two little people while he went and hunted for a highway patrolman. He drove up on Highway 40 and did all sorts of loops and illegal things before he finally attracted the attention of the Highway Patrol. They followed him back down to where we were parked.”

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  zodiac

  For the last two years Toschi had been chief of security for the posh Pan-Pacific Hotel at 500 Post Street. As director of twenty-four-hour security he conducted discreet surveillance of the VIP’s floor and coordinated with their security people—grueling work. “Many times computer companies asked me to meet with their own corporate security manager . . . do a walk-around of the hotel and the rooms where equipment is going to be,” Toschi said. “Times people would call me and I would be so tense and exhausted—missing luggage and missing items from rooms.” And yet, around each bend in the hotel’s labyrinth of corridors, Toschi’s nemesis still lurked. A stone’s throw away Zodiac had flagged down Stine’s cab that long-ago Columbus Day. Toschi recalled the legions of Zodiac suspects. Had there ever been a greater mystery? The legend grew. A new generation became obsessed.

  As if he had never vanished, Zodiac turned up later as fodder for television dramas. One day location directors for the Nash Bridges television program arrived unexpectedly from Hollywood and checked into the Pan-Pacific. As Toschi inspected their five rooms, one asked him, “Are you familiar with the Zodiac killer story? That’s our next project.” He laughed, knowing how many years he had spent hunting Zodiac. “What was it like to be on the hunt for a serial killer?” they asked, and so he told them. When Toschi saw the completed show, he said, “At least they didn’t make me a nut. I even got to save the life of Nash Bridges [Don Johnson] through the character of his former mentor. The plot is that Bridges hears his mentor in homicide, Dale Cutter, a retired inspector, is having family problems. After many years, he goes hunting for Zodiac again. The drama ends with the real Zodiac still alive and making a call to Bridges.”

  Unsolved Mysteries would profile Zodiac, and the
Fox Network program Millennium filmed an episode in which the hero (Frank Black) approaches Zodiac’s trailer through the brush in Santa Rosa. The climax occurs in a theater like the Avenue. In the darkened movie house Black comes upon Zodiac—gun pointed, one foot advanced, the square-cornered black hood with the crossed circle in stark contrast—the drawing of him in costume come to life. The figure, through, is a dummy that allows Zodiac to escape as effectively as the actual Zodiac had.

  Wednesday, March 4, 1992

  Detectives had not yet given up on Leigh. Weary manhunters, realizing they were up against a wily and clever opponent, thought they had overlooked some clue. Painstakingly, they scrutinized items seized from the suspect’s house, sought out the FBI for strategy. The bureau’s thousand-page Zodiac file mentioned only Arthur Leigh Allen in detail, his dossier accounting for ten percent of the file. Agents studied periodicals recovered from Leigh’s basement, especially an article on Dave Eastman, the “Bird Man of Eaton,” that had seized the suspect’s interest. The FBI ferreted out a second article on Eastman in The Irregular, a New Hampshire free periodical dated April 19, 1989. Of what import to Leigh Allen was Eastman, a former helicopter pilot and birdhouse builder? Leigh was a flyer (that association alone might have sparked his interest), but it made more sense if he had hidden something in a wilderness birdhouse. They noted that Eastman wore glasses like those in the Zodiac wanted circular. Detectives fine-combed their bounty again. Perhaps they already had that clue, but did it lie there unrecognized on a table heaped with other recovered articles?

  “As an experienced homicide investigator,” retired Detective Baker remarked, “I recognize that, for purposes of search warrants and for determining the validity of suspects’ admissions/confessions, the existence of such items would not be made public. However, unless the mention of specific items was somehow redacted/deleted from the publicized versions of the warrants to search Allen’s residence, this may not be the case (items not named with any specificity in the warrant may not be seized). This would lead me to believe that any souvenirs he may have collected may be more esoteric or abstract than would otherwise be recognized by the investigators. Then again . . . perhaps the investigators of that period may have lacked the present-day sophistication to have recognized the absence of such items from the scenes.”

  But what was there? A pile of recipe cards that had words humorously misspelled, a slip of yellow paper and a Zodiac Sea Wolf Watch the detectives had expected to find. They anticipated clippings on Zodiac; they were there. A serial killer who craved publicity would be compelled to keep cuttings of his newspaper appearances. He not only had videotapes of news programs mentioning Zodiac, but had retained a copy of the return of service of a search warrant Toschi had handed him in 1972. Allen had smiled then, as if he knew a joke that the police did not.

  I thought of Lynch’s anonymous tip in 1969. Without that tip, Leigh would not have been a suspect until he spoke freely to the three detectives at the oil refinery. He seemed to want to interact with the police, and enjoyed it when he was finally a suspect. What if Leigh had turned himself in? If not, who had been the tipster?

  “I probably hadn’t seen Leigh in twenty-five or thirty years,” Kay Huffman told me later. “I hadn’t kept in touch. I knew he had been down in Atascadero and I knew what for. And that blew me away because I had had no inkling of anything like that. Harold and Leigh had gone to an air show and he brought him home here. There was this little old man. I don’t know what happened to the young vigorous person I knew, but he wasn’t there anymore. Now the diabetes had made him look terrible and aged. I was devastated for days afterward. I couldn’t believe it was the same person.

  “My dad was very ill too and so I’d go up to Vallejo to visit him. I usually did that about every other weekend and if Leigh was in, I’d stop by and visit him a little bit. The first time I stopped by, he wanted to tell me about how he had burglar-proofed the house ’cause there had been a break-in. Then he wanted to know if I wanted to see the guns and knives he kept in the basement room his mother built for him. We used to call it ‘The Dungeon.’ I looked at him and said, ‘That isn’t what I came to see. I came to see you.’ And he says, ‘You don’t want to talk about my guns?’ ‘No, I don’t want to talk about them and I don’t want to see them ever.’”

  Monday, March 23, 1992

  An FBI special agent met with Conway while Bawart was following up leads. On Monday morning Conway advised the agent they were reinitiating the Zodiac serial murder investigation. “This was because of information concerning a possible suspect—Arthur Leigh Allen,” the S.A. wrote of the meeting.

  “Conway and Bawart were interested in designing an interview strategy for ALLEN should it become necessary to confront him,” said the submitted FBI report [252B-SF-9447]. He stated he “met on two separate occasions with Conway and Bawart. . . . These two meetings lasted a total of approximately ten hours. These investigators were interested in an interview strategy for a possible suspect ARTHUR LEIGH ALLEN. However, they indicated they had a considerable amount of investigation to conduct prior to contacting ALLEN.” The memo mentioned the 1991 search and indicated VPD had subsequently interviewed him again twice. On all occasions, ALLEN was “calm and cooperative,” but denied any involvement. This case was left pending because the Vallejo police indicated that they wanted additional assistance in their investigation as information developed. Therefore this case was left open until 3/23/92, when Bawart was contacted to provide a status report on the case. Because of SA caseload during the last year with priority matters . . . no regular memos have been placed in the [Allen] file explaining the reason to have the case remain open.”

  Tuesday, March 24, 1992

  As Bawart and Conway prepared “Report, Case #243145,” they discovered more circumstances that indicated Arthur Leigh Allen was in fact the Zodiac killer. “They got a lot of stuff that Mulanax did, then went and talked to some of the same people,” I was told. “A lot of what the informants were telling Conway and Bawart in the early nineties they didn’t tell Mulanax. Maybe they were afraid back then to come forward, but now in 1992 they’re not so afraid anymore. They just wanted to nail Zodiac.”

  Conway had advised the bureau that there “were two additional interviews to be conducted with people who had known the suspect for a long time . . . with a man who had known Allen at the time of the killings [Cheney].” Once these interviews were conducted, Conway indicated, he and Bawart “will present a full review of the case to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office for an opinion regarding possible prosecution for ALLEN. If the D.A. refuses to fill charges against ALLEN, Vallejo Police Department will close its investigation on the ‘ZODIAC’ case.”

  Bawart located Cheney. “When George Bawart tracked me down,” Cheney told me, “he contacted me by telephone, I talked to him. Then they had me come down to be interviewed by them in Vallejo. They flew me down to Sacramento, and George met me at the airport and drove me to Vallejo. We spent a couple of hours together with Roy Conway. What I had told Armstrong (and the other detectives) I told them. They recorded everything I said, and they pumped me for everything I could give them.

  “Allen loved to outsmart the other guy, I told them. In a 1967 conversation Leigh asked me how to alter his appearance. We discussed theatrical makeup and what you could accomplish with it. I wasn’t curious why he was asking me this. It wasn’t unusual to talk about something like makeup.” By the time Allen became a known suspect, he had already altered his appearance to an astonishing degree by burying his athletic physique in fat.

  “With Leigh,” said Cheney, “you just get into conversations about ‘What if this’ and ‘What if that.’ It was just more of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Leigh was always interested in all kinds of things. And I was too. Leigh enjoyed misleading people. He liked to trick people or influence them into things that they otherwise wouldn’t do.”

  “In January 1969 Allen had a conversation with Donald Che
ney, a friend of his,” wrote Bawart in his report. “He guised this conversation as though he were going to write a novel. Allen indicated to Cheney that he would call himself Zodiac and use the Zodiac watch symbol as his symbol. That he would kill people in lovers’ lanes by using a weapon with a flashlight attached to it for sighting at night, that he would write letters to the police to confuse and taunt them and sign them as the Zodiac. Allen stated he would get women to stop on the freeway indicating they had some problems with the tires, he would loosen their lug nuts so their tire would later fall off and he could take them captive.”

  Bawart arranged for Cheney to be polygraphed back in Washington State. “Bawart gave me a polygraph in his presence,” Cheney told me. “It was so short I couldn’t believe it. A month later, I went and took another one in the same police station in Kennewick, South Central Washington, one of the tri-cities here where I live, but without Bawart being present. I gathered that in the first they didn’t have the right test questions. They flew a technician from Seattle over here to run the polygraph. It was a little on the dull side except for feeling some stress. They hooked me up so they could measure my respiration and blood pressure. It seemed to me there might be four to five responses—the number of needles on the paper.

  “They asked questions that required yes-or-no answers. He told me to just answer in a calm and monotone way, no emotion. In the second test—I’ll tell you why they gave me two tests. In the second test, when we had gone through all the questions—they start off with ‘What’s your name,’ then they ask the questions about the case. Then when I thought he was finished with that, he kept asking me more questions. It didn’t seem to matter what the answers were, but the questions were mainly rephrasing of things. I tripped up and made a misstatement. It wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t intentionally making a misstatement, but I just said something I didn’t intend to say. All the needles made a jump, flopped around. Then he was satisfied. That was what he wanted. I guess that they were looking for something that would gauge.” It turned out, as Bawart told me later, “Cheney was telling the truth.”