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

by Robert Graysmith

  The biggest obstacle still was that Allen’s handprinting did not match the Zodiac’s. ‘The experts explained that the only explanation for this would be if ALLEN would have been able to develop a ‘false handwriting, ’” Bawart wrote. Allen had once asked Cheney if books on how to disguise handwriting existed, and later studied books on fake handwriting. The FBI noted: “Vallejo has requested no further assistance on this case, and it is therefore recommended that this case be closed at this time.”

  At Bawart’s workplace, a cabinet shop, he was mulling over a possibility that had intrigued him for years—one that might explain everything. There might be two Zodiacs working as master and slave. That theory had been one of the reasons George had tracked down Allen’s friend Robert Emmett. “I conjectured that there might be two Zodiacs, partners working together,” he told me later. “After that trip to Germany and seeing the man, I came to believe there was only one. As for Donald Lee Cheney, he’s now a retired mechanical engineer in Washington. Panzarella is wealthy, has sold his stock, and become owner of RKO Pictures Film Library. I even went down to interview him. Panzarella was just a regular guy, but he had all this money.”

  As for Ralph Spinelli, the other known tipster, he had reportedly been incarcerated 290 miles north of San Francisco on the Oregon border. Allen, after the Stine murder, had kicked in his door and beaten him a second time.

  Wednesday, August 26, 1992

  On a nice August afternoon about 3:00 P.M., George Bawart was working in his garage, the smell of new lumber and sawdust sweet in his lungs. A street cop phoned him at home and Bawart hustled to the phone. It had a special attachment for his hearing disability and made voices extra loud. “The cop was kind of a joker,” Bawart recalled.

  “Are you still investigating Arthur Leigh Allen as the Zodiac?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Bawart said. “Arthur Allen.”

  “Well, I’m in his house and he’s laying on the floor.”

  “What’s he doing laying on the floor?”

  “Well, he’s dead and he’s lying here with a great big bump on his forehead.”

  George listened carefully to the rest.

  He put the phone down. The room seemed to swim. They had waited too long. He steadied himself. Had someone, perhaps Zodiac’s partner or someone after revenge, gotten Zodiac before they could?

  34

  zodiac

  Wednesday, August 26, 1992

  “A street cop got detailed there,” Bawart told me. “Allen wasn’t answering his door. He had a girl living upstairs. When they didn’t hear from him for a long time, Allen’s upstairs boarder found his body. The cops went there. They opened the door, got in the house, and there’s Allen lying face down on the floor. I rushed over. I had to make sure he died of natural causes. His name has been published. He’s been showing up on TV. He’s been granting interviews and drawing all sorts of attention to himself. The Ferrin family had called me a number of times and said, ‘Do you really think he did it?’ I told them, ‘Yeah.’ And the Ferrin family can be kind of goofy. I thought, ‘Jesus, did one of them do something?’ So I went on down there and he was in fact dead.”

  Bawart stood in the dim basement, his intent face lit by the glow of Leigh’s new computer. He steadied himself, looking thoughtfully at the big man in the bathrobe on the cold floor. The professional side of the detective took hold. Bawart began assessing the facts. He recalled Allen’s words from television: “About the only way the heat will stop is if I die, that will cure it for me or if Zodiac himself confesses. . . . They haven’t arrested me . . . because they can’t prove a thing.”

  “He had fallen face down,” Bawart told me. “I rolled him over. He had a little injury to his head that I was at first a little bit concerned with. He had been bleeding. Usually when you have a heart attack, if you die right away you don’t bleed anymore. So I got the coroner and the medical examiner.”

  Thus, the prime suspect, with a lump on his head, his bathrobe open, lay with newspapers about Zodiac spread about him. In addition to clippings about the case, Allen possessed everything the experts had expected Zodiac to have—an arsenal of guns, bombs, a portable typewriter, a knife scabbard with rivets. . . . I recalled when Rita Williams had interviewed Allen the previous year, he had been dressed as he was today—in a flimsy bathrobe and rubber boots. He had attempted to shock her, waving his arms and shouting that the police had persecuted him. Bawart walked to the humming Epson Equity 1 computer. “The thing that interested me,” he said, “is that when I got there there was a bunch of computer discs out on the table and they said ‘Zodiac’ on them and stuff like that.”

  Floppy discs were scattered by the printer. Bawart ejected a disc still in the machine. It was labeled “Zodiac.” What was on the discs and in the computer and what was the significance of those particular Zodiac newspapers? Apparently the computers had been added since the last search—an Avstar computer, an Epson Equity 1 computer, and all accessories. Then Bawart spied a videotape marked with the letter “Z” lying on a bookshelf at the east wall. Bawart was excited over the tape. They would need a warrant to view that. As soon as they could, they played it. All the video showed was Allen mooning the police, cursing them, and complaining about the case—nothing incriminating.

  For some time Bawart had known Allen had been ill—suffering from diabetes, heart troubles, severe arthritis, and kidney failure. So the end was not only expected, but might be easily explained. The detective consulted the coroner, and he established the facts of death: “Found August 26, 1992 at 3:10 P.M. Immediate cause of death: Arteriosclerotic Heart Disease. Other significant Conditions Contributing to Death But Not Related to Cause Given: Diabetes Mellitus, Cardiomegaly, heart disease heart disease.” And the bump? “The coroner determined,” said Bawart, “that when Allen hit the floor he banged his head.”

  D.A. Mike Nail had already scheduled a meeting on Arthur Leigh Allen sometime earlier. With the death, the parley would still proceed. “About a week before we went to meet with him, Arthur Leigh Allen dropped dead. So that at this meeting, this D.A., being kind of a half-assed comedian, said, ‘We’ve got good news and bad news. We’re not going to file on Shawn Melton’—they didn’t want to spend the money on that—‘but I’m going to file on Arthur Leigh Allen.’ He was naturally joking because he knew he couldn’t file on a dead man.

  “The good news is that I’m going to indict Arthur Leigh Allen as the Zodiac. The bad news is that he’s dead.” “Mike Nail,” George told me later, “had political aspirations as a superior court judge [which he realized]. I’ve known Mike Nail my entire career. He started out as a rookie D.A. straight out of law school. He and I didn’t socialize together, but we would joke and stuff. He probably would not have filed on Allen, to be honest with you, because he was going for a judgeship and would not in any way want that to be compromised. The gist of it is we were going to file on him and he promptly died on us. The problem was the district attorney didn’t want to file on a dead guy. But they won’t one hundred percent clear it.

  “When we were getting ready to charge Allen with the case. I compiled a list so we could go to the district attorney’s office. When Jim Lang and Conway and I met with Mike Nail. We were doing two things that day—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 harebrained idea that he was the Zodiac. But he wasn’t, I can assure you of that! We were meeting with Nail, 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. We were also meeting at the same time to see if he would file on Arthur Leigh Allen.

  “Those thirty points were made to give to him to have something firm in
his hand rather than us telling him each and every point. That report was actually made to present to the district attorney’s office, but wasn’t intended to be part of the case file per se. I don’t remember all thirty of them. Some of them, when you’re putting together something like that, I didn’t intend for it to end up in the case file. It was more of a working file. One or two or three of those points a defense attorney could pick up on and really hammer because there was some supposition where I really didn’t have a lot of background to back them up. But the meat of the thing I could back up.”

  Thursday, August 27, 1992

  Conway signed an affidavit for a search warrant. “As you know,” Bawart told me, “I wrote another search warrant and searched his house again even though he was dead. There was a computer system and the videotape. The purpose of the search warrant was to view that tape and, according to the affidavit, determine if it contained evidence related to the so-called Zodiac killings.”

  Vallejo police descended to the lower apartment at 32 Fresno Street—as dark, dank, and museumlike as it had been the previous year. In the Epson printer was Allen’s partially completed “Polygraph Agreement” for the Vallejo police. Conway took possession of numerous videotapes and five containers of discs and manuals for the printer stacked there. Near the computer lay an index of computer discs labeled “Polygon” and a yellow disc catalogue with discs labled “Plolams” [Allen’s intentional misspelling of “Programs”]. They discovered a “Fruit Juice Recipe” bomb formula and a box with blank notepaper. Strips of paper were covered with math. A last will and instructions for the computer were on the east wall bookshelf. The will and instructions read:

  “Being sound in mind, if not in body, I hereby put to paper my last will and testament. I will update this document as conditions warrant, so this computer version will always be the last and most current will and testament. In cases of printed copies, the date on the copy will determine whether it is the most recent version of the will. All pages must be signed and dated by me, as well as the end of the last page.

  “First and foremost I wish to have it known that, due to whatever circumstances, I enter a vegetative state, that all life support systems be disconnected and whatever of my body organs that can be used to help others be utilized for that purpose upon my death.

  “The procedure for obtaining the most recent version of this will is as follows:” The detectives followed the procedure laid out—they turned on the monitor screen (the bottom roller on the lower right side of the monitor casing). They inserted the MS-DOS working copy.

  “Diskettes are located in the yellow-loose-leaf binder next to the printer into the top slot of the computer,” Allen had instructed. “This is known as the ‘A’ drive. With the elephant log on the top right toward you until it clicks. Push the ‘push’ button in so it clicks also. Push the power button in so the red light goes on. Insert the DATA disk into the lower slot (the ‘B’ drive) until it clicks, then push the ‘Push’ in as well. Now press the ‘enter’ key on the keyboard. A small light will appear on the ‘A’ drive and the computer will hum. Some printing will cycle onto the screen. When a request for the date or time appears, press the ‘entry’ key a couple times until the ‘A Prompt’ (A>) sign appears.”

  The instructions entailed seven complex maneuvers in detail to access the most current will: “I bestow upon my good friend, Harold Huffman, the duties of executor of this Will and Power-Of-Attorney. . . .” the document began. Allen left his Epson Equity 1 computer, all accessories, “porgrams” (as Leigh spelled it in his last will), and related literature to his tenant. Leigh concluded on a sad note and more lies.

  “As for my Brother, Ronald Allen . . . I was very deeply hurt by the total lack of support by his whole family during my recent conflict with the law. I still love my brother very much, which made the hurt all the deeper. I was hurt (but not surprised at all) when my sister-in-law took pains to phone me several times to tell me they were so broke that I couldn’t expect any financial help from them at all. Then they went right out and bought 3 Hondas, including a brand new Accord. Some poverty case! Still, if there is anything he wants for himself after all the above is sorted through, he is welcome to it. He’ll be getting the house anyway, which should be worth a couple bucks.”

  Leigh had four more cars, including a Corvair. He wanted his dentist to get his Rolls, but Ron got that. The cops studied a letter to the Vallejo police on the computer. “In the letter,” Bawart told me, “were references to letters he was gonna write about how he was gonna sue us for this, that, and the other.”

  “The return to the warrant says you found a knife and a knife scabbard with rivets,” I said to Bawart.

  “I don’t remember the scabbard at all,” he said. “I think we just took it because it had a knife. It wasn’t anything really earth-shattering. As for the Royal typewriter we found, that pertained to the Riverside murder and I had discounted Zodiac for that.” So had Conway. Riverside detectives were able to I.D. the typewriter used by the killer as a portable Royal typewriter, Elite type, Canterbury-shaded, such as found in Allen’s basement. Morrill had ruled that Zodiac wrote the handwritten Riverside letters mailed, but if he typed the confession letters too, then Allen’s typewriter might still offer a clue. I doubted it. The typewritten letters had been distant carbon copies.

  “I got about four or five phone calls when Allen died,” said Toschi glumly. “San Francisco was kind of curious why Vallejo didn’t just close the case. They told an inspector that the Vallejo district attorney chose not to close the case because Allen was terminally ill and was expected to die within two weeks. They had already scheduled a conference to discuss that decision in the next month after his death, so they went ahead and had it.”

  Saturday, August 29, 1992

  The day before, a Vallejo police property report on Allen had been filed in the municipal court clerk’s office. Now that the press realized who had died, they ran with the story. Erin Hallissy reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:“Man Once Suspected in Zodiac Case Dies—A man once suspected of being the Zodiac killer, who taunted police and terrorized Northern California with threats of murder, died Wednesday in Vallejo of a heart attack at the age of 58.

  “In 1971, attention focused on Arthur Leigh Allen when relatives and friends told police that he was acting erratically and that they feared he might be the sadistic slayer who killed at least six people and perhaps as many as 37 between 1966 and 1974. In his book “Zodiac,” former Chronicle editorial cartoonist Robert Graysmith described Allen under a fictitious name as the “the gut-feeling choice of most detectives” for the Zodiac killer. . . . Allen had reportedly told some people that he was the Zodiac killer.”

  Thursday, September 3, 1992

  “In the mid-1970s Allen was convicted of child-molesting charges and sentenced to prison,” Conway said publicly. “Last year, we searched Allen’s home in Vallejo as a part of a follow-up investigation into the unsolved case. We found some writings, some pipe bombs, some illegal weapons. None of it was sufficient to make an arrest for him being the Zodiac. . . . It is still an ongoing criminal investigation. His death has not changed that. I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation. I don’t have any reason to believe that Allen’s death was a suicide and there has been no preliminary evidence that foul play was involved.”

  In San Francisco, Dave MacHalhatton, KPIX-TV anchor, bannered the suspect’s death on the evening news. He and his wife, Bonnie, had conducted the first hour-long show on Zodiac with me back in 1986. “Allen died this week,” he said, “leaving behind the unanswered question, ‘Was he really the Zodiac?’” Tomas Roman reported that “the only thing the police are certain of is that their case remains unsolved. His death has little effect on the ongoing investigation into the man known as the Zodiac, the man who taunted police by claiming to have killed as many as thirty-seven people. . . . But even after an extensive search, police still did not charge Allen . . . with any crime linking him w
ith the Zodiac killings.”

  “I am not the Zodiac,” Allen had told KPIX. “I have never killed anyone. They have me questioning myself. . . . The only way I could clear myself is for the real Zodiac to confess—if he’s still alive. . . . All I can do is suppose on that. The only way I can get peace for myself is when I am finally dead and gone.”

  All Toschi could say was, “Mr. Allen was a very, very good suspect. We looked into Mr. Allen very closely.” The FBI, on noting the death, said in a report, “The San Francisco case is closed at this time.”

  “This retired cop who was working on the case told me he’s out of work now,” Pete Noyes told me. “They found a lot of computer discs in Allen’s house. They went in there and picked up a lot of stuff. The psychologist, Thomas Rykoff, apparently has some deal going with a guy down here to write a book. I don’t know if that’s ethical or not. Rykoff interviewed him at Atascadero.”