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

by Robert Graysmith

  Bob Woolridge, a good friend at Time-Life, called for an update on Zodiac. “Inspector Toschi called me at home for a chat,” he said. “I’ve been tracking down all this stuff that’s been going on in Vallejo. McCochran at the Vallejo Times-Herald has told me that the police apparently found a videotape after their second search warrant of Mr. Allen’s house. I don’t know what any of this means and I don’t think Vallejo police are talking. I’m going to try and speak to Captain Conway at Vallejo a little later this afternoon. I hope he’ll give me a hint at least. But if I hear anything I’ll certainly let you know.”

  As soon as police could, they played the videotape. All it showed was Allen mooning the police, cursing them, and complaining about the case. Authorities hinted more was on the tape, but “nothing incriminating.” Though Leigh had specified close friend Harold Huffman to be executor of his estate, the task fell to Ron Allen who “sort of took over.” Karen “took first dibs on all his stuff, not Ron,” a friend claimed. “Huffman only met her after Leigh’s death, but quickly took a disliking to her. I’ve read how Ron cooperated with the police, helped gather some information. I got the feeling that Ron knew his brother was involved in this type of activity. They have people in the media who have tracked them down. Ron’s a hard guy to reach. Usually, his wife won’t let him near the phone. I thought, since the guy died suddenly, maybe he left something behind. Maybe he did. I thought, a good chance they found something in that house.”

  Leigh Allen was not embalmed. Though he was cremated, samples of his brain fluid were ordered preserved. It might allow future DNA testing. Leigh’s ashes were to be scattered off the coast near San Rafael. The Vallejo Times-Herald headline a week after Allen’s death said: “SUSPECT’S DEATH WON’T HALT ZODIAC INVESTIGATION.” Death would not stop an investigation into the truth. We owed it to the victims to assemble the missing pieces. I could not stop. None of us could.

  Friday, October 2, 1992

  Darlene’s sister, Pam, claimed that she had confronted Allen before he died and, after his death, was in his home. In his bathroom she claimed she had observed “a weird sexual device held with suction cups to the side of the tub.”

  “Of course, I’m not actively working on the case anymore,” said Bawart. “I used to get all those letters, and since Arthur Leigh Allen died, nothing happens on it anymore. Someday down the road we ought to put our heads together. I’ve got every file that Fred Shirisago had. And all our files and all the original stuff on Zodiac. I’ve got it up in my attic along with a bunch of stuff of Allen’s. It might be interesting to go over it someday down the road if you ever write a sequel. What was really interesting is if you read this report—from then-Sergeant Lynch, in the center of another report on a regular piece of paper—I don’t think there are more than a hundred words in it. He talks about 1969 just after the Berryessa killings going and interviewing Arthur Leigh Allen as to his whereabouts at the time of the killing. Arthur Leigh Allen makes the statement about . . .”

  “About the chickens? Two chickens . . .” I said.

  “Yeah! And he was going to Berryessa on the day the killings took place, but he changed his mind and went to Salt Point. This was in 1969, before Toschi and Armstrong had even looked at him. I hadn’t read that until I got reinvolved in it in early 1992. So I go back and Lynch is still alive. He has since died. I go ask him, ‘John, you don’t say in the report why you’re going talking to Arthur Leigh Allen. What prompted you to pick out this guy? You don’t say—and he couldn’t remember. Somebody—somehow, his name came up in 1969 just after the Berryessa killing.

  “Usually—I’d write a report and say, ‘Pursuant to John Doe telling me that Arthur Leigh Allen fit the description and claimed he was going to Berryessa on that day, I went by to talk to him.’ Then at least I’d have John Doe to go back to and talk to later on. I’d ask him, ‘Why did you accuse this guy?’ Of course your book came out much before I went and talked to Lynch. When I talked to him, he had quit drinking. But he wasn’t in the best of health. He just couldn’t remember.

  “John Lynch was a prince of a guy. He was a very honest, straightforward guy, but he had a hell of a booze problem. When John would get off duty—it was spooky—he lived in an old house in an old section of town. It wasn’t really a Victorian. It was sort of a Tudor. If you had to go by and talk to him about something, he never would answer the phone. You go by and you knock and he’d come to the door and there were no lights on and it was musty. He would always talk to you on the front porch. He’d be drunk from the time he got off duty to the time eight hours before he was to come on duty.

  “My guess was this: Allen told a family member or friend he was going to Berryessa. Later that unknown person read of the murders. Allen must have said something or been acting erratically enough for them to tip the police. My money is on a family member.” Would we ever discover who that early tipster had been?

  “From our last two conversations, I’m truly amazed at your background information on Zodiac,” said Toschi. “Some of the information you have on Arthur Leigh Allen in the Riverside area really got my attention, and I wish that the Riverside P.D. had given me the fact that Allen was actually known around their town. It would have given me a stronger case to discuss with our D.A. and the other detectives working on the Zodiac case.”

  Sunday, May 15, 1994

  “There is one specific detective [Harvey Hines] who has since retired from a very small police department,” Conway explained, “who is absolutely convinced that he solved the Zodiac case and it happens to be a guy who has a lengthy criminal history and he’s living in Tahoe. Again there is no fingerprint match, no handwriting matches, there’s nothing more than a whole bunch of coincidences.”

  The Chronicle ran a two-part story about Hines’s suspect in its This World section. The article upset Toschi. “It was cheap journalism,” he told me. “I wouldn’t even call it journalism. I remember talking to Hines in the seventies, and he was very strange then. He had tunnel vision. He wouldn’t even listen to other suspects and keep an open mind. Hines has had twenty years to find out where his guy was on the dates of the murders. It should be easy to prove one way or the other. Paul Avery called me, and he too was upset.”

  “Conway is equally certain that the Zodiac is someone else,” reported the Chronicle. “I’ll tell you what I told Harvey [Hines],” said Captain Conway of the Vallejo Police Department. “He’s wasting his life barking up the wrong tree. [His suspect] is not the Zodiac. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve given Harvey over the years, but he has nothing of any evidentiary value. I believe as I always have that the Zodiac was Arthur Leigh Allen. If I could show Harvey what evidence we have on Allen today, he would get off this kick immediately. Unfortunately, I can’t do that for legal reasons.” Added Conway about suspect Allen, who died in 1992, “If Allen were alive today, we would file charges against him as the Zodiac. Unfortunately, we ran out of time making a case against him and he died.”

  35

  the conference

  Monday, April 26, 1993

  “The subject today is the Zodiac killer,” Judge George T. Choppelas said solemnly. A gray-haired, whip-smart Municipal Court magistrate, he looked like Fred Astaire, and kept as trim with regular workouts on his rowing machine. The perplexing case fascinated the judge, and he had called a special discussion on Zodiac to rethink the case and satisfy his own curiosity. The meeting convened at a San Francisco State auditorium at 1:30 P.M. in front of a large audience. Choppelas, acting as moderator, introduced Rita Williams, KTVU-TV newsperson. “She interviewed the person, the one suspect,” he said, “that Vallejo and San Francisco investigators and Robert Graysmith, former political cartoonist turned author, and others believe to have been the Zodiac killer.”

  Choppelas then recounted Cheney’s story of Allen’s vow (a year before there was a Zodiac) to tie a flashlight to his gun barrel, shoot couples in the woods, and write taunting letters signed Zodiac to the police. He explai
ned how Allen was in the Riverside College area when Bates was stabbed, and how Darlene Ferrin was stalked by a friend named “Leigh.” He told how there were no letters from Zodiac while Allen was confined at Atascadero and how the Santa Rosa murders ceased during that time. Captain Roy Conway, immediately on the scene of the Ferrin murder in 1969, had been associated with the case ever since. “I was a patrol sergeant that evening and I was dispatched to a place that was in a remote part of Vallejo on July 4, 1969. Both victims were still alive at the time. The male survived, the female died. I tried to talk to her and talk to him both. She was unable to speak or do anything, and had been shot with multiple gunshot wounds. The passenger in the car had been shot multiple times and he has survived. He’s still alive to this day.

  “Because I was a patrol sergeant at the time, I was not initially assigned as the investigator on the crime. It was not till several years later when I got promoted to captain that I was given responsibility for the case. The primary investigator who’s been working on this case the longest of all law enforcement personnel that’s ever been involved is Detective George Bawart, who’s sitting over there in the corner.” George stood and waved. “What we’ve done over the years—every time there’s any kind of media attention given to the Zodiac case, there’s all kinds of information that flows into [the] police department, or departments, and other departments and [the] California Department of Justice. There’s all kinds of people calling up who say I know who the Zodiac is.”

  Conway pointed out what he considered some of the misinformation about Zodiac. I didn’t agree with all of it. “It’s not intentional,” he said. “One of the pieces of misinformation is the Riverside homicide. I’m here to officially tell you that the Riverside Police Department never believed that Zodiac was involved. We have since more than satisfied ourselves that Zodiac had nothing whatsoever to do with the Riverside killing.” Riverside thought their local suspect had committed the homicide. But a handwriting examination had already proven Zodiac wrote letters to the Riverside press claiming responsibility for Bates’s murder.

  Captain Conway played his case conservatively, focusing unequivocally only on those cases where it was absolutely certain that Zodiac had been involved. “There are only three of them in that category. The reason we know the three are unequivocally the Zodiac is because he gives physical evidence or verbal evidence that only the killer would know.” He pointed to the Paul Stine cab killing as most striking—Zodiac had swiped a portion of Stine’s shirt, enclosing fragments with his correspondence. “In our case [the Blue Rock Springs murder] Zodiac went to a pay telephone right after the homicide. In fact, I would have had to have passed him because it’s a long road out to where this homicide occurred. I probably passed him, although we went to great lengths to try and time everything. The people who discovered the people who were shot took a long time to get to a telephone—probably more than a half hour passed before we even got a phone call.

  “Shortly after [12:40 A.M.], a male voice called from a pay telephone, which we subsequently located [traced to Joe’s Union Station at Tuolumne and Springs Road by 12:47 A.M.], telling that he just committed this homicide and how he did it and some other details to cause us to know this was really the guy who did it. One of the examples of misinformation is that we had no recording devices in the police department in those days. There was in fact no recording of that phone call.” Former Vallejo Patrolman Steve Baldino disagreed. On Now It Can Be Told, with Geraldo Rivera, on July 14, 1992, he had said, “I heard the tape—the dispatcher let me hear it. I believe it was the next night. Apparently the tape is no longer here, but it did in fact exist, because I did hear it.” Nancy Slover, the police operator, had heard it too.

  “The other homicide we know positively for sure,” continued Conway, “is the Lake Berryessa homicide. Again the killer gave some very pertinent information that only he would know. There’s only three. The other killing, on Lake Herman Road, happened [seven months] before the Zodiac killing. We had some very good suspects in that case, and Detective Bawart and I are satisfied that the Zodiac didn’t really do that case, although we don’t have unequivocal proof on that.

  “The other interesting thing about the Zodiac case is that there are several people who have become obsessed with solving the case. We have had several in our own department. There are private citizens who became obsessed with the case and have convinced themselves they have absolutely solved it. They are very absolute about it. Neither one of the suspects that they have are our suspect.

  “All three have written lengthy documentation about it. One is an attorney in our city who claims his brother, his dead brother, is the Zodiac [Jack Beeman]. Another used mathematics to prove it. In his mind he is absolutely convinced he’s solved the Zodiac case. He thinks it’s a college professor at Boston University who now works for the University of California at Berkeley. If you talk to that man and give him any time, he is absolutely, unequivocally convinced. He says its mathematically impossible for anybody to be the Zodiac except [his] suspect.

  “We have two other individuals, both in law enforcement. One of them is now retired just recently . . . he’s been working on it twenty years and he’s absolutely convinced he knows who the Zodiac is. And his Zodiac is living in Tahoe. Then we have another person in another state agency that worked on the Zodiac for years. He happened to be on duty. He stopped and did a field interrogation of a person he believes to this day is the Zodiac. So everyone of these people, if you talk to them, independent of anything else, you would say he must be right. It’s only logical that he’s right.

  “One of the major reasons that the Zodiac case has not actually been solved to the point of somebody being actually arrested and tried is that law enforcement didn’t do a very good job of coordinating information. . . . One of the most telling points in Mr. Graysmith’s book—he asks the question why the search warrant wasn’t served at two locations, and only one location—and that was twenty years ago that happened. If they had served a search warrant at the right location at that time, they probably would have solved the Zodiac case. But they didn’t.

  “Twenty years later, Detective Bawart and I served that search warrant! And we did that a couple years ago. We found a lot of information that caused us to believe we were on the right track, but that person subsequently died and we don’t have any legal mechanism to say we’ve solved the case because we can’t bring the suspect to trial. He’s referred to in Robert Graysmith’s book as ‘Robert Hall Starr.’ His actual name is Arthur Leigh Allen.

  “He’s worked in Vallejo all his life. At the time [1971-72] San Francisco Police Department developed information that we subsequently backtracked and gone over every piece of it. That information would have allowed them to serve a search warrant on his primary residence in Vallejo, but at that point of time he was living part-time in a little trailer in Santa Rosa. And so they served the warrant on his little trailer in Santa Rosa instead of his home in Vallejo. I’m fairly convinced that if they had served the search warrant on that home in Vallejo, they would have found the actual smoking gun, but that didn’t happen. It’s primarily because they were working on their own and made no effort to coordinate information with our agency.”

  “There’s a lot of instances that occurred in this case that happened in one area and the other area didn’t know about it,” added Bawart. “Those are the kind of errors in the case the various police departments made. Roy and I, in hindsight, taking all this stuff down twenty years later, put it all together and made us seem like we’re real smart, but we’re not. We had the benefit of all those reports.”

  The judge asked me how I came to write the book. “The way I got interested in this,” I said, “I was political cartoonist for the Chronicle and every day you try to do a cartoon that’s going to make a change in the world. I looked at the Zodiac case and thought, ‘Here’s a guy no one seems to be able to catch. If I go around the state and put together as many facts as I can and put
a book out there, somebody’s going to solve this.’ It’s pretty much what I decided to do, and I did over a ten-year period. At the end of that time I had a book of considerable length. An editor and I spent another three years taking out five hundred pages. Maybe we took the real suspect out. It’s possible, but not likely. We did place Mr. Allen as a student at Riverside and in that library the night Cheri Jo Bates was slain. Perhaps, as Captain Conway believes, Riverside wasn’t a Zodiac killing, but of all the 2,500 suspects in the case, Allen was the only one at the scene.”

  Conway discussed the prints in Stine’s cab.

  “Hundreds of people can be in a cab. There was emergency medical personnel at the scene, other officials at the scene. Nobody took any elimination prints at the time. They have a whole drawer full of fingerprints that came out of that cab, and it’s an extremely arduous task and most of them are partial. I assure you the primary suspects have been checked. There’s no fingerprint matches anywhere. . . . Ken Moses, one of the best print men in the state and SFPD has one of the best computer systems in the state. They certainly would have run that bloody print long ago had it worked out, but they didn’t preserve the crime scene well enough, any of the prints, particularly the bloody print of the man believed to be responsible. There were ambulance people there, there were other cops there. They are saying, how come this print doesn’t match up to the analyzer? It could have been the guy driving the ambulance got some of Paul Stine’s blood on his hands and then touched it and that’s the way of the bloody print.

  “Incidentally, Allen wore size 10½ shoes, and that’s the size of the Wing Walker shoe print found at Lake Berryessa,” I said. I summarized the pattern of the murders: “They usually happened by a body of water on a weekend and usually involved a young couple who were enjoying all the things Zodiac did not enjoy—intimate, loving relationships.”