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

by Robert Graysmith

  “The old Zodiac—that thing will never die,” said another. When Toschi spoke to Avery, Avery said, “That’s history, that’s all in the past, Dave.” “That kinda saddened me a bit,” Toschi told me, “because for me it was the case of a career.”

  Sunday, August 29, 1999

  “It always surprised me that Ken Narlow knew hardly anything about Allen,” Tom Voigt, who ran a Web page on Zodiac, told me. “I brought him the Bawart Report on the reasons why Allen is the Zodiac and copies of Mulanax’s report. We went over to his house and he started reading it. He was not impressed with how the report looked—the first thing he said was, ‘It’s not on official letterhead, but the content makes up for the way it’s presented.’ He read a bit more. He turned red, and was swearing quite a bit by the time he finished. He was very angry. ‘If even a couple of these things are true,’ he said, ‘then Allen’s the Zodiac!’

  “Narlow was upset because he hadn’t known anything about this when it was going on. He had been invited to the search in 1972, but couldn’t go because he had a hernia operation. He was relying on Mulanax, Armstrong, and Toschi to clue him in. He’s really angry because he’s reading all this for the first time and knew nothing of the facts in the report. At that point he started trying to track down Bill Armstrong. He was tough to find, but Narlow eventually talked to him. They had a long conversation. Armstrong had put it all behind him. When Armstrong quit, he really quit. He didn’t realize that Allen had ever been searched again. He didn’t know that Allen had died. Basically, it was just like he was living in a cave.”

  “As far as I could tell,” Voigt told me, “the Vallejo police had put all their Zodiac records on microfilm and destroyed the originals. Mel Nicolai told me—we talked in May—he told me they placed Allen in Riverside and they know for a fact he was there. He wasn’t a student and he didn’t work there. At the time Bates was murdered he was a schoolteacher at Valley Springs Elementary School in Calaveras County, and every weekend Allen would go to Riverside. Drive all the way down to Riverside because he was a member of this racing club.”

  Tuesday, October 19, 1999

  “I decided last week I was going to retire,” Toschi told me. “I wasn’t feeling too good—I was kind of dragging. I was working an average of ten hours a day. I’m sixty-eight now. I’m still doing a little security and body-guard work at Temple Emmanuel since around 1987. I was doing a lot of things and it was beginning to take its toll. I’m going to do a little P.I. work. I’ve had my license since ’86. You’ve got to have your weapon, state firearms certificate, a book test. Because of my background they’ll waive the firing test. ‘I think you still know how to shoot,’ they said. I had my ‘CCW,’ carrying concealed weapon, from the chief, which made me legal.”

  As I spoke with Toschi, it had occurred to me I had interviewed many of the witnesses the police had not, seen files long since destroyed. I knew facts they did not. Perhaps the case against Arthur Leigh Allen could still be made. I tried out some of the new intelligence on Toschi.

  “Did you know,” I asked him, “that Allen had his trailer repaneled just before you searched it in 1972? Who knows what was hidden in those walls? He had another trailer by Bodega Bay. No wonder you didn’t find anything. Then Zodiac signed his murder of the San Francisco cabbie.”

  “How is that?” asked Toschi.

  “Stine, undeniably a Zodiac victim, did not fit the pattern of attacks against couples, though he qualified by being a student. He may have been chosen for another reason. Stine did not die at a water-related site, though his original destination had been Third Avenue and Lake. After Allen told Spinelli he was going to San Francisco to kill a taxi driver he chose a specific cabbie and specific destination. Paul Stine’s middle name was ‘Lee,’ and his birthday, December 18, the same as Leigh Allen’s. Yellow Cab dispatcher LeRoy Sweet gave Stine his last scheduled trip destination at 9:45 P.M.—to 500 Ninth Avenue, Apartment #1—an apartment complex, the Allen Arms. Tom Voigt pointed that out to me. Zodiac had given us his first name, ‘Lee,’ his birth date, ‘December 18,’ and his last name, ‘Allen.’20 But how Zodiac knew Stine’s birth date and middle name and how he snared that specific cab, I can’t imagine. Did this mean he knew Stine? Additionally an ‘Arthur Allen, student, ’ was renting an unfurnished apartment at 320 2nd Avenue, only four and a half blocks from the murder site.”

  Stine began pushing his hack at 8:45 P.M., his only completed fare—from Pier 64 to the Air Terminal. His incomplete way-bill read Washington and Maple Streets in Presidio Heights. “He never arrived at the 9th Avenue location,” said Sweet. “At 9:58 P.M. I assigned the ‘no-go’ dispatch to another cab.” Responding officers at Washington and Cherry discovered the cab meter still running, indicating Stine had picked up a fare en route. At exactly 10:46 P.M. the meter read $6.28.”21 That enabled Armstrong and Toschi to backtrack to where Zodiac had gotten into the cab—Geary and Mason. Witnesses observed Zodiac wiping down the left-side doors of the cab prior to his escaping, leading Toschi to believe that this was the side from which he entered downtown.

  Stine, who drove a motorcycle, had been selling insurance to pay his way through SF State. Could he have previously met Zodiac as an insurance client or at a motorcycle club? Zodiac shot Stine from the backseat,then entered the right front door. Three teenaged witnesses across the street observed Stine being “jostled” by Zodiac who was “seated in the right front seat at the time.” Stine generally kept his cab fares and tip money in his pocket and would separate it at the end of his shift. His wife, Claudia, said he had only $3 to $4 of his own money when he left home for work. Zodiac took Stine’s wallet (where he kept all his registration papers) and some keys to the cab. Was Zodiac looking for something that would link him to his victim?

  “If Stine was taking his cab out to the Richmond [District],” theorized Toschi, “Zodiac may have flagged him down and said, ‘I want to go to Washington and Maple.’ Stine might have said, ‘That’s almost in the same area. I can do two at once. I can drop you off and get over to Ninth Avenue in five minutes. I’ve got a guy jumping in the front seat. I can take you and handle the other one. I get two fares for one.’” Toschi had suspected Allen was left-handed, but never been able to prove it.

  “In his last will,” I said, “Leigh requested that a Clear Lake friend, Mark, receive ‘my left-handed scissors and all my archery equipment.’ So, he was ambidextrous after all, as you suspected. Eyewitnesses confirmed that Leigh wore unique Wing Walker shoes the same size as Zodiac’s. He fits Zodiac’s physical description in every way—six-foot height and over two hundred and thirty pounds. The lumbering walk. Leigh, by his own words, placed himself at the Berryessa and Riverside scenes. He had the technical knowledge to write codes, diagram and build bombs, and the skill to shoot various weapons. He and Zodiac share the same birthday. He misspelled the same words as Zodiac on his menu cards. And what about Don Cheney? When he took a lie detector test, he passed. His comments in 1971 about Allen saying he wanted to hunt people and call himself the Zodiac were true.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me at all,” said Toschi.

  “Now Phil Tucker says Allen told him the same things. Leigh confessed he was Zodiac to a variety of people—a Sonoma Auto Parts employee; Spinelli, of course. Police referred to the criminal as ‘Zodiac.’ However, Zodiac referred to himself as ‘The Zodiac.’ Allen, in his taped interviews with television crews, always said ‘The Zodiac.’ On his analyst’s tapes Allen reportedly sobbed and admitted he was ‘The Zodiac.’ He claimed he spoke for Zodiac, and explained the origin of the Zodiac ciphers as having originated at Atascadero.”

  “How do you discount remarks like that?” said Toschi. “Allen was a very sick, disturbed, and dangerous man—a frightening person. It was unfortunate that the Vallejo P.D. didn’t charge him even though they knew he was Zodiac. It would have put closure on the darn thing. It would have brought relief to those who survived. And made a lot of peace officers happy. The case is close
d. That’s all I wanted to do was close the case. Tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Let me advise you of your Miranda rights,’ and then handcuff him. To this day, I still say Leigh Allen was ‘my man.’ Guys would tease me and I’d say, ‘I think the case will be solved someday.’ I think it is solved. If you’re comfortable on what you’ve done on this one, then I would go with it.”

  Could I find eyewitnesses placing Allen at the scene of the murders? Only two Zodiac crimes offered that potential. I began to re-examine them in depth, including all that I had recently learned. I commenced with the stabbings at Lake Berryessa on September 27, 1969, on a lovely Saturday afternoon.

  38

  the city at the bottom of the lake

  As Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard had over thirty years earlier, I went by way of Pope Valley, rushing past old stone wineries and hot springs until I reached the twisting shoreline and inlets of Lake Berryessa. At this tree-shaded resort east of Napa, Zodiac had become Count Zaroff at his hunt—stalking his victims in the twilight. Riverside had a connection to this attack too. After two years at Angwin College, Cecelia was transferring to U.C. Riverside to study music. She had just driven up from San Bernardino with her friend Dalora Lee. They planned to drive back the next day. I got a permit from Park Headquarters and turned left to drive two miles along the meandering shoreline of oak-studded groves and coves. Twenty-five miles long, several miles wide, Berryessa was man-made. It had been created with the construction of Monticello Dam in 1957. In September the surface of the clear blue lake is warm. Two hundred and seventy-five feet below the temperature plunges to a frigid 40 degrees. At the bottom schools of black bass swarm among the ruins of a town sacrificed for the dam. Somewhere in those submerged houses, where only a scuba diver could go, Zodiac might have hidden trophies.

  The clearing where Bryan and Cecelia had been attacked by Zodiac on September 27, 1969, lay 510 yards from the parking lot on a promontory of the lake’s west shoreline. Behind burbled Smittle Creek. Beyond, sun flashed off placid water near an island. The wind lifted dust, blowing it among the groves and stretch of deserted shoreline. Shrubbery covering the bank isolated it even more. A sign nailed to an oak read: “Dangerous Area—no open fires or firearms.” I heard, as Zodiac must have, the stillness of the forest, the wind sweeping solemnly across stretches of deserted lake, and the bite of Wing Walker boots in the sand. The killer had imprinted deep tracks all around the Karmann Ghia. Aerial police photos shot from a fixed wing aircraft eerily marked his path, each step covered over with a little cardboard box. As I studied the secluded lake, I realized I had underestimated how few people were visiting Lake Berryessa that terrible day. There had been virtually no one around. Zodiac had to have been seen without his hood.

  Here’s who was at the lake: Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard (the victims), Park Rangers Dennis Land and Sergeant William White (both in a patrol car three miles away when the call came in), Ronald Henry Fong of San Francisco and his son on the lake fishing (who saw the couple and rowed for help), Archie and Beth White at Rancho Monticello (who arrived at the crime scene with White and Fong by boat, Land drove to scene from park Headquarters), Cindy, a waitress, a patron at Moskowite Corners, and a father and two young boys across the lake shooting BB-guns. They were all removed from the scene. At the scene were Dr. Clifton Rayfield and his son, David, three PUC college girls, and a stocky man who walked oddly.

  Originally I had discounted a description of a heavyset man at the lake because he had dark hair and Zodiac did not. That had been reinforced two weeks later when Officer Fouke described Zodiac as blondish, balding, and “graying in back.” An anonymous typewritten letter 22 on Eaton bond (like the Zodiac letters) sent to the Chronicle and bearing an FDR stamp read:“Dear Sir: With the popularity of hair pieces today it would be a logical masquerade to remove whatever was the usual hair style if the Zodiac killer intended to strike. It would be normal to resume the hairstyle he usually appeared in for daily appearances. To illustrate my point, I have cut the hair styling from the picture of the victim [Cecelia Shepard], and superimposed it on the composite. . . . Anything to help. I would as soon remain anonymous.”

  Had Zodiac as far back as 1970 been telling us (as he mentioned a Zodiac watch) that he had worn a wig at Berryessa? Now I recalled Hartnell had gotten a sense of that before he was stabbed. “I remember a kind of greasy forehead,” he told me. “The attacker had sweaty dark brown hair—which showed through dark glasses covering eyelets in the hood. And it’s not impossible the guy was wearing a wig.” If Zodiac had been the dark-haired man, then eyewitnesses had seen him without his hood, had observed events preceding the crime.

  Three college seniors, all twenty-one years old, saw Zodiac unmasked. They attended the same college as Bryan and Cecelia—Pacific Union College at Angwin. The Seventh-day Adventist campus perched loftily atop an extinct volcano, Mt. Howell, about eight miles from St. Helena. They had traveled the same route as Bryan and Cecelia, coming into Berryessa from Angwin via Pope Valley and Knox Valley Road. At 2:55 P.M., they pulled into a parking spot two miles north of the A&W at Sugar Loaf. Before they could exit, another car, a Chevrolet, “silver or ice-blue in color,” a 1966 two-door, full-size sedan, slid alongside. As the driver pulled past them, they saw the auto’s California plates. The stranger then backed up until his rear bumper was parallel and off to the side of their car. Zodiac had performed a similar maneuver at Blue Rock Springs. The man sat there, his head down as if reading. The girls got the impression he wasn’t.

  “We had pulled in at a gas station and this man pulled up beside us,” Lorna,23 one of the students, told me. “He was scooted way down, his eyes just kind of looking over at us—watching us. And he followed us to the parking place back maybe a hundred feet where we parked and walked down to the water’s edge.” At 3:00 P.M. the trio had walked to the lake shore and settled under the oak-studded cover. Half an hour later, they were in their swimsuits sunbathing when they noticed the stranger again—smoking cigarettes and watching them. Twenty minutes later he was still there, his T-shirt hanging out at the rear of his trousers.

  “And within a few minutes he was in the trees watching us,” said Lorna. “My two girlfriends didn’t pay any attention. ‘I’m not going to look at him,’ they said. ‘He’s just a creep.’ But I watched him a lot, and over a period of almost an hour he watched us from various trees. He was between us and the car so we couldn’t leave. He was not distinctive, just an average, normal plain person, other than he gave us the creeps. And he obviously followed us and obviously watched us. I remember his face as being square, all sides symmetrical. I don’t remember him at all being pudgy, just compact . . . stocky, solid. The minute you mentioned the suspect was a swimmer, that felt so right about his body type. I wouldn’t say he had a limp, but he favored one leg when he walked. He was clean-cut, nice-looking, and wearing dark-blue pants, pleated like suit pants, and a black sweatshirt with short sleeves, knitted at the ends.” Fouke had seen Zodiac wearing brown pleated pants.

  The women estimated the man to be six feet to six feet two inches tall and between 200 and 230 pounds. Hartnell thought Zodiac weighed between 225 and 250 pounds. “I don’t know how tall Zodiac was,” he told me, “maybe . . . six feet, somewhere in there. I’m a pretty poor judge of height because of my own height. . . . He was a sloppy dresser.” Allen, then thirty-five, stood six feet and weighed between 200 and 230 pounds. “I would say older than thirty-five—middle thirties,” Lorna said. “He was clean-cut and had hair that was too perfect.”

  “You mentioned his shirttail was hanging out,” I said, “and I realized how inconsistent that was with neatly parted hair.”

  “I know,” Lorna replied, “and it was exactly parted and combed and probably was a wig in such a breezy place. Other than in the gas station, I don’t remember any other people up there. I think the only reason we were safe is that we faced a marina. There was no activity, but there were mobile homes and boats at least parked there
. We felt like there were people around, but I don’t think we saw people. There were none on the beach. We were the only ones—none on the parking area. None on the road.”

  At 3:50 P.M., the women looked up. The stranger was gone. When they didn’t see him again, they waited almost forty minutes to be sure it was safe. “At one point he disappeared and at that point we made a run for the car,” Lorna told me. “When we got to the car, Bryan and Cece’s car was parked behind ours. They were directly around the corner from us probably within three hundred yards. Later we were in one little cove and they were right around the corner. We didn’t know it at the time, but their car was parked right by ours. Cecelia and I were maybe four or five rooms apart [at PUC] on the same dorm floor. She was our floor monitor. We weren’t close friends but I knew her well. She was a singer and I worked in that department. She was incredible and the tiniest, most fragile person.”

  When Ken Narlow and Deputy Land later asked the women to provide details, they were “very sure and positive of what they had seen.” “All three said they could identify the man if they saw him again,” said Narlow. “However, only [Lorna, the principal witness] felt confident enough to work with an Ident-a-kit artist. This particular sketch was drawn with the assistance of the three young girls who had seen this particular individual in a car acting suspiciously, but this wasn’t near the scene of the crime. To the best of my recollection, it was probably four or five hours prior to the actual crime.”