Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed by Robert Graysmith
Zodiac himself had provided the link between himself and Baker’s case, and had done it in such a devious manner that I only recently tumbled to it. It took an understanding of Zodiac’s mind-set of mirror images and transparencies to unravel his visual clue. In his letter of June 26, 1970, Zodiac had circled double-peaked Mount Diablo on a cut section of a Phillips 66 road map. Apparently, Mount Diablo was important to him—its elevation of 3849 feet calling to mind that Stine died in front of 3898 Washington, an address Zodiac himself chose. The map, coupled with a two-line code at the bottom, supposedly told where his bomb was set. On July 24, he dropped another clue. “PS.,” he wrote. “The Mt. Diablo Code concerns Radians [a mathematical term representing an angle of measure] &#inches along the radians.” Mt. Diablo is a bench mark used by the U.S. Geographical Survey to separate north, south, east, and west—the towns connected by a 57-degree radian. The map also mentioned something a pilot might use—“magnetic north.” An “F”-shaped symbol coupled with a backward “7” appeared twice on his threatening Halloween card to Avery. “F” stood for wind speed and direction—north at fifteen to twenty miles an hour. The complete symbol was also an exact copy of a cattle brand used on Fred Harmon’s Pagosa Springs, Colorado, ranch. Harmon’s comic strip cowboy hero, Red Ryder, was a highly recognizable salesman for air rifles during the 1940s and ’50s.
“Zodiac’s Mt. Diablo code is a binary spacing code,” an expert told me. “The top line is the alpha line, the bottom line is the beta line. This code uses Greek letters, which are to be used as numbers. Example: Alpha=1, and Beta=2. Delta=4. The code operates by the key code letter, and upside-down Greek Gamma, Gamma=3. Therefore, to start this code, you ‘ask’ the code key questions, like: Who are you, what is your message?” But the map said something entirely different, something visual.
First, I knew that Leigh loved Mad magazine and that the Zodiac code of April 20, 1970 (“My name is—”) could read “ALFRED E NEU-MAN” when deciphered. “By the way have cracked the last cipher I sent you?” he asked in the same letter. Cracked magazine was Mad’s chief competitor. Since May 1964, Mad had featured a visual puzzle on its inside back cover, a “Fold-In.” The instructions read: “Fold this section over left, then fold back so ‘A’ meets ‘B.’” I folded the map so that the ruled corners met at the right edge. Then held the map up to the light so that the back shone through. The crossed circle with an arrow at the twelve o’clock position pointed to the exact site of the Domingos/ Edwards murders.
Below Mount Diablo, Leigh began to sail again, losing himself in a seemingly endless thousand-mile maze, the Delta. The huge tideland marsh, fed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, was diked with countless levees for flood control. Yet Allen never really lost himself in those twisting channels. A point of reference, Mount Diablo, constantly towered in the distance—the amount of acreage visible from its peak second only to that seen from Mount Kilimanjaro. With his flat feet, Allen felt most at home on the water or in the air.
“Big” Dan Blocker, 350-pound star of the Bonanza television western, had died suddenly during the previous summer. Allen ceased wearing his enormous white cowboy hat. He could no longer be “Hoss.”
Tuesday, November 21, 1972
An anniversary of sorts—three years earlier, David Odell Martin came to the FBI’s attention when he slashed his wife and eleven-year-old daughter with a broken bottle and knife. Just before police fatally shot him, Martin shouted, “I’m the Zodiac killer!” Armstrong immediately informed the FBI: “Martin is definitely not identical with UNSUB in this matter.” Toschi told me, “In the first four years of the Zodiac case, I would say about fifteen men have told cops throughout the country that they are Zodiac. Some of them were drunk at the time, some had obvious mental problems, the rest were being booked on other charges and were seeking publicity.” When cranks weren’t confessing, rumors took the place of new leads in the investigation. One such attributed an undertaker’s murder and theft of his embalming fluids to Zodiac.
In Santa Rosa, thirteen-year-old Lori Lee Kursa went shopping at the U-Save Market with her mother. Blue-eyed, long blond hair parted in the middle, she was distinctively dressed in polished-denim bell-bottoms, a brown leather jacket, and brown suede cowboy boots. Around 5:30 P.M. she apparently wandered off. Half an hour later, Lori was observed briefly by a family friend, Barbara, in the same market, but after that nothing more was seen of her. Immediately, her mother reported her missing. The search dragged on through November and into the first week of December, but police unearthed no leads. “You know what was strange about our victims?” Santa Rosa Sergeant Steve Brown later told me. “The first one he threw in the ditch was found by bike riders the next day, so he decided, ‘I better hide them a little bit better.’ Then he ended up throwing them out by Franz Valley and it’s pretty remote. You would need to know that area. You don’t just drive there. I recently re-drove it. Of course if the killer lived here and drove around a lot he would know. I’m thinking about a guy who’s living in Lake County or Napa County who traveled that road back and forth and who worked over here. If you are going out of Santa Rosa, the dumps are all on the left side of the roadway. You wouldn’t pull your car over to the left side, facing the wrong way, to dump a body. He’s not going to park on the right side, drag the person across the road and throw them. It doesn’t make sense. I was thinking, just like you, he goes out, there’s a shed, trailer or barn that he uses. And after they’re dead, when he comes back, he’s now on the right side of the roadway. That’s when he stops and dumps them and then goes back into Santa Rosa.”
On December 12, a hiker, Lex Moore, stumbled across Kursa’s body in a ravine, about fifty-five feet from Calistoga Road. She had been dumped at the scene completely nude and her body had frozen from the extreme cold. Police estimated she had been dead only a week, though she had been missing for three full weeks. She had been kept alive “somewhere,” but they had no suspects.
Someone had broken her neck, dislocating her first and second cervical vertebra. “Strangulation,” Stanford’s Dr. Lunde explained to me, “is not like shooting someone with a gun. It involves a kind of muscular tension . . . the sensations that come from that play a part in the sexual aspect of these people for which sex and aggression seem to be intertwined. It is also a way of proving to the person their power over the victim. Assertion of raw power, and since that is a big part of the enjoyment for these people, it is prolonged by strangulation. . . . I know one such person who very consciously, more than one, at least two, have volunteered they would take twenty, thirty minutes to strangle victims to prolong the pleasure so to speak.”
Kursa’s unusual clothes were missing. She had not been sexually assaulted. Unsuspected by the police, the solution to another mystery lay only one hundred yards away. There, a shallow grave in a ravine near the roadway concealed Jeanette Kamahele’s corpse—her hands and ankles bound to her neck and white clothesline wrapped around her neck four times. But because the area was deeply wooded, police failed to find her and would not for many years—not until July 6, 1979.
Thursday, December 28, 1972
At four in the afternoon, twenty days after a freakish snow dusted Twin Peaks and Golden Gate Park, two men discovered the bones of Maureen Lee Sterling and Yvonne Weber. They were off a rural road 2.2 miles north of Porter Creek Road in the Franz Valley Road area. A powerful murderer, to avoid leaving tracks, had bodily lifted the corpses over shrubs and a ditch, then hurled them down a sixty-six-foot embankment. Apparently, he considered his victims as rubbish to be dumped.
Cause of death and any sexual assault were impossible to determine, but patterns linked the homicides to the others. The killer had murdered them elsewhere and kept their clothes. And the killer tied knots like a seaman. How would those knots match up with those in the Santa Barbara murders—granny knots and marline hitches? The victims had been abducted in this rotating order: on Friday, Saturday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday. All vanished
“As far as the murders go,” continued Baker. “I was almost thinking a postman or PG&E guy just because of the places that they go. The last girl that was found was in a very remote creek. It’s not a place where you can dump them off the side of the road and they land there. The three on Franz Valley Road were found in the same location along the side of the road. You don’t have to throw far to get where they landed. The last one we had in the creek, I don’t know how the hell he got her in there.”
Several months earlier, officers on the way to the Santa Rosa area that a killer had used as a dumping ground for murdered Santa Rosa coeds had stopped in their tracks. Walking down the road toward them and from the secluded murder area was Arthur Leigh Allen. “I travel this road to go skin-diving,” he said. In the same direction Allen visited two friends at Clear Lake. “Leigh always picked up hitchhikers especially while attending Santa Rosa JC and Sonoma State University,” a source told me. “This always bothered my mother. He picked hikers up on the highways. I remember the two girls disappearing from the skating rink and the other murders. Those bodies discovered on Franz Valley Road and in Calistoga weren’t far from my parents’ home.”
Friday, December 29, 1972
Since August 4, 1971, when police questioned Leigh for what they erroneously believed was the first time, Zodiac had sent no letters. But we hardly needed more clues from the killer. We already knew a lot about Zodiac. He could be caught if we put our minds to it. All the early suspects were singled out because their handprinting was like Zodiac’s or they resembled the composite sketch. Few were as tall or heavy as the killer actually was; some were slender as a boy.
Zodiac had three qualities, had to have these qualities—he was strong and he was smart and he possessed specialized technical proficiency in code, chemistry, firearms, engineering, electronics, and bomb-making. More telling, Zodiac knew forensics, leaving behind false clues and wearing glue on his fingertips. In fact his marksmanship skills, knowledge of police I.D. techniques, and use of Highway Patrol cutoff maneuvers to box in his victims pointed to Zodiac being a policeman. Two victims had been reaching for their licenses when he blinded them with a flashlight and unleashed a fusillade of bullets.
And yet Zodiac was compelled to deride police in his letters, the thrill of baiting them becoming a powerful motive in his game of outdoor chess. He taunted authority as if striking out against a controlling figure in his daily life—a boss, a father, or a policeman. Serial sadists, enraptured with the various tools of police work and with policemen themselves, were frequently police groupies. Some sexual sociopaths dressed in uniform when trapping and torturing their victims, often applied for police work, or expressed a desire to work in some law enforcement capacity. Invariably they would offer aid in the hunt for themselves. The known serial killers were remarkably alike.
FBI agent John Douglas’s psychological profile of the Atlanta child murderer spoke volumes. He said the killer “would live in the area, sometimes pose as a police officer, show extreme interest in media coverage of the case, and have difficulty relating to members of the opposite sex. In fact, children who lived near [the suspect Wayne] Williams thought he was a policeman because he drove cars that looked like police cars, showed them a badge, and ordered them around.” Williams monitored police-band radio, just as California multiple murderer Ed Kemper did. Kemper frequented a local bar to become pals with off-duty policemen. “He showed me his gun and his handcuffs right here in the bar,” recalled the bartender. “He handcuffed a friend and shoved him up against the wall. . . . You see, Kemper always wanted to be a policeman. All his friends were cops. He used to talk about it all the time . . . said he had been hired as a security guard somewhere in the Bay Area—but he was only a big guy who sometimes worked as a gas station attendant.” After slaying his mother, the Santa Cruz giant left a note behind, ridiculing his former friends on the force.
Ted Bundy used a gold badge and handcuffs to masquerade as “Officer Roseland” at a Salt Lake City shopping center. One of the “Hillside Stranglers,” Kenneth Bianchi, had wanted to be an L.A. policeman, even taken a police science course at a Rochester community college. When cops apprehended Bianchi in Bellingham, Washington, he was enrolled as a deputy in the sheriff’s reserve training program. His white, late-model auto with silver spotlights mounted on both sides resembled a police car. Inside his black attaché case he carried a highway patrolman’s badge and cuffs.
John Wayne Gacy, as a youth, dressed in the policelike uniform of his local civil defense squad. Fascinated by the trappings of law enforcement, he obsessively fixed upon James Hanley, a detective with the hit-and-run unit. Gacy became “Jack” Hanley, a brutal, muscular homicide cop who existed only in his mind. Jack, “a devoted hater of homosexuals,” was the savage, sadistic cop that Gacy both admired and feared. When Gacy was drunk or stoned, his alter ego assumed control and committed the acts a sober Gacy never could.2 Because Jack had been in charge, Gacy suppressed the details of his crimes. He forgot the acts he had committed on the boys he buried in the walls of his house. Fantasy Detective Jack made nightly forays into the seamy sections of town, cruising slowly in an old black Oldsmobile, radio scanner squawking, spotlight and red lights rotating. Dressed in a leather jacket, trousers, and highway patrolman’s shoes, Gacy picked up boys and handcuffed them. Some psychiatrists analyzed Zodiac as being at least “a latent homosexual to whom bullets and knives afforded perverse satisfaction.”
Dr. Lunde warned to look for a suspect who had a collection of guns and early interest in guns, knives, and various instruments of torture. “As an adult,” Lunde wrote in Murder and Madness, “a collection of such instruments, proficiency in their use, and an emotional attraction to weapons may be seen which goes far beyond that of any ordinary collector.” Serial killers will become incredibly skillful in their use. Whenever Zodiac’s lair was uncovered and a search made, I was certain huge numbers of weapons would be present—guns, bombs, or the “Death Machine” Zodiac bragged about. Had Arthur Leigh Allen—like Williams, Bianchi, Kemper, Bundy, and Gacy—once wanted to be a policeman?
He had.
On May 2, 1952, Allen, then nineteen, sought employment with the Vallejo Police Department. They turned him down. “He applied right out of high school to be a Vallejo cop,” a source explained, “and they said no. Therefore he had a very good reason for hating the Vallejo Police Department—rejection.” Allen offered his heart to the law again much later. On June 11, 1964, he was a non-certified personnel applicant at the Watsonville Police Department. Watsonville spurned him too. Sometimes it seemed everyone did. “Well, there you go,” said Toschi. “A guy who is a ‘wannabe’ cop and cannot make it, hates all cops. It’s been proven. They hate any authority figure after that because they couldn’t pass whatever tests were necessary.”
Chicago clairvoyant Joe DeLouise, who felt tuned into Zodiac’s mind, agreed. “The person who created Zodiac was somebody very familiar with law enforcement,” he said. “I think he was an ex-cop. In his letters to the police he knew everything that was going on with the police. He knew his victims. I feel he will kill until he is caught.” Had Leigh, like Kemper, gotten close to the police and learned about the impending search of his trailer? California Highway Patrolman Lynn Lafferty had been Leigh’s childhood friend, and possibly Allen may have wanted to emulate him. Lafferty had been anxiously searching for Zodiac on his own.
Leigh had been an occasional teacher at Travis AFB, whe
Though civil charges were dismissed on July 8, 1958, Allen received a “less than honorable discharge” from the Navy late that year. One of the ancillary reasons for his expulsion was that he had again left weapons in plain sight in his car. From 1959 on he listed his draft status as “Non-finished active duty and reserve time, USN.” Because of the police, Allen’s greatest ambitions would never be realized. He would never become a Navy Seal or submarine commander or cop. By the end of 1972 Allen had at least five reasons for hating the police—his rejections by Vallejo and Watsonville P.D., VPD’s arrest of him and resulting Navy discharge, his firing from the refinery, and the humiliating search of his trailer. If he were Zodiac, he had a sixth reason to despise cops—SFPD had nearly captured him.