Zodiac Killer: Newly Discovered Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

Chapter 5

Cheri Jo

October 30, 1966

Cheri Jo Bates was an eighteen-year-old college student. She had been studying in the library at Riverside City College and was walking to her car. The Zodiac Killer had watched her arrive and had disabled her Volkswagen Bug; he then waited for her to return to it. The parking lot was empty, and no one had given him a second glance.

When Cheri Jo tried to start her car, the engine wouldn’t turn over. She hit the wheel in frustration and looked around, hopeful she would catch the eye of a fellow student who could help.

That’s when the Zodiac Killer made his move. “Excuse me, miss,” he said. “I couldn’t help but notice you seem to be having car trouble. Is there some way I can help? Do you need a jump or a ride?”

“Oh, thank you very much,” the pretty girl replied. “I don’t know what’s wrong with this hunk of junk.”

The Zodiac opened the hood and pretended to fiddle with the engine but seemed to have no luck. After a few moments, he stood up and shrugged his shoulders. “You’ll have to call a mechanic,” he said. “Here, come look. This wire is frayed, see?”

She leaned over and peered in, but it was too dark to see much in the interior of the hood. “I guess I’ll have to go find a pay phone,” she said. “This isn’t how I planned on spending my night.” She thought to herself that the man looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she had seen him before.

“Are you sure you don’t need a ride?” the Zodiac Killer asked again. “You could always send a tow truck to get the car later. You really shouldn’t be waiting in a dark parking lot by yourself.”

As she turned to answer him, he viciously slashed out with the knife he had kept tucked in his sleeve. He stabbed her three times in the chest, once in the back as she fell away from him, and then seven times across the throat.

Using a knife again gave him a sick, exhilarating thrill—how he had missed this! Time seemed to slow as he watched the life seep out of her, and every minute stayed crystal clear in his memory.

It wasn’t until later that he noticed his watch was missing; it must have fallen off as he attacked Cheri Jo.
You must be more careful
, he told himself in anger.
You’ve lost your edge after so long living as a normal man, a man who doesn’t give in to his darker urges.
He had had that watch for years, and his wrist felt strange without it; he found himself frequently rubbing the skin it used to cover.

Nobody noticed Cheri Jo’s car sitting in the parking lot all night. A groundskeeper discovered her body the next morning in an alley, and the police found the watch near the car. They would later trace it back to a military post in England and determine the owner had a seven-inch wrist.

They also found skin under the girl’s fingernails—she must have scratched the killer as she fell to the ground. The skin cells belonged to a Caucasian male, but the police couldn’t gather any information beyond that.

Yet the Zodiac Killer didn’t get much satisfaction out of the murder of Cheri Jo—one solitary woman was no longer enough of a challenge. Perhaps he would kill two people at the same time again, which he had found to be singularly thrilling. In fact, he was toying with the idea of making that his new signature.

Chapter 6

The Wait

June 1969

Holmes had explained the letter to Watson, and Watson sat silently while he read it over and over. He was having trouble believing it.

“What made the fellow wait until 1968 to start murdering again? How did he fight his urge to kill for the years in between?” Watson asked. “And if this truly is Jack the Ripper—which is a horrifying thought—how did he master his murderous instinct for so long?”

“Well, who’s to say he hasn’t committed many murders over the years? Perhaps the bodies have not been found, or perhaps he even traveled the country to find his victims—if that is true, then the cases would be open in other towns, and the San Francisco authorities would have no idea. Or maybe he was really trying to go honest for a while. I do not know, my friend,” Holmes said, shaking his head.

“Do you think Lydia and Mark are safe after receiving that newspaper?”

“I’ve given that a lot of thought today,” Holmes said. “At first, I was very worried. But the paper came back from the lab, and it was just red paint, not blood. And to tell you the truth, I do not think he will go for someone close to me. I don’t get the impression he wants to torture me, though that is more of a gut feeling than one based on fact. He just wants to get my attention, but if I feel uneasy at all, I will move them in with us for a while.”

“Well, we have plenty of room. Whatever you think is best is what we shall do.”

“I need to go over these files first. It looks like it will be an all-nighter for me tonight, old friend,” Holmes told him.

“I will stay up with you as long as I can keep these old eyes open.”

“Good, I was hoping you would say that. I need to get the police file, as well as the information I gathered today at the library, organized and in chronological order. But first, a piece of pie.”

Watson laughed—no matter how many decades passed, Holmes always worked best on a satisfied stomach.

It took Holmes an hour to organize the reports and articles he’d gathered. Some of the murders were not definitively tied to the Zodiac Killer, but if they were unsolved and if even a tenuous connection could be found, the police had conscientiously included them in the file.

As Holmes flipped through the miscellaneous papers, he ran across a letter to the Riverside Police Department dated November 29, 1966. He inserted it after the reports of the murder of Cheri Jo Bates. It caught his attention and stood out from the other documents. It read as follows:

The Confession

By____________________________

She was young and beautiful but now she is battered and dead. She is not the first and she will not be the last I lay awake nights thinking about my next victim. Maybe she will be the beautiful blonde that babysits near the little store and walks down the dark alley each evening about seven. Or maybe she will be the shapely blue eyed brownett that said no when I asked her for a date in high school. But maybe it will not be either. But I shall cut off her female parts and deposit them for the whole city to see. So don’t make it to easy for me. Keep your sisters, daughters, and wives off the streets and alleys. Miss Bates was stupid. She went to the slaughter like a lamb. She did not put up a struggle. But I did. It was a ball. I first pulled the middle wire from the distributor. Then I waited for her in the library and followed her out after about two minuts. The battery must have been about dead by then. I then offered to help. She was then very willing to talk to me. I told her that my car was down the street and that I would give her a lift home. When we were away from the library walking, I said it was about time. She asked me, “About time for what?” I said it was about time for her to die. I grabbed her around the neck with my hand over her mouth and my other hand with a small knife at her throat. She went very willingly. Her breast felt very warm and firm under my hands, but only one thing was on my mind. Making her pay for the brush offs that she had given me during the years prior. She died hard. She squirmed and shook as I chocked her, and her lips twiched. She let out a scream once and I kicked her head to shut her up. I plunged the knife into her and it broke. I then finished the job by cutting her throat. I am not sick. I am insane. But that will not stop the game. This letter should be published for all to read it. It just might save that girl in the alley. But that's up to you. It will be on your conscience. Not mine.

Yes, I did make that call to you also. It was just a warning. Beware…I am stalking your girls now.

CC. Chief of police

Enterprise

The police had also recovered a handwritten letter from the library where Cheri Jo had been studying:

Sick of living/unwilling to die

cut.

clean.

if red/

clean.

blood spurting,

dripping,

spilling;

all over her new

dress.

oh well

it was red

anyway.

life draining into an

uncertain death.

she won’t

die.

this time

someone’ll find her.

just wait till

next time.

That note confused Holmes a bit. If the Zodiac Killer truly had left that note, then had he not meant to kill Cheri Jo? Had he just meant to hurt and frighten her?

The killer sent another letter straight to the
Los Angeles Times
.

This is the Zodiac speaking

Like I have allways said, I am crack proof. If the Blue Meannies are evere going to catch me, they had best get off their fat asses + do something. Because the longer they fiddle + fart around, the more slaves I will collect for my after life. I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones, there are a hell of a lot more down there. The reason I’m writing to the Times is this, They don’t bury me on the back pages like some of the others.

“Cheri Jo could have quite possibly been his first murder, or at least his first in the area,” Holmes said. “If we’re assuming this killer is Jack, then we know for certain she is not the first woman he has brutally killed.”

“What happened to the poor girl?” Watson asked.

Holmes explained the events of the case, ending with the police’s discovery of Cheri Jo’s body in the alley.

“Was it a robbery, too?”

“No, Cheri Jo’s purse and belongings were found at the scene. There was some speculation that she was attacked by an old boyfriend or someone she had brushed off, but that was just a theory. There was a size-ten shoeprint found in blood near the body, and that ruled out the boyfriends the police interviewed.”

“So the police are not sure the Zodiac committed this murder?” Watson asked.

“No, but there is enough of a possibility that they included the case in the file just to be safe. I think the Zodiac was practicing with this one; he was seeing what he could get away with and how it made him feel. He did send another note saying that Cheri Jo had to die and that she would not be the last.”

“If this really was the Zodiac, why are there so many misspellings in the letter to the
Times
, while the first is written in an entirely different style?”

“We must remember he’s a clever man,” answered Holmes. “He would have started out wanting recognition, but afraid of being caught. He wouldn’t have developed that pride or feeling of invincibility just yet. The misspellings and different styles of writing could very well have been his attempt to gain attention but keep his true identity safe.”

There were a few more killings the police had tentatively attributed to the Zodiac Killer, and Holmes now turned his focus to those. On December 20, 1968, a couple was murdered on a lover’s lane. The couple had originally intended to go to a Christmas play but instead went to eat and then ended up parking outside of Vallejo, California. Holmes was still appalled that young people engaged in such a scandalous activity as “parking” before marriage, but Lydia insisted he must change with the times, and he was trying.

David Arthur Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were sitting in David’s brown Rambler when someone walked up to the car and shot out the right rear window and the left rear tire, trying to scare the couple out of the car. It worked, and David threw open the passenger-side door and tried to run. He didn’t get farther than the right front wheel when the killer shot him in the head; the young man fell to the ground—dead. Betty Lou fled on foot, but the killer had incredibly accurate aim at only ten feet away; she was shot five times down the spine and died instantly.

The witness who discovered the bodies claimed she saw a light-colored Chevrolet speeding away from the scene, but the ground was frozen, and there were no tire prints. It seemed the Zodiac Killer had the luck of the devil.