Zodiac Killer: Newly Discovered Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

Chapter 7

American Dream

July 1969

The Zodiac Killer—he had now entirely stopped thinking of himself as Jack the Ripper—was pleased with how his life in the United States was working out. It truly was the land of opportunity, and he was living his own twisted version of the American dream. He had an apartment and a job as an aide at a mental hospital, which paid the bills and left him with flexible hours in which to pursue his new hobby. He was here on this earth to do one thing and one thing only, and he was having a jolly good time doing it. Keeping the police at bay was now a large part of what turned him on. After all, he couldn’t murder someone every day, or he would certainly be caught. The next best thing was being chased and watching his pursuers grow increasingly desperate and frustrated.

On that hot July night in 1969, he pulled his car to a stop in a lonely parking lot in Vallejo, California. He knew it was a popular parking place for lovers where he could easily find another pair of victims. It was a little after midnight. He spotted a Corvair and exited his car with a flashlight.

As he approached, he saw the couple fumbling to pull out their identification.
They must think I’m a cop
, he thought to himself with amusement.

He started firing his nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol without warning. He hit the twenty-two-year-old girl, Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, three times and the nineteen-year-old boy, Mike Renault Mageau, twice. The car was splattered with blood, and the Zodiac’s heart pumped with adrenaline and the sick joy he felt when taking lives. As he turned to walk away, he heard the young man let out a scream of pain. The Zodiac grimaced, leaned back into the car window, and fired two more shots into each victim. Satisfied that both were dead, the Zodiac returned to his own car and drove away, throwing the gun into the seat beside him.

What a rush
, he thought as he drove away.
I’m glad I made sure the boy was dead because he got a good look at me and could certainly set the cops on my tail.

Since the parking lot had been empty except for the couple, the Zodiac decided to call the police station and report the crime.

“Hello, I have just committed two murders,” he said when the dispatcher answered the phone.

“Say again.”

He repeated it.

“I am also responsible for the Faraday/Jenson murders in December of 1968. I am the Zodiac, and I will start giving you clues to my identity. You must decipher the code, and then you’ll know who I am.”

He went on to describe the previous crime with details that only the killer would know. By the time the police arrived on the scene with sirens blaring, he was long gone—back to his nest to make plans for the game he had initiated with Sherlock Holmes.

The Zodiac didn’t realize then that he had made his first mistake—Mike had somehow survived, even after being riddled with bullets. When he regained consciousness, he would eventually tell the police that his attacker was a white man about five eight or five nine, in his late twenties or early thirties, and with a stocky build, round face, and brown hair.

For the time being, though, the Zodiac was still high on his drug of choice—murder. As he walked up the stairs into his nondescript apartment, which he had carefully decorated to be bland and unmemorable, he knew it was time to turn his attention toward how he would torture Holmes. He poured himself a whiskey and sat down to think. He looked around at his home and missed what he used to have in London—the walls in the apartment here were paper thin, meaning he had no privacy from the mediocrity of his neighbors’ lives; he often wished he could shoot them just to shut them up. His furniture was cheap and lumpy, and the pictures on the walls were probably the same as those that hung in thousands of other homes. Even the curtains were limp and brown. He wondered if always being on the run was worth eternal youth. He had changed jobs and identities so frequently since immigrating to America that he had never managed to amass wealth, and for some months, he could barely make ends meet. His childhood, in his mind, assumed a golden glow of comfort and prosperity. He conveniently blocked out his periods of being a vagrant on the London streets.

And, of course, given the Zodiac’s special taste in hobbies, he had no friends. He could let no one grow close to him. Instead, he relied on the occasional prostitute to serve as both companion and release, but he could rarely afford the luxury. He was surprised he had not killed any of them this time; his rage at the profession seemed to have faded. His tastes had changed. Now, he wanted to destroy young couples in love and see their futures disappear down the barrel of a gun.

As the Zodiac pondered these bleak thoughts, his resentment of Sherlock Holmes started to grow as well. Holmes had somehow become a success even in America; he was wealthy and had a family who loved him. The Zodiac wanted to feel the thrill of pursuit again, which was why he had first contacted the man, but perhaps now he also wanted to make Holmes pay as well. After all, it was Holmes’s fault that he had been forced out of his beloved homeland.

Perhaps Holmes would even discover more of the Zodiac’s victims—the bumbling police couldn’t connect the dots in some of the cases. The Zodiac was frustrated that he wasn’t receiving the credit he deserved. He had even recently thought about killing some of his patients in the hospital but did not really relish the idea. He wanted his victims to know what was going to happen to them, and he wanted them to lose their futures, just as he had. Most of the people at the mental hospital under his care would never live normal lives again anyway, and some of them were not lucid enough to even grasp the concept of their own deaths.

He was startled from his thoughts by the rumble of his stomach—he had not eaten all day. He got up and went into his small kitchen to open a can of spaghetti. As he ate straight from the can, he thought of his plan. He would get the chase started back full force. He typed another misspelled letter to send to the newspapers…onward and upward.

I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO

MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD

GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE

MOST DANGEROUE ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL

SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING

EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING

YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST

PART OF IT IS THAE WHEN I DIE I WILL BE

REBORN IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE KILLED

WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE

YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO

SLOI DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF

SLAVES FOR MY AFTERLIFE

EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

He had not used a cipher at the end of a letter in a while, but he knew that decoding such a message would be just the thing to set Sherlock’s brilliant brain on fire, and perhaps hasten him down the Zodiac Killer’s trail…

Chapter 8

Letters

September 1969

Holmes knew the murders would continue—it was as if the killer was taunting him, daring him to step fully back into the world of cat and mouse, hunter and prey. The most recent murder was recounted in the paper Holmes had read that morning, and San Francisco’s citizens were existing in a state of blind panic. The killer was ramping up.

The killer had also sent another letter to the newspaper that revealed details of the murders that only he could know.

Dear Editor,

This is the murderer of the 2 teenagers last Christmass at Lake Hermon + the girl on the 4th of July near the golf course in Vallejo. To prove I killed them I shall state some facts which I + only the police know.

Christmass

1 Brand name of ammo

Super X

2 10 shots were fired

3 the boy was on his back with his feet to the car

4 the girl was on her right side feet to the west

4th July

1 the girl was wearing patterned slacks

2 the boy was also shot in the knee.

3 Brand name of ammo was western

Here is part of a cipher the other 2 parts of this cipher are being mailed to the editors of the Vallejo Times + the SF Examiner.

I want you to print this cipher on the front page of your paper. In this cipher is my identity.

If you do not print this cipher by the afternoon of Fry 1st of Aug 69, I will go on a kill rampage Fry. night. I will cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night then on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.

Zodiac (symbol)

The most recent murder had happened as follows…

Cecelia Ann Shepard and Bryan Calvin Hartnell had been having a wonderful day picnicking by a lake near Napa, California, when Bryan heard the bushes rustle. Suddenly a man came out. He was wearing what looked like a hooded vest with a circle and an X on it. Bryan moved protectively in front of Cecelia; the expression on the stranger’s face was frightening.

“I escaped from prison, and I need money and a car,” the stranger told them. His voice was flat, without expression, and Cecelia’s heart started to race with panic.
What sort of stranger admits to being a convict? What does he really want?
she wondered.

Bryan hurriedly pulled his car keys and his wallet from his back pocket and offered them up. “Take it,” he said. “I don’t have much money, but you can take what I have and the car. It’s parked over there behind the trees.”

The man ignored Bryan completely. Instead he tossed a rope at Cecelia. She didn’t reach out to catch it, and instead it fell limply against her legs. “Tie your boyfriend to that tree,” the man told her. “Do it fast, or you’ll be sorry.” To emphasize his words, he pulled a long, wicked-looking knife from his sleeve.

She shakily did what she was told. She was afraid to scream—the area was remote, and she realized if no one was around and she made this man angry, anything could happen. Cecelia tried to apologize to Bryan with her eyes as she tied the last knot.

Then she felt a shove from behind. The man pushed her up against the tree and turned her around, tying her up as well.

Bryan was still trying to hold out hope that the man would tie them up, take the car, and not hurt them; perhaps he only wanted a head start without them calling the police. He realized that he was living a nightmare when a sharp, searing pain knocked every other thought out of his head—the madman was stabbing him.

The Zodiac was almost frenzied in his rage as he stabbed Bryan four more times and then turned his anger to Cecelia, slashing her ten times with his knife. He was covered in warm blood, a bath of death, and he basked in it.
Oh, won’t the police have fun with this one!
the Zodiac thought.
And Holmes, wherever you are, this will make you renew your search for me. Every person I kill is on your head now.

Bryan, perhaps wiser than Mike, feigned unconsciousness and waited until he was sure the attacker was far away before he cried for help. He used all of his remaining strength, calling out again and again, pausing in between to speak to Cecelia, who was hanging pale and limp against her bonds.

“Don’t die, sweetheart,” he said over and over. “Someone will help us and get us to the hospital. Just please don’t die.”

Eventually, a passing fisherman heard the anguished yells and alerted the park rangers, who arrived on the scene to find the distraught, gore-drenched couple.

Cecelia had woken up and, together with Bryan, had managed to untie their restraints; they huddled in fear and pain, clinging to one another.

It took nearly an hour for the ambulance to arrive, and within forty-eight hours, Cecelia was dead. Bryan, though he survived, would be scarred physically and emotionally by the attack for the rest of his life.

The paper later recounted that the Napa Police Department received a phone call shortly after the stabbings, and a man claimed responsibility in a hoarse but proud voice; the killer had also left a note on the door of Bryan’s car, along with the Zodiac Killer’s symbol.

Vallejo

12-20-1968

7-4-1969

Sept 27-67-6:30

By knife

The police found size-ten-and-a-half Wing Walker Military boot prints around the car but no other clues.

“Now, where do we start?” asked Watson as he looked upon Holmes’s puzzled face.

“Well, if this killer runs true to form, there should be a letter coming soon. That’s where we’ll most likely find the clues. I will be sure to check in the morning, my friend. I am sure you are tired and need to get your rest,” Holmes told Watson.

“Yes, I am a little tired. I wanted to help you, though.”

“Well, we’ve been over what we have. Nothing more to do now. Thank you for being here with me, old chap.”

“I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

Watson went to bed and left Sherlock to ponder what he had read. This would be a big challenge. He knew there would be more murders before he could catch the killer, and it tortured him that the murders were happening as a direct result of his own failure to take Jack the Ripper to the authorities so many decades ago. He had been trying to protect his friends, and his loyalty to them had resulted in so many innocent lives lost. Holmes was filled with urgency to find the Zodiac and stop the monster’s spree before he got any more blood by association on his hands.