Zodiac Unmasked (13 page)

Cal Poly Pomona, where Don Cheney, Sandy Panzarel a, and Leigh’s brother, Ron, studied. Leigh’s pal, Harold Huffman, was already down there

attending USC and coaching every sport he could. For awhile Leigh had difficulty choosing between an engineering or physical education major.

Since his math skil s proved too meager for engineering, he decided to focus on physical education. Ultimately, he settled on elementary education

as his major. On June 16, 1956, at the end of his term, he used his summer break to enlist in the Navy.

He received his associate of arts degree from Val ejo Junior Col ege in 1957. He returned to Cal Poly from January 1959 until June 13, 1959,

and excel ed. He became the State Col ege Trampoline Champion for Central California and Central California Spear Fishing Champ. On July 27,

1959, Al en applied at the State Department of Education in Sacramento for a position, but by January 4, 1960, was back studying at San Luis

Obispo. He remained until June 1960, when he began work at Hemet Mental Hospital only twenty miles from Riverside. One good thing had

resulted from his brief Navy stint—he was able to study on the G.I. Bil at Cal Poly from January 1961 until March 1961.

On June 19, 1961 he applied at the State Personnel Board in Sacramento as a psychiatric technical trainee, Department of Mental Hygiene, and

briefly became a psychiatric teacher at Atascadero. There he became friendly with a convicted murderer who had been jailed for several years. He

later said they exchanged samples of code. Al en graduated from Cal Poly with a bachelor’s in education (B.E.) on December 15, 1961. Only six

units shy of a master’s degree, he seemed unable to final y sever his ties with col ege life. During this time, he owned hunting rifles, at least two .22-

caliber pistols, and, true to his Zodiac sign of Sagittarius, a hunting bow and arrows.

From 1959 to 1963, Leigh, stil in the process of obtaining his teaching credentials, had various jobs. He taught fourth grade and P.E. at Santa

Rosa School in Atascadero just north of Cal Poly. “I real y enjoyed teaching elementary school kids,” he said. “My kids did wel —one little girl in the

third grade knew tenth-grade math by the time she graduated. My entire class could read at seventh-grade level. I sure loved working with

elementary school kids.”

Meanwhile, Panzarel a, Cheney, and Leigh’s brother, Ron, were attending the Cal Poly campus in Pomona together. Panzarel a’s major field of

study was electronic engineering, Cheney’s was mechanical engineering, and Ron’s, landscape architecture. They shared a rented house to cut

costs. “In 1961-1962,” Cheney afterward told me,“we al were living in a four-bedroom house with two students named Bil and Joe. We had two

guys in the one larger bedroom—Ron and I slept there. Those were good times.

“Ron had a good sense of humor, he was entertaining and a fun guy. Everyone liked him. He was a very easygoing guy and a notorious

underachiever. He was very wel laid back. He was bril iant in his landscape architecting work at school, but he didn’t keep his grade point average

up. He passed some courses, but not with flying colors, so he had to stay at Cal Poly for quite a while so that he could get his average up to

graduate. He would do very wel in other courses, but he could never get around to taking the final. He dragged on and on. He never made it to early

morning classes. He had an alarm clock—one of those Big Bens with the great big gongs on the top of it—that thing would ring, would run down

and stop ringing, and he wouldn’t twitch.

“Cal Poly Pomona was about two miles away to the west, and I rode a bike to school each day. Sandy graduated in the spring of 1964, but I

never actual y graduated. I should have graduated in the winter of 1964. I finished up and had a problem with my senior project and I wimped out on

that, didn’t do it.

“That house is where Sandy and I first met Leigh. It was 1962. I was stil single then, and married Ann later that year. I remember that one time

especial y. Leigh had just rol ed in there from Riverside. He had been attending sports car racing. He went every year for the big race they held

down there in the early summer. I went with Ron and Leigh together one time. In fact, the only sporting events Leigh and I went to together were road

racing. He frequented Laguna Seca, Vacavil e, and Riverside. He was a student there. Leigh owned an Austin Healey and used to go to a driving

school in Riverside; after taking those lessons he kept commuting down there for the races.”

Friday, May 30, 1963

Leigh Allen paid
an unexpected visit to the house in Southern California. “I remember Leigh came down to visit us,” Panzarel a told me. “Leigh

was not living in the Pomona area, but had just come down to Pomona that weekend. I thought it was odd at the time. And he had a machete in the

car. For no particular reason, he walked in without a word and slammed it into the counter and tried to scare everybody. One of my roommates, Joe

Dandurand, was there. My ex-wife was there when it happened. Ron was somewhere in the house. That was just before I left at the end of the

semester and Ron and I went and got a place together in Walnut. I stil think about Leigh coming to Pomona to visit just before the boy and girl were

murdered. That’s creepy.”

Monday, June 3, 1963

In the morning,
Leigh curtailed his visit and started back to Atascadero, where Santa Rosa Elementary School was closing for the summer. He

intended to pack up, then return to Val ejo that day. Heading north on Highway 101, on a direct line to Atascadero, he climbed from Ventura to

Santa Barbara, passing Goleta, then El Capitan Beach, and closing on Refugio Beach. The Santa Ynez Mountains loomed to the northeast, and

further east and far beyond—Los Padres National Forest. Sand blew across the divided blacktop and gul s wheeled in the sky. In places the north

and south lanes were neighborly, running side by side with each other, but in spots they widened away. A gray mist swept in from the sea. “They’ve

got me searching my memory for blank spots, for lapses,” Al en would say years later. Ahead he saw a turnout, just at the point where 101 leaves

the beach. His eyes strayed over the divide to 101 southbound. Beyond was the beach. He was now three miles south of the Gaviota Tunnel.

5

robert domingos and linda edwards

Monday, June 3, 1963

Three miles south
of the Gaviota Tunnel, an attractive teenage couple, Robert George Domingos and Linda Faye Edwards, swung onto an oak-

lined turnout just off southbound 101. Domingos pul ed his gray Pontiac over and the laughing couple piled out, radiant in their youth and promise.

They had left home, ostensibly for a Lompoc High School seniors’ “Ditch Day” graduation party. Instead, the couple intended celebrating at the

seashore. Thick bushes hid their car from passing north-bound traffic. However, any auto cruising southbound could spot the vehicle, an indication

someone was down on the isolated beach.

Robert was the eighteen-year-old son of a wel -to-do Lompoc rancher; Linda was to be eighteen in three days. For both it had been a day of

farewel and anticipation as they looked forward to their nuptials in October. The teenagers were roughly twenty miles west of Santa Barbara and

three miles from El Capitan Beach. Robert dug a large blanket from the trunk, and the couple crossed the highway and over railroad tracks running

between them and a low bluff. From the bluff, one of the chain of unstable sea cliffs tracing the shoreline, they had a view of the mile-and-a-half-long

state beach below. Beyond stood the Channel Islands—San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz. Robert and Linda commenced down a steep,

partial y hidden path to the beach, running the last twenty yards. Banana palm trees lining Refugio Creek gave the area a tropical atmosphere.

Where the creek flowed into the ocean, a freshwater lagoon had formed.

Robert and Linda reached an isolated spot frequented only by the occasional local fisherman. They saw evidence of recent activity. Long ago

this beach had been the chief
contrabandista
port on the coast, visited by genteel smugglers and ferocious pirates. At the mouth of the canyon,

buried in the sand, lay traces of an ancient adobe foundation. In early California days a grand rancho, La Nuestara Señora del Refugio, stood there.

It faced the sea boldly until the French pirate Hyppolyte de Bouchard—by gun, by knife, by rope, and by fire—put an end to that. His buccaneers

wounded the servants, cut the throats of the horses, tied up the Ortega family, and burned their impressive hacienda.

The teenagers spread out their blanket on the sand near the rocky shoreline. The day before, at just the same spot, a man with reddish hair had

been shooting at seagul s with a rifle. Rich tide pools, swarming with life, moved with each surge of salt water. Spray exploded against black rocks,

and the sharp tang of sea air fil ed the teenagers’ lungs. Sailboats danced in Santa Barbara Channel, and in the sky aircraft droned lazily—an

airport was nearby. The laughing pair lounged in their swimsuits at the surf line as the day passed and the sky clouded over. Of al transitional

domains, those between sea and land are the most disparate and prone to alteration. Robert and Linda grew drowsy, barely aware of the boom of

the waves and wavelets rustling eel grasses at the sea edge. The crack of a twig on the path made them start. The lowering sun flashing off the

water and gusts of sand blinded them. They drew back as a squarish shadow fel upon the sand. Peering up, they saw a man leveling a .22-caliber

rifle at them.

By Rope
—He barked orders. First came fumbling attempts to tie them—the man had brought along precut lengths of narrow cotton clothesline.

First he coerced Linda to bind Robert. She had tied a loosely knotted length around his wrist, and was stil clinching a rope in her hand when the

stranger knelt. With trembling fingers, he began to finish the tying himself—first with a few granny knots and then marline hitches, a knot not

commonly used by laymen. In the midst of this, Robert and Linda leaped to their feet and plunged into the steep creek bed leading uphil from the

blanket. The couple tried to run in the soft sand of the creek bed. They lurched in the general direction of a shack, which had been barely visible

from the blanket.

By Gun
—The interloper thundered after them, firing on the run. Slugs ripped into the young man first, hitting him in the back as he ran screaming

for help. There was no one to hear them. The bul ets were closely grouped, astonishing accuracy for shooting while moving. Robert dropped face

down. The stranger then swung the rifle toward Linda, firing into her back. He approached slowly until he stood over the couple. He pumped more

bul ets into the boy’s back, striking him in al eleven times. Linda had fal en onto her back, and so a fusil ade of bul ets penetrated her chest.

Altogether, she was hit eight times.

The kil er’s viciousness had not abated as he continued to inflict injuries upon the corpses. Dragging Robert face down by his legs away from the

shoreline, he left welts and abrasions just above the boy’s surfer’s trunks. Rocks scraped his chest and face, leaving deep contusions. The stranger

was sweating by the time he completed the first part of his gruesome task—hiding the corpse in the woodpile shelter by the nearly dry creek bed.

The primitive structure lay halfway between the shore and the railroad embankment. Almost lost among dense shrubs and trees, it was used mostly

by transients.

By Knife
—He returned to the woman, cut down the front of her swimsuit with a knife, and exposed her breasts. He slashed her body, the wounds

describing a curved river. Next, he dragged her feet-first to the shack, and because Linda was supine, al the abrasions were to her back and

buttocks. After pul ing her inside the lean-to, he ripped off her swimsuit and tossed it cal ously over her fiancé. Then he draped Linda’s body, face

up, over the boy.

By Fire
—Now the stranger looked around for things to burn. He gathered up his leftover lengths of rope and empty cartridge boxes and tossed

them into the shack. Smashing the lean-to, he ignited it with wooden matches he had brought along. A funeral pyre would hide al traces of his

crime. Although he tried several times, the structure refused to catch, or he might have returned to his car on the road above believing that

everything behind him was blazing.

Tuesday, June 4, 1963

When Linda and
Robert failed to return, Domingos’s father filed a missing persons report. The Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department issued an al -

points bul etin. The father, along with other family members, joined the search party, and that night located the missing boy’s car in the turnout. A

Highway Patrolman took the trail to the beach below to look further. The lean-to shack was so concealed it took searchers thirty hours to discover

the teenagers. Tracks and postmortem marks on the bodies showed they had been dragged there. That there were no usable latent prints meant

the kil er had likely worn gloves. It was an incomparably evil crime.

No sexual attack had taken place, and that was uncommon. At least there was no presence of semen, though the relatively primitive forensic

techniques of the time might have missed it. Stil , that was doubtful. The board-certified forensics pathologist who performed the autopsies was

highly qualified, having been trained at the L.A. Coroner’s Office.

A contingent of jail inmates roved the crime scene. Prisoners had been bused there to scour the brush and comb a three-mile section of desolate