Zodiac Unmasked (16 page)

[Lake Berryessa victim] was stabbed more than 20 times with a 12-inch butcher’s knife, in the chest, back and abdomen—with many of the

stabs coming in pairs, making Zodiac’s cross-hair mark.—[Marshal ] Schwartz.”

The last was not true.

Over at the SFPD, professorial, pipe-smoking Bil Hamlet was hunched over a makeshift desk in the hal way. “We put a little partition around him

so he wouldn’t be bothered,” said Toschi. “We were getting prints from al over the Bay Area and Northern California. He’s got his magnifying

glasses on, he’s working off three-by-five cards. That’s al he was working on. If you get too many guys examining prints, you lose something.” But

that cab print never matched anyone.

Wednesday, December 31, 1969

Zodiac’s periods of
violent activity mirrored school-year vacation time and holidays—summertime, Columbus Day, Hal oween, Thanksgiving,

Christmas, and the Fourth of July. Leigh Al en’s revelations to Cheney had been imparted on New Year’s Day. Most of his time-consuming letters

and codes were mailed during school vacations. Few occupations outside an elementary schoolteacher’s offered holidays off, plus an additional

three months’ vacation. Zodiac’s activities fit the school year and hardly anything else.

Zodiac had threatened to shoot children as they dashed from a disabled school bus. He promised to plant bombs that targeted the buses by their

height and number of windows and detonated along school bus routes. “I feel that the odds are substantial that the kil er is a public employee,

possibly working for one of the schools,” theorized an expert. “His possible connection with a school or university, even if only as an area

maintenance man, is open to speculation.”

Though Leigh, at this time, was showing those closest to him cryptograms he kept concealed in a gray metal box, he never spoke of codes with

Cheney. “No, absolutely not,” said Cheney. “Leigh never talked about codes, didn’t even work crossword puzzles, and at no time evidenced any

interest in astrology. He liked to make up rhymes, however.”

Friday, January 30, 1970

Four Cal Poly
at San Luis Obispo students provided a tip to the local police, who passed it on to the FBI Identification Division. Their information

was that a graduate of their university closely resembled the composite of Zodiac. “He owns 9-mm and .22-caliber handguns and frequently travels

alone in San Francisco and frequently remote areas of the state,” they said. “He was absent from Cal Poly the weekend of the last murder.” During

the time Zodiac was penning letters and committing a string of brutal murders, Al en was wel settled in the Bay Area. However, if it was Leigh the

four students were pinpointing, then he might stil be making frequent southbound trips to his old alma mater. He tended to rove the Golden State,

large blocks of his time unaccounted for, and this left his family wondering.

Monday, March 23, 1970

At 3:00 A.M,
forty minutes after she escaped from her kidnapper, Kathleen Johns filed a report with Stanislaus Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Ray Lovett.

The pregnant woman and her baby girl had been abducted en route to Petaluma from her Compus Way, San Bernardino home. As with Bates, the

interloper had gimmicked her Chevrolet wagon to trick her into his car. He conveyed Johns on a terror ride until she and her baby leaped from the

moving car and hid in a field. He searched for them until the timely arrival of a passing trucker. Deputy Lovett later located her blazing auto on

Highway 132, about one-quarter mile west of the Delta. The abductor had taken the time to replace a sabotaged tire, drive the car elsewhere, and

torch it.

The kidnapper drove a tan late-model vehicle, wore glasses, a dark ski jacket, and navy-blue bel -bottoms. Johns had recognized him as Zodiac

from a wanted poster tacked to Lovett’s wal . He was thirty, stood five feet nine inches, and weighed 160—too light for Zodiac. “It was twenty-eight

years ago,” Johns recal ed recently, “and I perhaps wouldn’t know him now. . . . The calm voice—I remember it like it was yesterday. I don’t think you

could live through something like that and forget.”

Friday, July 24, 1970

Zodiac belatedly claimed
responsibility for the Johns abduction in a letter not published until October 12. On June 26 he had claimed to have shot

SFPD Officer Richard Radetich, and
that
was a downright lie. It made Toschi wonder about his claims of a Riverside murder.

6

avery and the dark alley

Saturday, October 24, 1970

The Zodiac case
was already affecting
Chronicle
reporter Paul Avery’s health. It would eventual y destroy it. In the early morning hours he drove

his car onto narrow little Mary Street. Mary lay in the shadow of the
Chronicle
and continued on northwest, running behind the Old Mint. Avery

parked where Mary intersected Minna, the dank al ey separating the
Chronicle
from the
Examiner.
It was a rough area and Minna at the time held a dubious honor. It was the site of more murders than any other place in the city. He was not gone long—from 12:40 A.M. until 1:40 A.M., but long

enough. During that time he traversed a long, dimly lit corridor into the city room. The
Chronicle
was a huge three-story barnlike building with a

tower at the Mission and Fifth Street corner. The quality of light was yel ow-greenish at best. Beneath his feet Avery felt the tremble of tremendous

presses grinding out an early morning edition. Teletype keys rattled nervously in a little room to his left—a ghost was on the line. Lines of rubber-

cement pots, rows of battered old Smith-Coronas, and stacks of used photo zincs, copper-backed and etched with acid, crowded desktops.

Avery filed a story, then returned to his car. The right vent window was smashed—the mark of an experienced booster. Only a few things were

missing. His Wel s Fargo checkbook, containing checks numbered 118 to 125, had been taken. His expensive Sony cassette tape recorder, which

held an interview with a Zodiac tipster—a man with a muffled voice—was gone. Avery was concerned enough to cal the police. Officers Gerald

Derham and Wil iam Thiffault reported.

It was then Avery noticed that his large gray briefcase, emblazoned with his initials, “P. A.,” had been stolen. He had stuffed that briefcase with a

complete clipping file on Zodiac. He looked up and down the darkened street. It began to dawn on him how close the kil er was. He seemed to be

privy to reporter’s notes and Sunday features before they were published; he used newspaper Teletype paper and supplies that might had been

purchased from Woolworth’s down the street. What if Zodiac were getting into the building late at night? The paper was a twenty-four-hour

operation, but manned by a skeleton crew at night. Security in the building consisted of a guard at a tal desk on the Fifth Street entrance, but there

were two sets of back stairs and two elevators that led to the editorial floor. Additional y, there was a passage between the
Examiner
and

Chronicle
that spanned Minna Street and al owed people to walk from one paper to the other. Zodiac was not just watching the hunters; he might

be entering the paper at night.

A
Chronicle
printer believed Zodiac actual y worked there. “Many of the Zodiac cipher symbols are also printer’s proofreading marks,” he told

me. “The Zodiac symbol itself is a proofreader’s mark used to line up corrections on a tissue overlay and for color registration. His method of

numbering pages is also the printer’s method: 1/6, 2/6, one of six, two of six, etc. . . . to alert the typesetter and proofreader to fol ow the flow of copy.

The arrows used on the bus diagrams are also printer’s arrows. Not just a line with an inverted ‘V,’ but with the ‘V’ fil ed in.

“When Zodiac began writing his letters, the paper was attempting to enter the electronic age with a computer system known as the ‘Braegen.’

Rather than generating tape-punched copy for the Linotype machines on Fairchild TTS machines, copy was typed on IBM typewriters, then single-

sheet-fed into scanners, which in turn generated tape sent to the Linotypes. The paper used for typing was narrow fan-fold cheap bond such as

Zodiac used. Blue felt-tipped pens were provided to us (they would not reproduce on copy fed through the scanners) and used by the copy cutters

for instructions and the typesetters for notes questioning spel ing, continuity, and so on.”

Chronicle
editors eventual y cast a jaundiced eye upon two former employees. The editors went over their employment records to see if any days

off corresponded with Zodiac crimes and letters. One worker, suffering bouts of severe depression, had disappeared during the night shift, leaving

behind a note for four years’ sick leave. The other vanished, leaving behind four payrol checks he never picked up.

Monday, October 26, 1970

In North Sacramento,
two days after Avery’s files were stolen, twenty-eight-year-old court reporter and juvenile court aide Nancy M. Bennal ack

failed to show up at work. Friends discovered her bloody body, throat slashed, in her second-floor flat. The unknown kil er had entered by a sliding

glass door Miss Bennal ack had left open so her cat could get in. She was engaged to be married on November 28. She had not been sexual y

assaulted. Her apartment was a half mile from Nurse Judith Hakari’s apartment. Hakari, twenty-three, had been kidnapped from in front of her North

Area apartment after leaving her job at a local hospital. Her badly beaten body was found in a shal ow grave in a remote section of Placer County.

She too had not been sexual y assaulted. Like Miss Bennal ack, she was engaged to be married.

Tuesday, October 27, 1970

The next afternoon
Zodiac mailed “Averly” a garishly decorated Hal oween card signed “Your Secret Pal.” My comparison of an unaltered card

demonstrated Zodiac had done considerable redrawing. He had careful y cut out and pasted a skeleton and an orange pumpkin to the card,

painted staring eyes, and skil ful y added brush lettering. It had taken him at least a day to prepare. “You can see how Zodiac must have taken

delight in putting his own markings on the card,” Toschi told me.

“Also, the ‘PEEK-A-BOO’ and the added printing on the card. Al done by Zodiac.” The card, il ustrated with a smiling skeleton giving Avery the high

sign, was signed “Your Secret Pal.” Zodiac had painted a smal number 14 on the skeletal right hand. Inside, he claimed victim “4-TEEN.” News of

Bennal ack’s death would not appear in the
Chronicle
until the fol owing morning.

Avery wrote Chief Al Nelder:

“Due to the death threat mailed me by the so-cal ed Zodiac kil er, I whole-heartedly agree with the advice I have received from Armstrong

and Toschi that discretion is the better part of valor and that I should carry a gun in order to protect myself should need arise. Therefore this is

my formal request that your office issue me on a temporary basis a permit to carry a concealed weapon.”

Nelder concurred, not only granting Avery authority to pack a .38-caliber revolver, but permission to practice on the police target range. Nelder’s

consideration got Avery in hot water immediately. Around 9:45 P.M., patting the reassuring weight of the .38 in a concealed holster under his jacket,

he waved good night to Night City Editor Steve Gavin. Avery retrieved his car from the multistory lot on Fifth Street and turned onto Minna. At the

corner of Sixth Street, twenty derelicts, peering from dark doorways and gloomy barroom entrances, watched intently. Avery’s headlights

il uminated a one-sided struggle. Only ten feet away, two men were grappling. The first, making hard, thrusting motions from the waist, was armed

with a hunting knife. The second, wounded in his chest, had doubled his belt around his fist as a shield and was backing up, warding off blows with

his arms.

Avery frantical y honked his horn, but the fight continued. Worried about his own safety, he made a quick U-turn to the opposite side of Sixth. The

knife man moved in as his victim final y toppled into the street. Avery, stil honking and yel ing, observed a drunk lurching up Sixth, supporting himself

close against the dirty building fronts. As the wino weaved by, the knife man wheeled, rushed the drunk, and stabbed him too. In a pathetic attempt

at self-defense, the drunk folded his arms over his heart. Anyone who crossed the knife man’s path was in peril.

“Someone is going to be kil ed,” Avery thought, and slipped from his car, drawing his weapon as he crept closer. Halfway across Sixth Street, he

shouted, “Drop the knife and get against the wal !” The knife man froze, then faced Avery. He raised his arms above his head and took a few halting

steps in the reporter’s direction, fixing him with a glassy stare as he came. Avery repeated his command, locking eyes with him and leveling the gun

until he heard, rather than saw, the bloody knife land at his feet. The knife man placed his palms against the front of 125 Sixth Street, a hotel. Avery

yel ed into the lobby to the desk clerk: “Cal the cops!” In a minute a relatively wel -dressed pensioner tottered to the door and said, “The police are

on the way.” For the next five minutes Avery kept wel back from his prisoner. Final y he heard the wail of a siren, a police car appeared, and two

officers climbed out.

“This guy just stabbed a couple of people—wil you take over?”

“Whose gun do you have?” said the senior officer.

“It’s mine,” said Avery, producing his special police star. He explained the circumstances leading up to authority being granted for him to carry a