Zodiac Unmasked (17 page)

gun. “You can check this up by giving the chief a cal ,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. I’m supposed to cal Chief Nelder at ten o’clock on a Sunday night.”

“Why don’t you cal Armstrong or Toschi?”

“You do it,” said the cop.

Toschi vouched for Avery and everything was fine, except that the two victims had limped away into the night.

“No victims,” said the cop, shrugging. “The best we can do is book him for brandishing a knife in a rude and threatening manner. Just

misdemeanors.” No one was questioned and, since Avery ended up being the only witness, he signed a citizen’s complaint. Next morning, he got

to the Hal of Justice by 10:30, but the knife man, sentence suspended, had already been released. “I didn’t exactly enjoy the role of policeman,” he

told Nelder. “I’m worried how close I came to kil ing the guy. I kept looking at him and thinking if he comes at me with a knife, if it comes down to it, if

it’s a matter of survival, I’m going to have to pul the trigger. I don’t think I ever real y paused to consider before that by carrying a gun, I was putting

myself in a position where sooner or later I’d have to use it. I’m going to get rid of it, Chief. The weight of that gun has gotten too heavy.” When Avery

returned to his houseboat in Marin County, he hauled down the sheet of steel plate he had instal ed in the one window that faced a shadowed

Sausalito street next to Gate 5. He felt sick and Zodiac had made him that way. Over time his lungs began to fail.

7

arthur leigh allen

Friday, November 13, 1970

A San Rafael
graphologist analyzed Zodiac’s handprinting. “He is five feet eleven and one-half inches tal , sharp but not creative,” she speculated.

“His hair is sparse and he may sometimes wear a wig or false beard. He may wear lenses on occasion. He may have a malformation or fault such

as finger damage on his right hand. He puts himself under self-hypnosis consciously or unconsciously, and may know something of this in actual

fact. He always believes that he is drowning, either by emotional pattern or literal y by water or being overwhelmed by unpremeditated

circumstance. May have boat or houseboat. Has probably scuba dived. Brain damage. Tissue damage from oxygen lack at birth or later, maybe

from diving too long and running out of oxygen . . .” Zodiac had written, “Please help me I am drownding.”

In the fal Leigh had begun attending Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, and rented a slot for his trailer in Santa Rosa. On Friday the

thirteenth, Al en had a motorcycle accident while returning from Sacramento where, earlier in the day, someone murdered Santa Rosa resident

Carol Beth Hilburn. She had last been seen at the Zodiac, an after-hours club on West Capitol Avenue frequented by members of motorcycle

gangs. She had been wearing a jacket with the large yel ow letters SANTA ROSA on the right side. Hilburn had been staying in Santa Rosa with

her sister while studying to be an X-ray technician. On the left side of her slick, hip-length black jacket was her name, CAROL. She was the third

attractive young woman to be kil ed in less than a year in Sacramento. Her nude, severely bludgeoned body was found in an isolated field near Dry

Creek on the city’s northern edge. A car had dragged her into a field and left her face up. Her throat was then cut and she was beaten so savagely

she was unrecognizable.

That afternoon, both Paul Avery and Detective Sergeant Dave Bonine requested Sherwood Morril conduct a comparison between handwriting

samples from Zodiac and the Riverside printing received in the Bates case.

Sunday, November 15, 1970

Over the years
a white Chevy Impala would make many appearances in the Zodiac case. A victim’s baby-sitter saw a round-faced watcher on

Wal ace Street in an “American made sedan, white with large windshield and out of state plates.” Three women at Lake Berryessa the day of the

stabbings observed a suspicious man in a Chevrolet, “silver blue or ice blue in color, 1966, two-door sedan, ful size car, quiet, very conservative,

with California plates.” The Impala showed up again in Santa Rosa on November 15, 1970. At 4:00 A.M. a woman driver saw “a 1962-63 White

Chevrolet” fol owing her from a Santa Rosa post office. Shortly after, a “white Chevrolet Impala, sedan 1964,” fol owed a second woman on

Mendocino Avenue and Chanate Road. At 5:10 A.M. a “white Chevy, 1963-64” tailgating a woman on Fourth Street was stopped by police and

tried to speed off. The driver, a twenty-five-year-old Val ejo man, said he was lost and looking for way out of town. The officer escorted him out of

town. The next day came a break in the case.

Monday, November 16, 1970

Morrill found a
match, linking Zodiac’s printing with three “BATES HAD TO DIE” letters and a wavering blockprinted poem discovered in the

Riverside Col ege Library. Zodiac had carved a ghastly verse into a plywood-board study desktop with a blue bal point pen. The poem was

probably written as early as January 1967, when the desk was stored in an unused col ege basement. “Sick of Living . . .” it began. Beneath the

gory poem were the incised lower-case initials “R H.” Morril checked over six thousand handwriting samples searching for a kil er with those

initials. “Most of those exemplars came from the Riverside Col ege and military instal ations,” he told me. “They were al on microfilm, blown up, and

I had a magnifier that I just slipped them under one after another. Now this is the weak link in the case—some of those registration certificates were

typed.” Captain Cross was encouraged. “Wel , it looks like we’re in business,” he said. The hunt for Zodiac was now statewide.

In the early evening of November 16, Al en stood in the doorway of his trailer nursing his wounds, physical and emotional, past and present. He

listened. The roar of traffic on Santa Rosa Avenue fil ed his head. He put on his white hat and locked the door to his trailer. He limped to his car and

started the dusty old clunker. Night was fal ing.

At 6:00 P.M. an employee at the Los Guilucos School for Girls, about eight miles from Santa Rosa, returned from shopping. She slowed for

heavy oncoming traffic at the corner of Pythian Way and two-lane Sonoma Highway. Approaching the narrow road for her turn, she flicked on her

turn signal, slowed, and waited for two cars at the corner. As the second car passed by, a hand shot from the bushes. It fastened on her door

handle. A face glared at her from the brush. It looked familiar. The features resembled the Zodiac wanted poster. “My impression was of light-

colored hair, somewhat receding, though not bald,” she recal ed. “He was dressed in a navy-blue jacket and I judged him to be about thirty-five and

wearing dark-rimmed glasses.” She stepped on the throttle, executed a sharp left turn, and raced another quarter mile to the apartment complex

where she lived. “I feel,” she said, “that the man at the corner and the man sketched in the paper are one and the same.”

Thursday, November 19, 1970

The Riverside P.D.
held a secret Zodiac conference. While Armstrong remained behind, Toschi, Narlow, and Nicolai flew southward. “Sometimes

we split up,” said Toschi. “‘Do you want to do this?’ Armstrong would ask me, and we would take turns in order to accomplish different tasks at the

same time.” Toschi was shocked to discover Avery on the same plane to Riverside. “We saw him right away. He had his name stenciled on the

back of his carry-on. Narlow and Nicolai looked at me, and I said, ‘Hey, I don’t know anything about this!’ They thought Bil or I might have told him. I

asked Avery, ‘Paul, how did you know we were going down? You have to tel me. These guys think I’m a snitch.’ Avery said, ‘Captain Cross told

me.’ After we landed and were waiting for our Rent-A-Car, Avery had the bal s to ask to ride with us to headquarters. Of course the answer was no. I

liked Avery and had been able to trust him on cases where a lot of guys thought he was a little sneaky. He was never that way with me at any time.”

As Avery drove alone to the meeting, he thought back three days earlier to an incident on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. A stocky stranger,

“between twenty-five and forty-five years old” had approached two girls and offered them a ride. “No, thanks,” they said, gesturing to a VW at the

curb, “we’ve got our own.” They ate at a snack bar, returned forty minutes later, and discovered their car wouldn’t start. Suddenly, the same stranger

was at their side, extending his aid. A passerby noticed the man helping a young girl push a Volkswagen, the other girl behind the wheel. When he

offered to help, the stocky man, enraged at the intrusion, ran off. The second Good Samaritan checked the engine. “The middle distributor wire has

been ripped out,” he told Avery later.

“The girls filed a report with the local police that may contain the stranger’s license plate number,” the man added. Twelve hours afterward, the

Chronicle
received an anonymous cal . “City desk, don’t bother with general rewrite,” the voice said. “This is the Zodiac and it’s the last time I am

going to cal .” Avery thought it odd that Zodiac knew newspaper lingo. Berkeley cops searched their files, but could not find the plate number.

Avery was actual y quivering. The pressure was tremendous and he had been increasingly “freaked out” over Zodiac’s threat against him twenty-

four days earlier. Ten days ago, when Avery first visited Riverside, he had begged the city desk to cal him if any letters came while he was away.

“Zode—as I cal him,” wrote Avery in a memo, “is something like the Viet Cong. [Avery had spent three years in Vietnam as a war

correspondent.] You don’t know who he is, where he is, or when or where he might strike next. I am getting cross-eyed from trying to keep one

eye directed ahead and the other over my shoulder. I real y doubt he intends to come after me, but I am being careful.”

“I wasn’t pleased with the Riverside visit,” Toschi told me. “I tried to be friendly as the meeting got under way, introduced myself by giving my

name, spel ing it T-O-S-C-H-I, and saying (as I always do), ‘That’s Italian.’ I’m very proud of my heritage—I spoke Italian before English because my

mother was Piemontese and my father Toscano. We spent the whole day in their office and had lunch. We thought we were going to get more

information. We got minimal. I was truly disappointed that we weren’t getting a heck of lot of anything. With the exception of [Detective] Bud Kel y,

who was always up front with me, we never got much cooperation with Riverside. These Riverside guys aren’t tel ing us anything. It’s so obvious that

they’re holding on to everything for themselves like we’re here to purse-snatch. And that was not the case. We were there to share information.

“They had confiscated the Riverside desk and kept it in a special evidence room at police headquarters. That desk real y got my attention . . . that

lettering was so obviously by Zodiac. Later, after we got the tip about Al en, Riverside never even bothered to check on him having been in the

region—and I asked, ‘Did you know Arthur Leigh Al en?’ ‘Did you arrest him?’ ‘Has he ever been cited in the area?’ ‘Can we connect him to RCC?’

They were kind of leaning against the fact that it could have been our kil er, Zodiac. From that moment on, they developed tunnel vision to any other

suspects. Riverside thought they knew who had committed the Bates murder.”

Captain Irv Cross of the Detective Bureau said, “We are not ruling out the possibility that the kil er may have been a local youth.”

Back in San Francisco, an anonymous typed letter arrived at the
Chronicle
—“It both angers me and amazes me,” I read, “that a wanton kil er like

the Zodiac has escaped detection and justice for so long.

“It is my personal opinion Zodiac has spent time in some type of institution—either prison or mental hospital. . . . Zodiac would not be

married. He is unable to function in a relationship with a woman, either sexual y or emotional y. . . . The hunt for the Zodiac kil er has been a

tragic comedy of errors. . . . I know this: every act of horror such as mass kil ers beginning their ugly business has a starting point which is

ignited by what I choose to cal a trigger. The beast within them lies quietly most of the time, but then something triggers it or sets it off. In the

case of Zodiac I speculate it was due to two things: an episode in his life at the time of the first kil ing, traumatic to the person known as Zodiac,

but not necessarily to anyone else. He seems to have a real hatred for police and enjoys needling them in their failure to catch him. Possibly an

encounter with police at that particular time. I don’t personal y believe he does his kil ing according to some astrological timetable. I think he

kil s on holidays and week-ends simply because he doesn’t work then. I suggest in al probability he has a job which is a forty hour work week

and five consecutive days. . . . I shal remain anonymous. I hope you wil not stop in your efforts to find this fiend. I wish you good health and

good hunting. [signed] Armchair.”

In the unusual letter “Armchair” mentions he never heard of a mother shooting an adult child. “I suppose I am too suspicious of everyone,” he

concluded. “But being suspicious has saved my bacon more than once.” And “Armchair” had not only used Zodiac words (“needling,” “trigger,”

“hunt,” “hunting”), but had lived in Riverside at the time of the Bates kil ing, quoting events and newspaper articles he had read there. I was never

able to track him down.

Friday, December 18, 1970

On Arthur Leigh
Al en’s birthday, a burglar broke into a woman’s home. The thief took pains to conceal his identity—adhesive tape on his