Zodiac Unmasked (19 page)

girl were analyzed. Al were Western coated .22 Long Rifle ammo with 6 RH class characteristics. They could only have been fired from a J. C.

Higgins, Model 80, .22 automatic pistol. Betty Lou had been shot five times in the back in a “remarkably close pattern.” Three of the bul ets had

emerged from her front. Betty Lou’s dress had no smoke or gunpowder residue in one hole in the center front. Nor was there any tattooing in the

five punctures in the upper right side of her back. However, in the topmost hole in back, a single grain of gunpowder was discovered. That meant

that of al the slugs that struck her, only one was fired at a closer range. Al the others were fired from at least several feet. Two of the ten bul ets fired

were never accounted for, lost in the nearby field.

Lundblad began timing the events of that night. First he drove to the home of Mrs. Stel a Borges, the woman who had discovered the bodies

sprawled by the roadside. From her ranch to the crime scene was two and seven-tenths miles and that took three minutes. From the crime scene to

the Enco Station on East 2nd Street in Benicia where she had flagged down police was three and four-tenths miles. It took Lundblad five minutes at

the “safe high speed” Borges had driven. “It is two and one-tenths miles from the intersection of Lake Herman Road and Luther Gibson Freeway to

crime scene,” he wrote, “a three minute trip.” Later he also timed the distances between two suspects’ homes and the murder site at various

speeds. Lundblad learned there had been a prowler around the Jensen home. Upon several occasions the gate leading to the side of the house

had been found open.

The unsolved murders
forever tainted the region. On that forsaken road a man in a white Chevy cruised under the ful moon. Residents had taken

to cal ing him “The Phantom of Cordelia.” A big man was also observed roving the territory on foot, stalking over a gravel path to the old pump

house, scouting for game, practicing his shooting, and moving through the quarry and watery areas where he could dive like a ghost. The huge man

moved in other remote areas of Val ejo too, tracking the watery outskirts of Val ejo as if seeking something. Three astrological water signs—

Scorpio, Pisces, and Cancer—determined the timing of Zodiac’s assaults. To prove this, astrologers confidently pointed to his later double

shooting at Blue Rock Springs—committed during the sign of Cancer with the moon in Pisces.

Mrs. Stel a Borges’s ranch sat off Fairgrounds Drive and abutted the Syar Rock Quarry on American Canyon Road. To the east was Borges

Summit Reservoir, and to the north a creek that rushed year-round with water. The big man swam in the cold water and stood like an apparition at

her gate. Mrs. Borges, an important witness in the Lake Herman murders, saw him there herself. Forty-five minutes before midnight, December 20,

1968, she had set out for Benicia along Lake Herman Road. The lights of her car had il uminated the crumpled bodies of two teenagers at the

roadside. Heart pounding, she had raced the rest of the way into Bencia and flagged down a police cruiser. For some reason the stranger

reminded her of that traumatic moment.

Her nephew, Albert, had also noticed eerie occurrences a year after the murders. “We grew up on the Borges Ranch,” he told me.“My Aunt Stel a

saw a lot of strange things over the years and so did I. It was her home her entire life. In November 1969, I was in the military and had a weekend

pass. My ride dropped me off at the rest area around 10:00 P.M. My brother proceeded down Lake Herman Road to the rest area with his girlfriend

and waited for me. He was familiar with the road and the Zodiac incident the previous Christmas. We al were.

“He was armed with a pistol in his truck on the way back across Lake Herman Road. Not far from the Lake Herman gate someone had lifted a

huge log across the road. It was nine or ten feet long. We could not go around. We stopped. I felt uneasy, looked around, and I told my brother to

back up and go around the long way to Val ejo. There I cal ed the police and reported it. Later, [to the south] at wooded Dan Foley Park by Lake

Chabot, several teenagers on the hil were shooting BB guns. They observed a large man at a distance watching them. He stayed as long as they

did, then left. Many people saw this stalker.

“In the early 1970s, we used to go shooting and target-practice by the rock quarry. We had done that for years. My cousins told me about a big

guy who used to come up and shoot with a whole armory in his car—military-type weapons, .45 Colts, M-16s, and the like. He wore military

fatigues, bloused boots, and al . One day I was up there shooting and this guy was also there. When he saw me he immediately came up to where I

was and chal enged me. ‘What are you doing here?’

“This guy was a gun nut and had burned up one box of ammo after another. He was wearing a black basebal cap and was about six feet one,

large and muscular like myself. But I felt at a disadvantage, uneasy because he had strange eyes and he did not take them off me throughout his

questioning, even when I told him I was a member of the family. I drove by Lake Herman the next day, and stopped by the gate where my aunt found

that first couple of victims, and what a chil I got. It was like the incident had just happened. I thought to myself what if an old Chevy Impala should pul

up alongside—then got the hel out of there.

“I came to the conclusion that Zodiac was probably in the Navy or at least worked at the Mare Island shipyard. Val ejo police have fouled up in the

past, and I wonder if this fel ow was closer to the police than we think. I personal y believe that after shooting the couple at Blue Rock Springs,

Zodiac did drive down Lake Herman Road and since he was a pretty thorough person, had a police car radio so he could keep tabs on al aspects

of information being relayed.”

Mrs. Borges’s nephew was not the only one who had observed bizarre events on the outskirts of Val ejo. An Oakland man’s son had been out at

Blue Rock Springs the very evening of Zodiac’s Fourth of July, 1969, murder and seen someone quite like Leigh Al en. “They were out riding their

motorcycles along Columbus Parkway,” the father explained, “when they met a huge man walking along the road. My son was going to offer him a

ride, but he was so huge and the motorcycle so smal he decided against it. Besides, he said, it was near twilight and the man looked kind of

spooky. In any event, he appeared to come from a car parked further down the road. My son described a 1950s black Plymouth, but was vague

about the license plate number. It had an ‘X’ in it, he’s sure of that. He was very confident about the make and color of the car. My son was about

seventeen at the time, and I am sure he did not repeat his observations to the police, especial y when he heard a murder had taken place right

after. It probably frightened him in the extreme.”

Zodiac was a watcher—no doubt of that. The lonely always are.

Saturday, July 15, 1972

Carolyn Nadine Davis,
long blond hair parted in the middle, gray-blue eyes, a fifteen-year-old runaway from Shasta County, left her Grandmother

Adelian’s house in Garbervil e. In the pocket of her black coat nestled a one-way plane ticket from Redding to San Francisco. At 1:50 P.M. the road

stretched ahead. She swung her green-print cloth handbag and eyed passing cars. In the bag was a false I.D. that identified her as “Carolyn Cook.”

She approached the on-ramp, began hitchhiking on 101 in a southerly direction, and was not seen alive again. The other missing women had been

hitchhiking north. If Al en were responsible, the change from a northerly direction to a southerly one was accounted for. He was no longer working in

Pinole and traveling north homeward each evening.

8

arthur leigh allen

Thursday, September 7, 1972

“There was a
second meeting with investigators,” Panzarel a told me. “Leigh was then living in a house trailer somewhere on the coast and I had

been there. The most bizarre thing is that hanging on the wal was a picture of him buffed out, a senior in high school, winning the CIA Diving

Championship, and this guy’s total y healthy looking. Only seven, eight years later, he’s a three hundred pound blob.”

Bil Armstrong contacted Don Cheney in Torrance again. A year had now snaked by since he and Toschi had questioned Leigh Al en. So many

homicides, so many suspects, so many legal hurdles to clear. “Inspector, I was going to cal you,” Cheney said. “I don’t know if it’s important, but I

thought of something else Arthur Leigh Al en and I discussed in our conversation on New Year’s Day, 1969. When Leigh was discussing his plan, I

can recal that he asked me how you could disguise your handwriting. I remember my response. I told him, ‘I guess you could go to a library and get

books on writing examination to find out how writing is identified.’”

Armstrong absorbed this, then asked Cheney again if he was certain about his memory of his conversation with Al en.

“I am positive,” he said.

Things were moving again.

Toschi scanned a photocopy of the first letter signed Zodiac—the dread it inspired two years ago stil fresh in his mind. “This is the Zodiac

speaking,” it began. Zodiac had firmly handprinted these three pages twenty months after Al en’s conversation with Cheney. After studying the

originals and discovering no indented or secret writing, the FBI returned them to Sacramento on August 18, 1969. Thus, Toschi had only a copy for

reference. A phrase had stuck in Toschi’s mind, and so he leafed through the August 4, 1969, photostat, rereading it, misspel ings and al .

“Last Christmass—In that epasode the police were wondering as to how I could shoot & hit my victims in the dark. They did not openly state

this, but implied this by saying it was a wel lit night & I could see silowets on the horizon.

“Bul shit that area is srounded by high hil s & trees. What I did was tape a smal pencel flash light to the barrel of my gun. If you notice, in the

center of the beam of light if you aim it at a wal or ceil ing you wil see a black or darck spot in the center of the circle of the light about 3 to 6 in.

across.

“When taped to a gun barrel the bul et wil strike exactly in the center of the black dot in the light. Al I had to do was spray them . . .” Here

Toschi came to the remainder of this last sentence, one he and Armstrong had ordered the press not to print. It read: “as if it was a water hose;

there was no need to use the gunsights. I was not happy to see that I did not get front page cover-age.” [Signed with Zodiac’s crossed circle

and “no address.”]

An
electric gun sight
—exactly as Al en had suggested to Cheney. “Leigh actual y constructed such a device,” Cheney told me much later. “He put

a penlight on an H&R revolver with tape.” Zodiac, enraptured by his science fiction invention, referred to it again in his November 9, 1969, letter: “To

prove that I am the Zodiac, Ask the Val ejo cop about
my electric gun sight
which I used to start my col ecting of slaves.” Val ejo cop? What Val ejo

cop? thought Toschi. Had Zodiac, like Leigh Al en, been questioned by an as yet unknown Val ejo policeman at some point before November 9,

1969?

“The next time we saw Al en was up in Santa Rosa,” Toschi explained. “That’s when we felt we might have something. Leigh’s name was just

thrown at us again in a phone cal late one morning.” Toschi never did determine the exact date of that cal . He recal ed only that it was summer (it

was stil light out at eight o’clock that night) and that enough time had passed for witnesses to grow dispirited about the progress Val ejo police

were making.

“I would real y like to talk to you about a case you and your partner are working on,” began the cal er circumspectly.

“Are we talking about Zodiac?” Toschi asked.

“Yes, absolutely. You’re reading my mind. I’m the brother. I believe you know what I’m talking about.”

There was caution and concern in his voice. “I do,” Toschi said, recal ing the visit he and Armstrong and Mulanax had paid to Ron and Karen

Al en’s house one August night.

“I feel, and my wife feels, a larger police department with more resources could do a little bit more than what the Val ejo Police Department has

been doing. I can only speculate what they are doing at the present time, Inspector.”

“Have you given al your information to the Val ejo Police Department?” Toschi asked.

“Yes, but we don’t think they have done enough,” Ron said.

“When Ron Al en cal ed,” Toschi told me later, “he was a very concerned person and real y was asking San Francisco to talk to him. He says, ‘I

need to talk to you fel ows and I’ve already spoken to Sergeant Mulanax and some other officers.’ It was like he wasn’t getting the same officer al

the time, that he wanted to pass information on. And right away my brain is thinking ahead like, ‘Oh, God, here we go again because I’ve got to talk

to Jack Mulanax. We can’t drop the bal —I mean, it’s his jurisdiction.’”

“Where are you?” Toschi asked.

“I’m in the city,” Ron Al en said, and told him where—between Market and Mission on First Street.

“Can you get away this afternoon for fifteen or twenty minutes so we can talk to you and just see what you have?”

“Yes, I can take a break. How soon?”

“Can you spare some time so we can come down immediately?”

They agreed to meet in the lobby of the PG&E Building in downtown San Francisco in about thirty minutes. “What are you going to be wearing?”

asked Toschi. “The two of us wil be there.”

“And that’s how it al started,” Toschi told me.“We natural y went in and ran it by our boss, Charlie El is, real quick. I told the lieutenant what we got