Zodiac Unmasked (23 page)

realm of ultimately solving the Zodiac mystery, I wil emphasize again that I firmly believe, within the context of what is probably his first murderous

rampage, that within our case lies the solution.”

Zodiac himself had provided the link between himself and Baker’s case, and had done it in such a devious manner that I only recently tumbled to

it. It took an understanding of Zodiac’s mind-set of mirror images and transparencies to unravel his visual clue. In his letter of June 26, 1970, Zodiac

had circled double-peaked Mount Diablo on a cut section of a Phil ips 66 road map. Apparently, Mount Diablo was important to him—its elevation

of 3849 feet cal ing to mind that Stine died in front of 3898 Washington, an address Zodiac himself chose. The map, coupled with a two-line code

at the bottom, supposedly told where his bomb was set. On July 24, he dropped another clue. “PS.,” he wrote. “The Mt. Diablo Code concerns

Radians [a mathematical term representing an angle of measure] &#inches along the radians.” Mt. Diablo is a bench mark used by the U.S.

Geographical Survey to separate north, south, east, and west—the towns connected by a 57-degree radian. The map also mentioned something a

pilot might use—“magnetic north.” An “F”-shaped symbol coupled with a backward “7” appeared twice on his threatening Hal oween card to Avery.

“F” stood for wind speed and direction—north at fifteen to twenty miles an hour. The complete symbol was also an exact copy of a cattle brand used

on Fred Harmon’s Pagosa Springs, Colorado, ranch. Harmon’s comic strip cowboy hero, Red Ryder, was a highly recognizable salesman for air

rifles during the 1940s and ’50s.

“Zodiac’s Mt. Diablo code is a binary spacing code,” an expert told me. “The top line is the alpha line, the bottom line is the beta line. This code

uses Greek letters, which are to be used as numbers. Example: Alpha=1, and Beta=2. Delta=4. The code operates by the key code letter, and

upside-down Greek Gamma, Gamma=3. Therefore, to start this code, you ‘ask’ the code key questions, like: Who are you, what is your message?”

But the map said something entirely different, something visual.

First, I knew that Leigh loved
Mad
magazine and that the Zodiac code of April 20, 1970 (“My name is—”) could read “ALFRED E NEU-MAN”

when deciphered. “By the way have cracked the last cipher I sent you?” he asked in the same letter.
Cracked
magazine was
Mad
’s chief

competitor. Since May 1964,
Mad
had featured a visual puzzle on its inside back cover, a “Fold-In.” The instructions read: “Fold this section over

left, then fold back so ‘A’ meets ‘B.’” I folded the map so that the ruled corners met at the right edge. Then held the map up to the light so that the

back shone through. The crossed circle with an arrow at the twelve o’clock position pointed to the
exact
site of the Domingos/ Edwards murders.

Below Mount Diablo,
Leigh began to sail again, losing himself in a seemingly endless thousand-mile maze, the Delta. The huge tideland marsh,

fed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, was diked with countless levees for flood control. Yet Al en never real y lost himself in those twisting

channels. A point of reference, Mount Diablo, constantly towered in the distance—the amount of acreage visible from its peak second only to that

seen from Mount Kilimanjaro. With his flat feet, Al en felt most at home on the water or in the air.

“Big” Dan Blocker, 350-pound star of the
Bonanza
television western, had died suddenly during the previous summer. Al en ceased wearing his

enormous white cowboy hat. He could no longer be “Hoss.”

Tuesday, November 21, 1972

An anniversary of
sorts—three years earlier, David Odel Martin came to the FBI’s attention when he slashed his wife and eleven-year-old

daughter with a broken bottle and knife. Just before police fatal y shot him, Martin shouted, “I’m the Zodiac kil er!” Armstrong immediately informed

the FBI: “Martin is definitely
not
identical with UNSUB in this matter.” Toschi told me, “In the first four years of the Zodiac case, I would say about

fifteen men have told cops throughout the country that they are Zodiac. Some of them were drunk at the time, some had obvious mental problems,

the rest were being booked on other charges and were seeking publicity.” When cranks weren’t confessing, rumors took the place of new leads in

the investigation. One such attributed an undertaker’s murder and theft of his embalming fluids to Zodiac.

In Santa Rosa, thirteen-year-old Lori Lee Kursa went shopping at the U-Save Market with her mother. Blue-eyed, long blond hair parted in the

middle, she was distinctively dressed in polished-denim bel -bottoms, a brown leather jacket, and brown suede cowboy boots. Around 5:30 P.M.

she apparently wandered off. Half an hour later, Lori was observed briefly by a family friend, Barbara, in the same market, but after that nothing

more was seen of her. Immediately, her mother reported her missing. The search dragged on through November and into the first week of

December, but police unearthed no leads. “You know what was strange about our victims?” Santa Rosa Sergeant Steve Brown later told me. “The

first one he threw in the ditch was found by bike riders the next day, so he decided, ‘I better hide them a little bit better.’ Then he ended up throwing

them out by Franz Val ey and it’s pretty remote. You would need to know that area. You don’t just drive there. I recently re-drove it. Of course if the

kil er lived here and drove around a lot he would know. I’m thinking about a guy who’s living in Lake County or Napa County who traveled that road

back and forth and who worked over here. If you are going out of Santa Rosa, the dumps are al on the left side of the roadway. You wouldn’t pul

your car over to the left side, facing the wrong way, to dump a body. He’s not going to park on the right side, drag the person across the road and

throw them. It doesn’t make sense. I was thinking, just like you, he goes out, there’s a shed, trailer or barn that he uses. And after they’re dead, when

he comes back, he’s now on the right side of the roadway. That’s when he stops and dumps them and then goes back into Santa Rosa.”

On December 12, a hiker, Lex Moore, stumbled across Kursa’s body in a ravine, about fifty-five feet from Calistoga Road. She had been

dumped at the scene completely nude and her body had frozen from the extreme cold. Police estimated she had been dead only a week, though

she had been missing for three ful weeks. She had been kept alive “somewhere,” but they had no suspects.

Someone had broken her neck, dislocating her first and second cervical vertebra. “Strangulation,” Stanford’s Dr. Lunde explained to me, “is not

like shooting someone with a gun. It involves a kind of muscular tension . . . the sensations that come from that play a part in the sexual aspect of

these people for which sex and aggression seem to be intertwined. It is also a way of proving to the person their power over the victim. Assertion of

raw power, and since that is a big part of the enjoyment for these people, it is prolonged by strangulation. . . . I know one such person who very

consciously, more than one, at least two, have volunteered they would take twenty, thirty minutes to strangle victims to prolong the pleasure so to

speak.”

Kursa’s unusual clothes were missing. She had not been sexual y assaulted. Unsuspected by the police, the solution to another mystery lay only

one hundred yards away. There, a shal ow grave in a ravine near the roadway concealed Jeanette Kamahele’s corpse—her hands and ankles

bound to her neck and white clothesline wrapped around her neck four times. But because the area was deeply wooded, police failed to find her

and would not for many years—not until July 6, 1979.

Thursday, December 28, 1972

At four in
the afternoon, twenty days after a freakish snow dusted Twin Peaks and Golden Gate Park, two men discovered the bones of Maureen

Lee Sterling and Yvonne Weber. They were off a rural road 2.2 miles north of Porter Creek Road in the Franz Val ey Road area. A powerful

murderer, to avoid leaving tracks, had bodily lifted the corpses over shrubs and a ditch, then hurled them down a sixty-six-foot embankment.

Apparently, he considered his victims as rubbish to be dumped.

Cause of death and any sexual assault were impossible to determine, but patterns linked the homicides to the others. The kil er had murdered

them elsewhere and kept their clothes. And the kil er tied knots like a seaman. How would those knots match up with those in the Santa Barbara

murders—granny knots and marline hitches? The victims had been abducted in this rotating order: on Friday, Saturday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday,

and Tuesday. Al vanished around 5:00 P.M. in a period of growing darkness. Al had been found in the rural, semi-isolated eastern section of

Sonoma County near lakes, rivers, ditches, and streams. The Santa Rosa crimes were water-related by name: Mark
Springs,
Calistoga (Water),

Creek
Val ey. The furthest point between discovery sites was sixteen miles. Sterling, Weber, and Carolyn Davis, with a seven-month gap, were

found in the exact same spot—2.2 miles north of Porter Creek Road on Franz Val ey Road. However, Kim Al en may have been sexual y assaulted

and that did not fit Zodiac’s pattern.

“As far as the murders go,” continued Baker. “I was almost thinking a postman or PG&E guy just because of the places that they go. The last girl

that was found was in a very remote creek. It’s not a place where you can dump them off the side of the road and they land there. The three on Franz

Val ey Road were found in the same location along the side of the road. You don’t have to throw far to get where they landed. The last one we had in

the creek, I don’t know how the hel he got her in there.”

Several months earlier, officers on the way to the Santa Rosa area that a kil er had used as a dumping ground for murdered Santa Rosa coeds

had stopped in their tracks. Walking down the road toward them and from the secluded murder area was Arthur Leigh Al en. “I travel this road to go

skin-diving,” he said. In the same direction Al en visited two friends at Clear Lake. “Leigh always picked up hitchhikers especial y while attending

Santa Rosa JC and Sonoma State University,” a source told me. “This always bothered my mother. He picked hikers up on the highways. I

remember the two girls disappearing from the skating rink and the other murders. Those bodies discovered on Franz Val ey Road and in Calistoga

weren’t far from my parents’ home.”

Friday, December 29, 1972

Since August 4, 1971,
when police questioned Leigh for what they erroneously believed was the first time, Zodiac had sent no letters. But we

hardly needed more clues from the kil er. We already knew a lot about Zodiac. He could be caught if we put our minds to it. Al the early suspects

were singled out because their handprinting was like Zodiac’s or they resembled the composite sketch. Few were as tal or heavy as the kil er

actual y was; some were slender as a boy.

Zodiac had three qualities, had to have these qualities—he was strong and he was smart and he possessed specialized technical proficiency in

code, chemistry, firearms, engineering, electronics, and bomb-making. More tel ing, Zodiac knew forensics, leaving behind false clues and wearing

glue on his fingertips. In fact his marksmanship skil s, knowledge of police I.D. techniques, and use of Highway Patrol cutoff maneuvers to box in his

victims pointed to Zodiac being a policeman. Two victims had been reaching for their licenses when he blinded them with a flashlight and

unleashed a fusil ade of bul ets.

And yet Zodiac was compel ed to deride police in his letters, the thril of baiting them becoming a powerful motive in his game of outdoor chess.

He taunted authority as if striking out against a control ing figure in his daily life—a boss, a father, or a policeman. Serial sadists, enraptured with

the various tools of police work and with policemen themselves, were frequently police groupies. Some sexual sociopaths dressed in uniform when

trapping and torturing their victims, often applied for police work, or expressed a desire to work in some law enforcement capacity. Invariably they

would offer aid in the hunt for themselves. The known serial kil ers were remarkably alike.

FBI agent John Douglas’s psychological profile of the Atlanta child murderer spoke volumes. He said the kil er “would live in the area, sometimes

pose as a police officer, show extreme interest in media coverage of the case, and have difficulty relating to members of the opposite sex. In fact,

children who lived near [the suspect Wayne] Wil iams thought he was a policeman because he drove cars that looked like police cars, showed

them a badge, and ordered them around.” Wil iams monitored police-band radio, just as California multiple murderer Ed Kemper did. Kemper

frequented a local bar to become pals with off-duty policemen. “He showed me his gun and his handcuffs right here in the bar,” recal ed the

bartender. “He handcuffed a friend and shoved him up against the wal . . . . You see, Kemper always wanted to be a policeman. Al his friends were

cops. He used to talk about it al the time . . . said he had been hired as a security guard somewhere in the Bay Area—but he was only a big guy

who sometimes worked as a gas station attendant.” After slaying his mother, the Santa Cruz giant left a note behind, ridiculing his former friends on

the force.

Ted Bundy used a gold badge and handcuffs to masquerade as “Officer Roseland” at a Salt Lake City shopping center. One of the “Hil side