Zodiac Unmasked (26 page)

Coreris and John Fotinos, cal ed to his posh workshop behind the San Franciscan Hotel, discovered his mutilated body on a bloody mat. In the

victim’s own blood, the kil er printed on his body and the wal , “Satan Saves—ZODIAC.” Salem’s murder was solved in a horrible way. South of Big

Sur, a Highway Patrolman pul ed over two young Wyoming men driving the car of a young social worker found floating in the Yel owstone River. His

heart, head, and limbs had been severed as if in ritual sacrifice. “I have a problem,” one of the men told the officer. “I am a cannibal.” Both were

carrying wel -gnawed human finger bones in their pockets.

Like Zodiac, Paul Avery typed on a manual typewriter, had intimate knowledge of the
Chronicle
and police techniques, and wore Wing Walker

shoes. Like Leigh Al en, Avery had been born in the thirties in Honolulu and raised in a military family as the son of a career Naval officer. He had

his own theories about Zodiac. “He might be some sort of merchant seaman,” Avery told me, “because for long intervals we don’t hear from him.

For some reason Zodiac’s grown cautious. Whether or not ‘Zode’s’ in prison or has simply stopped kil ing, I stil have to contend with this—” He

snatched up a particularly vicious copycat letter:

“Paul Avery: I kil ed Erakat [Zuheir Erakat, a victim of the Zebra kil ers, a case Toschi had been assigned]. The Blind Lady is next, then you.

The Grand Finale wil be suicide, with TV coverage, from the Golden Gate Bridge. Soon My mission in life is done. Aloha.” Two Zodiac

symbols served as a signature to the letter.

“Scoop. Paul Avery and the Fuzzy S.F. Pigs: a .45 automatic and a plastic bag with a draw-string over his head got his cooperation, but he

was yel ow and whined. That deal was extra and commissioned by someone now dead. My California activities are unaffected—just on ice

presently—you are stil there, so say your prayers—the Zodiac cannot be trifled with. Zodiac Claims 17 . . . Paul Avery—Hah!”

The thirty-nine-year-old former war correspondent found himself buried beneath tips. “This is the half-brother of the Zodiac speaking,” one fretted.

“I’m concerned that Zodiac might be using my High Standard .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol.” But of them al , Wil y’s3 story was especial y tragic.

Wil y’s family, convinced their son was Zodiac, sent stacks of handwriting exemplars, along with their own handwriting expert’s opinion, to Avery:

“After lengthy study and consideration of specimens of handwriting done by ‘Zodiac’ and comparison with letters written by him, it is my

belief that al of these handwritings were done by the same person.”

“They don’t seem to be nuts,”
Chronicle
reporter George Murphy advised Avery, “just a pleasant couple who believe they are acting as good

citizens. My first reaction is to go to Oakland and ask their suspect, who’s now out on bail, if he’s the Zodiac. I’l be around for further interrogation

this afternoon, but it doesn’t seem like Zodiac.” Wil y had been jailed soon after Zodiac’s letter to Bel i, but Avery scanned a few passages anyway.

“I am sorry for al the people that I have kil ed and maimed,” wrote Wil y. “But understand something if you can, every person that I ever kil ed

actual y deserved it. . . . I never wanted to become what I was, it was an accident when I kil ed that first man in San Francisco, and from then on

I had to do what they wanted. Do you know what it’s like to look someone in the face and then pul a trigger. You never get used to it. And I’m

not crazy, just always scared.”

Avery realized “Wil ie” thought he was a mob hit man. With a shudder, he forwarded Wil y’s letters to Sherwood Morril , who said, “They’re
not

Zodiac’s handwriting.” The reporter was burning out. Lines etched his face; against the bright blue shirts and red neckerchiefs he often wore, his

complexion stood sal ow.

Saturday, December 22, 1973

Toschi and Armstrong
worked to exhaustion, grabbed a bite at Original Joe’s, then rushed back to their office to begin the daily cycle al over

again. The Zodiac case was like the tide—hopes lifted, only to be dashed against the rocks. And yet beneath the surface they felt

tremendouscurrents—another unsolvable mystery, a hint of deeper crimes as they waded through sluggish water. To the north in Santa Rosa,

outside their jurisdiction, bad things continued to happen. At the winter solstice, a day that held significance to Zodiac, Theresa Diane Walsh was

hitchhiking on 101 from the area of Malibu Beach to her home in Garbervil e. A sliver handmade cross swung from her neck, a fire-opal ring and a

copper-band ring flashed on her fingers. Ten dol ars of colored beads she used for making bracelets rattled in her backpack. Somewhere along the

way, she too disappeared. Her strangled body, hog-tied with one-quarter-inch nylon rope, was discovered next to Kim Al en’s in a creek six days

later. Zodiac had tied his victims at Lake Berryessa with clothesline, but Walsh, like Kim Al en, may have been sexual y assaulted and this was

unlike Zodiac, whose pleasure was pain.

Monday, January 28, 1974

All month long
the world’s oceans had been uncommonly wild, whipping the West Coast with fury. Hurricanes, high tides, and thunder-storms

relentlessly beat the shores. A major coincidence of cosmic cycles had occurred. Earth, moon, and sun had aligned in a nearly straight line—a

configuration cal ed syzygy. During the new and ful phases of the moon, positive ions charged the atmosphere and freaky, motiveless murders

occurred as far away as Miami.

Zodiac hunched over a light table, the glow highlighting his intent face. In the past, his desire for notoriety had compel ed him to boast. Now a

more commanding power, a celestial power, drove him to break his three-year silence. Because of the timing of his kil ings, experts had long

believed Zodiac was “moon mad”—sensitive to the gravitational influences, enhanced luminosity, and electromagnetic field changes of ful and new

moon phases, changes that affect the human nervous system and increase the brain’s nervous activity.

“If one considers the human organism as a microcosm,” psychiatrist Arnold L. Lieber wrote, “comprising essential y the same elements as, and

in similar proportion to, those of the earth’s surface—approximately eighty percent water and twenty percent organic and inorganic minerals—one

could speculate that the gravitational forces of the moon might exert a similar influence upon the water mass of the human being.” Studies on

nuclear magnetic resonance demonstrated that biological tissues respond to the interaction between moon and Earth. These biological tides might

be sufficient to trigger emotional, psychological, and physiological outbursts in certain predisposed individuals.

“Ironical y, on dark, moonless nights,” Toschi told me, “al my years in Sex Crimes, Aggravated Assault, and Homicide, my home phone was

relatively quiet—even when on cal . When it was a clear, bright moonlit night, nights of ful and new moons, violent crime increased. Inevitably the

Toschi home phone would ring—Operations Center reporting marital fights, shootings, stabbings—al night long. Contrary to popular belief, dark

spooky nights would be a normal tranquil night for a policeman.” At Stanford, Dr. Lunde suggested another possibility for the timing of Zodiac’s

assaults. “Were Zodiac’s nighttime murders always at a time when there was fairly good moonlight?” he asked me. “Always a ful or new moon,” I

replied. “So he would be able to see at night,” said Lunde. Coincidental y, a
Sacramento Bee
Sunday article on Morril had appeared prominently

the day before, January 27. So the new letter might in part have been an ego thing, a competition with Morril for publicity.

Zodiac bent to his labor. A film had been terrifying San Francisco, much as he used to, receiving as much publicity as he once had. Lines of thril -

seekers stretched around the block, sixty thousand since Christmas, waiting to enter the Northpoint Theater and see
The Exorcist
. Once inside,

after a two-hour wait, a few immediately exited and were sick on the sidewalk. Zodiac had seen them himself—“Disgusting!” his letter commented

on this phenomenon and the sickness of the public at large. He had revved his car and rushed away. The postmark, 940, wouldn’t be much help to

the police. It only indicated the letter had been mailed from an adjacent county south of San Francisco and picked up before noon on Tuesday.

Wednesday, January 30, 1974

For over a
month the two-man Zodiac Squad had not seen any real action. Zodiac had mailed his last letter just under three years ago. The

number of tip letters dwindled, fal ing from fifty a week to ten to practical y none. Toschi, working il and out of sorts, had taken to glaring at the

sealed five-foot-tal steel-gray filing cabinet crammed with Zodiac artifacts. “One drawer is marked ‘Concerned Citizens,’” he said. “The second

drawer is for suspects only.” (Ultimately there would be eight drawers.) “Do I think we’l ever catch the guy? Of course I do. I have to feel that way, or

I’d have given up long ago. To me it’s a major chal enge, a major case. Bil and I are the Zodiac Squad of the country.”

Recently they had been busy tracking down the infamous Zebra kil ers who slaughtered fifteen and wounded eight random victims over a 179-day

period. Though al of the victims were white and al of their assailants black, that was not why the religiously motivated cult murders came to be

known as the “Zebra” kil ings. “The special unit we put together worked mostly at night,” Toschi explained, “because that’s when the kil ings were

occurring. They used a radio channel that was seldom used to keep it available for anyone who cal ed in who might have seen some suspects.

They put it on ‘Channel Z,’ which was never used at al . It was ‘Z’ for ‘Zebra’ and the press picked up on it and our kil ers became the Zebra kil ers.”

Members of this fanatical cult had to pass an initiation that consisted of shooting or hacking to death men, women, and children in order to reach

the rank of “Death Angel.” Two nights ago, between 8:00 and 10:00 P.M., another Zebra murder had set off a round-the-clock manhunt. Dog-tired

and aching, Toschi had stayed in bed this one morning. He glanced at the clock, studied the sky outside. Everything was out of kilter. As a fuel-

saving device, Daylight Savings Time had arrived three months early this year. Toschi, unaware the kil er’s unexplained silence was about to be

broken, buried his face in the pil ow. Over at the
Chronicle
Carol Fisher slit open a letter, froze, and read the fol owing:

“I saw and think ‘The Exorcist’ was the best saterical comidy that I have ever seen. Signed, yours truley: He plunged him self into the bil owy

wave and an echo arose from the suicides grave titwil o titwil o titwil o PS. if I do not see this note in your paper. I wil do something nasty, which

you know I’m capable of doing”

This wasn’t the first time Zodiac had quoted Gilbert and Sul ivan. Carol recognized the “titwil o” lines from the second act of
The Mikado,

specifical y the aria of Ko-Ko, the fainthearted Lord High Executioner. Three and a half years ago the kil er had also paraphrased
Mikado
lyrics (“a

little list he had of al those who would never be missed”). He had quoted them at great length from memory. Divergencies from the original text,

primarily Acts I and I , proved that. “And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist” had been changed to “and the singurly abnormily the girl who never

kissed.” Various alternatives to lady novelist—lady dramatist, lady motorist, lady bicyclist, etc., were usual y suggested by the actor portraying Ko-

Ko. I believed that Zodiac’s little list was a rol cal of real people he knew and whom he fancied had wronged him—“banjo seranader,” “piano

orginast” and “al children . . . up in dates [students].” Police had always believed Zodiac had essayed the role of Ko-Ko professional y. I suggested

a col ege production.

The night Zodiac hailed cabdriver Paul Lee Stine, the Lamplighters had been rehearsing
The Mikado
nearby on a stage smal er than a Pacific

Heights living room at Presentation Theatre, 2350 Turk Street. During their entire run, from October 18 to November 7, 1969, no Zodiac letter was

received. Scrawls at the bottom of the new letter even resembled the rounded ersatz Japanese cal igraphy on Ko-Ko’s paper fan. On January 30,

1974, music director Gilbert Russak was stil putting Ko-Ko, Nanki-Poo, Pooh-Bah, Pish-Tush, and Yum-Yum through their paces. Carol thought

Zodiac might be a member of that cast.

In the letter’s lower right-hand corner, Zodiac had printed “Me-37 S.F.P.D.-0.” Fisher cal ed Homicide and they rang Toschi at home. The

detective, burning with fever, forced himself up. The last time he had felt this bad was on the front lines in Korea. Drafted after leaving Galileo High,

he had faced seven months of hard combat with the 24th Infantry Division. Within half an hour, Toschi had parked under the
Chronicle
tower, ridden

to the third floor, and was reading Zodiac’s score. “Thirty-seven!” he muttered, praying the kil er was lying. “Another Gilbert and Sul ivan swipe and

another shot at SFPD,” said Toschi. “Jeez, why does he single us out every time. What is this grudge? And why Gilbert and Sul ivan?”

Dr. Murray S. Miron of the Syracuse Research Institute reached some conclusions on the new letter. In a confidential FBI psycholinguistics report,

he suggested “suicides grave” might indicate Zodiac was contemplating suicide. Miron referred to Zodiac’s letter to Attorney Mel Bel i in particular.