Zodiac Unmasked (28 page)

anything but platonic, as had al of Leigh’s relationships with women.

“Sexual sadists like Zodiac are limited or incapable of forming normal adult sexual relationships,” Dr. Lunde told me. “And so what are the

alternatives? One is sex with dead bodies or kil ing for sexual satisfaction. Another is sex with children.” CI&I, alerted by the arrest, requested

Al en’s Val ey Springs School file and began probing for earlier signs of improper relationships with children. Police also contacted every school

where he had taught. As authorities tried to build a bigger case, Al en remained free on bail. He took to harassing a deputy testifying against him.

At night, he stood menacingly outside the man’s house. Final y, the cop rushed out and chased him away. Just before Leigh’s trial, someone mailed

an anonymous typewritten letter to a local judge. The judge brought it into the Calistoga P.D.

“Did you miss me?” it read. “Was busy doing some nefarious destardly work, for which I am wel suited. . . . Ah yes! Justice shal be done. I

had to laugh. [San Francisco Chronicle columnist] Herb Caen mentioned that Toschi was the only man looking for the Zodiac. Zodiac gave me

a car to pick up the evidence. He knew my Plymouth was sabotaged.”

A disabled Plymouth had been spotted by a teenage boy at Blue Rock Springs the night of the Fourth of July murder.

Thursday, January 23, 1975

Police drove to
Al en’s home in Val ejo and rearrested him. His mother let the deputies in and they descended to find Leigh shrieking in the center

of the basement. Live chipmunks were crawling al over him—the pets and victims he let share his subterranean room. “Squirrel shit was dripping

from his shoulders,” recal ed one cop. “He remained in our custody from that date on. When he was at the Sonoma County Jail, cel block #2B2, he

came to the attention of three Mexican guys who tried to ‘punk’ him. He let them screw him. Later, in court, the other little boy testified against Al en.”

Thursday, March 13, 1975

Sergeant Mulanax had
not given up on Al en, and wrote the FBI:

“SYNOPSIS: Subject fits the general description of Zodiac. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He attended school in Riverside, California. He

is employed in Oakland Calif. He is a convicted sex offender of children. TYPE OF EXAMINATION: Evaluation of fingerprints and palm prints.

Evaluation of handwriting exemplars submitted, with evidence on file. MATERIAL SUBMITTED: 1. Two yel ow pages of yel ow material (partial

text of Zodiac messages.) 2. Red diary written by subject over period of one year. 3. Palm prints of subject of left and right hands. 4. One white

sheet containing Zodiac text, written with ink pen by subject. 5. Solano County jail arrest record.”

Later that day Al en was sentenced to Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminal y Insane.

“As for the little animals Leigh always had,” a friend of Al en’s told me, “he definitely had lots of chipmunks, and even a skunk at one time. When

he was sent to Atascadero he gave the animals to the Elnoka Nursery off Highway 12. He had an abundance of the little creatures. I remember

hating to see them caged al the time and now Leigh was going to be caged as wel .”

A sharp-eyed officer, Sergeant John Burke, noticed he was wearing a Zodiac wristwatch and entered the fact in his file.

Friday, March 14, 1975

Leigh arrived at
Atascadero and began serving his sentence. Back in 1969 he had shown his sister-in-law several pages of handprinted legal

terminology and cryptograms. “They pertain to a person who had been committed to Atascadero State Hospital for molesting a child,” he had said.

“This is the work of an insane person.” Leigh had been prescient, for he was now in that very situation. Meanwhile, al Zodiac-type attacks,

sightings, and letters ceased. That inactivity from Zodiac was extraordinarily tel ing. Only the investigation continued, grinding slowly, but

exceedingly fine. The old clock in the Homicide room in San Francisco ticked on as if measuring off three years as slowly as it could.

Meanwhile, Al en’s friend, Jim, was troubled. “Leigh cal ed me at work one night,” he told me later, “I felt sorry for him so I would listen. That’s why

he thought I was his buddy. ‘I have to go to jail,’ he said. ‘I need to come down and talk to you. I have some unfinished business, something I want to

get off my chest. I want you to be by yourself, and I want you to wait for me after work.’ I thought, ‘Good grief, this is weird. Al these stories are flying

around. I don’t know if I real y want to meet him after work alone.’ But I told him I’d wait for him. After work and a couple of beers, he’d go through his

two-hour dissertation. Another kid was working with me, Paul Blakesly. So I told Paul, ‘You know, old Leigh wants to come down and see me by

myself, and I don’t real y trust him. I don’t know what he’s got up his sleeve, so would you hang around and break a beer with me and we’l wait for

him.’ So we laid a couple of club-like things around the store just in case. Old Leigh comes down and, of course, he looked like hel . His eyes were

al red, and he had a little stubble al over his face. He had been crying his guts out. He wanted to spil the beans—that he was being investigated

for the Zodiac thing when they’d picked him up again.

“He’s going on with this big story al about Zodiac. Leigh claimed he was being checked because a bunch of girls had disappeared up the

Russian River area, and they were al on his days off or time off. The police had come down and checked his time-card records behind closed

doors. A lot of coincidences pointed to him, he said, but they were circumstantial. It seemed so beyond comprehension that I was afraid if I start

repeating al these stories—Christ! They could hang him on a story and I don’t want to tel them the wrong thing. This went on to probably nine

o’clock at night. Nothing happened and we al parted ways.”

11

atascadero

Tuesday, October 14, 1975

Allen had been
to Atascadero before, but in the capacity of a therapist. Now he returned as a prisoner. If police had comprehended how

repugnant the mental institution was to him, how terrified he was of being confined there, they might have employed a useful tool. Al en’s fear might

have been used as a pry bar to extract information about Zodiac. But Al en coped, began working in the print shop, and soon had mastered new

techniques. In the print shop he devised a plan to get the police off his back.

Back home the
Times-Herald
reported that:

“Zodiac is stil considered a possible suspect in a series of Sonoma County kil ings. . . . Zodiac threatened in one rambling letter to torture

his victims, and Sonoma County has some murder victims who were tortured to death through slow strangulation and by administering

strychnine. . . . Sonoma County’s seven young female victims [between 1972 and 1974] al were dumped in rural areas. A Sonoma County

man recently was considered a Zodiac suspect but was ruled out, according to Sonoma Sheriff’s Captain Jim Caulfield. He was a molester of

young boys, however, and has been committed to Atascadero State Hospital.”

“While Leigh was in Atascadero,” a Val ejo source told me, “I think that’s when my mother first became aware he may be the Zodiac. He wrote to

her that they suspected him of the crimes. At one point, I think my mother cal ed him there and spoke to him. She asked him directly if he was the

murderer. I believe he was somewhat jovial about it, but never admitted to the crimes. She verified that he was the suspect through the Santa Rosa

District Attorney, John Hawkes.”

Leigh, signing himself “Drawer A,” wrote Jim in Sonoma. “If Zodiac writes one letter while I’m in here,” he wrote earnestly, “then that wil clear me

of being the Zodiac.” The remark was puzzling. Everyone knew Leigh was imprisoned for child molesting, not for being Zodiac. He repeated the

same remark to women he knew. In his long outdoor chess game with authorities, Al en seemed always one step ahead. For the second stage of

his plan, he hoarded his daily medication and got a job in the dispensary. Like Zodiac, Leigh knew explosives. For his third step, he and a

companion began building a bomb to blast their way out of the prison.

Monday, November 3, 1975

In order to
pass various psychiatric tests during his incarceration, Al en boned up on the proper responses to make. He took al his tests in this

fashion: “He would not smile or show emotion and would speak in a low monotone.” He took tests as a man drugged. During TAT (Thematic

Apperception Test) evaluations, Al en was asked to make up stories based on simple line drawings portraying people in ambiguous situations.

(“Explain what is going on in this picture.”) Indirectly, his answers revealed aspects of his subconscious feelings and personality—“he has a violent

fantasy life . . . a hyperthymic (highly emotional) individual unable to establish normal social contact.”

Final y police decided to give him a lie-detector test. “A polygraph machine is only a stress detector and anxiety detector,” Toschi told me. Lie

detectors, a favorite investigative tool, are fal ible and register false positives about fifteen percent of the time. Polygraphs measure changes in

pulse, blood pressure, and breathing, but can be tricked by real y good liars.4 Even the term “lie detector” is a misnomer. Erle Stanley Gardner

wrote in his
Court of Last Resort
, “Lie detection is impossible. What is possible is the detection of stress (and in a few cases the covering up of

stress). A polygraph or Psychological Stress Evaluation test should never be used as the sole judge of a person’s innocence. As with al scientific

evidence, these tests need to be evaluated. The lie test is not permitted as evidence in court except by stipulation because it is undependable and

subject to the interpretation of the operator. As late as 1998 the Supreme Court would rule lie detectors unreliable. Leonarde Keeler, though not the

inventor of the lie detector, had done the most to refine the machine. The lie detector is in use today much as he developed it. Briefly, the polygraph

records changes in the body’s physiological responses to questions.”

Details for the test were ironed out, and Leigh agreed. “What happened,” Detective Bawart told me later, “was a guy from the Department of

Justice who was working under Fred Shirisago went down to Atascadero and they put Al en on a polygraph. That was Sam Lister—the head

polygraph guy at DOJ.” Al en entered a plain soundproofed and air-conditioned room. Lister had him sit in the examining chair. Careful y, he

hooked him up to three devices, a procedure alone that usual y causes stress in a subject. First a blood pressure-pulse unit—a sphygmograph—an

instrument similar to that used to take blood-pressure readings—was connected to graphical y record the movements of his pulse. After the blood

pressure sleeve was wrapped around his biceps, a flexible corrugated tube, a pneumograph, was strapped around Leigh’s chest to measure

changes in his respiration. Final y, an electro-dermal unit, usual y metal tubes clenched in both hands or electrodes on the hand (a monitor pinched

on a fingertip), measured galvanic changes or responses in his skin. As the prisoner’s reactions to each question were recorded on a moving strip

chart, he was observed through a two-way mirror.

Were he to lie, his heart would beat faster, his breath come more quickly, and changes would take place in his skin moisture. Pens on a moving

strip of graph paper recorded reactions. Leigh had already been put at ease in a cordial pre-interview. Leigh kept to a monotone and did not smile,

later claiming the test lasted ten hours. “A polygraph wil take maybe an hour—max,” Toschi told me. “Al en’s lying about that.” There are usual y ten

to twelve questions, and those are brief, basic, and easy to understand. Leigh was asked his first name, his last name. After each question there

was a pause of fifteen to twenty seconds. Then he was asked if he knew who had kil ed Darlene Ferrin, the Blue Rock Springs victim.

“No,” he said.

“Do you live in California?” asked Lister.

“Yes.”

“Did you yourself kil Paul Lee Stine on October 11, 1969?”

“No.”

“Were you a resident of Val ejo?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have anything whatsoever to do with this homicide?”

“No.”

“Are you forty-two years of age?”

“Yes.”

“Are you deliberately concealing or withholding any guilty knowledge of the homicide at Washington and Cherry Streets?”

“No.”

“Is today Friday?”

“Yes.”

“Have you deliberately lied at any time during this entire interview?”

“No.”

“Let’s do the test once more completely,” said Lister. It was common practice to talk over results and learn the reasons for responses. “People

overreact, underreact, have guilt complexes, are frightened, are angry,” said polygraph expert Chris Gugas. “The examiner has to take into account

variables such as intel igence, emotional stability, reaction to shock. The process in never cut-and-dried.” Thus the expert can start again with a

revised set of questions, or repeat the same questions so responses could be compared. Lister indicated that Al en had passed his polygraph

examination both times. “He is not the Zodiac Kil er,” he said. Al en cal ed afterward to tel his family and friends that he had passed and was not

Zodiac.

“And they ran Al en at Atascadero and he came up clean,” Bawart lamented. “That bothered us. Wel , we had two other experts read his charts,

and they say, ‘He was on drugs during this time.’ Our polygraph examiner, Johnson, examined the charts and said, ‘It’s my opinion that Al en was on