Zodiac Unmasked (29 page)

some type of drugs while he was taking the test.’ It was also his opinion that Al en did not pass the polygraph exam and that it was inconclusive.

And then we served a search warrant at Atascadero and I had a bunch of shit about that, but anyway, he was on Thorazine. Atascadero is a mental

hospital and many of the inmates are on different types of tranquilizers. These other guys who read the charts said, ‘Hey, old Lister here didn’t give

him any control questions about whether he was on any drugs. We’re looking at this thing—this guy’s loaded. You could’ve asked him if he had a

mother and father and he would have said no.”

Polygraph tests can be neutralized by a subject through drugs or pain, but the subject’s responses would be noticeably high and flat. Al en had

reportedly stockpiled his daily medication of Valium tranquilizers and pilfered Thorazine, a drug prescribed for extreme paranoia, from the

dispensary where he briefly worked. “Thorazine was for the real y psychotic patients,” said Bawart. “It wouldn’t be the common drug they would hand

out, but he had access to the dispensary. They were giving Valium to him. Al he had to do was save it up. This is only guessing. You know you’re

going to take a polygraph test—you’ve got your buddies down there. In fact he had a strong buddy—he was going to build a bomb and blow his way

out of Atascadero and they caught him. That infernal device was close to lethal quality.”

Dr. J. Paul De River, in
Crime and the Sexual Psychopath,
wrote that “disregard for civil or moral law, and the cunning and stealth are also part

of the make up of the ‘non sexual’ psychopath. Like his sex-motivated counterpart, he is only ‘mad’ sporadical y, and for the rest of the time he

might lock the details of his acts out of his consciousness.”

“Al en had a letter,” Bawart continued, “that he phonied up that was signed by—the guy’s name was [Jim] Silver, an investigator. And Silver had

done some correspondence with him [requesting a polygraph examination]. Al en got Silver’s signature from the correspondence. Al en worked in a

print shop there at Atascadero Hospital, and he made up a letter that he duped on this guy Silver’s signature with a phony Department of Justice

heading on it. He had used a mechanical means to lift the signature of the investigator from a document, placed it on prewritten letters, and printed

them up. It was a letter to any law enforcement agency and, as I recal , said: ‘To Whom It May Concern: This man is not a suspect in the Zodiac

case and has been completely cleared. He has passed a polygraph examination and law enforcement should no longer consider him a suspect in

the Zodiac kil ings.’ Just a bul shit thing so he could show people. Of course Silver would never write such a letter.” Though he had passed the lie

test, Al en had lied about the letter clearing him.

Monday, December 1, 1975

Allen wrote a
Santa Rosa Superior Court judge, tel ing him of the lie test results and including “a copy of a letter received from the State

Department of Justice” exonerating him.

“After five years of being the subject of investigation, interrogation, search and other forms of harassment,” he explained, “I was final y subjected

to ten hours of polygraph examination, administered by the Justice Department, here at the hospital. I signed away my rights and cooperated ful y,

in order to final y resolve the issue, and have subsequently been removed from the Department’s suspect list for the crimes specified in the

enclosed letter.

“Since . . . I doubt the Department wil take the trouble to distribute their findings to other concerned agencies, and since I do contemplate

returning to the Santa Rosa area to live, I am taking it upon myself to impart this information to you, in the hope that it wil find its way to its resting

place in the proper file. I am hoping that, in the future, I wil be able to go in peace, and not get sweaty palms at the mention of another unsolved

homicide.

“The above has been quite a weight on my shoulders for the last five years. Now that I am cleared, I do heartily wish to forget the whole miserable

affair. . . . Thank you for your time and consideration, and have a pleasant Holiday vacation. Sincerely, Arthur Leigh Al en, Case #74-0109-68.”

Though Al en claimed to have been the subject of five years of investigation, he had not become a real suspect until 1971. In his mind he must

have dated the beginning of his troubles from Sgt. Lynch’s brief questioning at Cave School. As for the ten-hour lie test—“Al en’s lying about that,”

Toschi said.

Al through the rest of 1975, Leigh’s mother faithful y wrote to him in prison, one of the few stil corresponding with him. But in counseling, Leigh

revealed how cold he felt her letters were and how much he hated her. Leigh felt an even stronger hatred for Atascadero. He feared staying there

more than he dreaded the police. At night he could hear strange cries echoing down the highly polished floors. A big man could be afraid too.

While Al en was locked away, brooding and planning, the Val ejo Sheriff’s Department doggedly pursued their Zodiac investigation. “Zodiac was

a certain man,” Les Lundblad told his son, Les, Jr., who had just returned from a golf match. “The only time I played golf,” Les, Jr., recal ed, “I played

in a foursome with this man. I produced a Polaroid of the foursome to my dad and he pointed the ‘beady-eyed’ man out.” Detective Sergeant

Lundblad thought this beady-eyed suspect was protected by a powerful official. Later an ex-Highway patrolman interviewed Les, Jr., and told him

that this official had ordered Sergeant Lundblad to back off. The son didn’t think his father would have obeyed that order, but was at a loss to

explain why more wasn’t done with the ‘beady-eyed’ man. However, the late Sergeant Lundblad’s interest in this early suspect predated the police

interview with Leigh Al en in 1971 and his subsequent visit to Atascadero to see Al en who had by then become the chief suspect.

Sergeant Ralph Wilson told me that when Lundblad returned from Atascadero, he said, “That’s him!” His remark carried conviction. Three years

later, I was in the main sheriff’s office just above the jail—Fairfield, California, Criminal Division. Captain Vince Murphy had arranged for me to look

at some evidence. The switchboard operator, a slim, dynamic woman, paused between cal s and recal ed the late Les Lundblad with admiration. “I

was there when he came back from Atascadero,” she said. “He was furious. ‘That’s him!’ he said, ‘That’s Zodiac. That’s the son of a bitch and we

can’t do anything about it!’ and he believed this right to the day of his death.”

The operator was troubled, concerned that she once had spoken to Zodiac when he cal ed the sheriff’s office. Zodiac had told her his real name,

but she couldn’t remember it. She’d lost the name in al the excitement. “I worked closer with Lundblad than with Lynch,” Narlow told me. “I always

got the feeling that Lundblad knew who Zodiac was. That story [about Cheney and Al en talking about hunting humans] is so bizarre you don’t know

whether to believe it or not. Sometimes people concoct things like this for whatever reason. But that story about him talking about those things is so

pat, that if in fact he did say it, then he has to be the Zodiac.” And so Toschi, Armstrong, and Mulanax probably had the right man, but somehow

were being outfoxed. No one could get around the handprinting, the partial print on the cab, and now the lie test. Those obstacles were the big

three. The
Sacramento Bee
and
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
’s secret witness programs established a $20,000 reward for Zodiac’s capture,

adding to Yel ow Cab’s existing reward. So many Zodiac tips trickled into Val ejo P.D. that Detective Bawart was assigned to help track new leads.

12

witches

Monday, January 5, 1976

Sonoma County Sheriff’s
Detective Sergeant “Butch” Carlstedt blinked, then looked again. He perceived links between twelve Jack the Ripper-

style murders and the long-sought Zodiac. Zodiac might be arranging his crimes in a broad “Z” extending over the Bay Area. He might be tracing

out an even larger “Z,” encompassing the entire West. Sonoma County Sheriff Don Striepeke agreed, pointing to Rodeo; Vancouver, Washington;

Seattle; Salt Lake City; Santa Fe; and Aspen-Vail as locations where girls were slain. He surmised this psychopathic kil er might practice

witchcraft, kil ing slaves for his afterlife just as Zodiac had boasted. Ultimately, though, the assailant turned out to be Ted Bundy, not Zodiac.

But Striepeke was not deterred. From the beginning, Zodiac’s occult bent had fascinated him. The sheriff examined diagrams—a series of

arranged sticks discovered at a murder site along semi-remote Franz Val ey Road. Was this a witchcraft symbol? The sticks formed a square and

a rectangle joined together to indicate a human figure. Inside the rectangle were two stones, and outside, two more pebbles. Four sticks ran around

the outer edges. Striepeke thought the design might represent the black magic “Seal of Vassago.” Vassago is a mighty prince who declares things

past, present, and future and discovers what has been hidden. A local teenager claimed it was a design he made to show his girlfriend the shape

of his new trailer, but it stil might be a witch sign. Zodiac also used other esoteric symbols in his codes—dots such as those used in astrological

horoscopes. The nearly invisible Zodiac scarcely needed witchcraft—the Santa Rosa murderer was powerful enough to heft bodies over a ditch

and hurl them considerable distances down a hil side. Witches mail bloody swatches of cloth to their enemies. So did Zodiac.

Berkeley Chief of Police Wes Pomeroy was interested in the occult angle too. He had written to the Department of Justice, OCCIB, on February

14: “Enclosed are five photographs of various signs photographed in a rural (Val ejo) area. Please determine if the enclosed photographs

represent signs in witchcraft. If so, please determine what each individual sign’s significance is in mutual cases of interest.”

“It’s highly doubtful that witchcraft might be involved with Zodiac,” David Rice assured me, “as the
Wiccan Rede
prohibits harm to anyone,

including animals.”

I drove to
Val ejo to ask Sergeant Lynch about Zodiac again, hoping he might recal something new. I recal ed how, after the Lake Berryessa

stabbings, Lynch had issued a public appeal to Zodiac to surrender. “We wil see that he gets help and that al his rights are protected,” promised

Lynch. “[Zodiac] is obviously an intel igent individual. He knows that eventual y he wil be taken into custody. So it would be best that he give himself

up before tragedy is written in blood.” I sat down in his darkened dining room. “I think there were five of us in the investigation bureau,” he began

softly. “I think what real y happened was we were spending so much time and going so many places that I guess they got dissatisfied with the way it

was being handled . . . when we first started on this case there was this guy George—he used to go down to the coffee shop [where Darlene Ferrin

waitressed]. He was trying to date her, but for some reason Dee [Darlene’s nickname] didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Constantly

bothering her and fol owing her. Dee was deathly afraid of him. The whole investigation original y seemed to focus on this guy.” George hadn’t

visited his familiar watering hole, Jack’s Hangout, since the July Fourth shootings. Next their search led Lynch and his partner to the Kat Pad on

Sacramento Street, Kaiser Steel in Napa, then to the Pastime bar in Benicia. “Me and Ed Rust,” said Lynch, “we found out he quit the Pastime, and

went up to Yountvil e. I got a description of him from his landlady, Mrs. Violet Peeler. He was five foot seven, with a stocky build and a dark

complexion. Kind of plump with dark straight hair. Unfortunately, while George had a water-related last name, he had an airtight alibi too.” A

December 3, 1964, Solano County Fairfield police report, 242, PC Battery, gave George’s weight then as a mere 127 pounds.

“In Val ejo, we checked everybody out,” Lynch concluded. “Once I got a cal from someone who said Zodiac lived on Arkansas Street. I drove over

there and found a man whose only connection was that he’d painted stars on his ceiling, including the Little Dipper. Everyone was a suspect and no

one was safe.” Even in the dimness, I saw the tol the case had taken on Lynch.

Saturday, July 24, 1976

“I watched Herman
die in my sleep for eight weeks,” Inspector Armstrong told the press, recal ing Police Officer Herman George. George had

been gunned down in the street in November of 1969. “He died a very slow and painful death. . . . When I leave the office at night I forget the job

completely. I never discuss my work at home . . . wel , I can’t real y. I find other ways to unwind.” Armstrong became a man who could never sit stil , a

man constantly in motion. Final y, he burned out on Homicide. The next day, Armstrong transferred to the Bunco Division, leaving Toschi as the last

remaining San Francisco policeman working the Zodiac case.

“At least a year before he left Homicide, Bil just didn’t want to do it anymore,” Toschi said. “Now that I’m the only one working on it, I never let a

day go by without remembering Zodiac. It’s gotten to be more personal. Every day I wonder what became of him.”

Six cab drivers had been murdered since Stine’s kil ing in 1969 and six suspects had been arrested and tried. Five were convicted of first

degree murder, one of second degree. Just ten days after Stine’s senseless murder, Toschi and Armstrong had investigated another Yel ow Cab