Zodiac Unmasked (36 page)

Tucker had given him permission to drive. I often circled by the Fresno Street home and saw his tan station wagon parked in front, unused. Most of

the time Leigh worked within walking distance at Ace Hardware, though I knew he hated walking because of his limp and fal en arches.

16

arthur leigh allen

Saturday, July 26, 1980

In front of
Ace Hardware, five wheelbarrows were lined up beneath a poster of a smiling Suzanne Somers. She was dressed incongruously in a

Santa outfit. Inside, Leigh was no longer secluded in the rear. He manned the front register, conversing with customers in a loud voice. The name

“LEE” was sewn neatly over the left breast pocket of his orange work coat. His boss, Steve Harshman, initial y ordered the correct spel ing

(“LEIGH”), but the shorter version was cheaper. I needed more samples of Al en’s handwriting, but it was becoming difficult to trick him into printing

anything. Al en was piling boxes of fire extinguishers as a friend of mine approached.

“Could you help me find these items?” Fay asked. He stacked three more boxes without looking up. “If I help you, wil you help me?” he said

deliberately. He picked up a smal basket, fil ed it with her supplies, and tossed her list on top. “Couldn’t you write an itemized receipt for me?” she

said. “One of those people at the front registers wil help you,” he replied. “I’m not authorized to do that. Have a nice day.”

I spoke again to Al en’s parole officer. A sensitive young man, Pel e had been disturbed by various mental evaluations of his parolee. Al en’s

tests matched the profile a Napa State psychiatrist, Dr. Leonti Thompson, had drawn up. “[Zodiac’s particular type of psychosis] creates a

deepening helplessness,” Thompson commented, “from which the victim occasional y rouses himself by a terrific output of psychological energy . . .

and if to that private world of the schizophrenic is added the paranoid’s delusion of persecution or grandeur, then sometimes that distorted world

becomes a place where murder is born.”

“He is an extremely dangerous person,” Leigh’s analysis read. “He is sociopathic and possesses an incredibly high I.Q. . . . Subject is repressing

very deep hatred and is incapable of functioning with women in a normal way.” He is “a loner, inept at establishing any sexual relationships beyond

those of children.”

“I talked with Arthur about his mother,” Al en’s parole officer told me, “and that’s one of the major things in his therapy and the way he relates to

life. I approach this from the aspect of a parole officer and contrary to the image of me, I’m pretty much into how people are and what changes

motivate them. Basical y, Arthur is that interesting.”

“Do you think he hates his mother?” I asked, recal ing Leigh’s comments at Atascadero.

“Oh, yeah. He absolutely hates her,” said Pel e with feeling. “She’s in her sixties and would say to Leigh about the father, ‘He never takes care of

his familial responsibilities. Al men are al assholes. . . . You’re just like al other men. You’re this, you’re the other.’ Years of that completely

demolished Leigh’s ability to have regular heterosexual relations with an adult female. One of the things he does frequently is when his mother says,

‘Why are you the way you are?’ he says, ‘The reason I’m al fucked up is because of you. You made me the way I am!’ And she feels real y guilty and

the guilt comes out and she refuses to do anything to stop whatever behavior he’s involved in, at least whatever behavior that she knows about.”

The NYPD’s top psychologist, Harvey Schlossberg, profiled Son of Sam and reached findings that applied to Zodiac. “The inspiration for al his

hate and revenge is much more likely to be a woman—a mother, sister, or girlfriend who rejected him. Historical y such maniacs do disappear.

Jack the Ripper was never captured, nor was the more recent San Francisco Zodiac kil er.” Zodiac would have a seductive, dominant mother who

gives affection and rejection erratical y. Serial murderer Ed Kemper, a six-foot nine-inch-tal , 280-pound murderer of women, also fantasized about

kil ing his mother. Seven female victims in Santa Cruz were surrogates. He saved her for last. Her scolding tongue no longer would disapprove of

him.

Sexual sadists, because of their confused sexual identity, possess a great underlying hatred of women. Zodiac’s emotions were as tangled as a

strand of DNA—violence to him was love; love was violence. He was unquenchable in his blood lust, and the only successful relationship Zodiac

could ever have with a woman was murder.

“The sister-in-law knew the psychiatrist,” continued Pel e, “knew that she was revealing things the family wanted to keep secret, but as a good

citizen felt obligated to come forward. Al en had always considered her an interloper.” Pel e, to keep from fixating on Al en, considered other Zodiac

suspects. “There was this girl, Julie,” he told me, “who had run away from her home in Oregon and fal en in with a Hel ’s Angels gang member. One

day she tel s me that there won’t be any more Zodiac kil ings or letters. ‘There was this guy who hung around with us. He wasn’t a member of the

Angels, just a hanger-on,’ she said. ‘This guy says he’s the Zodiac and I believe him. I know he’s the Zodiac, but he O.D.’d last year on heroin—right

here in Val ejo.’ The girl had divorced (her husband was from Val ejo), and gone back to live in Oregon with her child. She said only that the guy

wore glasses and plaid shirts. She didn’t remember his name.” The Hel ’s Angels connection rang a bel . Initial y, Sergeant Lynch suspected two

Hel ’s Angels had committed the Lake Herman Road murders. On three different occasions, he and his partner had thrown them in jail for gas

station robberies. “They shot people,” Lynch said matter-of-factly, “but are in prison now.”

The next evening, Sunday, I parked across from Ace Hardware. Framed in the light of the window, Al en stood out as an orange blotch in the

twilight. I watched as he stocked a peg board with electrical cords. Was this Zodiac, under glass and in plain sight for al to see? When Leigh quit

the store at 6:15, he was wearing a dark navy windbreaker such as Zodiac wore during the Stine murder. I asked Leigh’s boss, Steve Harshman,

for samples of Leigh’s printing. He angrily refused, but I left behind my business card with my new unlisted phone number where Al en could see it.

From that point on, I received hang-up cal s at midnight every Saturday night. They were unsettling, even frightening, but I did not change the

number. I did not want to lose even that tenuous contact with the suspect.

Friday, August 8, 1980

“I agree the
kil er is keeping his own file and mementos geographical y quite a distance from where he lives and works,” one reader suggested.

“Zodiac didn’t stop kil ing during some years. Perhaps he changed employment and that caused him to kil elsewhere occasional y. In the

workplace he is mild, discounted and comes across as slightly distracted. I bet his payoff is not in murdering specifical y, as much as in his

knowledge that he is final y powerful enough to have some momentous impact on others’ lives. He can confound the police and the best minds in

his area, therefore he is smarter than anybody. He can kil , therefore he exists.”

Al en, dissatisfied with his job at Ace, applied for an adult-education class after work. The class schedule stil gave him Friday evenings off— the

time Zodiac had done some of his kil ings. But as months passed, he became more disenchanted.

Friday, November 14, 1980

“I don’t see
any possibility of advancement,” Leigh explained to Steve Harshman. “I work every weekend and only get one day off a week.” Thus,

Al en resigned his job at Ace Hardware, never realizing what a staunch defender he had in Harshman.

Saturday, November 15, 1980

Leigh’s new job
as a warehouse supervisor in Benicia at Spectro Chrome Graphics paid $5 an hour, less money than he had been making, and

the job was farther away. Under his new boss, Harriet Hurba, he coordinated supply, receipt, delivery, and distribution in and out of the plant. Leigh

wrote Pel e about the new job. The letter carried too much postage and the handprinting on the envelope slanted downward like Zodiac’s. “It was

almost as if he wanted me to think he was guilty of being Zodiac,” said Pel e. “Al I could get out of this guy was a typed letter. And very neat. By the

way, our chemist’s into foot-powered planes now.” Pel e laughed. “He’s actual y trying to build one that flies, even with his weight and blood

pressure problems. But Leigh’s highly suggestible. His interest in man-powered flight probably came from a name-sake, Bryan Al en. Last year he

began tel ing friends he was considering building a foot-powered plane.” On June 12, 1979, Bryan Al en, a Visalia resident, successful y crossed

the English Channel in a bicyclelike aircraft, the “Gossamer Albatross.”

“And of course,” continued Pel e, “when that young girl was abducted last year we thought of Al en right away. Not only was he driving a white van

like the one seen, but he told me he was in that area and had engine trouble. It real y had me going for a while, but the police found the guy who did

it.

“Leigh’s incredibly strong. When he worked at the [Sonoma] auto parts store he was always getting hassled by the guys there and he dared a guy

to come at him. Al en picked up the guy and hurled him across the room into a stack of empty cardboard boxes.”

“A few times when Leigh and I would be coming back from someplace,” Kay Huffman recal ed, “we’d see a gang squaring off in a fight and he

would say, ‘Oops! Gotta hurry up and take you home so I can change my clothes and get back for the fight! I keep chains in my trunk for such

events.’ And so that’s what he’d do.” “One time Leigh took on a whole gang that had earlier harassed him,” Harold Huffman recal ed. He had

witnessed many of Leigh’s furious, youthful outbursts. “He ground out the leader’s eye with a thumb, sending the other members fleeing.” Sandy

Panzarel a later told me, “Remember the story of Leigh kicking the shit out of the five marines on a San Francisco street? Wel , he had enormous

physical strength. That was a true story.”

In San Francisco a personal ad appeared in the
Chronicle
: “BIG ‘Z’ Welcomes Big ‘A’. Permission granted.” And in San Francisco Zodiac

continued to prey on Toschi’s mind. He recal ed the days when Ron Al en would cal to express his fears. “He just couldn’t figure out why Val ejo

P.D. had ceased looking into his brother,” Toschi told me. “What had happened? I never knew and it bothered me.”

“By 1980,” John Douglas wrote, “I’d been at Quantico a few years and had some research under my belt when I learned the FBI wanted to take

another look at the body of Zodiac literature. I remember getting a file of letters to look at, and I had several conversations with Murray Miron over

the finer points of our analytical approaches. Before we could get too deeply involved, however, the letters were pul ed. I never did find out what

prompted the renewed interest at the Bureau, or what caused our involvement to be canceled.”

New adventures occasional y took Toschi’s mind off Zodiac. His encounter with San Francisco’s “Human Fly Bandit” was one. “He’s six foot one,

205 pounds,” he told me. “Now that’s one big fly. With al his robbing gear—ski mask, surgical gloves, hooded jacket, and sawed-off shotgun, he

was eerily reminiscent of Zodiac in costume. And this big fly is quite acrobatic. We cal ed him and his partner the Human Flies because of their

daring mobility on top of elevators and their cunning in maneuvering hotel elevators as they wished. I never saw such an ingenious method of

robbery before. With an obvious knowledge of elevator electrical circuitry, they first disconnected the elevator alarm bel and emergency phone.

They rode atop the elevators, then trapped their victims between floors. Sometimes there can be as many as twenty-five people squeezed into

these elevators and if these Human Flies strike, then they wil get a big score. I’ve got to admit it takes guts to ride ‘shot-gun’ on top of an elevator

on the twenty-fifth floor. Flinging open the escape trap in the elevator roof, the Flies covered their victims with a shotgun, lowered a mail sack,

ordered the guests to fil it with valuables and credit cards, then drew the sack up. They struck at the luxury Holiday Inn and a week later at the Hyatt

Hotel. I was kidded by every cop I saw. ‘Hey, Dave, catch any flies today?’”

Toschi kept tabs on any use of the stolen credit cards. “At one point,” he told me, “I was just two days behind the Flies when I heard from Portland

that they had a suspect with one of the stolen cards—the Flies were final y getting sloppy. Then the Alameda County cops picked up two others

trying to use stolen cards. It broke the case for me. I notified the East Bay cops that I had another suspect in custody in Portland and suggested they

tel the main suspect, in the Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, that San Francisco was going to book his brother for robbery. The plan worked. The

kid broke and protected his older brother. So now they’re saying at the Hal of Justice, ‘There’re no flies on Dave.’”

Monday January 12, 1981

“I understand Les
Lundblad had a guy he liked a lot,” I mentioned to Sergeant Mulanax at his Val ejo home. A cheery fire crackled in the fireplace.

Deer heads stared back at us with glassy eyes. “Lundblad had gone to a mental institution at Atascadero in 1975 and come back and said, ‘That’s

the guy. ‘That’s Zodiac and we can’t do a thing about it.’”

“Wel , I worked pretty closely with Les,” Mulanax told me. “He was inclined to get real high on a suspect where I wasn’t.”