Zodiac Unmasked (37 page)

“Was this Leigh?” I asked Mulanax.

“That was the only suspect I ever developed that I had any strong feelings about,” said Mulanax. “His father was a retired commander or

lieutenant commander in the Navy, a much-decorated serviceman. In fact, he worked for the city for a while. Old-time family, respected. He was an

assistant engineer or some damn thing for the city. I didn’t know him. Al en was down on the first Zodiac murder. Down at Riverside at that col ege.

But this was a long time ago and what was this, 1966? And this is off the top of my head.”

“He was working at an Ace Hardware store in Val ejo.”

“I don’t think there’s anything to prove now, but at the time I was real high on him. I think Armstrong and Toschi were too. Also Nicolai.”

“Did you ever have anyone besides Al en?”

“The only one that ever turned me on was Al en.”

“Do you think Zodiac is stil alive?”

“We had numerous meetings and it’s the consensus of the group that the guy is either dead or in a mental institution or penal institution.”

“Of course that’s where Al en was from 1975 until 1977.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“And what I thought was interesting is that after Toschi and Armstrong questioned him in his trailer, we stopped getting letters at the
Chronicle
.”

“In Val ejo,” he said, “we wrote detailed reports and Dave and Bil , they didn’t. They’d scratch it on a piece of paper.”

“How did you personal y get onto Al en?”

“Some people who knew him . . .”

“Oh! The two guys he told he was going to become Zodiac.”

“Yes.”

“What gets me about that is that it’s such damaging testimony. I understand one of the men might have had a motive to lie in that Al en

supposedly had made improper remarks to his daughter. That made me doubt it a bit.”

Wednesday, January 14, 1981

Allen remained the
best suspect. Outside of his admission that he had been in Riverside, police had ferreted out no concrete evidence of his

presence in Southern California where Zodiac claimed to have kil ed others. “Leigh’s family had told us something about Leigh being around the

Riverside area in the middle or late sixties,” said Toschi. “I was surprised that [Val ejo Lieutenant Jim] Husted said, ‘Forget about Riverside

because we can’t place Leigh Al en in the area.’ Of course, yes, he was there. Al en’s own family had told us that he had spent time in the Riverside

area and was familiar with Southern California, but they weren’t too sure exactly what he was doing because he was on his own a lot.”

“Leigh stayed with families down south before and after Atascadero,” I told Toschi. “He worked in the area, often drove to Riverside on week-

ends for car races, and later he flew a plane there. On Monday, Mulanax confirmed Al en was at Riverside City Col ege in 1966 when the murder

occurred.”

Toschi sighed. “We were the first ones to apprise Mulanax of Leigh, very, very briefly, when the family first came to us,” he said. “They had

already scanned Leigh very briefly. Mulanax’s eyes real y popped. He actual y thought we had him. To this day we stil may. Mulanax liked Al en very,

very much. Jack was so high on Al en in those days we were working with him. He said he had never come across a better-looking suspect. That’s

the way I felt also. We left Al en’s file in our metal file cabinet, two manil a four-inch envelopes of material on Al en, and we just put it away with much

regret. We just didn’t know where to go. Jack says he has an inch-and-a-half file at his house. Could it be he has information that never got into the

file at Val ejo? It’s a bit frustrating to realize that we had to put his folder back in our files.” Al en’s indelible presence tracked al over the south—in

Pomona, Hemet, Torrance, San Bernardino, Paso Robles, Riverside, and San Luis Obispo. Police had no substantial evidence that he was left-

handed.

17

zodiac suspects

Thursday, January 15, 1981

Other policemen besides
Toschi and Narlow had cherished suspects. Highway Patrolman Lyndon Lafferty pegged Zodiac as a resident of

Fairfield, a town east of Val ejo. Since December of 1969, a Fairfield copycat had been dispatching typed letters to the
Chronicle
:

“This is the Zodiac speaking I just need help I wil kil again so expect it any time now the [next] wil be a cop . . .”

Two days later he wrote again, enclosing a drawing of a knife titled “The Bleeding knife of Zodiac,” Page fifty-nine of an astrology book,
Day-by-

Day Forecast for Cancer
and a horoscope forecast for Leo. “I just need help I wil kil again . . . I just want to tel you this state is in trouble . . .” he wrote.

Harvey Hines, a former Escalon, California, police officer, believed he had found Zodiac. In November 1973, while taking night-school

criminology in Sonora, he stumbled across reports of a flirtatious man who approached two South Lake Tahoe women in 1971. A year earlier,

possible Zodiac victim Donna Lass had disappeared from there. Intrigued, Hines inquired at the hotel where she worked as nurse and came up

with a suspect who had studied basic codes at radio school. He had been arrested multiple times since 1946, and in 1969 lived near where Paul

Stine had picked up Zodiac. Hines later told
Hard Copy
, “My suspect is the Zodiac. Every fiber, every part of my being tel s me he is the Zodiac

Kil er.” A televised clip showed a pair of slipper-clad feet—the suspect retrieving his morning paper. “Hines’s been chasing this guy through Vegas

casinos with a video camera,” a cop told me, “screaming, ‘He’s the Zodiac!’” But Zodiac was six feet tal , 240-plus pounds, and about thirty-five.

Hines’s suspect was three inches shorter, ninety pounds lighter, and twelve years older.

Was there a connection between Lass and someone from Riverside? The theory was that Zodiac had been a former kidney dialysis patient of

Donna’s when she worked at Riverside’s Cottage Hospital. Her roommate, Jo Anne Goettsche (Get-She), had also been a dialysis nurse since

1975. “Donna had never told me about any such person,” she told me. “Her family, though, asked me the same question. We worked on the same

surgical ward at Letterman General Hospital in the Presidio [where Zodiac had been last seen] and several corpsmen there were giving flying

lessons over in Hayward. We used to go flying with two men from Riverside in 1970.”

“Where was this?”

“Oh, right here in San Francisco.”

“San Francisco?” Mulanax had told me that Darlene Ferrin had also gone flying with two men, but he’d never checked them out. Leigh Al en flew.

“I don’t know if I can remember their names,” Jo Anne said. “Donna was here in San Francisco from February to June of 1970. She moved to Lake

Tahoe to work and three months later vanished. Donna was kind of naive, and not very experienced with men. She was easily drawn away. She

was hooked on gambling. That’s why she went up there. She liked to ski and liked to gamble, so she took the job in the casino hotel [the Sahara

Hotel, Stateline, Nevada] as a first-aid emergency nurse. I went up alone to meet her over the weekend, having talked to her earlier in the week.

She had moved to a new apartment, so that’s why we were meeting at the hotel on Saturday night. That was the first day she had the apartment and

I didn’t have the phone number. I was supposed to meet her when she was getting off work, and she would show me where she lived. She was

nowhere to be found so I stayed in a motel overnight and then looked some more. I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like her to just not show up.

When I came back to the city Sunday night without finding out anything, I don’t know why I didn’t cal the police. I was young, I guess.”

Donna’s older sister, Mary, told me, “Donna was always people’s favorite nurse. She used her credit card on Saturday [September 5, 1970] and

went to work that night. She worked from six at night to two in the morning. She was writing the log of the day at 1:45 A.M. (the last people she saw

were the Bentleys from San Francisco). As it ended ‘complains of,’ [c/o], her pen just trails down the page, dragged from the last word she wrote to

the bottom of the page as if she had been interrupted. It was not signed.” Donna’s car was later found parked near her new apartment.

An unidentified male cal er rang Donna’s landlord and employer and said that she would not be returning because of il ness in the family. “They

had received a phone cal that she had an emergency at home,” said Jo Anne, “and when her boss cal ed home to her mom, she said, ‘There’s no

il ness in the family. That cal is a lie.’ That’s when we knew. And we went there that night.” The family flew out from Sioux Fal s, South Dakota. “We

went to San Francisco and Jo Anne met us at the airport and drove us to Tahoe,” said Mary. “And she had been up there to see Donna. I had been

on vacation with Mom and my four little kids and we were there just two weeks before Labor Day. Then Jo Anne went up there to see her for Labor

Day, and so we went up Sunday night. We couldn’t get a word out of anyone at the casino—where she was or what was going on. As for the police,

they wouldn’t even put it out as a missing person until forty-eight hours had passed. The police had been in the apartment and searched it. We went

back up on the third of October and came back on Monday the fifth. There was someone Jo Anne and Donna were dating from Sacramento. There

was a phone cal South Lake police had received from Sacramento, but he never cal ed back.” Jo Anne said, “Her sister had a private detective

pursuing the investigation for years, but they never found her—ever! It was very strange.”

“What was real y strange,” Lynch told me, “is some guy came up to Val ejo P.D. one night and he was drunk. He said he had been trying to report

Donna Lass’s disappearance to SFPD, but apparently the guy was a heavy drinker and when he had gone there they’d thrown him out. He knew

there had been a previous murder in Val ejo by the Zodiac so he came up here to report. I talked to him for a long time, but I can’t think of that guy’s

name. Or the name of the musician he thought was involved, but that orchestra was in Tahoe at the time this girl disappeared. They never found her

did they? No.”

There was a tenuous Tahoe connection with Leigh Al en. A friend of Leigh’s had bought a hotel there, and Leigh might have been visiting him the

night Lass vanished. And I found a connection to the 1963 murders of Robert Domingos and Linda Edwards near Santa Barbara. “Donna left Sioux

City, went to Minneapolis,” said Mary, “then went to Santa Barbara and worked. They took this doctor east to this big convention, and when she

came back she went to San Francisco to Letterman General. The pay was good, but she got awful y tired of the hours—weekends, nights. Her

friends from Santa Barbara had moved up there to Lake Tahoe. ‘Oh, we have the perfect job for you. Come on up and join us and live with us.’ And

so that’s what she did for the summer.”

Under “Personals” in the
Chronicle
I spotted this ad:

“ZODIAC, We offer a National and interested forum to hear your story as you wish it told. Would like to interview you with complete

anonymity. Contact THE AQUARIAN AGE magazine 270 World Trade Center, SF 94111.”

They gave a local number and stationed a worker by the phone in case Zodiac should cal . The worker might stil be waiting.

Monday, January 19, 1981

As Mulanax and
I drove to Blue Rock Springs, I watched storm clouds sweeping in from the San Pablo Bay. “Most of them I’d get a specimen of

their handwriting,” said Mulanax, explaining how he processed Zodiac suspects, “and have Morril check it out. Either that or the physical

description was so far off in age or some such thing where it couldn’t logical y be the suspect.”

“You mentioned this Tommy ‘Lee’ Southard?” I said.

Mulanax laughed. “That Southard,” he replied, “was one of the early suspects. A serviceman at Mare Island, as I recal . I didn’t investigate him.

Lynch and Rust conducted the investigation on him. Six weeks or a couple of months after this [Blue Rock Springs] shooting happened they came

up with him. He looked pretty good for a while.”

“Southard lived at home with his mom,” Lynch added, “and wore thick-lensed glasses. He also lived downtown in an apartment. We had a

burglary case on the guy and I tackled him at a restaurant. He was a real oddbal . He cut his wrists when I arrested him, and was later kil ed

downtown in a bar shooting on Virginia Street.”

Zodiac raced down to Napa after the stabbings at Lake Berryessa and rang up the police from a pay phone only four-and-one-half blocks from

the police station. Narlow found the location intriguing. “A guy here in Napa is very proficient at making bombs,” he told me, “and happens to trade

at the barbershop directly across the street from the booth where the cal was made.” Police technician Hal Snook, rushed in his dusting of a wet

palm print on the receiver (he was needed at Lake Berryessa), feared botching the job. He used a combination of a hot light and blow-drying to

accelerate the process, got some prints from the phone booth8 and sent them to the FBI. Tommy Lee Southard was the first they tried to match. The

FBI Identification Division replied on October 23, 1969:

“Seven latent fingerprints, three latent palm prints and one latent impression which is either a fingerprint or a partial palm print appear in the

submittedphotographs and are of value for identification purposes. We compared those prints to Thomas Leonard Southard—no identification

was effected. We could not rule him out conclusively since we do not have his palm prints.”