Zodiac Unmasked (4 page)

Cheney and Panzarel a at col ege. Robert Hal Starr had attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the late 1950s and early 1960s while studying to

become an elementary school teacher, had even taught at Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminal y Insane just to the north of the university.

Langstaff assembled some new information, drafted a letter, and sent it flying up to the San Francisco Bay Area—where Starr lived, worked, and

hunted.

Monday, July 19, 1971

Langstaff’s letter containing
Panzarel a and Cheney’s suspicions arrived at Armstrong and Toschi’s Bryant Street Headquarters. In contrast to

the summer sun, the Hal of Justice was a chil y structure, and massive—750,000 square feet, 885 rooms. The morning light glinted on gold lettering

carved into the facade—“EXACT JUSTICE TO ALL . . .” The messenger carried the letter past the metal detector and armed guard and into an

elevator to the fourth floor—Homicide and Sex Crimes Detail. He paused at black hand-painted lettering on frosted glass, which read, “Room 454.”

A handmade sign above the door read, “City Zoo.” He saw that the room beyond was huge, with polished floors, gray file cabinets, and wooden

desks. Final y, the letter landed on San Francisco Homicide Inspector John McKenna’s desk.

McKenna, an intel igent man, wel read, a former banker, had already been alerted by an earlier phone conversation with Detective Amos. He

scanned the letter avidly, then rang up Cheney. “We want you to attempt to obtain samples of Starr’s handprinting,” he said. “Any specimens

acquired and any new disclosures should be sent directly to Inspector Toschi.” The fol owing day, Toschi’s partner, Bil Armstrong, opened a

second letter from the Manhattan Beach police. It provided more details—fascinating details. Pulses began to race. The old black clock on the wal

ticked faster.

World-famous attorney Melvin Bel i returned late from the theater and unlocked his opulent Montgomery Street office. His broad face, lit by the

warm glow of a Tiffany lamp, was pensive. He sat at a magnificent desk, gazed out his sidewalk picture window, and for long moments rubbed his

brow. “The King of Torts” was thinking of Zodiac and his friend Inspector Dave Toschi. Toschi had never forgotten his first meeting with the lawyer.

“The elevator door opens and a dozen or so TV people and reporters are there,” Toschi recal ed. “And here Bel i comes with a black hat slanted

very low over his right ear and this long, black cashmere coat draped over his shoulders. I never saw a scarf so long. It must have gone down to his

knees because it was wrapped around his neck half a dozen times. You could barely see his face. His wife, dressed in a beautiful tan fur, towered

over him. I told the assistant D.A., ‘The Great One has arrived.’ It was Bel i’s show and after he entered the packed courtroom, it must have taken

him a couple of minutes to unwind that amazing scarf.”

Zodiac had written the silver-maned solicitor just before Christmas, 1969. “School children make nice targets,” he threatened. “I think I shal wipe

out a school bus some morning.” “In 1969,” Bel i recal ed, “the San Francisco papers were ful of a one-man crime wave cal ed the Zodiac kil er, a

real loony who’d attacked three couples in lovers’ lanes in the Bay Area and a cabdriver, kil ing five of them, and leaving his mark [a crossed circle

like a gun sight] at the scene. On October 13, 1969 [twenty-two months after Starr’s discussion with Cheney], the Zodiac had threatened to shoot

the tires out on a school bus and ‘pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.’ The police were guarding the school buses and some parents

were driving their kids to school in their own cars. The public was frantic, and the police were under a good deal of pressure to find the Zodiac.”

For some reason Zodiac not only mentioned Bel i in his letters, but phoned him more than once. In some twisted way he either admired Bel i’s

flamboyant courtroom bravado (a bravado second only to his own) or presumed that Bel i might offer a lifeline to him. The attorney had defended

both Mickey Cohen and Jack Ruby. Now Bel i climbed a hard rope ladder to the unique bed he kept fifteen feet up in his living room. He slept fitful y,

unable to escape the thought that he actual y possessed a clue that might solve the case.

Thursday, July 22, 1971

The San Francisco
detectives failed in their attempt to get Cheney to obtain samples of Starr’s handprinting. “I didn’t have any source for that,”

Cheney told me much later. “Armstrong kind of hinted around: Would I write a letter to him to try and get some response out of him? If I had been a

single man at the time I would have done anything they wanted, but I had a wife and two little kids and I didn’t want to open any doors. He could have

found me by just looking in the phone directory.”

Next, the Department of Justice requested samples of Starr’s handprinting from Dr. Frank English, District Superintendent of Val ey Springs

Elementary School, where Starr had once taught. Dr. English complied immediately, and exemplars of Starr’s handprinting were rushed to the

SFPD. By car Toschi hand-delivered the blockprinted applications to CI&I’s Mel Nicolai in Sacramento. Nicolai quickly submitted the samples to

Sherwood Morril , the state agency’s crack documents examiner. The scholarly analyst compared them to Zodiac’s letters and reported to Nicolai

the fol owing Thursday. A. L. Coffey, Chief of the Bureau and Nicolai’s boss, wrote the SFPD the same day.

“Enclosed are the exemplars for Robert Hal Starr,” Coffey stated. “Mr. Sherwood Morril . . . has compared the printing on the submitted

documents with the printing contained in the Zodiac letters and advised they were not prepared by the same person.” Agents returned Starr’s

original applications, and they were replaced in his employment file with no one the wiser. In spite of this setback, the San Francisco detectives

were not deterred. Zodiac was the most intel igent criminal in their experience. He would know a way around Morril and how to fake handprinting.

That had to be the answer. They rushed on, heedless in their excitement.

Saturday, July 24, 1971

In 1970 Detective
Wil iam Baker joined the Major Crimes Unit of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department and was assigned to several

unsolved cases. One was the tragic double murder on a remote beach of two Lompoc High School seniors, Robert George Domingos and Linda

Faye Edwards. “I picked up the case seven years after it occurred,” Baker told me. “Several of the investigators on the case were stil active, so I

took every available opportunity to bug them about it.” One morning Baker came across a Hal oween card Zodiac had written to the
Chronicle
on

October 27, 1970. The kil er had drawn an arcane “Sartor Cross,” accomplishing this by crossing two words—“Slaves” and “Paradice.” However,

Zodiac had printed other words on both sides. These riveted Baker’s attention. The kil er had neatly painted, “By ROPE, By GUN, By KNiFE, By

FiRE.” Rope, gun, knife, and fire had been part of Baker’s unsolved case.

“I immediately sent out a statewide Teletype asking for similars,” he said. “I was soon cal ed, in succession, by Bil Armstrong and Mel Nicolai. To

make a long story short, both told me that just on the basis of the description I offered them, there was a good possibility Zodiac was responsible

and our cases might be linked. However, inconsistent with the other cases attributable to Zodiac, our victims were kil ed on a Monday. It is unknown

if the murders occurred at dusk or later, but it’s unlikely, judging by how the victims were dressed—in swimsuits.” At every possible opportunity

Baker worked the Domingos and Edwards case. A long road lay ahead. He began traveling to speak with most of the detectives in most of the

precincts where the crimes were attributable to Zodiac.

Monday, July 26, 1971

Inspector Armstrong was
traveling too. The handsome, silver-haired investigator, sharp-featured and strong-jawed, arrived in Torrance and

reached Cheney and Panzarel a at Science Dynamics. “Down comes this guy,” Panzarel a recal ed, “a poster guy for the FBI, but very sensitive for

a cop.” Armstrong heard essential y the same story that Amos and Langstaff had. Cheney unerringly re-created the conversation he’d had with his

friend. But Armstrong, not satisfied, began to probe. “Mr. Cheney,” he asked, “could you have read some news accounts about the Zodiac kil ings

and associated those articles with your conversation with Starr?”

“That’s not the case,” he replied. “I can recal the conversation and the date. I can recal my responses to what he said. I could testify to the same

under oath in court.” Armstrong could not shake him on the date of the conversation. A background investigation revealed Cheney, born in

Bakersfield on April 25, 1934, had attended Cal Poly Pomona from fal 1959 until winter 1964 while studying to become a mechanical engineer.

Currently he lived in Pomona with his wife and children. He had no criminal record.

Armstrong spoke next to Sandy Panzarel a, Cheney’s boss and longtime friend. He too had studied at Cal Poly Pomona—from fal 1961 until his

graduation in spring 1964 with a degree in electronic engineering. Panzarel a characterized Cheney as a “very solid person not given to

exaggeration or the tel ing of falsehoods. He’s a very methodical, logical thinker.” Later on Starr’s sister-in-law and brother confirmed Cheney’s

reliability. “If Don Cheney said that to you,” Starr’s brother, Ron, said, “I would believe the same to be true.” Armstrong promptly returned to San

Francisco to bring Toschi up to speed.

He and Toschi painstakingly searched for an ulterior motive on Cheney’s part. “Why would he make such a statement to the police if it were not

true?” asked Toschi. For Starr to cal himself Zodiac, to lay down the method of procedure, the M.O. of the murders, long before Zodiac named

himself, was highly incriminating. Unlike Jack the Ripper, who had, in al likelihood, gotten his name through the ingenuity of a London reporter,

Zodiac had chosen the sobriquet by which he was now known. The homicide detectives felt that if that conversation were true, then Starr
had
to be

Zodiac. And what had accounted for the long delay in Cheney coming forward to the police? Sometime later Cheney explained how he had come

to recal the conversation he had with Starr that fateful New Year’s Day 1969.

“When I left col ege,” Cheney told me, “I got a job at G. J. Yamas in San Francisco. I was there a couple of years. Then, when I lived in Concord, I

had an unsuccessful period trying to sel life insurance, and moved back to Pomona to start working at the Fluor Company. Fluor was an

engineering company, but primarily they were in refineries and chemical plants. At one time Bechtel and Fluor and Parsons were al partners—they

built the Bay Bridge together.

“One evening Ron and Karen, Starr’s brother and sister-in-law, were at my house in Southern California for dinner. We were sitting around the

kitchen table chatting, and Karen told us about Starr going to a painting party in his suit. Ron was on the guest list. Ron and his brother were at the

party and Starr was the guy in the suit. She was using that as an example of him being unadjusted to social things. She was ragging him on that.

She was a little afraid of her brother-in-law because she recognized he was not squared away with the world at al . With her education in social

work she had been exposed to such things.

“One morning I was having breakfast in the new cafeteria at Fluor in what they cal ed the Task Force Center. I had been at the company about

three months or four months then. My brother-in-law, Ron Ebersole, had a newspaper and he was pointing to a composite drawing. ‘That looks like

your buddy,’ he said. And I looked, and that composite was a picture of Starr—except for the hair and absence of glasses. Ron was the only guy at

Fluor who could have recognized him from a prior time. I said, ‘Yes, that looks like him,’ but I didn’t think much of it.”

What was unique about the sketch was that it was not the round-faced composites from Zodiac’s attacks at Lake Berryessa or in San Francisco,

but a profile that Toschi and Armstrong had never seen. “My brother-in-law passed me the paper and I read the article,” Cheney continued. “Up to

this moment I had forgotten the crucial details of my conversation with Starr—that he was going to cal himself Zodiac. I hadn’t remembered even

when I had seen the occasional stories about Zodiac. That sketch was a coincidence, I thought, but a few months later [November 16, 1970] I saw

Zodiac’s threat in the
Times
about shooting out the tires of a school bus and shooting kids as they came bouncing out, something Starr had said to

me. I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. I couldn’t ever get over that. That’s when it absolutely clicked. Then I remembered everything he had said.

“It was another year before I cal ed the police. I was at Fluor in 1969 and 1970. We finished a big contract and they had had major layoffs, so I

had about a year where I was working at a big paper mil in Laverne, which was just a few miles up from my house. I didn’t talk to the San Francisco

police about it right away, I sat on it a while and just thought about it. I just couldn’t get around the fact that it couldn’t be chance. That was too

specific a quote. The 1971 kil ings in the Grass Val ey area had also brought my suspicions to a focus.

“I went to the Pomona police station since I was living in Pomona at the time, and had an interview with an officer. I spent an hour there and I

thought that might execute my responsibility on the business, but nothing ever happened. Apparently what I told him was never reported because