Zodiac Unmasked (42 page)

“He seemed to be speaking for Zodiac,” Craig said later. “He claimed that he was the one who created the Zodiac codes, or at least the codes

were inspired by him. He showed us his own code, which is the one he apparently showed Ron Al en’s wife. He had others that were different from

what Ron Al en’s wife saw.” Craig recognized a lot of the symbols as being Zodiac’s. Al en told them that the Zodiac ciphers he had in his

possession were the original work of a convicted murderer he had met at Atascadero. “It was while I was working there in the early sixties,” he said.

That much was true. “Yeah, Zodiac got this from this inmate and it inspired his ciphers.”

“What do you mean?” asked Craig. “What do you mean? How do you know that unless you’re Zodiac?”

Al en continued to draw suspicion to himself with such sly comments and appearances at crime scenes. And time was running out for the

investigators—nineteen years had passed since Zodiac’s last confirmed murder, thirteen years since his last letter. Would that unsolicited lead

linking Leigh Al en to Zodiac ever come?

Tuesday, October 28, 1987

Clairvoyant Joseph DeLouise
claimed he’d been tuned into the hooded executioner’s thoughts for nearly twenty years. He had once psychical y

envisioned a box in the Zodiac’s possession and advised him to rid himself of it. I wondered if Leigh stil had the mysterious gray box he al owed no

one to open. DeLouise thought the kil er might be a Scorpio or Aquarian because of the figures 11-2 and 2-11, which he kept receiving.

Transmissions registered on DeLouise’s mind: a white dog and horses, loneliness, and an intense hatred of the police.

The Chicago-based psychic, known as the “Prophet of Specifics” because of his accurate predictions, had recently had a second vision. “Zodiac

is living near Berkeley,” he said on Monday. “I recently got a cal from a Bay Area woman who believed she was dating Zodiac. A few weeks after

the woman cal ed, I got an anonymous cal . ‘I’m back,’ it said. The woman promised to cal me back but never did. She may be dead. I see danger

around her. I don’t feel that she was putting me on. He’s out there now. He’s dating and he’s kil ing, but he isn’t taking credit anymore. What he’s

doing now is personal. He feels rejected by the women he’s seeing. I think he’l cal me soon. I can feel it.” As if in response to the psychic’s

entreaties, a gloved hand dropped two letters into a San Francisco mailbox on the morning of October 28. Addressed to the
Chronicle
and
Vallejo

Times-Herald,
both carried Zodiac’s familiar salutation.

Wednesday, October 29, 1987

The
Times-Herald
received
its letter and passed it on to Fred Shirisago, who had it dusted for prints. “Our guy has never left a print in the past,” he said. But the FBI had once gotten a print
similar
to the cab print on one letter. I asked Shirisago if he believed in the bloody print. “I don’t know

myself,” he said. “There were some witnesses indicating that he wiped it al off.” A handwriting expert analyzed the printing on the new letter

immediately. The first three sentences read like the April 1978 letter. The text said:

“Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking I am crack proof. Tel herb caen that I am stil here. I have always been here. Tel the blue pigs if

want me I wil be out driving around on Hal oween in my death machine looking for some Kiddies to run over Cars make nice weapons. . . . The

pigs can catch me if they can find me out there. Just like in the movie: The car. Tel the kiddies watch before they cross the streets on hal oween nite. Tel Tochi my new plans Yours truly: [Zodiac symbol] guess VPD-0”

Kim Kraus, a Val ejo mother of three, heard about the new letter. “One of the neighborhood boys actual y brought a copy of the article down to our

house and showed my children. It frightened them.”

Darlene’s former husband, Dean, had no comment, but his present wife, Kathie, did. “I’m just hoping this is al a hoax,” she said, “but maybe if

Zodiac surfaces—hopeful y without hurting anyone—he might leave a new track that could lead to him being caught—and seeking help. I can’t

imagine somebody being quiet and stay back al this time if he were as batty as [Zodiac] was. A guy as cocky and conceited as him would have let

it be known he was busy again.”

“The only thing that would keep this guy back is the police being close,” I told reporter Gene Silverman. “I think the police
are
close and I stil

believe they are going to solve this. From what I saw, the letter looked like bits and pieces of other Zodiac letters. There’s nothing original about it.

Zodiac always had a macabre bent to his writing, and I don’t see it here. He misspel ed Toschi, and I can’t imagine him doing that. Zodiac, in his

way, has a lot of respect for Toschi. But I understand the desire to see the real Zodiac surface. It would be one more chance for him to slip up. I’l be

the first to say so—I think both letters are fakes.”

“Until Zodiac is caught, this fear wil always be hanging over the Ferrin family—over al of us in fact,” said Carmela (Leigh) Keelen, owner of

Carmela’s Cafe. In 1969 she had owned Caesar’s Italian Restaurant and employed Dean as a cook. “Every time I get a crank cal , Zodiac crosses

my mind.” At mid-month, Darlene Ferrin’s sister, Pam, had discovered a Zodiac symbol scrawled in blue felt-tip pen on her front door, and now a

threat to Hal oween trick-or-treaters was painted on the garage.

Thursday, October 30, 1987

DOJ agreed. Captain
Conway, relieved the letters were hoaxes, nonetheless put extra patrols on the streets Hal oween Eve. Hal oween was an

important holiday for Zodiac. Val ejo’s “Big Game” was traditional y held that day. Zodiac had mailed a threatening Hal oween card, and often

mentioned “game.” Spirit Week for the Big Game included symbolic “burial” ceremonies of the Dr. James J. Hogan Senior High School’s footbal

team. Some of Zodiac’s victims had been Hogan High students. Val ejo High students stood watch over a coffin that contained a “body”

representing Hogan High.

Murder suspect Shawn Melton, a police groupie, confessed to police he was re-enacting a Zodiac murder when he strangled Jeremy Stoner.

Melton’s first contact with the police had been when he took the results of his own investigation of a Zodiac Val ejo murder to local detectives.

“Jim Lang, and Captain Conway and I met with Mike Nail,” Bawart told me, “who was a D.A. then and is now a judge. There was a kind of

infamous case from our county, a kid named Jeremy Stoner, a six-year-old, was abducted and ultimately found dead in the Delta. The responsible

on that was a guy named Shawn Melton. Melton’s father at one time al uded to the fact that Melton wrote letters to the newspaper [like Zodiac] and

his terminology was somewhat similar to the Zodiac. Somebody came out with this hair-brained idea that he was the Zodiac. But he wasn’t, I can

assure you of that! We were meeting with the D.A. at that time to see if he would refile on Shawn Melton. There had been two trials on him and there

had been two hung juries.” Melton was eventual y convicted. He was the first murderer inspired by Zodiac. To our horror, he would not be the last.

Tuesday, November 17, 1987

“I found it
difficult to believe that such a horrifying murderer as Zodiac has not yet been caught,” a reader told me. “Your writings on Starr [my

pseudonym for Al en] certainly convinced me he is Zodiac. I believe that if the police had searched Starr’s mother’s house and especial y the

basement they would have found al the evidence they could possibly have wanted. By this time, Starr has obviously hidden any evidence. He also

figures prominently in my mind because Zodiac is obviously an intel igent man who uses deliberate misspel ings to throw off the police. Did Starr

have a habit of deliberately misspel ing words?” A good idea. I checked. Remarkably, I discovered he did.

Some Zodiac ciphers had never been solved. Buffs had not given up trying to crack them. The eighteen characters at the end of Zodiac’s three-

part cryptogram attracted the most attention. Ruth Gerstankorn rearranged them to read something other than the anagram “Robert Emmett the

Hippie” most had already discovered. She found “Before I meet eternity” and another possibility—“Before I meet them I pity them.” Another reader

said:

“The thing that chil ed my blood was that one of the symbols used was a circle bisected by a cross, used in the plotting of what is known as a

polar co-ordinate. My supposition is this, the last eighteen characters [BEORI-ETEMETHHPITI] in the August ’69 cipher is not a name, but

more important a location that pinpoints the murderer’s location. The letters are in actuality numbers laid out in algebraic fashion on a graph

with the graph being laid out on a north-south to east-west grid on principle streets or landmarks in the San Francisco area, with random letters

being inserted as a fil er to make the line come out even in respect to characters per line. Done in mathematical fashion, the accuracy of this

graph could easily pinpoint the location to a specific location in a specific room in a specific building.

“Another point—al eighteen characters are numbers and that both coordinates are fol owed by numerals after the decimal point. This type of

mathematical plotting is widely used in mechanical engineering and would be used by anyone familiar with science. Since the leading

suspects had been sailors at one time, the characters could stand for degrees of latitude and longitude. This can be used after compensating

for deviation and variation on a magnetic compass to pinpoint a location to within sixty feet, plus or minus. I would, after translation, use an

aircraft map of the area of summer 1969 vintage to plot the isogonic lines properly, inasmuch as the location of the earth’s magnetic pole does

change slightly from year to year. Latitude and longitude are customarily given as a series of numbers fol owed by a letter, in degrees minutes

and seconds.”

However, early on, cryptographer Henry Ephron reported to Sergeant Lynch that the eighteen characters were “symbolic dust tossed into the

eyes of any would-be solver” to confuse and delay solution:

“No one recognized that these meaningless characters [nul s] are standard practice in cryptography to fil out empty space and equalize

groups in size (in this case to fil out the space necessary with similar symbols in order to make the third part exactly the same size as the first

two, a project obviously dear to the heart of Zodiac).” Ephron explained that repetitions of symbols, digraphs, and longer groups are the means

by which ciphers are solved: “On the basis of frequency the value L should have had only two symbols, but because of the frequency of Ls in his

message, he switched after the enciphering was begun to using the square both half-black and ful y black, thus giving himself another symbol

for L and for greater variety in the double L’s he gave up the alternation regularity. But my first discovery on analysis was the identity of the two

squares and B (al the symbols for L). Zodiac’s symbol for A appears, seemingly by error, as S and S as A. More dust in the solver’s eyes!

There is no mistake there. He was trying to confuse the decipherer and he did.”

Paul Avery stil believed the eighteen characters stood for Robert Emmett.

“Everybody loves a good mystery,” he said. “People track me down to talk about Zodiac. I’m deluged with phone cal s and weird

correspondence.” “It’s the stuff legends are made of,” I replied. “In twenty years this case wil be like Jack the Ripper. But sometimes I feel like I’ve

created a monster by writing about it.” “No,” said Avery. “The real monster is Zodiac himself.”

To those around him, Zodiac, a borderline psychotic, might appear as wel control ed and calm, even reasonable. “He prefers the passiveness of

pictures, TV, and the movies,” Dr. Murray Miron wrote. “Zodiac would have spent much of his time in movie houses specializing in sadomasochist

and occult eroticism.” One particular movie had been set at the unique place where Al en’s father worked, where Wing Walker shoes were sold,

and where Leigh had spent time visiting and going to the movies. This second influential film inspired his letters. It would tel us more about Zodiac.

It told us where he had been.

21

zodiac at treasure island

Streets named Sturgeon,
courts named Halibut and Flounder intersected, and an Avenue of Palms buttressed the island’s west side. An

enclosure of tile and marble had once been the Fountain of Western Waters. It had cascaded before a seventy-foot-high terra-cotta-colored statue

of the goddess Pacifica. Then, Treasure Island had been a city of light, floating upon the waves in the very climes where Robert Louis Stevenson

once trod. It shimmered briefly at the end of the 1930s as a beacon of peace, flickered, and then went out. But for a while the night had been lit with

pastel searchlights il uminating domes and towers; colored lights were reflected in stil pools and sparkled in fal ing cascades.

Treasure Island began as a series of jagged surf-lashed shoals north of Yerba Buena Island. Prevailing summer winds from the Golden Gate

forced workers to first construct a ten-story seawal . They massed thousands of tons of boulders to erect a barrier thirteen feet above sea level

around a square-mile area. The resulting lagoon, a mile long and two-thirds of a mile wide, was then fil ed in with twenty mil ion cubic yards of

seafloor mud. A ramp soon connected Treasure Island with central y located Yerba Buena Island and the Bay Bridge. Final y, San Francisco