Zodiac Unmasked (45 page)

“Oh, and another thing. He always did talk about ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ to my mother. In fact I have read the story as young girl, never

realizing that this was a big part of Leigh’s life. As for a possible hiding place of evidence, my mom mentions that Al en put up paneling in his trailer

—it must have been the Val ejo one or Santa Rosa one. My mother notes she saw white gloves in his trailer in Val ejo and that he did have
another

trailer in Bodega Bay, an area he knew wel .”

Toschi and Armstrong had never been told that.

Monday, April 2, 1990

Two Bernal Heights
gardeners digging at 1114 Powhattan Avenue struck metal about six inches down. They unearthed a rusty metal box and

pried it open with their shovels. Inside were two hundred sticks of crystal ized dynamite that had been buried for years. The SFPD transported the

explosive to an isolated site and safely detonated it. Had Zodiac’s stash for his threatened bomb projects been discovered at an address he had

once had some connection with? I doubted it. But somewhere, Zodiac stil had bombs. One day, he’s going to die and the police wil go through the

basement and find guns and bombs—and the case wil be solved. Perhaps one person wrote the Zodiac letters and one person kil ed—only a slim

possibility. Zodiac seemingly acted alone at Berryessa. As far as police could tel , one man, the kil er, had written in felt-tip pen on the door of his

victim’s car and that printing matched Zodiac’s.

Sunday, April 1, 1990

“You wanted to
know
who
he was,” another Zodiac buff, Daniel L. Kleinfeld, offered. I wanted to know
why
he was.

“Zodiac’s mother was very protective . . . affectionate, but extremely moralizing. His father—more passive did not have a great deal of

contact with him. To show affection the mother fed him copious amounts and the stocky child became fat, tormented by classmates. In

adolescence he became suffocated by his mother, unable to break away. He would continue living with her. Condemned by his mother as evil,

he grew to hate her. His feelings of superiority over his peers intensified. He is a military fetishist, like those who impersonate police officers or

soldiers. Zodiac was raised with a very clear sense of justice, of righteousness prevailing. Thus he came to his ‘slaves’ concept. To him, the

way his peers treated him was a grave injustice, which could only be repaid by them doing him service in ‘Paradice’—an afterlife with slaves is

always, to Zodiac, a paradise. He gained a great deal of weight between the shootings on July 4 and stabbings on September 27. He ate,

then murdered. Then ate more.”

Zodiac’s imagination was
a slave to popular culture. Al the pieces of the Zodiac persona had been fitted together on the public stage. One

incredible inspiration to him—beginning August 16, 1969 (two weeks
after
the Cipher Slayer christened himself Zodiac), Dick Tracy began

pursuing the “Zodiac Gang” on the comics page. The Zodiacs, in black hoods emblazoned with white symbols of the zodiac, had drowned an

astrology columnist. Tattooed across the face of their leader, Scorpio, was an astrological symbol of Scorpio. Light-haired and moonfaced, he not

only resembled the prime suspect, but a description of Zodiac as “very round-faced . . . hair combed up in a pompadour.” On August 20, the

Zodiacs raid the police morgue. “Masked torpedoes came in,” says the bludgeoned attendant, “demanded the corpse’s shirt.” Later Zodiac would

steal a victim’s shirt and mail portions to the police. The gang is told, on September 24, “Scorpio has spoken. He is ready for operation west

branch.” Three days later Zodiac stabbed two students at Lake Berryessa while wearing a black hood with a white symbol. “The ‘Zodiacs’ have

done it again!” Scorpio crows. The day of Stine’s murder, October 11, Scorpio drunkenly toasts his success. “To jol y li’l old us—T’ jol y li’l old

Zodiac gang.” The story line ended November 4, 1969.

But how could Zodiac have seen Dick Tracy’s encounter with a Zodiac criminal before publication? Chester Gould drew
Tracy
six weeks in

advance to al ow time for the
Chicago Tribune
Syndicate to make changes and mail proofs to subscribing papers to size, retouch, engrave in

metal, and print. Pre-printed color Sunday sections with the same storyline were delivered weeks before that. If Zodiac worked at the
Chronicle

then he might have had an advance look. He was a long time reader of the strip—“The Purple Cross Gang” in a 1936 sequence wore black hoods

with white crosses on them. Like Tracy, Zodiac used the archaic spel ing, “clews.”

More importantly,
Dick Tracy
provided Zodiac with a way to avoid leaving prints. “Put a coating of this liquid cel ophane on your fingers,” says a

gangster. “It prevents fingerprints and it don’t clutter up your sense of touch either.” On February 9, 1969 Tracy explained blood type analysis on a

toothpick left at a crime scene. “As you know, salivary secretion often is used in place of blood for type determination. Your subject had a blood

type AB.” Though DNA testing had not been introduced, there was a primative version—ABO-PGM testing. Saliva could speak volumes about

Zodiac and he knew that. Even in 1969, Zodiac would no more have licked a stamp than he would have forgotten to wear his gloves.

A comic strip and Zodiac watch had provided his name and symbol. Movies such as
The Most Dangerous Game
and
Charlie Chan at

Treasure Island
had inspired and influenced him. One prompted him to hunt humans, the other, set on Treasure Island, provided the black hood

and salutation for his letters, even inspired Zodiac’s duel by mail with the
Chronicle
. But if Zodiac could be motivated by popular culture, others

could be influenced by Zodiac himself. It was the most shocking byproduct of the entire case. Someone claiming to be the San Francisco Zodiac

Kil er was shooting people in New York City. Somehow he knew their birth dates and promised one victim for each of the twelve Zodiac signs. We

feared it was the original Zodiac, returned at last with guns blazing.

24

zodiac II

Bold headlines said
it al in the summer of 1990: “GUNMAN TERRORIZES NEW YORK—CALLS SELF ZODIAC. SHOT 3 MEN, ONE

FATALLY, WOUNDED A FOURTH IN CENTRAL PARK.” Zodiac was shooting people in an eight-block section of Brooklyn and in Central Park on

Thursdays at twenty-one-day intervals.

“When I was a detective sergeant,” Mike Ciravolo told me, “I ran the the Zodiac case here. At that time they gave me and my forty-nine detectives

the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Let me tel you how the case developed. But before I go into detail—when we were working on our case you know what we

did? We went out and bought a case of your book,
Zodiac
. I had al my detectives read it to see if they could cul anything that might be of help in

our investigation.

“Let me go into 1990 for you. At that time I was a commanding officer of the crimes-against-senior-citizens squad in Queens. I had a smal unit—

eight detectives on the beat. I came in at seven o’clock one morning. A detective [Andy Cardimone] from night watch (which works out of the

Queens homicide squad right down the hal from us) came up and says, ‘Sarge, we had a shooting of a seventy-eight-year-old man last night and

he’s expected to live. You gonna take the case?’

“‘Sure, we’l take the case,’ I said.

“‘Something funny,’ he says. ‘I found this note on the step and it had these rocks.’ He hands me the fuckin’ rocks—three stones. ‘This note was

next to it.’ It was the first Zodiac note we became aware of. It said: ‘This is the Zodiac the twelve sign Wil die when the belts in the heaven are

seen.’ It had a round circle with three pie shapes in it and a little scribble. We didn’t real y know what it meant at the time.” The kil er had fol owed the

victim, Joseph Proce, a retired ice delivery worker, for ten blocks and into his front yard. He asked the old man for water and if he could go inside.

“Why do you want to go inside?” Proce asked. “Because I’m cold,” he said, then shot Proce with a homemade zip gun and ran toward Eldert Street.

“So when we get to the scene that morning,” continued Ciravolo, “uniform officers and the detectives who worked the midnight-to-eight shift have

responded. There were some clothes in a heap on the first stoop—this brown stuff where Joseph Proce was shot in the back, and I told Detective

Bil Clark, ‘Bil y, check those clothes over there.’ As he’s going through he says, ‘Sarge, a round just fel out.’ ‘Let’s get it to the lab,’ I said. We

canvassed the block. It was a very residential block [87th Road in Woodhaven, Queens], and we came up with a witness who saw a guy in an Army

fatigue jacket—the witness believed him to be black—running down the block towards Brooklyn. That street sat right on the Brooklyn-Queens

border.” In California Zodiac kil ed on town borders in an effort to create confusion and competition between authorities over jurisdiction. “So the old

man was taken to the hospital. He was expected to survive. I kept sending detectives back there every day to interview him.”

The New York Zodiac murders occurred at the height of the crack wars in East New York, and the 75th Precinct, where two of the victims were

shot, averaged a hundred murders annual y. Ciravolo continued. “Zodiac said, ‘Al shoot in Brooklyn,’ in some of his subsequent notes. He also

used to write ‘380’ or ‘9m’ [nine-mil imeter], ‘RNL’ [round-nosed lead], ‘no grooves on bul et—no grooves on bul et—’ By the way, there was never

any grooves on the bul et. Zodiac never, ever lied about what he said in any of his letters.”

“Was he making his own ammunition?” I asked.

“No, he wasn’t, but I feel he may have made his own gun.” A zip gun, made of duct tape, wood, and pipes of various sizes for different calibers.

Ciravolo laid out this chronology for me: “This attack on Proce happened on May 31. So now what happens—I take a copy of this note and I go to

Chief Menkin, Chief of Detectives for Queens. ‘Chief,’ I say, ‘I had a strange shooting last night—one of my senior citizens got shot. I think we’re

going to be able to interview him when he gets off the respirator. ’ (But he ultimately died three weeks later from infection from the bul et. But we did

interview him.) I said, ‘I think we got a nut going around here. I hope we don’t have a second Son of Sam.’

“‘Wel , keep me posted on this,’ the chief said. That was May 31. On June 19, I get a cal from the
New York Post
that a reporter [Anne Murray]

got a letter sent down there. They faxed me a copy. It’s our guy—it’s obviously the same handwriting—claiming responsibility for three prior

shootings. He says he shot a man with a cane in the street on March 8.” At 1:45 A.M., Mario Orosco, forty-nine, an immigrant from Medel in,

Colombia, finished work at a midtown cafeteria, and left the J train at Crescent Street. He paused at the corner of Atlantic and Sheridan Avenues

and noticed a man in a beret and bandana, dressed al in black, walking behind him. He was holding a homemade nine-mil imeter gun. Alarmed,

Orosco began hobbling away on his cane, but was shot in the upper back.

“Then,” Ciravolo went on, “Zodiac says he shot another man [Jermaine Montenesdro, thirty-four] in his left side in front of his house [at Nichols and

Jamaica Avenues in Queens] on March 29 [at 2:57 A.M.]. Then he said he shot an old man with a cane on May 31—which matches my case, the

Proce shooting. Then he says, ‘Al shoot in Brooklyn. ’ So I said, ‘He was wrong about my guy being in Brooklyn. He didn’t know the way the map

gets a little crazy right on the border. Obviously, when he shot this guy in Queens, he thought it was in Brooklyn, but he was about two hundred yards

out of Brooklyn on the Queens side. We started checking al the homicides in Brooklyn. None of them matched up. Then we checked al the first-

degree assaults—and boom! We got two guys who were shot and they
survived
. So we looked into these, and the next morning the Chief of

Detectives summoned us al down to his office and he decided to give me the case with nine detectives to look into this.

“I’d stayed up al night along with a couple of other detectives and we had come up with a theory. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘he shot March 8, then he shot

again March 29. Twenty-one days apart, al on a Thursday, by the way—and al in the early morning hours—between 1:45 and 4:00 A.M. So there

was twenty-one days in between the first and second shooting. Then sixty-three days in between my old man getting shot—which is three intervals

of twenty-one.”

The New York Zodiac wrote notes taunting the task force, which ultimately numbered fifty men. He vowed to kil one person born under each of

the twelve astrological signs. So far he had shot a Scorpio (Orosco, born October 26, 1940), a Gemini (Montenesdro, born May 28, 1956), and a

Taurus (Proce, born May 20, 1912). “So now here we are,” Ciravolo proceeded, “sitting in the Chief of Detectives’ office on June 20. I said, ‘Chief, I

think he’s going to shoot again. Tonight, after midnight is Thursday and it’s twenty-one days since my old man got shot.’ So he gives me thirty

detectives and everybody only gets two square blocks—’cause al of the shootings are within half a mile of each other. We got the streets blanketed

and then al of a sudden—six o’clock in the morning, I cal off the detail and I’m back at the station house. I’m signing everybody’s overtime slips and

I get a cal . He saw us in the neighborhood and jumped on the train.” On the nights of the Zodiac’s first three attacks, three star clusters—Orion,