Zodiac Unmasked (46 page)

Taurus, and Pleiades—were al visible. The three would al be seen again on June 21, 1990. The police waited, dreading the outcome.

Thursday, June 21, 1990

Zodiac struck in
Manhattan on the first day of summer. The heat was on in Brooklyn. To dodge the tightening police net, he took the subway to

59th Street and went to Central Park about 7:00 P.M. It would be quiet there. He walked around a few hours until he saw Larry Parham, thirty, a

former janitor, now homeless. Zodiac had approached his victim days earlier to ask his astrological sign—Parham, born June 29, 1959, was a

Cancer. He slept nights on a park bench behind the Central Park band shel . Zodiac sat down a few benches away and waited until a few people

stil there left. Parham made a mattress from pieces of cardboard and a pil ow from his duffel bag. Five hours after the start of Parham’s

astrological period, and on the cusp of Gemini and Cancer, Zodiac shot him in the upper chest. He folded a note covered with astrological signs

under a rock amidst Parham’s meager possessions. “In the letter I left,” the kil er said later, “I used the phrase I read from the encyclopedia. It was to

throw you off the track. . . . I just wanted to increase the fear.”

Astrologists found themselves baffled in developing a coherent, star-based theory to predict the shooter’s next move. Previously, they had linked

the attacks to the first and second phases of the moon, but on June 21 the moon had been in its last quarter. Then came a startling headline:

“Expert: Copy Cat Attacker Goes by West Coast Book.” “N.Y.P.D. Combs ‘Zodiac’ Thril er for Clues,” a second headline read. The New York

Zodiac was using the San Francisco Zodiac as a guide. Psychologist Candice Skrapec, a professor of criminology at John Jay Col ege of Criminal

Justice, theorized that the gunman was
imitating
the California kil er:

“He’s fol owing an account in the book Zodiac written by Robert Graysmith,” said Skrapec. “He has seen the book and read parts of it. The

scope sight, the circle with the cross inside, the drawings, the name Zodiac, the astrological components . . . come from the book. We are

looking at an individual who is thinking the same thing he read in the book. . . . With this kind of behavior it would not be uncommon for the

crimes to escalate, and there wil be shorter time between incidents.”

Friday, June 22, 1990

Chief of Detectives
Joseph Borrel i (“That’s Borrel i. Two
r
’s. Two
l
’s, boys.”) once led the “Son of Sam” probe. “The strange circumstances seem to fal under the zodiac signs of the dates of the shootings,” he said. “In the beginning when we looked at that, it was pure happenstance. But when

you get four out of four, you began to look at it more closely.” The day after Parham was shot, the
New York Post
received another note from

Zodiac:

“This is the Zodiac. I have seen the Post and you say

The note Sent to the Post not to any of

The San Francisco Zodiac letters you are

Wrong the hand writing is different it is

One of the same Zodiac one Zodiac

In San Francisco kil ed a man in the park with a

gun and kil ed a woman with a knife and kil ed

a man in the taxi cab with a gun”

“It was obvious from looking at the letter,” said
Post
reporter Kieran Crowley, “that Zodiac was anxious to convince everyone that he was the

same Zodiac who had kil ed people in California years before.” Crowley wrote:

“Below the diatribe was a drawing of a chubby Zodiac in a square-topped executioner’s mask, with his symbol emblazoned on his chest. To

the right he declared: ‘Me in the park; is this similar no; One Zodiac.’ This was getting interesting. If the California Zodiac had come to New

York, it was an incredible story. In fact, it was too good to be true. . . . He wanted us to think he was a heavy-set, middle-aged white guy from

San Francisco. Or did he actual y believe that he was the California Zodiac reincarnated? The incidents he described, especial y the drawing

of Zodiac in his executioner’s mask, were directly from the Graysmith Zodiac book. Graysmith, when I reached him by phone in California, was

appal ed that someone was apparently using his book as a blueprint for occult murder. The former political cartoonist for the San Francisco

Chronicle said his il ustration of the original Zodiac in a hood appeared only in his book.”

Crowley reached me at home. “Oh, my God, I feel terrible,” I told him. “This is a copycat and not the same guy as ours. When I first heard about

the shootings in New York, I checked up on a Zodiac suspect here who had never been charged. He is stil here.”

Another reporter wrote: “Fearful New Yorkers are snapping up copies of
Zodiac
, the 1986 bestsel er about a Bay Area serial kil er,” “Graysmith,

who spent ten years researching the book, is horrified that it might have become a how-to manual for terror, a macabre guidebook.” “I hope it isn’t

so,” I told him too. “I waited a long time after Zodiac ended his kil ings before writing this book for just such a reason.”

Monday, June 25, 1990

Jewelers saw sales
of birthstones plummet as New Yorkers pondered how Zodiac had known his victims’ signs. NEWS REPORT:

“Police are tel ing people not to tel strangers their birthday. Four people have been shot, targeted for their astrological signs. Today one of

them [Joseph Proce, his third victim] died. The gunman claims to be the Zodiac Kil er of San Francisco fame in the late sixties, but police don’t

believe it. Meanwhile fifty New York detectives are on the case, the tabloids are going crazy and presumably New Yorkers are even more wary

of strangers than usual.”

“The computerized system,” Police Commissioner Lee Brown reassured the public, “enables us to make sure we capture al the tips, al the

information that comes in and gives us a chance to pul it up rapidly. The system employs a light scanner that permits clerks to feed information

from incoming cal s directly into the computer for handwritten notes.”

Zodiac I wrote, “Only Orion [The Hunter] can stop Zodiac and the Seven Sister. No more games, pigs.” A map published in the the
Daily News

overlaid a diagram of the Orion constel ation upon a map of the city. The first three shootings in Brooklyn lay over the part of the constel ation known

as Orion’s belt.

Thursday, June 28, 1990

One man, his
symbols, drawings, and letters identical to Zodiac’s, brought New York to its knees. Such deadly imitation was unprecedented. I flew

to New York, checked into the Omni, and visited the crime scenes. The press fol owed me, slipping so many notes under my door, I could barely

open it. The city was terrified. Mike McAlary wrote in his column:

“I met with Robert Graysmith, a former San Francisco newspaper guy. Graysmith spent ten years investigating San Francisco’s Zodiac

serial kil er. The original Zodiac was a much more lethal guy, Son of Zodiac. No one knows more about the original Zodiac than Graysmith.

Son of Zodiac has obviously read Graysmith’s book cover to cover. He is using the tome as a guidebook to murder . . . trying his best to

imitate the original Zodiac’s penmanship. They write in the same poor black lettering. . . . Beware . . . We live in the age of cheap sequels.”

“We have looked at that book,” said Borrel i. “The New York Zodiac kil er probably has too. Investigators assigned to the Zodiac task force

believe the gunman stalking New York City had read and copied parts of Graysmith’s book.” Warren Hinckle in the
Examiner
said, “Borrel i, who

fol ows Graysmith’s bible as religiously as does his quarry, has ruled him a copy of the original Zodiac.”

A news anchor, her cameraman, and I headed into Central Park in Manhattan. Taking one twisting turn after another, we neared Literary Walk

near 72nd Street on the east side. Nobody would be in Central Park at midnight but the extraordinarily foolish and Zodiac. We discussed the case

on the bench where Parham had been shot. New York Hospital doctors stil had the former Fort Greene resident on a respirator in their trauma unit.

The lights above the band shel cast long shadows across the wooded path, as silent and dark as Lake Herman Road or Blue Rock Springs. I gave

the interview looking over my shoulder. “We dug a round out of that park bench,” Ciravolo told me. “We found a thumbprint on the bottom right-hand

corner of his note. The park victim described a man who looked like [TV weatherman] Al Roker. It was of a guy who had asked for his birthday, not

the shooter. When you press detectives for a composite sketch to please the press, mistakes like that happen. The sketch was wrong and we knew

it. By then it was a citywide case, not just capsulized on the Brooklyn-Queens Border. So that’s when we had forty-nine detectives and went at it the

whole summer. Every twenty-one days when it would fal on a Thursday we’d go out there with a smal army in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.”

As I left to go to the airport, I saw police searching Central Park, the crisp darkness lit by flashing red lights. A female worker and her friends at

the airport thanked me for coming to New York to help. That alone made the trip worthwhile.

Thursday, July 12, 1990

“Zodiac uses the
trains. We’re sure of that,” said the police, formulating plans to shut down the subways and trap him if he struck again. Cops

cuffed a subway fare-beater after they found a city map covered with Zodiac symbols in his pocket. Hundreds of officers anxiously waited for

Zodiac I to strike on his preordained day. “We had in excess of 150-200 bodies,” Ciravolo said, “a mil ion supervisors—the overtime was

astronomical. At one point we had a hot line set up. It looked like a Jerry Lewis Telethon. We had ten cops who were on limited duty—you know,

broken wrist, broken ankle, just sitting there taking phone cal s from the public—in excess of ten thousand telephone tips. Each one was checked

out. When each one was checked out we went through the book again. And guess what? Zodiac went under. He wrote a few notes, taunting us

—‘more games, pigs. I’ve seen you out on Eldridge Lane looking for me, you are not good. You wil not get the Zodiac.’

“He wrote things such as this: ‘This is the Zodiac. The first sign is dead. The Zodiac wil kil the twelve signs in the belt when the Zodiacal light is

seen.’ We were looking at this note for months and were asking what the fuck is the ‘Zody-acal light’? I cal ed NASA and I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr.

Scientist. Is there such thing as the Zody-acal light?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘but there is the Zo-die-ical light.’

“ ‘What the hel is that?’

“‘Wel , it’s refracted particles of dust coming off refracted sunlight, but you can’t see it in big cities. You can see it down in the Caribbean and on a

clear night right at dusk.’

“‘When do you see the Zodiacal light?’ I asked.

“‘Twice a year. It comes out early in October and it comes out again in March.’13

“So this guy started shooting people in March, then he stopped. We got this October coming up, so it’s going to be interesting to see if he comes

back. He also said, ‘Orion is the one who can stop Zodiac and the seven sister,’ which is Pleiades, which is another constel ation. Out of the four

people he shot, he shot al of them in the torso—never any head shots, and three of the four survived. One guy has a round stil in him. It’s stil too

close to his spine to remove.”

Thursday, August 16, 1990

I returned to
New York, staying at Days Inn on 57th Street and wandering the streets in early morning. A garbage strike was in progress. Heaps of

refuse, blurry with flies, mounded each corner. Zodiac victim Darlene Ferrin’s sister, Pam, stepped daintily over the trash, lifting the low hem of her

silky dress. She appeared on the
Sally Jesse Raphael Show
and told how Zodiac had changed her life. A man, she reported, tried to pul her car

keys from her ignition in front of an Antioch, California, store. He brandished a knife and threatened to abduct her, but she escaped after a struggle.

Local police had been skeptical of her earlier reports of death threats—a note pinned to her front door that read “187” [187 is the California Penal

Code section dealing with homicide], a coffin delivered to her door, a cross planted on her lawn, and teddy bears with knives stuck in them left on

her steps. Antioch Police Sergeant Bob Lowe denied they had dismissed Pam’s previous complaints. “Any and al reports of that nature are always

taken seriously,” he said. Vernon Hockaby of Antioch was more irate. He wasn’t related to Pam, but hundreds of cal ers had phoned his number

during the last year.

After making good on a third of his threats, Zodiac I vanished just as the original had. “We went at it for about nine or ten months,” Ciravolo told

me, “until Chief of Detectives Borrel i disbanded it.” Val ejo Detective Bawart, stil on reserve to help the VPD solve complex homicides, said,

“Zodiac’s success in his kil ing and the success of most serial kil ers are that they have no connection with their victims. Psychopaths like this

usual y outgrow it in their later years and later life.” Was this the case with the New York copycat? Had he outgrown his rage, gone underground?

In the interim, I learned Leigh Al en was going blind.

25

arthur leigh allen

Thursday, October 11, 1990

Allen’s deteriorating vision,
a side effect from diabetes mel itus and arteriosclerotic heart disease, had seriously impeded his activities. Though

his kidneys were failing, Leigh ignored his doctor’s advice to curtail excessive fluids and watch his weight. As mental acuity decreased, he