Zodiac Unmasked (50 page)

automatic ammunition, live or expended, that may have been fired from a 9-mm pistol. They would try to link this to the murder of Paul Stine. They

listed any knives a foot long with a one-inch blade having rivets in the handle and tape around the handle, and a black executioner’s hood which

covered Zodiac’s head and hung down over his shoulders almost to his waist and was sleeveless. A circle and cross were painted white across the

chest. Conway desired any diaries or journals that Al en might have kept that linked him with Zodiac or the investigation to catch him. Any item that

had the Zodiac’s symbol of a crossed circle on it. He made one last request in his appeal: “Your Affiant asks that after the service of this search

warrant that the Search Warrant Affidavit and Return of Service be sealed by the court. The reason this request is made is that the Zodiac case has

had national publicity and has been one of the few cases that has so inflamed the public that it would serve no purpose for the news media to get

information from this affidavit if no charges are filed. In the other vein, if charges are filed, the publicity from this affidavit would tend to make it

difficult to have a fair trial.”

Police had come to believe that Zodiac was an unsophisticated kil er who contrary to former beliefs did not stalk his victims—just came across

them in lovers’ lanes. But the kil er was very familiar with Val ejo and Berryessa and the surrounding area, and victims had complained of being

stalked before their deaths.

I also thought sadly of Al en’s lost promise—at one time he could have been an Olympic diver. I recal ed his yearbook picture and photos of him

from junior high school and the 1950s when he was a lifeguard at The Plunge. A clipping portrayed a very slim young man, 180 pounds, about to

leap from a diving board. Leigh had been fit and handsome, looking eerily like the first composite sketch of Zodiac. In the time between the murder

of Paul Stine and his first interview with Toschi and Mulanax, Al en had gained so much weight, his face had become so owl-like, he was compared

to rotund Burl Ives the folksinger—but Al en was stil relatively young and Ives had been an old man. As it was, these days Al en was just getting by

on his $500-a-month disability checks.

Wednesday, February 13, 1991

Municipal Judge F.
Paul Dacey, Jr., Val ejo-Benicia, granted a search warrant (#1970) for Al en’s home at 32 Fresno Street and the boat stored

at 1545 Broadway.

Thursday, February 14, 1991

Conway and his
men served the warrant—rapped at the door and stood expectantly in the brisk morning air. The door opened and an army of

cops entered. After al these years, at last they would final y see what was in that dank tomb of a basement.

28

the search

Thursday, February 14, 1991

“I’m a nice
guy,” said Al en.

“What if I can prove you’re a mean guy?” said Conway.

“If you had something on me, you’d charge me,” Al en said placidly. He leaned on his cane. His eyes, heavily lidded, shone a lustrous brown

beneath a massive brow—squirrel’s eyes. Leigh’s dog, Sobie, was at his feet. Conway pul ed out a chair and conducted the interview upstairs

where Leigh’s parents, Bernice and Ethan, had lived. Scattered al about him, he saw the dusty antiques and mementos of long-ago gentility.

Presently, a young woman was renting this upper floor while Leigh exiled himself to the basement. Leigh, however, kept some of his clothes,

including shoes, in the upstairs back bedroom. There was a record player in the upstairs dining room and downstairs bedroom, and many records

and accessories. He had a Sharp TV and a Sharp video recorder. He had a second video camera, lenses, a black video convertible recorder and

stereo adaptor, and many, many tapes. There was a lot of pet equipment.

As he probed, Conway learned little things—Leigh was a gourmet cook. His sausage-making equipment was kept on a high shelf in his

bedroom. A hard-bound sausage book and supplies (spices, casings, etc.) were in the laundry room pantry. The shelves held numerous cook-

books. He often printed out recipes for his friends, and enjoyed purposely misspel ing words on on these recipe cards. “We confirmed this through

his brother and other relatives, that he did these misspel ings on purpose,” Conway told me later. “It wasn’t by accident. He’d write recipes, for

example, and he’d spel ‘eggs’—instead of ‘eggs,’ he’d spel it ‘aigs.’ And that was intentional, just to get a chuckle out of people who would read it.

He did that consistently, doing that with al kinds of things.”

As they discussed his high intel igence, Al en became flippant. “Oh, no!” he said with a laugh. “I’m not gifted.” Later, in a television interview on

KTVU-TV, he described himself exactly that way. “I
am
gifted.” “I don’t booze anymore,” he said, and admitted his high degree of mechanical ability.

“I go to excess with anything.”

Conway and Bawart descended into Al en’s dark and dreary basement. “It was almost museum-like,” said a detective. If it were a museum, then

they might ferret out relics of Zodiac’s past. The detective’s notes, in longhand, stated: “Very dusty + cluttered. Books stamped w/S’s name. Dust

everywhere.” There was an Amana freezer and refrigerator, Maytag washer and dryer, and camping and fishing gear. Conway’s men unearthed

four boxes of videotapes, a box of audio reel tapes, and one cassette recorder in the basement. They played a few seconds of each of the tapes,

then exchanged stunned looks. They climbed the stairs and sat down and played a tape for Al en. Screams of pain fil ed the room. After the

recorded cries ceased, Conway snapped the machine off. There was a long pause.

“That’s me,” Leigh said.

“Doing what?”

“Spanking a young boy.”

“What?”

“A young boy who was feigning pain. I find it sexual y stimulating,” he said without embarrassment. “I admit to being a sexual deviant. I do get

sexual pleasure, cruel pleasure, from sadistic pornography.” He noticed the investigators staring at him. “Wel , there’s a lot of remorse for ya,” he

said.

The same kind of screams were on other tapes—the cries of yet unknown victims? It was difficult to tel if al were kids, though that in itself was

criminal enough. So infatuated with children was Al en that he seemed unable to stay away from them even though it might mean being sent back to

Atascadero.

“If I was Zodiac,” he said emotional y, “I’d want to get it off my chest. Zodiac would be judged crazy. . . . Zodiac doesn’t like to kil . I’d rather be

dead than go to Atascadero. I can’t be there. I hated the lack of freedom at Atascadero—the crazy people. They play mind games with you there.”

The search for the smoking gun continued. Among the cobwebbed and yel owed clippings in the basement, police ferreted out a column by

Superior Court Judge Thomas N. Healy that Leigh had snipped shortly after his release from Atascadero. Judge Healy’s “Insanity Defense,” an

update of the Criminal Insanity Plea as a defense, had run in the
Vallejo Independent Press
on January 10, 1979. Healy had cited People v. Drew

as a redefinition of the legal concept of madness. The M’Naghten Rule, introduced in England in 1843, imposes a legal distinction for judging legal

insanity—requires either that an offender not know what he was doing at the time he committed a crime, or not know it was wrong or was under a

delusion. Obviously, such a defense figured into any strategy Al en would use if ever tried and convicted as Zodiac. New York’s Son of Sam, David

Berkowitz, sentenced to 315 years at Attica, afterward admitted he had faked his insanity. The searchers discovered miscel aneous papers and

news clips about Zodiac. Among them were several copies of 1982 editions of the
Times-Herald
and the
San Francisco Chronicle
that contained

Zodiac stories. Detectives seized two copies of the
Vallejo Times-Herald
dated June, 3, 1982, and a
Chronicle
from June 6 of that same year.

Conway observed that though Leigh did a lot of talking, he real y never said anything. “There’s so many lies I caught him in,” said Conway, “his

denying things didn’t have any relevance anymore. The last letter that’s attributed to the Zodiac was a couple of months after he got out of the

Atascadero State Hospital. There were no letters whatsoever during the time he was in Atascadero State Hospital.”

Leigh denied any involvement in the Zodiac murders, but readily admitted that Sergeant Lynch had questioned him in early October of 1969. “I

had planned to go to Berryessa on that date,” he said, “but I changed my mind and went to the ocean instead.” He said nothing more about the

neighbor who had witnessed him returning home the day of the stabbings. Nor did he mention the neighbor’s death by “cerebral thrombosis—

massive” seventeen days later. According to Conway, Leigh was “very amiable, calm, and cooperative throughout the interview.” But detectives

brought up a mountain of weapons from the basement. “Get a load of this,” one said as they unearthed a Ruger .22 revolver with six live rounds. A

.22 revolver. A Ruger .44 Blackhawk and five rounds. A Colt .32 automatic and seven rounds. A Remington .22 short-caliber rifle, a Stevens model

835 12-gauge double-barrel shotgun, and a Winchester Model 50 20-gauge automatic shotgun. Winchester Super, and miscel aneous ammunition

for .32-, .22-, .44-, and .30-caliber guns. A .22 automatic clip with three rounds. A Marlin .22 rifle with a scope. An Inland .30-caliber rifle. Since

Al en was an ex-felon, possession of firearms was il egal.

Then came a bigger find—Captain Conway’s men discovered four pipe bombs, a primer cord, and seven impact devices (Railway Torpedo).

They ferreted out one can of black powder, partial y ful , and some Euroarms .44-caliber black powder, #13357 variety. They retrieved the fol owing:

two safety fuses (green, two rol s each, 98½ feet) and two rol s of orange safety fuses, nine non-electric blasting caps, two one-inch galvanized

pipes with one end cap, five pipe thread compounds, six pipe vises.

Inside a cardboard box they located bottles of potassium nitrate, green safety fuse, two bottles of sulfur, two glass bottles of black material, and

miscel aneous fireworks. Years later, I would find myself one day on the chil y slopes of Lincoln, Montana, at the Unabomber’s tiny cabin. Shortly

after Kaczynski’s arrest, police recovered items from the cabin identical with Al en’s basement chemicals and firing devices. They even unearthed

a box containing fireworks.

“I never left bombs in my basement,” Leigh maintained.

“Wel , we found some,” said Conway.

“I didn’t even know they were there.”

“Listen,” said Conway. “We have your fingerprints on the pipe bombs under your house.”

“No, you don’t,” he said with a smile. “An ex-con left them there nine, ten years ago. He’s been dead for years.”

Conway was later asked, “Did you in fact find fingerprints?”

“Let me answer that this way,” he said. “Al en first denied having any knowledge whatsoever of any bombs existing in his basement, and when we

told him of his fingerprints on the bombs—which there wasn’t, by the way, then he had an explanation of how he was cleaning up the basement and

moved them from one spot to another. That’s the kind of stuff we went through with him al the time.” Al en said that the bombs had been stored

there ten years ago, which would have been 1981, a dozen years after Zodiac bragged about a death machine in his cel ar. Investigators rooted out

a Zippo lighter with “D. E. Brandon” engraved on it. Brandon apparently was the name of the ex-convict who had al egedly left the bombs, and he

was very much alive. The FBI later spoke with the ex-con. He denied “having left several bombs in a friend’s basement years ago.”

Next they showed Al en a piece of yel ow, lined paper. It contained a menu for making bombs. Who could forget that Zodiac, on November 9,

1969, had claimed the “death machine” waited in his basement:

Take one bag of ammonium nitrate

fertilizer & 1 gal of stove oil &

dump a few bags of gravel on

top & then set the shit off

& wil positivly ventalate any

thing that should be in the way

of the blast.

The death machine is al ready

made. I would have sent you

pictures but you would nasty

enough to trace them back to

developer & then to me, so I

shal describe my masterpiece

to you. Tke nice part of it is

al the parts can be bought on

the open market with no quest

ions asked.

1 bat. pow clock—wil run for

approx 1 year

1 photoelectric switch

2 copper leaf springs

26V car bat

1 flash light bulb and reflector

1 mirror

2 18" cardboard tubes black with

shoe polish inside and oute

the system checks out from one

end to the other in my

tests. What you do not know

is whether the death machine

is at the sight or whether

it is being stored in my

basement for future use.

“I’ve never seen that piece of paper before,” Al en said. “I’ve never seen these documents before.” Conway added the yel ow paper to his bounty.

During most of the questioning Leigh was evasive, leaning on his cane and smiling. And he was wearing a Zodiac Sea Wolf Watch #26894—

another version of the one he had worn at the refinery twenty long years ago. Conway bagged it next and put it with the yel ow paper. They took

away one cardboard box wrapped in a brown plastic bag with “Mrs. E. W. Al en” printed on a label. Then investigators discovered a letter from the