Zodiac Unmasked (53 page)

“I want to listen to those tapes.” So did I, I thought.

“Are you going to pay the guy?” I asked. I never trusted the validity of information that was purchased.

“I’m not going to pay him anything.” He cal ed back soon after. “Wel , I’ve got Val ejo P.D. coming in here. They’re real excited. They say they’re

real close to solving the case.”

I spoke with Jackie Ginley and the Val ejo P.D. because I had gotten a number of cal s from NBC and CBS television about Zodiac concerning

“some tapes.” “Do you think they do this periodical y, cal up with a hook on the story and try and sel it?” Jackie asked, referring to the tapes for

sale. “I’m getting some cal s here from people who knew Mr. Al en back in high school. A lot of people. But you know how it is working on a daily

paper, there’s not much time to devote to something like that.”

Tuesday, June 11, 1991

Bawart and Conway
studied Mulanax’s files from 1971, then went and talked to some of the same people he had. “A lot of what the informants

were tel ing Conway and Bawart in the early nineties,” a source told me, “they didn’t tel Mulanax. Maybe they were afraid back then to come

forward, but now in 1991 they’re not so afraid anymore and just want to get the guy.”

“Captain Conway and I re-interviewed Phil Tucker,” Bawart told me. “Tucker worked for GVRD. He wasn’t real y a friend of Al en’s. He was an

associate, as many other people were [who were] involved in any kind of athletics in that period of the time. This interview was in the infancy of

when I was doing background work on Al en.”

Bawart’s seven-page report,
Circumstances Which Indicate Arthur Leigh Allen Is, In Fact, The Zodiac Killer,
would grow to thirty items. 17

“During our interview Phil Tucker was unable to remember that Arthur Leigh Al en had told him that he [had] special [electronic gun] sights for

shooting in the dark. He did, however, indicate that Al en told him he was proficient in shooting and proficient in shooting in the dark. Arthur Leigh

Al en had told him he had read a book . . . about hunting people with a bow and arrow.”

Tucker recal ed, “Al en was fascinated with the concept of stalking people rather than game. He indicated a number of times that it would be

great sport to hunt people as they had intel igence. We were on our way to the beach to go scuba diving when he started discussing hunting trips

and ended up talking about hunting people with bows and arrows. I felt he wanted my reaction to these statements. I told him I would never consider

hunting people. He tried to make it seem like this was an idea for a book he was going to write. I got the idea that he was real y saying, ‘Is this

something you’d like to do with me?’ I just ignored him. I think he told me the name of the book he had read.”

“Was the name of the book
The Most Dangerous Game
?” asked Bawart.

“I don’t think so.” Possibly Al en had mentioned not a book, but a 1945 film,
A Game of Death,
a remake of
The Most Dangerous Game
. “This

conversation took place prior to September of 1966 as that’s the month and year I married my first wife. That is why I recal the time easily. I did not

see Al en to any great degree, nor go out on hunting and fishing trips with him, after my marriage.”

“Do you know Donald Cheney?” asked Bawart. Stalking people at night with a gun had been part of the conversation Cheney said Al en had with

him New Year’s Day, 1969. Zodiac had also al uded to hunting people in his cryptogram.

“I do not,” said Tucker.

“Why didn’t you give this information to Toschi and Mulanax in 1971?”

“I only answered their questions. They did not ask me so I didn’t tel them. I was not asked about any fantasies Al en may have related to me.”

Tucker also indicated that during the span of their conversation, he saw Al en had a Zodiac brand watch with a Zodiac symbol. Tucker also

repeated that he had seen Al en write with both hands. “He uses both hands equal y wel when handprinting, but his handprinting is not real good.”

Tucker also mentioned that Al en had an interest in codes, and repeated that he had seen a handwritten Zodiac-type cryptogram at Al en’s house.

“This was prior to any cryptograms being published in the newspaper,” he said. “Al en was the kind of fel ow who loved to try and outsmart the other

guy.”

Tucker related, as he had for Mulanax and Toschi, that in 1969, he owned an older brown beat-up Corvair. Al en had driven this Corvair, but

Tucker could not specifical y indicate whether Al en drove this Corvair on July 4, 1969. Mike Mageau had described an older brown vehicle, “similar

to a 1963 Corvair, older and bigger, old plates,” as being the kil er’s vehicle.

Thursday, July 25, 1991

Now Allen became
more than a name in the police files—he was the subject of the nightly news. “My first occasion to meet Arthur Leigh Al en was

in July of 1991,” reporter Rita Wil iams recal ed. “We had gotten wind that Captain Conway and his folks had served a search warrant back on

Valentine’s Day of that year and it was about to be unsealed. We first talked to the captain.”

“Why,” Wil iams asked Conway, “haven’t there been any charges brought against Al en when you found pipe bombs in his residence?”

“I’m not going to comment on an ongoing investigation,” replied Conway.

“Do you think you are close to getting the case solved . . . any closer than you were twenty years ago?”

“Honestly, I don’t think so,” he concluded.

“Then,” recal ed Wil iams “just on a lark, my cameraman and I went to Al en’s to see what we might get. It was late one evening. It was summer

and stil light outside, but beginning to get dark. My cameraman and I walked up to his door, and Nick sort of hid in the bush while I knocked on

Al en’s door. Al en was not clothed. He had on his bathrobe and yel ed out the window, ‘Just a moment.’ Final y he came to the door. When I told him

what I was doing, he surprised me by saying I could come in.”

Wil iams had interviewed both the “Night Stalker” and the “Trailside Kil er.” “I was alone in their jail cel s,” she recal ed, “but of al the people I’ve

ever interviewed, none had ever given me chil s like Arthur Leigh Al en. That was the thing that got me. He had this demeanor about him. He was

just so big and so kind of apelike—just scary. It’s hard to describe, but you could see the strength. And that some of things he was accused of

doing, you could see he could, in fact, accomplish. He was the kind of man that, even though he was very sick—at that time he was on kidney

dialysis and had high blood pressure, was taking al sorts of medication—he was stil a frightening presence.

“When he had agreed to my request for an interview, I paused. I had second thoughts. He had not seen my photographer some distance away,

and I was not going into that house alone. Final y, the photographer was al owed to enter too. At first Al en told us we couldn’t take any pictures. He

just wanted to see what we were doing there. But over the course of the next hour and a half, we sat down and had a discussion with him.

“He had that sort of barrel chest, huge shoulders. He wasn’t al that heavy, because he was on dialysis then. Even though he was sick, everything

about him was ominous. He had on a housecoat and combat boots—big heavy boots—‘clomp, clomp, clomp!’ Then later, he changed clothes in

the midst of the interview.” Al en donned a transparent blue sport shirt, vertical y ridged with two filigreed designs and unbuttoned to show his broad

chest. His herringbone pants were old-fashioned, pleated and a grayish brown. On his right wrist a Band-Aid covered a needle mark made that

morning.

Wil iams, blond, attractive, and long-legged, was dressed in a short red jacket over a black tailored suit, accented by gold jewelry. They made an

odd couple as Al en led her through a tangled, disorderly garden. A chain-link fence reinforced with wood and wire ran along the perimeter. Al en

pointed out where the police had retrieved bombs from beneath the house. “Al en talked about how the police had robbed him of stuff,” recal ed

Wil iams, “harassed him and taken things he had never gotten back—sentimental stuff from his mother. He was quite upset.” A hot wind rose

against the pearl-gray sky.

They descended into the dusty basement room. It was warmer there. Wil iams sat with her back to a rugged homemade bookshelf of unfinished

wood. She studied the items on the wal . Was that a Boy Scout felt band with every badge they awarded? Was it Al en’s? A local child’s? Dust

covered an audio device—sounding machinery used in diving; a few diving, swimming, and spear-fishing trophies lined a shelf. Various

photographic supplies were above her head. A Dustbuster (covered with dust) hung from the wal . On the floor a gal on container with a handle sat

next to a smal table. On that table, captured in the glow of a swivel lamp, lay a clutter of electronic equipment—a stereo, a reel-to-reel tape

recorder, video games, a VCR, audio cassettes, and a black-and-white phone. A copy of
Zodiac
was under one of the audio cassettes. Near a

clock sat an almost empty stein of beer though Al en was not supposed to drink. There was a glass ashtray, though Al en did not smoke. An empty

dinner plate had been tucked under one shelf. She returned her focus to Al en. Police had taken away many items; none of the things Wil iams was

most interested in were present—Zodiac watch, guns, bombs, clippings.

As they spoke, Al en sat rigidly upright, hands folded in his lap, like a reprimanded student, and perched on the edge of what Wil iams took to be

a rumpled couch covered with a blue blanket and two white pil ows. Only later she realized, “That was where he slept.” His bald head was framed by

tan curtains painted with a design of bonsai trees and a blue sea stretching beyond. Al en’s elderly tan dog lay against his left hip, striking out with

his hind leg occasional y.

“I’ve lived in this house since I was eight,” said Al en. “My mother died three years ago and ever since I’ve lived here—alone—in this room. I

began taking kidney dialysis in April of 1991. First two times a week, then three times. I blew up like a blimp. My weight shot up to maybe 280

pounds. Final y, I was taking ten injections of insulin a day. Eventual y I returned to my present weight of 220 pounds.”

Wil iams told me later, “Though he was an obviously il man, Al en was stil a powerful, frightening presence. In his prime he would have been

terrifying. I had read the book and I knew some things to ask. I started out by acting as if I knew nothing about the case, and getting more specific

during the interview, and just let him just talk. He said it was al circumstantial evidence, that there was never anything to pin him to be the kil er, or,

in fact, Captain Conway and the Val ejo police would have arrested him and charged him. He talked about some pipe bombs found under his

house.”

“I didn’t know the bombs were there,” Al en explained. “An ex-con friend, now dead, asked me to store some things more than a decade ago.

They must be his. They told me my fingerprints were on the bombs. I don’t believe that. I wouldn’t be sitting here if they were and there’s real y no

way they could get on there. . . . I think there probably is a Zodiac stil out there and he’s just laughing himself to death.”

“Al en lived with his mother,” Wil iams said. “He never married. He was arrested once for molesting a smal boy and served time in Atascadero.

He broke down and choked up on that. ‘I realize now how horrible that was,’ he said, ‘and what an impact I may have had on that child. I’m not the

kind of person to hurt anyone.’

“I asked for a response to the fel ow [Cheney] who had gone to authorities about his remarks about hunting people—but first I quoted Zodiac—‘I

like kil ing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than kil ing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of al to

kil . . . . ’

“Al en tel s me that he read that story, ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ back when he was in the eleventh grade, and it had such an impact on him

that he then was shooting jackrabbits and that was the only thing he could ever kil , and that he indeed had not said that recently. ‘Wel , he built this

into something much, much grander,’ said Al en, ‘and remembered other conversations that we didn’t have and decided, wel , I must be the Zodiac.

That was something that we talked about back when we were in high school together and he’s mistaken. Everybody’s trying to get publicity. In fact I

had never said that.’ Al en never went to high school with Cheney, and did not meet him until 1962.

“Al en has al sorts of explanations for everything,” Rita recal ed. “Three or four times throughout the interview, he mentioned that he had never

read
Zodiac,
yet he would mention things that are in that book that he would not have known simply from interviews that Captain Conway and others

have done with him. And then he would start back and say, ‘Wait a minute. No! I’ve never read that book. I heard that he said that.’ And he took

great liberties with the truth there and that was not true. [
Zodiac
is visible under papers on his desk in the filmed interview.]

“And I used the summation that was in the book—about Al en’s mother being very domineering and that he was not the favored one in the family,

that his brother, who looked more like his mother’s side of the family, was the favored son, and that Leigh had been under the dominance of his

mother al his life. Very crass—[Al en] said several things about bodily functions of his dog and other things, I think more for shock value and to see