Zodiac Unmasked (55 page)

through probate.

Beemen didn’t share his knowledge with Captain Conway and the Val ejo police either. “He didn’t present any information,” said Conway. “He

wants to save it for the news conference.” Within months Beeman would cal a press conference to reveal what he knew. The press, including Paul

Avery, and police officials had been invited. The announcement would be made in Val ejo on Hal oween.

“Before he had that Hal oween Day press conference,” recal ed Bawart, “Beeman got hold of me and said, ‘I’m going to do this exposé. I know al

this stuff. I want you to investigate this.’ So I went down and met him at his office. ‘Do you have any documentation?’ I asked. ‘Wel , no I haven’t done

any of that,’ he said.” Handprinting samples provided by Beeman had not matched those of Zodiac. But so far nobody’s handprinting had, and

probably nobody’s ever would. I stil believed that Zodiac might have been a different personality when he wrote his letters. No matter, we al had to

wait until Hal oween to hear what Beeman had to say.

31

jack zodiac

Thursday, October 31, 1991

Tears welled up
in Val ejo lawyer Wil iam Steadman Beeman’s eyes. One tear coursed down a broad cheek, dampening his starched white

col ar. Shyly, the seventy-one-year-old man brushed a lock of straight dark hair from his glasses and peered over a podium crowded with

microphones. Beeman, succeeding beyond his dreams, had attracted a multitude. Television cameras glinted in the light and cables snaked at his

feet. He saw
Chronicle
reporter Paul Avery entering the Solano County Fairgrounds, and consulted his watch. They were a little late getting started.

He had scheduled the press conference for 10:30 A.M. and spent almost $600 to stage the meeting, not including the cost of mailing invitations to

reporters and investigators. He had a lot riding on this event. He let them stew a bit longer. After al , he was ready to reveal who Zodiac was—just

about the biggest story there was.

“There is no apparent motive behind the timing of the announcement,” said reporter Jackie Ginley, “but it dovetails with a Val ejo police

investigation of Arthur Leigh Al en, a Val ejo man who was once a prime suspect in the stil unsolved 1969-70 kil ings.” Since Tuesday Ginley had

worn out her dialing finger trying to reach Al en for comment on what Beeman might say. Was Beeman, like Spinel i, about to name Al en as the

Zodiac?

For almost an hour Beeman presented the verification that led to his conjecture. “There are at least 101 points of circumstantial evidence,” he

said. “I have a real problem with revealing the identity of this person. I had to do a lot of soul-searching.” Beeman began to build to his revelation,

describing his suspect variously as “a recluse,” and “a woman-hater.” He was “so disordered that he could not hold down a job,” said the attorney.

“He could not even face a woman in the unemployment office without flying into a rage. ‘Women are subhumans,’ he told me. ‘They cannot think

logical y and they act on emotions,’ he said. He had done occasional work for me and sometimes repaired television sets. He particularly hated

Yel ow Cab drivers,”

Just before noon the big moment arrived. Beeman held up
Jack the Zodiac,
a two-part paperback book he had published under the pen name

“Doctor O. Henry Jiggelance.” Volume One of the set opened with the warning: “This story is entirely fictional.” Light began to dawn in the eyes of

the assembled throng.

“‘Jack the Zodiac,’ was my own brother.”

Jack Beeman, a long-haired, dignified sixty-six-year-old, had died in Phoenix seven years earlier. “Jack the Zodiac,” Beeman said, “came close

to kil ing me. If he hadn’t been drunk, and I hadn’t moved like a mongoose, he would have.” In spite of the acrimony between them, Beeman had

represented Jack in minor run-ins with the law. He also believed that his brother had been responsible for the 1983 death of a Val ejo prostitute.

Beeman pointed out that Jack misspel ed the same words as Zodiac. “He used the same phrasing as that in the letters,” he said.

The audience was not persuaded.

“I feel you’re sincere in this,” said Avery. “It’s a pretty heavy trip to be laying on your brother, but you’ve offered nothing more than circumstantial

evidence.”

“I wouldn’t be wrong in saying there are one hundred people who have cal ed with the same kind of generalities,” Bawart later said. “We look into

everything, but I’m not going to pay $58 for his book [the cost for the privately printed two-volume set].” Besides, Bawart had no time for reading

unless he did it on a plane—he had just gotten a lead connecting Arthur Leigh Al en with Zodiac. That lead would take him to the other side of the

world.

32

the german hippie

“When I retired
they kept me on the case—you know that,” Bawart told me, “and anytime anybody would cal , ‘My brother or brother-in-law’s the

Zodiac,’ they cal ed me in. However, the department was total y satisfied that Arthur Leigh Al en is the Zodiac. I used to use
Zodiac
like a Bible,

because I could never keep al the dates straight. I’d use your book to figure out when stuff real y happened.”

“I always thought that would be the best value that such a book could have,” I said.

“There was a guy that was a friend of Al en’s from high school and col ege. His name was Robert Emmett Rodifer.”

“Robert Emmett?” I said. That was the name anagramists had deduced from the garbled last symbols of Zodiac’s three-part 1969 cipher—

ROBET EMET THE HIPIE or “Robert Emmett the Hippie.” Emmet was an Irish patriot who had been hanged. A statue of him stood in Golden Gate

Park in front of Morrison Planetarium—a room ful of stars and the hal of biology—Al en’s passions. Al en’s father, Ethan, was named after Ethan

Al en, an American patriot who had been hanged. Robert Emmett had been born in 1803, Al en’s father in 1903. “And was Robert Emmett a

hippie?” I asked.

“He was a hippie-type. Rodifer was a guy Al en knew at Poly where he went to col ege in Southern California and stretching back to the time of

the earliest murder. Robert Emmett had also been manager of the Val ejo High swim team. Later he became a hippie attending the University of

California at Berkeley and at U.S.F. Apparently there was some real y bad blood between the two. I found Rodifer, but it wasn’t any great sleuth

work on my part. Because of the search of Al en’s house, Leigh’s name came out in the press. A woman in Val ejo saw it. She had gone to school

with Arthur Leigh Al en, bought your book, and read the portion where it says [in the last line of the deciphered 340-symbol code of November 8,

1969], ‘My name is Robert Emmett the Hippie.’ And she said, ‘My goodness, I know Robert Emmett. Emmy Lou—Robert Emmett Rodifer. She got

a hold of me.”

“They cal ed him Emmy Lou?”

“I don’t know why. Talented. Rodifer was a real outgoing guy. In fact he was a mime and he played on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and al that kind of

stuff. Arthur Leigh Al en actual y hated the guy. Maybe it was because Al en was an introvert and this guy was an extrovert, although they were

friends—let’s say,
had
been friends.

“We tracked the guy down. We found out about Rodifer through his classmate. We thought he might be working in concert with Arthur Leigh Al en.

He was now living in Germany. Rodifer was around children al the time at the base where he worked. Jim Lang went with me. He was the chief

deputy of the district attorney. Ironical y, Jim Lang spent twenty years with the LAPD, the last portion of which was working homicide. He retired, but

he was stil a young enough man that he went to law school and got a law degree. He was the district attorney of a county up north. He came down

here and worked initial y in the public defender’s office, then transferred over to the D.A.’s office for a number of years. Youthful-appearing, a real

smart mind, and he knows the homicide business too because he worked in it. In any event he wrote al these letters of rogatory, and it started in

August of 1991.”

“This seems to be a very important time,” I said. “Everything coming together.”

“Right. It took a hel of a long time. We ended up in Germany in the dead of winter in February 1992. It was kind of a fun trip. We actual y spent

two weeks over there. One week we were actual y working. One week we were touring. We made some very good friends. The captain in charge of

the homicide division in Heilbraun, Germany, and his wife turned out to be good friends. They’ve been out here visiting us and we’ve got a big

motor yacht and we took them out on the Delta. We had a great time with them.

“Basical y, what happened in Germany was this—in order to speak with Rodifer, we had to go through letters of rogatory, which is requests of the

German government to come over and interview a person within their country. Even though this guy was an American citizen living on an American

base, we stil had to go through the German laws. I brought my own copy of your book,
Zodiac,
and a second copy. My German aide read English

and asked for one of the copies. The magistrate, who under German law determines whether it is permissible for U.S. officers to speak with

Rodifer, al owed it after some deliberation. Then he looked over my copy of your book and asked if
he
could have it. Of course I gave it to him. We

met with the police in Heilbraun and explained the whole situation, and they felt they had enough to write a search warrant for Rodifer’s place, which

they ultimately did. We went there with about half a dozen German policemen, al of which were in plain clothes. They did a real thorough search of

his place. We didn’t find anything connected with the Zodiac. I found a bunch of kid stuff. They kinda thought it might be important, but I wasn’t sure

of that either.”

Bawart theorized Rodifer might have been aiding Al en. “I didn’t know if there were actual y two kil ers, but there might have been two individuals

who got their jol ies doing this. We couldn’t talk to him at the time of search, although he did talk to me quite a bit. He volunteered to. Rodifer was a

smal man, five six at most. Kind of a bubbly kind of guy. He had been a number of places. He worked with the Department of Defense and he ran

their Dependents’ Activities Program. If you’re a sergeant or something and you’re going to be overseas long enough, you get to bring your family

over. The families sometimes don’t relate to the new country, so the Army has community centers and he ran those community centers where your

kids could go there and learn to wrestle and play basketbal and shoot pool and just have different functions. It was so kids could occupy their time

while in a foreign country. He had been doing it a long time. He was in Japan. In fact he was married while in Japan. I was never able to locate his

ex-wife.

“We had to ultimately go before a German judge. We served the papers on him, and a day or two later we went to the courthouse and al the

questioning [of Rodifer] was done before this judge. It was an extensive questioning and he was under oath and he had to answer truthful y. I don’t

know how much that means. He gave us a story about him knowing Al en. He was never real close friends with him. ‘I was real y popular in school

and Leigh was not,’ he told me. ‘He was jealous of me.’ There was apparently some animosity between him and Al en because of this. Then after

that he volunteered to talk to me at length, and I jammed him pretty good. In fact he had a German-appointed attorney who got upset with me. I tend

to believe him. I came back and I interviewed a lot of classmates who were in that era when they were together—junior col ege. We interviewed

them and I’m satisfied that ‘Robert Emmett the Hippie’ is a guy that Arthur Leigh Al en didn’t like.”

“Did you get handwriting samples from Rodifer?”

“It was one of the things we went to talk to Rodifer about. We got samples of Rodifer’s handwriting from the Department of the Army, where he

was fil ing out requests to go here, there, and everywhere. There was both printed and cursive matter on it. He wouldn’t be disguising his

handwriting to fil out an application. We had our guy who was doing al our handwriting analysis, Cunningham from San Francisco, and he looked

at it, compared it to the Zodiac letters, and said, ‘No, he didn’t write these.’”

“Where was Rodifer in 1968 and 1969? Al those Zodiac letters then had had local postmarks on them.”

“He was out of the country, I think. Oh, wait a minute. He was going to school in Berkeley.”

“How about 1974-1977?” That had been the period when no Zodiac letters had been received.

“He was out of the country, but I don’t want to say that for sure.”

“Did Rodifer have a lie-detector test as wel ?”

“No,” said George, “Germany doesn’t al ow it. And as for Rodifer, he was not useful to testify.”

The detectives retooled and began once more looking for evidence. If they were to interview Al en again they would need some expert guidance

from the FBI. When Toschi had gotten in trouble, Al en had said to his P.O., “Now he’l know what it feels like.” Toschi had this to say about him:

“Al en had a great resentment anyway, but after al that public humiliation—now he’s real y going to start hating cops.”

Tuesday, February 4, 1992

The media storm
blew over and Leigh went on with his life. His good friend, Harold Huffman, one of the first to offer solace after last year’s search,

visited to check on his health. “When he and Leigh made contact again,” his wife, Kay, told me, “they agreed to never talk about what he went to