Zodiac Unmasked (56 page)

Atascadero for. If Leigh was going to speak about any of his perverted feelings or what had led him to do it, Harold could not be his friend. Those

were the rules that were laid down. Harold said, ‘I can deal with Leigh al right, but I do not want to know the particulars and I don’t ever want to talk

about it.’ Leigh tried to discuss it a few times. He made a couple overtures, but was met with silence. When my husband said ‘no,’ people listened.

The Leigh that Harold knew was not necessarily the Leigh I knew. When my son Rob got a little older he said, ‘Mom, did you know Dad took me out

with the Zodiac?’ I said, ‘Dad took you out with Leigh?’ He said, ‘Yeah, Mom.’”

Harold and Leigh went on day trips, shooting and diving around the North Bay. Though lame and legal y blind, Leigh could stil shoot accurately. In

the water he was almost his old self. Harold told his son how Leigh had recently visited the coast to dive for abalone. A party of frog-men, decked

out in expensive gear, were taking lessons. Before they could dive, Leigh appeared in his trunks, knife clinched between his teeth, and plunged into

the surf. “In a few minutes,” Rob recal ed, “he returned with the legal limit suctioned onto his large bel y. He loved to gloat in the surprise of

bewildered spectators. He shined when the spotlight was on him.” While Leigh even drove on occasion, he let Huffman take the wheel, only

forbidding him to drive them near Blue Rock Springs or Lake Herman Road. “If the cops are tailing me, they might use it against me,” he said.

“They’l go, ‘What were you doing cruising Blue Rock Springs with your friend?’ I don’t want to see you hassled.”

Leigh was very familiar with Lake Herman Road. Once, he and Kay were driving around the outskirts of Val ejo when they stumbled on a bleeding

man by the road. It was a scene much like the Lake Herman Road attack. “In 1956, Leigh and I were coming back on American Canyon Road,” Kay

elaborated, “and saw a man standing outside his little car pul ed off the side of the road. He was waving his arms. We got out. He and his wife had

been drinking a lot of wine out of a jug and some kids had come along and asked him for a match. When they rol ed down the window, the kids

pul ed him out, cal ed him a wino, and beat him up. So Leigh took the jug and he threw it far as he could out into the field. I never figured out how

come I agreed to this—when you’re young you do dumb things—I sat in the car with the doors locked with these two little people while he went and

hunted for a highway patrolman. He drove up on Highway 40 and did al sorts of loops and il egal things before he final y attracted the attention of

the Highway Patrol. They fol owed him back down to where we were parked.”

33

zodiac

For the last
two years Toschi had been chief of security for the posh Pan-Pacific Hotel at 500 Post Street. As director of twenty-four-hour security

he conducted discreet surveil ance of the VIP’s floor and coordinated with their security people—grueling work. “Many times computer companies

asked me to meet with their own corporate security manager . . . do a walk-around of the hotel and the rooms where equipment is going to be,”

Toschi said. “Times people would cal me and I would be so tense and exhausted—missing luggage and missing items from rooms.” And yet,

around each bend in the hotel’s labyrinth of corridors, Toschi’s nemesis stil lurked. A stone’s throw away Zodiac had flagged down Stine’s cab that

long-ago Columbus Day. Toschi recal ed the legions of Zodiac suspects. Had there ever been a greater mystery? The legend grew. A new

generation became obsessed.

As if he had never vanished, Zodiac turned up later as fodder for television dramas. One day location directors for the
Nash Bridges
television

program arrived unexpectedly from Hol ywood and checked into the Pan-Pacific. As Toschi inspected their five rooms, one asked him, “Are you

familiar with the Zodiac kil er story? That’s our next project.” He laughed, knowing how many years he had spent hunting Zodiac. “What was it like to

be on the hunt for a serial kil er?” they asked, and so he told them. When Toschi saw the completed show, he said, “At least they didn’t make me a

nut. I even got to save the life of Nash Bridges [Don Johnson] through the character of his former mentor. The plot is that Bridges hears his mentor

in homicide, Dale Cutter, a retired inspector, is having family problems. After many years, he goes hunting for Zodiac again. The drama ends with

the
real
Zodiac stil alive and making a cal to Bridges.”

Unsolved Mysteries
would profile Zodiac, and the Fox Network program
Millennium
filmed an episode in which the hero (Frank Black)

approaches Zodiac’s trailer through the brush in Santa Rosa. The climax occurs in a theater like the Avenue. In the darkened movie house Black

comes upon Zodiac—gun pointed, one foot advanced, the square-cornered black hood with the crossed circle in stark contrast—the drawing of

him in costume come to life. The figure, through, is a dummy that al ows Zodiac to escape as effectively as the actual Zodiac had.

Wednesday, March 4, 1992

Detectives had not
yet given up on Leigh. Weary manhunters, realizing they were up against a wily and clever opponent, thought they had

overlooked some clue. Painstakingly, they scrutinized items seized from the suspect’s house, sought out the FBI for strategy. The bureau’s

thousand-page Zodiac file mentioned only Arthur Leigh Al en in detail, his dossier accounting for ten percent of the file. Agents studied periodicals

recovered from Leigh’s basement, especial y an article on Dave Eastman, the “Bird Man of Eaton,” that had seized the suspect’s interest. The FBI

ferreted out a second article on Eastman in
The Irregular,
a New Hampshire free periodical dated April 19, 1989. Of what import to Leigh Al en

was Eastman, a former helicopter pilot and birdhouse builder? Leigh was a flyer (that association alone might have sparked his interest), but it

made more sense if he had hidden something in a wilderness birdhouse. They noted that Eastman wore glasses like those in the Zodiac wanted

circular. Detectives fine-combed their bounty again. Perhaps they already had that clue, but did it lie there unrecognized on a table heaped with

other recovered articles?

“As an experienced homicide investigator,” retired Detective Baker remarked, “I recognize that, for purposes of search warrants and for

determining the validity of suspects’ admissions/confessions, the existence of such items would not be made public. However, unless the mention

of specific items was somehow redacted/deleted from the publicized versions of the warrants to search Al en’s residence, this may not be the case

(items not named with any specificity in the warrant may not be seized). This would lead me to believe that any souvenirs he may have col ected

may be more esoteric or abstract than would otherwise be recognized by the investigators. Then again . . . perhaps the investigators of that period

may have lacked the present-day sophistication to have recognized the absence of such items from the scenes.”

But what was there? A pile of recipe cards that had words humorously misspel ed, a slip of yel ow paper and a Zodiac Sea Wolf Watch the

detectives had expected to find. They anticipated clippings on Zodiac; they were there. A serial kil er who craved publicity would be compel ed to

keep cuttings of his newspaper appearances. He not only had videotapes of news programs mentioning Zodiac, but had retained a copy of the

return of service of a search warrant Toschi had handed him in 1972. Al en had smiled then, as if he knew a joke that the police did not.

I thought of Lynch’s anonymous tip in 1969. Without that tip, Leigh would not have been a suspect until he spoke freely to the three detectives at

the oil refinery. He seemed to want to interact with the police, and enjoyed it when he was final y a suspect. What if Leigh had turned himself in? If

not, who had been the tipster?

“I probably hadn’t seen Leigh in twenty-five or thirty years,” Kay Huffman told me later. “I hadn’t kept in touch. I knew he had been down in

Atascadero and I knew what for. And that blew me away because I had had no inkling of anything like that. Harold and Leigh had gone to an air

show and he brought him home here. There was this little old man. I don’t know what happened to the young vigorous person I knew, but he wasn’t

there anymore. Now the diabetes had made him look terrible and aged. I was devastated for days afterward. I couldn’t believe it was the same

person.

“My dad was very il too and so I’d go up to Val ejo to visit him. I usual y did that about every other weekend and if Leigh was in, I’d stop by and

visit him a little bit. The first time I stopped by, he wanted to tel me about how he had burglar-proofed the house ’cause there had been a break-in.

Then he wanted to know if I wanted to see the guns and knives he kept in the basement room his mother built for him. We used to cal it ‘The

Dungeon.’ I looked at him and said, ‘That isn’t what I came to see. I came to see you.’ And he says, ‘You don’t want to talk about my guns?’ ‘No, I

don’t want to talk about them and I don’t want to see them ever.’”

Monday, March 23, 1992

An FBI special
agent met with Conway while Bawart was fol owing up leads. On Monday morning Conway advised the agent they were reinitiating

the Zodiac serial murder investigation. “This was because of information concerning a possible suspect—Arthur Leigh Al en,” the S.A. wrote of the

meeting.

“Conway and Bawart were interested in designing an interview strategy for ALLEN should it become necessary to confront him,” said the

submitted FBI report [252B-SF-9447]. He stated he “met on two separate occasions with Conway and Bawart. . . . These two meetings lasted

a total of approximately ten hours. These investigators were interested in an interview strategy for a possible suspect ARTHUR LEIGH ALLEN.

However, they indicated they had a considerable amount of investigation to conduct prior to contacting ALLEN.” The memo mentioned the

1991 search and indicated VPD had subsequently interviewed him again twice. On al occasions, ALLEN was “calm and cooperative,” but

denied any involvement. This case was left pending because the Val ejo police indicated that they wanted additional assistance in their

investigation as information developed. Therefore this case was left open until 3/23/92, when Bawart was contacted to provide a status report

on the case. Because of SA caseload during the last year with priority matters . . . no regular memos have been placed in the [Al en] file explaining the reason to have the case remain open.”

Tuesday, March 24, 1992

As Bawart and
Conway prepared “Report, Case #243145,” they discovered more circumstances that indicated Arthur Leigh Al en was in fact the

Zodiac kil er. “They got a lot of stuff that Mulanax did, then went and talked to some of the same people,” I was told. “A lot of what the informants

were tel ing Conway and Bawart in the early nineties they didn’t tel Mulanax. Maybe they were afraid back then to come forward, but now in 1992

they’re not so afraid anymore. They just wanted to nail Zodiac.”

Conway had advised the bureau that there “were two additional interviews to be conducted with people who had known the suspect for a long

time . . . with a man who had known Al en at the time of the kil ings [Cheney].” Once these interviews were conducted, Conway indicated, he and

Bawart “wil present a ful review of the case to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office for an opinion regarding possible prosecution for

ALLEN. If the D.A. refuses to fil charges against ALLEN, Val ejo Police Department wil close its investigation on the ‘ZODIAC’ case.”

Bawart located Cheney. “When George Bawart tracked me down,” Cheney told me, “he contacted me by telephone, I talked to him. Then they

had me come down to be interviewed by them in Val ejo. They flew me down to Sacramento, and George met me at the airport and drove me to

Val ejo. We spent a couple of hours together with Roy Conway. What I had told Armstrong (and the other detectives) I told them. They recorded

everything I said, and they pumped me for everything I could give them.

“Al en loved to outsmart the other guy, I told them. In a 1967 conversation Leigh asked me how to alter his appearance. We discussed theatrical

makeup and what you could accomplish with it. I wasn’t curious why he was asking me this. It wasn’t unusual to talk about something like makeup.”

By the time Al en became a known suspect, he had already altered his appearance to an astonishing degree by burying his athletic physique in fat.

“With Leigh,” said Cheney, “you just get into conversations about ‘What if this’ and ‘What if that.’ It was just more of knowledge for knowledge’s

sake. Leigh was always interested in al kinds of things. And I was too. Leigh enjoyed misleading people. He liked to trick people or influence them

into things that they otherwise wouldn’t do.”

“In January 1969 Al en had a conversation with Donald Cheney, a friend of his,” wrote Bawart in his report. “He guised this conversation as

though he were going to write a novel. Al en indicated to Cheney that he would cal himself Zodiac and use the Zodiac watch symbol as his symbol.

That he would kil people in lovers’ lanes by using a weapon with a flashlight attached to it for sighting at night, that he would write letters to the

police to confuse and taunt them and sign them as the Zodiac. Al en stated he would get women to stop on the freeway indicating they had some