Zodiac Unmasked (57 page)

problems with the tires, he would loosen their lug nuts so their tire would later fal off and he could take them captive.”

Bawart arranged for Cheney to be polygraphed back in Washington State. “Bawart gave me a polygraph in his presence,” Cheney told me. “It

was so short I couldn’t believe it. A month later, I went and took another one in the same police station in Kennewick, South Central Washington,

one of the tri-cities here where I live, but without Bawart being present. I gathered that in the first they didn’t have the right test questions. They flew a

technician from Seattle over here to run the polygraph. It was a little on the dul side except for feeling some stress. They hooked me up so they

could measure my respiration and blood pressure. It seemed to me there might be four to five responses—the number of needles on the paper.

“They asked questions that required yes-or-no answers. He told me to just answer in a calm and monotone way, no emotion. In the second test—

I’l tel you why they gave me two tests. In the second test, when we had gone through al the questions—they start off with ‘What’s your name,’ then

they ask the questions about the case. Then when I thought he was finished with that, he kept asking me more questions. It didn’t seem to matter

what the answers were, but the questions were mainly rephrasing of things. I tripped up and made a misstatement. It wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t

intentional y making a misstatement, but I just said something I didn’t intend to say. Al the needles made a jump, flopped around. Then he was

satisfied. That was what he wanted. I guess that they were looking for something that would gauge.” It turned out, as Bawart told me later, “Cheney

was tel ing the truth.”

The biggest obstacle stil was that Al en’s handprinting did not match the Zodiac’s. ‘The experts explained that the only explanation for this would

be if ALLEN would have been able to develop a ‘false handwriting, ’” Bawart wrote. Al en had once asked Cheney if books on how to disguise

handwriting existed, and later studied books on fake handwriting. The FBI noted: “Val ejo has requested no further assistance on this case, and it is

therefore
recommended that this case be closed at this time
.”

At Bawart’s workplace,
a cabinet shop, he was mul ing over a possibility that had intrigued him for years—one that might explain everything.

There might be two Zodiacs working as master and slave. That theory had been one of the reasons George had tracked down Al en’s friend Robert

Emmett. “I conjectured that there might be two Zodiacs, partners working together,” he told me later. “After that trip to Germany and seeing the man,

I came to believe there was only one. As for Donald Lee Cheney, he’s now a retired mechanical engineer in Washington. Panzarel a is wealthy, has

sold his stock, and become owner of RKO Pictures Film Library. I even went down to interview him. Panzarel a was just a regular guy, but he had al

this money.”

As for Ralph Spinel i, the other known tipster, he had reportedly been incarcerated 290 miles north of San Francisco on the Oregon border. Al en,

after the Stine murder, had kicked in his door and beaten him a second time.

Wednesday, August 26, 1992

On a nice
August afternoon about 3:00 P.M., George Bawart was working in his garage, the smel of new lumber and sawdust sweet in his lungs. A

street cop phoned him at home and Bawart hustled to the phone. It had a special attachment for his hearing disability and made voices extra loud.

“The cop was kind of a joker,” Bawart recal ed.

“Are you stil investigating Arthur Leigh Al en as the Zodiac?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Bawart said. “Arthur Al en.”

“Wel , I’m in his house and he’s laying on the floor.”

“What’s he doing laying on the floor?”

“Wel , he’s dead and he’s lying here with a great big bump on his forehead.”

George listened careful y to the rest.

He put the phone down. The room seemed to swim. They had waited too long. He steadied himself. Had someone, perhaps Zodiac’s partner or

someone after revenge, gotten Zodiac before they could?

34

zodiac

Wednesday, August 26, 1992

“A street cop
got detailed there,” Bawart told me. “Al en wasn’t answering his door. He had a girl living upstairs. When they didn’t hear from him for

a long time, Al en’s upstairs boarder found his body. The cops went there. They opened the door, got in the house, and there’s Al en lying face down

on the floor. I rushed over. I had to make sure he died of natural causes. His name has been published. He’s been showing up on TV. He’s been

granting interviews and drawing al sorts of attention to himself. The Ferrin family had cal ed me a number of times and said, ‘Do you real y think he

did it?’ I told them, ‘Yeah.’ And the Ferrin family can be kind of goofy. I thought, ‘Jesus, did one of them do something?’ So I went on down there and

he was in fact dead.”

Bawart stood in the dim basement, his intent face lit by the glow of Leigh’s new computer. He steadied himself, looking thoughtful y at the big

man in the bathrobe on the cold floor. The professional side of the detective took hold. Bawart began assessing the facts. He recal ed Al en’s words

from television: “About the only way the heat wil stop is if I die, that wil cure it for me or if Zodiac himself confesses. . . . They haven’t arrested me . .

.
because they can’t prove a thing
.”

“He had fal en face down,” Bawart told me. “I rol ed him over. He had a little injury to his head that I was at first a little bit concerned with. He had

been bleeding. Usual y when you have a heart attack, if you die right away you don’t bleed anymore. So I got the coroner and the medical

examiner.”

Thus, the prime suspect, with a lump on his head, his bathrobe open, lay with newspapers about Zodiac spread about him. In addition to

clippings about the case, Al en possessed everything the experts had expected Zodiac to have—an arsenal of guns, bombs, a portable typewriter,

a knife scabbard with rivets. . . . I recal ed when Rita Wil iams had interviewed Al en the previous year, he had been dressed as he was today—in a

flimsy bathrobe and rubber boots. He had attempted to shock her, waving his arms and shouting that the police had persecuted him. Bawart

walked to the humming Epson Equity 1 computer. “The thing that interested me,” he said, “is that when I got there there was a bunch of computer

discs out on the table and they said ‘Zodiac’ on them and stuff like that.”

Floppy discs were scattered by the printer. Bawart ejected a disc stil in the machine. It was labeled “Zodiac.” What was on the discs and in the

computer and what was the significance of those particular Zodiac newspapers? Apparently the computers had been added since the last search

—an Avstar computer, an Epson Equity 1 computer, and al accessories. Then Bawart spied a videotape marked with the letter “
Z”
lying on a

bookshelf at the east wal . Bawart was excited over the tape. They would need a warrant to view that. As soon as they could, they played it. Al the

video showed was Al en mooning the police, cursing them, and complaining about the case—nothing incriminating.

For some time Bawart had known Al en had been il —suffering from diabetes, heart troubles, severe arthritis, and kidney failure. So the end was

not only expected, but might be easily explained. The detective consulted the coroner, and he established the facts of death: “Found August 26,

1992 at 3:10 P.M. Immediate cause of death: Arteriosclerotic Heart Disease. Other significant Conditions Contributing to Death But Not Related to

Cause Given: Diabetes Mel itus, Cardiomegaly, heart disease heart disease.” And the bump? “The coroner determined,” said Bawart, “that when

Al en hit the floor he banged his head.”

D.A. Mike Nail had already scheduled a meeting on Arthur Leigh Al en sometime earlier. With the death, the parley would stil proceed. “About a

week before we went to meet with him, Arthur Leigh Al en dropped dead. So that at this meeting, this D.A., being kind of a half-assed comedian,

said, ‘We’ve got good news and bad news. We’re not going to file on Shawn Melton’—they didn’t want to spend the money on that—‘but I’m going

to file on Arthur Leigh Al en.’ He was natural y joking because he knew he couldn’t file on a dead man.

“The good news is that I’m going to indict Arthur Leigh Al en as the Zodiac. The bad news is that he’s dead.” “Mike Nail,” George told me later,

“had political aspirations as a superior court judge [which he realized]. I’ve known Mike Nail my entire career. He started out as a rookie D.A.

straight out of law school. He and I didn’t socialize together, but we would joke and stuff. He probably would not have filed on Al en, to be honest with

you, because he was going for a judgeship and would not in any way want that to be compromised. The gist of it is we were going to file on him and

he promptly died on us. The problem was the district attorney didn’t want to file on a dead guy. But they won’t one hundred percent clear it.

“When we were getting ready to charge Al en with the case. I compiled a list so we could go to the district attorney’s office. When Jim Lang and

Conway and I met with Mike Nail. We were doing two things that day—there was a kind of infamous case from our county; a kid named Jeremy

Stoner, a six-year-old, was abducted and ultimately found dead in the Delta. The responsible on that was a guy named Shawn Melton.

“Melton’s father at one time al uded to the fact that Melton wrote letters to the newspaper [like Zodiac] and his terminology was somewhat similar

to the Zodiac. Somebody came out with this harebrained idea that he was the Zodiac. But he wasn’t, I can assure you of that! We were meeting

with Nail, at that time, to see if he would refile on Shawn Melton. There had been two trials on him and there had been two hung juries. We were

also meeting at the same time to see if he would file on Arthur Leigh Al en.

“Those thirty points were made to give to him to have something firm in his hand rather than us tel ing him each and every point. That report was

actual y made to present to the district attorney’s office, but wasn’t intended to be part of the case file per se. I don’t remember al thirty of them.

Some of them, when you’re putting together something like that, I didn’t intend for it to end up in the case file. It was more of a working file. One or

two or three of those points a defense attorney could pick up on and real y hammer because there was some supposition where I real y didn’t have

a lot of background to back them up. But the meat of the thing I could back up.”

Thursday, August 27, 1992

Conway signed an
affidavit for a search warrant. “As you know,” Bawart told me, “I wrote another search warrant and searched his house again

even though he was dead. There was a computer system and the videotape. The purpose of the search warrant was to view that tape and,

according to the affidavit, determine if it contained evidence related to the so-cal ed Zodiac kil ings.”

Val ejo police descended to the lower apartment at 32 Fresno Street—as dark, dank, and museumlike as it had been the previous year. In the

Epson printer was Al en’s partial y completed “Polygraph Agreement” for the Val ejo police. Conway took possession of numerous videotapes and

five containers of discs and manuals for the printer stacked there. Near the computer lay an index of computer discs labeled “Polygon” and a yel ow

disc catalogue with discs labled “Plolams” [Al en’s intentional misspel ing of “Programs”]. They discovered a “Fruit Juice Recipe” bomb formula and

a box with blank notepaper. Strips of paper were covered with math. A last wil and instructions for the computer were on the east wal bookshelf.

The wil and instructions read:

“Being sound in mind, if not in body, I hereby put to paper my last wil and testament. I wil update this document as conditions warrant, so

this computer version wil always be the last and most current wil and testament. In cases of printed copies, the date on the copy wil determine

whether it is the most recent version of the wil . Al pages must be signed and dated by me, as wel as the end of the last page.

“First and foremost I wish to have it known that, due to whatever circumstances, I enter a vegetative state, that al life support systems be

disconnected and whatever of my body organs that can be used to help others be utilized for that purpose upon my death.

“The procedure for obtaining the most recent version of this wil is as fol ows:” The detectives fol owed the procedure laid out—they turned on the

monitor screen (the bottom rol er on the lower right side of the monitor casing). They inserted the MS-DOS working copy.

“Diskettes are located in the yel ow-loose-leaf binder next to the printer into the top slot of the computer,” Al en had instructed. “This is known

as the ‘A’ drive. With the elephant log on the top right toward you until it clicks. Push the ‘push’ button in so it clicks also. Push the power button

in so the red light goes on. Insert the DATA disk into the lower slot (the ‘B’ drive) until it clicks, then push the ‘Push’ in as wel . Now press the

‘enter’ key on the keyboard. A smal light wil appear on the ‘A’ drive and the computer wil hum. Some printing wil cycle onto the screen. When

a request for the date or time appears, press the ‘entry’ key a couple times until the ‘A Prompt’ (A>) sign appears.”

The instructions entailed seven complex maneuvers in detail to access the most current wil : “I bestow upon my good friend, Harold Huffman, the

duties of executor of this Wil and Power-Of-Attorney. . . .” the document began. Al en left his Epson Equity 1 computer, al accessories, “porgrams”