Zodiac Unmasked (59 page)

person, the one suspect,” he said, “that Val ejo and San Francisco investigators and Robert Graysmith, former political cartoonist turned author,

and others believe to have been the Zodiac kil er.”

Choppelas then recounted Cheney’s story of Al en’s vow (a year before there was a Zodiac) to tie a flashlight to his gun barrel, shoot couples in

the woods, and write taunting letters signed Zodiac to the police. He explained how Al en was in the Riverside Col ege area when Bates was

stabbed, and how Darlene Ferrin was stalked by a friend named “Leigh.” He told how there were no letters from Zodiac while Al en was confined at

Atascadero and how the Santa Rosa murders ceased during that time. Captain Roy Conway, immediately on the scene of the Ferrin murder in

1969, had been associated with the case ever since. “I was a patrol sergeant that evening and I was dispatched to a place that was in a remote

part of Val ejo on July 4, 1969. Both victims were stil alive at the time. The male survived, the female died. I tried to talk to her and talk to him both.

She was unable to speak or do anything, and had been shot with multiple gunshot wounds. The passenger in the car had been shot multiple times

and he has survived. He’s stil alive to this day.

“Because I was a patrol sergeant at the time, I was not initial y assigned as the investigator on the crime. It was not til several years later when I

got promoted to captain that I was given responsibility for the case. The primary investigator who’s been working on this case the longest of al law

enforcement personnel that’s ever been involved is Detective George Bawart, who’s sitting over there in the corner.” George stood and waved.

“What we’ve done over the years—every time there’s any kind of media attention given to the Zodiac case, there’s al kinds of information that flows

into [the] police department, or departments, and other departments and [the] California Department of Justice. There’s al kinds of people cal ing

up who say I know who the Zodiac is.”

Conway pointed out what he considered some of the misinformation about Zodiac. I didn’t agree with al of it. “It’s not intentional,” he said. “One

of the pieces of misinformation is the Riverside homicide. I’m here to official y tel you that the Riverside Police Department never believed that

Zodiac was involved. We have since more than satisfied ourselves that Zodiac had nothing whatsoever to do with the Riverside kil ing.” Riverside

thought their local suspect had committed the homicide. But a handwriting examination had already proven Zodiac wrote letters to the Riverside

press claiming responsibility for Bates’s murder.

Captain Conway played his case conservatively, focusing unequivocal y only on those cases where it was absolutely certain that Zodiac had

been involved. “There are only three of them in that category. The reason we know the three are unequivocal y the Zodiac is because he gives

physical evidence or verbal evidence that only the kil er would know.” He pointed to the Paul Stine cab kil ing as most striking—Zodiac had swiped

a portion of Stine’s shirt, enclosing fragments with his correspondence. “In our case [the Blue Rock Springs murder] Zodiac went to a pay telephone

right after the homicide. In fact, I would have had to have passed him because it’s a long road out to where this homicide occurred. I probably

passed him, although we went to great lengths to try and time everything. The people who discovered the people who were shot took a long time to

get to a telephone—probably more than a half hour passed before we even got a phone cal .

“Shortly after [12:40 A.M.], a male voice cal ed from a pay telephone, which we subsequently located [traced to Joe’s Union Station at Tuolumne

and Springs Road by 12:47 A.M.], tel ing that he just committed this homicide and how he did it and some other details to cause us to know this

was real y the guy who did it. One of the examples of misinformation is that we had no recording devices in the police department in those days.

There was in fact no recording of that phone cal .” Former Val ejo Patrolman Steve Baldino disagreed. On
Now It Can Be Told,
with Geraldo

Rivera, on July 14, 1992, he had said, “I heard the tape—the dispatcher let me hear it. I believe it was the next night. Apparently the tape is no

longer here, but it did in fact exist, because I did hear it.” Nancy Slover, the police operator, had heard it too.

“The other homicide we know positively for sure,” continued Conway, “is the Lake Berryessa homicide. Again the kil er gave some very pertinent

information that only he would know. There’s only three. The other kil ing, on Lake Herman Road, happened [seven months] before the Zodiac

kil ing. We had some very good suspects in that case, and Detective Bawart and I are satisfied that the Zodiac didn’t real y do that case, although

we don’t have unequivocal proof on that.

“The other interesting thing about the Zodiac case is that there are several people who have become obsessed with solving the case. We have

had several in our own department. There are private citizens who became obsessed with the case and have convinced themselves they have

absolutely solved it. They are very absolute about it. Neither one of the suspects that they have are our suspect.

“Al three have written lengthy documentation about it. One is an attorney in our city who claims his brother, his dead brother, is the Zodiac [Jack

Beeman]. Another used mathematics to prove it. In his mind he is absolutely convinced he’s solved the Zodiac case. He thinks it’s a col ege

professor at Boston University who now works for the University of California at Berkeley. If you talk to that man and give him any time, he is

absolutely, unequivocal y convinced. He says its mathematical y impossible for anybody to be the Zodiac except [his] suspect.

“We have two other individuals, both in law enforcement. One of them is now retired just recently . . . he’s been working on it twenty years and

he’s absolutely convinced he knows who the Zodiac is. And his Zodiac is living in Tahoe. Then we have another person in another state agency that

worked on the Zodiac for years. He happened to be on duty. He stopped and did a field interrogation of a person he believes to this day is the

Zodiac. So everyone of these people, if you talk to them, independent of anything else, you would say he must be right. It’s only logical that he’s

right.

“One of the major reasons that the Zodiac case has not actual y been solved to the point of somebody being actual y arrested and tried is that law

enforcement didn’t do a very good job of coordinating information. . . . One of the most tel ing points in Mr. Graysmith’s book—he asks the question

why the search warrant wasn’t served at two locations, and only one location—and that was twenty years ago that happened. If they had served a

search warrant at the right location at that time, they probably would have solved the Zodiac case. But they didn’t.

“Twenty years later, Detective Bawart and I served that search warrant! And we did that a couple years ago. We found a lot of information that

caused us to believe we were on the right track, but that person subsequently died and we don’t have any legal mechanism to say we’ve solved the

case because we can’t bring the suspect to trial. He’s referred to in Robert Graysmith’s book as ‘Robert Hal Starr.’ His actual name is Arthur Leigh

Al en.

“He’s worked in Val ejo al his life. At the time [1971-72] San Francisco Police Department developed information that we subsequently

backtracked and gone over every piece of it. That information would have al owed them to serve a search warrant on his primary residence in

Val ejo, but at that point of time he was living part-time in a little trailer in Santa Rosa. And so they served the warrant on his little trailer in Santa

Rosa instead of his home in Val ejo. I’m fairly convinced that if they had served the search warrant on that home in Val ejo, they would have found

the actual smoking gun, but that didn’t happen. It’s primarily because they were working on their own and made no effort to coordinate information

with our agency.”

“There’s a lot of instances that occurred in this case that happened in one area and the other area didn’t know about it,” added Bawart. “Those

are the kind of errors in the case the various police departments made. Roy and I, in hindsight, taking al this stuff down twenty years later, put it al

together and made us seem like we’re real smart, but we’re not. We had the benefit of al those reports.”

The judge asked me how I came to write the book. “The way I got interested in this,” I said, “I was political cartoonist for the
Chronicle
and every

day you try to do a cartoon that’s going to make a change in the world. I looked at the Zodiac case and thought, ‘Here’s a guy no one seems to be

able to catch. If I go around the state and put together as many facts as I can and put a book out there, somebody’s going to solve this.’ It’s pretty

much what I decided to do, and I did over a ten-year period. At the end of that time I had a book of considerable length. An editor and I spent

another three years taking out five hundred pages. Maybe we took the real suspect out. It’s possible, but not likely. We did place Mr. Al en as a

student at Riverside and in that library the night Cheri Jo Bates was slain. Perhaps, as Captain Conway believes, Riverside wasn’t a Zodiac kil ing,

but of al the 2,500 suspects in the case, Al en was the only one at the scene.”

Conway discussed the prints in Stine’s cab.

“Hundreds of people can be in a cab. There was emergency medical personnel at the scene, other officials at the scene. Nobody took any

elimination prints at the time. They have a whole drawer ful of fingerprints that came out of that cab, and it’s an extremely arduous task and most of

them are partial. I assure you the primary suspects have been checked. There’s no fingerprint matches anywhere. . . . Ken Moses, one of the best

print men in the state and SFPD has one of the best computer systems in the state. They certainly would have run that bloody print long ago had it

worked out, but they didn’t preserve the crime scene wel enough, any of the prints, particularly the bloody print of the man believed to be

responsible. There were ambulance people there, there were other cops there. They are saying, how come this print doesn’t match up to the

analyzer? It could have been the guy driving the ambulance got some of Paul Stine’s blood on his hands and then touched it and that’s the way of

the bloody print.

“Incidental y, Al en wore size 10½ shoes, and that’s the size of the Wing Walker shoe print found at Lake Berryessa,” I said. I summarized the

pattern of the murders: “They usual y happened by a body of water on a weekend and usual y involved a young couple who were enjoying al the

things Zodiac did not enjoy—intimate, loving relationships.”

“We interviewed everyone in this case,” said Conway. “We interviewed Kathleen Johns. I’m at kind of at a loss as how to explain it, but I don’t

believe what she described even happened, let alone that the Zodiac did it.” “Johns is the only one I thought was a little iffy,” I said. “As years go by,

I’ve come to believe more and more that the man who kidnapped her wasn’t Zodiac.”

“The only thing I put any stock in is a thing that I know for a fact,” said Conway. “Al this business about the phases of the moons and al these

cryptograms in reality didn’t have to do with anything. It was a way for the Zodiac to play with people’s minds for his own perverse satisfaction.

Those cryptograms, as it turned out, had no meaning.” The ciphers did, however, explain his motive and revealed the clue of
The Most Dangerous

Game,
which led to his family and friends turning Al en in.”

We discussed my conversations with Al en. “It may have been because of the child molesting,” I said, “but when you work in the arts you get a

kind of intuitive sense about things, and literal y my spine got chil s when I was around him. There was something about him very wrong. I often used

to go in and buy things—he worked in a hardware store—just a very scary guy, but highly intel igent. He had a degree in botany and biology.”

“Biology,” said Wil iams. “He said he didn’t quite get his master’s degree—he didn’t finish his thesis; he had finished the course work for a

master’s. His bachelor’s degree was in elementary education. And he said his I.Q. was—I wrote it down—in the 130s. ‘Certainly no genius,’ he

said, ‘but I am intel igent.’”

“He cal ed himself gifted,” said Conway. “That’s the terminology he used.”

“Real y,” said Wil iams. “‘My mind,’ he said ‘I believe is 136.’ I asked him about the cryptograms. ‘I was in the Navy,’ he said, ‘and what I did there

was chipping paint and then I was a third-class radioman. That certainly doesn’t make me an expert on cryptograms.”

We began naming his skil s. “Scuba diver, marksman . . . airplane pilot,” said Wil iams. “He knew explosive devices, cryptography, meteorology,”

I said, “charts (naval and pilot) and compass, writing, drafting, and graphics [his father was not only a Navy officer but a draughtsman]. Chemistry

[he was a chemist], guns [he col ected them], disguise and sewing [he was a Navy sailmaker]. He not only typed, but had the same kind of portable

typewriter the Riverside letters were written on.” “Phil Tucker,” said Bawart, “had given us the information that as a child Al en had been forced to

write with his right hand though he was natural y left-handed.”

“Sailor, pilot,” continued Conway. “In fact, he had some trophies for Hobie Cat. He was also a swimmer. The other thing he did, he was quite an

avid cook. His living quarters were, as Rita could tel you, in the basement of his parents’ house. And every part of this little room was covered with