Zodiac Unmasked (62 page)

transmission station, had been undressed, then redressed. The victim was Jun Hase, a mental y chal enged eleven-year-old last seen three days

ago. Just after lunchtime, he had set out to visit his grandfather. Now neighbors recal ed a suspicious vehicle had been parked near the boy’s

home.

“JAPAN KILLER MAY IMITATE ‘ZODIAC’” read the Associated Press headline. “Note on beheaded boy similar to those of infamous Bay Area

murderer decades ago . . . a cross-like symbol found on notes left by the Kobe Kil er.” The murder and contents of the kil er’s message shocked the

Japanese people as no crime in memory. Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto pleaded with police to capture the kil er as soon as possible. “So this

is the beginning of the game,” read the letter. “I desperately want to see people die. Nothing makes me more excited than kil ing. Stupid police,

stop me if you can. It’s great fun for me to kil people.”

The message was hardly more than a rephrasing of Zodiac’s: “I like kil ing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than kil ing wild game

in the forest. . . .” Several English words in the communication had apparently been misspel ed on purpose. A black-bound translation of my book

on the Zodiac slayings had been published in Japan two years earlier. Perhaps the kil er had identified with Zodiac’s obsession with the
Mikado
.

I heard banging at my front gate. A team of newsmen from Japan International Network were there to speak with me. Masahiro Kimura offered

plane tickets to me. “We want you to come to Japan to look over the crime scene.” Though I had lived in Tokyo for six years, I saw no way I could

help. Instead we drove to Julius Kahn Playground, the last place Zodiac had been seen. Kimura showed me copies of the letters. We ended the

day riding in a taxi along the same route as Stine had taken, an unsettling trip for the Yel ow Cab driver who was eavesdropping. Kimura said

neighborhood watches in Kobe had been organized.

In Japan hundreds of police cordoned off the school site. Teachers stationed stress-guidance counselors at local schools and children left for

school with electronic alarms inside their backpacks. The kil er had threatened to take revenge on the “compulsory education system.” The tragedy

in Japan brought back horrible memories of how armed guards had been stationed on Bay Area school buses when Zodiac had threatened:

“School children make nice targets, I think I shal wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire & then pick off the kiddies

as they come bouncing out.”

Thursday, June 5, 1997

The Japanese Zodiac’s
rambling, partial y incoherent 1,400-word letter was published. In handwriting that matched the message stuffed inside

the head, Zodiac I I took responsibility for the schoolboy’s murder. He threatened to kil “vegetables,” a word police took to be the writer’s

disparaging term for people. “From now on, if you misread my name or spoil my mood I wil kil three vegetables a week,” he wrote. The original

Zodiac had threatened to kil if he did not see his name in the papers. “If you think I can only kil children you are greatly mistaken.” It was signed

Seito Sakakibara
[Apostle Sake Devil Rose]. Zodiac II claimed this was his real name.

Like Zodiac, Devil Rose had presented a name by which he wanted to be known. Like Zodiac, it infuriated him when the press misinterpreted his

words. They had taken
“oni-bara”
(“devil’s rose”) on the note as a coded message. Amateur sleuths also noted a chil ing connection between the

beheaded child, Zodiac, and
The Exorcist
. In January 1974, Zodiac had mentioned the wildly popular movie. Nine years later Wil iam Petter Blatty,

author-producer of
The Exorcist,
wrote a sequel,
Legion
. In uncorrected proofs, Blatty named the vil ain Zodiac. In a film,
Exorcist III,
he was cal ed the “Gemini Kil er.” Gemini decapitated a twelve-year-old boy just as the Tomogaoka Junior High kil er had.

Neighbors in Kobe noticed that a local fifteen-year-old boy had recently turned “a bit gloomy.” The physical y smal ninth-grade student, eldest of

three sons in a middle-class family, was kil ing and mutilating pigeons and cats in the neighborhood. The boy had beaten a friend for tel ing on him

to schoolmates. The same classmates tipped police he kil ed two kittens.

Saturday, June 28, 1997

Police raided the
boy’s home, seizing horror videos, a knife, and “a book about the San Francisco kil ings” in his room. In his journal the youth

wrote of a god, “Bamoidooki,” and cal ed his attacks “sacred experiments.” They dredged a hacksaw from a close-by pond and arrested him for

beheading his neighbor and classmate, Jun Hase. He confessed he had also bludgeoned a ten-year-old and attacked three other girls, two with a

hammer the previous February and March. Under Japanese law the boy was not identified because of his age. Convicted on October 18 of attacks

on al five children (two of whom died), he was sentenced to a juvenile prison to be treated for mental il ness until he turned twenty-six.

Sunday, October 19, 1997

They finally located
Stine’s lost bloody shirt in the Bryant Street property room. It had been checked out, listed as a miscel aneous item, and

abandoned in a cardboard box in the official coroner’s office—a blunder probably indicative of past performance. The SFPD had recently tossed

out evidence in the Charles Ng serial kil ings. They thought the case had been completed, but after decades Ng was just coming to trial. Bawart

feared the San Francisco investigation of the Stine murder had been “very sloppy.” “For instance,” he told me, “the names of the fire crew [at Cherry

and Washington] were not taken to eliminate them as donors to the bloody print.” Toschi reassured me, “The cab had already been taken away by

the time the fire crew arrived.”

37

arthur leigh allen

Sunday, October 11, 1998

The first words
out of Toschi’s mouth were bitter as ashes: “I got up this morning and the first thing I realized was that it’s been thirty years since it al began.” San Francisco celebrated Fleet Week. Jets buzzed downtown skyscrapers. Outside the Golden Gate, a Navy plane, guided by an

angled crossed circle—a huge Zodiac symbol—coasted featherlike onto a carrier’s deck. Frustrated detectives from San Francisco, Val ejo, Napa

County, and Solano County had gathered, possibly for the final time, to discuss Zodiac. The last of the original Zodiac trackers, Ken Narlow, had

retired in 1987. “I have a place on the coast where I attack the salmon and abalone,” he said. “I needed something to occupy my time besides

golfing and fishing so I took the job of transportation director for our local Catholic high school.” And Zodiac? “I’d like to think that if we had some of

the technology in those days that we have today, we’d be a lot closer to this guy,”

“The old Zodiac—that thing wil never die,” said another. When Toschi spoke to Avery, Avery said, “That’s history, that’s al in the past, Dave.”

“That kinda saddened me a bit,” Toschi told me, “because for me it was
the
case of a career.”

Sunday, August 29, 1999

“It always surprised
me that Ken Narlow knew hardly anything about Al en,” Tom Voigt, who ran a Web page on Zodiac, told me. “I brought him

the Bawart Report on the reasons why Al en is the Zodiac and copies of Mulanax’s report. We went over to his house and he started reading it. He

was not impressed with how the report looked—the first thing he said was, ‘It’s not on official letterhead, but the content makes up for the way it’s

presented.’ He read a bit more. He turned red, and was swearing quite a bit by the time he finished. He was very angry. ‘If even a couple of these

things are true,’ he said, ‘then Al en’s the Zodiac!’

“Narlow was upset because he hadn’t known anything about this when it was going on. He had been invited to the search in 1972, but couldn’t go

because he had a hernia operation. He was relying on Mulanax, Armstrong, and Toschi to clue him in. He’s real y angry because he’s reading al

this for the first time and knew nothing of the facts in the report. At that point he started trying to track down Bil Armstrong. He was tough to find, but

Narlow eventual y talked to him. They had a long conversation. Armstrong had put it al behind him. When Armstrong quit, he real y quit. He didn’t

realize that Al en had ever been searched again. He didn’t know that Al en had died. Basical y, it was just like he was living in a cave.”

“As far as I could tel ,” Voigt told me, “the Val ejo police had put al their Zodiac records on microfilm and destroyed the originals. Mel Nicolai told

me—we talked in May—he told me they placed Al en in Riverside and they know for a fact he was there. He wasn’t a student and he didn’t work

there. At the time Bates was murdered he was a schoolteacher at Val ey Springs Elementary School in Calaveras County, and every weekend

Al en would go to Riverside. Drive al the way down to Riverside because he was a member of this racing club.”

Tuesday, October 19, 1999

“I decided last
week I was going to retire,” Toschi told me. “I wasn’t feeling too good—I was kind of dragging. I was working an average of ten

hours a day. I’m sixty-eight now. I’m stil doing a little security and body-guard work at Temple Emmanuel since around 1987. I was doing a lot of

things and it was beginning to take its tol . I’m going to do a little P.I. work. I’ve had my license since ’86. You’ve got to have your weapon, state

firearms certificate, a book test. Because of my background they’l waive the firing test. ‘I think you stil know how to shoot,’ they said. I had my

‘CCW,’ carrying concealed weapon, from the chief, which made me legal.”

As I spoke with Toschi, it had occurred to me I had interviewed many of the witnesses the police had not, seen files long since destroyed. I knew

facts they did not. Perhaps the case against Arthur Leigh Al en could stil be made. I tried out some of the new intel igence on Toschi.

“Did you know,” I asked him, “that Al en had his trailer repaneled just before you searched it in 1972? Who knows what was hidden in those

wal s? He had another trailer by Bodega Bay. No wonder you didn’t find anything. Then Zodiac signed his murder of the San Francisco cabbie.”

“How is that?” asked Toschi.

“Stine, undeniably a Zodiac victim, did not fit the pattern of attacks against couples, though he qualified by being a student. He may have been

chosen for another reason. Stine did not die at a water-related site, though his original destination had been Third Avenue and
Lake
. After Al en

told Spinel i he was going to San Francisco to kil a taxi driver he chose a specific cabbie and specific destination. Paul Stine’s middle name was

‘Lee,’ and his birthday, December 18, the same as Leigh Al en’s. Yel ow Cab dispatcher LeRoy Sweet gave Stine his last scheduled trip

destination at 9:45 P.M.—to 500 Ninth Avenue, Apartment #1—an apartment complex, the
Allen
Arms. Tom Voigt pointed that out to me. Zodiac

had given us his first name, ‘Lee,’ his birth date, ‘December 18,’ and his last name, ‘Al en.’20 But how Zodiac knew Stine’s birth date and middle

name and how he snared that specific cab, I can’t imagine. Did this mean he knew Stine? Additional y an ‘Arthur Al en, student, ’ was renting an

unfurnished apartment at 320 2nd Avenue, only four and a half blocks from the murder site.”

Stine began pushing his hack at 8:45 P.M., his only completed fare—from Pier 64 to the Air Terminal. His incomplete way-bil read Washington

and Maple Streets in Presidio Heights. “He never arrived at the 9th Avenue location,” said Sweet. “At 9:58 P.M. I assigned the ‘no-go’ dispatch to

another cab.” Responding officers at Washington and Cherry discovered the cab meter stil running, indicating Stine had picked up a fare en route.

At exactly 10:46 P.M. the meter read $6.28.”21 That enabled Armstrong and Toschi to backtrack to where Zodiac had gotten into the cab—Geary

and Mason. Witnesses observed Zodiac wiping down the left-side doors of the cab prior to his escaping, leading Toschi to believe that this was the

side from which he entered downtown.

Stine, who drove a motorcycle, had been sel ing insurance to pay his way through SF State. Could he have previously met Zodiac as an

insurance client or at a motorcycle club? Zodiac shot Stine from the backseat,then entered the right front door. Three teenaged witnesses across

the street observed Stine being “jostled” by Zodiac who was “seated in the right front seat at the time.” Stine general y kept his cab fares and tip

money in his pocket and would separate it at the end of his shift. His wife, Claudia, said he had only $3 to $4 of his own money when he left home

for work. Zodiac took Stine’s wal et (where he kept al his registration papers) and some keys to the cab. Was Zodiac looking for something that

would link him to his victim?

“If Stine was taking his cab out to the Richmond [District],” theorized Toschi, “Zodiac may have flagged him down and said, ‘I want to go to

Washington and Maple.’ Stine might have said, ‘That’s almost in the same area. I can do two at once. I can drop you off and get over to Ninth

Avenue in five minutes. I’ve got a guy jumping in the front seat. I can take you and handle the other one. I get two fares for one.’” Toschi had

suspected Al en was left-handed, but never been able to prove it.

“In his last wil ,” I said, “Leigh requested that a Clear Lake friend, Mark, receive ‘my
left-handed scissors
and al my archery equipment.’ So, he