Zodiac Unmasked (65 page)

Sunday, December 10, 2000

After leaving the
Chronicle,
Paul Avery wrote for the
Sacramento Bee
, then returned to San Francisco to report for the
Examiner
until his retirement in August 1994. For years he had suffered with emphysema and heart problems. Ironical y, the reporter had fal en il at the same time as

Leigh Al en. He often visited the M&M, a famous Mission Street newspaper watering hole, dragging his oxygen tank with him. “The image that I’l

keep forever,”
Examiner
Editor Phil Bronstein said, “is of Paul, police radio attached to one ear, cigarette in his hand, oxygen supply hooked up to

his nose, arm around my shoulder, sharing the scandalous details of the latest story he’d broken.” This morning on Orcas Island, Washington, Paul

had died at age sixty-six at the West Sound home of the grandfather of his wife, Margo St. James. He had died without unlocking the riddle of

Zodiac. But for many years the reporter had been divorced from his biggest story, and by 1980, when I visited him in Sacramento, he had forgotten

most of the details.

Harold Huffman died on June 19, 2001. “Leigh would write Harold from Atascadero,” Kay Huffman told me, “and include letters that were stamped

and addressed and ask Harold to mail them on. I never figured out why if he could mail out to Harold why he couldn’t mail out to other people. I

never saw the insides of them. Actual y, I found one while I was going through some of Harold’s stuff. Harold never forwarded it on. Whether he ever

sent the others on or not I have no idea. It sounds like something my husband might not have done. I never opened that letter. I figured if Harold

wasn’t going to forward it, it wasn’t something I wanted to see either.” In Harold’s opinion, the contents of those letters were harmless. One of the

unforwarded letters was a request for aviation charts and addressed to the Distribution Division (C-44), National Ocean Survey in Washington,

D.C.

“I get awful y lonely when I am ignored,” Zodiac had written. If “obsession” best described Zodiac’s hunters, “lonely” was a word that Zodiac had

made his own. In that loneliness, the shape of Zodiac’s crimes unfolded like fireworks in the copper-colored sky above Val ejo. The secret lay with

Darlene Ferrin on that long-ago July Fourth. Her murder held the secret of Zodiac’s identity. Zodiac had known Darlene, known her wel , and more

importantly, she had known him in his true identity and without the concealment of that hideous black veil.

39

unmasked

Saturday, December 30, 2000

“I spoke with
Don Cheney,” Zodiac buff Tom Voigt told me. “Cheney, as you recal , had fingered Leigh Al en as Zodiac in 1971. He was up in

Washington when I suggested we meet. He was wil ing to drive down here to Portland to the Hood River, which is about an hour from me, but four

hours from him. We met at the Hood River Inn, which is right on the Columbia River. We had a whole section to ourselves. It was a beautiful view of

the Columbia and he sat facing it. He was very relaxed and a nice pleasant guy, probably six feet tal .”

“Was Leigh homosexual,” Voigt asked Cheney, “or did he have an interest in women? Was there ever a girl he real y liked?”

Cheney thought. “In the time that I knew Leigh,” he said, “there was only one female that Leigh ever mentioned and she was a waitress.”

“Was this in Val ejo?” Voigt asked.

“Yeah.”

“Where did she work?”

“At a pancake house. I don’t remember her name or anything, and it was the only time Leigh ever mentioned her. We went to an International

House of Pancakes, right around the corner from Leigh’s house. We had dinner there after a hunting trip in 1967. I was stil living in Concord then.

Leigh pointed out the waitress, a girl with brown hair. She was pretty and she was young. Leigh liked her.”

“If you saw a picture of that girl would you recognize her?” said Voigt, his interest up.

“Naw, it’s been too long,” Cheney told him.

“I don’t know if Al en ever went to Terry’s,” Voigt said with a laugh. “Al en liked IHOP, I don’t know about Terry’s. Why would you go to Terry’s when

you’ve got an IHOP just around the corner?”

Cheney told me the same thing. “The IHOP was close to the house there,” Cheney said, “a couple blocks away at the bottom of Fresno Street.

Leigh and I made a right turn on Tennessee. We were going someplace for an outing when we saw the girl there. Leigh indicated he was interested

in her. ‘What do you think of that waitress?’ he asked. ‘I think I might be able to make some headway with her.’ But nothing ever happened with it. It

was a girl of very similar appearance to Darlene Ferrin. She could have been the girl that he pointed out at the IHOP, but I couldn’t say from my

memory that it was the same girl. This happened in 1967.”

Cheney could have said that the waitress was Darlene and that the restaurant was Terry’s Waffle Shop at Magazine Street and Interstate 80.

That Darlene had waitressed at Terry’s from April 24, 1968, until her murder on July 4, 1969, was wel publicized. But I knew Cheney had told the

truth because of something he did not know.

After Darlene filed for divorce from her first husband, Jim Phil ips, she spent six months in Reno, making four round trips to maintain residency.

She returned to Val ejo in 1967 to work with her friend, Steven Kee,
at the International House of Pancakes on Tennessee Street
at the foot of

Fresno. Darlene
had
been the woman Leigh pointed out to Cheney. He had even gotten the year right. Dean Ferrin had been the cook at the IHOP

and eventual y he and Darlene were married and she began to work at Terry’s. “Why do I meet al the sick ones first?” she had written Dean from

Reno.

“Darlene and I first met in ’65 at the phone company in San Francisco,” said Bobbie Oxnam, Darlene’s friend and coworker at Terry’s. “Six girls

came into the phone company together. Three of us lived in an apartment house and three of the others lived in the residence quad just next door . .

. some strong ties built there. Whenever I would have some of the group up, Darlene always had the invitation to come over. And so a lot of times

when we talked, we were talking about the other girls. Unless she was real y down or real y depressed, Darlene seldom talked about her personal

problems. She had to be especial y down to burden you with her own problems.

“She worked at the phone company about nine months, then her and Jim, her first husband, took off to the Virgin Islands. Then when they got

back they got hold of Mel and I for a place to stay. They stayed with us two or three weeks. One of the reasons why we kicked them out of the

apartment was because Jim had a smal handgun and we didn’t want that. That’s when we told them to get out; otherwise they would have stayed

with us longer while she was looking for work.”

“Darlene’s first husband had a .22-caliber handgun while in Val ejo,” Sergeant Mulanax told me. “Because a .22-caliber semiautomatic had been

used in the two murders out on Lake Herman Road, I went looking for him. I picked him up in Santa Cruz [February 2, 1970] and checked it out

then.”

“Jim was into horoscopes,” continued Oxnam. “I was scared of him and he scared Darlene. This guy who brought her a silver purse and belt from

Mexico was down there while Jim was. I was always under the impression that Jim bought it and sent it up to her through this guy. I moved back to

Val ejo. By this time she and Jim had split and she was going with Dean. It was sweet. She’d buy twenty-five chocolate mints for Dean, put them

under her pil ow, and forget about them. She was always there to listen to you, but would make a statement every once in a while that she was

terrified of ‘this guy.’ She would never go into any sort of depth. If you questioned her she would clam up, but I know Darlene was afraid of someone.

She never verbalized precisely what made her afraid. He had something on her, but what he had I don’t know. I have a feeling it was connected with

the Virgin Islands, but that’s just a hunch. From some of Darlene’s conversations, Jim and her got into trouble while they were in the Virgin Islands

skin diving for shel s.” It was rumored they had seen a murder there.

In 1966 Dean Ferrin had moved to a back apartment of Vern’s Bar at 560 Wal ace Street. After he and Darlene married, she moved there too.

Their daughter, Deena Lynn, was born January 24, 1969. Just over a month before Deena’s birth, David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen had been

shot out on remote Lake Herman Road. The next day Darlene told her coworker Bobbie Ramos, “This is scary. I knew the two kids who were kil ed

on Lake Herman Road. The girl more so. I’m not going up there
again
.” Darlene told her baby-sitter the same thing: “That was real y spooky. I knew

that girl who was kil ed on Lake Herman Road. I’m not going out there anymore.”

“It al started after her baby was born,” said Oxnam. “I mean, we talked about her fears a couple of times. Darlene was scared of somebody, had

been for quite some time . . . she would make a statement every once in a while that she was having trouble. I think a lot of us know the man she

was afraid of, but can’t place him. Darlene was the type of person who had a lot of friends and was friendly toward anyone. That was one of the

problems between her and Jim. Every week there was somebody new, a new friend. They’d be her friend for a week, but after that wouldn’t be the

topic of our conversation. People were her whole interest in life. She real y enjoyed mixing and just being around people.”

“What about this the guy in a white Chevy who had been bothering her at Terry’s?” I asked. “According to one of Darlene’s baby-sitters, she had

complained of a stocky man coming to the restaurant early in the morning to talk to her.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Oxnam said, then added surprisingly, “You know, in al the years since her murder the police never talked to me.”

In February and March 1969, Darlene’s baby-sitter, Karen, observed a man in a white car staking out their ground-floor apartment. Around 10:00

P.M. the man lit a cigarette or momentarily turned on the interior light, and she got a glimpse of his face: “He was heavyset, middle-aged, and very

round-faced,” Karen said. “His hair had a curl to it. I told Darlene about it when she got home. ‘I guess he’s back checking up on me again,’ Darlene

told me. ‘I heard he was back from out of state. He doesn’t want anyone to know what I saw him do. I saw him murder someone.’ Dee [Darlene’s

nickname] sometime during this conversation mentioned the man’s name, and that first name was very short, three or four letters. His second name

was just slightly longer. A common name. Dee appeared to be genuinely frightened of this individual, and mentioned that he had been checking up

on her at Terry’s Restaurant. . . .” Karen was so upset she quit in May.

A strange man left packages for Darlene at her home—a silver belt and purse from Mexico, a flower-print fabric, and a package the size and

shape of a bundle of money. “About the time I took that package from him that looked like money to me,” reported Darlene’s sister, Pam, “Darlene

started paying me for baby-sitting in ten-dol ar and twenty-dol ar bil s. Before that she was giving me quarters, her tip money.” Darlene’s sister,

Linda, described the man who brought Dee presents from Tijuana—“large forehead and close-cropped hair”—like Leigh Al en’s. Leigh and his

chums had made a trip to Mexico about that time, feasting on lobster on the beach. Around the same period, a man Darlene referred to

interchangeably as “Robbie” and “Lee” moved from his residence near Hogan High, about two blocks from Darlene’s friend Mike Mageau’s home,

to directly across from the Ferrins’ home.

“About the beginning of June 1969,” Bobbie Ramos said, “Darlene told me of a man in a white car watching her.” I asked about her “new friends.”

“Darlene’s new friends were Mike Mageau and a man in a Mercury Cougar named Robbie or Lee. I never spoke to him, but I definitely know how

he looks. He drove Darlene over and she had her laundry with her.” However, Bobbie recal ed a slender and much younger man than Zodiac, with

black hair and horn-rimmed glasses.

Evelyn Olson, another Terry’s waitress, said a man named “Lee” had “some kind of hold on Dee [Darlene’s pet name].” Linda Del Buono,

Darlene’s sister, also named Darlene’s closest friends for me: “They were Sue Gilmore [Dean Ferrin’s cousin],” she said. “Bobbie, a blond down at

Terry’s, and this guy named Lee who used to bring gifts to her from Mexico. Darlene met this Lee by Franklin School at a laundromat. He told her

he lived above the laundromat. I wonder if that’s when she got her laundry stolen—uniforms, baby’s diapers, everything.” Leigh Al en, who also

spel ed his name “Lee,” worked part-time at the Franklin School as a janitor.

Though Dean saw no change in Darlene’s demeanor, her friends did. “Darlene became more nervous than ever. She rarely smiled now,” they

said. They attributed her weight loss to diet pil s. “I seen a change in my sister the last four months before she died,” said Pam. “Very nervous,

losing weight. I don’t think it was drugs. She was just frightened of this guy who was constantly fol owing her.”

“Towards the end, that last year, we weren’t that close,” said Carmela Leigh, Dean’s boss at Caesar’s Palace Restaurant and his landlord. “She

had a whole new group of friends—never mentioned names—she was just never around. We’d have barbecues and everything and Dean, who

everybody just real y liked, he’d come over for the barbecue and we’d say, ‘Where’s Darlene?’ and he’d say, ‘She went to the laundromat about