Zodiac Unmasked (66 page)

4:00,’ and this would be about 9:00. She’d go to the laundromat, and five hours later he’d be at the party by himself and he just didn’t know

anything.”

On May 9, 1969, Darlene purchased a new house at 1300 Virginia Street, and reported that a former neighbor was watching her. Darlene

organized a painting party and invited a few of the many policemen she knew from Terry’s. “Lots of the cops knew her,” Sergeant Lynch told me.

“They used to stop in at the coffee shop out there. She worked the 3:00 A.M. late shift on weekends, and she’d get off work and run off to San

Francisco. She used to like to take off her shoes and stockings and run through the surf, and this is at four in the morning. She dated al kinds of

guys. She was a goer.”

“Among [Darlene’s] companions were men,” the
Times-Herald
’s Gene Silverman later wrote, “men who were not necessarily her husband. Dean

Ferrin was reportedly unconcerned. He considered her association with male friends just an aspect of her being young and lively.” “You got to

understand how cops operate, especial y back in those days,” Detective Bawart added. “If you’re working the swing shift, the graveyard shift, and a

new waitress came on, it would be a contest to see who could get in her shorts first. That’s the way cops were back then. There were a lot of cops

pursuing her. She was a pretty loose gal, Darlene was.”

“Darlene had a rep as being pretty fast and loose,” Mulanax elaborated. “She was dating a lot of different guys. Certainly during the time she was

working as a waitress out at Terry’s. Prior to Terry’s I have no knowledge of Darlene dating. Before her death she saw three Val ejo cops, one ‘a

drive-in Romeo’ and another a deputy in the sheriff’s office. According to our reports, Blue Rock Springs was Darlene’s favorite hangout to take her

boyfriends. So regardless of who she was with, that’s where she would go.” And yet she had turned down the lonely older man in the white car. How

must he have felt?

Saturday, May 24, was the day of the painting party. “How many people showed up at the party?” I asked Linda. “There were about fifteen. The

party lasted a long time.” “Who was there?” “The Mageau boys. Steven Kee. They were there. Steve went directly into the Navy after graduating

from Hogan High in 1965. His friendship with Darlene goes back to about 1963, I think. He was worried about Dee during her year-long absence

and was stationed on the U.S.S.
Rook
. He was very shy. I recal he had a little red car at one time and a green Olds pickup. He was also very

jealous of Dee, you’ve got to keep that in mind. He moved to San Diego just after the Lake Herman murders, and so was not there for her.” I was

more interested whether he had seen someone bothering Darlene at IHOP.

“George was there.” Linda continued. “I know Howard was there.” “Howard ‘Buzz’ Gordon?” “Yeah.” “How about women?” “Only one or two.” “How

about Baldino?” “Steve? Yeah.” Another Val ejo cop. Val ejo Policeman Richard Hoffman, though on the guest list, had not attended. Among the

other guests were: Jay Eisen (a San Francisco friend of Darlene’s); Rick Crabtree; Darlene’s female friend Sydney; Linda, Darlene’s sister; Pam,

Darlene’s younger sister; Ron Al en; and
a stocky man in a business suit and tie.

“Darlene cal ed me and told me to come over to the party,” her sister Linda said, “and Darlene was scared to death. She didn’t expect for this

man to show up. I got there at one in the afternoon. He showed up when I was on my way over. He was the only one dressed neat. Everyone else

had old jeans on and was painting the house that she had just put a down payment on. . . . And so the police assumed that this was Bil Leigh, who

was Dean’s boss, and they just left it at that. But it was ‘Lee,’ and it was not his last name. I never spoke to him, but I definitely know how he looks . .

. and Darlene was scared to death. This guy at the painting party was the Zodiac. I know Zodiac is the person I saw at the party. The way she was

acting. This guy had no business being at her house.

“Dee got into something and she was afraid and wanted to back out of it. And she begged me, ‘Linda, don’t go near him. Just don’t talk to him.’

He was overweight . . . this guy scaring the heck out of her. I mean, she couldn’t eat. I noticed how much weight she had lost. When something was

bothering her she couldn’t hide it. She wasn’t smiling. . . . She begged me, ‘Just go, Linda, just go.’ She asked me to leave ’cause she didn’t want

him to know any part of the family.

“The way she acted made me fix this man’s face in my mind. I can see him sitting there in the chair. There were stil fourteen people left at the

party when I left, and more coming. I wish I would have stayed. I do believe that she got into something and was afraid and she didn’t know how to

go about getting out of. I think she did want to get out, and the Zodiac said, ‘Wel , we’l just do away with her’cause she’l probably go to the police.’

He was also the one at Terry’s. When I walked into Terry’s this one particular day with my dad, this man was sitting there and he was constantly

watching Dee al the time. And as I walked in he held the paper up above him’cause he noticed me. Later somebody [a tal , lean, black-haired man]

shot four holes in the ceiling at Terry’s.”

After Linda left the painting party, Darlene’s younger sister, Pam, arrived. She also noticed the man in the suit. “He was so out of place,” Pam told

me. “He was a pretty wel -dressed guy. Yeah, very wel -dressed, an older man. I saw him only the one time. He never did get out of that chair.

Everybody was a little scared of him being at the party and a little nervous because he was there. . . . This guy was asking about her at work, prying

into her finances . . . he is the same man who was sitting at the bar, the counter, this was the same man that was asking me questions. He was

asking me about her little girl and what was her relationship with her husband, Dean. ‘What did she do with her tips?’ he asked. ‘She real y got her

head together.’ ‘I understand Dean never wants to watch the baby.’

“The stranger had a short common nickname—Lee. It was ‘Lee,’ L-E-E, not ‘Leigh,’ and it wasn’t his last name. There was this guy at the party

who I think is Zodiac. The same guy who was at the party was the one who delivered a package to the doorstep of Wal ace Street one day that I

was baby-sitting. I saw him at the door and took a package from him. He told me under no circumstance was I to look in that package. He was the

same man I remembered seeing leave a package on the doorstep at Wal ace Street.”

“And the age of the man at Terry’s harassing Darlene—”

“I would say between thirty-five and thirty-eight.” She estimated him to be almost six feet tal . “I can picture this man. . . . I remember seeing him at

the door and I remember seeing him at the painting party and he liked to talk to me because I was a pretty honest person. Dee got upset with me

because she thought I was tel ing him too much. ‘Wel , he would ask me something so I answered.’ Dee said, ‘Pam, I’m going to stop asking you to

my parties if you don’t stop talking to him. There are some things I don’t want people to know about me.’ I said, ‘I thought you were dating this guy

the way he talks.’” Ron Al en’s name had been on the guest list for Darlene’s painting party. After Cheney moved to Southern California in 1969,

Leigh’s brother and sister-in-law paid him a visit.

“Ron and Karen were at my house for dinner,” Cheney told me. “This was before my purchase of my new house [at 1842 Berkeley Avenue]. We

were sitting around the kitchen table chatting, and Karen told us about Leigh going to a painting party in his suit. Ron and his brother were at the

party and Leigh was dressed in a suit and tie. Karen was using that as an example of him being unadjusted to social things. She was ragging him

on that. She was a little afraid of her brother-in-law because she recognized he was not squared away with the world at al . With her education in

social work she had been exposed to such things, and I don’t think Ron had.”

Two Lees were
crossing paths in Darlene’s life. “Robbie” or “Lee” (she apparently cal ed him by both names) lived close enough to see into

Darlene’s house on Wal ace Street. Thus, he had no reason to park out front to watch her. That had to be a second “Lee.” I asked Mulanax about

him. “Assuming that Zodiac is one of Darlene’s new friends, did you ever put together a list of her new acquaintances? Did you come across a

Robbie?” “The people interviewed were her family basical y and her coworkers,” he answered. “There are numerous people there she was

associated with, but whether they were her new friends, I don’t know.”

On June 29, 1969, Darlene confided to her friend Bobbie Ramos, at a county fair, that “Lee” was the name of a man who had lived across the

street from her. A Terry’s waitress had also observed a man in a white car, its vertical gril bars blacked out like a Mustang, fol owing Darlene. She

had jotted down his license number, and this enabled me to track the car down. The vehicle was a 1968 white hardtop Cougar Mercury coupe (only

hardtops were made until 1969). I was disappointed. That car could not have been the one Zodiac used at Lake Berryessa. His worn tire tracks

showed two different-size tires and a width between the wheels of 57 inches. The Cougar had the widest wheelbase around—111 to 123 inches. Its

wheelbase width was closer to the white four-door hardtop 1959-60 Chevy Impala seen at the murder site on Lake Herman Road. Coincidental y,

the Cougar’s owner had traded in a 1960 Impala sedan in April 1969 for the Mercury.

Only one apartment building, 553, stood on Wal ace Street. After a long search, I found and interviewed the Cougar’s registered owner, a Robbie

Lee Moncure, who had once lived at the Wal ace Street apartment house and worked at Kresge’s and Mare Island Naval Station. In 1971, he had

moved to Fresno, California, and in April 1977, sold and junked the Cougar. However, he was black-haired, too thin (165 pounds), and too young

(twenty-five at the time of the murders) to be Zodiac. My hope was that if he had been watching Darlene, he might have seen the older man named

“Lee” who was watching her.

“We were real close . . . friends,” Robbie told me, “and that was it! She didn’t share the names of her friends with anybody. Each was sort of

separate. I didn’t pry. . . . I was just into her. These little games she played with different people were like you could see on TV or in a movie. A

series that was going on and on. Darlene was petite. Ful of devilment. She was on Wal ace Street and flying a kite one night. But I remember that

she cal ed me another night from the Coronado Inn to come out and pick her up. She didn’t trust this guy—an older man. The guy I saw was stocky.

At the time I wasn’t paying too much attention to him because she told me she wanted to come home right away.” Robbie could recal no more.

A year after this encounter, a Val ejo resident, Marie Anstey, vanished from the Coronado Inn parking lot on Friday the thirteenth. Anstey,

bludgeoned, then drowned, had not been sexual y molested and was found near water—like the Santa Rosa victims. I believed Robbie Lee had

seen Zodiac unmasked.

Leigh Al en could be linked to Darlene through the painting party and her friends who knew of a shadowy figure named “Lee.” Could he now be

connected to Darlene on the night of her murder? I had sought Lynch’s advice. He was not total y unaware that a man named “Lee” might be

Zodiac. He had searched out tips on a variety of men with the middle name Lee. One owned a .22-caliber gun, a .45, and a 9-mm gun. “There was

a guy here who thinks he’s Zodiac, a local nut,” said Lynch. “He’s been in and out of Napa. In fact I knew him. I didn’t think I knew him when I got that

tip by letter from out of state by his ex-wife. He was a sadistic two-hundred-pounder, six feet tal , with a fetish for leather. He told his wife, ‘You wil

be my slave in the hereafter, ’ a phrase similar to Zodiac’s ‘slaves in the afterlife’ remark. You can’t real y pin anything down with those guys. None

of them wil ever talk to you.”

“Who tipped you to Leigh Al en as Zodiac?” I asked the last time we spoke. “Was the informant anonymous?”

“I think the information came through the local sheriff’s office . . . Les Lundblad, he’s dead now. I think the information came through him. Yeah,

everything was coming second-hand. You could never talk to anyone directly.”

“You talked to Darlene’s sister, Linda, in San Jose.”

“I did talk to her—many times.”

“Did you ever speak to this ‘Lee’ from the painting party?”

“No.”

“They dug a perfect bul et out of the car,” I said, “one that wasn’t smashed. It probably went through the fleshy part of Darlene’s body and had just

enough momentum to penetrate the upholstery. That copper-coated ammo was pretty new. It had only been out for six months. Did you ever get a

lead on that?”

“No,” said Lynch. “I admit I don’t know much about guns. A guy on Skyline Boulevard south of San Francisco was firing his gun and he had that

kind of ammo. I had that guy in, trying to find out out how he got that. Nothing came of it. I never thought that Zodiac chased Darlene and Mike to

Blue Rock Springs. I believe that guy just came upon them at random. He was just out there to shoot somebody and he found them.” I disagreed

with that. Zodiac had to have stalked them to some degree. At last I came to that fatal Fourth of July.

“It was an
exceptional y hot Fourth,” Bobbie Oxnam told me. “Everyone was down by the waterfront.” The sky was fil ed with a spectacular display

of pyrotechnics. The staccato pop-pop-pop of firecrackers was like gunfire. The smel of gunpowder was in the air. Earlier in the day Darlene had