Zodiac Unmasked (67 page)

her hood up by a bowling al ey when she had an altercation with a man driving a white van. He was later described to police as thirty years old, six

feet tal , 180 to 185 pounds, with hair “the color of champagne combed straight back.”

“Darlene was al excited when she came into Caesar’s that evening,” Carmela Leigh told me. Caesar’s stood at 1576 Vervais Street, near Elmer

Cave School, where Leigh Al en worked. “Al I knew was she was going to get to ride on a boat in the parade. When Darlene left at 7:00 P.M., she

said, ‘I’m going to have a party,’ and wanted me to come. I said, ‘Yeah, OK, OK,’ but she knew I wouldn’t be there.”

Darlene and her sister, Christina, went out to Mare Island for a ride on a decorated and lighted boat, the
General French Genora
. Leigh Al en’s

boat reportedly was also in Val ejo’s Traditional Boat Parade on the channel. “A friend of hers had a boat,” Mulanax told me. “There were two guys

on a boat and two guys flying that Darlene knew.” At 10:00 P.M., after the Mare Island parade, Darlene and Christina stopped by Caesar’s again.

Darlene had planned a smal party at her house after the restaurant closed. Fifteen minutes later she cal ed her sitters and learned Bobbie Ramos

wanted to talk to her. At 10:30 P.M. Darlene and Christina arrived at Terry’s, and Darlene went inside to talk to several waitresses. “Darlene did not

speak to anyone other than some of the girls who work at Terry’s before she took me home,” Christina recal ed.

But outside the restaurant Darlene had a second confrontation. She argued with a man in his “thirties or forties” in a blue car with out-of-state

plates. Earlier in the evening, Deputy Ben Vil areal had seen a blue 1967 Ford sedan sitting out at Blue Rock Springs. Christina (the “most stable

and honest member of Darlene’s family”) said she “sensed a tension in the air and in the conversations.” Darlene came away “very upset.” She

asked Darlene, “What’s going on?” “Don’t worry about it,” Darlene answered, “you’l read about it tomorrow in the papers.” Only a day or two before,

Darlene had told her the same thing. “Real y, something big is gonna happen. . . . I can’t tel you yet, but it’s going to be this week.” Christina later

mentioned the out-of-state car, the stranger, and her sister’s odd remarks—none of which appear in the final VPD report—to a detective:

“DEE and CHRISTINA went to Terry’s Restaurant where DEE talked with several waitresses and, outside the restaurant, talked to a man

(nfi) parked outside in a blue car with out-of-state plates (nfi). CHRISTINA claims to have sensed a tension in the air and in the conversations

and reportedly asked DEE what was going on to which DEE al egedly replied, “Don’t worry about it—you’l read about it tomorrow in the

papers.” Her description of the car was later modified in a notation made by Lt. Jim Husted in the left margin: The car was “1) al white. 2)

larger than Dee’s Corvair. 3) Older than Dee’s Corvair (1963).”

Pam also confirmed the argument in Terry’s parking lot. “Al I know was when she came back to the car,” she told me, “the story I got was that he

wanted to take her out. She didn’t want to go out with him because she was married . . . he was between thirty-five and thirty-eight years old.” One

argument had been in daylight; the other an hour and a half before the shooting at Blue Rock Springs. Investigators had confused the nighttime

argument with a morning confrontation. Just like Robbie and Lee, they were two different things at two different times. At 10:45 P.M. Darlene

dropped Christina off at the family Val ejo home. The sitters, Janet Lynn Rhodes and Pamela Kay, were anxious to go. They had been sitting since

early afternoon. Janet Lynn had sat for Darlene only that Fourth of July. The girls told Darlene “an older-sounding man” had been cal ing her

repeatedly. Darlene changed from her patriotic jumpsuit of red, white, and blue stars. Quickly, she donned blue shoes and a white-and-blue flower-

patterned slack dress, a pattern Zodiac would later describe.

“Dee knew the teenagers kil ed out on Lake Herman Road,” Janet Lynn confirmed to me. “She had said that. ‘He’s back from out of state. I once

saw him kil somebody.’” Later, from his hospital bed, a heavily sedated Mike Mageau told police what happened next.

“Dee came [via Georgia Street east] to MAGEAU’S home at 864 Beech-wood [west of Hogan High where Betty Lou Jensen had attended],”

read the official statement. “At approximately 11:30 P.M. . . . and picked him up in her car. Since both were hungry, he said, they headed down

Springs Road and went toward Val ejo. However, at approximately Mr. Ed’s Restaurant, Dee said she wanted to talk with him about

something.”

An eerie paral el here—Betty Lou and David had stopped at Mr. Ed’s Drive-In too just before being shot. The teenagers had visited Sharon, a

friend, on Brentwood Avenue at 8:20 P.M., and remained until 9:00 P.M. At 10:30 their Christmas concert was over and they went from there to Mr.

Ed’s, then Lake Herman Road. Mr. Ed’s phone number was later found scrawled on a photo envelope in Darlene’s purse along with the words

“hacked,” “stuck,” “testified,” and “seen.” Had Zodiac, December 20, 1968, mistaken Betty Lou for Darlene? Betty Lou Jensen bore an uncanny

resemblance to Darlene Ferrin at age seventeen (I had two photos of them at the same age). The odds of Zodiac happening upon two women who

could be twins in pitch blackness and in widely separated, remote areas were incalculable—unless he trailed them. On several occasions Betty

Lou had cautioned her older sister, Melody, to close the blinds. On occasion, their mother found the gate leading to the side of the house open and

tracks in the garden.

Did Zodiac mistake the teenagers for Darlene and her friend Steven Kee, whose parents lived on Cottonwood one street over from Jensen’s

friend, Sharon? Did he trail them to Mr. Ed’s, Darlene’s hangout? Or was Betty Lou’s murder meant as a warning to Darlene, who claimed to know

her?

“They turned around and at his suggestion,” continued Mageau’s report, “drove east on Springs Road to Blue Rock Springs where they

could talk.”

“The minute they drove off, Mike told Dee they were being fol owed,” Linda said. “Just that phrase, ‘We’re being fol owed.’”

“How did you hear that?” I asked.

“I heard that through Sergeant Lynch and Sergeant Mulanax. Darlene started just going down any side streets and this car just kept fol owing

them. . . . I don’t know what made her go toward Blue Rock Springs.” Linda had also spoken to Mike in the hospital after Zodiac shot him, and I was

anxious to hear what else she had learned.

“They knew they were being fol owed?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

“And Darlene thought it was someone named Lee.”

“Yeah.”

“She did say that?”

“Yes.”

“Did the police understand that Zodiac’s name was supposed to be Lee?”

“I don’t think so, but Mike knows who Zodiac is. He does.”

Pam agreed. “Zodiac knew Darlene,” she told me, “because he cal ed her by name . . .
she was known by ‘Dee’ and he called her ‘Dee
.’”

“He did this when he shot her?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And this is something Mike told you.”

“And this is something Mike told me in the hospital.” His acute tongue injury had prevented him from providing a description to police for two

days.

“One unconfirmed source states that MAGEAU claimed they were fol owed from the time they left his house by a similar suspect car.”

Was this true? Sue Ayers, a legal secretary and friend, talked to Mike in the hospital. “Dee and the shooter,” he told her, “had an argument at

Terry’s on July 4. They drove away and the man fol owed them to Blue Rock Springs where the argument continued and shooting fol owed.” The

daughter of the caretaker at Blue Rock Springs reportedly witnessed the argument in the lot, and seconds before shots rang out told her father

there was going to be trouble. Mike’s offical statements continued the story:

“After five minutes there,” MAGEAU said, a car [reportedly a 1958-59 brown Ford Falcon with old California plates] pul ed in from Springs

Road, the driver turned off his lights and pul ed around to the left of their car (east of their car) some six to eight feet from Dee’s car. The car

remained there for about one minute.

Mike said he asked Dee if she knew who it is and she stated, “Oh, never mind. Don’t worry about it.” Mageau said he did not know if this meant

she knew who it was or not. The car left after one minute at terrific speed, hurtling toward Val ejo on Springs Road, and they were left alone in the

darkened lot overlooking the golf course. About five minutes later the man returned. He parked on the passenger side and to the rear of their car,

headlights stil on. A man came up to them carrying a flashlight with a handle on it. Were Darlene and Mike fol owed to Blue Rock Springs? I asked

Mulanax. “I wouldn’t have that feeling because my thought is these Zodiac kil ings are not planned,” he said. “They’re opportunity things. That’s my

feeling.”

“But Zodiac did describe what Darlene was wearing and it was pretty dark.”

“He was also shining a heavy big flashlight in there too.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s a flashlight that has a handle on it like you’d use in a boat. The kind that floats.”

“MAGEAU said they thought it was the Police and they started to get some identification out of their purse/wal ets when suddenly the man

started shooting. MAGEAU said it sounded like the gun had a silencer on it.”

This was a fact never reported, something only Zodiac would know. In 1991, after the search of his home, Leigh Al en told a friend, “They missed

a few things—like the silencer I had hidden in my socks in the dresser.” Had Zodiac turned away, not to reload, but to instal a silencer? Darlene,

Mike, and the stranger had already attracted the attention of George R. Bryant, twenty-two, a Selby Smelter employee and son of the Blue Rock

Springs caretaker. “The groundskeeper’s son saw three people arguing,” Mulanax told me. “Bryant was in a two-story house looking out the window

and trying to get some shut-eye. Fifteen minutes later, he heard gunshots.” Bryant was some eight hundred feet from the lot lying on his stomach

when he heard “one shot, a short interval, another shot, a pause, then rapid fire.” Final y he heard “a tire screeching as a car left the scene.” Bryant’s

recal of the number of shots was insufficient. Zodiac fired a total of seven shots.

“After firing repeatedly the man turned to walk back to his car, but MAGEAU believes he cried out and the man returned and fired two more

shots at him & twice more at Dee.”

Mageau, wounded in his neck, left leg, and right arm, was thrashing his legs when Zodiac fired a second time. “Mike got the door open,” Lynch

told me, “and fel out of the car, and the only time he even looked at the guy was when the guy got back into his car and he opened the door and he

got a clear profile view of him. You know, where some people kind of comb their hair up in a kind of pompadour and then back.” Mike described

Zodiac as having “a large face, thirty years old, with short curly light-brown hair worn in a military-style brush cut. As for his build, he was beefy,

heavyset without being blubbery fat, 195-200 pounds and had a slight potbel y.”

Sergeant Richard Hoffman, responding to the crime scene, took up the story from there. “I was working juvenile division as a plainclothesman in

a plain car when the cal came out that night,” he told me. “It was dark at Blue Rock Springs, elms swaying in the wind, the wild cries of strutting

peacocks roaming the grounds coming to my ears. Roy Conway and I had been the first officers to reach Blue Rock Springs [four miles from

downtown Val ejo and two miles from the site of the earlier Lake Herman murders]. Mike Mageau had original y been in the backseat, but I found

him outside on the ground on his back. His eyes were wide and he lifted his arms upward as if imploring me for help. When he opened his mouth to

cal for aid, blood gurgled out. CPR had just come in, and the doctor removed Darlene’s sweater and began applying pressure to her chest. With

each downward pressure the little tag on her bra fluttered as air exited the bul et hole. The M.E. took this probe and put it in each of Mike’s wounds

—he was staring upward and ful y conscious—feeling every bit of it.”

Lynch and his partner, Ed Rust, arrived next. “Mike was lying at the rear of the car, said Lynch, “and she was stil behind the wheel. I remember

she was trying to say something, and I put my ear over her like this to try to understand, but I just couldn’t.” “First came firecrackers, then gunshots,”

Rust added. “One patrol got there before us—around midnight. It took us ten to fifteen minutes to get there. She died at 12:26 A.M. She kept trying

to talk, but we couldn’t distinguish anything. In fact, we sent one of the officers with her in case she could say something. I think it was Dick Hoffman.

He was the patrol officer who was there first. Mike said he thought it was a police officer come up to check. He pul ed up behind them at sort of an

off line from their car. He said that he had been parked in the same place before, and Darlene had a police officer that came up the same way [a

cutoff technique] and shined a light just the same. It had happened before that way, and he had the impression it was a police officer when he first

came up. Mike got out after the guy left, pushed out the right side of the two-door car. He said he had climbed over the seat trying to get away. The

guy shot him several times. This was the only avenue he had was to get in the backseat.”

“Shortly after, the ambulance arrived,” Lynch said, “and I helped the driver take her out of the car. Then Dick Hoffman fol owed the ambulance to