Zodiac Unmasked (7 page)

mother used to favor him, much to Starr’s disdain. She adored Ron who was a nice-looking kid. And Starr at this time had already gotten fat. I spent

the weekend in the home with the dad and the mom. Starr came over. He was living in his trailer at the time and I saw how unassuming the father

was. He had been wounded in an airplane wreck over Oklahoma in the late fifties or early sixties and he was never the same after that. He was a

draftsman now and we drove him to work, dropped him off and picked him up later. Nice man, but very meek. He wasn’t always that way. Ron told

me it was the accident that made him that way. After the accident Ethan could no longer keep his son in line. He became—how should I say this—

quiet. The mother was total y the dominant personality. They were always arguing and bantering. He’d real y cuss her up and down, screaming at

her. I know if I had spoken to my parents that way, they would have kil ed me. Starr cal ed her a ‘c—’ and stuff like that. It was awful and this was at

the dinner table.”

Cheney elaborated on this. “Starr’s father was a decorated jet pilot,” he told me. “I don’t know if he got shot down or he had a wreck, but he had

an accident and was injured pretty badly and was medical y discharged. I didn’t know him from the days when he was stil in the Navy. He was stil

active, but apparently had lost some of his fire. He wasn’t the hot jet pilot he had once been. He stil went to work and stil was a draftsman on Mare

Island. He wasn’t bummed up. He could walk al right and al of his functions were normal. He was a nice guy. The family had commissary privileges

and had I.D. cards so they could shop on military bases. The Wing Walker shoes he wore probably came from Mare Island. They were made for

pilots and crewmen.”

From the street Mulanax idled his car and observed the smudged, practical y ground-level window to Starr’s disordered basement apartment,

and tried to imagine what it must be like. He stil yearned to have a peek. Starr’s mother had described her son’s inner sanctum as stacked with

books. Starr was quite the student, “a professional student,” his brother said. “After summer vacation,” Bernice had explained, “he intends to return

to col ege at Cotati for the fal semester.” Mulanax thought back to 1969 and to another summer vacation—tumultuous times, violent times for

Val ejo.

Starr had been a student then too and Zodiac had been at his boldest, grasping Water Town in a grip of fear. With the intimate knowledge of a

Val ejo resident, he capitalized on a citywide police and firemen’s strike. Throughout the walkout there were only two dozen California Highway

Patrolmen to cruise about and enforce traffic laws for a city of 72,000. On July 21, negotiators almost had the strike licked, but Apol o 11 delayed a

settlement meeting when Governor Reagan declared a moon-flight holiday.

So far summer vacation 1971 had been less turbulent, thought Mulanax. Val ejo had a highly efficient law enforcement team in place and Starr

had a job with Union Oil of California to keep him occupied. Returning to headquarters just before lunch, Mulanax rang the Union Oil refinery at

Pinole and spoke with McNamara in Personnel. He confirmed Starr was employed as a junior chemist in their lab, had been since September 8,

1970. But Starr could not have been very happy at Pinole. Last April 20, the overqualified man had applied for employment at a Union 76 garage in

nearby Rodeo. “His summer hours at the refinery are from 8:00 A.M. until 4:00 P.M.-4:30 P.M.,” continued McNamara, “and that’s each weekday.”

“I’d like to interview him during working hours,” Mulanax explained.

“That’s a bit out of the ordinary,” said the personnel chief, “and bound to cause some disruption.” Disruption was exactly what Mulanax had in

mind. “Wel , we can provide my private office for your purposes,” McNamara agreed.

“Good,” said the detective. “Just don’t let on that we intend to interview him prior to his being brought to the office.” Most definitely Mulanax

wanted to surprise Starr and put him off balance. He hung up, noted the appointment on his pad, then dialed Toschi and Armstrong and informed

them of the meeting. Famished after a busy morning, he went to lunch.

Armstrong and Toschi had been busy too. Toschi studied two pages of scribbled notes, munching animal crackers and dunking them in a cup of

Instant Folgers. He had just learned that Starr, though born left-handed, had been compel ed as a child to write with his right hand—a possible

cause of serious psychological problems.

After lunch, Morril got back to Mulanax in Val ejo about Starr’s canceled checks. “I’ve compared them to Zodiac lettering,” Morril said, “and they

come up negative.” What were they missing? wondered Mulanax. If Starr was Zodiac, had he devised a way to disguise his printing? Or had a

confederate written them? Right to the end that shadowy second man would be a worrisome element in the hunt for Zodiac.

Wednesday, August 4, 1971

Toschi, Armstrong, and
Mulanax sped south from Val ejo along Interstate 80 and rattled across the Carquinez Bridge into Contra Costa County.

Tracing the shore of San Pablo Bay, they swept past Selby, Tormey, Rodeo, and Hercules. To the west Hamilton AFB shimmered across clouded

green water. The previous January two Standard Oil Company tankers had col ided just outside the Golden Gate, spil ing almost two mil ion gal ons

of black gummy crude into the Bay. Shortly before 10:25 A.M. the detectives halted at the chain-link gate of a vast oil refinery. The Pinole instal ation

was impressive. By night, when it was twinkling with a mil ion diamond lights, great clouds of roiling steam made it otherworldly; by day fingerlike

black towers shot hundreds of feet upward like the barrels of guns.

The gate slid back and, three or four blocks later, the detectives climbed out. Toschi craned his neck upward, where processing towers boiled

crude oil to 750 degrees. The heating procedure separated molecules, converting them into propane, gasoline, butane, kerosene, diesel fuel,

lubricating oil, even road tar and wax. Starr was a chemist and the refinery itself no more than a giant chemical lab. Complex conduits twisted into

overlapping tunnels, funneling raw petroleum into mammoth storage tanks, catalytic units, and vacuum distil ation units.

Sudden shril whistles alerted Toschi. High above, men scrambled on gantries and towers. An unctuous mist like soot showered down on them

and made Toschi queasy. His breakfast this morning and for many mornings prior had been a few aspirins washed down with cold coffee. They

entered McNamara’s office and watched as he phoned a lab to summon the unsuspecting assistant chemist. “It’l be a minute,” he said. Starr’s

records were spread out like a fan on McNamara’s desk. Bil Armstrong took the time to thumb through them since he would be in charge of the

questioning.

The investigators did not hear the suspect in the hal way—only the elevator doors opening with a “whoosh.” Starr walked softly for a big man and

was wearing padded shoes of some sort. At last they would see him face to face. Toschi sat rigid in his seat. He half rose. After so many suspects,

after so many years and disappointments, was Zodiac final y here—within their grasp? Toschi held his breath. The door opened. Starr’s physical

presence was al Toschi thought it would be and al that he knew Zodiac’s was.

2

robert hall starr

Wednesday, August 4, 1971

Starr filled the
doorway. His bold, almost hairless head swiveled from face to face as the trio of detectives identified themselves. Starr seemed

surprised and a little nervous that they were policemen. “I realized that he was afraid he was going to get fired,” Toschi told me later, “and that alone

might have accounted for his apprehension.” Twenty-five hundred Zodiac suspects had surfaced over the years and been painstakingly checked

out. Since so many counties, jurisdictions, and unincorporated areas were involved, cops did not always compare notes or even names. Starr was

not their first good suspect. He was not their last. Conveniently, alarm bel s should have resounded in the investigators’ minds. They didn’t. Only

after the conference, when their heads were cool and time al owed them to consider what Starr had said, so much of it unbidden, did their pulses

begin to race. Back at Homicide that stark black clock seemed to tick faster.

As Mulanax had done, Toschi took in the suspect’s physical presence—Starr had blue-brown eyes and short light brown hair that was graying in

the back. Hadn’t Officer Fouke mentioned something about Zodiac having “light-colored hair possibly graying in the rear,” recol ected Toschi, “and

the curve of Zodiac’s skul had shone through his sparse hair the night he shot the cabdriver.” The late sixties were a period of protest when people

rebel ed against the shorter hair of the the fifties and wore their hair long. In 1969, Zodiac had worn his short—like a military man. However, during a

previous attack at Lake Berryessa, Zodiac presumably sported a healthy head of straight brown hair beneath his hood.

“I remember a kind of greasy forehead . . .” the surviving Berryessa victim told me later. He thought the perpetrator had dark brown hair—a lock

had shown through dark glasses covering narrow eyelets. Beneath those glasses, the wounded boy conjectured, were a second pair of glasses.

The kil er, in complete costume—a black executioner’s hood with a white circle and cross on the chest—had appeared almost magical y in the

twilight on September 27, 1969. Zodiac had traveled north to Napa County and targeted the student and his young girlfriend, stabbing them with a

foot-long, inch-wide bayonet with a taped wooden handle. He had decorated the haft, carried at his belt in a handmade scabbard, with brass rivets.

“I don’t know how tal Zodiac was, maybe five foot eight or six feet, somewhere in there. I’m a pretty poor judge of height because of my height,”

said the lanky student.

Starr’s wide brow had breadth enough for a second apple-cheeked face; his neck was thick; high-set ears flew out like horns. His broad-

shouldered, six-foot-tal bulk was intimidating. “Everybody that I ever saw that met Starr underestimated his height,” Cheney later explained. “He had

that fearsome look in his eyes. Thick thighs and a big butt and a bel y and strong shoulders and chest.” Yes, Starr was a heavy man, but then so

was Zodiac. The surviving Berryessa victim estimated Zodiac’s weight at between 225 and 250 pounds. “I described this guy as being real y fat,”

he said. “I don’t know, he could have been moderately heavy and wearing a thickly lined windbreaker.” But there was another way to tel .

Detective Sergeant Ken Narlow of the Napa County Sheriff’s Department had done a compaction test on Zodiac’s unique footprints. He had a

deputy sheriff weighing 210 pounds walk alongside them. “He didn’t sink down as deeply as Zodiac had,” Narlow told me, “In order to put that print

so deeply into the sand we figured the Zodiac weighed at least 220 pounds. Clear prints at the heel had indicated that Zodiac was not running when

he left.” Morril , the handwriting examiner, as conservative with the compaction test as with handprinting, told me, “It depends on how the sand was

at the time too. If the guy was taking big loping steps or mincing along. They were guessing at the size from the indentation he made. Suppose the

sand the day before was different. Suppose there had been water in it.”

But the ground had been dry and he had been striding leisurely. The prints were firm and especial y clear at the heel. Napa cops arrived almost

immediately because Zodiac had boldly phoned them from a booth within four and one-half blocks of their headquarters. “He was bound to have

some blood on him,” Narlow told me. “To come in from Berryessa and hit that particular telephone he had to pass, I figure, some twenty to twenty-

one telephones. He came in close enough to hear any possible sirens rushing out of the city of Napa. He could cal in from the lake, but he would be

trapping himself up there. It’s a twenty-five-minute drive down. The booth was twenty-seven miles from the crime scene. If we had found out he was

cal ing from the lake we could have sealed the area off.”

At the lake there was further proof that Zodiac’s considerable weight was not padding. He had impressed unique marks deeply into the earth. A

circle on the sole reading “SUPERWEAR” showed clearly in Narlow’s plaster moulages. Zodiac’s military motif, suggested by a black holster at his

belt containing a blue-steel semiautomatic military .45, was enhanced by the identifying logos of his shoes—black boots used primarily by the

Navy. Wing Walker shoes were worn almost exclusively by aircraft maintenance crewmen for walking the wings of jets. Narlow discovered that, but

only after his men cul ed 150 shoe boutiques with names like “The Spinning Wheel” and “Wil ow Tree.”

In 1969, 103,700 pairs of Wing Walkers had been shipped to Ogden, Utah. The Weinbrenner Shoe Company of Merril , Wisconsin, had

manufactured them per a 1966 government contract for one mil ion pairs total. The last pairs were distributed to Air Force and Naval instal ations

on the West Coast. Only active-duty personnel or former active-duty personnel, or their dependents, could have purchased such shoes. These

personnel were required to present an I.D. card that carried a thumbprint and photo to enter any base exchange and make any purchases there.

Val ejo, its economy directly related to military operations, served as home for many skil ed employees with Navy or Air Force ties. They toiled at

Travis AFB, north of Val ejo near Fairfield, or at Hamilton, Mather, and McClel an Air Force Bases, nearby Mare Island, Alameda Naval Station, and