Zodiac Unmasked (35 page)

the end of my first year at junior col ege, a mutual friend introduced us. He had come back to see the coaches. He offered me a lift home and I took

it. I offered him coffee and he accepted. I didn’t know how to make coffee and he didn’t drink coffee. He drank it anyway. That was the beginning of

the love story.”

“Leigh was like a grandpa figure,” Rob recal ed, “a tal , heavyset, balding man who lived in the basement of an old house.” Rob played with his

chipmunks while Leigh loaded wire traps into the trunk of their car. Leigh left the cages at various rest stops on their way to Lake County. “I hope I

don’t get caught,” he remarked slyly, “I no longer have a valid trapper’s license.” Rob took a quick liking to him. “He was quite funny,” he recal ed.

“Leigh told great stories at night when the three of us stared at the stars and treetops cocooned in our sleeping bags. By day, he would entertain

me . . . by doing somersaults off an old diving board into the shimmering melted snow below which sprayed in every direction upon his impact. He

limped on earth, but was an acrobat in the air and water. Like a fish, he used to sneak up on me underwater in the kiddie section of the lake and

grab my submerged legs—he could hold his breath for an eternity, so I never knew where he was.”

The trio picked up the stil -empty cages as they hurtled north to Blue Lake. At the cheap motel where they stayed, Leigh showed off by diving into

the motel pool and swimming the perimeter of the pool underwater for nearly two minutes. Toward the end of their stay Leigh slammed the car door

on Rob’s toe. The boy began to weep. “You’re tough and brave,” Leigh told him. “Most boys your age would have cried. You aren’t a sissy.” After

that they were real friends. Rob visited him at Ace Hardware and ate with him and his father at the corner IHOP.

Thursday, October 11, 1979

A major coin
shop robbery had occurred on Irving Street and Toschi had been searching for witnesses. He realized it was the tenth anniversary of

his most daunting case. At 6:26 P.M., instead of going home, he stopped to relive old memories on the corner of Washington and Cherry. He heard

the evening news blaring from a nearby home as file footage of the Stine murder unrol ed. As he drove away, Toschi could not escape the sense

that he had not been alone on that dark corner among the solemn mansions.

Wednesday, October 31, 1979

On Halloween, Leigh
registered
another
special-construction trailer, #ME86336. Why so many in so many places and what did he keep in them?

Certainly, he feared a second search, and knew such an inquisition must come eventual y. However, he feared something more than any intensive

inspection of his dreary basement. Any parole violation might remand him to Atascadero, which he dreaded above al . Recently, I heard, on old

Lake Herman Road where the Northern California Zodiac had begun back in 1968, a boy was found shot between the eyes and a girl strangled.

Monday, January 28, 1980

Leigh, already wrestling
with weight and blood pressure problems, now battled a growing alcohol and vision problem. Haltingly, he strol ed the

short distance from his Fresno Street home to 1131 Tennessee Street—his new job at Ace Hardware. He later claimed March 19 as his first day,

but actual y began January 28. Steve Harshman was his new boss; Dean Drexler his supervisor. Drexler immediately put Leigh in charge of sel ing

electrical supplies. Eventual y, Harshman would make Al en a buyer for the garden and tool department. Highly educated, the former convict knew

he was worth more than the $5.35 an hour they were paying him. Quite quickly, he became dissatisfied in another area. Working every day but

Sunday gave him no time for other things.

A letter delivered to the
Chronicle
that morning read: “This is the Zodiac speaking, I have moved to higher country for my next victem good luck

Zodiac.” The return address on the envelope was “guess?” But the postage was not excessive and the ink red, not blue—another copycat. In

Sacramento, I visited Sherwood Morril , CI&I’s handwriting expert. Morril had been born and bred to the investigative bureau. His father, Berkeley

Police Sergeant Clarence S. Morril , opened CI&I in 1918. “My father was a little fel ow,” Morril said. “He was five feet eight inches, weighed about

140 pounds dripping wet. When they lobbied the bil to open the state bureau, they set it up with a board of managers. An independent agency—

they had a sheriff, a chief of police, and a district attorney who were appointed by the governor for staggered terms. In theory, no one person or

board could get control of the office. My dad wasn’t going to take the civil service exam but his boss, Chief August Vol mer, one of the most

progressive officers at the time, insisted. Dad came up here, opened the agency (January 1, 1918). He died in 1940 and he’d been at CI&I al that

time.”

It was Chief Vol mer who encouraged San Francisco writer Dashiel Hammett to speculate whether or not it was possible to transfer fingerprints

from one place to the other. Hammett decided prints could be forged successful y by laminating a set of prints onto fingertips, as he had a

blackmailer do in his story “Slippery Fingers.” Zodiac had written that he used glue on his fingertips. Was this the secret of the unmatchable prints

on Stine’s cab, the phony clues Zodiac claimed he left behind for police to find?

Morril had wanted to be a bal player, but instead learned handwriting analysis under Charles H. Stone, the state’s first documents expert. “He’d

been chief of police of Bakersfield before that,” Morril said. “My dad hired him to be assistant chief, but put him in charge of Questioned

Documents. He took me aside when I graduated from high school and told me, ‘There are no documents schools. California wil grow and with

growth comes litigation and with litigation comes the need for documents examiners.’ I studied psychology and science, and after working for seven

years took to the courtroom. In 1933, I went to work for Questioned Documents and they put me under Stone.”

“Because Zodiac wrote in manuscript instead of cursive,” Morril said, “that presents some idea of his actual age.” Teaching of that style of writing

had been confined to a few selected schools in the U.S. (such as Pleasant Val ey Grammar School in Camaril o, California). In 1969, those

students would have just turned thirty-five. Sherwood was studying a vicious piece of hoax mail addressed to Herb Caen. A huge staring eye,

deliberate misspel ings—“We have suche fun on the way here. We kil manie hitchhikers so slow to danse”—and comments about hot irons echoed

earlier Zodiac letters. “This is the second similar note we’ve received,” science reporter Dave Pearlman had written in a
Chronicle
memo. “It

seems unusual y ugly so I thought maybe the FBI folk would want to be aware of it.”

“What I look for when making an analysis varies,” Morril explained. “If a person has a peculiar style of writing, maybe one or two characteristics

wil tip you off. I just did one yesterday. There were several similarities, but there were several big discrepancies, which rules it out. Now this is the

same way you make an identification in fingerprints. If you have enough points, a partial print often contains twelve characteristic points and no

significant difference, you have an identification. The average print has about fifty ridge characteristics. The same thing happens if you find enough

individual handwriting characteristics in a person’s handwriting and no significant difference, you have an identification. But any one significant

difference would throw it out. You’d have to discard it. You may feel that it’s stil the same guy, but he made a goof. Now a significant difference is

one that can’t be reasonably explained.”

Zodiac might have memorized a series of just such “goofs” and used them consistently in his letters. The significant difference from his true

writing might be explained if he had trained himself to make these goofs.

“What’s so unusual about the
k
Zodiac makes?” I asked.

“That was one of the things at first we thought was consistent,” said Morril , “but Zodiac got away from it. He made it in three parts, but since then

he’s made them like you or I might make them.” If that
k
had been window dressing, then it was another indication that Zodiac’s writing—that

checkmarklike
r
, that cursive
d
always on the verge of fal ing over, and that three-stroke
k
—could be a purposeful fabrication. At times I suspected Zodiac had a confederate who wrote the actual letters.

A handwriting expert analyzed Zodiac’s writing:

“See those looped ‘d’s? That means he’s arrogant and proud and also doesn’t feel secure about himself. Misspel ing words like ‘nose’ is an

effort at disguise, an effort to make the letter seem anonymous . . . when you combine his very rushed writing, indistinct letters, variability in the

spacing, variability in the letter size, that would be an indication of a manic-depressive. In addition to that the writing slants downward at the

end. Even if he starts up by the end of the line most of the letters have fal en down, which be indicative of a depressed state. . . . Zodiac tends

to dot his ‘i’s very close to the stem . . . where the writing is beginning to fal over the ‘i’ dots are stil fairly careful y dotted. . . . He is also a very

lonely person and is very sensitive to criticism which means he might get upset if you cal ed him crazy instead of clever.”

Sunday, January 27, 1980

“What is it
about San Francisco?” lamented Herb Caen. “What is it that seems to attract the dreamers and deviants, kooks and crazies. San

Francisco seems to be the last sanctuary for the rootless in its tolerance for every form of lifestyle.” The area had been inflicted with a blight of serial

kil ers, kidnappings, urban guerril as, religious cults, and political assassinations. Charlie Manson recruited his family from Haight-Ashbury’s drug

culture and flower children. The region attracted Juan Corona (murderer of twenty-five transient laborers), John Linley Frazier (who kil ed five to halt

pol ution), and Herbert Mul in (who slew thirteen in a deadly four-month orgy to prevent a state-destroying earthquake). In the Bay Area the SLA

kidnapped Patricia Hearst and used cyanide bul ets to slay Oakland School Superintendent Marcus Foster. The New World Liberation Front, the

Zebra Kil ers, Jim Jones’s People’s Temple, Dan White, and Zodiac al cal ed the environs home.

Avery and Toschi
tried to forget Zodiac. So did I, especial y at the beginning of a new decade. We knew a little more now. In the 1970s serial

kil ers were stil a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1980s efforts to understand and profile violent repeat offenders began in earnest. On July 11,

1984, the Justice Department would propose a special unit at Quantico, Virginia, to be cal ed the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—

VICAP. FBI agents—psychologists, psychiatrists, and regular investigators—pooled their resources, their jobs to make psychological portraits of

serial rapists, child molesters, arsonists, and kil ers. Interviews with mass murderers and sexual deviants might explain what motivated them to

commit their atrocities. Ultimately VICAP, to uncover uncaught repeat murderers like Zodiac, developed verbal and mental pictures of serial kil ers.

First, they listed traits they held in common. Zodiac, a combination of hedonistic and control-oriented types, was technical y an “organized nonsocial

offender.”

“Organized kil ers are cal ed nonsocial because they elect to be social y isolated,” wrote expert Greg Fal is. “Although they are often glib and

charming they may feel nobody is quite good enough for them. They . . . are often quite clever. More self-assured than the disorganized asocial

offender, these kil ers are wil ing to travel far to find their victims.”

Monday, March 3, 1980

“Allen has a
friend I haven’t told you about before,” Lieutenant Husted of the VPD explained, “and he seems to have confided in him that he is the

Zodiac kil er and told him details of some of the murders. I’d like to put that friend, Jim, under hypnosis. This is the same man Al en met at the

Sonoma Auto Parts Store and wrote from Atascadero. Remember? Leigh was hoping that Zodiac would kil again and clear him. While Leigh and

Jim were drinking one evening, Al en al egedly confessed he was Zodiac. He offered to testify, but got cold feet. He’s afraid of Al en and his wife

has begged him not to speak with us. Eventual y, Al en did as much as fess up to a second man at the store.”

But neither witness was ever hypnotized, and like so many leads, this one was pursued no further. Leigh continued hunting in the hil s—carving

out the hearts and livers of captured squirrels and storing them in his freezer. Could the “death machine” in Zodiac’s basement have been a

reference to a freezer compartment that held the bodies of dissected chipmunks? This dismembering of birds, squirrels, and mice by the

ambidextrous chemist fit the pattern of serial kil ers who tortured and kil ed animals. He had given it a new twist—masking his dissections with an

assortment of scientific permits.

Monday, April 21, 1980

Leigh’s list of
vehicles grew. He registered a 1965 Buick sedan, a blue Skylark, #MLZ 057. And he stil had the Karmann Ghia, gray Corvair, three

special-construction trailer campers, and two sailboats. He had reportedly owned a brown Corvair in 1965 similar to the car Zodiac used during the

Fourth of July murder. However, though Leigh once owned a 1957 Ford, he may only have been glimpsed in Phil Tucker’s 1958 Ford sedan, which