The Most Dangerous Animal of All (21 page)

Cecelia Shepard was beautiful, with blond hair that flipped up at the ends and a friendly smile that reflected her sunny personality.

Like Judy.

It is possible that Van saw her at the college and followed her there, or maybe he was already at the lake when he saw Cecelia, and she made his heart race. Either way, he was prepared.

Cecelia and Bryan chose a spot by a large tree near the western shore of the lake, at Twin Oak Ridge. Bryan spread a blanket on the ground, and they lay down to admire the cloudless blue sky. A light breeze blew across their bodies as they laughed and talked about what had happened in their lives since they had last seen each other.

My father, hidden behind a nearby tree, watched jealously, his fury mounting with each giggle that floated toward him on the breeze.

He had to get closer, and slithered as quietly as he could to another tree.

According to police reports, Bryan heard the crunch of leaves. “Did you hear that?” he asked Cecelia, looking around for the source of the noise. “Do you see anything?”

“Look, over there. There’s a man behind that tree,” Cecelia said, pointing, becoming a little nervous at the idea of a man spying on them.

“What is he doing?” Bryan asked, unable to see him from his place on the blanket.

“I can’t tell,” Cecelia said, watching as the man ducked behind another tree.

Bryan jumped up when Cecelia suddenly cried, “Oh, my God. He has a gun!”

In his previous murders, Van had enjoyed the element of surprise. This time, his prey saw him coming.

Petrified, the friends froze as Van, wearing a black hooded mask that covered his head and shoulders, trained his gun on them.

He informed them that he needed their car keys and money to get to Mexico. He said that he had escaped from Deer Lodge State Prison, in Montana, where he had killed a guard. His words had the desired effect.

Bryan moved closer to Cecelia, trying to keep Van talking while he figured out a way to get away from the masked man. He noticed a white symbol on the front of the part of the executioner’s hood that covered Van’s stomach. It looked like a circle with a symmetrical cross inside. Sunglasses were clipped over the cut-out eyes of the mask, and Bryan glimpsed brown hair through the holes in the mask.

The other thing he noticed worried him even more than the symbol: a long-bladed knife tucked into a sheath on his belt and a piece of what looked like rope hanging from his pocket.

“Is that gun loaded?” he asked.

Van removed the magazine and showed Bryan a bullet, taunting his victims.

He then threw a piece of clothesline at Cecelia and ordered her to bind Bryan’s hands behind his back. Cecelia, her hands shaking, complied with the demand. She took the wallet out of Bryan’s pocket and threw it at Van, hoping that if he got money he would not hurt them.

Her ploy didn’t work. Their money was the last thing Van wanted.

Van bound Cecelia’s wrists, seeming to Bryan to become nervous when he touched her. Van retied Bryan’s to make sure he couldn’t free himself. Then he tied them both together at the ankles.

“Lay on your stomachs,” he demanded, pulling out his knife. “I’m going to have to stab you.”

“Stab me first,” Bryan begged. “I can’t stand to see her stabbed first.”

Without another word, Van plunged the knife into Bryan’s back, over and over, until he was sure his victim was incapacitated. Although the pain was intense, Bryan played dead, praying his attacker would stop.

It worked.

Van turned his attention to the girl, but it wasn’t Cecelia he saw.

It was Judy, and he began viciously stabbing her in the back, frenzied now, not methodical, as he had been with Bryan, the large blade ripping through her again and again.

Cecelia, trying to shield herself, turned over, and Van stabbed her several more times in her stomach, in the chest.

And then lower.

His rage finally sated, Van turned and walked away, leaving them for dead.

He did not take anything; the car keys, the wallet—nothing.

He simply took out a black marker and drew his symbol on the door of Bryan’s white Volkswagen. Underneath it he wrote:

Vallejo

12-20-68

7-4-69

Sept 27-69-6:30

by knife

When he was sure his attacker was gone, Bryan tried to crawl to the road. He and Cecelia screamed for help. A man named Ronald Fong heard their cries and called Archie and Elizabeth White, owners of a boat repair shop at the Rancho Monticello Resort, nearby.

“I just saw a man and woman lying on the beach south of the resort, covered in blood. They said they had been stabbed and robbed,” Ronald told Archie.

Elizabeth called park headquarters and agreed to meet the park ranger, Sergeant William White, at the beach. Together with Ronald, they boarded a ski boat and hurried to help Bryan and Cecelia. By this time, an hour had passed since the pair had been brutalized.

When they arrived at the scene, they found Cecelia crouched on her elbows and knees, rocking back and forth as if the constant motion could ward off the pain. The sweater dress she was wearing was soaked in blood. Elizabeth tried to calm her down, to make her more comfortable, but nothing worked.

“He was a man with a hood. His face was covered. He was wearing black pants. It hurts. It hurts,” Cecelia cried.

“Did he rape you?” Elizabeth asked.

“No. And he didn’t take anything,” Cecelia said, the conversation helping her to regain her composure a bit.

“He was wearing glasses with dark clip-on glasses over his hood. He had a black pistol,” Cecelia said before the pain became too much to bear.

It wasn’t long before ranger Dennis Land found Bryan close to the nearby road. He carefully put the injured young man in his pickup truck and radioed for police and an ambulance. He drove to the beach where the others had gathered.

Sergeant White tried to talk with them about what had happened. Bryan was more coherent than Cecelia and told him how they had been tied up and stabbed. Noticing a lot of blood near Cecelia’s groin area, the ranger stopped asking questions, because she seemed to be going into shock.

The sound of sirens indicated that help was nearby, and the rangers waved the paramedics in.

Cecelia and Bryan were taken to Queen of the Valley Hospital and placed in intensive care. The next morning, Cecelia underwent emergency surgery and lived one more day before succumbing to the numerous stab wounds she had endured.

Bryan survived, and he described the killer for police: twenty to thirty years old, pleated, old-fashioned pants, sloppy dresser, black ceremonial hood that came down to his waist, symbol on front of the hood, stomach hanging over trousers, not too intelligent but not illiterate, voice even-toned with a slight drawl that was not southern.

Van would have been disappointed to hear that description, because he took pride in the way he dressed and in the way he spoke. But he had disguised himself well for this event.

Just over an hour after his attack, Van pulled into a car wash located at 1231 Main Street in Napa. He plugged coins into the pay phone and dialed the operator, who put him through to the Napa Police Department.

“I want to report a murder—no, a double murder,” he told the switchboard operator calmly. “They are two miles north of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.”

“Where are you calling from?” the operator said.

“I’m the one that did it,” Van replied before letting the receiver slip from his hand to dangle there as he walked away. He had learned his lesson the last time and would not risk drawing attention again by hanging up so the operator could call back.

And again he was wrong. Only Cecelia would die, but for Van, that was all that really mattered anyway.

32

My father was beginning to unravel. As often happens with serial killers, the stress in his life, coupled with his thirst for revenge and his narcissistic tendencies, was starting to get the better of him.

By October 1969 Edith’s swollen belly was a constant reminder that there would soon be another screaming child in his home, and Van could not take the demands of being a husband and father much longer. While Edith began busily preparing for the birth of her baby, Van began plotting ways to rid himself of his children.

His need to kill was escalating.

It had been more than two years between the murder of Cheri Jo Bates and the Jensen/Faraday attack, almost seven months between Jensen/Faraday and Ferrin/Mageau, and only two months and three weeks between Ferrin/Mageau and Shepard/Hartnell.

On October 11, just two weeks after he’d attacked Cecelia and Bryan and three days after Judy’s twenty-second birthday, Van hailed a cab two blocks from his apartment in the five-story building on Bush Street.

Paul Stine, the driver of Yellow Cab number 912, was working nights to support his wife, Claudia, and to help with the cost of his grad-school tuition. At twenty-nine, Paul was on track to graduate from San Francisco State College with a doctorate in English in December. The years he had worked nights and sacrificed to pay for school would soon pay off. His dream of becoming a college professor was finally within reach.

Paul had clocked in at 8:45 p.m. and had taken his first fare from Pier 64 to the air terminal. At 9:45 p.m., he was on his way to pick up his next dispatch at 500 Ninth Avenue when he saw a man dressed in dark trousers and a parka flagging him down. It is possible that Paul knew Van, which would explain why the cabbie stopped to pick him up on the way to get another fare and allowed him to sit in the front seat. But the moment Paul pulled over on the corner of Mason and Geary Streets, his destiny was sealed.

Van asked Paul to drop him off near the Presidio, a military installation that overlooked the city and its surrounding areas. Near the end of the nineteenth century, reforestation of the installation had begun in an effort to beautify the post, which had been opened to civilians. Its national cemetery, the largest on the West Coast, boasted many decorated officers, and its collection of military artifacts attracted visitors from around the country, including Van. He knew the area well.

Near the corner of Cherry and Washington Streets, in Presidio Heights, an affluent enclave that borders the Presidio, Van pulled out the nine-millimeter semi-automatic he was hiding beneath his jacket and told Paul to stop the car. The cabbie did as his passenger demanded, pulling over close to a stop sign.

Van put the gun up to the right side of Paul’s face and shot him at point-blank range right above the ear.

Paul slumped over the steering wheel.

Van pulled him across his lap. Three teenagers in a home across the street at 3899 Washington Street watched through a second-story window as Van went through Paul’s pockets and took out his wallet. One of the teens called police while the other two observed Van leaning over his victim, wiping the dashboard and interior of the car with a handkerchief.

The teenagers couldn’t see that Van was also tearing a bloodstained section of Paul’s striped shirt from his body.

They stared in horror as he got out and wiped his fingerprints off on the outsides of the passenger and driver’s-side doors.

Without even looking around to see if anyone was watching, Van casually began walking north on Cherry Street toward the Presidio. He turned east on Jackson Street and then north on Maple.

Ambulance number 82 responded, but there was nothing paramedics could do.

Paul Stine was dead.

Officers on the scene spoke with the teenagers, whose responses were somewhat jumbled because they were in shock. They did, however, give police a description of their suspect: white male, early forties, reddish-blond hair, crew cut, glasses, heavyset, dark brown trousers, dark parka, dark shoes.

“Suspect should have many bloodstains on his person and clothing,” the dispatcher repeated over the airwaves. “Suspect may also be in possession of the keys to the Yellow Cab. Probably has wallet belonging to the victim. Suspect is armed with a gun. Last seen walking north on Cherry Street from Washington Street.”

In a crucial miscommunication, the dispatcher also said, “Negro male.”

Patrolman Donald Fouke and his partner, Officer Eric Zelms, were searching for the black suspect when they saw a white man walking east on Jackson Street. The man turned north onto Maple and headed toward Julius Kahn Playground, in the Presidio. Fouke would later state that the subject did not appear to be in any hurry. They reported that they did not stop him.

It was a few minutes before the correction crackled through police radios. “We now have further information: a Caucasian.”

In those few minutes, Van had disappeared.

My father couldn’t wait to gloat. In a letter to the
San Francisco Chronicle
postmarked October 13, he wrote:

This is the Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington St + Maple St last night, to prove this here is a blood stained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in the north bay area.

The S.F. Police could have caught me last might if they had searched the park properly instead of holding road races with their motor cicles seeing who could make the most noise. The car drivers should have just parked their cars + sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover.

School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. just shoot out the front tire + then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.

The threat caused panic among the parents of schoolchildren in San Francisco, but police did not pick up on the subtle clue my father had embedded in the message, which only he could have understood. Van had met my mother when she came bouncing off a bus eight years earlier.

Enclosed with the letter was a piece of Stine’s bloodied shirt that Van had ripped from the dead man’s body.

Paul’s brother, Joe Stine, was infuriated by the murder of his brother and the arrogance of his killer. When interviewed by the
Chronicle
, he stated, in an October 23, 1969, article, that “Zodiac has to be sick, a maniac. I hope that by offering myself as a target, I can bring him out. I work at Richfield service station at 706 Sutter Street in Modesto near Rouse Street. I start work at 7:00 a.m. I go to lunch at Walk-In Chicken in a shopping center two blocks away, riding a bicycle along Sutter Street and leaving the station at noon each day.