Zodiac Unmasked (2 page)

commented on Zodiac as “lumbering like a bear,” “clumsy,” “not very nimble.”

Included in this book is an in-depth analysis of the two films that inspired Zodiac’s costume and M.O. and the short story that obsessed him.

Popular culture and the face of a watch may have inspired him, but Zodiac himself inspired not one, but three copycat murderers—in New York,

Val ejo, and Japan. Beginning in 1986, I set out to tel the end of Zodiac’s chil ing story—using the complete FBI file on Zodiac, confidential state

and police files and internal and intradepartmental law enforcement memos, psychological and parole officer files, psychiatrists’ sessions with the

chief suspect, lie-detector tests, never-published newspaper stories, unused reporter’s notes, and outtakes from television interviews. I have tried

to make this book as accurate an account as thirty years of research can provide.

Most importantly, in this book, for the first time, are
all
the Zodiac letters and envelopes previously unreproduced. Quoted are copycat letters and

possible Zodiac letters mailed anonymously to me. Automatic writing done under hypnosis by Starr’s sister-in-law indicates she saw Zodiac

ciphers in his hand before they appeared in the press. Starr had bragged to friends, long before there was such a person as Zodiac, that he would

hunt couples with a gun that projected a beam of light, taunt the police in letters, and cal himself Zodiac. As one detective said, “If this story is true,

then he almost has to be Zodiac.” Recorded interviews with detectives and witnesses I conducted almost thirty years ago took on new meaning as I

incorporated hundreds of facts never revealed in print before.

The long pursuit and lure of the case, its mystery, tragedy, and loss, ruined marriages, derailed careers, and demolished the health of a bril iant

reporter. Zodiac’s story began with obsession, but its ending was a study in frustration. Police were beaten back time and again. Would the most

elusive kil er in history, a cerebral, modern-day Jack the Ripper, escape them? Or would the dedicated teams of detectives and amateur sleuths al

over the world uncover the final secret of Zodiac? It was a toss-up whether or not police could ever prove that Starr, their bril iant and physical y

powerful chief suspect, was their man. Zodiac’s murders had taken place in different counties and, due to interdepartmental jealousy (Zodiac was

the biggest case of al ), each police agency withheld vital information from the others. Not only that, but sexual sadists like Zodiac (who achieve

pleasure through the pain they cause others) become amazingly proficient at concealing their identities.

We begin unmasking Zodiac on a sultry July Fourth, and conclude on another, more lethal, Fourth of July. In between we learn of murders

unsuspected, a lonely man in his basement home, and a shadowy figure who might be Zodiac’s accomplice. But it had al begun with a watch. In

that stifling room on that summer day the cops kept reminding themselves, “It’s only a watch.” But they were stil afraid. That watch was the stuff of

nightmares.

—Robert Graysmith
San Francisco July 2001

1

zodia
c

Sunday, July 4, 1971

Starr’s face was
everywhere. Across the il uminated showroom, his round face was reflected in the brass compass, duplicated in the shiny

varnished sides of the Chris Craft, reflected in the deep and highly polished floor, mirrored in the brass work around him, and copied in a hundred

polished shaft bearings. His stocky form was reproduced ful length in the floor-to-ceiling show window. Final y, the showroom closed, the holiday

sale ended, the lights were extinguished, and Robert Hal Starr departed. He lumbered toward the lot, an immense shape against the summer

night. As he went, he fished for keys to one of his many cars. Keys to cars he did not own jangled in his pocket.

At the end of the lot, Starr was a hazy blur—momentarily visible in the flash of the Volvo’s interior lights. He slid behind the wheel, gunned the

engine, and expertly merged into freeway traffic. Soon, he reached Val ejo, a town typical of many other smal California towns baking in a sultry

summer night. Black skeletal derricks flashed by; battleships and three-tiered warehouses crouched in silhouette. Mare Island loomed as a

shadowy mass across the straits, and sailboats fleeted as oily smudges on San Pablo Bay. Skyrockets flared briefly above. The staccato
pop-pop-

pop
of firecrackers was like gunfire. The smel of gunpowder was in the air. San Francisco towered thirty miles away, Oakland less than twenty, and

to the north the fertile Wine Country stretched through sun-drenched Napa and Sonoma counties.

The town was ideal for a man with so many vehicles. Interstate 80, the main coast-to-coast route of the West, neatly bisected the suburb.

California 29 and 37 and Interstate 680 twisted veinlike to its heart. Val ejo occupied a strategic position between San Francisco and the capital—

right where the river snaked down from Sacramento to greet the Bay Area—right where salt water embraced fresh. Here, a deepwater channel for

seagoing traffic linked the Sacramento and San Joaquin River ports. Surrounded by water on three sides, Val ejo was a water town—home for

Zodiac, a water-obsessed kil er—a sailor of the knife, a mariner of the gun and of the rope.

Starr braked at a chestnut-colored stucco two-story house slouching on the east side of Fresno Street. Spanish tiles traced the rooflines of the

low-pitched dwel ing. At the rear, a modest chimney peeked over a field of weathered shingles. Left of the entrance stairs, a portico shrouded a

conventional stile-and-rail door. From a bril iantly lit picture window, a woman’s lean shadow stretched to grotesque lengths across the sunburned

lawn. Bernice glowered at her son. Frequently, he stood for hours at the same Venetian window, motionless as if at the length of a chain.

Years ago he had been a trim athlete, a potential Olympic swimmer, a former lifeguard at “The Plunge.” Now weight had swol en a face once lean

and sun-bronzed from innumerable days of sailing and swimming. His light-colored hair, reddish in the summer, had thinned perceptibly, and a

noticeable paunch disrupted the line of his athletic torso. Bernice considered his increasing girth a dreadful failing. Soon he would be nearly

unrecognizable. She was a tal woman, almost as tal as her son. Starr’s health, splendidly robust in his youth, had perceptibly faltered. His hunter’s

eyes had dimmed. His flat feet and injured leg made any activity but swimming and trampolining difficult. Aimless hours spent guzzling Coors beer

from quart jars had taken their tol . He frequently parked in secluded rural areas, legs curled against the dash, until he cramped and could sit and

drink and watch no more. His violent outbursts terrified Bernice. Squabbles between mother and son had always been fierce, but since his father’s

death last March their dinner table skirmishes had escalated. She often observed her son at the open trunk of his car, peering intently inside. Little

eyes looked back. “Damn chipmunks,” she thought.

In his spare time Starr, a crafty and silent Sagittarius, stalked chipmunks with a bow and arrow. Sometimes he used a .22, and at other times set

traps. The tiny squirrels he snared alive were popular with the neighborhood children. On weekends kids circled him gleeful y, flags flying behind

their two-wheelers. Disregarding their parents’ warnings, the offspring flocked to see the “Chipmunk Man.” They adored feeding peanuts to his

pets.

Now Starr slammed the trunk lid shut and strode to the northeast side of the house. He trudged down a driveway to where a white Mercedes

glowed luminously in the dusk. The darker silhouette of a detached two-door garage skulked further back. A black shroud of ivy cascaded over the

fence.

A creak at the side screen door alerted Bernice, and she hastened to fix supper. Wriggling chipmunks squealed, clinging to Starr’s broad

swimmer’s shoulders. Giving his mother’s back a disdainful look, and stil wearing his living-fur wrap, Starr dropped down into his cel ar room.

Bernice was most fearful of what her son stored in that basement. In that dreary tomb ticked something he had once cal ed his “death machine.”

It had been
almost two years since Zodiac had murdered a taxi driver in San Francisco—longer than that since he shot and stabbed the others.

But in al that time Homicide Inspectors Bil Armstrong and Dave Toschi (pronounced Tahs-kee) had not forgotten the elusive Zodiac. Twenty-nine

minutes away from the turbulent household on Fresno Street, past the lonely Emeryvil e mudflats and just across the Bay Bridge, they continued to

labor at the Hal of Justice. On the street below, the red-neon “OK Bail Bonds” sign flashed twenty-four hours a day. “Zodiac actual y set out a

chal enge,” Inspector Toschi recal ed. “‘I’m better than you,’ he taunted us. ‘Smarter than you,’ he said. ‘Catch me if you can.’ We intended to do just

that.”

As Zodiac terrorized the Bay Area, inundating local papers with his chil ing letters with bizarre references to popular culture, he invariably belittled

the SFPD for failing to halt his string of murders. Zodiac had made it personal, tantalizing them with masterly cryptograms—some so unbreakable

that they baffled the brightest code-breakers the FBI, NSA, and CIA could field. Al but two homicides attributed to him involved couples—young

students kil ed in or around their cars on weekends. He hinted at unknown murders, past and present.

“Zodiac struck out in savage rage,” speculated one psychiatrist, “against those who flaunted an intimacy he craved with an intensity only the

deeply frustrated human can imagine.” Sex was never a factor in his motiveless attacks. Sadism was; the more pain he caused, the more pleasure

he felt. Directly after an attack, Zodiac was compel ed to gloat, pitilessly writing or phoning his victims’ families, breathing silently into their ears—a

sound like the rushing of wind. He used a different weapon each time, and when possible took something from each victim—car keys, a bloody

shirt, a wal et—trophies. He stil had them somewhere. Now if only Toschi and Armstrong could find them.

Zodiac’s rampages occurred at dusk (when he sometimes wore a grisly executioner’s costume) or at night under a new or ful moon. Bodies of

water and places named after water drew him as metal to a lode-stone. Perhaps Zodiac was a sailor, swimmer, or boatman. Whatever he was, he

knew Val ejo intimately—its back lanes and pebbled shortcuts, its black country roads and echoing quarries. Toschi was convinced he was a

longtime resident of Water Town.

And so Toschi and Armstrong developed new facts and shuffled yel ow sheets under the burning fluorescent lights of their fourth-floor office. They

watched the minute hand of the big clock jerking intermittently, like a barely beating heart. At times it hardly seemed to move. Toschi leaned back in

his swivel chair, its springs complaining loudly. “What we need now,” said Toschi, looking across at Bil Armstrong, “is a good snitch.” Between the

ticks of that clock something happened—the detectives were about to come up with their most important lead yet in Zodiac’s seemingly endless

reign of terror. It would arrive by letter, the kil er’s chosen medium.

Thursday, July 15, 1971

Manhattan Beach is
northernmost in a succession of al -American beach towns running south from LAX to the Palos Verde Peninsula. It roosts

some twenty miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles. Scores of wealthy white Angelenos inhabit the rows of pastel cottages hugging its shores.

The town’s main drag is Highland, and at 2:50 P.M. bronzed surfers were catching the best waves of the day as an unmarked cop car hurtled south

along the broad avenue. Detective Richard Amos and his partner, Art Langstaff, were fol owing up a tip that had originated in Pomona. Two

Torrance men had information about Zodiac.

The skies were smog-tinged, the air muggy, but traffic was light. Amos sped east on Artesia, then spun onto lengthy Hawthorne Boulevard. A red

light halted them. Impatiently, Amos drummed the wheel. The car idled, pumping exhaust onto the shimmering asphalt. He considered Zodiac—

uncaught and insubstantial as vapor. Years of effort, and yet no one seemed able to lay a hand on him.

Both informants were waiting in front of Science Dynamics, a computer bookkeeping business, as Amos pul ed to a stop. Santo Paul Panzarel a,

“Sandy” to his friends, was a Lawndale resident and owner of the company. His employee and col ege roommate, Donald Lee Cheney, was the

more anxious of the pair. The South Bay investigators had no sooner climbed out than Panzarel a and Cheney got to the point—they knew the

identity of Zodiac.

Out of the stifling heat, they named their man—Robert Hal Starr. They had known Starr almost ten years, since 1962, known him while attending

Cal Poly in Pomona with Starr’s brother, Ron. Cheney had last seen Starr on a day as cold as today was blistering. Though Panzarel a had made

the cal that had summoned them, it was Cheney who told them the story.

“It was New Year’s Day afternoon,” Cheney said. “I was living in the Bay Area then—I drove to Starr’s home on Fresno Street in Val ejo. I’m

positive my visit was not later than January 1, 1969, because I moved to Southern California on that day. I remember specifical y it was the New

Year’s after Starr was fired from Val ey Springs School up near the Mokelumne River. That had been in the early summer. As to Starr’s reason for

leaving Val ey Springs, he hemmed and hawed more than he said anything, and gave me some kind of lame excuse about it, but I never heard the