Zodiac Unmasked (22 page)

The detectives adjourned to the Holiday Inn Coffee Shop at 3345 Santa Rosa Avenue, about six blocks away, to have lunch and discuss the

exploration. It was hot. Toschi could tel Dagitz was pretty depressed. The fingerprint expert put down his cup and said, “The prints on Stine’s cab, if

they were those of Zodiac, do not match Al en’s. It’s a positive no.”

“But,” said Armstrong, “there were so many fingerprints in this public cab, that it is unknown that if, in fact, we have Zodiac’s fingerprints at the

crime scene or not. In some of the letters Zodiac wrote us, he bragged that he put airplane glue on fingers to obliterate any fingerprints.”

“So they have a latent print,” Mulanax later told me. “It’s my own personal opinion there’s a lot of doubt this could be a Zodiac print. You dust a cab

and you’re going to lift some latents off it. Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the guy who did the job. On the same thing, up in Napa, they have a partial

palm print, but how many people use a public phone booth?”

“When we drove back from Santa Rosa,” said Toschi, “even though we were told we had to have a little bit more, we then went up to see

Sherwood Morril . The refinery where Leigh had worked was not too far from Val ejo. Every time I pass it going up to Sacramento, I’d see the darn

thing and it would bring back memories. I would think, ‘I wish we could close this case.’ This is what was on my mind constantly. Constantly. And I

felt we did.”

In Sacramento a heavyset, scholarly man in a three-piece pinstripe suit greeted them. Morril took the two pages Al en had printed. He studied

them through his thick glasses. That night he would put them under his twin microscope. “Morril , to be honest, shot us down,” Toschi recal ed, “He

phoned and said, ‘Sorry, Dave. There’s just no match. I’m sure you have the right suspect and I’m sure you’re on the right track.’ Sherwood

indicated that the handprinting was
similar,
but not the Zodiac kil er’s.”

“The thing that impressed me about the handwriting,” Detective Lynch recal ed, “every time I’d take a handwriting sample to Morril , he’d just sit at

his desk and I’d hand it to him and ‘No good.’ He did that I don’t know how many times. Al I know is that when Zodiac was writing these letters, he

was either drinking, smoking pot, or taking some kind of narcotics because it just seemed to me that as he wrote his handwriting would just

deteriorate.”

Terry Pascoe, a Department of Justice Document Examiner, reported to Armstrong. “If the writing had been a product of a mental state,” he said,

“the writing of a subject can be different when in a different mental state, or it could be a case of an intentional deception. With the talents that [Al en]

has, writing with both hands, this could be done.” He later told Detective George Bawart that “a person of high intel igence could study the methods

used to examine handwriting and fool a documents examiner.” Afterward Bawart reported, “Our handwriting expert, Cunningham, confirms that if

Al en had the ability to write with his left hand, this could explain the inability to match the handprinting to Arthur Leigh Al en.”

Armstrong listened intently to Pascoe. “Do not eliminate this subject because of handwriting,” he warned. But Morril , who had examined al the

known writings of Zodiac, told Toschi and Armstrong that he did not feel a mental state would change a person’s handwriting. He was a rival of the

younger Pascoe and the two often differed on opinions. Armstrong was never able to reconcile this problem. It was not unprecedented. Peter

Kurten, the Dusseldorf Ripper, wrote letters reproduced in the same newspaper his wife read each morning. She never recognized the writing as

her husband’s. Kurten’s altered mental state while composing the notes made him a completely different person with a different handwriting. I

wondered if Leigh had other personalities. “By the way, Robert,” Morril confided to me later (November 17, 1980), “I do now note that the printing

that Al en is doing is contrived and not natural to his own.”

Toschi had thought they were real y going to find something. “As soon as we started getting information from the sister-in-law and the brother,” he

said, “I felt Al en was the one. It al sounded just perfect, but we just couldn’t find a way to prove that Leigh Al en was the Zodiac kil er. We had done

everything but stand Arthur Leigh Al en on his head. We found no physical evidence inside the trailer linking Al en to the Zodiac case. Everything he

had, according to his brother and sister-in-law, was in that trailer. We checked the Department of Motor Vehicles. He might have some other

trailers and vehicles not registered. A very shrewd, very wily individual.”

The mistake lay in failing to obtain search warrants for Val ejo (in spite of Al en’s ailing elderly mother)
and
Santa Rosa. The detectives might

have had the misfortune to search the wrong place. From the inception of the murders, Zodiac had used the multiple-county strategy, striking in

unincorporated sections of Val ejo or areas of confused jurisdiction between sheriffs’ and police departments. Benicia police actual y secured the

Lake Herman Road crime scene until Val ejo sheriff’s men could be brought in. And of course the VPD wanted part of the action. And so did the

Oakland P.D.

If Arthur Leigh Al en was Zodiac, then after the trailer search, he had only to speed to his Val ejo basement and destroy al physical evidence

connecting him with the crimes. And what of Al en’s other trailers? He might have caches in every county Zodiac kil ed in. “We were always

wondering,” said Toschi, “is there another vehicle nearby? We were just wondering if we could find the right one. The right piece of evidence that

says, ‘That’s him. Gotcha.’”

“When Armstrong met with Cheney and I in another meeting,” said Panzarel a, “that’s where I learned about the trailer search. Armstrong’s tel ing

us about dead animals, al the vibrators Leigh had for having sex with himself, dildos and al that stuff. But they stil couldn’t get anything on him. The

more I think, over the course of a lifetime, when I think of the most interesting people I’ve met in my life, Leigh certainly was one of them. And the

more we know about him, the more we know he was certainly capable of doing something like that. You’ve got a smart guy who decides his

contribution to the culture is he’s going murder people in unincorporated areas mostly manned by smal police departments. You know it’s pretty

easy to get away with that if you’re smart. It’s al circumstantial, but who else could it be but Leigh Al en. It frightens me, I’l tel you that.”

And thus the best Zodiac suspect of al had passed every one of the detectives’ tests and they went on to other suspects. So far Zodiac had sent

three pieces of the gray-and-white-striped sports shirt he had torn from Stine after shooting him. Toschi estimated, “That leaves about 120 square

inches of the shirt stil unaccounted for.” At the
San Francisco Chronicle,
we al awaited the next scrap of bloodied fabric and the horrifying

message wrapped around it.

9

policeman and sailor

Monday, November 13, 1972

But that blood-soaked
letter did not arrive. Zodiac had apparently disappeared. But on the Southern California front, Zodiac’s shadow was not

only present, but looming larger. After sleuthing hundreds of hours, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department believed they had final y linked

Zodiac to the deaths of Domingos and Edwards.

In July 1971, when Detective Baker of the Major Crimes Unit sent out a statewide Teletype, he’d asked for similars. “Both Bil Armstrong and Mel

Nicolai gave me a cal ,” he told me, “and expressed their suspicions that our case may be linked to Zodiac. Just on the basis of the description I

offered them there was a good possibility Zodiac was responsible. I ended up traveling and talking to most of the investigators in most of the

jurisdictions where the crimes were attributable to Zodiac. And just reviewing their cases and talking with them and they in turn reviewing what I had.

“Mel Nicolai, who I judged to be one of the single most knowledgeable people on al of the cases, told me he felt our case may wel be the work of

Zodiac. If it isn’t, it amazes me how someone could commit murders like those of Linda and Robert and not be heard from before or since. I’ve

worked on other serial-kil ing cases and the psychopathology involved in our case is no different. When the Lake Berryessa circumstances were

described to me, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I’m sure you can discern the striking similarities.”

Just as in the vicious Berryessa attack, the victims were students, a young couple reclining on a blanket by an isolated shore. A sexual sadist

tends to target members of his own race, often chooses victims with specific occupations or similar characteristics. His apparently random victims

are chosen because they meet some psychological or symbolic need within the murderer’s system of delusions. A sadistic sociopathic kil er like

Zodiac, say FBI profiles, “selects his victims for the purpose of venting certain deeply rooted sexual and sadistic urges, such as the need to mutilate

parts of the victim’s body to achieve sexual satisfaction.” Once he is captured, the kil er’s detailed and grisly confession itself is a brutal assault

thrown in the face of the police.

What if Zodiac was choosing victims who were students like himself? Robert and Linda were targeted because their car on the road above had

attracted a roving kil er who fol owed their path down to the water. In both the Napa and Santa Barbara slayings the attacker brought along a knife, a

gun, and precut lengths of clothesline. And why tie victims he intended to kil ? So he could torture? A serial kil er’s pleasure springs from his ability

to intimidate, command, and exert power over his captive. Terror and the power it brings are a sexual sadist’s trademarks because he feels terror

and is powerless. Such a man as Zodiac kil s those, young couples, who share an intimacy he is incapable of sharing. Gratified by the sight of a

cowering, whimpering hostage, he is al owed by the rope to prolong the kil ing as long as he wishes.

“Both victims were hit in the back (relatively close grouping considering they were running away when hit),” said Baker. That linked Baker’s case

to Zodiac’s Lake Herman Road shootings, also accomplished with accuracy and tight grouping. Zodiac had shot a fleeing woman with deadly

accuracy while racing behind. He had done it in the pitch blackness of a country road.

“On the floor of the shack were two empty fifty-round boxes for Winchester Western Super-X .22 long-rifle cartridges,” said Baker. “Spent casings

had been found along Robert and Linda’s flight path. They had six lands and grooves with a right-hand twist.” Zodiac had used Super X copper-

coated .22 long-rifle ammo in the Lake Herman murders. The double murders had been committed on December 20, 1968, two days after Al en’s

thirty-fifth birthday. The recovered slugs, in good condition, also had a right-hand (clockwise) twist with six lands and six grooves—a “six and six.”

“Stock numbers on the boxes found in the shack could be traced,” Baker explained. “The ammunition lot number was TL 21 or TL 22. Our W-W

ammo was probably purchased at Vandenberg Air Force Base Exchange based on the fact that it was the nearest source for that lot number. The

only store anywhere within a hundred miles that sold it was VAFB. It was determined to a degree of probability to have been purchased there.

However, it could be that the same ammo lot number (metal urgical-common origin/batch) was available at other bases as wel . The usual clerk at

the base exchange at the time was a man named Summers or Sumner. The SAC unit base near Lompoc is less than an hour’s drive from the

crime scene. That was just one more thing that told us that there might be a connection to Zodiac—I was also considering March AFB or Travis

AFB.

“It’s not so much hard evidence that links Zodiac with the double murder here, but the pattern of the slaying. We don’t have any corroborating

fingerprints, bul et or casing marks, or eyewitness observations. If there had been any shoe prints, anything identifiable, I would have jumped on that

just for the possibility because I was aware of the Lake Berryessa case.” The shoes Zodiac wore at Lake Berryessa in September 1969 were sold

through base exchanges only. “Military shoe prints would have been significant. And if there had been anything, I certainly would have remembered

that. Whether or not the Riverside case was a Zodiac kil ing, our case preceded the others by at least three years, far earlier than would be

expected. There appears to be a high degree of probability that this subject is responsible for the double murder in our county. Several significant

similarities between our case and the others, as wel as other evidence, al tend to connect Zodiac with this crime.

“When I last talked to Bil Armstrong at a CHIA conference in San Francisco, he told me he’d never think of the Zodiac murders without including

our case as one of them. I never had contact with Dave Toschi after our initial meeting at their office in 1972. I’ve felt very strongly about it ever

since. It’s not something that goes away over time. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you.” Baker was the kind of cop who would never give up.

Outside of Jack the Ripper, there had never been a greater uncaught or more elusive monster than Zodiac.

“The very real possibility of a connection of our case to the core Zodiac case,” said Baker, “is the impetus that has brought me to believe that my

decades-old suspicion of our case being the work of Zodiac was not misguided. Not to overstate the role of the Domingos/Edwards case in the