Zodiac Unmasked (3 page)

straight story. I helped him move back to Fresno Street. On New Year’s Day I came over to his house because my wife and I had been arguing and I

just had to get out of the house.

“We had gone to his apartment—at this time it was a one-car garage that had been converted into a room. You didn’t step down, the basement

lair came later. You just walked in at ground level. It had three exterior wal s—a window in the front, a window in the side, a smal window in the

back. There was a bathroom at the rear which had a window which let some light in there. The other part of the house was fairly wel isolated from

that room. I don’t remember ever hearing activity unless the mother was cooking. It was early afternoon.”

Starr read a lot of science fiction. On the table that day lay the August 1967
Fact and Amazing Science Fiction
open to Jack Vance’s 15,000-

word story, “The Man from Zodiac.” On their last hunting trip Starr had talked about science fiction with Cheney. On several previous occasions he

and Cheney had gone hiking and hunting in the woods northeast of San Francisco. In the twilight, rifles lowered, Starr had shared long, sometimes

unsettling, discourses with him—talks about death. He was a huge silhouette in the dark, and his eyes glittered in the firelight as he expounded

bizarre theories. “With Starr,” said Cheney, “you just get into conversations about ‘What if this?’ and ‘What if that?’ He had a way about him.”

On their final hunting trip Starr had abruptly changed the subject from science fiction to something total y unrelated. He first mentioned hunting,

then guided the conversation to an adventure story he had read in the eleventh grade—“The Most Dangerous Game.” Richard Connel ’s taut,

classic tale concerned the hunting of men in a forest with bows and arrows and guns.

“Have you ever thought of hunting people?” said Starr.

“What?” said Cheney. Cheney recal ed other weird conversations with his friend before, and took this one in stride. He was wel acquainted with

Starr’s way of drawing people into his own interior fantasy world.

“It would be great sport to hunt people,” Starr elaborated in the night, using personalized expressions such as “If I did this” or “If I did that . . .” At

times he cast his remarks in the form of a novel he intended to write someday. He was a powerful man, gesticulating in the dark.

“Beneath that fat,” said Cheney, “was steel.”

That day Starr’s eyes strayed to the unique watch he had gotten on his birthday only days before. “He showed me the watch first,” Cheney told the

detectives. “I remember the unusual logo symbol just above the pinion in the dial. When he showed the watch to me, it was pretty much like he

wanted an opinion about the quality of the watch. ‘I don’t think this is a very good watch,’ he said. ‘Wel , it’s a fine Swiss watch,’ I told him. ‘That’s a

quality watch.’”

Starr began talking about his career. “It’s time to look for a new job,” he said. “I’m thinking about becoming a private eye, a private investigator

like ‘Mike Hammer.’ That would be fun and interesting. I’m looking for something I can do on my own without having to be hired.”

Cheney thought this was because he was having problems getting hired. “You don’t real y have the training,” said Cheney. “And you real y don’t

have a base of people who know who you are that you can get business from.” Cheney was not so much amazed at Starr’s idea, but honestly

concerned that his frend was il -equipped for such a job. Starr seemed to read his thoughts.

“Wel , maybe I can create my own business by being a criminal,” said Starr, “And if I was, here’s what I’d do.”

Starr suggested he might go to a lovers’ lane area to seek out victims at night—attach a flashlight to a gun barrel and shoot them. “I would use the

light as an aiming device,” he said, “enabling me to walk up and gun down people in total darkness. As the shootings would be without motive,

imagine how difficult such murders would be for the police to solve. They would never catch you. You could then send confusing letters to the

police”—he might have said “authorities,” Cheney amended in an aside to Amos and Langstaff—“letters to harass and lead them astray.

“And I would sign them ‘Zodiac.’”

“‘Zodiac,’” said Cheney. “Why that? Why not something else? That’s stupid.” Cheney paused and said to the investigators, “I might have used the

phrase ‘childish.’ I don’t remember exactly. Whichever word I spoke, it had a remarkable effect on him. He became emotional, very emotional, and I

was sorry I had said anything at al .”

“I don’t care what you think,” Starr had snapped. “I’ve thought about it a long time. I like the name ‘Zodiac’ and that’s the name I’m going to use.

Yes, I would cal myself ‘Zodiac.’”

As Starr queried him about methods to disguise his handwriting and makeup to disguise himself, Cheney’s eyes roved over Starr’s room—to the

disheveled piles of papers and maps, and the rows of books on aviation and sailing lining the wal s, the stacks of
Mad
magazine. In the shadowy

room, among the clutter, he observed Starr’s Ruger single-six and Harrington Richards long-barrel. “The Harrington Richards was kind of old and

battered and had the nine-shot cylinder,” he recal ed. “That was his arsenal as far as I knew, though he did come up with a rifle for deer hunting from

somewhere, that and a pair of .22-caliber revolvers.”

On December 20, 1968, twelve days earlier, Zodiac had used a .22-caliber semiautomatic J. C. Higgins Model 80 to murder two teenagers out

on Val ejo’s lonely Lake Herman Road. These were his first known Northern California murders. The kil er utilized .22-caliber Super X copper-

coated long-rifle Winchester Western ammo—the same brand used in double murders south of Lompoc in 1963. “Earlier in the day,” added

Cheney, “he took me out Lake Herman Road and pointed out a roadside turnout. He didn’t signify its importance, but I think that’s where the two

kids had recently been kil ed.”

Starr discussed shooting the tire off a school bus and picking off “the little darlings.” He would shoot them as “they came bounding out” of the bus.

Cheney doubted his friend would actual y be doing these things. “It was like we were talking about a plot for a book or something in that order,” he

told the detectives. “It was not quite as if we were talking about real events. He kind of slipped in and out of the present. We were having that kind of

conversation. It gave me the shivers a little bit. Even then. That was the last time I ever saw him. I knew it was in my mind that I wasn’t going to see

him again.”

When Cheney got home that night, he told his wife, Ann, his friend was “acting strange.” “I moved quite shortly after that,” Cheney concluded. “I

had the opportunity for a job in Los Angeles. It didn’t have to do with him. It had to do with me finding work.”

There was silence. His words seemed to the detectives to be reasonable enough, the kind of things an honest man might say. The afternoon had

waned. The detectives had spent over an hour with the men. Both Cheney and Panzarel a cautioned Amos and Langstaff as they left. “He is a very

intel igent man, but also a very impatient person. We think he carries a weapon at al times.”

Returning to their headquarters on 15th Street, the detectives asked Criminal Identification and Investigation (CI&I) in Sacramento to expedite

Starr’s “yel ow sheet,” a record of previous arrests, to them by Teletype. While they waited they had time to think. When Starr had made the remarks

to Cheney was crucial. By Amos’s calculations those words were uttered only days
after
the first known Northern California Zodiac murders.

Additional y, al letters in which the murderer identified himself as Zodiac had been mailed
after
Starr and Cheney’s New Year’s Day discussion.

Not until August 4, 1969 (though Toschi and Armstrong’s files said August 7) had Zodiac baptized himself in a three-page letter to Bay Area

papers. Until then the phantom had no shape, no name, only a crossed circle scrawled at the bottom of three letters and ciphers delivered at the

end of July. There was no way around it. Panzarel a backed up Cheney’s story, and both seemed upstanding, astute, credible. Their words had the

ring of Gospel. If what they said was true, then Robert Hal Starr
had
to be the notorious Zodiac.

Amos and Langstaff assessed what motives the two local men might have to lie. The length of time it had taken them to come forward puzzled

the detectives. Zodiac had been a menace for years. A previous headline (“ZODIAC LINKED TO RIVERSIDE SLAYING”) spanning the
Los

Angeles Times
’s front page on November 16, 1970, had not flushed the friends out. For some reason a more recent letter had galvanized them.

Four months before (March 13, 1971), the “Cipher Slayer” had written the
Times
from Pleasanton, a smal , sleepy town in Alameda County

across the Bay from San Francisco. As was his practice, Zodiac affixed excessive postage—two inverted six-cent Roosevelt stamps. As was his

rule, he exhorted in block printing: “Please Rush to Editor.” The words “AIR Mail” took up a third of the envelope. Zodiac was a highly impatient

maniac. His letter covered most of the
Times
front page—big black headlines, bold as a declaration of war.

“This is the Zodiac speaking,” he began as always. “Like I have always said I am crack proof. If the Blue Meannies are evere going to catch

me, they had best get off their fat asses & do something. Because the longer they fiddle & fart around, the more slaves I wil col ect for my after

life. I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones, there are a hel of a lot more

down there. The reason that I am writing the Times is this, They don’t bury me on the back pages like some of the others.” He had signed the

letter with a box score: “SFPD-0” and “[Zodiac’s symbol: a crossed circle]-17+.”

Something about the recent communication, possibly a tel ing phrase, may have rung a bel with Cheney and Panzarel a. Zodiac had used the

term “Blue Meannies,” meaning, Amos surmised, the cops. Music-hating “Blue Meanies” had terrorized the Beatles in a 1968 animated film,
The

Yellow Submarine.
Starr had once wanted to be a submarine sailor, so that made a little sense. “Fiddle & fart around,” an odd, crude expression,

was spoken regional y in Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Lubbock, Texas. Marines and sailors said it. Maybe Starr, an ex-Navy man, used it too.

Cheney said no, but recal ed his friend often used the phrase “Do my thing,” a popular phrase Zodiac had used in a letter. Initial y, Zodiac had

concealed his murderous connection with Southern California (belatedly capitalizing on it). Until now he had been predictable—governed by a daily

horoscope he wanted police to believe he cast himself, and drawn to water-related sites to murder. Afterward, he unfailingly wrote the
San

Francisco Chronicle
to boast of his atrocities and taunt the police. But by writing an L.A. paper Zodiac had broken his pattern. For what reason?

Possibly he had made a mistake down south. Perhaps he intended his
Times
letter as a warning to people who stil remembered him there. If he

did, the letter had had the opposite effect.

It alerted Cheney instead, attracting him for the first time to a composite drawing and written physical depiction of Zodiac. Of course, al of this

was speculation. Something had delayed Cheney in coming forward with his fears. Was it possible that Cheney had a motive in fingering Starr and

that there was il wil between the two? This was not the case with Panzarel a, who knew what had alerted him. “Al of a sudden,” Panzarel a said,

“Zodiac was writing letters to the
Times
near where we were living. It didn’t bother me, though I suspected Starr was the author, but it bothered

Cheney a lot. Starr fits everything I ever thought about Zodiac. He is incredibly intel igent and has a great deal of problems with any type of authority

figure.” Panzarel a had told the detectives that Starr was “a very intel igent man, but also emotional-type person.” As far as Panzarel a could tel ,

Starr matched the descriptions in every respect. Ten days after the
Times
letter, Zodiac had resumed his old ways. He dispatched a four-cent

postcard to the
Chronicle,
affixed with a stamp of Lincoln, his head lowered in mourning. On the opposite side was a drawing of a man digging in a

snowy, wooded encampment. The phrase “Don’t bury me” implied someone in Zodiac’s life had died. By May, the maniac was cynical y pleading

for help by phone—begging to be stopped before he kil ed more.

The staccato clatter of keys and the insistent ringing of the Teletype bel interrupted the detectives’ theorizing. Amos laid the CI&I report next to

the old black phone that had unleashed them on the scent scant hours ago. The printout provided basic facts: File #131151/Social Security #576-

44-8882; date of birth, December 18, 1933—unmarried—living with his mother in Northern California. Langstaff noted job application entries

running from 1958 through 1964, among them “NON/CERT Personnel, Watsonvil e Public Schools.” They found one arrest: “6-15-58 Val ejo P.D.

60278, D.P. [disturbing the peace], dismissed on 7-8-58.” There were no wants. Gradual y, Amos added to the data by phone. The suspect’s

family, he learned, had some money and his father, a Navy flier of some note, had passed away in March—just when Zodiac had broken a five-

month-long letter-writing dry spel .

And Starr might be placed down south for the murder of a coed in Riverside, just east of Pomona, where he visited his brother, Ronald, and