Zodiac Unmasked (30 page)

driver slaying only blocks away . . . “driver shot in the head . . . wal et stolen, cab lights left blazing . . . engine running. A row of brightly colored shirts littering the sidewalk.” Toschi and Armstrong quickly nabbed a Tenderloin busboy in bed with his girlfriend. She had nagged him about money, so

he flagged down a cabbie, held him up, and shot him during a struggle. “I took twenty-seven dol ars off him,” the chain-smoking youth said, “then

threw my .22 revolver down a storm drain. I knew I’d get caught. I left my fingerprints al over the cab. I’ve got a record so I knew it was only a matter

of time before you picked me up. Sure, I feel bad about it . . . especial y for his wife and little girl. Whatever I get, I got coming. You don’t kil

someone and not pay for it. You see, I never wanted to see the inside of a jail again.” Only Stine’s kil er stil remained at large. It began to look as if

Zodiac might win his lethal chess match with the police simply through attrition.

“My mom and I,” a Southern California resident later told me, “visited Mr. Al en in Atascadero State Hospital almost every Saturday, and when he

was released he even stayed at our house just north of Atascadero and west of San Luis Obispo. . . . I remember when he stayed at our house, he

stayed in my mom’s room with her. She always said that nothing happened, and I tend to believe her, since I remember him as not a very sexual

person. Mr. Al en was very good to al of us kids. He spent a lot of time with my brothers and us girls. He taught us basic values, he was an avid non-

drinker and non-smoker. He had a lot of smal pets. He especial y liked kangaroo rats, and had a permit to keep them and do research. He taught

my brother how to drive, shoot, fix cars, and do al of those other guy things. He used to go to his various trailers, and they used to go target

shooting in the mountains and river bottoms of Northern California. Mr. Al en was an expert marksman.”

While Al en was incarcerated, Zodiac refused to die, living on in speculation, in every dark shadow along a lake and in al our hearts. If Zodiac

had simply faded away, good men like Toschi, Armstrong, Mulanax, Lynch, Narlow, and Avery had been beaten.

Tuesday, August 24, 1976

The 1965 blue
Volkswagen van bus had been in and out of the garage on A Street several times. On June 23, 1976, its owner had the motor

overhauled for $520.74. In July, Wilfred Roenik, manager of the German Car Center east of Merced, noticed the van back again. A fix-it ticket said

the rear lights weren’t working. “The vehicle has ground problems,” Roenik explained, but its owner did not ask to check the headlamps. The owner

reappeared on August 2, saying he needed a voltage regulator and battery. Those were instal ed for $39.05. On Tuesday, August 24, he returned

the battery. “It cost too much,” he complained, and that afternoon instal ed his own new battery.

Around 8:00 P.M. the van’s owner, a forty-one-year-old Santa Rosa Junior Col ege teacher, climbed behind the wheel. He was tal , six feet three

inches, 190 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes. An ex-soldier, he had served at Fort Hamilton, New York. In 1959, he’d received an early

release from the Army as an overseas returnee. Six years later, he became an English teacher and part-time art instructor.

It was a clear night, the road ahead was dry. He was not under the influence of barbiturates or alcohol. He had just eaten. Going only fifty, five

miles under the speed limit, he took his van eastbound onto an expressway with no streetlights. Highway 12 began as two lanes separated by a

forty-foot-wide divider strip, real y only dirt with grass and weeds, then abruptly became a four-lane divided expressway. At 8:30 P.M., just where the

highway curved west of Wright Road, the van’s headlights blinked out. At the start of the divided section, the VW eased onto the center divider and

drove along there for a distance. The van ignored the curve, kept going straight, and flew across the dirt divider into the westbound lane.

A man en route to a friend’s home in Sebastopol entered the point where the two westbound lanes merged to one. He could clearly see the

headlights of other vehicles in the eastbound lanes. “Oh, my God!” he cried when he saw the van cross straight into oncoming traffic. There was no

braking action, only light skid marks about two feet long just before impact. The van col ided head-on into a 1972 Toyota traveling west in the #1

lane. Both vehicles bounced nine feet into the #2 lane and came to rest on the north asphalt shoulder less than three thousand feet east of Merced

Avenue. Both drivers were pinned in their cars. At 8:50, the fire department extricated them. The woman driver in the Toyota would be OK.

At 9:00 P.M. they wheeled the teacher into the Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital Emergency Room and doctors began working on him. Deputy

Durham spoke with Dr. Larson. The wounds were severe: a tear of the pericardial sac of the heart and left pulmonary vein . . . abrasion of the

zygomatic arch, multiple fractures of the right lower extremity, a fracture of the left hip and right arm, multiple fractures of the ankle, laceration left

lower leg, radial and ulna on right. They couldn’t keep his blood pressure above 60. At 1:25 A.M. the teacher died on the operating table. Sheriff

and Coroner Don Striepeke ruled the cause of death to be: “Shock due to multiple traumatic lesions.”

Durham retained the teacher’s wal et and personal property. The only address they had on him was a P.O. box in Santa Rosa. The deputy ran a

1028 registration check, and learned that the victim lived in a trailer home in Sebastopol. At 9:30 A.M., Durham spoke with the teacher’s ex-wife

and discovered he had been having some epileptic seizures control ed by medication. At 3:00 P.M. Investigator Siebe, interested in items inside

the trailer, sealed it. It wasn’t until November 8 that police returned the property, noting for their records: “Landlord and Ex-wife are going to itemize

things in his room and store them at landlord’s place to free the room.” Why did police keep the teacher’s possessions so long? Were they

connected with the Santa Rosa murders? A decade would pass before I found out.

Friday, August 27, 1976

At midnight, San
Francisco Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, working late at City Hal , opened the last of her mail. “Did you miss me?” a note read.

“Was busy doing some nefarious dastardly work, for which I am very wel suited.” She rang the police, they cal ed Toschi, and at 5:00 A.M.,

unshaven and bleary-eyed, he hustled upstairs to study the letter. “This isn’t from Zodiac,” he explained. “It’s ‘Old Tom’ playing games again. I’ve got

an entire file on Old Tom’s bogus letters. Oddly enough, he isn’t drunk when he writes his Zodiac letters. The typing is far too elaborate for a guy

who is sauced. And a guy who keeps doing a thing like that when he’s sober has gotta have something wrong with his head. He’s kil ing himself

with alcohol.” The detective arranged for the McCauley Clinic to treat Tom for malnutrition; tried to get him into Napa under a section of the Welfare

and Institution Code about being a danger to himself. However, Tom, an old pro, got himself a writ, and eight days later a judge dropped him back

into the Tenderloin. I visited Old Tom in his flea-bitten hotel room, found him curled up on a urine-stained mattress. He was total y obsessed with the

case. If that made him crazy, then we al were.

Toschi stil had seven years left until his minimum retirement date. “I’m watching the mailbox,” he said, “to see if I get a seventh-anniversary card

from Zodiac.” An ad had run in that morning’s
Chronicle
: “ZODIAC Your partner is in DEEP REAL ESTATE. You’re next. The Imperial Wizard can

save you. Surrender to him or I’l terminate your case. R.A.”

13

the voice of zodiac

Friday, November 5, 1976

Toschi bumped into
Karl Malden (“Lieutenant Mike Stone” on
The Streets of San Francisco
). The actor was on location at the police

identification bureau, shooting a scene with costar Michael Douglas. Malden recal ed Toschi from a meeting the previous year and hailed him. “You

had that unusual upside-down holster and gun,” he said. “I had never seen anything like it.” They spoke of the job like two cops. “I’l get Zodiac

someday,” Toschi vowed to Malden. “And I’l bring him to justice. That’s my motivation—justice. I’m not a vengeful type, but when a life is taken,

there must be justice. He has taken six lives; who knows how many more? I work with death, sorrow, and tragedy. Yet I like my job because it’s a

useful one. I bring in kil ers for society’s judgment. Ringing bel s and knocking on doors, good old-fashioned police work. That’s what does it. I’ve

even gotten religious-type letters where they tel me to pray, to talk to God, and then I’l catch Zodiac, they say. These people don’t know they’re

talking to the biggest believer around.” It was a speech he not only gave often, but believed in his heart.

“The Zodiac case is like the unsolved Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles,” Toschi told me later. “The chief detective in that case always said he

would know the kil er if he questioned him by means of one secret question he never revealed—I’ve held a couple of things back from the press too.

. . . I remember meeting Clint Eastwood while he was making
Dirty Harry,
an almost shy person . . . faded jeans, a T-shirt, white tennis shoes, and

he was a star. And Stu Rosenberg, the director of
The Laughing Policeman
. Walter Mathau was wonderful, Bruce Dern terrific in that film. Stu took

a cab and met us at a murder scene. ‘I don’t know how you do this,’ he said. ‘My God!’”

Two months later, the House Select Committee sought out the nation’s top investigators and invited Toschi to participate in a second look into

the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. He declined. The assignment would have taken him away from Zodiac for two

years. As Christmas approached, Toschi’s mood lightened. One of the crime lab people snapped a candid shot of him grinning on the phone and

wearing fel ow Inspector Rotea Gilford’s Zebra-patterned hat.

For years, amateur
sleuths had groped for any clue that might unmask Zodiac. His use of English was a valuable lead. A U.C. Berkeley linguistics

professor, examining Zodiac’s use of vernacular, concluded he was of English or Welsh extraction. English cartoonist Jim Unger, who drew the

syndicated strip
Herman,
was once a British policeman. “The letters from Zodiac show he is a man from the north of Great Britain,” Unger said. “Of

course, we know he speaks with no accent, but he may have lived there.” A British police car currently in service was cal ed the “Zodiac,” its hood

insignia a crossed circle. Author Nancy Ashbaugh told me: “‘Tit Wil ow’ is a song sung by English mothers instead of ‘Rock-a-bye-Baby.’ Zodiac

mentions peppermint and ‘phompfit. ’ Zodiac means pomfits, a term for candies. ‘Give the child a pomfit [violet squares and lavender squares].’

There are pomfits in
Alice in Wonderland
.” A mind reader stated, “Zodiac is definitely of German-Irish ancestry.”

Writing in future tense—“I wil . . . I shal ,” Zodiac also used purposeful misspel ings. Was there a man in the case who, in his daily life, habitual y

misspel ed words in a mocking, taunting, or jocular manner? Spel ing mistakes in the three-part cryptogram might not be encrypting mistakes, but a

hidden message. Zodiac had used extra letters such as the
r
in “forrest” and
e
in “expeerence” and omitted letters such as the
s
in “dangerous.”

Using these divergences, Zodiac buff J. B. Dahlgren was able to spel “Science is mysterious Isis,” but admitted that skil ed anagramists might find

better combinations.

Along with oddly spel ed words,
X
’s ran through Zodiac’s letters: “X’mas” and “Super X.” The circled 8 in the letter might be a Taurus or Cancer

symbol. Toschi, himself a Cancer, had gotten in the habit of regularly picking up astrology magazines hoping one might provide an overlooked clue.

An astrologer, using the dates when Zodiac had struck or mailed letters, tried unsuccessful y casting his horoscope backwards. “That way I can

ascertain his birth date.” Another was sure Zodiac was a Capricorn. “Saturn is the ruling planet of Capricorn and Zodiac’s activities are tied to

certain events in Saturn,” he said.

“Look in the Chronicle,” John H. Grove advised, “and see what the horoscope recommended on days he kil ed. After al , Hitler wouldn’t move

without his astrologer’s okay. . . . Cappies are usual y good spel ers, and his errors could be a ruse to throw everyone off the track. Zodiac

appears to be strongly affected by the dice naturals 7 and 11, the latter especial y. Apart from gambling and the occult his assumed name may

be interrelated with his love of eleven. The word Zodiac is derived from the ancient Greek Zodiakos. The Hel enes had no separate numbering

system, each alphabetical letter having a numerical value. I was amazed when I computed the numerical value for Zodiakos and found it to be

1111. Is Zodiac aware of this? He probably is. He may be crazy or a doper or both, but he is neither stupid nor il iterate.”

If the number eleven was important to the kil er, what did twelve mean to him? There were twelve signs to the Zodiac. Zodiac’s nature (and that of

most serial kil ers) was to clip and col ect stories about himself. Since buying three papers a day might attract undue attention, he might have home

subscriptions to them al . The
Examiner
had not only buried Zodiac on page 4, but begged him to surrender to them (an unwise suggestion to a