Zodiac Unmasked (41 page)

FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL OF ALL TO KILL. . . .”

Leigh Al en freely admitted he loved Connel ’s short tale. “It was the best story I read in high school,” he earnestly told detectives in that hot

refinery office. Connel ’s story existed as book and film. Which influenced Zodiac—printed story or movie? Subtle differences indicated which. It

was possible to learn when “a terrible thought crept like a snake” into Zodiac’s brain. “The Most Dangerous Game,” printed in
Variety
and

published by Minton Balch & Company in 1924, won the O. Henry Memorial Award for that year. The printed version, included in adventure

anthologies and high school texts ever since, goes like this:

Sanger Rainsford, a big-game hunter, fal s overboard from his yacht. Stranded, he hears the report of a .22, and thinks the hunter must have

nerve to tackle large wild game with so light a gun. He meets General Zaroff, a sadistic Russian expatriate sportsman. Zaroff (a name similar to

Zodiac) hunts at night with different weapons to make the hunt more exciting. When Rainsford says he considers the Cape buffalo the most

dangerous of al big game, Zaroff corrects him, “No. You are wrong, sir . . . here in my preserve on [Ship-Trap Island], I hunt the most dangerous

game. . . . My hand was made for the trigger, my father said. . . . My whole life has been one prolonged hunt. . . . I enjoy the problems of the chase

[so] I had to invent a new animal to hunt. I bought this island, built this house [an ancient castle with towers and a gargoyle-shaped door knocker],

and here I do my hunting.” Surrounding are jungles with mazes of trails, hil s, and swamps. “Every day I hunt, and I never grow bored now, for I have

a quarry with which I can match my wits.”

Zaroff’s “most dangerous game” is people. He provides Rainsford with three hours, head start and “an excel ent hunting knife.” He “cheerful y

acknowledges” himself defeated if he doesn’t find him by midnight of the third day. If Rainsford wins, the general’s sloop wil place him on the

mainland. Armed only with a .22-caliber pistol and bow and arrow (Al en’s hunting weapons), Zaroff pursues his quarry. On the first night Zaroff

al ows Rainsford to escape. Rainsford realizes he is saving him for another day’s sport.

The final battle is played out in the mad hunter’s bedroom. “You have won the game!” he says. “I am stil a beast at bay.” Rainsford cries, “Get

ready, General Zaroff,” and Zaroff is kil ed. But the written story lacked the costume and pursuit of a young couple by gun and knife that had inspired

Zodiac. Zodiac’s primary motivation, that galvanizing flash point, was a film, but which one and in what year?

In a conversation
with his friend Phil Tucker, Al en spoke of a 1945 film,
A Game of Death
.9 With its stalking by crossbow and Zodiac-like title,

the film was likely an inspiration. General Kreigner’s insanity is attributed to a wound from a Cape buffalo rather than a need to dispel boredom.

Other adaptations of Connel ’s story fol owed.10

Because Wil is O’Brien’s animation of his giant ape, King Kong, took too many months to complete, producer Merian C. Cooper and directors

Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel decided to shoot a second movie employing
Kong
’s existing sets and much of its cast. RKO’s sixty-three-

minute-longblack-and-white adaptation of
The Most Dangerous Game
was shot in 1932, a year after Al en’s birth. Screenwriter James Ashmore

Creelman, while retaining Connel ’s dialogue, introduced a sexual pathology to account for the cunning Count Zaroff’s mania—hunting inflamed his

other passions. The hunt as a precursor for sex had entered the equation. Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea), an American big-game hunter returning

from safari, swims to nearby Ship-Trap Island after fake channel lights lure his yacht onto a reef. Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), archer, waltz

composer, and self-confessed barbarian in evening dress, is the perfect host. Costar Fay Wray (Eve Trowbridge) recal ed, “. . . the actor who

played Count Zaroff with a jagged scar across his forehead had something wrong with one eye and it gave him a real y scary expression.” Banks’s

face presented two dramatical y different profiles—the left brutish, the right handsome—the result of a serious wound the actor received during

World War I. His Jekyl -Hyde quality depicted the schizophrenic qualities of a cultured man possessed by bestial desires. “God makes some men

poets,” Zaroff explains. “Some He makes kings, some beggars. Me, He made a hunter. . . .

“One night as I lay in my tent with this—this head of mine, a terrible thought crept like a snake into my brain . . . hunting was beginning to bore

me. When I lost my love of hunting, I lost my love of life, my love of love . . . what I needed was not a new weapon, but a new animal. . . . We

barbarians know that it is after the chase and then only that man revels . . . you know the saying of the Ogandi chieftains—‘Hunt first the enemy,

then the woman.’ It is the natural instinct. What is woman? Even such a woman as this until the blood is quickened by the kil . . . one passion

builds upon another. Kil , then love. When you have known that, you have known ecstasy.”

“Here on my island I hunt the most dangerous game,” the count tel s Rainsford and Eve. “We are going to play ‘outdoor chess.’ Your brain against

mine—your woodcraft against mine. When I was only stirrup high [my father] gave me my first gun. . . . It would be impossible to tel you how many

animals I have kil ed.” Al en’s father, a military man, gave his son a rifle and taught him to hunt, and Al en was the only Zodiac suspect who was an

archer. The image that opens the film is a castle door knocker of a Dying Centaur, an arrow in his breast. A wal painting above the stairs depicts a

similar maddened centaur, armed with a bow and arrow, carrying the body of a woman through the woods. The centaur is the astrological symbol

for Sagittarius (November 22-December 21), Al en’s own zodiac sign.

Zaroff, his Cossack henchman, Ivan, and a pack of hounds hunt Rainsford and Eve. In the film the hunt takes place in one night, not three, and a

couple, not a single man, are hunted just as Zodiac hunted couples. If they elude Zaroff in the island’s foggy jungle, they wil be set free. With his

Satanic black hunting outfit, folds gathered and cinched at wrists and ankles, Zaroff races swiftly through the fog behind a pack of hounds. In a

sheath on his left side is a foot-long knife. The scabbard is decorated with rivets. In his right hand is a precision high-powered rifle. Pursued in the

watery sections—a swamp, a waterfal , the couple final y reach the ocean’s edge. The wounded count dies when he plunges over his balcony and is

devoured by his own ravenous hounds as Rainsford and Eve escape by boat.

Because of the weapons (especial y the bow and arrow), the costume, which so clearly inspired the outfit Zodiac wore at Lake Berryessa, the

nighttime pursuit of a couple near water, the concept of outdoor chess, and the image of the Dying Centaur, I am inclined to think this particular film

most influenced Zodiac. And it had played at the Avenue Theatre. “Those animals I hunted,” says Rainsford, “now I know how they felt.” With the

lonely, unloved archer, the elite exile, Zodiac had found a resonance with his true life.

Radio drama, at
its zenith during Zodiac’s youth, adapted Connel ’s tale. The most famous radio version appeared on CBS’s
Suspense,

September 23, 1943. Its fifty-eighth show starred Orson Wel es as Zaroff and Keenan Wynn as Rainsford. Jacques A. Finke wrote the script for

producer-director Wil iam Spier.11 Augmented by sound effects, ful orchestra, and the power of imagination, radio adaptations could be

formidable influences. Al en, ten at the time of the broadcast, would have been lying in the darkness listening that Thursday night, lit only by the glow

of the dial. The static of the broadcast fil ed the room. A formative age, ten.

“I don’t remember which day we had discussed ‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ and hunting people,” Cheney told me, “but somebody did a

televisionpresentation using that plot and I think that’s what we discussed, that and the fact that there was a book. The plot has been used and

used.”

The inspiration for Zodiac’s gun that projected a beam of light came from a television show adapted from a story by Wil iam C. Morrison. A

1950s
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
starring Myron McCormick featured a young man with a flashlight taped to his rifle. “Just shoot for the dark spot in

the light and you wil hit your target,” he said—exactly as Zodiac wrote. Hunting smal game at night, he chanced upon two lovers—result: accidental

murder. A vengeful father says at the conclusion, eyes glittering: “The excitement of a manhunt—the most dangerous game!”

20

arthur leigh allen

Sunday, September 27, 1987

Arthur Leigh Allen,
in spite of financial problems, lacked the wil power to resist a new purchase. He bought a $2,500 foam, fiberglass ultra-light

“aeroplane” with a folding-wing option. Likewise, he was compel ed to heap on additional paraphernalia, and draw up blueprints for clever

modifications. But his deteriorating vision drastical y curtailed his active lifestyle. His flagging physical stamina, due to growing diabetes and kidney

problems, anchored him close to Fresno Street.

“Kidney failure is a slow process,” a nurse explained. “It’s only imminent after years and years. You can have it most of your life, but it’s only

toward the end of the disease that you end up on dialysis. It depends how bad your hypertension is. Through the years the diabetes destroys the

blood vessels, causes them to be less resilient, and so you get high blood pressure. Then the high blood pressure destroys the kidneys and you

end up on dialysis. The vision goes.

“Natural y drinking is harmful. Your skin color has changed because your kidneys are not functioning properly. And so you look sal ow. Dialysis is

not painful, but it is debilitating. You wil get very weak afterward, and usual y not be good for anything the rest of that day. The treatment’s for three

hours, three times a week, for as long as you live. Sometimes it’s longer for people who drink too much. If they’re large individuals the time might be

extended.”

Against doctor’s orders, Leigh guzzled beer from a quart jar, scanning the newspaper where conjectures about Zodiac’s fate stil raged. They

were most plentiful on the anniversaries of the attacks, a day such as today. Explanations as to Zodiac’s whereabouts ranged from imprisonment to

death to police proximity so close Zodiac dared not act. Il health had hardly been considered in the equation. Thus far, outside law enforcement,

Al en’s name had not been linked to Zodiac in print. No fraudulent informant could target Al en if he hadn’t heard of him. But the prime suspect stil

flaunted his connection to the case—saving articles about Zodiac and perversely wearing the Zodiac watch and Z-emblem ring. It give him

pleasure. Gradual y, the genie emerged from the bottle. The leak came not from the media, but the local police department. A substitute teacher in

Santa Rosa junior and senior high schools became concerned.

“My occupation has given me the opportunity to observe how local teenagers have reacted to your book about Zodiac,” he informed me. “I’ve

seen copies pul ed out at free reading time in classrooms al over town, but I never had much interest in the subject until last spring when, at various

times, I overheard students and staff members discussing the book. Apparently one of the students is the son of a local policeman, and word has

gotten around that the man you cal ‘Starr’ works at Friedman Brothers Hardware in south Santa Rosa. Some of the kids seem to know the man’s

real name, or think they do.

“This caused me to worry on two counts. First the man they think is ‘Starr’ may not be him, and an innocent man’s reputation is being ground up in

the rumor mil . Second, the man might real y be Starr and he might real y be the kil er. This raises the unpleasant image of little bunches of junior

high kids trooping through Friedman Brothers on safari fol owing a dangerous paranoid. I’m sorry this sounds a bit negative. I thought your book

was wel done and I hope your work leads to the kil er’s capture.”

Born in 1971, Harold Huffman’s son hadn’t been too familiar with the Zodiac case until his father began tel ing him about his old friend, Leigh

Al en. “After my father spil ed the beans,” Rob wrote, “I read Robert Graysmith’s
Zodiac.
. . . I scared myself to death. I knew exactly who ‘Robert Hal

“Bob” Starr’ real y was. After digesting this horrific realization, I would brag to my friends regarding al I had learned from
Zodiac
and my father’s

(and mother’s) tales of Leigh’s violent outbursts when they were young. I would make al the connections. I would, in turn, scare my friends to death

—then break the ice by tel ing them how Leigh wanted to make raviolis for my father and I, but instead we went to IHOP. On other occasions my

Dad would bring home oranges from Leigh’s trees, and I would offer them to my friends. Once digested, I’d reveal to my pals that they had just

eaten Zodiac Kil er oranges (and again they would be scared to death).”

“Craig,”12 a young man, also learned of Al en through the Santa Rosa Police. In the late 1980s, he and his dad visited Al en’s house on Fresno

Street. Al en claimed he didn’t know who had turned him in to the police. Craig told him it was Cheney. “I’m very disturbed at the thought of that,”

Leigh replied. “Don Cheney is capable of perpetuating these crimes and he even frightens me. Don has a terrible temper.”