The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (34 page)

An anonymous correspondent tied the Zodiac slayings to the unsolved murder of Cheri Jo Bates, a college girl in Riverside, California, on Halloween 1966. The police could not rule out a connection, but could not prove a concrete link either. But when crime writer Paul Avery checked it out he discovered that the police had received what they considered to be a crank letter about the murder, five months after the killing. It was signed with the letter Z.

Cheri Jo Bates was an 18-year-old freshman, who had been stabbed to death after leaving the college library one evening. In a series of typewritten letters, the killer gave details of the murder only he could have known. He also said that there would be more and talked of a “game” he was playing. But there were also handwritten letters, where the handwriting matched the Zodiac’s and Avery managed to persuade the police to re-open the Bates case in the light of the Zodiac murders.

During 1971, there were a number of murders that could have been committed by the Zodiac. Letters purporting to come from him confessed to them, but he could easily have been claiming credit for other people’s handiwork. However, on 7 April 1972, 33-year-old Isobel Watson, who worked as a legal secretary in San Francisco, alighted from the bus at around 9 p.m. in Tamalpais Valley and began walking home up Pine Hill. Seemingly out of nowhere, a white Chevrolet swerved across the road at her. The car stopped. The driver apologized and offered to give her a lift home. When Mrs Watson declined, he pulled a knife on her and stabbed her in the back. Her screams alerted the neighbours. The man ran back to his car and sped off. Mrs Watson recovered and gave a description. Her assailant was a white man in his early 40s, around five foot nine inches and he wore black-rimmed reading glasses. The police said that there was a better than fifty-fifty chance that this was the Zodiac killer.

As time went on, other detectives dropped out of the case, leaving only Inspector David Toschi. The FBI looked at the files, but even they could take the case no further.

The correspondence from the Zodiac ceased for nearly four years. Though psychologists believed that he was the type who might commit suicide, Toschi did not believe he was dead. Toschi reasoned that the Zodiac got his kicks from the publicity surrounding the killings, rather than the killings themselves. Surely he would have left a note, or some clue in his room, that he was the Zodiac. Then on 25 April 1978, Toschi got confirmation. The
Chronicle
received a new letter from him. This time it mentioned Toschi by name. The author wanted the people of San Francisco to know he was back. Now the police had a new opportunity to catch him.

Robert Graysmith, author of the book
Zodiac
, deduced that the killer was a movie buff. In one of his cryptograms he mentioned “the most dangerous game” which is the title of a film. In another, he called himself “the Red Phantom”, the title of another movie. And he frequently mentions going to the movies to see
The Exorcist
or
Badlands
, a fictionalized account of the murderous spree of Nebraskan killer Charles Starkweather. The police used this information and the Zodiac killer’s obvious love of publicity to try and trap him. When a movie about the Zodiac killings was shown in San Francisco a suggestions box was left in the lobby of the cinema. The audience were asked to drop a note of any information or theories they may have in it. The box was huge and a detective was hidden inside it. He read every entry by torchlight as it fell through the slot. If any looked like they came from the Zodiac killer, he was to raise the alarm. None did.

The Oakland police thought that they had captured the Zodiac killer. They arrested a Vietnam veteran who had seen the movie three times and had been apprehended in the lavatory at the cinema masturbating after one particularly violent scene. The Oakland PD was soon proved wrong. His handwriting did not match the Zodiac’s. Soon there was a welter of recrimination. Toschi was transferred out of homicide after baseless accusations that he had forged the Zodiac letters for self-promotion. The police in the Bay area began to believe that the Zodiac killer was either dead or in prison outside the state for another crime. Or it could have been, after the close call with the killing of Paul Stine, that he figured that his luck was running out.

But Robert Graysmith was not convinced. He managed to connect the Zodiac killings with the unsolved murder of 14 young girls, usually students or hitch-hikers in the Santa Rosa area in the early 1970s. Most of them were found nude, their clothes were missing but largely they had not been sexually molested. Each of them had been killed in different ways, as if the murderer was experimenting to find out which way was best. Graysmith reckons that the Zodiac’s body count could be as high as 40.

The Zodiac’s symbol, a cross in a circle, Graysmith believes, is not a stylized gunsight but the projectionist’s guide seen on the lead-in to a movie. Through a cinema in San Francisco which has the constellations painted on the ceiling he traced a promising suspect. The man, Graysmith was told, filmed some of the murders and kept the film in a booby-trapped film can.

Another Graysmith suspect was a former boyfriend of Darlene Ferrin’s. He had also been a resident of Riverside when Cheri Jo Bates had been murdered. He lived with his mother, whom he loathed, and dissected small mammals as a hobby. During the crucial 1975–78 period when the Zodiac killer was quiet, he was in a mental hospital after being charged with child molesting at a school where he worked.

Although he had two promising candidates Graysmith could not pin the Zodiac murders on either of them. He published the story of his investigation in 1985.

But then, in 1990, a series of strange murders began in New York. The perpetrator claimed to be the Zodiac. The killer’s description does not match those given by the witnesses in California. But a man can change a lot in twenty years.

The Sonoma County Slayings

Between 1972 and 1975 fifteen females were murdered around Sonoma County in northern California. The first victims were thought to be 12-year-olds Yvonne Weber and Maureen Strong, who vanished on their way home from the Redwood Ice Skating Rick in Santa Rosa at around 4 p.m. on 4 February 1972. Their remains were found at the bottom of a 60-foot embankment near a country road in the Franz Valley area, east of Sonoma County on 28 December. Forensic examination indicated that they had been killed elsewhere and simply dumped there. The killer had removed their clothes and taken a single gold earring from each girl – a practice he would continue in the future.

On 4 March 1972, 19-year-old Kim Wendy Allen, a student at Santa Rosa Junior College, was travelling home when she vanished. She was last seen at 5 p.m., hitch-hiking northbound along Highway 101. Her naked body was found on the bed of a creek. She had been strangled with a clothesline. There were rope burns on her ankles and wrists, as if she had been tied spread-eagled, and superficial cuts on her chest. Again her clothes and a single earring were missing. The killer had also taken her handbag and other possessions including a small barrel of soy sauce which had a Chinese character on it that resembled the character drawn by the Zodiac killer in one of his letters.

Then on 21 November, 13-year-old Lori Jursa was abducted from the U-Save market in Santa Rosa. She found with a broken neck three weeks later in a ravine near Calistoga Road. Again she was naked and, although the wire loops were still in her ears, the body of her earrings were missing.

Less than 100 yards from where Lori Lee Jursa’s body had been dumped, the skeletal remains of 20-year-old Jeannette Kamahele were found in a shallow grave on 6 July 1979. A student at Santa Rosa Junior College, she was last seen hitch-hiking near the Cotati on-ramp of Highway 101 and was travelling north to Santa Rosa on 25 April 1972. Her hands and ankles had been together with white clothesline that was then wrapped around her neck four times.

The killer then moved to San Francisco. On 29 May 1973, the body of Rosa Vasquez of 834 Bush Street was found in Golden Gate Park. She had been strangled and was, at one time, thought to be one of the Zodiac victims. The body of Yvonne Quilantang of 140 Delta Street was found in a vacant lot in the Bayview district on 10 June. She had also been strangled and the 15-year-old was seven months pregnant. Again she was thought to have been a Zodiac victim. The body of 16-year-old Angela Thomas, originally from Belton, Texas, was found at Benjamin Franklin Junior High School on 2 July. She had been smothered. Then on 15 July, 24-year-old Nancy Patricia Gidley went missing from the Roday Inn motel at 895 Leary Street and was strangled. Another possible Zodiac victim, her body was dumped in the parking lot of George Washington High School, near where the taxi driver Paul Stine was killed. An X-ray technician from Mountain Home, Idaho, she was visiting San Francisco to be maid of honour at the wedding of Collete Mrozek, of Novato, California, at Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County. She also had ambitions to be a freelance writer for the San Francisco
Chronicle
. All four were naked.

There was a strong military connection between these victims. Nancy Gidley served four years in the Air Force and had been discharged at Hamilton Air Force Base early the previous year. Rosa Vasquez was a keypunch operator at Letterman General Hospital at San Francisco’s Presidio. Angela Thomas was the daughter of an Army sergeant who was once stationed at the Presidio. In San Francisco for a visit, she was last seen in the area of the Presidio, where she had gone to look up old friends. And Yvonne Quilantang was engaged to a soldier who was stationed in Missouri, though she was pregnant by another man.

By now an established trend was obvious. Only the location changed. Four young women were strangled and dumped naked in San Francisco in the spring and early summer of 1973 before hitch-hiker Caroline Davis was poisoned and dumped in a ditch near Santa Rosa in July. It was the same spot that Strong and Weber’s remains had also been discovered.

Fifteen-year-old Carolyn Nadine Davis was last seen leaving her grandmother’s house in Garberville on 15 July 1973. A runaway from Anderson in Shasta County she went missing while hitch-hiking south on Route 101. On 31 July 1973, her naked body was found 2.2 miles north of Porter Creek Road on Franz Valley Road in the same spot as Yvonne Weber and Maureen Strong had been dumped seven months earlier. She had been poisoned by strychnine and the police discovered that Carolyn had bought a one-way ticket to fly from Redding to San Francisco. On the embankment above her body, twigs were placed in strange design to form two interlocking squares. This was thought to be a witchcraft symbol designating “the carrier of spirits”. Again the Zodiac killer was interested in such symbols.

The next body turned up near Redding on 22 July. It belonged to Nancy Feusi. Practically naked, it was so badly decomposed the cause of death could not be determined.

Back in San Francisco, the naked body of Laura O’Dell was found on 4 November. She had been strangled.

On 22 December 1973, 22-year-old Therese Dian Walsh disappeared while hitch-hiking on 101 from Malibu Beach to her home in Garberville. She had been hog-tied with a one-quarter-inch nylon rope, raped, strangled and thrown into a creek near the spot where Kim Wendy Allen’s body was found. Some believe that there is an occult significance that she went missing on the winter solstice.

The police believe the same killer stabbed Brenda Merchant in Marysville on 1 February 1974, dumping her naked body in a ditch alongside a rural road. Then on 29 September, the naked body of Donna Braun was discovered floating in the Salinas River near Monterey. The 14-year-old had been strangled. She was thought to have been the last of the killer’s victims.

The idea that these murders might have had occult significance was put forward by Sergeant Erwin Carlstedt of the Sonoma County Police. He cited the “witchcraft symbol” found on the embankment in the Caroline Davis case, though they could have been just a piece of childish art. He also pointed out that the bodies had all been dumped on the east side of a road. At the time he tied the California killings to those of seven women in Washington state, between January and July 1974, who had all been abducted in the waning – or sacrificial – phase of the moon. His 1975 report stated that the killer was “familiar with witchcraft or the occult, because of a witchcraft symbol found during the Caroline Davis case and the possible occult involvement in the missing females in the states of Oregon and Washington”. However, the Washington killings were later attributed to prolific serial killer Ted Bundy, while Bundy’s known movements preclude involvement in the California murders.

Serial rapist and murder Harvey Carignan was a suspect in the unsolved murders, when it came to light that he had been given a speeding ticket he collected in Solano County, east of Santa Rosa, on 20 June 1973. But no solid evidence ties him to any of the murders. One week later, he attacked Marlys Townsend at a bus stop 1,500 miles away in Minneapolis. Clubbed unconscious from behind, she woke in Carignan’s car, still groggy from the blow. But when he tried to make her masturbate him, she found strength enough to leap from the speeding vehicle and save herself. This ultimately led to his arrest in September 1974 and he was already in jail when Donna Braun was murdered. Besides none of the crimes showed Carignan’s MO. He beat his victims with a hammer.

In his book
Zodiac
, published in 1986, author Robert Graysmith ascribes these and other unsolved murders to the elusive “Zodiac” killer. But as he has not been caught, then it is impossible to say whether one or more serial killers are at large in the Golden State.

Southern California’s Original Night Stalker

While “The Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, who terrorized southern California in 1985, languishes on death row in San Quentin, “The Original Night Stalker” is still at large. He started out as the “East Area Rapist”, then became the “Orange Coast Serial Killer”, before being dubbed “The Original Night Stalker” because his MO closely resembled Ramirez’s, raping and killing his victims in their own homes.