Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed
Robert Graysmith
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 - zodiac
Chapter 2 - robert hall starr
Chapter 3 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 4 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 5 - robert domingos and linda edwards
Chapter 6 - avery and the dark alley
Chapter 7 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 8 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 9 - policeman and sailor
Chapter 10 - the devil
Chapter 11 - atascadero
Chapter 12 - witches
Chapter 13 - the voice of zodiac
Chapter 14 - suspects
Chapter 15 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 16 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 17 - zodiac suspects
Chapter 18 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 19 - zodiac’s “dangerous game”
Chapter 20 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 21 - zodiac at treasure island
Chapter 22 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 23 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 24 - zodiac II
Chapter 25 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 26 - zodiac II returns
Chapter 27 - the big tip
Chapter 28 - the search
Chapter 29 - belli
Chapter 30 - media starr
Chapter 31 - jack zodiac
Chapter 32 - the german hippie
Chapter 33 - zodiac
Chapter 34 - zodiac
Chapter 35 - the conference
Chapter 36 - zodiac III
Chapter 37 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 38 - the city at the bottom of the lake
Chapter 39 - unmasked
epilogue
appendices
sources
selected references
index
A Berkley Book
Published by The Berkley Publishing Group
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This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
Copyright © 2002 by Robert Graysmith.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graysmith, Robert.
Zodiac unmasked : the identity of America’s most elusive serial killer revealed /
Robert Graysmith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-440-67812-7
1. Starr, Robert Hall. 2. Serial murders—California—San Francisco Bay Area.
3. Serial murderers—California—San Francisco Bay Area. 4. Serial murder
investigation—California—San Francisco Bay Area. I. Title.
HV6534.S3 G73 2002
364.15’23’0979461—dc21
2001058968
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acknowledgments
All the material in this book is derived from official records or interviews I’ve conducted over a thirty year period in my search for Zodiac. My heartfelt thanks to Inspector Dave Toschi, Detective George Bawart, and the editorial, legal, and production staff of this book: Gary Mailman, Liz Perl, Hillary Schupf, Heather Conner, Jill Boltin, Pauline Neuwirth, Esther Strauss, and especially, Natalee Rosenstein, my editor.
Zodiac in Costume by Robert Graysmith.
Author’s line-cut illustration of Zodiac in costume at Lake Berryessa.
introduction
Zodiac’s unmasked features first came into focus one blazing summer day upon the crystal face of a watch. The detectives inside the cramped office studied the large, expensive timepiece on the wrist of their prime suspect with dread. Such a commonplace object should not arouse fear—yet it did. It had taken them almost three years to winnow 2500 suspects down to a handful, among them a man named Starr. Now they saw Starr’s broad, smiling face reflected in that watch and they knew. The watch had been a catalyst for murder. Its stark black and white markings had inspired an unprecedented reign of terror. Its logo had given the killer his symbol, a crossed circle, like a gun sight, and his name—Zodiac.
After Jack the Ripper and before Son of Sam there is only one name their equal in terror: the deadly, elusive, and mysterious Zodiac. Since 1968 the hooded murderer had terrified San Francisco and the Bay Area with a string of cold-blooded killings. He hid his true features beneath a black homemade executioner’s hood, emblazoned in white with his symbol. Zodiac, in taunting letters sent to newspapers, provided hidden clues to his identity with cunning codes. “This is the Zodiac speaking,” he began as always. “By the way have you cracked the last cipher I sent you? My name is—” His cryptograms defied the greatest code-breaking minds of the FBI, the CIA, and NSA.
To terrify the public, Zodiac employed arcane terminology and purposely misspelled words. Sometimes he forgot himself and spelled a word correctly within the same letter. He used mispunctuation and un-grammatical language in his letters, yet understood subtle grammatical usages such as “shall” and “will.” “I shall no longer announce to anyone when I comitt my murders,” Zodiac printed in blue felt-tip pen in November 1969. “They shall look like routine robberies, killings of anger, & a few fake accidents, etc. The police shall never catch me, because I have been too clever for them.” And Zodiac was clever, wearing glue on his fingertips to keep from leaving prints, and changing bizarre weapons with each attack. Among his weapons were a gun that projected a beam of light so he could hunt people at night, electronic bombs in his basement (targeted for school children), a homemade knife in a decorated scabbard, and guns of every caliber. We were all afraid. Single-winged planes trailed school buses manned by armed guards, a reaction to Zodiac’s threat to “pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.” With each whispered phone call and cryptic message, each bloody scrap of victim’s clothing mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle, where I worked as a political cartoonist, a resolve grew within me to uncover his true face.
What made Zodiac so irresistible to the human imagination was not only that he offered so many hints to his true identity, but that he was always just out of reach. Who could forget the phone receiver, still damp with sweat and swinging from its cord, that Zodiac had used only moments before? He had brazenly called police from a booth four blocks from their headquarters. Directly after an attack, he was compelled to gloat, heartlessly calling his victims’ families, breathing silently into the phone—as if he were about to speak his name.
We knew Zodiac, whoever he was, as a man of many parts—cryptographer, criminologist, chemist, artist, engineer, bomb-builder, poet, weapons master, and above all a practioneer of the rope, the gun, and the knife. The tension grew as Zodiac, unquenchable in his b
lood lust, hinted at previously concealed murders. Had he made a past mistake that might reveal his true face? “They are only finding the easy ones,” he wrote. “There are a hell of a lot more down there.” Zodiac may have been referring to the October 30, 1966 murder of a Riverside, California coed. Zodiac was drawn to attack or write on holidays—the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, Christmas, Halloween, and Labor Day. In Southern California a double murder on a beach on Whit Monday, a Virgin Island holiday, may have been his first, a rehearsal for a double stabbing at a lake six years later. Zodiac had connections to the Virgin Islands, as did one of his victims.
Though highly intelligent, Zodiac was not an original man. He had stolen his image and method of murder from a watch, movies, comic strips, and a short story. His M.O. had been laid out in advance on the pages of his favorite adventure tale. Obsessed with the idea of hunting men as game, Zodiac stalked young couples “because man is the most dangerous animal of all to kill.” His rampages occurred on weekends at dusk or at night under a new or full moon. He cloaked himself in astrology (though that may have been a sham) and apparently cast his own horoscope to determine when he struck. Or was Zodiac only “moon mad,” affected by the moon as the tides are?
Almost all the homicides attributed to him involved students killed in or around their cars near bodies of water and places named after water. Water always figured in his crimes somewhere. Possibly Zodiac was a swimmer, boatman, or sailor. Whatever he was, he knew Vallejo, a Navy town where the Northern California murders began, intimately. I was convinced Zodiac was a longtime Vallejo resident who knew his victims and had stalked two for a period of time, one in particular.
Zodiac still walked among us from the 1960s into the 1990s. He was not at work elsewhere. His massive ego and easily identifiable methods would have made him known instantly. He intended to play his game of “outdoor chess” to the death and on home turf. Surviving victims and horrified witnesses fled into hiding. Investigators themselves were fearful. In their hearts they knew there was no defense against the compulsive, random killer. Some eyewitnesses were never interviewed by the police or recontacted to be shown photos of suspects. I only found them decades afterward. One had seen Zodiac unmasked and could identify him. Others had seen him cloaked in darkness, or in his hood, or at a distance. All of the witnesses had untapped and important information to give. The prime suspect had unique body language and, unbidden, the eyewitnesses all commented on Zodiac as “lumbering like a bear,” “clumsy,” “not very nimble.”
Included in this book is an in-depth analysis of the two films that inspired Zodiac’s costume and M.O. and the short story that obsessed him. Popular culture and the face of a watch may have inspired him, but Zodiac himself inspired not one, but three copycat murderers—in New York, Vallejo, and Japan. Beginning in 1986, I set out to tell the end of Zodiac’s chilling story—using the complete FBI file on Zodiac, confidential state and police files and internal and intradepartmental law enforcement memos, psychological and parole officer files, psychiatrists’ sessions with the chief suspect, lie-detector tests, never-published newspaper stories, unused reporter’s notes, and outtakes from television interviews. I have tried to make this book as accurate an account as thirty years of research can provide.
Most importantly, in this book, for the first time, are all the Zodiac letters and envelopes previously unreproduced. Quoted are copycat letters and possible Zodiac letters mailed anonymously to me. Automatic writing done under hypnosis by Starr’s sister-in-law indicates she saw Zodiac ciphers in his hand before they appeared in the press. Starr had bragged to friends, long before there was such a person as Zodiac, that he would hunt couples with a gun that projected a beam of light, taunt the police in letters, and call himself Zodiac. As one detective said, “If this story is true, then he almost has to be Zodiac.” Recorded interviews with detectives and witnesses I conducted almost thirty years ago took on new meaning as I incorporated hundreds of facts never revealed in print before.
The long pursuit and lure of the case, its mystery, tragedy, and loss, ruined marriages, derailed careers, and demolished the health of a brilliant reporter. Zodiac’s story began with obsession, but its ending was a study in frustration. Police were beaten back time and again. Would the most elusive killer in history, a cerebral, modern-day Jack the Ripper, escape them? Or would the dedicated teams of detectives and amateur sleuths all over the world uncover the final secret of Zodiac? It was a toss-up whether or not police could ever prove that Starr, their brilliant and physically powerful chief suspect, was their man. Zodiac’s murders had taken place in different counties and, due to interdepartmental jealousy (Zodiac was the biggest case of all), each police agency withheld vital information from the others. Not only that, but sexual sadists like Zodiac (who achieve pleasure through the pain they cause others) become amazingly proficient at concealing their identities.
We begin unmasking Zodiac on a sultry July Fourth, and conclude on another, more lethal, Fourth of July. In between we learn of murders unsuspected, a lonely man in his basement home, and a shadowy figure who might be Zodiac’s accomplice. But it had all begun with a watch. In that stifling room on that summer day the cops kept reminding themselves, “It’s only a watch.” But they were still afraid. That watch was the stuff of nightmares.
—Robert Graysmith San Francisco July 2001
1
zodiac
Sunday, July 4, 1971
Starr’s face was everywhere. Across the illuminated showroom, his round face was reflected in the brass compass, duplicated in the shiny varnished sides of the Chris Craft, reflected in the deep and highly polished floor, mirrored in the brass work around him, and copied in a hundred polished shaft bearings. His stocky form was reproduced full length in the floor-to-ceiling show window. Finally, the showroom closed, the holiday sale ended, the lights were extinguished, and Robert Hall Starr departed. He lumbered toward the lot, an immense shape against the summer night. As he went, he fished for keys to one of his many cars. Keys to cars he did not own jangled in his pocket.
At the end of the lot, Starr was a hazy blur—momentarily visible in the flash of the Volvo’s interior lights. He slid behind the wheel, gunned the engine, and expertly merged into freeway traffic. Soon, he reached Vallejo, a town typical of many other small California towns baking in a sultry summer night. Black skeletal derricks flashed by; battleships and three-tiered warehouses crouched in silhouette. Mare Island loomed as a shadowy mass across the straits, and sailboats fleeted as oily smudges on San Pablo Bay. Skyrockets flared briefly above. The staccato pop-pop-pop of firecrackers was like gunfire. The smell of gunpowder was in the air. San Francisco towered thirty miles away, Oakland less than twenty, and to the north the fertile Wine Country stretched through sun-drenched Napa and Sonoma counties.
The town was ideal for a man with so many vehicles. Interstate 80, the main coast-to-coast route of the West, neatly bisected the suburb. California 29 and 37 and Interstate 680 twisted veinlike to its heart. Vallejo occupied a strategic position between San Francisco and the capital—right where the river snaked down from Sacramento to greet the Bay Area—right where salt water embraced fresh. Here, a deepwater channel for seagoing traffic linked the Sacramento and San Joaquin River ports. Surrounded by water on three sides, Vallejo was a water town—home for Zodiac, a water-obsessed killer—a sailor of the knife, a mariner of the gun and of the rope.
Starr braked at a chestnut-colored stucco two-story house slouching on the east side of Fresno Street. Spanish tiles traced the rooflines of the low-pitched dwelling. At the rear, a modest chimney peeked over a field of weathered shingles. Left of the entrance stairs, a portico shrouded a conventional stile-and-rail door. From a brilliantly lit picture window, a woman’s lean shadow stretched to grotesque lengths across the sunburned lawn. Bernice glowered at her son. Frequently, he stood for hours at the same Venetian window, motionless as if at the length of a chain.
Years ago he ha
d been a trim athlete, a potential Olympic swimmer, a former lifeguard at “The Plunge.” Now weight had swollen a face once lean and sun-bronzed from innumerable days of sailing and swimming. His light-colored hair, reddish in the summer, had thinned perceptibly, and a noticeable paunch disrupted the line of his athletic torso. Bernice considered his increasing girth a dreadful failing. Soon he would be nearly unrecognizable. She was a tall woman, almost as tall as her son. Starr’s health, splendidly robust in his youth, had perceptibly faltered. His hunter’s eyes had dimmed. His flat feet and injured leg made any activity but swimming and trampolining difficult. Aimless hours spent guzzling Coors beer from quart jars had taken their toll. He frequently parked in secluded rural areas, legs curled against the dash, until he cramped and could sit and drink and watch no more. His violent outbursts terrified Bernice. Squabbles between mother and son had always been fierce, but since his father’s death last March their dinner table skirmishes had escalated. She often observed her son at the open trunk of his car, peering intently inside. Little eyes looked back. “Damn chipmunks,” she thought.
In his spare time Starr, a crafty and silent Sagittarius, stalked chipmunks with a bow and arrow. Sometimes he used a .22, and at other times set traps. The tiny squirrels he snared alive were popular with the neighborhood children. On weekends kids circled him gleefully, flags flying behind their two-wheelers. Disregarding their parents’ warnings, the offspring flocked to see the “Chipmunk Man.” They adored feeding peanuts to his pets.
Now Starr slammed the trunk lid shut and strode to the northeast side of the house. He trudged down a driveway to where a white Mercedes glowed luminously in the dusk. The darker silhouette of a detached two-door garage skulked further back. A black shroud of ivy cascaded over the fence.
