Hunted: The Zodiac Murders (The Zodiac Serial Killer Book 1)

by Mark Hewitt

  At 3:00 in the afternoon, and again at 3:45, 18-year-old Cheri Jo Bates, a pretty Southern California brunette, telephoned Stefani Guttman, her close friend and fellow Riverside City College (RCC) student. She invited her friend to accompany her in picking up a few books from the college library. It was Sunday afternoon, and Cheri Jo, a conscientious first-year student, needed the literature to complete a class assignment. Guttman would forever regret passing on the opportunity.

  Alone, Bates set out sometime before 6:00 p.m. on October 30, 1966.

  Just before she left, she wrote a note for her father, with whom she lived, informing him of her destination: “DAD—Went to RCC Library.”

  Joseph Bates arrived home shortly afterwards and found his daughter’s words. Before he departed for dinner at a friend’s home, he too scribbled a note—Stefani had called and left a message. This father and daughter team communicated well and often. Joseph had phoned Cheri Jo from his friend’s home at 5:00, and again at 5:15, to invite his daughter to join them for dinner, but the line was busy on both occasions. He had just missed her when he got back home around 6:00 p.m.

  Joseph showered, changed his clothes, and traveled back to his friend’s home. Cheri Jo would have to fend for herself.

  Earlier that day, the two had celebrated Mass at Saint Catherine’s Catholic Church, followed by breakfast. When her dad went to the beach at Corona del Mar with his friend to enjoy the unseasonably warm temperatures that afternoon, Cheri Jo had declined to accompany them. She had homework to complete. She also hoped to make time to compose a passionate letter to her boyfriend in San Francisco.

  When Joseph finally arrived home to stay around midnight, he discovered that his message remained untouched. A feeling of worry overcame him. Cheri Jo, his only daughter, had not returned from the library.

  Alarmed, he hurriedly telephoned Guttman for any information he could gather. He would call her again at 6:50 in the morning. At daybreak, he filed a missing person’s report with the Riverside Police Department (RPD). He and Cheri Jo were so close, and she was usually so careful and punctual, that he refused to wait any longer. He knew something was wrong.

  Something was.

  At 6:30 on the morning following her disappearance, the body of Cheri Jo Bates was found face down on a dirt pathway that led to a student parking area. It lay between two old, vacant houses that had been purchased by the college in preparation for an expansion. Bates’s remains were approximately 100 yards from her disabled car (one police estimate lists 200 feet instead of 300 feet, possibly a typing error). The grisly discovery was made by 48-year-old RCC groundskeeper Cleophas Martin as he operated a street sweeping machine. Cheri Jo had been stabbed numerous times, including a coup de grace to the neck, a slice that nearly decapitated her.

  The furrowed grass in the area bore witness to a horrific struggle. Bates was fully clothed in a yellow blouse (the coroner described it as a “loose pink moderately heavy blouse”), home-made red Capris, and white sandals. She wore no sweater because she was planning to return home immediately after collecting the books—she preferred to study at home. Her arms were drawn in, and her body partially concealed a woven straw tote-bag purse beneath her, papers from which would be used to identify her. She had been beaten about the face and strangled. The autopsy would detail seven deliberate cuts to her young throat.

  Born in Nebraska on February 4, 1948 to Joseph C. Bates and Irene Karolvitz, Cheri Josephine Bates lived with her father, a machinist at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory in Norco. Her only sibling, her younger brother, Michael, had joined the Navy and was stationed far from home. She could see her mother anytime, since she too lived in Riverside, having divorced Cheri Jo’s father. The family, which had been intact at the time, had moved to California eight years prior to the attack. A family of four, through divorce and a military assignment, had become a household of two.

  Her parent’s divorce and her brother’s absence did not hold Cheri Jo back. She was even-keeled, dedicated, and determined. A full-time student at RCC, she still found time to do typing and other clerical work for Riverside National Bank. She was well liked by her friends, but more importantly, she was respected by them. Never given to erratic impulsiveness, her word was her bond. Everyone who knew her knew that she was as dependable and prompt as she was loyal. Her creative flair never resulted in periods of irresponsibility. She was generous and kind, and always seemed to have a smile on her face. She had no shortage of date requests from the many men drawn to her gregariousness. She was planning a career as a flight attendant. An official at the Ramona High School where Bates had been a cheerleader described her as bright and very popular with both boys and girls during her high school career in Riverside.

  Riverside, California, the town where Cheri Jo and her family had lived for almost a decade, was founded in 1870. Named for the Santa Ana River on which it sat, it became the county seat in 1873 when Riverside County was established. No permanent settlement had occurred at the site prior to this time, but the area was well known to the local Native Americans, who had over the years built many temporary dwellings there. The Spanish first arrived in the region in 1774.

  Once established as a permanent town, and seat of the county, Riverside became known for the Washington Navel Orange, a popular variety of seedless orange. It boasted large settlements of Chinese and Korean workers, possessing one of the largest Chinatowns to be found in California. It played host to NASCAR racing and other track events at the Riverside International Raceway that operated from 1957 to 1989. When it finally closed, the raceway’s buildings and track were dismantled to make way for a shopping mall.

  In the 1960 census, the town boasted a population of 84,332. Cheri Jo Bates would never again be counted among the cities’ residents, however. She had been murdered in cold blood.

  ***

  The 1960s in California was a tumultuous decade. As far as American history, only the 1860s with the Civil War offered more social and cultural upheaval. One consequence of the free love and rebellion was a large number of serial killers spawned in the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s. They may have emerged on the scene as a result of widespread interpersonal alienation, the increased number of absentee parents, or merely the nebulous but palpable angst that permeated the culture. Whatever the cause, the surge of a “new” type of criminal was notable and alarming. At the time of Bates’s death, no one realized that a lone murder in Southern California was the opening salvo of a deadly spree, and the beginning of a decades-long mystery. It was a one-off event when it occurred, and it seemed unrelated to other contemporary crimes.

  The crime in and of itself was high profile, and the community felt an urgency to find its resolution. In the usually safe town of Riverside, murder was rare. Riverside Police Chief L. T. “Curly” Kinkead quickly assigned seven officers. They were ordered to drop their current projects and apply themselves full time to the murder investigation. Detective Sergeant Gren was assisted by six detectives: Dick Yonkers, Earl Brown, Wayne Durrington, Cliff Arons, Curtis Best, and Bob Walters. These investigators would in turn be supported by full-time detectives assigned to the case by the District Attorney’s Office, and additional detectives from the Coroner’s Office. On the first day of the investigation alone—the day Bates’s body was discovered—24 officers put in a total of 133 man hours of effort.

  And this was only the beginning. The first month recorded a total of 30 different law enforcement agents working the many facets of the murder case.

  Gren, Brown, and Yonkers preserved the integrity of the crime scene and began to search for clues, even as students began to flow past on their way to class. Many stopped to stare.

  Subsequent investigation revealed that Bates had checked out three books on the U.S. Electoral College system from the RCC library at approximately 6:00 p.m. When she returned to her lime green Volkswagen Beetle, parked on a city street near the library at 3680 Terracina Drive (the address of college), she was unable to start the vehicle.
Apparently, not realizing the damage that had been done to her car, she turned over the engine again and again, enough to drain the battery. Three library books lay on the passenger seat of her car; the keys remained in the ignition.

  Under greater scrutiny, it was evident that someone had deliberately tampered with Miss Bates’s 1960 Volkswagen. Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies Jack Reid and Jack Elms, who located Bates’s car on the morning after her disappearance, noted that the distributor coil and condenser had been torn out, and the coil wire dislodged from the distributor socket. A few greasy fingerprints and palm prints that dirtied the driver’s door must have come from whomever had disabled the car. Both windows were rolled down. The passenger door was ajar, suggesting to detectives that her assailant may have been in the vehicle with her. Detective Captain Irvin “Irv” L. Cross of the Riverside Police Department (RPD) ordered the vehicle towed to the police station to be examined.

  Dr. F. Rene Modglin, a pathologist on contract with the Riverside County Coroner’s Office, began his preliminary autopsy right at the spot Bates lay. He had been called at home at 7:15 in the morning by Chief Deputy Coroner William J. Dykes and notified of a possible homicide. Dykes called again at 8:30—this time to Modglin at work—ordering him to proceed to the site. The pathologist arrived just after 9:00 a.m. Based on the temperature of Bates’s liver, and the corpse’s stage of rigor mortis, he tentatively estimated that the girl had been killed at 10:30 p.m. That estimate would be modified following a more extensive study of the body.

  The detectives gathering clues soon learned that Cheri Jo may have announced her passing.

  A woman who lived in the vicinity reported that she heard a scream the previous evening between 10:15 p.m. and 10:45 p.m., followed by a second, muted scream, and then two minutes later by the sound of an older car roaring to life. This information was described in the newspapers as originating from an anonymous caller, who at the time of the sounds did not think them important enough to contact the police. Whether these were related to the violent attack was never established.

  The screams could have come from someone unwittingly stumbling across the body in the dead of night, or by someone unrelated to the crime. If they had been made by Bates, and denoted the time of the attack, investigators were left to wonder what Bates was doing between 6:00 p.m. and 10:15 p.m., especially in light of the fact that she could not start her car and may not have shown herself to her friends in the library, which shuttered for the night at 9:00 p.m. The police believed that the screams coincided with Bates’s death, but would not confirm this without corroborating evidence.

  Authorities transported the body to Acheson and Graham Mortuary, where Modglin performed a complete autopsy. Those present included: Detective Gerald H. Dunn, Detective Earl T. Brown of the RPD, Investigator Jim Lesseigne (Riverside County District Attorney’s Office), Michael J. Reilly (Riverside County Coroner’s Office), and Mr. Scotty Hill, an embalmer at the mortuary. The pathologist ruled it a death due to hemorrhage of the right carotid artery. Fingernail scrapings suggested that the victim had struggled against a white, male assailant.

  Bates weighed 110 pounds. The doctor noted her green eyes and brown hair. Her blood type was AB positive, and tested negative—as expected—for traces of drugs or alcohol. He recorded, among many other abrasions and wounds, a 2-centimeter oblique laceration to her upper lip, numerous petechia in the skin of her forehead, and an area of dark blue-gray discoloration of the skin of her left cheek and chin. He removed from her stomach the roast beef that had been cooked and eaten by Bates on Sunday, evidencing between two and four hours of digestion. He now set the time of death to a range of time between 9:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m., but an even earlier time would be stated in a future document.

  During the preliminary procedure, still at the crime scene, Modglin found a clot of blood with four sandy-brown hairs attached to it. They were on the base of Bates’s right thumb, and provided a most intriguing potential forensic link to her killer. Analysis conducted by the Trace Evidence Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1999 revealed that the hairs did not match exemplary hairs taken from Bates. The killer may have deposited the clot during the mortal violence.

  The wounds on her body revealed that the friendly coed had been attacked with a small knife whose blade measured only three and a half inches by a half inch, possibly a pen knife or a small kitchen implement. She had been stabbed numerous times in the chest, once in the back, and slashed across her neck. Investigators had on their hands a homicide caused by multiple stabbing and slashing wounds of the abdomen and neck—inflicted with a sharp instrument or knife. Despite having no eyewitnesses and no firm time of attack, they remained hopeful that enough clues were present to identify and convict the person or persons responsible. They wanted the case solved.

  They wanted it solved quickly.

  Detectives Bob Walters and Earl Brown of the RPD used a metal detector to search the area of the crime scene for a murder weapon. None was found. An investigation of the library also proved fruitless. Walter Seibert was one of a few of Cheri Jo’s friends who was at the library from 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. None of them saw Bates, whom they knew and would have noticed, according to the police report. Bates’s friends did report that they saw four men in work clothes sitting on a fence across from the spot where Bates’s car was located. One newspaper reported that Bates had been seen studying at the library until its close at 9:00 p.m. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery later wrote that “numerous witnesses” had observed Bates in the library though none had spoken to her.

  The Press, a local Riverside newspaper, carried two stories about the attack on the day after Bates was found. In the first, information about the discovery of a body was shared with the public. Bates was identified by name, and her father’s name and address were listed, the naïve standard of an innocent time, “Joseph Bates 4195 Via San Jose.” The article noted that the area of the crime had to be roped off because students were beginning to arrive for classes. Officer J. Walters was pictured looking for clues. In a separate picture, Officer Ben Castlebury interrogated librarian Harry Back and reference librarian Winifred Turner about the library’s hours of operation. The story noted that officers carefully circumnavigated the pathway, preventing the destruction of any forensic material, until it had been processed.

  The second article, titled, “Father waits in vain for daughter’s return,” told the heart-wrenching story of Cheri Jo’s dad. By Monday morning, Joseph knew that a body had been found at RCC, and that Cheri Jo’s Volkswagen, with California license plate PNA-398, had been discovered nearby. Police didn’t say anything to him at first, but he suspected that the remains were those of his only daughter.

  The police eventually notified him of what he already knew. He was now very alone.

  ***

  On Tuesday, Gren informed reporters that the detectives had interviewed 75 people, but still had not solved the riddle: “So far we have drawn a blank.” He asked for public assistance from anyone who had seen Bates before her demise, hoping that knowledge of her movements and activities of Sunday night would aid the investigation.

  Tips flooded in. Everyone wanted to help, it seemed. When the public was told of the small blade that was used against the popular, young coed, telephone calls came in from people all over town who had located just such a knife. On November 14, the campus gardener raked up a small knife on the college grounds. Unfortunately for the investigation, it had no dried blood on it and the size was wrong.

  It was reported that one witness had seen Bates as she drove toward the library on the day she went missing. A 1965 or 1966 bronze-colored car, possibly an Oldsmobile, had been observed following her. No one else could confirm the sighting, and no such vehicle was ever positively identified.

  Riverside Police Chief Kinkead revealed on Wednesday that nearly 125 citizens had been interviewed by police, who were working the murder case around the clock.

  In the aftermath
of the attack, RCC illuminated and provided open space at the spot the crime had occurred. Facing pressure from the community, it moved up its schedule to install mercury vapor lights on the campus between Terracina Drive and Fairfax Avenue.

  The few pieces of physical evidence found at the scene of the murder intrigued investigators. A heel print in the soil from a military shoe, sized between 8 and 10, appeared to come from her attacker. It was identified as a B.F. Goodrich waffle design, a men’s four-eighths inch washer-type half heel. At first it appeared that the shoes that made the impression originated in England. Subsequent investigation indicated that they were sold only to federal prison industries at Leavenworth, Kansas, where they were cobbled with leather into shoes for the U.S. government. The pair that made the impressions in the soft ground could have been purchased at nearby March Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command base. Shoes bearing the identified tread patterns were also available to other government agencies, including prison administrations.

  A man’s Timex watch, with the fastener on one side of the watch torn off, may have also been deposited by her attacker. It had a white, stainless steel face and no serial number. Located ten feet from Bates’s body, with its hands stopped at precisely 12:24, the watch may have been pulled from her killer during the struggle. It was later determined that the watch had been purchased from the PX at an overseas military base. This resulted in the interrogation of 154 airmen stationed at March Air Force Base—all those who took classes at the college.

  The Timex was sent on Thursday to the California Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (CII) in Sacramento, and subjected to many tests by a private company in San Diego. A summary of the crime five years later indicated that the police were convinced that the watch belonged to her murderer, but they also knew it could have been totally unrelated to the attack or purposefully placed by her attacker as a false clue. If it was worn by Bates’s killer, the police had one more piece of information about him: he had a seven-inch wrist. The watch was dotted with white paint spatter, an intriguing potential clue to its owner’s identity.