by Mark Hewitt
Quiet after Labor Day, the lake no longer bustled with summertime revelry. It was remote and secluded, set back from the busier highways of the area: 101 to the west and Interstate 80 to the south. The area was far enough off the beaten path that it was relatively free of murders, often several years passing between them. 1969 recorded an unusually high number of homicides for the Lake Berryessa region, however, notching near double digits.
The couple finally departed St. Helena midafternoon. They made their way to Knoxville Road, the two-lane highway that wove through the hills to the west of Lake Berryessa, and from which they could admire the oak trees and other vegetation that surrounded the lake. As they drove to the north, they began to look for a place to park, preferably near one of the many pathways to the water. Hartnell later recalled that as they approached the area from the south he noticed a car in the first turnout. He drove on, seeking seclusion, until he found a vacant parking area, the second or third turnout. He shut off his car.
Though the two had chosen amity over a romantic bond with one another, and she had relocated to Southern California, there was deep warmth and caring between Hartnell and Shepard. Without question, each would gladly make profound sacrifices for the other.
The couple gathered their belongings for the stop—including a plaid blanket and a deck of cards—and made their way along a path that would lead them to the water’s edge. After carefully stepping over a foot stile, they navigated the narrow dirt trail and descended until they encountered an unpaved road which originated at a service entrance for park vehicles. Bryan and Cecelia were now halfway between Knoxville Road and the shoreline.
Cecelia Ann Shepard, “Cece” to her closest friends, was a petite beauty with a warm smile. Two years older than Bryan—she was born on New Year’s Day in 1947 in Nuzzid, India—she similarly had a wide circle of friends and was well liked by her classmates. The lithe, 22-year-old woman had just completed her year at PUC that spring and was savoring the next chapter of her life: completing her bachelor’s degree at U.C. Riverside in Southern California. She had traveled up north from Loma Linda the previous day with a girlfriend to pick up some items she had stored that spring at her former school. She also wanted to check in on friends and re-live some of the many joyous memories she carried from the region. The trip was not designed for her to meet up with Hartnell, but once the two began chatting in the dining hall, she made ample space in her schedule to spend the afternoon with her former boyfriend.
Continuing to follow the path, the couple skirted a tree-covered hill and made their way toward an oblong stretch of land which jutted left, paralleling the length of the lake. In some wet winters, water covered the narrow strip that connected the mainland to the elevated promontory, making their picnic area a sometime-seasonal island. Despite the heat of September, and the high demand for water in Northern California, Bryan noticed that they were crossing a temporary spit. They had entered Twin Oaks Ridge and set foot on a grassy peninsula that would in time be labeled “Zodiac Island.”
They spread their blanket near one of three large oak trees and stretched out to enjoy the shade, the spectacular view of the lake with its ragged surrounding hills, and each other’s company. They would remain in their idyllic surroundings for an uninterrupted 45 minutes of pleasant conversation. Then their lives would be altered forever as a serial killer completed his Northern California hat trick of carnage.
***
At 8:20 that evening, Detective Sergeant Harold Snook, “Hal” to his friends, a time-tested veteran, received a telephone call from his headquarters, the Napa County Sheriff’s Office (NCSO). An ambulance had been sent to Lake Berryessa in response to a report of a double stabbing, he was told. Snook requested that Detective Sergeant Ken Narlow and Detective Sergeant Richard Lonergan be called to the scene. He also ordered a police unit to secure the integrity of the site.
Immediately, NCSO telephoned Narlow and Lonergan at their respective residences, and notified them of the brutal knife attack on the shore of Lake Berryessa. They were told that the two victims were due to arrive at the Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa, and that they should immediately proceed there to begin their investigation. By these calls, the two were effectively assigned the case.
Just after 8:30, Narlow entered the hospital, followed 11 minutes later by Lonergan.
Before his partner arrived, Narlow was informed that the unknown assailant responsible for the attack had used a telephone booth at the Napa Car Wash, on the corner of Clinton and Main Streets, to phone the Napa Police Station. The address was 1231 Main Street. The call was similar to the one the Vallejo Police Station fielded a mere twelve weeks earlier. Snook, who had just arrived at the hospital a few minutes after Lonergan, now rushed to the intersection to process the phone booth for clues.
At 7:40 p.m. on the night of the attack, Officer David Slaight of the Napa Police Department (NPD) received the unusual telephone call. He had been on patrol that evening, and as a rookie, the affable, young cop was required to man the phones during meal breaks. Dutifully, he had returned to the station to answer calls so that others could eat. Already aware of the attack at Lake Berryessa, he initially thought that some park ranger who was out of radio contact had pressed this caller into service to provide the Police Department with an update. Slaight heard a young-sounding, male voice, possibly from someone in his early 20s, calmly state,
“I want to report a murder, no a double murder. They are two miles north of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.”
When the caller paused, Slaight interjected, “where are you now?” He wanted to know the exact location of the man who he thought was calling on behalf of a ranger so someone could be sent for an update.
The caller ignored the question and continued in a barely audible voice, “I’m the one that did it.” At that, the line went silent.
Once again, the Zodiac serial killer had attacked a couple in a remote area and then made a taunting telephone call to the police. Once again, he had traveled to a location a few blocks from a police station to place the call using a public pay phone. The killer was following some twisted criminal blueprint, or he was repeating an activity that had been successful for him in the past.
Slaight, suddenly aware of the call’s significance, telephoned the operator on another phone line, and asked if it was possible to put a trace on the call that he had just received. The operator promised to keep that line open, informing him that the caller had used a ten-cent pay phone. In speaking to the operator, the stranger had refused to identify the number from which he was calling. She told Slaight that the prefix of the telephone number was 255.
Years later, Slaight would explain how he located the telephone. As he listened to the line, he heard the sounds of some traffic passing by and some voices, possibly women. He had difficulty hearing very well because he was in the process of calling the Sheriff’s Office on another line to report the call, and his own radio was hissing in the background. Nevertheless, he could tell that the receiver had not been returned to its cradle at the conclusion of the call. When someone from the Sheriff’s Office—it may have been Slaight himself, he admitted—sent out a call to patrolling officers that the attacker had called from a pay phone with a prefix of 255, and that it sounded as if the telephone receiver had not been hung back up, a local reporter who had been listening on a police scanner moved into action. (The Napa Register reported on September 29 that it was Pat Stanley, the News Director at KVON Radio, and he was at the Sheriff’s Office when the call was broadcast.) He drove around looking for a phone booth with its receiver dangling. When he discovered it on Main Street, he shouted into the booth, thus alerting Slaight.
Snook reached the telephone booth, as directed, just a few blocks from the Napa Police Station, at 8:50 p.m. Already present at the scene were Officer Eric Ronback and Reserve Officer Donald Stanley, who had both carefully protected the perimeter. Snook was informed that the assailant was not there, nor h
ad any car left evidence of its presence, such as rubber skid marks or tire tread marks. No one had approached the officers while they were there, and no footprints were observable on the blacktop. There was also no evidence that anyone had fled from the booth in a hurry.
Snook observed the scene of the call. The telephone booth stood on the south wall of the car wash on Main Street. The folding door was on the south side of the booth. The phone within the booth was situated on the north corner of the east wall, with its receiver dangled directly under and to the south of the phone unit (in front of it). The openings of the receiver faced east.
Snook captured color photographs. He lifted 35 latent prints, carefully numbering them from 1 to 35, photographing four of them, numbers 29 through 32, prior to lifting them. He noted that water beads were present for three hours after he had arrived. The phone’s number was recorded, 255-9673. Snook did not leave the site until 11:49 p.m.
The ambulance bearing the victims hurried into the hospital parking lot at the same time that Snook had arrived at the phone booth, two Piner Ambulance Company employees in attendance, Earl and Robert. To Narlow, the victims appeared to be in critical condition: Shepard was in a coma, and Hartnell spoke only in short bursts. Within five minutes, both Narlow and Lonergan were dismissed from the hospital entrance so that the emergency personnel could attend to their patients.
Two skilled physicians had been assigned the care of Hartnell and Shepard, though one of them had not yet arrived.
Narlow learned that Shepard’s best friend was named Judy. Once outside the emergency room, the officers contacted the Chief Security Officer at PUC to gain assistance in contacting her. Upon hearing that she had left the college that afternoon, Narlow put out an APB (all-points bulletin) around the City of Napa and the County of Napa for her yellow Datsun.
At precisely 9:37, the officers were given permission to speak with Hartnell, who had been taken to the x-ray room for a better look at his injuries. Because his partner had been called away to the telephone, Lonergan conducted the interview alone. It was clear to the detective that the patient was in a great deal of pain, and was beginning to show signs of shock. The officer listened carefully to the information that was offered.
Hartnell related that he and Shepard had been approached by a gun-wielding man wearing a black ceremonial-type hood that was square on top. He guessed that the assailant weighed 200-250 pounds, a heavyset guy. After being tied up, the two victims were stabbed with a long knife that had been slipped out of its sheath. The assailant wore dark clothing: a dark jacket and dark pants. The knife had a black handle and was possibly homemade. The handgun appeared to be an automatic, but being unfamiliar with the specifics of guns, the victim was unable to offer anything more definitive. Hartnell was overcome by his body’s response to his wounds—shock was eclipsing his will to assist the police. He quit speaking as if he was turning his attention to the process of healing. A more complete interview would be conducted the next day by Detective Sergeant John Robertson of the Napa County Sheriff’s Department.
Narlow and Lonergan left for the Sheriff’s office at 10:15 p.m., but not before assigning Deputy Sheriff Allen Brambrink and Deputy Sheriff William Munk to remain at the hospital to provide security for the victims until other arrangements could be made. No one knew whether their assailant, or someone else, would initiate a second attack at the hospital. The deputies were also assigned the task of receiving any clothing or other evidence as it was released by the hospital. Brambrink would soon be spirited away to provide security at the crime scene through the dark of night until the first signs of daylight.
Narlow’s APB was successful, and Judy was soon located and brought to the Napa County Sheriff’s Office (NCSO). She told Narlow and Lonergan that she was from Sun Valley, California. Because she had been with the couple that afternoon, she was able to provide the investigators with information on the events that led up to the strange attack. She was with the victims when they left PUC at one o’clock for the rummage sale in St. Helena. She had last seen them at two o’clock in the afternoon. At that time, she told the officers, she believed that the couple was headed for San Francisco. She knew nothing of any plans to go to Lake Berryessa.
The lead investigators next traveled to the attack site at Lake Berryessa, arriving at six minutes before midnight. They found the scene guarded by uniformed officers under the control of Detective Sergeants Dave Collins and Ray Land of the Napa County Sheriff’s Department. Years later, Narlow would relate that there was not much of a scene to secure by the lake since a warden had gathered the discarded clothing, the blanket, and other items and bunched them all together. Trying to be helpful, he had inadvertently contaminated evidence in the case.
Collins and Land briefed Narlow and Lonergan.
Recalling events years later, Collins guessed that he had been informed of the double stabbing at Lake Berryessa at 6:15 p.m. Further investigation placed the time of the stabbing at an estimated 6:15 p.m., and Collins’ being notified sometime later. In his report for the State of California, Special Agent Mel Nicolai of the CII, who had been assigned to assist the Napa County Sheriff’s Office by Supervising Special Agent Ken Horton, recorded that Collins was notified at 7:13 p.m. Collins was on the northeast side of Napa. Immediately, he contacted his partner, Land, who was in St. Helena. They each sped to the scene, arriving at the lake at almost the same time, about 30 minutes after first notification of the crime.
The four officers observed a white 1956 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia with a black vinyl top bearing Oregon plates parked by the side of Knoxville Road, near the entrance to a path that led to the attack site. On the passenger door, scrawled in black ink, a message from the killer taunted the investigators. The detectives were shown footprints and tire tracks believed to have been left by the assailant. They waited for the arrival of police photographer Sergeant Tom Butler and criminalist Detective Sergeant Hal Snook to collect and preserve the physical evidence.
As they waited, the lead detectives learned from Park Ranger Dennis Land that there was a locked gate one-half mile south of victim’s car which opened to a service road that snaked down toward the water. It crossed the path that Hartnell and Shepard had used to get down to beach. The detectives unlocked the gate, followed its roadway, and found footprints where the footpath traversed the service road, halfway between crime scene on the beach and Hartnell’s car on Knoxville Road. These prints matched those beside the car in the lot, so they decided to secure the area and wait until daylight to hunt for additional footprints. Somebody relocked the gate.
Detective Snook finally appeared at the lake twenty minutes into the next morning, having spent three hours processing the Napa telephone booth. He took careful measurements of the scene. The placement of Hartnell’s car was established at seven-tenths of a mile north of Park Headquarters (not the “two miles” quoted by the caller). Fifteen feet north of the car Snook noted a stile for traversing the barbed-wire fence that separated the parking area from the pathway to the shore.
The footprints found from the stile to the side of Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia, apparently left by the attacker, were thirteen inches long and four and one half inches wide. At the heel, the shoeprints measured three and one quarter inches in width. The heel that made the print was three and one seventh inches in length. The prints revealed a parallel tread pattern on both the heel and the sole inset which was three-quarters of an inch from the edges.
Butler photographed the shoe prints. A plaster cast was created from one them, and a photo was taken of Snook pointing at it (it led away from the foot stile in the direction of the car).
Snook noticed that the assailant’s car had left tire impressions about 20 feet to the rear of the Karmann Ghia. One set was photographed and a cast was made. The impression nearest the fence was four and a half inches in width and evidenced a parallel tread design. Butler photographed it; Snook made a cast of it. The impression that lay the farthest from the fence was five and a half i
nches in width with a straight, one-eighth inch tread design in the center of a herringbone design on either side, consisting of three approximately one-sixteenth-inch treads between two approximately one-eighth-inch treads. This was also photographed by Butler and cast by Snook. Narlow would later comment on the mismatched treads, suggesting that they evidenced an older vehicle. The distance between the inside left tread and the inside right tread measured 52 inches, making the effective distance between the wheels—measured from the center of one tire to the center of the other—precisely 57 inches.
Butler took general photos of the scene, including the car’s passenger door which had been defaced with some intriguing writing. The perpetrator had apparently, using a black felt tip pen measuring three-sixteenth of an inch at its tip, written his soon-to-be iconic crosshairs symbol above the following:
Vallejo
12-20-68
7-4-69
Sept 27-69-6:30
by knife
Latent fingerprints numbering 36 to 43 were lifted from the car and taken into evidence. The vehicle remained locked and showed no signs of tampering or attempted entry. Initially, Narlow kept secret the details of the car door writing from the general public. When a photograph of the scrawl was later disclosed, the last line, “by knife,” was obscured from view with tape and a piece of brown paper. The NCSO wanted to withhold some information in order to challenge any future confessions. The media and public immediately began speculating on the contents of the concealed information, drawing fallacious conclusions. The NCSO attempted to calm public fears by announcing that the final line did not in fact contain a date on which the murderer planned a future attack.
The killer had claimed credit for his work. It was another attack by the Zodiac, connected by the words written on the car door to the two Vallejo-area crime scenes. The incident would be investigated as one of a series, but it would also need to be investigated in its own right. Perhaps this was the scene at which the killer’s identity could be established. He may have had a connection to one of these two victims or the area now scarred by the violence. Or perhaps this wasn’t a Zodiac attack at all. It may have been some other killer wanting to throw off investigators and lead them to fallaciously conclude it had been committed as part of the series.
