by Mark Hewitt
And why did the writer include implied or underhanded threats? Beyond describing his internal turmoil, he explained that withholding one form of attack would make another type inevitable. He claimed to be trying hard to prevent murder number 9 and possibly number 10. Then he asserted that if he held back too long from this/these murder(s), he would be forced to detonate a bomb that would incur a large body count. Killing one or two people is a very different activity than causing a blast that would demolish a busload of school children. It was not clear why holding back from one would necessitate the other.
The killer claimed that he was in conflict with himself, that there was a force that was attempting to take over him. What exactly was it that the Zodiac experienced that would cause him to murder a single person, or a couple, again? And why, if his resolve remained strong in that matter, would he be required to perpetrate a mass killing instead?
To some, his references to murder appeared to be no more than additional threats communicated under a new banner. Unless the purpose of depositing the piece of Stine’s shirt in the envelope was to conclusively identify the sender, its inclusion suggested that the killer was far from being sincere.
The Zodiac’s boast of 8 victims was immediately questioned by the police. He had only been credited with 5 murders by this point. The Bates killing had not yet been connected to him, and no other murders would ever be definitively attributed to him in the future. If this were an honest plea for help, some reasoned, the Zodiac would not claim credit for more murders than he actually committed. It may have been the first hint that he wrote quizzaciously.
By this time, the bus bomb appeared to investigators to have been nothing more than a hoax. The Zodiac later offered an excuse as to why he could not carry through with the threat: he was “swamped out” by rain. More likely, the diagram was merely an attempt to scare, not unlike his threat to kill up to a dozen citizens in San Francisco, and not unlike his threat to kill school children by shooting up a bus. None of these scary scenarios ever materialized as an actual act of violence. Future letters would also suggest that no bomb ever existed.
If sincere, the writer’s request for help was short-lived. Belli would receive no further mailings. The meek tone would never be repeated. With his next communication, the Name letter sent in early 1970, the Zodiac reverted to his familiar themes of threatening, boasting, and taunting.
The Zodiac’s cry for help may have been nothing more than a quote lifted from the Beatles’ movie, The Yellow Submarine, that had been released in 1968. The phrase “Please help me” occurred in the dialogue as well as in the lyrics of the song “Help” that was prominently featured in the 1965 film of the same name.
The Zodiac would add to his vocabulary the expression “Blue Meannie,” another reference to The Yellow Submarine in a later letter directed at The L.A. Times. Both phrases may have spawned from an idea co-opted from the Manson Family murders, whose twin nights of carnage occurred four months previous to the writing of the Belli letter. The Zodiac may have been fishing for new ways to gain newspaper space and public attention. He may have thought that he could find success by copying the actions of the Manson Family, whose apocalyptic interpretation of the Fab Four provided the fuel for their depravity.
Some detectives realized that the actual meaning of the letter may be no more profound than a new type of threat with a generous helping of mockery. The Zodiac may have been ridiculing the role that “Sam” played in this murder spree when the impostor called into the Jim Dunbar television show. He may have been making fun of anyone who would believe that he himself was in need of help or willing to surrender to the authorities. The letter may have been a tongue-in-cheek response to events that did not include him at all: the carnival that was the Jim Dunbar show where he only appeared to participate. He may have used the opportunity of another letter to threaten the general public by reminding them that he had killed before and would most certainly kill again. He presented his greatest threat to the public when he reminded them in a backhanded way that mass murder might be in its future.
His reference in the letter to something attempting to gain control of him may have been in response to Dunbar asking “Sam” what was going on “inside of [him].” The letter itself may have been in reaction to Belli’s words following the Dunbar broadcast when the attorney claimed that the Zodiac was “sick, sick, sick.”
It appeared to many that the Zodiac was neither serious about wanting to change his ways nor under the influence of an alter ego that was driving him to murder. He was up to the same old shenanigans: ridiculing, threatening, and taunting, which he had provided in all of his previous communications. If the letter was created and sent during a time of personal insight and sincerity, that sincerity left, never to be seen again, and the insight, however fleeting, did not provide a vision of health over the next four years.
Belli responded to the letter, even though he was in Europe at the time of its arrival. In a telephone call to reporter Paul Avery from Rome on Sunday, October 28, he made an appeal for the Zodiac to contact him. He added that he was willing to meet the killer anywhere at any time. He told The Chronicle that he was certain that the Zodiac would reach out him.
He was wrong; the Zodiac never did.
The Zodiac’s true feelings toward Belli emerged in a message sent in April of the following year. In the Dragon card, the killer mocked the attorney with the words, “Melvin Eats Blub[b]er.” He may have soured on the attorney, but by mentioning him, he revealed that Belli was still on his mind.
Melvin Belli’s path would cross that of the Zodiac case at least one additional time. Two years after the debacle of a television show, a good suspect emerged from Southern California. The famed lawyer was invited to give a lecture in order to draw out the man. Charles Ashman, at the time a young law student who police thought might be the Zodiac, was seated in the front row of the lecture, surrounded by police officers posing as fellow students. When the presentation concluded, the suspect eagerly approached Belli to speak with him in person.
Belli did not want to beat around the bush, and boldly confronted him. “Are you the Zodiac?” he queried. Shocked, the young law school student denied being the killer, or ever having killed anyone. He was soon eliminated from suspicion based on other evidence. He went on to be, in Belli’s words, “one of the best Constitutional lawyers I have ever known.”
9 | MODESTO, CALIFORNIA
“I gave a rather inter[e]sting ride”
The fertile soil of California’s Central Valley extends from the rolling coastal hills of California’s Pacific shoreline to the jagged Sierra Nevada mountain range on the east side of the state. Measuring as many as 60 miles by 450 miles, the desert plateau comprises more than 14 million acres. Sprawling Sacramento, its largest city, presses against the north boundary. The smaller towns that punctuate the landscape stand out amidst regimented orchards, sweeping ranches, and plenty of ground left fallow. The level plain accommodates long, straight highways for direct, if uneventful, travel. In the summer, ground temperatures frequently linger in the triple digits. At night, an ominous darkness descends, especially in the empty, quiet places.
At approximately 11:15 p.m. on Sunday, March 22, 1970, the realization came upon 22-year-old Kathleen Johns that she was being followed. She was driving westbound along Highway 132, close to the northern end of the valley. She was very vulnerable—alone with her 10-month-old daughter, Jennyfer and in the advanced state of pregnancy with her second child. She did not know that area well, even though she had in the past hitched rides through its vastness with truckers. The car behind her, which had not attracted her attention up to this point, began flashing high beams at her.
She contemplated the meaning of the gesture. Again and again, over the distance of several miles, the driver of the strange vehicle attempted to alert Johns to something. One police officer recorded that the pursuit began in the city of Modesto; another, that it started near Interstate 5, a 30-minute drive fro
m Modesto. Johns herself claimed that she first became aware of the vehicle near Modesto. Somewhere on Highway 132 between Modesto and Interstate 5, a strange driver wanted Johns to maneuver her car off the highway.
At first the young mother refused. She continued along Highway 132, even as the flashing of the other car’s lights became more and more insistent. Johns thought herself no fool to stop for a stranger along a darkened highway, and advanced toward the promise of a safer region. Finally, after an estimated 15 minutes of driving, she capitulated. Within sight of I-5, the well-traveled Interstate that is a major artery extending the length of California to the north and the south, she slowed her 1957 Chevrolet station wagon to the side of the road to determine the cause of the stranger’s concern.
What exactly had happened that night remains a dark mystery within an already enigmatic case. Kathleen Johns and her infant daughter may have encountered the Zodiac serial killer along a dark, lonely stretch of highway. They may have been abducted and driven around for more than an hour in the rural farmland of California’s Central Valley by a threat-breathing captor. Or maybe the two did not encounter the Zodiac, were not kidnapped, and did not face any threats whatsoever. The many differing accounts of the young mother’s experience do little to clarify events.
The Kathleen Johns incident, of all the Zodiac attacks and suspected Zodiac attacks, is the most difficult to reconstruct from eyewitness testimony, police reports, and interviews. The truth has suffered as a result of sloppy record keeping, vague descriptions, and changing stories. The contradictions are legion, and the points of agreement are not central to the case. The details of what occurred in the life of Kathleen and her daughter that night depended on who was relating the story—and when. There exists variation in location, in dialogue, in actions, and in the order of events. Johns was, according to one account or another, a creative liar with ulterior motives, a kidnap victim, a hysterical woman, an uncooperative witness, or the victim of an attack by the infamous Zodiac serial killer.
In follow-up interviews during the course of her life, Johns proved herself to be fickle and very impressionable, evidently changing her story in an effort to please those with whom she spoke. As many details slipped out of her memory over the years, she appears to have replaced them with accounts of her ordeal that she found in books, watched in movies, or read in newspapers. She had a difficult time disagreeing with others, and was often easily convinced by investigators and researchers who encouraged her to endorse one pet theory after another.
Other significant activities in Johns’s life may have affected her ability to precisely remember the details of her experience. In the 1970s, she would later explain that her domestic situation was very unsettled. Within two and a half years of the incident, she had given birth—Jody was born three months after her ordeal outside Modesto, on June 18—divorced, remarried, and traveled to Germany. Because of her changed last name, she dropped out of view of police investigators. The turbulent relationships in her life and her move overseas pressed the unusual event to the back of her mind.
At the time, Johns failed to comprehend the full magnitude of the Zodiac’s horror in California. The police and the public were still seven months away from learning that the killer had a history in Southern California that predated his attack at Lake Herman Road, outside of Vallejo. Until then, the case would not receive substantial coverage beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. By the time the story engulfed the south of the state, Johns was on her way out of the country. The kidnapping—if that is what it was—remained a disconcerting but minor event in her mind and in her life. It was not until the early 1980s, nearly a decade after her encounter, that police officials began to challenge the initial reports.
In an authenticated letter sent by the Zodiac four months after the incident, the killer claimed responsibility for the enigmatic attack. While neither explaining his actions nor attempting to prove his involvement—as he had after many of his previous attacks—he merely referred to the odd event as “a rather inter[e]sting ride for a couple of ho[u]rs that ended with my burning her car where I found them.”
If the Zodiac wrote the truth, and Johns did encounter him that night, she was very fortunate to be alive because most of the victims who were attacked by him did not live to tell of their experiences. And those who did survive were severely damaged.
By the spring of 1970, Cheri Jo Bates, David Faraday, Betty Lou Jensen, Darlene Ferrin, Cecelia Shepard, and Paul Stine had all been murdered. Though Michael Mageau and Bryan Hartnell had each survived a clash with the killer, they were both left with what their attacker must have assumed to be mortal wounds. Their predicament proved barely survivable, and they miraculously lived. But not without severe emotional and physical effects.
If Johns encountered the Zodiac, she and her daughter were the only female victims to survive, and the only victims of either gender to remain physically unscathed.
Regrettably, the police reports failed to shine a focused light on what exactly happened during the apparent attack. The officers tasked with interviewing Johns and recording events were careless with details and generous with factual errors. The existent police files do not present a consistent, cohesive narrative, with discrepancies between reports being numerous. Even if Johns provided conflicting pieces of information during her interviews with the officers, the reports failed to illuminate it because of their own inaccuracies, contradictions, and vague wording. It is not at all clear whether Johns was the victim of an encounter with the Zodiac, was kidnapped, or was reporting on events that never happened the way she claimed they did.
If a crime had been committed, the perpetrator apparently benefited from his choice of a victim and the location of his actions. Johns proved to be antagonistic to law enforcement, and was easily dismissible by gormless officials in backwater police jurisdictions. The officers could not even agree on whether any illegal activity had occurred.
When all of the police reports are cross-indexed with Johns’s later words, a probable narrative emerges for the first half of her most unusual night. But the tale must be told with numerous significant variations. For instance, there remains disagreement as to exactly where Johns, at the behest of the stranger, stopped her station wagon.
Sergeant Charles J. McNatt, badge #7425, in his report for the Patterson Police Department, recorded that Johns entered I-5, was passed by the strange driver, and then pulled over to the side of the highway soon after Highway 132 merged with the Interstate. Deputy Bauer, writing a statement for the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office (SJCSO), case 70-7475, placed the location at Highway 132, one-quarter mile west of the delta. Deputy Jim Ray Lovett, #160, of the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department hedged his bet by being vague in his description, placing the stop somewhere in the vicinity of Highway 132 and Interstate 5, noting that Johns was unfamiliar with the area and was unable to give a more precise position. Each of these descriptions would later prove to be either inaccurate or unnecessarily vague.
In all likelihood, the place where Johns pulled off the road, consistent with her later description of what she observed after she parked her car, was just east of Bird Road, still on Highway 132. Johns claimed that she could see a service station ahead of her. She reported feeling comforted in the presence of its welcoming lights. The station, a Richfield at the intersection of Highway 132 and Chrisman Road, still in operation today under a different name, was in fact easily visible from a vehicle parked just east of Bird Road on Highway 132. (The line of sight has since been broken by the construction of an overpass.) This location is precisely where Johns’s disabled car was recovered several hours later, according to Reed & Son Towing Company which took possession of the station wagon with California license plates HOJ 518 in the early hours of March 23.
The different locations provided by the officers’ reports later became fodder for speculation. Some investigators wondered whether the station wagon was moved at some point after Johns left her vehicle. Because she
pulled over in one spot, it was reasoned, and the car apparently found in another, her vehicle must have been relocated in her absence. In all likelihood, the discrepancies were due to the sloppy reporting of a rural area and the careless description of a remote highway. It would have been prohibitively difficult for the assailant to have moved the vehicle, and as details bear out, also highly incredible.
The strange car passed Johns as she pulled off the road, slowing down as she slowed, and then backed up. As he drew his vehicle alongside of hers, the driver of the alerting car told Johns that there was a problem with her rear wheel. He claimed it was “wobbly,” and offered to fix it for her.
It was a plausible story. Johns’s car, which had been purchased on the street in San Bernardino, was old and in poor condition. The young mother never knew when something else would go wrong with it.
She had no reason to doubt the man’s words. Living in a world that was much safer or more naïve than California today, she gratefully accepted his offer of assistance without suspicion. She remained seated and observed what occurred next.
The stranger emerged from his vehicle—described by Johns as a tan-colored late model, possibly a Pontiac or a Buick, “a big, old car”—carrying a tire iron. She reported years later that he returned to his 2-door car to retrieve the tire iron from the back seat after approaching her car on foot. He proceeded around the back of her station wagon to a point where Johns lost sight of him, and began working on her right rear wheel. She could hear him doing something mechanical in nature for about one to two minutes, she later estimated.
