by Mark Hewitt
There was an obvious discrepancy in the timing of Johns’s arrival and Lovett’s summoning. It would not be the last discrepancy.
Immediately after calling Lovett, McNatt transported the mother and daughter in his car to a local diner, half a block down the street, today operating under the name “Mil’s.”
Recalling events years later, Johns complained about how uncomfortable she was. She was very pregnant, sitting in a dark room, with nothing to do for “hours.” Jennyfer was hungry and crying, and no one offered them anything. According to one account, Johns sat in the front window of the closed restaurant, peering out toward the police station.
Fortunately for all involved, the Zodiac never showed himself in Patterson, just as he had passed on the chance to attack in Modesto. When daylight broke, the Johns were taken back to San Joaquin County, to where her station wagon had been located.
Johns evidently did not get along with McNatt. A personality conflict and a mutual mistrust may have contributed to any misunderstandings that morning. According to McNatt, Johns was hysterical when she was brought into his office. Three times in his report, he described Johns as being hysterical or becoming hysterical again. In an interview conducted years later, however, Johns vehemently denied being upset even once, repeatedly criticizing the officer’s attitude toward her, “I never got hysterical.”
For her part, Johns did not offer assistance as an eagerly cooperative citizen. She bore an obvious anti-police attitude—not an uncommon trait at the time. She admitted to owning a black-light and smoking marijuana, and was sympathetic to, if not a full participant in, the anti-establishment spirit that flourished in the 1960s. She was not nice to the older, by-the-book veteran officer, she later confessed.
The cop and the victim may also have been dragging from the lateness of the hour. Shift work for the police officers and a nighttime drive for Johns may have lowered their defenses, raised hackles, and played tricks on their memories.
McNatt reported that Lovett, upon his arrival in Patterson, also interviewed Johns—or received a briefing from him, noting vaguely, “the same story was related to [O]fficer [L]ovett.” Not long after his arrival in Patterson, Lovett alerted the SJCSO and departed to search for Johns’s abandoned vehicle. He reported locating it on “Maze Boulevard” (the name of Highway 132 as it traverses the town of Modesto), two miles east of Interstate 5.
But the car had been torched, its interior completely consumed by fire.
Lovett recorded that he returned to Patterson at that time and transported Johns and her daughter to Tracy.
***
The car fire told police that Johns’s escape had not ended her assailant’s activities that night. After Johns fled his car, the stranger apparently returned to Highway 132 and located her station wagon where it had been disabled. He—or someone else—burned the abandoned vehicle beyond recognition, possibly making use of an accelerant.
He departed, leaving behind the station wagon’s flaming shell. In a standard crime report of the SJCSO, Deputy Bauer described what he found when he went to investigate the station wagon that was described to him by Lovett. The vehicle’s interior was completely charred, the arson performed while the owner was “hauled about the county.” With information possibly supplied by other departments, Bauer too noted that the car’s owner had been picked up on the pretext of being taken to a service station for car repairs. If Johns’s captor had not set the vehicle ablaze, it had been done by an associate of the assailant or by another stranger in an unrelated—and highly coincidental—act of vandalism
The SJCSO ordered the station wagon towed. Bauer received a report that the hubcap was missing, likely removed from the scene by Johns’s assailant. It was eventually located and taken to ID to be checked for fingerprints. The SJCSO contacted the Country Club Fire Department who in turn notified the rural fire department in Tracy for a possible arson investigation. Whether the firemen moved on it or not, the SJCSO declared that it would file arson and kidnapping charges against the perpetrator if he were ever identified.
He never was.
The SJCSO also contacted the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and requested fingerprints of the Zodiac, knowing that San Francisco had some on file. When advised of Johns’s statement, Inspector Tyrell of the SFPD Homicide Division asked that a full report be sent to his office, attention Inspector Armstrong and Inspector Toschi.
Reed of Reed & Sons Towing took possession of Johns’s 1957 Chevrolet station wagon at the location of its immolation. Upon close inspection, he noticed that the right rear wheel was held in place by only two loose lug nuts. (McNatt reported that no lug nuts were in place; Lovett, that one remained.) He removed two other nuts from the right front wheel and tightened all four on the back wheel to correct the problem. He transported the charred wreck to his shop on Highway 50 in Tracy.
***
Two friends, Bill Horton and Fredrick Beamon, witnessed events they believed may have been related to the apparent abduction. They read an article about Johns and contacted Sergeant Hall of the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office. Hall passed the information to SJSCO Deputy Ambrose who wrote his report from Hall’s statement:
While driving on Highway 132, near Highways 33 and 580, in the general area of Johns’s encounter with her captor, Horton and Beamon noticed a white, 1959 Buick stopped at the side of the road. The driver motioned for them to pull over. The two continued on, ignoring the request because they felt uneasy about the situation. They had not thought again about the odd event until reading about Johns’s experience.
When Deputy Ambrose and Deputy McKay, both of the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office, later attempted to contact Beamon at his residence in Modesto, his mother, Teresa Watson, told them that her son had left the house on March 22 and had not been back since. He was supposed to be at the home of his friend, Bill Horton, she added. Ambrose offered his business card with instructions for Watson to have her son contact him as soon as possible.
The two detectives attempted to reach Horton, but were unsuccessful in locating him.
The detectives then traveled to Reed & Sons Towing to examine the blackened hulk that was once Johns’s station wagon. When they rummaged for the ignition key, which they believed had been abandoned on the front seat—Bauer had observed it there after the fire had been extinguished—they could not find it. Reed had not seen the keys, but mentioned that a couple had been to the lot on March 23 to inquire about the car. Perhaps they had taken them. Johns, with the help of her husband, Robert, who had driven up from their home in San Bernardino, had apparently recovered the key.
Years later, Johns would clarify the end of her time in the Central Valley following her strange encounter. She explained that one of her cars around that time did not need a key, and she didn’t think she even possessed one. The vehicle could be started by hot-wiring the ignition. She and Robert had been by the wreckers to see the station wagon and to recover their belongings. Because she had spent much of the day in the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department speaking with a variety of officers, she was not able to get to Reed & Sons until after dark. Even though all of Jennyfer’s worldly belongings had been in that car, nothing of the vehicle was salvageable. The couple returned to San Bernardino that night, without staying over in the Central Valley, and soon put the whole bizarre affair out of their minds.
It wouldn’t be until the 1980s, more than a decade later, that Vallejo and San Francisco detectives would track her down and begin to question her again about the events of March 1970. By that time, the information she provided and the initial police reports were irreconcilable. Though officers wanted her to say that her “captor” was some guy from Vallejo, according to Johns, she was simply too unsure of any identification. Suspect photographs were paraded in front of her by law enforcement agents and former law enforcement agents as late as 1998.
Johns passed away of natural causes on June 1, 2002.
***
It remained
a topic of intense debate whether or not the man who picked up Johns was the Zodiac serial killer. There was good reason to believe that he was, but there was equally compelling evidence to suggest that it may not have been. Johns believed she had a direct encounter with the serial killer, and the Zodiac himself, in a letter sent subsequent to the event, claimed responsibility for the attack, including the torching of the car. However, Johns may have been mistaken, and the Zodiac was entirely capable of lying.
Arguing against an authentic Zodiac encounter was the reliability of both Kathleen Johns and the Zodiac. Both represented questionable sources of information. The Zodiac had great motivation to lie, since any obfuscation promised to help preserve his freedom. Any incorrect information that the killer could provide—and he had already supplied some on previous occasions—would hamper the investigation with fallacious leads and burden prosecutors with problems if and when he was identified. Johns, for her part, was suspected of exaggerating and embellishing over the years. Nowhere in the three police records, for instance, was there even a hint that the young mother had received a death threat, a rather important detail for all of the officers to have mistakenly omitted from official reports, if that is what Johns at the time had claimed. Lovett’s filing from that day even questioned whether a crime had been perpetrated.
Johns’s claims may have morphed and grown with each telling. Many investigators discounted her words, acknowledging that eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Sergeant Bawart, recalling events years later, suggested that there was something wrong with her story. It appeared to him that she had covert motives, that she was possibly attempting to gain sympathy from her husband or that something similar was in play. And even if she was being fully honest with law enforcement, she still may have been mistaken to equate her captor with the Zodiac.
Investigators had to consider a wide range of possible explanations for the evening’s odd events. The entire episode may have been a misunderstanding between Johns and a helpful citizen. It may have been a kidnapping enacted by a bizarre but seemingly innocuous stranger who was not the Zodiac. Perhaps the Zodiac claimed credit for something he did not do, an action that he was known to perform on at least one other occasion. Or maybe Johns’s understanding of the incident was the product of a woman under so much psychological pressure and family stress that she saw and heard events in a much different light than they actually occurred, though the police realized that the burning of her vehicle did suggest that her “captor,” whoever he was, offered at least some threat to her.
The actual survival of Johns and her daughter also suggested something other than a Zodiac event. Surprisingly, both victims lived. If Kathleen Johns was to be believed, the driver had at least an hour in which to attempt, or even commit, murder. He did not do so. No previous Zodiac encounter was longer than 30 minutes, most over in a matter of minutes; no previous Zodiac encounter occurred without a murder; no previous Zodiac encounter involved an invitation to ride in the killer’s car; and no previous Zodiac encounter occurred without the use of a weapon. It may be difficult to explain Johns’s experience as a Zodiac attack when it appeared to resemble no more than a long drive, without the use of a weapon, in the perpetrator’s vehicle, and in which no one was left for dead.
But maybe it was the Zodiac who Johns and her daughter encountered.
If it was the Zodiac, there were some interesting implications for the investigation, the investigators noted. The attack presented additional information and another eyewitness. Those tasked with capturing the famed Northern California killer weighed the new pieces of data, hoping that something would tip the scales of justice in their favor.
If this was indeed an actual Zodiac attack on Johns, the episode represented the introduction of a child into the case. Though the Zodiac referred to his victims on Lake Herman Road and at Blue Rock Springs Park as “kids,” all of his previous targets were in actuality at least on the cusp of adulthood, teenagers or older. In the Johns event, a true child—Johns’s infant daughter—was present. This may have been a mistake on the Zodiac’s part since he may not have been aware that she was accompanying Johns until he pulled them over—or even until they entered his car.
Jennyfer’s presence therefore may have even saved her mother’s life: it may have been sobering for the killer to contemplate the death of a child, or the pain of a motherless infant. It is possible that he was experiencing sympathy for this pregnant woman and her young daughter. At this point in his serial killing career, his vicious plans to kill innocent school children and his threatened bomb were only theoretical. Confronted with a flesh-and-blood infant, he may have had reason to reconsider his diabolical plans, either from personal revulsion or a fear of public scorn.
This attack also introduced the idea that children may have been a part of the Zodiac’s life. Johns had observed pieces of children’s clothing in the stranger’s vehicle. The killer may have been a father, an uncle, or a deviant with a sexual interest in children’s attire. Perhaps the Zodiac had concealed himself in a family, just as Gary Ridgeway, the serial killer known as the Green River Killer, did in Washington State in the 1990s. More tantalizing but uncertain clues for an already confused investigation.
Armstrong and Toschi apparently placed a low priority on speaking with Johns. They may have read the conflicting police reports in their offices in San Francisco and felt no urgency to follow up. It would not be until four months later that the killer would claim credit for the “attack.” By that time, Johns may not have been available for additional interviews. It was a lost opportunity in the highly controversial event.
No mailing was sent immediately after the “attack,” nor was any telephone call received. These aberrations from his usual modus operandi have been heralded by some as proof that it was not a Zodiac event. In fact, the Zodiac would not refer to this attack until it was well documented in the press, leading to speculation that he was not involved, but was instead claiming credit for something he had learned about through the media. Fortifying the argument that the event was not the responsibility of the serial killer, the next letter from the Zodiac—received one month after Johns’s unusual experience—cast a new diagram, breathed new threats, taunted with a new cipher, but made no mention of Kathleen Johns.
The Name Letter
Approximately four weeks following the apparent abduction of Johns, the next authenticated letter arrived, marking a familiar length of time between a Zodiac attacks and a Zodiac missive. The two-page “Name letter” was received by The San Francisco Chronicle on April 21, 1970, postmarked the previous day in San Francisco.
The mailing, while saying nothing of the Johns incident, nevertheless presented a variety of new milestones in the killer’s crime spree. It contained another new cipher—the first not carefully presented on a separate page and the first not long enough to be considered a serious piece of cryptographic work. It also offered a revision to the bomb diagram first detailed in the 6-Page letter.
Lieutenant Charles Ellis of the SFPD reported to the media on the new letter and its new, 13-character cipher. He noted that the 340 cipher, received the previous year, had not been solved, adding that many experts by that time did not believe that it contained any decipherable information.
In the new note, portions of which were not immediately released to the public, the killer denied responsibility for a murder, claiming that the recent bombing of a police station and the concomitant killing of a police officer was not precipitated by him. The violence had been thoroughly reported in the papers and on television.
On February 17, 1970, a pipe bomb had been placed on the windowsill of the San Francisco Golden Gate Park Police Station. Its detonation killed SFPD Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell, severely wounded and partially blinded Officer Robert Fogarty, and injured eight other officers. The carnage was blamed on the radical left political group the Weather Underground, which courts eventually found responsible for numerous bombing deaths, including as many as 2
0 public officials and 2 of its own members.
The FBI’s San Francisco Field Office requested the authentication of the Name letter on the day it was received by The Chronicle. The FBI Crime Laboratory in Washington, D.C. received its copy of the letter two days later, and promptly examined it on October 24. A photograph of the envelope, which bore the San Francisco postmark of April 20, was given the identifying title, Qc45; photographs of its two pages, Qc46 and Qc47. Hand printing characteristics noted by the laboratory indicated that these were prepared by the person who had written the other threatening letters in the case.
A further request was made to the FBI in Washington, D.C. for handwriting comparisons and a deciphering of the brief encryption. The Chronicle planned to mention the letter in print on October 22, but agreed to withhold certain facts. While the FBI found characteristics that showed the letter authentic, it was unable to decipher the message: “No decryption could be effected for the cipher text portion…”
The new cipher, a mere 13-characters long, was hardly a sincere effort of honest communication. Such a short message would necessarily provide numerous solutions, each of which could be argued to be the intent of its author, especially in light of the many spelling mistakes and errors of coding in the 408 cipher, the only Zodiac cipher that has ever been definitively deciphered. Since it was reasonable to expect that an error or two would be present in the new encryption as well, and because that probability couldn’t be excluded, the number of possible correct solutions to the 13-character cipher was essentially infinite. And no thirteen-letter solution could be proven to not be the correct interpretation. In cryptographic circles, ciphers less than 30 characters are considered not inherently breakable.
