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

by Mark Hewitt

  Her family members employed Private Investigator John Miller of Des Moines Iowa, and offered a $500 reward to aid in locating her, a desperate strategy that over time would cost more than $3000 and revealed no reliable details of her fate. When no additional evidence of her whereabouts emerged, they ruefully acknowledged that she must be dead.

  The investigation into Lass’ disappearance soon beat a path to the young nurse’s former roommate and former co-worker, Jo Anne Goettsche, who had been invited to Tahoe to spend Labor Day with Lass in her newly rented apartment. She traveled the distance from the Bay Area on September 4, she claimed, but not knowing Lass’ address, she was unable to make contact with her friend. She visited the Sahara only to learn that Lass was absent. Incredibly, she returned home to San Francisco without meeting up with her friend. According to Goettsche, Lass liked her job and planned to work through the winter in Lake Tahoe to save enough money for a trip to Europe.

  The reason Lass’s apartment was so clean, investigators speculated, was because she was expecting company. They may not have realized that she had just rented the space, and hadn’t had time to soil it.

  Initially, no consideration was given to Lass being a victim of the Bay Area’s infamous Zodiac serial killer. The nature of her disappearance argued against her inclusion into the case, even if it had been suggested at this stage. In all of the previous Zodiac attacks, the victims were found almost immediately. Not only were they not hidden or missing, on two occasions the perpetrator actually telephoned the police with precise directions to the victims’ location. (And no call was necessary after the murder of Paul Stine, the Zodiac evidently witnessing the police response to the scene.) The Zodiac furthermore never ventured outside of California (to kill as the Zodiac, as far as anyone knew), and Lass was last seen in Nevada. The Lake Tahoe area is not near the San Francisco Bay area, the Zodiac’s usual hunting grounds, being a three-hour trek from San Francisco under favorable driving conditions. Unlike many previous Zodiac victims, Lass was not known to frequent Lover’s Lane areas.

  With the arrival of a strange card in the mail, everything changed. Lass’s name was added to a list of possible Zodiac victims, despite the fact she worked in the Lake Tahoe area of Nevada, outside of California, despite the fact that she was never located, dead or alive, despite the fact that the card may not have originated with Northern California’s most notorious serial killer, and despite the fact that the card presented no clear claim of credit for any attack.

  A concrete connection between the Zodiac and Donna Lass has over the decades proven very elusive. Those who see in the circumstances of the missing nurse the work of the serial killer do so with very tenuous evidence. For Lass to have been killed by the Zodiac implies a number of facts that remain unknown and, at this point in time, apparently unknowable. It is not known, for instance, whether in fact she is dead. If dead, it is unknown whether she was murdered or was merely the victim of a tragic accident. She may even have purposefully left the area and made a new life for herself in some other place. Leaving your identity behind without telling anyone is an activity protected by the Constitution of the United States. Lass may well have utilized her Constitutional freedoms to relocate, for whatever reason.

  However, while it is no crime to leave a difficult situation—or any situation—Lass was not the flighty type. Her friends and relatives described her as happy and dependable. It would have been out of character for her to leave in silence. She was sociable by nature, and deeply loved her family. Her relatives soon believed that she was dead. She would have contacted them if she were alive, they were convinced. The police suspected that she had been abducted and murdered, but they could not prove it.

  Police Chief Ray Lauritzen of South Lake Tahoe, after his department took up the case, believed that Lass was no longer alive because it was not in her character to drop out of society as so many other young people were doing at the time. He described her as a good girl, not given to drugs and alcohol, and not the type of person who would cease communication with her family.

  A reward of $10,000 was later offered for clues to Lass’s whereabouts, a fund that would forever lay unclaimed. The newspaper quoted South Lake Tahoe Police Lieutenant John Crow saying that the case was still open but that all leads had been exhausted. No new information about her surfaced, and Donna Lass was eventually declared legally dead by a court decree when no new information about her surfaced.

  Despite the differences between the Lass case and known Zodiac events, the young nurse may nevertheless have been a victim of the Zodiac serial killer.

  A criminal can change his modus operandi (MO). Killers, including the Zodiac, can and do change many aspects of their attacks for a variety of reasons. They attempt to avoid detection so they will incorporate into future missions anything they can devise to increase the likelihood that they will elude capture. As they attempt to draw as much pleasure as they can while following their individual, twisted fantasies, they will often change as they experiment with new and varied ways of carrying out their assaults. They also learn from their mistakes.

  If Lass was his victim, the Zodiac deviated from his usual patterns by venturing outside of the Bay area, by concealing a body (apparently), and by never overtly claiming credit. In one way only was it consistent with previous Zodiac attacks: her “demise” occurred at dusk or later on a weekend.

  It may be only coincidental that prior to relocating to Stateline, Lass lived in San Francisco and worked at the Letterman General Hospital, not far from the site of Paul Stine’s murder. But it may suggest that the killer, if Lass was a Zodiac victim, had a strong connection with that neighborhood. The first time the Zodiac utilized a cab instead of driving his own vehicle and the first time a “victim” was targeted outside of California, the evidence led to the Presidio Heights District of San Francisco. Some armchair investigators would examine this link and develop a Zodiac suspect, but no conclusive evidence against him was ever established, not as the Zodiac and not for being responsible for the disappearance of the young nurse.

  The Zodiac may have boasted about an attack on Lass. If he did so, his communication was veiled and cryptic. A postcard that may have come from the Zodiac may have referenced Lass. Like so much else in the Zodiac case, this communication—and the Lass disappearance itself—was open to interpretation.

  The next two mailings included in the case files made no mention of Donna Lass, and gave no hint of the petite nurse’s fate.

  The Crack Proof card

  Postmarked October, 5, 1970, a newly received postcard began, “Dear Editor: You’ll hate me, but I’ve got to tell you.” It contained other messages affixed to the card which, like the opening, were clipped from newspapers, including the date, “Mon., Oct. 5, 1970” and “I’m crackproof, What is the price tag now?” The FBI Field Office in San Francisco sent a photographed copy and a Xeroxed copy of the postcard to the FBI in Washington, D.C. They arrived October 15.

  But the FBI was unable to find any hand printing, or anything else of significance that would enable them to compare this card to previously received Zodiac material. In its October 29 report, it was unable to conclude very much. All of the lettering was cut from the Monday, October 5 edition of The San Francisco Chronicle. A red cross had been affixed to the card, created from thin red paper. (It was not stained with blood, contrary to several reports.) The address on the front of the card, to which it was sent, “The San Francisco Chronicle,” had been carefully excised from a copy of that newspaper and pasted to the card, giving no clue to its creator.

  The FBI labeled the message side of the card Qc57, and the address side Qc58, reviewing the mailing on October 16. Nothing that would indicate the card’s source was found.

  As a possible Zodiac card, it has been a detective’s problem child ever since its arrival. It may have been created and sent by the Zodiac. It may not have been. The Zodiac himself appeared to claim credit for it when, in a subsequent letter, he declared, “Like I have
always said, I’m crack proof,” implying that it was he who had previously made that boast. But he may instead have been attempting to co-opt the authoring of a phrase that had already been widely reported in the media. Investigators wondered whether the card was a hoax.

  The Crack Proof card made no specific threats or claims, but appeared to use several sentences to boast of the Zodiac’s continued killing. “Some of Them Fought It Was Horrible” was created out of headlines that already included single quotation marks around the words, and “The Pace isn’t any slower! In fact it’s just one big thirteenth” utilized several pieces of published material patched together. The cryptic information provided no direction for investigators, pointed to no specific victims, and may have been an empty taunt.

  It also may not have come from the Zodiac, though it did contain the word “Zodiac” cut from a newspaper, and had a crosshairs symbol similarly borrowed from some media. There was no iconic phrase “This is the Zodiac speaking,” nor any familiar hand printing (or any writing at all) to link it to the Zodiac case. It may have been a meaningless hoax, and that is what investigators eventually suspected, even though they initially believed that it was an authentic Zodiac communication.

  Chronicle reporter Paul Avery took the one-year anniversary of Paul Stine’s murder, October 11, 1970, as an opportunity to write about the mysterious card, and for the first time share with his readers the Johns letter and the Torture letter, which had both been withheld from the public.

  Once the information was released, the Zodiac’s interest in The Mikado intrigued many, and led to speculation that his costume at Lake Berryessa was an attempt at parading himself as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, the prominent character in the light opera who sang the song quoted in the Torture letter. In time, the costume and the light opera became conflated into one single item, many coming to assume that they understood the meaning of the event at Lake Berryessa.

  ***

  On October 21, the Cincinnati Post and the Times Star Newspaper contacted the SFPD (who in turn passed the information on to the FBI), notifying them that a man had been arrested on a murder warrant by Butler County, Ohio. The suspected serial killer was booked in Cincinnati and charged with the murder of a 16-year-old girl whose body was mutilated with a superficial Z cut into her abdomen. Her left nipple had been excised. The suspect, who was also being investigated for his participation in other murders, had been in the San Francisco Bay Area in August, 1970, during which time two black prostitutes—23-year-old Brenda Vance on August 4, and Janice Smith, aged 22, on August 30—were found murdered in California while they were plying their trade. Both victims had been brutally executed with severe blows to the head. Smith was mutilated extensively, including the removal of her left nipple. Vance exhibited numerous burns to her torso and breasts. Investigators believed that they had each been moved at gunpoint to an abandoned dwelling before being callously murdered.

  The man suspected in all of these killings was unwilling to discuss any other case until he was tried on the local murder. Regardless, the FBI opined that he might be willing to discuss his activities with Zodiac investigators, provided that there were no objections from the Butler County Sheriff’s Department. Accordingly, the FBI requested that their Cincinnati Field Office contact the Butler County Sheriff’s Office for major case prints, a photograph of the suspect, and the needed permission to interrogate him.

  Notes passed between law enforcement agencies at the time of this possibly unrelated murder spree revealed new details about the FBI’s participation in the Zodiac case. The Feds now attributed 7 murders to the Zodiac (possibly including the 2 San Jose stabbing victims). They had an extortion case against the perpetrator of the Zodiac murders, but noted that the “U.S. Attorney has indicated preference for prosecution by local authorities on murder charges.”

  On October 22, the FBI granted its Cincinnati Field Office permission to conduct a limited investigation into the new suspect. Prints had already been collected and were in custody. Unfortunately, the investigation could not immediately proceed. The Sheriff of Butler County refused to allow the interrogation of his prisoner because the suspect had been charged with first degree murder, and the Sheriff feared that an interview might prejudice the case he was building.

  The Halloween card

  The Chronicle received yet another mailing from the Zodiac serial killer in 1970. Addressed to “Paul Averly, S.F. Chronicle, 5th—Mission, S.F.,” and postmarked October 27 somewhere within the city of San Francisco, a Gibson Greetings Cards Halloween card arrived on October 29. It was immediately turned over to the SFPD homicide detectives, who forwarded it to the CII in Sacramento. Handwriting expert and Questioned Documents Examiner Sherwood Morrill authenticated it the day after its arrival at The Chronicle. The FBI Field Office in San Francisco immediately sent a copy of the card and its envelope to its D.C. headquarters.

  The stunningly visual document would become a notorious piece of evidence in the case because of the palpable threats it exuded. It was specifically directed to the attention of Chronicle reporter and columnist Paul Avery, who had by this time written virtually all of The Chronicle’s articles on the Zodiac, and who would become embroiled in, and forever attached to, the case.

  The same day the Halloween card was received, a postcard which had been postmarked October 17, 1970 in Berkeley and sent to an address in Orinda, was submitted for analysis to the FBI by the SFPD. Like some previous Zodiac mailings, it bore cut out portions of newspapers and other publications. It began with the threat, “Monday, October 12…The Zodiac is going to…” The SFPD knew the card’s author, and wanted him investigated as the Zodiac.

  For some unknown reason, the FBI Laboratory did not receive the Halloween card until November 2. It recorded the results of its investigation on a work sheet the next day. Nothing of cryptographic significance was noted. It was a generic, ubiquitous greeting card, with the number “14,” written on the hand of the skeleton on the front of the card (which the FBI concluded was probably a claim regarding the number of victims), with several Zodiac symbols added inside and a few strange words and phrases. There were no extraneous markings and no cryptic texts.

  The analysis of the three items—Qc59, the Berkeley postcard, Qc60, the Halloween card envelope, and Qc61, the Halloween card—came on November 12. There was no hand printing to compare in any of the three because the postcard was typed or created with cut-out portions of a newspaper, the Halloween card was artfully drawn rather than printed, and it contained too much distortion for a comparison to be effected. However, the Halloween card and its envelope did reveal enough detail to demonstrate some similarities to previous Zodiac letters.

  The FBI forwarded the Halloween card and the postcard to its Cryptanalysis Unit for further evaluation. The postcard was eventually dismissed as a probable hoax.

  The Halloween card may have been further evidence of a killer’s psychological degeneration. Another jejune taunt in the form of a greeting card, this one marketed as a friendly jest to a friend or family member for the season of Halloween reinterpreted by the killer into a horrific threat. Much of its content remained mysterious and strange; what exactly the sender was attempting to communicate was not clear. Why the labor was put into supplementing the card with additional words, symbols, and visual enhancements was not obvious. It would have taken the killer considerable time and concerted effort to prepare the mailing, yet all that work was in vain if no clear message was conveyed or comprehended.

  None was.

  The preprinted words, “From your SECRET PAL I feel it in my bones, You ache to know my name, And so I’ll clue you in…” on the front of the Card suggested that it was sent to Avery as a hint to his identity. Inside, the wording continued, “…But, then, why spoil the game?” The killer had previously sent a total of four ciphers, the first one with a cover letter containing the promise, “in this cipher is my iden[t]ity.” While no putative encryption is present in the Halloween card mailing,
questions arose as to the correct interpretation of many of the pieces of information contained within. What, for instance, did the writer mean by intersecting the large, heavy words “PARADICE” and “SLAVES,” what did the many eyes carefully drawn on the interior of the card represent, and how were the vertical words “by fire,” “by knife,” “by gun,” and “by rope” to be understood?

  The killer may have been satisfied in sending a visually chilling taunt, complete with skeletons and Zodiac symbols. He knew it would be published in newspapers and shown on television for its emotional impact. Its enigmatic message only served to heighten its palpable threat, and maybe, investigators suspected, that was its intent.

  The words added by the Zodiac on the interior, “PEEK-A-BOO YOU ARE DOOMED,” “4-TEEN,” and the number “14,” written on the hand of the skeleton on the card’s front, seemed to some a clear threat that the Zodiac had killed again or was threatening Paul Avery as his next target.

  Fear led Avery to approach SFPD Police Chief Alfred J. Nelder and request a permit to carry a concealed weapon. He argued that he had gone through the SFPD police academy for a story and had received weapons training. Furthermore, his three-year stint as a war correspondent in Vietnam had caused him to sometimes handle guns. He was awarded the permit. (Avery coincidentally later used the .38 caliber handgun to break up an unrelated mugging in progress.) Avery carried the weapon for about a year by his own estimation. When his fears diminished, he relinquished it.

  What precisely the killer was communicating with other symbols, such as the ones written across the bottom of the card’s interior and a strange symbol on the envelope’s return address, like so many aspects of the Zodiac case, provided a breadth of questions and a dearth of answers.