by Mark Hewitt
On a single page, the Zodiac had scrawled,
The is the Zodiac speaking
Like I have allways said
I am crack proof. If the
Blue Meannies are evere
going to catch me, they had
best get off their fat asses
& do something. Because the
longer they fiddle & fart
around, the more slaves
I will collect for my after
life. I do have to give them
credit for stumbling across
my riverside activity, but
they are only finding the
easy ones , there are a hell
of a lot more down there.
The reason that Im writing
to the Times is this, They
dont bury me on the back pages
like some of the others.
SFPD—0 [crosshair symbol]—17+
The murdered Cheri Jo Bates has languished in the category of “possible Zodiac victims” by many researchers who are unconvinced that the Zodiac was responsible. Despite the fact that copious pieces of internal evidence link the Confession letter to the other Zodiac writings, despite the killer’s claim of responsibility, despite the fact that many police officers were quite certain that the writer of the Confession letters was also responsible for the killing of the coed, and despite the authentication of the Bates letters and the desktop poem as genuine Zodiac communications, the Zodiac may have claimed credit for a murder he did not commit. He may have had nothing to do with the communications either, a fact held by some, though Sherwood Morrill has positively identified the Bates letters and the desktop poem as matching Zodiac’s writing. If the Zodiac falsely claimed Bates’s murder, he took a great risk in taking responsibility for the death before 30 days had passed. Had someone else been arrested as her killer, the Zodiac would have ended up looking rather foolish. Bates’s killer was not identified following the sending of the Confession letter; he never was identified.
Even as late as the 1980s, many in the RPD refused to consider the Zodiac responsible for Bates’s murder. The police department was following up on a suspect, and the Bay Area authorities were attempting to tighten the noose around the neck of their suspect, named Arthur Leigh Allen. Since Allen was not responsible for Bates’s murder, it could not have been a Zodiac killing, the logic went. When neither the Riverside youth nor Allen panned out as good suspects in the murders for which they were investigated—and the evidence against each of them proved very weak—many authorities once again began to consider the links that conflated the killings into a single case.
***
No one remembers why the case’s main suspect was brought to the attention of law enforcement in the first place.
On October 6, 1969, Detective Lynch first contacted Allen at the suspect’s place of employment, Elmer Cave School in Vallejo. He could not recall years later what circumstances led him to interview Allen. Upon questioning Allen in relation to the Lake Berryessa attack, the balding 35-year-old explained that he had gone skin diving at Salt Point Ranch on September 26, and had not returned to Vallejo until between 2:00 and 4:30 in the afternoon of September 27. He stayed home the rest of the day, though he could not recall whether or not his parents were home at the time. He was a part-time student at Vallejo Junior College, and worked part time as a custodian at Elmer Cave. Living with his parents at 32 Fresno Street in Vallejo, the corpulent suspect was six feet one inch tall and 241 pounds.
Over time, other pieces of circumstantial evidence would link Allen to the Zodiac serial killer crimes, much of which the suspect himself offered to investigators Toschi, Armstrong, and Mulinax during a surprise interview on August 4, 1971 at Allen’s new place of employment, the Pinole refinery of Union Oil of California. A former friend, Donald Cheney, reported to the police that before the attacks in the Vallejo area, his friend had shared with him that he (Allen) was planning to become a killer. Cheney claimed that his friend indicated to him that he would use the name “Zodiac”—coined from a watch that had been gifted to him by his mother—and attack random victims who would be impossible to connect to him. The diving watch included a crosshair or “Zodiac” symbol on its face in addition to the printed word “Zodiac.”
Cheney’s claims were cast into suspicion when it was revealed that the suspect had been accused of making inappropriate sexual advances toward Cheney’s own child. Investigators had to consider that Cheney invented the story to frame his former friend. Nevertheless, George Bawart of the Vallejo Police Department (VPD) created a document listing 30 links connecting Allen to the Zodiac crimes. None of the 30 points were anything more than circumstantial.
A search warrant was executed on Allen’s Vallejo home, but nothing conclusively tied him to the murders. In 1991, when Mageau was shown a photo lineup of men that included the suspect, he first picked out Allen as his attacker, indicating an 8 out of 10 level of confidence in his selection. However, Mageau then pointed to another photograph and said that his attacker had a large head like the man in that second photo. It was not deemed a conclusive identification.
Allen was exhaustively researched and investigated. His handwriting—of either hand, in case he was ambidextrous—did not match that of the Zodiac letters, his fingerprints matched none collected in the case, and warranted searches of his home and trailer provided no forensic match. He was subjected to interviews, multiple handwriting tests, and background checks. A partial DNA profile of the killer was obtained from authenticated Zodiac letters in 2002, when technology enabled small quantities of old saliva to be detected and sequenced. It excluded Allen, whose brain tissue had been preserved following his death in 1992. Most investigators, however reluctantly, looked beyond the case’s prime suspect, realizing that there was no more proof that he was the Zodiac than there was evidence that he was the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Some investigators steadfastly refused to entertain the possibility that Allen was not somehow involved in the series of murders, the circumstantial evidence looming large in their minds.
***
In The L.A. Times letter, the Zodiac opened a can of worms when he claimed there were additional victims in Southern California, “There are a hell of a lot more down there.” Although the boast could have been a red herring, there were unsolved murders in Southern California—many unsolved murders—that could have been the responsibility of the Zodiac. One attack in particular paralleled the Zodiac event on the edge of Lake Berryessa.
On June 4, 1963, 18-year-old Robert Domingos took his 17-year-old fiancée, Linda Edwards, to a remote beach on the Pacific Ocean, near Santa Barbara. They skipped school on the annual “ditch day,” two days before graduation, to spend some time alone. The next evening, the couple was found dead of gunshot wounds. Domingos suffered 11 shots; Edwards, 9. Both died from massive damage and blood loss as a result of the Winchester Western .22 caliber Super X copper-coated long rifle bullets, fired from a semi-automatic. Their hands were bound with cords. Edwards’ bathing suit had been sliced to expose her breasts. Their bodies had been dragged to, and stacked into, a small shack located away from the beach. Their assailant had apparently unsuccessfully attempted to burn down the shack with matches to conceal any evidence in the murders.
After the link was established between Bates murder and the Zodiac killings in Northern California, this double murder came under increased scrutiny. The similarities to the Zodiac attack at Lake Berryessa, September 27, 1969, were obvious. Both had been carried out on a couple, in a remote area, alongside water, with possibly pre-cut lengths of cord, and with a gun and a sharp instrument present. Similarities to other Zodiac attacks were apparent in the use of the Winchester Western bullets—the same type used to kill Faraday and Jensen on December 20, 1968—and the use of fire, also employed after the apparent attack on suspected Zodiac victim Kathleen Johns. The couple’s last minute, unannounced trip to a secluded location followed the same unplanned itinerary as the att
acks at Lake Herman Road, Blue Rock Springs Park, and Lake Berryessa.
The investigation acknowledged that it may not have been a Zodiac attack. Arguing against it was a lack of follow-up letter or telephone call, a lack of a specific claim of involvement, and a moving of the bodies, all of these details being substantial differences between this attack and those of known Zodiac killings. Until the case is solved—and more than five decades have already passed—investigators believe that it will in all likelihood remain a suspected Zodiac double murder.
But the Zodiac was not the only serial killer operating in California in that era. In 1972 and 1973, seven female hitchhikers went missing in Sonoma County, part of San Francisco’s North Bay. Six of the victims turned up dead, each dumped nude into a creek or a ravine close to a roadway. The series came to be known as the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker murders due to the similarities between the deaths.
Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber were 12-year-old students of Herbert Slater Middle School. On February 4, 1972, after leaving the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa, they hitchhiked on Guerneville Road. Their bodies were discovered on December 28 on Franz Valley Road. Already dead, they had been tossed down an embankment. The badly decomposed corpses would not reveal a cause of death.
Kim Wendy Allen was last seen hitchhiking to school on March 4, 1972 at the Bell Avenue entrance to Highway 101. The Santa Rosa Junior College student was 19. Her body was located the next day twenty feet off Enterprise Road in Santa Rosa, also down an embankment. She had been raped, her hands and feet bound. The cause of death was ligature strangulation that lasted an estimated 30 torturous minutes.
Thirteen-year-old Lawrence Cook Middle School student Lori Lee Kursa ran away from home November 11, 1972. She was last seen on November 21 by friends in Santa Rosa. She may have been observed while two men aggressively pushed her into a van. Her body was found in a ravine off of Calistoga Road in Santa Rosa on December 14. She was known to have hitchhiked in the past.
Carolyn Nadine Davis was last seen hitchhiking on July 15, 1973 on Highway 101 in Garberville. The 14-year-old’s remains were discovered on July 31 almost exactly where Sterling and Weber had been located seven months earlier. Surprisingly, the cause of death was listed as strychnine poisoning.
On December 22, 1973, Theresa Diane Smith Walsh hitchhiked at Zuma Beach in Malibu. The 23-year-old was planning to go to Garberville for a family Christmas. She was found six days later in Mark West Creek. She had been tied with rope, sexually assaulted, and strangled.
The seventh victim’s remains were found off of Calistoga Road in Santa Rosa on July 6, 1979. The approximately 19-year-old woman was never identified.
Two additional possible victims—Lisa Smith, 17, of Petaluma, and Jeannette Kamahele, 20, of Santa Rosa—were eventually added when the two young women went missing, March 16, 1971 and April 25, 1972, respectively. Their bodies were never found.
The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker murders became part of a much larger set of killings that occurred across a region as far north as Redding and as far south as Monterey, including several in or near San Francisco. In 1975, the FBI reported on a total of 14 homicides between the years of 1972 and 1974, claiming that they were all conclusively linked. This case was never solved. Though some have attempted to link these murders to those of the Zodiac serial killer, no compelling evidence has ever been uncovered to conflate the two cases. And obvious behavioral and circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that at least two separate killers were independently responsible for the carnage.
Following the receipt of The L.A. Times letter, the Zodiac serial killer disappeared as completely and as mysteriously as the three men who had escaped the Federal prison on Alcatraz Island on June 11, 1962, shortly before the institution shuttered its cells for good. But unlike Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, the Zodiac would reappear. He was silent for almost three years. While the investigation metastasized into Southern California, work continued in the Bay Area to collect evidence, investigate suspects, and develop new leads. The Zodiac would not write for another thirty-four months.
Suddenly, in January of 1974, the Bay Area was startled out of its complacency with yet another authentic Zodiac letter.
The Exorcist letter
The last authenticated Zodiac letter, the Exorcist letter, arrived on the 30th of January, 1974. The envelope bore a single Eisenhower eight-cent postage stamp. It was addressed, “San Fran. Chronicle, Please Rush To Editor.” Curiously, three stickers had been affixed to the envelope’s front, each apparently removed from the packaging that contained the stamp. One said, “USE Zip code;” the other two contained information about the book of stamps. Postmarked Tuesday, January 29, from somewhere in either San Mateo County or Santa Clara County, this new mailing was written in blue from a felt-tipped pen. The letter comprised a single, white sheet of paper. The SFPD processed the letter and retained possession of it, the San Francisco FBI Field Office sending to Washington, D.C. photocopies of the letter, the bottom portion of the letter that revealed a palm print, and the dusted envelope containing fingerprints.
The Zodiac had written the following:
I saw & think “The Exorcist”
was the best saterical com-
idy that I have ever seen.
Signed , yours truly :
He plunged him self into
The billowy wave
and an echo arose from
the sucides grave
titwillo titwillo
titwillo
Ps. if I do not see this
note in your paper, I
will do something nasty,
which you know I’m capable of
doing.
[unidentified symbols]
Me—37
SPFD - 0
This new letter appeared to present some kind of end for the Zodiac. Letters received after this one differ in two very distinct ways. First, apart from a likely forgery in 1978, they did not claim to come from the Zodiac, and therefore did not contain the familiar Zodiac scrawl, the crosshairs symbol, the word Zodiac, or the iconic phrase, “This is the Zodiac speaking.” Second, related to the first, they appeared to be mundane, banal letters to the editor with no apparent or implied threat, no claim of past violence, and minor, if any, demands from the author. If they were from the serial killer known as the Zodiac, they were of a very different tone and demeanor, and did not bear the hallmarks of his previous letters. Either he was attempting to slip these past editors so that he could see his “non-Zodiac” words in print, or he was demonstrating that he was no longer a killer or a threat to society. If they were his, he had once again undergone a bold transformation—or eagerly wanted others to believe that he had.
By this time, the FBI could attribute 6 murders to the Zodiac, accepting Bates as a victim on the strength of the Zodiac’s 1971 claim to The L.A. Times and the similarities in writing style, as well as the behavioral links between Bates’s murder and the murders of the other victims. Written and sent while the nation was relishing its love affair with the blockbuster movie The Exorcist, this new note was an apparent attempt to co-opt the attention garnered by the major motion picture. Perhaps the killer emerged from his three-year absence as a direct result of so much praise being lavished on a horror movie. But there was a much more immediate horror in the Bay Area just prior to the letter’s arrival.
For two hours on January 28, 1974, two men went on a rampage—not unlike the one threatened by the Zodiac in 1969 in the 3-Part letters—that resulted in the deaths of 4 individuals. This spree was one small portion of a string of racial murders that became known as the Zebra killings, and took place between October, 1973 and April, 1974. All told, 16 people were killed and between 8 and 10 were wounded. Four men were eventually caught and convicted of the murders. The January 28 violence led the headlines and was the talk of the town. The Exorcist letter was postmarked the following day, and received by The San Francisco Chronicle the day after that. The Zodiac may not have
wanted his carnage of the past to be overshadowed by this recent crime wave, though he never made any mention of it.
The killer did reference the new horror film. The churlish tone of the single sentence that began the letter, and comprised its body, suggested that the killer was sarcastically boasting of his own ability to enact a horror. He seemed to deny his own fear of the scary film by condemning it to the category of “sat[i]rical com[e]dy.”
Ironically, while the Zodiac classified the frightening movie The Exorcist as a satirical comedy, he treated The Mikado as some kind of horror. He quoted the latter in threat, and alluded to it in an attempt to dominate his readers, even though the play itself contained no killing, merely humorous threats to kill. No one actually died during its performance. Rather than a horror, The Mikado is a love story and a farce that lampoons British high society and its prudish mores and pompous bureaucracy. So the killer interpreted horror as satire and satire as horror.
The design of the letter was as odd as its message. His normally messy writing was juxtaposed against a very complex page layout. Where one would expect a usual tabulation at the beginning of paragraphs, the writer instead provided a sophisticated use of literary presentation. The letter exhibited a structure as if it were created by an editor or professional writer. The first sentence, sans the salutation or iconic phrase that the police had come to expect, concluded with a sign-off that was roughly centered on the page. Its writer may not have known how to spell, but he was evidently well versed in the signatory portion of a missive. “Signed Yours Tru[l]y:” ended with a telling colon. Used correctly, it led the reader to the next section of the letter, defining who the Zodiac was, or at least providing the title he was willing to apply to himself. The Zodiac apparently self-identified with a quote from The Mikado, this one nearly perfectly reproduced.
