Mike made his way out of Darlene’s car by opening the door from the outside and falling out. He was bleeding from his face, neck, right arm, and left leg. One of the bullets had cut through his jawbone and tongue, so he couldn’t even scream. Fortunately, three other young people were out that night looking for a friend of theirs. They drove into the parking lot and discovered Mageau, writhing on the ground. They raced off to summon help.
Just ten minutes after midnight, the call came in to the Vallejo police switchboard. The two officers first-on-scene were quickly followed by Detective Sergeant John Lynch and Sergeant Ed Rust. And the scene was horrible: Mike Mageau, bleeding profusely, was in a lot of pain, and Darlene was barely alive behind the wheel. Lynch laid Darlene out on the parking lot as they waited for an ambulance. She seemed to try to tell them something, but it was unintelligible. Lynch and Rust had actually heard a report of shots being fired. It had been called in by the son of the groundskeeper at the golf course, who heard the gunfire and the sound of a car leaving quickly. But it was the Fourth of July and the police figured it was fireworks. According to an interview Lynch gave Robert Graysmith, journalist and author of the comprehensive book Zodiac, he and his partner felt terrible later, wondering if had they responded more quickly would they have passed the suspect vehicle as it fled the scene. On top of that, when they arrived, they realized they knew one of the victims. Darlene knew a lot of the local police from the restaurant where she worked. She’d even dated them. And she and Dean lived next door to the Vallejo Sheriff ’s Office. She was pronounced DOA at 12:30 A.M. at Kaiser Foundation Hospital. Mike Mageau was critical and faced surgery to his jaw, arm, and leg, but would recover from his physical injuries.
At the crime scene, detectives found the Corvair’s windows were open on both sides with the ignition on. The car was still in low gear, the radio on, and Darlene hadn’t applied the parking brake. All of this was consistent with Mike Mageau’s description of how the car had stalled; the subject had caught up to them before she had a chance to either properly park or get going again.
Inside the bloody car, along with Darlene’s purse and Mike’s wallet, investigators found spent nine-millimeter shell casings. Mageau’s description of the events made no mention of the UNSUB stopping to reload, and at least nine shots had been fired, so the weapon was thought to be a Browning semiautomatic.
Comparisons between this and the shootings at Lake Herman Road just two miles away seemed inevitable. In both instances, the subject approached young couples as they sat in a car in an isolated location at night. Both times a gun was used. But in this case, according to the surviving witness, the subject actively and aggressively pursued the victim’s car, almost herding it to the crime scene. And in this case, the victimology yielded clues that this was not a stranger crime and that perhaps more easily discernible motives applied.
As police looked into the victims’ backgrounds, they discovered that Darlene Ferrin may not have been a random target. According to friends and associates, she liked to go out and was often in the company of men other than her husband—Mike Mageau, for example. But this seemed to irk Dean’s friends and coworkers more than it bothered him. When they brought it up, he would defend his wife, reminding them she was still young and free-spirited. It was all innocent fun, he insisted, not as if she were having affairs. (This was also the California of 1969.) And he had an airtight alibi that night: he was with his coworkers.
But there were other men in Darlene’s life to investigate, including her first husband, Jim, who’d owned a gun. Darlene was said to be afraid of him. But he didn’t match the physical description of her killer, and police ruled him out as a suspect. Another man, described as a persistent, frustrated suitor, was ruled out when police found he was home with his wife when the murder occurred.
Witnesses say another man spied on Darlene at home from a white, American car parked in front of her house. One baby-sitter reported that when she had told Darlene about the man in the car, Darlene had said she’d seen him kill someone. Darlene’s sister Pam also described a man in a white car who had delivered mysterious packages to the Ferrins’ home, including a package he warned Pam not to open. She’d seen him several times and described him as dark-haired and well-dressed. Sometimes he wore horn-rimmed glasses.
Another sister, Linda, also saw this man at Darlene’s house. He showed up at a party she threw to get the place painted. According to Linda, Darlene told her to steer clear of him. The baby-sitter and Darlene’s sisters all reported Darlene seemed afraid of this man, who’d also been spotted watching her at work at Terry’s. On the night she was killed, Darlene had a tense conversation in the parking lot of the restaurant with a man who drove a white car, as witnessed by her sister Christina.
Around the end of June, just before she was murdered, Darlene predicted to Christina that something big was going to happen. Darlene couldn’t or wouldn’t give her any details, but it would be big enough to get in the papers. People close to Darlene theorized that when she’d gone to the Virgin Islands with her first husband on their honeymoon, they might have fallen in with a rough crowd. Had she seen or heard about a murder there? Were drugs involved? But in the end, all of this speculation led no closer to the identity of her killer.
Mike Mageau was also an interesting character. He and Darlene had met at Terry’s, when he was there with his twin brother, David. The nineteen-year-olds were said to have a competition going, vying desperately for Darlene’s attentions, fighting over who would get to do favors for her. On the Fourth of July, Mike was wearing several layers of clothing, which stunned police until he explained to Detective Lynch that he was self-conscious about his slight build and wore more clothes to try to fill out his appearance. According to several people who talked to Robert Graysmith, Mageau also gave different versions of the events of that night depending on who asked the questions and when they asked. Variations included how the two ended up at Blue Rock Springs, whether they were randomly followed or whether they met up with someone who argued with Darlene first and were then followed to the parking lot, the physical description of the UNSUB and his vehicle, and so on. Darlene’s sister Pam thought Mike believed Darlene knew their assailant and Mike was trying to protect her because he loved her. In any event, after he recovered, he moved away.
At 12:40 A.M. on July 5, a call came in to the Vallejo police switchboard. A man’s voice told operator Nancy Slover that there had been a double murder. He gave such precise directions to the scene that it sounded to her as if he’d either rehearsed it or was reading from a script. He did not allow her to interrupt him with questions, and he continued speaking until he was done. For credibility, in addition to the exact description of where the crime scene was, he told her he’d shot his victims with a ninemillimeter Luger. Then he claimed credit for killing “those kids last year,” said good-bye, and hung up.
I have no doubt that the caller was working from a script. This was a highly organized offender. He knew the call would be traced, and he had only a brief time to establish credibility and say his piece before getting off. If the police were able to develop a suspect shortly after this shooting, I would have advised them to include notes with directions or drafts of a full script on a scrap of paper in their search warrant, just as we often do in extortion or kidnapping cases.
It took seven minutes for Pacific Telephone to trace the call to a pay phone in front of a service station right near both the Vallejo Sheriff ’s Office and the home Darlene shared with her husband and daughter. A witness who’d been walking by the phone booth at the time had seen a man inside described as stocky, matching Mike Mageau’s first description of the shooter. About an hour later, around 1:30 A.M., “crank” calls were received at Darlene’s home, at Dean Ferrin’s brother’s house, and Dean’s parents’ house. In each instance, the caller said nothing, and the person answering just heard the sound of someone breathing.
The phone calls, and the location of the phone booth from which the
killer reported his work, made it seem that the UNSUB knew at least one of his recent victims. For one thing, the calls were made before news of the shootings, much less the identities of the victims, had been made public. I know from experience that many offenders derive great satisfaction from calling in a report of their crime while looking into the home of their victim, waiting to see the effects of their work. But Darlene and Dean had only lived in the home by the sheriff ’s office for a few months before her murder; their old address was the one in the phone book. If this offender chose that pay phone so he could gloat over the experience, he’d need to know not only her name, but be familiar enough with her life to know that she’d recently moved.
Was it the mysterious man in the white car Darlene feared? Of course, it’s also possible the UNSUB didn’t know whom he’d shot and simply picked the pay phone by the Sheriff ’s Office to taunt authorities.
It makes sense that in looking for a suspect with a connection to these victims the emphasis would be on Darlene. In addition to the victimology, the crime scene itself tells us she was the focus of the offender’s rage. She overwhelmingly bore the brunt of the attack, with many more—and more serious—gunshot wounds than her companion. In an attack of this nature, it would make more sense for the male, who normally represents the greater physical threat to the offender, to be the more seriously injured. Also, since the killer took his shots from Mageau’s side of the car, one would expect Darlene to be more likely to survive the attack.
But assuming the UNSUB did not know his victim or victims, the focus of the attack on the female is still telling. We saw this in the Son of Sam crimes in New York when David Berkowitz intentionally went to the woman’s side of the car with his .44 magnum. The male companions were only secondary considerations.
According to Mageau, the killer doubled back to fire more shots at both of his victims before he left. Given that Mageau was already wounded and vulnerable, we might have expected the shooter to make sure to finish him off this time, but instead he expended two of the four additional bullets at Ferrin, who he could see was already mortally wounded. The male victim was not only left alive, but was able to describe the UNSUB.
Less than a month after Darlene’s murder, the self-proclaimed killer made contact once again, but this time to the press instead of the police, and this time by mail. The San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, and Vallejo Times-Herald all received nearly identical letters from an author claiming to be the serial killer. The letter to the Chronicle began:
Dear Editor
This is the murderer of the
2 teenagers last Christmass
at Lake Herman & the girl
on the 4th of July near
the golf course in Vallejo
To prove I killed them I
shall state some facts which
only I & the police know . . .
The letters went on to provide details for each of the two cases, including ammunition used and the position of the victims’ bodies. Enclosed with each communication was a section of a long, complicated coded message—made up of neatly printed symbols—each newspaper had received one-third. According to the letters, when solved, the cryptogram would reveal the identity of the killer.
I don’t imagine most in the law enforcement community actually believed the murderer was giving us his name. But I’ve always said that when a subject starts communicating with us, that’s a good sign. Compare this with a case like UNABOM, where we also had few solid leads. You’d much rather get your behavioral clues from a letter than a murder scene.
When he makes contact, this is when you start to feel you can catch the guy. His arrogance and feelings of power lead him to reveal more of himself, giving us the means to help someone in the public recognize him (as in the case of the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski), and enlightening us as to his motives so we can design effective proactive techniques to flush him out. When you have a series of cases where traditional motives such as greed, anger, or revenge don’t apply, the information you get from his communiqués is invaluable in elucidating his motives.
In this instance, the killer didn’t stop in taking credit for his crimes and taunting police with his coded puzzle. It wasn’t enough for police to know he was the real deal. He wanted every reader of all the local newspapers to know of and fear him.
I want you to print this cipher
on the front page of your
paper . . .
If you do not print this cipher
by the afternoon of Fry. 1st of
Aug 69, I will go on a kill ram-
Page Fry. night. I will cruse
around all weekend killing lone
people in the night then move
on to kill again, untill I end
up with a dozen people over
the weekend.
The papers, in cooperation with the police, published part of the letters without reproducing the entire text. As with other aspects of their investigations, authorities wanted some things held back so that there would still be details only the UNSUB would know. For him, knowledge of these would provide a means for him to establish credibility in later communications. And for law enforcement, ideally, it would set the stage for future identification and prosecution.
Ironically, while the cryptogram would not prove to contain the author’s identity explicitly stated, it did provide valuable clues in ways likely unintended by the UNSUB. For one thing, when an UNSUB goes to the trouble of putting something like that together, you know you’re not dealing with your average jerk murderer. Not only is this guy meticulous and obviously proud of proving his intellectual superiority to the police (to compensate for his general feelings of inadequacy), but he also enjoys these incredibly detail-oriented tasks. Think of how much time it would take just to painstakingly write out each of those cryptogram characters, all the while trying to mask your natural handwriting. One misguided stroke and you’d have to start over. It’s almost the patience of a bomb-maker.
Then there are the symbols themselves. The average reader of a local newspaper would not be familiar with most of the characters in the cryptogram’s text, which included meteorological and astrological symbols, Morse and navy semaphore code, and various Greek symbols. We’re dealing with someone with exposure to, if not extensive training in, some highly specialized areas. Even if he was not well-versed in these areas, he’d need reference books with the symbols to copy. Although we’d expect this UNSUB to be a loner, family members or associates would know that along with that trait, he’d have this type of educational or work background.
Like the bomb-maker, this subject would view his letters and this code—like the murders—as his art. We would expect him to have a work area set aside where he would do his meticulous printing and keep his reference materials: books on codes, code-breaking, symbols, as well as media coverage of his crimes and communications. It’s not as easy to notice as a locked garage or basement room that sometimes emits smoke or strange noises, but it’s a sacred, organized work space about which this subject would be compulsively protective.
Let’s try to relate these character traits specifically to one of the crimes. Whether you assume that Darlene Ferrin knew her killer or not, her murder was not the act of an enraged boyfriend-wanna-be, or someone looking to cover his ass on an earlier crime. This UNSUB was on an intellectual campaign of terror, and his target was much greater than any single individual.
It seems fitting, then, that although the police enlisted assistance from experts including those at Naval Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the FBI, in the end it was a couple of newspaper-reading, concerned citizens who finally deciphered the killer’s writings. The newspapers printed their sections of the code in different editions on different days, but by Sunday, August 3, all three parts were available to the public.
Donald Gene Harden, a forty-one-year-old high school history and economics teacher, and his wife, Bettye June, spent the ne
xt couple of days working to crack the code. All of the consulted experts agreed with their solution:
I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE
BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH
FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN
KILLING WILD GAME IN
THE FORREST BECAUSE
MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE
ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL
SOMETHING GIVES ME THE
MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE
IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING
YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL
THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAE
WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN
IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE
KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES
I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME
BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI
DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF
SLAVES FOR AFTERLIFE
EBEORIETEMETHHPITI
The solution only provided more proof of the author’s cunning. For example, in their analysis of such messages, code breakers try to apply some basic rules. The letter e is typically the most commonly used. To cover his tracks, this cryptogram’s designer used a total of seven symbols to stand for the letter e. As you can see from reading it, there were numerous misspellings, but it is not obvious which were true mistakes on the part of the author and which were planted.
In analyzing the message, much has been made of the reference to the author’s rebirth in “paradice” and his use of his victims as slaves. I would argue that this is less telling as an indicator of our UNSUB’s religious beliefs and more revealing in the context of other parts of the message, such as his reference to man as “the most dangeroue anamal of all,” which sounds a lot like the title of the famous Richard Connell short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” The story, which has been made into a movie several times, is about a wealthy madman who lives on his own island and lures passing sailors to dangerous reefs close to his shores with phony navigational lights. He rescues them from their shipwrecks, only to release and hunt them like wild animals in his compound.
The Cases That Haunt Us Page 25
