If I’d been involved, along with interjurisdictional cooperation, I would have been stressing the need to be proactive. Ironically, one approach I counsel police to try in cases like this was initiated . . . but by the offender.
I can imagine the Zodiac in late October 1969, seeing that the news programs and papers were devoting less and less coverage to the school bus threat, wondering how in the hell to top that. While I would not necessarily have been able to predict exactly what shape it would take, I would have been able to tell you that the UNSUB was going to need to do something to get himself back in the limelight. He was probably still reeling from his close call after he killed Stine (although he wouldn’t have admitted it), so he wasn’t ready for another murder. And since he hadn’t carried out his last written threat, he probably sensed that anything he put in another letter would have muted impact. What he needed was a publicity stunt.
Now, one technique I used to recommend was to identify someone in the public eye as a sympathetic character. We know most subjects follow their own press, so depending on the dynamics of the case and the type of offender, I’d advise police to establish someone the offender would feel comfortable contacting in some way. So, for example, at the same time that a local law enforcement bigwig was branding the UNSUB a crazed maniac, you could offer newspaper reporters access to a leading psychiatrist whose message would be 180 degrees in opposition: “This man isn’t crazy. In fact, he’s highly intelligent, which is why the police haven’t caught him. But he is misunderstood . . .” You could photograph the shrink at his office, conveniently mentioning where the office is located and making sure the number and address are in the book. Then you sit back and hope the UNSUB makes contact with the one person he sees as capable of understanding his message, of serving as his voice to correct misperceptions.
What the Zodiac did was bypass the setup. At 2 A.M., a call came in to the Oakland Police Department, across the Bay from San Francisco. The caller identified himself as the Zodiac and requested a phone conversation with high-profile criminal attorney F. Lee Bailey or, if he was unavailable, famed local attorney Melvin Belli. The caller said he wanted one of these two to appear on a local morning talk show. I find the Zodiac’s choices interesting. F. Lee Bailey had a reputation as a master of acquittal, after successfully defending all but three of the more than one hundred killers he had represented, and Belli had made headlines by defending infamous characters such as Jack Ruby and Mickey Cohen. As the years since then have proved, both attorneys had a flair for attracting media attention. And clearly this was what the Zodiac sought.
As it turned out, first-choice Bailey couldn’t make it, but Belli appeared that morning on Channel 7, next to host Jim Dunbar. They began the show one half hour earlier than normal. As they anxiously waited and viewers watched, the first of many calls came in a little after 7 A.M. The caller kept hanging up and calling back, identifying himself as “Sam” and giving Belli and Dunbar details of his headaches and loneliness. A dozen of the thirty-five phone calls were actually broadcast, and a meeting was arranged. Belli led a parade of police and media to the appointed spot at 10:30 that morning. You can probably guess the rest: “Sam” never showed. Later phone calls to Belli from this caller were eventually traced to a mental patient at Napa State Hospital. The police officer who had answered the phone when the call first came in to the Oakland PD thought the caller to the TV show sounded different from the one he had talked to. But it really didn’t matter who called Belli that morning as far as the Zodiac was concerned. He’d gotten his press, live. He’d succeeded in manipulating everyone in the viewing area, had a whole region on the edge of its seat, and had a famous personality at his beck and call with just a few hours’ notice. On top of that, precautions were still being taken to make sure he didn’t take out a school bus. And police were no closer to identifying him.
He still had to keep his hand in, though. In early November he sent two communications to the San Francisco Chronicle, consisting of a greeting card (“This is the Zodiac speaking”), another cryptogram, a seven-page letter, and a hand-drawn diagram of a bomb designed to destroy a school bus. To establish credibility, another swatch of Paul Stine’s bloody shirt was enclosed in one envelope, although by now the Zodiac’s handwriting—along with his odd habit of using more postage than required—were recognizable. The extra postage was simply practical; he could just pop the envelopes into a mailbox somewhere without having to come in contact with a human who could later identify him, and he knew for sure his mail would be delivered. We would later see the Unabomber employ this same technique.
Although much attention was paid to the drawing and references to the Zodiac’s bomb, I think other aspects of these communications, particularly the seven-page letter, are more significant. Consider the following:
. . . I have grown
rather angry with the police
for their telling lies about me.
So I shall change the way the
collecting of slaves. I shall
no longer announce to anyone.
when I comitt my murders,
they shall look like routine
robberies, killings of anger, +
a few fake accidents, etc. . . .
In numerous subsequent writings, the Zodiac would make reference to his new and improved body count. And after each of these, police would reevaluate unsolved murders in their jurisdictions, looking for potentially linked cases. In the early 1980s, some thought that the Zodiac and the Trailside Killer were one and the same. The conviction of David Carpenter in 1988 for those murders disproved this theory, as he was serving time for other crimes when several of the Zodiac killings occurred. Depending on whom you ask, though, today there are upwards of fifty possible victims of the Zodiac. In a sense, it’s the opposite of linkage blindness, and we run into it with every large-scale unsolved serial case. To this day, people are still adding to the tally attributed to Seattle’s Green River Killer, even though the first of those serial murders occurred in January of 1982.
Indeed, one of the reasons the Zodiac’s crimes continue to haunt us is that he captured the imagination of psychopaths as well as law-abiding citizens, making him a favorite for copycat criminals not only in the Bay Area but even years later in New York City and Tokyo. For reasons too complex to get into here, police knew fairly quickly these cases were not the work of the Zodiac.
What the Zodiac had effectively done was create the illusion he was still active whether he truly was killing people or not. As long as he wrote to claim credit, the lore surrounding him would continue. He blamed the police and their lies for putting him in the position of having to keep his specific crimes secret, thus creating a face-saving scenario for himself. If he never kills again, people will still wonder. And if he does, he protects himself by not providing details that might lead police to his identity. Indeed, after this, he sent no more pieces of future victims’ shirts, and no more detailed descriptions of crimes such as in the Jensen/Faraday and Ferrin/Mageau attacks.
One of the greatest mysteries of the Zodiac murders is why he stopped. Where did he go? We’ve discussed in chapter 1 how serial killers don’t just move down south and retire. Since the Zodiac kept writing for years after Stine’s murder, we know he wasn’t dead or, presumably, incarcerated. Perhaps he got sick or suffered some physical degeneration that made it impossible for him to carry out more crimes, but I think he just plain got scared. You run into a couple of policemen minutes after you’ve killed a man and you’re covered in blood, the adrenaline still pumping, that’s not something you get over too quickly.
He’d shown in his crimes, communications, and ability to evade identification and capture that he was a sharp guy. He saw the writing on the wall. Offenders like this don’t go down easy. To lose the high of being the lead story on the news for years, on and off, of having so many people fear you, to surrender all power and control and go to prison, that’s when I advise a round-the-clock suicide watch, just a
s I did with the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski.
At the same time, I think the Zodiac resented being in what he considered a position of weakness. He couldn’t admit the fear; that would have made him feel even more inadequate than he already was. So instead, he lashed out in page after page. And he didn’t only sound angry, he had to overcompensate by providing lots of details that showed his superior intelligence.
The police shall never catch me,
because I have been too clever
for them.
1 I look like the description
passed out only when I do
my thing, the rest of the time
I look entirle different . . .
2 As of yet I have left no
fingerprints behind me contrary
to what the police say
. . . I wear trans
parent finger tip guards. All it
is is 2 coats of airplane cement
coated on my finger tips—quite
unnoticible & very effective . . .
. . . If you
wonder why I was wipeing the
cab down I was leaving fake clews
for the police to run all over town
with . . .
. . . I enjoy needling
the blue pigs. Hey blue pig I
was in the park—you were useing
fire trucks to mask the sound
of your cruzeing prowl cars . . .
p.s. 2 cops pulled a goof abot 3
min after I left the cab. I was
walking down the hill to the
park when this cop car pulled up
& one of them called me over
& asked if I saw any one
acting supicisous . . .
. . . & I said
yes there was this man who
was running by waveing a gun
& the cops peeled rubber &
went around the corner as
I directed them & I dissap
eared into the park . . .
Hey pig doesnt it rile you up
to have your noze rubed in your
booboos?
As the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz also wrote long letters to the police, and by the end, we could see his degeneration pretty clearly, too.
In December, the Zodiac sent another letter, with another piece of Paul Stine’s shirt, this time to Melvin Belli. The message came in a Christmas card, and its tone was strikingly different from that of the last diatribe. He began by wishing Melvin a “happy Christmass,” then moved on to ask for help and expressed some insecurity.
Dear Melvin
This is the Zodiac speaking I
wish you a happy Christmass.
The one thing I ask of you is
this, please help me. I cannot
reach out for help because of
this thing in me wont let me . . .
The Zodiac warned that without help he might take his “nineth + posibly tenth victom,” implying there had been more murders since Paul Stine’s, although the killer provided no details. Then he stressed “Please help me I am drownding” and “Please help me I can not remain in control for much longer.”
Now, Belli put a positive spin on this letter, publicly stating that he saw it as indicating that the Zodiac, realizing he would soon be caught, was getting ready to turn himself in and wanted the attorney to help him avoid the gas chamber. Belli even said someone claiming to be the Zodiac had called his home when he wasn’t there and had had such a good conversation with the housekeeper that he expected to come home one day and find the two of them having a chat.
Years later, a vastly different interpretation was offered by my late esteemed colleague and valued friend Dr. Murray Miron. It was Murray’s opinion that in this letter the Zodiac revealed his depression. Murray felt that waves of depression would pass over the subject, and that it was “not entirely unlikely that in one of these virulent depressions, such individuals could commit suicide.” I would agree that the Zodiac might eventually commit suicide, but I also believe that, even in a depressed state, the Zodiac wrote letters with the goal of manipulating, dominating, and controlling their recipients and the larger audience he knew they would reach. So while this UNSUB likely did feel more alone and alienated from society around Christmastime, I believe this letter was a play for sympathy—one emotion the Zodiac hadn’t yet tried to get from the public. To confirm this, I would note that despite Belli’s assurances that he would protect the Zodiac from the gas chamber and do all he could to help him, the killer never contacted him again.
As I suggested earlier, one problem you confront when doing an analysis of this type of offender is there are so many potential Zodiac cases out there. Because we’re dealing with a subject who at least predominantly killed strangers, who changed jurisdictions, who used different murder weapons and different MOs with different crimes, you can spend a lot of time getting hung up on cases that may not even be part of the picture. At the same time, you don’t want to be guilty of linkage blindness.
LINKAGE BLINDNESS
I’ve culled through a lot of unsolved crimes that may have been related to the Zodiac’s series, and so far in this chapter I’ve limited our discussion to cases for which the killer claimed responsibility and offered some details or material evidence to substantiate his claim. We will now look at a case that illustrates how difficult it can be to rule an unsolved crime in or out of this series.
Kathleen Johns, twenty-three years of age and seven months pregnant, had about four hundred miles to cover as she left her home in San Bernardino, California, headed for Petaluma. It was Sunday, March 22, 1970, and Johns was taking her ten-month-old daughter to visit her grandmother (Kathleen’s mother), who was sick. Because of the length of the trip and the age of her baby, she planned to make most of the drive at night. She left in the late afternoon.
Around midnight on Highway 132, Johns noticed a car behind her, blinking its lights and honking its horn at her. The driver pulled up alongside her car and yelled that one of her back tires was loose. They pulled over and a clean-shaven, neat young man around thirty offered to tighten things up for her. She thanked him and stayed in the car while he ostensibly went back to fix it. When he was done and she tried to drive off, the tire fell off altogether. The young man returned to the side of the road and offered this time to take her to a nearby service station, which she could see up ahead of them. She and her baby got into his car as the man went to turn off her headlights and retrieve her car keys for her.
His kind acts stopped there, however, as he drove right by the gas station. They drove around for hours, with the man repeating to Johns that he would kill her and her baby. Finally, when he made a turn, she jumped out with her daughter and hid in a ditch. He tried to pursue her, but luckily for her, a truck happened on the scene and stopped, scaring the abductor off.
What makes many people think that Kathleen Johns and her children narrowly escaped becoming Zodiac victims is that her description of her abductor so closely resembles those of earlier cases. While she was being driven around, she put all her concentration into noticing details. She told police her abductor was a bit shorter than her five feet nine and weighed around 170 pounds. He wore thick-rimmed glasses held in place with an elastic band around his head. He wore well-polished black shoes, black bell-bottoms, a white shirt, and a dark nylon jacket. The shoes, coupled with his crew-cut brown hair, gave her the idea he was in the military.
Then, while giving her statement to police, she looked up and happened to see the composite sketch of the Zodiac circulated after Paul Stine’s murder. She identified her abductor as the man in the drawing. The crime also took place on a weekend, like the others, and in a different jurisdiction, both aspects of Zodiac crimes. It is consistent with the overall presentation of the Zodiac as an organized offender, particularly since Kathleen Johns’s car was later found moved from where it had been left and completely burned out, so as to eliminate any evidence that might hav
e been left behind. It is also consistent with criminal progression and escalation that the Zodiac might want to experiment with spending more time with his victim. And he had announced his intention to kill Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard after conversing with them for a while. This is a perfect example of a crime that may or may not be linked to the Zodiac.
In late April of 1970, the Zodiac pulled out all the literary stops, sending a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle that included a teaser (“my name is” followed by thirteen symbols or characters), news that he’d killed ten people at that point (though the police couldn’t identify any after Stine), an explanation of why he had not utilized his bus bomb (it had been damaged by recent rains), a schematic of a new bomb, and to top it all off, a dig at the police—the letter was signed with the crossed-circle symbol and the number ten alongside the initials SFPD and the number zero, written as a score.
As though to stress his importance and accomplishments far above those of law enforcement, he sent another communication just over a week later. In a humorous greeting card, he threatened again to bomb a school bus unless the police released details from his last letter and bomb diagram. He also suggested people start wearing “nice Zodiac buton . . . like . . . black power, melvin eats blubber, etc. . . . it would cheer me up considerbly if I saw a lot of people wearing my buton.”
We’ve seen this shift in moods before. The Zodiac obviously wrote his latest missive when he was in one of his buoyant emotional periods. It no doubt fueled his needed sense of self-importance when the chief of police in San Francisco went before the press to inform the public of the Zodiac’s latest bomb threat. But the diagram was not printed in the newspaper, and no one started wearing Zodiac buttons.
The Cases That Haunt Us Page 28
