The Cases That Haunt Us

by Mark Olshaker

  The summer of 1970 was a frustrating one for the Zodiac, if his letters are any indication of his emotional state. He wrote prolifically, sending three letters to the Chronicle in just a month. And one of these letters was the longest, and arguably the most creative, he’d sent thus far. At the end of June he mailed a brief letter expressing his anger at “the people of San Fran Bay Area. They have not complied with my wishes for them to wear some nice [Zodiac symbol] buttons.” He noted that although he’d warned he’d retaliate for noncompliance by “anilating a full School Buss,” school was out for summer vacation “so I punished them in an another way. I shot a man sitting in a parked car with a .38.”

  He drew another score, this time giving himself twelve [victims], SFPD still zero. With the letter, he included a Phillips 66 road map of the area around Mt. Diablo across the Bay from San Francisco, and a two-line cryptogram, which he asserted should be used in tandem to identify where he’d planted a bomb. The letter said authorities had until the fall to “dig it up.”

  As for his claim that he’d killed a man, while a police officer had been killed with a .38, there was a suspect in that case, and investigators found no evidence to suggest another Zodiac murder.

  The next letter began, “This is the Zodiac speaking I am rather unhappy because you people will not wear some nice [Zodiac symbol] buttons.” He then brings up:

  . . . the woeman & her baby that I

  gave a rather interesting ride

  for a coupple howers one

  evening a few months back that

  ended in my burning her

  car . . .

  Since Kathleen Johns’s abduction received only scant local press at the time, many interpreted this reference as proof that her abductor was, in fact, the Zodiac.

  Just two days later, the next letter was received. It continued the tone of anger and frustration in the other two and upped the total of Zodiac victims to thirteen. It obviously greatly disturbed him that no one was wearing Zodiac buttons, and he wanted to let people know they would pay for this slight.

  I shall (on top of every

  thing else) torture all 13

  of my slaves that I have

  wateing for me in Paradice.

  Some I shall tie over ant hills

  and watch them scream & twich

  and squirm. Others shall have

  pine splinters driven under their

  nails & then burned . . .

  And so on. The Zodiac then really revved up his creative talents, quoting from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and rewriting the lyrics.

  As some day it may hapen

  that a victom must be found.

  I’ve got a little list. I’ve

  got a little list, of society

  offenders who might well be

  underground who would never

  be missed who would never be

  missed. There is the pest

  ulentual nucences who whrite

  for autographs, all people who

  have flabby hands and irritat

  ing laughs . . .

  It went on and on with examples of people he’d like to see done away with, quite incoherent in spots. But it’s revealing of the Zodiac’s nature. Line after line cited examples of people who “none of them be missed” when it was actually he who would not be missed. But this is a cross-section of society, a petty, detailed list of all the kinds of people whom he perceived as having scorned him. Most of us register a slight, deal with it or brush it off, and move on. But not the Zodiac. In his mind he was ever cataloging how society had wronged him. This letter was his opportunity to give some of that back. At the same time, he hoped he was impressing us with his talent.

  Of course, his verse doesn’t scan properly, his spelling is miserable, and the sections that do make sense are not even clever. At least the overall metaphor works on some level, as the aria he embellishes is sung by the Lord High Executioner, which is doubtless a position he’d have liked to hold officially.

  One more point needs to be made about this letter. A postscript reads, “PS. The Mt. Diablo Code concerns Radians & # inches along the radians.” Without getting too technical here (not that I could on this subject), a radian is a mathematical term representing an angle of measure. One school of interpretation views the Zodiac crime scenes in relation to each other in time and space through mathematical analysis. As an example, the theory holds that Paul Stine’s murder occurred one block farther than he’d written on his log sheet because the killer needed him to be at a precise point on the map. That’s why the Zodiac switched his victim choice from couples to a cabdriver. Whom else could he get to a precise set of map coordinates so easily?

  Of course, one could argue that the killer’s new base of operations was San Francisco and he needed a murder site that would afford him an easy getaway, so, being familiar with the Presidio and its environs, he figured that was the way to go. However you choose to look at it, the radian reference holds some meaning in that it is not something most citizens are aware of and it, along with the Gilbert and Sullivan rip-off, shows an offender who comes off as both well-educated and illiterate—a fascinating combination—which may help account for his occasional lapses into disorganization at the crime scenes (having the presence of mind to wipe off Paul Stine’s cab, yet leaving fingerprints anyway, for example).

  His exposure is wider than his expertise is deep, if you will. This is likely why one avenue of investigation pursued by Toschi and Armstrong in San Francisco came up empty. They investigated players with The Lamplighters, the city’s Gilbert and Sullivan company. Interestingly, a run of The Mikado opened at Presentation Theatre one week after Paul Stine was shot, just a dozen or so blocks from the murder site. I would suggest that while this guy was reasonably sharp, he did not have the personality of a performer. You’d be looking for someone behind the scenes, someone with technical expertise. But this interest would stand out to the few who knew him well, since it would seem in direct contrast with his knack for such things as numbers and codes.

  A LETTER TO THE PRESS

  That fall there was a development that completely shook up the investigation. First, the Zodiac sent a Halloween card and a personal threat that proclaimed, “YOU ARE DOOMED!” to Paul Avery, the lead investigative reporter on the case at the Chronicle. Avery began carrying a gun, and he and fellow reporters started wearing buttons reading “I Am Not Paul Avery.” The card got a lot of press from the Chronicle and elsewhere, and Avery received a bunch of tips, including one from southern California.

  One letter (not from the Zodiac) encouraged Avery to check into whether the Zodiac had committed his first crime in Riverside, California. It was the unsolved murder of a young girl around Halloween. The anonymous tipster claimed he’d brought the possible connection to police but had been brushed off.

  If you’ve been reading closely, you’re probably returning to the murder of Cheri Jo Bates, the first case presented in this chapter. Recall the detailed letter, which, in retrospect, seems so similar to the Zodiac’s painstaking descriptions of the Jensen/Faraday and Ferrin/Mageau crimes. Remember how the letters to Joseph Bates, the police, and the press were signed with the letter Z. And I didn’t even mention that the envelopes all contained extra postage, just like later Zodiac letters.

  I’ve always said that in evaluating a series of crimes, you need to focus on the first one because that will show you where the inexperienced offender is comfortable. That crime is close to where he lives or works, and his behavior in the commission of that crime is most natural and revealing because he hasn’t yet perfected his techniques.

  What would the Bates UNSUB have learned from that crime? First, that a petite woman can still be hard to control. The next few blitz-style gun attacks eliminated that problem. Then, he really didn’t get the credit he likely felt he deserved for such a crafty crime. After he’d gone to all the trouble to set the trap and kill his victim, and then got away with it, nobody paid attentio
n to the letters he sent directly to police, the victim’s father, and the press at the six-month anniversary of the crime. So he learned that if he wanted credit in the future, he had to supply the details, or tangible evidence.

  But if Bates was “his,” and this killer liked attention so much, why wouldn’t he go for it once his credibility as the Zodiac had been established? For one, given his inferiority/superiority complex and his love/hate relationship with the police, I think he got off on what he saw as the ultimate “I know something you don’t know.” He must have relished every time he read the other murders referred to as the Zodiac’s first. Also, if it truly was his first murder, it’s possible he’d spent time around Bates and the library before. I’m not saying he necessarily knew her, but he’d seen her, because she and he had the same base of operations. He may have been afraid to let the investigation get too close to home, fearing that, if nothing else, someone might draw a connection with the dates of each change in venue. I believe the Bates killing is at least one more in the series, if not the first Zodiac crime. And this belief is backed up by the findings of experts such as California Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation handwriting expert Sherwood Morrill, who has connected the writings in the “BATES HAD TO DIE” messages and on the desktop with the later work of the Zodiac.

  I also think it’s more than a coincidence that after this link was made, communication with the killer dropped off. He sent a letter to the Los Angeles Times in March of 1971, the first time he’d ever contacted that publication. In it he boasted again that the “Blue Meannies” would never catch him and observed that “the longer they fiddle + fart around, the more slaves I will collect for my after life.”

  He did acknowledge the Bates murder as one of his doing, but scorned police, saying, “They are only finding the easy ones, there are a hell of a lot more down there.” And this time, his score was seventeen-plus, while the SFPD stagnated at zero. Just about a week later, “Paul Averly” received a postcard featuring an advertisement for a condominium development in Lake Tahoe, the crossed-circle Zodiac symbol, and choice phrases cut out of newspapers. There was no obvious message, so investigators tried to interpret the meaning of the card, looking into unsolved crimes there to see if this was a veiled reference to another murder. Nothing could conclusively be linked to the Zodiac.

  “THE BEST SATERICAL COMIDY”

  And nothing was heard from the killer for nearly three years. Then, at the end of January 1974, another letter came in to the San Francisco Chronicle. In familiar handwriting, the letter read, “I saw + think “The Exorcist” was the best saterical comidy that I have ever seen,” followed up with more misspelled references to The Mikado. By now, he’d raised his victim count to thirty-seven.

  The next two letters came in to the Chronicle in May and July of that year. The May letter was full of anger, criticizing the paper for running ads for the movie Badlands, based on the Charles Starkweather–Caril Ann Fugate murder spree of the 1950s, which the Zodiac apparently found too violent for his refined tastes. The July letter was similarly critical of the newspaper’s content, this time singling out a specific columnist. The man was spooked enough to leave the paper for a time.

  Then, after a gap of nearly four years, the last verified Zodiac letter was received in April of 1978. It read simply:

  Dear Editor

  This is the Zodiac speaking I

  am back with you. Tell herb caen

  I am here, I have always been here.

  That city pig toschi is good but

  I am [crossed out letters] smarter and better he

  will get tired then leave me

  alone. I am waiting for a good

  movie about me. Who will play

  me. I am now in control of all

  things.

  Yours truly:

  Where the signature would have appeared, there was yet another score: Zodiac—guess, SFPD zero.

  I think the gaps of years between letters is significant. I wonder if our guy was in jail on some minor charge, frustrated but at the same time gloating that the criminal justice system had no idea whom they were holding. It’s also possible that his silences coincided with trips out of the area, new military assignments if he’d been able to stay in, perhaps, or an illness. I also think it’s significant that consciously or not, in this last letter he touches on all the major themes and motives operative in his life. He affirms his existence (“I am here”) and his worth/superiority (“I am . . . smarter and better”). He reveals his desire to be left alone and his conflicting need for recognition (“I am waiting for a good movie about me”). Finally, he makes the ultimate claim of this type of offender: “I am now in control of all things.” For a man with no murders left to claim, no real reason for continuing the dialogue, it reads like a suicide note.

  It may well have been.

  EPILOGUE

  After all these years, it is safe to say that the Zodiac is not likely to resurface and continue his reign of terror in the San Francisco Bay area. But I am still asked if there was anything we could have done differently to get him.

  By 1980, I’d been at Quantico a few years and had some research under my belt when I learned the FBI wanted to take another look at the body of Zodiac literature. I remember getting a file of letters to look at, and I had several conversations with Murray Miron over the finer points of our analytical approaches. Before we could get too deeply involved, however, the letters were pulled. I never did find out what prompted the renewed interest at the Bureau, or what caused our involvement to be canceled. And as usual, I was up to my ass in alligators already, so I didn’t spend much time considering the matter.

  I do believe that if we saw a case like this today, we’d have some success employing proactive techniques like those mentioned throughout this chapter. With this type of offender, a profile is much less important than the proactive techniques, and these should be designed to play off the subject’s interests and weaknesses.

  In the case of the Zodiac, some hot buttons might be his need to taunt and express superiority over police, his need to seek credit for his crimes, and his overwhelming need to establish credibility.

  I would suggest that this last point would be one of his greatest weaknesses, because it is unusual for this type of subject to seek credit for his crimes. Guys like this are paranoid; they don’t want all that attention. It strengthens the case for Cheri Jo Bates’s murder to be a focal point for the investigation. He didn’t want the recognition, then he did. There’s something there.

  What he would have in common with other killers is that he’s always out looking for victims, as evidenced by all the reports of the suspect vehicle driving around the Lake Herman Road crime scene, and the witnesses who reported the strange man lurking around Lake Berryessa all afternoon on the day Cecelia Shepard and Bryan Hartnell were attacked. Like other subjects, the Zodiac could be influenced by his own press. Remember how quickly he responded to the challenge to provide details on the Ferrin/Mageau attacks? I think the Zodiac could be lured out to grave sites or memorial services on the anniversaries of the murders.

  With the Zodiac, the signature element to his crimes is his taunting of the police. The murders themselves are merely symbolic of his superiority, designed to quash his overwhelming feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Any technique that gave him the perception he was matching wits with the police would be a potentially good idea. So, for example, you could go back to the location of the first known case (Bates, Riverside) and announce a community meeting where the police would give a status update on the case presented by the lead investigator. To puff him up, you’d announce that the mayor and/or other community bigwigs would attend. The meeting should be held in a public arena such as a local school, but the site should be one people have to drive to. You want to videotape the audience, looking for the guy with the big smile on his face. You note license plate numbers for every car in the parking lot, knowing his is probably there. And you
announce that you’re looking for community involvement. Anyone interested in volunteering to assist us please sign up and register before you leave tonight. You could even skew the list of respondents to target your subject without making it too obvious. Say volunteers must be over eighteen, must have their own car, and must be familiar with the area. Knowledge of simple police procedure is helpful but not necessary. If five hundred people sign up, at least you have a working list. You eliminate all the women and go from there.

  There was one idea that I think was good, although it wasn’t designed to get enough, or the right kind of, information. When the movie Zodiac ran at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, audience members were invited to fill in a slip with their guess as to why the Zodiac killer committed his crimes. A motorcycle was offered for the best entry. This would appeal to the killer’s desire to be strong and macho and it offered opportunity for him to show how much he knows, or at least to get in another veiled jab at the police. And as we know from his later letters, the Zodiac followed popular movies and yearned to see one about himself.

  So who was the Zodiac? Or a better and more meaningful question might be, what kind of personality is, or was, he?

  A man once described by San Francisco homicide detective Dave Toschi as “a very, very good suspect,” and who has been the subject of intense investigation by Robert Graysmith in his research, certainly fits the description I would put together: highly intelligent, IQ estimated around 135; spent much of his adult life living with his mother, with whom he had a difficult relationship at best; educated in chemistry and trained in codes; a hunter who once described man as the “most dangerous game” to a friend. And he could be placed in the different jurisdictions at the time each of the Zodiac crimes occurred. He had been a student at Riverside College, lived near other crime scenes, and received a speeding ticket near Lake Berryessa the very evening of the attacks there. He was also once observed by his sister-in-law to be holding a piece of paper upon which were written strange symbols. The day of the attack at Lake Berryessa, he was observed to have a bloody knife in his car, which he explained as having been used to kill chickens. And during one of the gaps in communication from the Zodiac, this man had been in prison serving time on a child molestation charge, although he told others he’d been arrested because he was the Zodiac. Despite these and many more circumstantially incriminating facts, the police had no direct evidence on which to arrest and formally charge him in connection with any of the Zodiac crimes. This suspect died of a heart attack in 1992 at age fifty-eight.