Zodiac Cracked

by Marianne Koerfer

  The women I interviewed remembered Warren as rather “effeminate” and “pretty.” He worked with the Girl Scouts at every opportunity and wanted so bad to be one himself he went around proudly telling them that the Girl Scouts had actually made him a Girl Scout. In Warren’s mind, being honored for his work with the Girl Scouts was the same as being one.

  Warren often took pictures of the children he was around. After his death, his mother, who owned the property and the house in Joshua Tree where the couple was living, ordered Warren’s young widow to pack up and move out. Filed away in a storage area of the small house, a compromising calendar and many pictures were found and destroyed … pictures of both boys and girls. Warren had taken one of the young women he spent time with to his classroom after entering the school during the night. He showed her a girlie magazine he kept in his desk and told her he used it “to get the boys to do what he wanted them to do.”

  Warren’s wake was attended by several young women who were visually upset by his demise. His obituaries carried the following request: “In lieu of flowers, please make donations to the San Gorgonio Girl Scouts.”

  Warren’s mother had developed a private society of women that regularly met in the Estes house. These meetings were a cocktail party affair followed by a séance. The cluttered house was always darkened by the drawn shades and curtains even during the day. After Warren’s death, his young widow would stop by the Estes house infrequently for brief visits as Florence was busy selling off the family properties and making arrangements to relocate to Colorado. Florence told her former daughter-in-law that she had received visits from her deceased son, Warren, and her deceased husband, Fred.

  Warren’s young widow was all his mother had left of him, and she paid a visit to her estranged daughter-in-law. Two and a half years after Warren’s death, the young widow had remarried and given birth to her first child. It was a quiet, clear afternoon, and the young girl was in the midst of a light sleep in her hospital room when she opened her eyes to see Florence entering her room. She came bearing generous gifts for the child and well wishes for the young girl, a peculiar encounter from a woman who did not want to give up her precious son … the lost son she had convinced was the most important thing in the world—and he was to her. But when he tried to step out into the world on his own, he was always met with the day-to-day burden of trying to function at an acceptable social level.

  If the girls Warren had convinced he was so intelligent when they were in their teens and twenties and he was in his forties could speak with him today but with their own educations and life experience and he was unchanged, they would all see right through him … they would know he was playing with them. If Warren was alive today, he would be eighty-six years old.

  Warren’s BA in education and his advanced knowledge of astronomy, math, and science gave him what he needed to teach. He now had free manipulative access to students, boys and girls, of all ages. When he stepped into the 1960’s drug scene, his devious inner struggles began to fester. As an adult, Warren was about to yield to the immature emotionally dangerous child who would manifest his frustrations into his childhood make-believe hero, not unlike the Zodiac persona he would use to “get even” with the boys and girls he could never be one of … a persona he would use to “get even” with all the authorities who had suppressed him. He had become an adult who rejected the restrictions that came with adult responsibilities. He was getting older. Manipulating his way into the world of young boys and girls was still easy for him, but getting away with acting like them was not so easily accepted any longer. By 1966, at the age of forty, Warren was indulging in one-on-one “friendships” with young girls less than half his age. Today we have developed ethical standard laws that limit teacher-student interactions in an effort to give administrators and parents some leverage in protecting our students from rogue teachers like Warren Estes.

  Original Estes house on Central Ave., Riverside.

  Estes family relocates to Beechwood Place, 1965

  Warren and his mother, Florence, on his wedding day, March 1977.

  Headstone of Fred’s father (Warren’s grandfather), Evergreen Memorial Historic Cemetery, Riverside.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE COLLECTOR

  Vicki Hearne—Visitor

  Cheri Jo Bates—Victim

  Kathleen Johns—Escaped

  In 1964, two years before the murder of Cheri Jo Bates, Warren Estes was teaching astronomy A and B classes in the Adult Education Program at Riverside Community College and was referring to himself as “professor.” He was able to mingle freely on campus, above suspicion, with young college girls. What you are about to read is the chilling encounter of a young college student, eighteen years of age, who never knew she experienced a dangerous afternoon with the Zodiac. The following is the article she wrote in all innocence twenty years after the incident occurred:

  SARAH WHO HATED HOLIDAYS

  Victoria Elizabeth Hearne 1946–2001

  A while back I read in Animal Agenda, as I recall, a piece that expressed the writer’s conflict, as people say in creative writing circles and therapy sessions, over some fire ants who were invading her territory. (I do not use “who” rather than “that” carelessly here. A fire ant who is on your case has a definite personality.) On the one hand, one was supposed to be tolerant of all creatures, but on the other hand … well, I ask you, fire ants! I don’t remember whether or how the writer solved the problem, but I do remember a man named Warren Estes.

  Warren was a herpetologist, and in general a fan of all the wildlife of the Southwest desert, especially the inland southern California desert. I don’t remember what brought me to his small house, but I do remember vividly going for a drive with him, along the road toward the Salton Sea, an area of hyperbolic spaces. (“hyperbolic space” is a mathematical term. When you are on something flat looking toward something—a mountain, say, a most desirable mountain—and you start tramping toward that mountain, and you tramp and tramp and the mountain stays the same distance away because it is outside your eyes’ ability to perform the calculations of perspective, then the space is hyperbolic. If the mountain suddenly looms at your feet, or else at God’s feet, or at God’s feet if they were tangible and near, you have stepped out of hyperbolic space. I don’t know how it’s done.)

  Warren and I were driving along, and he suddenly stopped the car and leaped out, as lightly as a jackrabbit changing direction, and became tiny as he ran several hundred feet off the road, scooping something up at the end of his run. Or not so much scooping something up as—I saw him do this sort of thing with various creatures more than once—offering his hand for it to scurry into.

  The first one proved to be a kangaroo rat of some unusual variety; Warren was excited, and I was too young to know to take notes, or else too lost in the splendor of it all. What splendor? Oh, you know, someone who could see that well, have that degree of responsiveness to the landscape. Nowadays, I am given to understand, kangaroo rats are protected by persons who want housing developments kept free of cats or something like that (animal and environmental protection groups have a curious tendency to exempt cats from their sympathies, in my experience,) but this was the good old days, please recall. Perhaps the kangaroo rat had a family—I felt the pull of that possibility—but it is still somewhat difficult to say Warren was unsporting in his collection methods. Instead of asking for instructions about how to look properly, I tried idiotically to admire the kangaroo rat.

  Warren had scientific credentials, so he must have studied and dissected animals at some point, but when I knew him, he lived with them. His house was full of snakes, kangaroo rats, insects of all sorts, and Sarah the Scorpion.

  Sarah, said Warren, had troubles at holiday times, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas, when relatives were likely to be about the house. Most people can find it in them to produce a sympathetic “hmm” or an admiring gurgle for a kangaroo rat, since they are furry, but Sarah was another matter. The r
elatives looked and said, “Ugghhh!” and “Ooohhh!”

  Though I had done well with the snakes and so on, I didn’t, on the one hand, but on the other hand, quite know what to do when Warren, who had been holding Sarah and petting her, offered her to me, together with sundry instructions about how to pet a scorpion. Do not think I was unwilling, though I may have been too young to know that my memory of an enchanted day would fade. I was up for anything that involved animals, and who could resist this? But Warren gave me a slow, amiably appraising look and said, “If you’re afraid of her you shouldn’t hold her. She won’t like it.”

  He would speak to her, and she would respond. He talked to me as well, about the various evidences that she was nervous or relaxed. He stroked her poison sac. He admired her for her courage, and for her fine poison sac. And that is all my memory gives me now, at least palpably enough to report—Warren’s hand, desert-rat brown, and the scorpion glistening there, with a glisten that started as the glisten of menace, for all my appetite for animals, but became the glisten of something very like consciousness through Warren’s talk. He talked with her as some men talk with nervous Thoroughbred fillies, cajoling, admiring, gently admonishing.

  Warren Estes was said to have died last time I asked after him, I don’t know what became of his animals, though it would have been a simple matter to let them loose, there being little difference between indoors and outdoors in the simple, airy house he lived in. I remember the light on everything, Warren’s ordinary voice, neither high nor low.

  Of course Warren would be an offense to virtually all sides of the academic discussion of animals nowadays—I mean the discussion that centers around questions of rights. He would be an offense to some because he captured wild animals—he had a collection. To those who are making careers refuting the animal rights philosophers, he would be an offense for his heavy anthropomorphizing. The knowledge in his hand as he gently held Sarah, just as she liked to be held, he said—there is no room in the animal rights controversies for that knowledge. It does not sponsor or finance any political point of view.

  But it is possible that he understood something. After all, he did not get bitten or stung. Gertrude Stein wrote, “Each generation has something different at which they are all looking,” and the superficial evidence is that everyone in my literary generation is looking at the animals. But they are not. No one, including me, has any idea how to approach the topic of Warren Estes and Sarah, who became upset during the holidays, needing more than ever, Warren said—and there is no one else left to believe or doubt on the matter—to be held in that confident desert-rat-brown hand.

  [permission: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. 2011]

  The woman who wrote this essay was Vicki Elizabeth Hearne. She was born in Texas in 1946 and lived in several states with her military family. Vicki obtained her BA from Riverside Community College (RCC) and would go on to become an animal philosopher and trainer specializing in problem cases. After completing her higher education, she gained further success as an author and poet. Vicki was eighteen years old when she met Warren Estes. But Warren, on the prowl, would have made the encounter with her … he was thirty-eight years old.

  It was 1964, and Warren’s parents had just purchased a third lot in Joshua Tree, San Bernardino County, adjacent to two other properties they already owned. The new lot had a small house on it, and, unlike the other two properties, they added Warren’s name along with their names to this lot’s deed. The lots were located on a divided property area just off the main road of Twenty-nine Palms Highway between the Yucca Valley area and the nine-hundred-square-mile Twenty-nine Palms Marine Corps Base. Warren would use this house that he called “the cabin” as a place to keep his live collection. The cabin is where Vicki, in 1964, would have visited with Warren, his creatures … and Sarah.

  Joshua Tree was mostly undeveloped raw desert country … UFO territory. The area suited not just Warren but his father, Fred, who spent the better part of his life looking for alien beings in this very area.

  The remote high desert region of Southern California is home to the Giant Rock, the world’s largest free-standing boulder towering over seven stories high and covering 5,800 square feet of ground. The site was host to numerous UFO conventions that were attended over the years by thousands of people, including the Esteses. The Salton Sea is slightly longer than a one-hour drive south from the house in Joshua Tree. Along with stops, Warren and Vicki would have spent several hours making the trip. The day was so intense that Vicki wrote about it in 1984 and ten years later included the encounter in her published essays, Animal Happiness.

  Even at her young age, Vicki was already acutely in tune with the habits and instincts of animals. Her observations of Warren Estes can only be taken seriously as she was able to interact with him and observe one-on-one with a fresh intellect the strange incident that would linger in her mind for so many years. Ten years later, in her more experienced years, she was able to construct an educated profile of a very odd man. The information she tells us about Warren, however, is not just from these acute senses alone, but also from what Warren would have told her about himself. He narcissistically indulged in talking about himself to his young girls, spilling out a variety of his knowledge as a way to impress them with his superiority. But it was all a façade to gain access to them … to fulfill his need to be one of them.

  Vicki calls Warren a herpetologist and talks extensively about his collection. In addition, I have comments from several of his acquaintances who mention his collection. In a newspaper interview about his 1977 made-for-TV movie, Warren talks to the reporter about his “collection.” And the Zodiac letters are filled with rants about his collection. To talk to Warren or to know Warren was to know he had a collection. If you had not seen it, he would tell you about it … it was a true obsession. Vicki remarks about “his collection methods,” and Zodiac states in his letter of November 9, 1969, to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, “So I shall change the way [sic] the collecting of slaves.” This monster’s obsession is so strong that as Warren he collects insects along with scaly and furry desert creatures … as Zodiac he collects slaves—the innocent young victims he has murdered. I believe “Sarah the Scorpion” belonged to both collectors.

  Vicki tells us so much about Warren Estes’s life and persona:

  AGILITY: “He suddenly stopped the car and leaped out, as lightly as a jackrabbit changing direction.” “Running several hundred feet off the road.”

  SCIENTIFIC CREDENTIALS: “He must have studied and dissected animals at some point.”

  EYESIGHT: “Someone who could see that well, have that degree of responsiveness to the landscape.”

  VOICE: “He talked with her as some men talk with nervous thoroughbred fillies, cajoling, admiring, gently admonishing.” “Warren’s ordinary voice, neither high nor low.”

  POISON FASCINATION: “He stroked her poison sac. He admired her for her courage, and for her fine poison sac.”

  HATES HOLIDAYS: Vicki describes how Warren’s family visiting on holidays would recoil in disgust at the sight of his collection: “His house was full of snakes, kangaroo rats, insects of all sorts, and Sarah the Scorpion.” “Sarah who became upset on holidays, needing more than ever.”

  ATTACHES HUMAN TRAITS: “He would be an offense for his heavy anthropomorphizing.”

  When Warren tells Vicki, “Don’t hold her if you are afraid—she won’t like it,” it is clear to me that he is not just talking about Sarah “not liking it,” but he won’t like it either. A terrifying scenario is taking place here in this dimly lit “cabin” in the middle of the barren desert. How might Warren have reacted if Vicki “recoiled” from Sarah the Scorpion?

  One of the young girls Warren would regularly take to the cabin tells the story of how she and Warren were hiking one afternoon when they came upon a large rock with a rattlesnake coiled on top. The snake was four feet from her head. She stopped in her tracks, “scared to death.” Warren told her not to move
and that he would be right back. He left her standing there eye to eye with the coiled snake for what had to be at least fifteen minutes as he ran all the way back to the cabin to retrieve a cloth bag and a pole with a strap that he had made to catch snakes. When he finally returned and bagged the snake, they brought it back to the cabin and Warren caged it. He immediately gave it the girl’s name, telling her that now he had captured her and could visit with her alone at the cabin whenever he wanted. She was delighted. Warren’s creatures all had female names.

  This story drove me to ask, “Who was Sarah?” I found out that Sarah was a German student at Riverside Community College whom Warren knew. She returned to Germany, and Warren carried on a letter-writing relationship with her until he died. He liked to write letters as Warren, and he liked to write letters as Zodiac. And Sarah was most likely with Warren when he “captured” her.

  One of Warren’s girls told me that when she was in the hospital after surgery, Warren came to visit her. He was physically and verbally clowning around, causing her to laugh continuously. She begged him to stop as the laughing was hurting her so much, but he just kept on performing through her tears. We have to note here that this was a man in his forties, a man who called himself a professor, presenting himself to a young female student and causing her pain … he was laughing and enjoying the experience.

  Zodiac describes, in his letter of July 26, 1970, in some gory detail, how he will torture his slaves in their cages. This madman on drugs could not distinguish the young girls he took up to the cabin from the herpetology creatures he kept at the cabin. Having become detached from reality, the girls and his creatures were all the same to him. Warren enjoyed watching and experiencing both Vicki and the other young girl in fear of his creatures.