Zodiac Cracked: The Manifestation of a Killer

by Marianne Koerfer

  Warren tells Vicki that Sarah had troubles at holiday times when relatives were about the house. The relatives said “Ugghhh!” and “Ooohhh!” But Warren liked to both scare and shock people, including his family. When the children he spoke of visited the house in Riverside, he would run hot water over their hands to get them really warm and then carefully place one of his tarantulas on their open palms. They were scared, but they did it. Warren would place several of the tarantulas on his body and arms and walk around with the creatures perched on him. Not uncommon for spider wranglers to do, but most peculiar for an adult man to do to children for the purpose of scaring them on a holiday with a house full of family.

  I have to present a disturbing observation at this time. Did Cheri Jo Bates ever see Warren’s collection? If she had, did she recoil from Sarah the Scorpion and the collection, causing Warren to become very upset? On the night of October 30, 1966, at approximately 10:30 p.m., screams were heard by several people in the area where Cheri Jo Bates was murdered. The homicide investigators and the coroner considered this as the probable time of the brutal killing. There is, however, a time lapse of one hour (9:30 p.m. library closing time) to four hours (6:30 p.m. possible library closing time) in which Cheri Jo Bates could have left the RCC Library. Where was she during this interval? Warren lived only four blocks from the murder scene and the library. He certainly would have been able to use his “cajoling” voice to lure her away from her disabled car and eventually draw her four more blocks away to see his “collection” and pick up a tool or part to fix her car. He would then walk or drive her back to the area of the library.

  Warren was an inventor and must have known how to pull the distributor wire that disabled Cheri Jo Bates’s green 1966 VW. In the Confession letter sent November 29, 1966, to the Riverside Police Department and the Riverside Press Enterprise newspaper, the killer tells us how he disabled her car and waited in the library for her to leave, following her out after about two minutes. The letter further states, “She was then very willing to talk with me. I told her that my car was down the street and I would give her a lift home.” Zodiac lied many times in his letters. Clearly he lied to the young girl telling her he would give her a lift home. Obviously she believed he was going to give her that lift or at least get her car started as she left her checked-out library books on the front seat of her car, books that she needed for a homework assignment. Warren’s smooth-talking, cunning rhetoric would have included all the things he had in common with the stranded young college girl. He knew how to con and charm at the same time. He had played a deadly game with her.

  Warren’s mother was a school librarian, and his father worked at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory at Norco as a mathematician while Cheri Jo Bates’s father also worked at Norco as a machinist. Cheri Jo Bates and Vicki Hearne were both students attending RCC, and Warren was teaching at RCC. The paths of all interested parties were crossing.

  A poem carved into a desktop that was found in a storage room at the RCC Library in March of 1967, five months after Cheri Jo Bates was murdered, was signed “r h” … as in Riverside Herpetologist. If Warren Estes told Vicki Hearne he was a herpetologist, did he also tell Cheri Jo Bates the same thing as a legitimate ploy to talk to these young women about dissecting—cutting and blood?

  Warren and his Zodiac persona both have an obvious infatuation with fresh blood. As Vicki Hearne stated, “Warren had scientific credentials, so he must have studied and dissected animals” … the description of a conversation that surely included blood. The desktop poem mentions “blood spurting, dripping, spilling all over her new dress.” The poem was carved into the wood of the desktop with an ink pen, and Zodiac may have had the time to create it while Cheri Jo Bates was getting the books she was going to check out, but it probably was not created after her killing as the poem states, “She won’t die this time” … but she did. The picture of a dripping fountain pen on the cover of a greeting card sent on November 8, 1969, to the San Francisco Chronicle certainly represents dripping blood once again. Then there are the bloody pieces of taxi driver Paul Stine’s shirt that Zodiac sent in letters and a card. Zodiac calling the police after the Vallejo area killings to tell them where to find the “kids” he had just shot to death was a morbid plan to get the police to the murder scenes quickly enough to actually see the “kids” bleeding to death. Warren kept cages of horned lizards in and outside the family garage. These creatures are known to squirt blood several feet out from their eye sockets. Warren’s father, Fred, displayed his mounted butterfly collections on the walls of that same garage. One of the girls told me, “It was so creepy. It was like the garage was alive!”

  In Zodiac’s letter of November 9, 1969, to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, he jots down a notation on the folded letter, “To prove that I am the Zodiac, ask the Vallejo cop about my electric gun sight which I used to start my collecting of slaves.” As the first Zodiac killing in Vallejo was on December 20, 1968, we can extract from this statement that the “game” actually started with the Vallejo killings and not the 1966 Cheri Jo Bates killing. Unlike the twelve-inch bladed knife used in the Lake Berryessa stabbings, Cheri Jo Bates’s murderer used a three-and-a-half-inch pocket knife as a weapon—the tip actually broke off of during the stabbing frenzy. If the madman meant what he said in the desktop poem, he had not meant to kill that night, but he did, and the game he rants on about in the many letters to follow had begun in Riverside, not Vallejo.

  The confession letter, the desktop poem, and the Bates letters were all written by the same person. But if Warren did not kill Cheri Jo Bates, he did immerse his devious imagination into the killing by creating these documents and moving on to his own killing and further letter writing that all began in Vallejo as Zodiac states in his afterthought notation on the folded letter.

  At age thirty-eight, Warren Estes had found in eighteen-year-old Vicki Hearne a girl he could show off to and impress with his “collection.” Vicki stated she had seen Warren scoop up small creatures from the desert floor on “several occasions” … she clearly had spent time with Warren. But one year later, Vicki married a twenty-six-year-old University of California, Riverside, soil science student. Warren had lost a playmate, the girl who managed to tolerate his creatures. His personal life was changing drastically. That same year, in 1965, Warren moved into the newly purchased Riverside house with his parents. He had to move most of his live collection, his inventions, and his telescope and binocular equipment out to the property in Joshua Tree … they were no longer welcome in the new Riverside family home. What creatures he was able to keep at the new house were watched over by his attentive mother when he was not around. Without any parents, neighbors, or family to deal with, he could now be alone with his collection in a desert retreat cabin that in a short two years he would use to spend uninterrupted time writing the taunting Zodiac letters.

  [For an exercise demonstrating how telling the Vicki Hearne experience was, read her essay again but substitute the name “Zodiac” wherever the name “Warren/Estes” appears.]

  The last-known account of a lone female contact with the Zodiac is that of Kathleen Johns, which occurred on Palm Sunday, March 22, 1970, around midnight. Kathleen was twenty-three years old and seven months pregnant with her second child. The Zodiac offered her and her baby a ride to a gas station after he managed to pull them over on the highway and disable their vehicle. While filing a police report of the incident, Kathleen identified the suspect as the man in the police sketch she saw hanging on the wall of the Stanislaus sheriff’s department … the same man whose face was on the Paul Stine taxi murder wanted poster. Zodiac drove around with Kathleen and her sleeping baby for hours before he made a verbal threat in a flat, monotone voice: “I am going to throw the baby out of the window.” This terrifying threat caused her mommy mode to kick in, and when Zodiac slowed down the next time, Kathleen leaped from the vehicle with her baby in her arms … the bravest of acts. Zodiac, unable to immediately find Kathleen h
iding in the tall brush off the shoulder of the road and interrupted by the arrival of a semitruck whose driver stopped to see what the commotion was about, quickly left the scene. He returned to Kathleen’s disabled vehicle and torched it, completely destroying the vehicle and its contents. If the Zodiac had driven the newer-model vehicles of today that have a driver-controlled door locking system, Kathleen Johns would not have been able to open the door and escape.

  At the time of the incident, Kathleen Johns lived in the city of San Bernardino, on Campus Way, only twenty minutes from the cabin in Joshua Tree, San Bernardino County, where Warren was spending his off times. In a letter on July 24, 1970, sent to the San Francisco Chronicle, Zodiac claims he committed the act of kidnapping Kathleen, stating he took the woman and her baby for “an interesting ride.” Kathleen later states she too received a Halloween card from Zodiac, the same card but with fewer alterations as the one sent to reporter Paul Avery at the San Francisco Chronicle. Shortly after all this trauma, Kathleen left the area and went into seclusion. Many years later, in a 1998 interview, she remained steadfast that it was the Zodiac who had driven her and her baby around that night. Like Vicki Hearne, Kathleen Johns’s experience was so intense that years later she too would retain many vivid moments of the incident.

  Kathleen’s confrontation certainly reinforces the fact that Zodiac was capable of killing children. As Warren had driven around with Vicki Hearne and the other young girls he “played with,” Zodiac may have driven around with Cheri Jo Bates, and we know he spent several hours driving around with Kathleen Johns. Serial killers are notoriously mobile, and Warren needed to roam. He needed to have these girls in his car with him.

  One piece of valuable information I see in this incident is that Kathleen gave us Zodiac’s route. Whether Warren left from his cabin in Joshua Tree or his parents’ house in Riverside, his route would have crossed that of Kathleen’s as she would have driven out of the area heading north. Zodiac mailed a card to Kathleen’s home address after the incident. If he had obtained that address before the incident, he may have been watching her and could have left from her house. They both would have made their way onto north I-5, then jogged over and continued north on Highway 99 where the roadways fork. At Modesto, they would have turned west onto Highway 132 (called Maze Road in the area, and very lightly traveled), which would have taken them back onto north I-5 … Kathleen on her way to Petaluma and Zodiac on his way to San Francisco. He may have stayed on Highway 99 north longer if he was on his way to the Vallejo area. Was the killer headed north to kill again when he gave in to an urge to capture a lone female? Sadly, Kathleen Johns died of a heart attack in 2002 at the age of fifty-five. She would have lived out her entire life looking over her shoulder.

  Warren’s cabin in Joshua Tree/Yucca Valley, San Bernardino.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MOVIES

  Drive-In Theater—Charlie Chan

  Big Screen—Hellstrom Chronicle

  Made for TV—Tarantula Wrangler/Ant Coordinator

  Mail Order—Tarantulas/Guns/Butterflies

  In the very late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, an innovative entertainment media was being successfully spread throughout the country … the drive-in theater. These theaters offered an informal private place, the automobile, to view the latest black-and-white cinema productions pouring out of Hollywood. By the 1950s and 1960s, the most popular dating scene in California besides the beaches became these drive-in movie theaters, which were enjoying their peak existence as Americans continued their love affair with the movies now in living color. The long, warm California seasons encouraged these theaters to sprout up all over the state, and by the mid-1960s over two hundred drive-ins were in operation.

  Sitting in an automobile in the dark of the evening, surrounded by other vehicles, mostly filled with young couples on dates, was the man who would become the Zodiac, a man whose expertise was making telescopes and binoculars. One of the girls Warren played with told me how he would become more and more excited as the sky got darker and darker. He would watch the movie and everything and everyone around him, especially the couples. “Half way through the movie he would get out of the car saying he had to walk around for a while. He would walk up and down the aisles until I could not see him anymore. One time he brought back some kind of spider he had caught and put in a cellophane candy wrapper. I asked him to let it go. He shook the thing out of the bag into the back seat. I was a wreck for the rest of the night and he knew it, but I did not complain or he would have taken me home.”

  The police could only speculate on a motive as Zodiac was killing young teens in their vehicles as they were parked after dark in secluded areas. I would look here at the aura of the times for the answer. As there was no sexual contact of either the female or male victims of the Zodiac, and as he threatened to “punish” his victims, he surely was experiencing sexual frustration alone in his vehicle with his binoculars watching young couples making out in the drive-in theater. A rage inside him directed at these young couples and their vehicles would have been eating him up inside. As he was impotent and had no physical desire for sexual contact with a girl, he would never have experienced sitting in a car in a lover’s lane with a girl. Warren was at the drive-in to watch because he could not participate. When his breaking point arrived, he had to find a way to strike out and destroy the source of his frustration.

  California was dotted for hundreds of miles with drive-ins that were successful in showing B horror movies on screens backed by the dark of the night. Double features usually offered a new movie and a favorite rerun as the second feature. In 1939, Warren Estes was thirteen years old and the perfect age to be influenced by the movies. He grew into his teens and adulthood as the motion pictures grew into regular events at theaters, on television, and at the drive-ins. Today in California, most of the drive-in theater properties have turned into swap meets and flea markets.

  The murder movie theme was exploited in all genres with its lure being the bloody horrors perpetrated by a multitude of creative Hollywood killers: human, animal, insect, and alien. Most moviegoers could relate to the “hot on the trail” police and detectives who developed their motives and suspects as the movie progressed and, of course, always got their man or femme fatale. One of the earliest big-screen detectives to endure was Charlie Chan, a favorite character developed by Earl Derr Biggers. Hollywood made forty-one Charlie Chan movies between 1931 and 1949.

  The Chan films were the CSI of the day, with Chan or another expert explaining a new method of crime busting in each episode. In the 1936 release of Charlie Chan at the Race Track, Warren watched Chan explain the “trigger mechanism” of the photo-finish camera that would snap a picture the second an interference (the horse’s nose) interrupted a light beam and activated a photoelectric cell, starting a timer from its source on one side of the track and then beaming across to the other side to a long telescope-like tube. This idea would have sparked the Zodiac’s telescope bomb “trigger mechanism,” with the tall school bus interrupting the beam of sunlight, thus triggering the photoelectric switch as shown in his bomb diagrams. Chan’s explanation took a picture … Zodiac’s device set off a bomb. Warren as an inventor idolized Edison. He certainly would have been excited to watch this demonstration.

  In another Chan film, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, released in 1939, Warren at the age of thirteen would have been introduced to the killer “Zodiac” character who wore a full pullover head and face mask. Warren would have heard the words “Dr. Zodiac” coming through the six-by-eight-inch speaker hanging on the window of his vehicle in the drive-in theater while he watched the reruns and more through his binoculars. Both these films contained numerous scenes of threatening notes and letters being passed around aboard a Clipper filled with the movie’s characters, including Chan, flying from Hawaii to San Francisco. The notes were flashed on the big screen for the viewer to read, including, “Cannot escape Zodiac” and “unsigned.” Sound familiar?


  Chan films never disappointed. They were always offering more forensic techniques to catch the bad guys. Zodiac’s letters mention his own techniques that he used to avoid detection or capture and brag how he managed not to leave any fingerprints. He wanted to make sure everyone knew how skillfully he had outwitted the police. In his letter of October 13, 1969, he announced, “I am the murderer of the taxi driver,” and brazenly went on to tell the police what they should have done to capture him the night of the murder.

  Charlie Chan’s euphoric wisdoms are still widely quoted everywhere today. The clever innuendo comedy injected into the films would be another reason Warren, who always had a good laugh scaring people, would be drawn to take in these films over and over again. When the time came, he would present his own version of Dr. Zodiac. Warren’s experiences at the drive-ins had strangely become entangled in his continuing youthful identity crisis, which was running head on into his adult obsessive daily lifestyle. He would morph into the Zodiac like a true Hollywood monster himself, picking off the vehicles and couples from the drive-ins one by one.

  As part of the murder experience, Zodiac’s raging hatred for the victims and their vehicles would cause him to assault the vehicles in some way before, during, or after the event. One vehicle had its distributor wire disconnected to keep the victim from leaving the area. Another had a window deliberately shot out—Zodiac was a crack shot. One had a message written on the front passenger door that was an account of his killings, listing the location, Vallejo, and three murder dates with the current at-the-scene date, time, and weapon (a knife) listed—leaving the vehicle door looking eerily like an engraved tombstone. At the Stine taxi cab murder scene, Zodiac wiped the victim’s blood up with a torn-off piece of the victim’s shirt. The last vehicle, Kathleen Johns’s, was completely burned.