Zodiac Cracked: The Manifestation of a Killer

by Marianne Koerfer

  In October of 1969, the killing stopped, but the letter writing and threats continued through March 22, 1971. It was during this time that Warren Estes received a telephone call that would redirect his attention. Ken Middleham, Warren’s lifelong friend, would call and ask Warren to “collect” and bring him a supply of “live crawling extras” needed for some filming. Middleham was doing the insect macro-cinematography for the sci-fi film The Hellstrom Chronicle. Middleham again called on Warren to gather him some honey pot ants found around Joshua Tree National Park … Warren’s back yard. These ants would be used in the film Phase IV, another insect sci-fi production. Middleham worked out of an insect workshop studio he had set up in his home on the far edge of Riverside. He could have just as easily walked out to his back yard or driven a short distance into the dessert to gather the ants he needed, but he did not. Ken Middleham and Warren were special friends, with a friendship that extended into and throughout their adult lives. He knew Warren well and was best man at Warren’s wedding in 1977. I suspect that he was able to recognize his best friend’s deteriorating condition and offered him a diversion into the motion picture business … a diversion that Warren would capitalize on in the next few years.

  Warren and Ken had played with snakes, spiders, and other desert creatures since childhood. A favorite pastime of boys even today is to set ants on fire by holding a magnifying glass over them and let the sun pour through. As boys, these friends had become very adept with the use of a lens … so much so that each would use that lens to become experts in their respective fields. Warren used his knowledge of the lens to make telescopes and binoculars, becoming a well-recognized local amateur astronomer and teacher. Ken went on to use his knowledge of the lens to oversee the photographic department at the University of California, Riverside. Taxi driver Paul Stine’s eyeglasses were missing from the murder site … eyeglasses with lens that would attract Warren’s attention.

  Middleham used a microscopic and telescopic lens to develop his “time lapse photography” method, a method that, he says, “alters time.” He used a beam of light that, when interrupted, set off a camera. Sound familiar again? In June of 1971, The Hellstrom Chronicle movie was released, and in September of 1974, the movie Phase IV was released. From 1969 to 1971, Ken Middleham was working on the Hellstrom Chronicle, and during those same years, Warren Estes was sending Zodiac letters to the San Francisco Chronicle.

  One more confirmed Zodiac letter, the Exorcist letter, was received on January 29, 1974. Warren had worked his way into the movie scene and was no longer interested in his Zodiac letter writing until he saw The Exorcist movie and was compelled to write about it, breaking a silence of over two years. This was the letter that was not signed with his “crossed circle” or “Z” and did not open with the familiar, “This is the Zodiac speaking.” Only an eccentric score of “Me–37 SFPD–0” appeared at the bottom along with a silhouette doodle and a lyrical suicide excerpt from The Mikado opera. Warren did not drive into San Francisco to mail this letter. The Zodiac was gone and had gotten away with murder, and Warren Estes, the movie ant coordinator and spider wrangler, had arrived. The exorcist letter they mailed was postmarked from a county south of San Francisco because they lived south of San Francisco and there was no longer a need to play the game.

  Warren himself would not appear on screen in either of the made-for-TV movies, but what was perhaps better for him … his collection would appear. In 1977, Warren was fifty-one years old physically, but his mind had stayed behind in a very young, strange place. Zodiac’s threatening “scare them in order to have a good laugh” was very much alive in Warren. He was now using his collection on the big screen to scare them. The December 24–30, 1977, issue of TV Guide featured the December 28, Wednesday night movie with a half-page picture of a horde of tarantulas attacking a woman and the overlaid headlines: “Terror and Death Sweep Through a Defenseless Town! TARANTULAS: The Deadly Cargo,” with a prime-time 8:00 p.m. showing.

  As with the Vickie Hearne one-on-one telling experience, the following unbelievably revealing AP interview appeared in the December 1977 issues of newspapers across the country:

  “ ‘TROOPS’ OF WARREN ESTES TO PARADE ON CBS”

  Warren Estes is a school teacher with a different kind of second job. He’s one of Hollywood’s few insect, spider and reptile herders. Three hundred of his troops are on CBS tonight. All are tarantulas. They costar in “Tarantula: The Deadly Cargo.” It’s about what happens when a DC-3 carrying a deadly variety of the little beasties crashes near a small Southwestern town.

  Estes, 51, who lives in Joshua Tree in California’s high desert country, is in charge of getting the costars together, making sure they got to work on time and didn’t get underfoot.

  The spider wrangler, who teaches astronomy and outdoor education for the Riverside, Calif. school system, got into his other career thanks to a longtime friend, cinematographer Ken Middleham. He says they fooled around with spiders and snakes ever since they were kids. A few years ago, Middleham needed some crawling extras for “The Hellstrom Chronicles.” Estes supplied and oversaw same. He’s been at it ever since.

  As the tarantula casting director for “Cargo,” he says he had 100 shipped from outside California, got another 100 more from pet shops, and picked up the rest locally.

  One thing about tarantulas, even the nice ones can’t be told when and how to act. So Estes has to serve as their prompter. Example: They like to climb. So he puts them in situations where they’ll climb. “And when the cameras roll, I’ll shoot a little air blast down on them,” he adds. The reason: It makes them move right smartly. “It probably resembles what they feel when their natural enemy, the tarantula hawk, actually a large wasp, flies down for an attack-the beating of their wings,” he explained. He said when his gang finished their acting he had no problem returning them to their spider motels, “You just pick them up. Tarantulas are extremely docile.” He had help from the movie crew. When he picks tarantulas up, he added, “I just place them on my body one at a time, then take them off when I get to an area where I have little boxes I keep them in.” “Being festooned with tarantulas causes some attention, no?” “Yes, and you can imagine the reaction!” Estes laughed. He said the species he used didn’t have a fatal bite. But a doctor and a nurse hung around just in case. They weren’t needed, no bites.

  “Boy tarantulas are smaller and faster than girl tarantulas. This is necessary. When tarantulas make love, the boy must immediately flee. Otherwise, his lady will consider him a lunch as well as a lover. But there were no on-location tarantula romances when ‘Cargo’ was filmed,” Estes said, “because we kept them separated.” In fact, all 300 were kept separated until called to act. Estes said this is because tarantulas dislike each other. They fight to the death. After filming, each went right back into solitary. Alas, a few disputes did send some of his charges to spider heaven.

  But Estes recalled one joust that was stopped just in time. It occurred on the chest of a “dead” extra in the movie. “We got them separated,” he said. “Then the extra got up, brushed himself off, put his hat on and said, ‘Doggone, my wife is never going to believe this.’ ”

  [used with permission of the Associated Press copyright 2011—

  all rights reserved]

  I was able to locate and interview another “spider wrangler” who worked in Hollywood during the time Warren was active. I asked him if he remembered a spider wrangler named Warren Estes. He responded that he was in his twenties during Warren’s days but that he worked on the movie sets with the actors, quelling their insect fears. He did remember Warren as an “older man” with a station wagon who actually worked with the spiders in a movie about a cargo plane carrying coffee that crashed in a small Southwestern town and wreaked havoc (this is the Tarantulas movie plot). Warren used his father’s white station wagon whenever he wanted to, and, when his father died, Warren’s mother gave him the vehicle, something he would need to haul around his “spider motels
.”

  Note that Warren gives credit in his interview to his friend Ken Middleham for getting him into the business with The Hellstrom Chronicle.

  Warren’s explanation of where he obtained his tarantulas from mentions one hundred were “shipped from outside California.” In Zodiac’s letter of November 9, 1969, he tells us his “killing tools have been bought through the mail order outfits.” They both have the need to tell us about their “mail order” activities. In this same letter, referring to the bomb, he tells us, “All the parts can be bought on the open market.” As a child, Warren worked with his father, who, among other professions, was an entomologist who built his collection by sending some of his local butterfly specimens out of state through the mail and in exchange receiving specimens back in the mail from out of state. Warren had been going around asking some of his acquaintances to go to the desert with him to catch some tarantulas he needed for a film he was working on … but he did not get many takers.

  Warren states, “I’ll shoot a little air blast down on them,” referring to making the tarantulas move. In Zodiac’s letter of August 4, 1969, he says, “All I have to do is spray them as if it were a water hose,” referring to his victims fleeing from their vehicles while he fired multiple gunshot blasts at them. Also speaking of the “air blast,” he says, “It makes them move right smartly.” The words “right smartly” certainly sound like Zodiac’s phrase colloquialism in his letter of March 13, 1971, where he states, “fiddle and fart around,” referring to the police. Warren later laughs with the reporter about the reaction of people seeing him “festooned” with tarantulas he refers to as “boy tarantulas” and “girl tarantulas,” as he also did many times in his Zodiac letters referring to his victims as “the boy” or “the girl.” The article states, “A few disputes did send some of his charges [girl and boy tarantulas] to spider heaven.” Zodiac writes he is “collecting slaves [girl and boy victims] for his afterlife in Paradice [sic].” Warren sarcastically refers to his tarantulas as his “troops” … a clear reference to his Girl Scout troops.

  Warren’s first film debuted the same month and year, December 1977, that Tarantulas was aired. Empire of the Ants, another B sci-fi film starring Joan Collins and thousands of “angry ants,” had also appeared as a made-for-TV film. The credits listed Warren Estes as ant coordinator. This movie was partially filmed in Vancouver, British Columbia. Warren took his young wife of several months with him on location in Canada. There was an airline strike in progress when they were ready to return, and they had to drive back into the United Sates. But while on location, Warren mostly ignored his young wife and went about his usual business. He befriended a couple with a young daughter who were staying at the same hotel, spending most of his off time with them. An anonymous movie reviewer, unaware of who Warren Estes was, offered the following toast:

  Regardless of anything else, I think we should all raise a glass to Warren Estes, who is listed in the credits as “Ant Coordinator” … who else ever held that job on a set? Thanks Warren, thanks to all who make trash cause it has its place, too.

  [permission: IMDb.com]

  December 1977 was the beginning and the end of their movie career. On January 19, 1978, just twenty-two days after Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo was aired on national television, Warren Estes died of an heart aneurysm in his cabin in Joshua Tree, San Bernardino County, at the age of fifty-one. Being the Zodiac had taken its toll.

  [page courtesy of TV Guide magazine, LLC © 1977]

  TV Guide magazine listings.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE KILLER’S PREY

  Children—Bomb/Throw Out of Window/Poison

  Taxi Driver—Rehearsal Murder

  Kill a Cop—Final Fantasy

  Warren Estes was an only child, and, like most children without siblings, he was very possessive of his parents, his house, his property, and his “collection.” In Vicki Hearne’s account of Warren in “Sarah Who Hated Holidays,” Warren tells her that on holidays, relatives made an unwanted intrusion into his house. Yet many of Warren’s astronomy colleagues came and went from the Estes house without Warren being upset by them, but they knew better than to demean his collection. The intrusion into Warren’s holidays, “especially Thanksgiving and Christmas,” was obviously being made by adult family and their children.

  Then, there was the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts whom Warren would give astronomy instruction to at their overnight campsites. When Warren married for the first time, he was fifty years old, and his bride was twenty-three years old. He was thirty-eight years old and Vicki Hearne was eighteen years old when he took her out to the Salton Sea and to his desolate desert retreat in Joshua Tree to see his “collection.” Warren had taken many young girls in his car, driving into the desert and up to his cabin. He roamed around during the day and into the night with these young girls … although he was a man more than twice their age. Kathleen Johns was twenty-three years of age when Zodiac abducted and drove her and her baby around—the baby he had no problem “throwing out the window” as he could not give up the prey he hunted and trapped in the front seat of his car.

  Warren and the Zodiac could not get past dealing with children and could not connect to being adult. They liked being the free-spirited, wild desert boy child fixated on destroying children and specially driven to destroy young girls. They had no problem “picking off the kiddies as they come bouncing off the bus.” Warren was surrounded by young people; students of all ages, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, kiddies, and a baby. In Zodiac’s Confession letter, he warns us to keep our sisters, daughters, and wives off the streets. They are in his Alvord Science Lab and Riverside Community College classes, and he spends time outside school with these students. While exercising his astronomy hobby, he volunteered to be surrounded by Boy Scouts and especially Girl Scouts, and he wanted to do more than kill them all. He wanted to “control” them, “capture” them, “collect” them, and “torture” them by inflicting the “most delicious pain,” as Zodiac states in his Mikado letter received on July 26, 1970, by the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Warren’s devious demonstration of terrorizing young girls can be observed during his hospital visit to the young female surgical patient he kept laughing to keep in pain and again in his abandonment of the young girl he left stunned and terrorized by a rattlesnake he needed to capture. He left Vicki Hearne sitting in a car on the side of the road while he ran off into the dessert, and he left one of his young girls sitting alone in a car at the drive-in theater, returning with a frightening spider. He caused Cheri Jo Bates to be stranded in her disabled VW and caused Kathleen Johns to be stranded in her car on the side of the road. The madman had caged all these girls just like his creatures—they were the slaves he wrote about capturing and putting into cages. These girls were there for him to play with and of the same value to him as the creatures in his “collection.” But poking a stick into the cage of his captured prey no longer satisfied his needs—he needed to move on from endangerment, torture, and laughs. He needed a greater satisfaction—the ecstasy of the kill.

  Zodiac’s incriminating letters are threaded with the terms teenagers, girls and boys, kids, school children, children, and kiddies. He wraps himself up with children just as he wraps himself up with tarantulas.

  I found a troubling incident that took place while Warren was the Alvord School District director of the outdoor curriculum lab in Riverside. This lab had a Van de Graaff generator and a Tesla coil that Warren built himself. It was here that Warren would prepare science experiments and outdoor activities for the young students. Some of Warren’s friends who visited him at the lab referred to him as the mad scientist. The lab was located on Keller Avenue at Jones Avenue. In January of 1963, four hundred children of the Alvord School District between the ages of five and twelve years were stricken with a strange food poisoning that sent them all to the hospital. The news reports state that sick children brought in from eight different schools in Riverside were bedded in the corridors. Al
l but seventy children were sent home to recuperate. Dr. Jack Bristow of the Riverside County Health Department investigated the incident and said the food poisoning was caused by Bacillus welchii and that unlike botulism or ptomaine, a Salmonella bacteria was not likely to cause death. The food that was prepared that day was government surplus food, but no other outbreaks were reported, narrowing the source of the contamination to the Alvord central kitchen. The Riverside County Health Department advised that they only keep records for nineteen years so the actual record of the incident from 1963 is “unavailable.” The Alvord School District central kitchen was located one block from Warren’s Alvord Science Curriculum Lab.

  The central kitchen prepared meals for each of the eight schools every morning that were then transported to the schools, arriving on time for lunch. Warren could literally go out the front door of the lab and walk one block into the front door of the kitchen, as teachers could eat the lunches, too. He would have had unhampered access to the food as he visited and spoke to the kitchen people with his cunning voice. And he surely could have tainted the kitchen after hours during his nighttime escapades. He would know what to do and how to do it and had free access to do it. Warren liked to stroke Sarah the Scorpion’s poison sac. A woman whom Warren frequently visited remembered that Warren had on several occasions talked about how he could poison a large amount of people and that he knew he could “get away with it.” Was the poisoning of these children the incident he was speaking of years later … the incident he got away with?

  As a herpetologist and biologist, Warren was well aware of the various poisons contained in four-legged, eight-legged, winged, and slithering or gilled creatures. Having a father who collected butterflies, Warren would have been aware of the monarch butterfly, which sucks on the milkweed plant’s poisonous fluid, retaining the substance to kill the birds that feed on the haunt … he understood nature’s process. Warren would know that Salmonella was harbored and shed by snakes, lizards, and turtles. The small turtles that once were in most American households and kept in their plastic terrariums complete with green plastic palm trees have long been banned due to children getting Salmonella from their cute little amphibian pets.