Zodiac Cracked: The Manifestation of a Killer

by Marianne Koerfer

  BOOTPRINTS

  NEIL A. ARMSTRONG

  July 20, 1969 Earth’s Moon

  ZODIAC

  September 27, 1969 Lake Berryessa, CA

  Apollo 8 Lunar stamp issued May 5, 1969, commemorating the Christmas Eve circumnavigating of the moon by the Apollo 8 Spacecraft, NASA.

  Paul Avery Halloween card envelope,

  Oct. 27, 1970, with Apollo 8 stamp.

  “I’m crackproof” postcard, Oct. 5, 1970, with Apollo 8 stamp.

  The symbols at the bottom of the Exorcist letter are actually silhouettes of telescopes against the night sky displaying Comet Kohoutek. Note the tripods, telescope tubes, and the comet with tail off to the upper left.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE MASTERPIECE

  Mount Diablo Map & Code—Location

  Bomb Diagrams—The Death Machine

  Mad bombers have plagued mankind since before the invention of explosives … a fireball launched from a catapult is surely a bomb. A more serious concern here than the bomb itself, however, is who is being bombed. Soldiers on a battlefield may or may not be fair targets, but considering a school bus full of children as a target is immoral and beyond reprehensible. In Zodiac’s letter of October 13, 1969, to the San Francisco Chronicle, Zodiac stated, “School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire & then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.” But in a letter dated November 9, 1969, addressed to the “S. F. CHRONICLE,” Zodiac would back off from this plan and move on to an equally diabolical plan developing what he called “the death machine.” It was in this letter that the first bomb diagram was received along with a list of items needed to make the bomb. Zodiac also states in this same letter: “What you do not know is whether the death machine is at the site or whether it is being stored in my basement for future use.” The police did their best to investigate locations with basements in and around the San Francisco area. But there was no Zodiac basement—except in Warren’s mind … there was no cabin either. What Warren called his cabin was just either of the small houses located on the adjoining properties his parents owned in Joshua Tree.

  Warren had named the Joshua Tree property where his “cabin” was located “Rocky Hills.” In the early 1960s, Warren had acquired a very large telescope after the original owner’s death. In a newspaper article, he advised the reporter that he intended to take the telescope out to the “Rocky Hills Astrophysical Observatory at Joshua Tree in Riverside County’s desert area.” The location he was talking about is the Estes family retreat property, and the observatory is his personal observatory … the “cabin.” Amateur astronomers often set up personal observatories in their own back yards. All it takes is a telescope and a small free-standing building, converted garage, driveway, patio, or rooftop.

  Looking at the sky through a telescope is like looking at the ocean through a straw … you are not going to view very much area at one time, and you will soon lose track of that area altogether. All telescopes need to be planted on firm ground as the slightest movement can cause distortion and loss of the observed object. Large telescopes need to have their bases mounted several feet below ground like a fence post. The storage room in Warren’s cabin was loaded with telescopes, binoculars, various parts, and odd junk. When Zodiac tells the police the bomb may be at the site or stored in his basement, he surely means the bomb with its telescope trigger mechanism is stored in his cabin, the Rocky Hills Astrophysical Observatory—the cabin observatory that does not have a basement.

  Warren would take his bombs out to the desert or to remote hill areas to try them out and to perfect them. He worked on the bombs at both the old Riverside house and later at the Joshua Tree cabin. During 1969 and 1970, when the bomb threats were being received, Warren had moved all of his equipment up to the Joshua Tree cabin, so the “death machine” would have been conceived, built, experimented with, and stored in that cabin.

  Continued threats to use the bomb and an updated bomb diagram would be sent through five more letters, with the last bomb letter arriving on July 26, 1970. Included in the bomb letters, Zodiac offered a map and other clues to where the police might find the bomb set up. In the April 20, 1970, letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, Zodiac offered a deal; tell everyone about the bus bomb and wear some nice Zodiac buttons and he would not have his “blast.” The harassment of this letter was enhanced by Zodiac as he sent the message inside a greeting card. The card’s cover had two would-be prospectors, one on a donkey and the other larger figure riding a dragon. A dragon to a herpetologist is what a unicorn is to a zoologist. If discovered, both would travel around the world to see firsthand the elusive creature of their professions. Warren Estes, the herpetologist, must have been thrilled to find such a card. In a prior letter, Zodiac had made excuses for not using the bomb: “At the moment the children are safe from the bomb because it is so massive to dig in & the triger [sic] mech requires much work to get it adjusted just right.”

  During the 1960s and 1970s, California was trying to cope with the Cold War’s nuclear arms race, the Manson family, the San Francisco hippies’ “Summer of Love,” earthquakes, anti–Vietnam War protests, the Zebra murders, civil rights protests and riots, and a Zodiac who was getting crazier by the letter. From 1968 through 1970, a total of 3,912 murders were committed in the state of California. The police were already dealing with being spit on and being called pigs, and they were in no mood to play games with the Zodiac. The citizens of California and their police and other safety agencies were stressed to the max. By the mid-1970s, many of the police agencies across the nation were wearing small pink enamel pig pins on their uniforms in an effort to counteract the term pig, which was born during the 1968 Democratic National Convention confrontations in Chicago. Susan Atkins, one of Charles Manson’s girls who participated in the brutal Helter Skelter slaying of pregnant actress Sharon Tate, and her friends had written PIG on the front door of the murder house in Tate’s blood.

  As the obsessive personality of Zodiac raged on, he wrote a five-page letter on July 26, 1970, to the San Francisco Chronicle that exposed his frustration with not getting his way as no one was wearing “nice Zodiac buttons.” He now demanded that people wear “some nasty buttons or any type of Zodiac buttons that we could think up.” He went on to not only warn people what would happen if we did not comply, but he graphically explained how he would “torture all 13 of his slaves that he had waiting in Paradice [sic].” Like the spoiled child that he was, if he did not get his way, he would “do something nasty.” The police were further alarmed by this threat. Was Zodiac now going to torture his victims before he killed them? This threat was the killer’s lead-in to quote Ko-Ko in the Lord High Executioner’s aria from The Mikado opera. It was at the end of this letter that Zodiac signed with a large crossed circle and a message:

  PS. The Mt. Diablo code concerns

  radians & #inches along the radians.

  In this book’s chapter “Ciphers—Symbols—Clues,” I have divulged the answer to the coded bomb location (“Chabot Meridian Transit Telescope”). In Zodiac’s prior letter of June 26, 1970, to the San Francisco Chronicle, which contained the actual cipher, Zodiac also enclosed a portion of a “San Francisco and Vicinity Map.” On top of the Mt. Diablo feature of the map, he drew a circle around the peak and also drew four lines emanating in respective opposite directions from a center square blank area over that peak; each line of direction was labeled with a 3, 6, or 9 and a line pointing straight up with an arrowhead labeled 0, as what might be taken for the numbers around a dial. Zodiac included a message written at the site of this circle:

  is to be

  set to

  Mag. N.

  In the first bomb diagram letter, the Zodiac had signed off with a rather large crossed circle that had small X‘s marked around the circle at what might be the 6, 8, 9, 10, and 11 o’clock areas of a clock face. He also included small tick marks in the areas of the other hour
positions. Again, I will mention that so many people have spent so much time doing mathematical equations playing games with numbers, coming up with some unbelievable hidden meanings here: an address, various people’s names, geographical map locations of all sorts, and yes, even the Kennedy assassination.

  Keeping my perspective on dealing with just the facts that Zodiac laid out for us, and knowing that I was dealing with astronomy, not astrology, I knew I would be looking for a place that meant the most to an astronomer … that would be an observatory. California was flush with observatories, the best in the country. “Professor” Warren Estes would annually take his advanced astronomy class on a field trip to Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatory. He also went to Mt Wilson on his own time—during the night—with one of his young girls. “He knew how to get into the place and on occasion, they would spend the night up there.” Knowing the killings to be in the San Francisco Bay Area, it would be a logical leap to feel Zodiac would place the bomb at the site of a Bay Area observatory that appeared on the map he had sent. As Zodiac had struck on the north and west side of the bay, I examined the east and south sides of the bay and found the Chabot Science Center & Observatory (now called the Chabot Space & Science Center) located on the east side of the bay in Oakland as pictured in the middle of the area map. When I researched Chabot, I discovered it housed the Meridian Transit Telescope, a telescope that Zodiac understood.

  What we actually have to work with is a circle with numbers or ticks around the edges as a clock or dial, a square base with an object to be set to Mag. N., being true north or Polaris, along with a clue that concerns radians and # inches along the radians that can be used to measure angles, arc minutes, arc seconds or degrees (semi-diurnal arcs), a San Francisco Bay Area map, and the ever-present crossed circle.

  The zero at the top position of the circle would tell us we are looking for a sidereal clock that measures time by the apparent motion of the stars and is a twenty-four-hour clock that is numbered one through twenty-three with the twenty-fourth hour being the zero hour … no actual number twenty-four appears on the clock. A mean solar clock is what we use, with its twelve-hour time converted or set from the sidereal clock with the number twelve appearing at the top position. This clock is set by means of a meridian transit telescope with its tube usually mounted on a square as in the Chabot Meridian Transit Telescope and operated by aligning the telescope due north in a fixed position to observe the sun or stars crossing the NS meridian. The sidereal clock, the solar clock, and the meridian transit telescope are all located at the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, just east of San Francisco Bay. Chabot astronomers took readings every Friday night that would set the official time for the city of Oakland.

  When you look at the Chabot Meridian Transit Telescope, you are viewing Zodiac’s physical description of this instrument, with its tube mounted in a square center pointing north designating the arc of the meridian and flanked by setting circles on each side that place a star’s coordinates by adjusting the circles that are marked in ticked arc seconds and arc minutes or degrees. Although its service has been relinquished to the atomic clock, it is still housed at Chabot and can be seen inside the center. The more familiar Greenwich Mean Time was kept by the transit circle telescope located at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England.

  Warren was a clock watcher with a compulsive habit of looking at the wristwatch he always wore over his cuff. He often lectured on sidereal time and mean daily time and demonstrated the rising, setting, and transit times of the sun, moon, and stars. Prior to the invention of the atomic clock, the meridian transit telescope was the most reliable source of accurate time. This instrument is likened to the hour hand of a clock with the sky itself being the dial and the stars being the numbers on the dial.

  Chabot is host to continuous school bus loads of children. They offer a telescope-making workshop and also have teaching seminars for science and astronomy teachers. Warren would have been to Chabot to observe; with his education and telescope-making skills, there was nothing they could have “taught” him.

  The road up to the Chabot Observatory is very long with many areas of curves flanked by hills on either side. It allows more than ample roadside rises to set up the type of bomb Zodiac described in his diagrams. He called the contraption the “death machine” and further describes it as his “masterpiece.” In Zodiac’s letter containing the first bomb diagram, he tells us that the bomb was a dud. In another letter he tells us that the bomb can be adapted to new conditions and gives us a diagram of his updated version.

  Warren Estes was not only an astronomer, he also knew electricity and physics. He had built the Tesla coil that he kept in the science curriculum lab along with a Van de Graaff generator designed to create static electricity. Visitors to Warren’s lab were invited to experience having their hair stand on end or holding and lighting up a fluorescent tube—both accomplished by nearing or touching the charged-up Van de Graaff generator. Warren understood electricity beyond these types of simple experiments … he would have no problem working with the photoelectric switch and batteries that were integral parts of the “death machine” (see bomb diagrams).

  The most interesting feature of the bomb mechanism is the initiating point. It is eerily like that of the Meridian Transit Telescope. The telescope sits in a fixed position and when a star (or the sun) passes through its scope lens site, it “triggers” the time. The bomb sits in a fixed position and when a bus (due to its height compared to the height of a car) passes through the bomb scope’s site, the light interruption triggers the photoelectric switch. The first bomb diagram shows the second tube catching the light coming from the flashlight bulb directed through the first tube aimed at the mirror (a reflecting telescope concept) from across the road and “reflecting” the light from the mirror. The reflected light beam, if interrupted, would trigger the bomb. But the new improved bomb diagram eliminates the mirror and uses sunlight coming directly into the tube as a refracting telescope tube would catch the light … the light triggering mechanisms Warren would first be introduced to in the Charlie Chan at the Race Track movie.

  In Zodiac’s letter of November 9, 1969, sent to the San Francisco Chronicle, he lists the parts needed to make his bomb. Of the seven items listed, three can also be used to make a telescope: battery, mirror, and cardboard tubes. Warren makes a mistake when starting to write what kind of tubes are needed. He writes the first letter of the item but then scribbles it out and writes “cardboard tubes.” I believe he started to write “sonotubes,” which are made of heavy cardboard and are used for making concrete column molds. Many amateur telescope makers still use these tubes. If he had written sonotubes, the list would have screamed astronomer. The whole bomb concept is Kafkaesque. Kafka, as a suppressed writer, in 1919 developed a story, “In The Penal Colony,” about a condemned man whose sentence is carried out by a “capital punishment machine” that writes on the man’s skin with a pointed metal harrow until he bleeds to death. Exactly fifty years later, Warren, as a dysfunctional astronomer, invents a “death machine” bomb that is triggered by a telescope mechanism. Both men have created their death machines based on their professions.

  Warren’s most notable early claim to fame was his telescope-making ability. I spoke with one of the past judges of the telescope-making competitions. He relates that the judges looked forward to seeing what Warren had found and used to put together a working telescope. Warren would tell them stories of how he found the “odd and forgotten items.” Even after his death, the judges would use Warren’s incredible techniques to guide their decisions of who had built the best junk scopes. The local astronomy club had developed the coveted “Warren Estes Memorial Award” that was awarded for the “Best Use of Simple Materials and Technique.” Zodiac’s bomb trigger mechanism surely was the “Best Use of Simple Materials and Technique,” and, when writing about his “masterpiece,” Zodiac was not referring to the complete bomb but rather the trigger mechanism. As with all great ma
sters, he would have to have many creations to compare before just one creation could be christened. With over two hundred telescopes to his name, we now see Warren Estes and Zodiac merging again … they had created “The Masterpiece!”

  [permission Chabot Space & Science Center]

  Chabot Meridian Transit Telescope.

  [photo Daniel T. Drinnon ]

  Classic setting circle.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WRITING HABITS

  Zodiac Letters—Envelopes

  Vocabulary—Zodiac & Warren Estes

  Copycat—Salutations and Signatures

  The Zodiac letters are the diary of a dangerous, obsessed killer whose opening salvo, “This is the Zodiac speaking,” commands us to listen to him. He speaks to us with various intonations in the same letter—sarcastic, angry, or demanding but always threatening. His temperament changes by the sentence—unlike his voice. Two police dispatchers and surviving victims Bryan Hartnell and Kathleen Johns, who have heard Zodiac speak, all give the same voice description: monotone, even, no accent, and mature. Mel Tillis, the famous country singer, spoke with a natural stutter that completely disappeared when he sang. He had unintentional control of his singing but not of his speech. One of Warren’s activities as an amateur astronomer was giving lectures to various groups … he did not have a speaking problem. Zodiac had unintentional control of his special voice but not of his writing. As we have already seen, his written words display signs of dysgraphia, with dys meaning “difficulty” and graphia meaning “writing.”