Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  Perhaps a minute later a third car came along. The woman who was driving it saw Bettilou’s body lying on the ground and, instead of stopping, she resourcefully stepped on her accelerator to get help quickly from the next town. She met a police patrol car coming the other way and flashed her headlights to make it stop; she told the patrolman about the body and together they went back to the pump-house. They found Bettilou dead, and David still alive but unconscious. They got him to hospital, but he died shortly after arrival.

  There was very little for the police to go on. David had not been robbed. Bettilou had not been sexually assaulted or raped. The police looked at the possibility that the murderer was the jilted lover of either Bettilou or David, someone determined on revenge. But investigation failed to yield any suspects. The two teenagers had been ordinary students leading straightforward lives that concealed no secrets, no past. It was to be an unsolved double murder.

  Six months later the killer struck again at another spot favoured by lovers, this time at Blue Rock Park, just two miles from the place where David and Bettilou were murdered. Michael Mageau was sitting in his car with his girlfriend, a twenty-two-year-old waitress called Darlene Ferrin. They were not alone at Blue Rock Park, as there were other courting couples who had driven there for the same reason. They did not notice when a white car pulled up beside them for a few minutes. It drove off, then came back and stopped on the far side of the road. A spotlight was suddenly shone onto them and Mike saw a figure approaching. He assumed it was a policeman and reached for his driving licence, which the policeman would ask to see. Instead the approaching figure opened fire on them, shooting Darlene first, then Mike. The gunman walked back to his car, fired some more shots at them from there, then drove off at speed.

  A few minutes later the killer phoned the Vallejo County police station to report a murder on Columbus Parkway. He said, ‘You will find the kids in a brown car. They are shot with a 9mm Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye.’ When the police arrived, Darlene was dead. Mike was still alive, but the bullet had damaged his tongue and he could not speak.

  There was one more possible lead, though. Four months before the murder, Darlene’s babysitter had been aware of a white car parked outside Darlene’s apartment, and she had felt uncomfortable about it. She mentioned it to Darlene, who said, ‘He’s checking up on me again. He doesn’t want anyone to know what I saw him do. I saw him murder someone.’ The babysitter had seen the driver of the white car and could describe him. She told the police – too late to save Darlene’s life – that he was a middle-aged man with brown wavy hair and a round face. As Mike recovered, he regained the use of his voice and was able to confirm that the gunman had brown hair and a round face. The stalker watching outside Darlene’s apartment had been the man who killed her four months later.

  About two months after the shooting that left Darlene dead and Mike seriously injured, handwritten messages arrived at the offices of three local newspapers. They were written in capital letters. For some reason mad people often write in capital letters – perhaps the written equivalent of shouting. Either the writer of these notes was mad or he was trying to disguise his handwriting and prevent the police from identifying him.

  The three notes all opened in the same polite way: ‘DEAR EDITOR, THIS IS THE MURDERER OF THE TWO TEENAGERS LAST CHRISTMAS AT LAKE HERMAN AND THE GIRL ON THE 4TH OF JULY.’ He went on to give exact details of the gun and the ammunition he had used, to make it clear to the police that he really was the murderer. He also sent an extra sheet of paper covered in a strange code, together with the demand that the editors publish it on their front pages. If they did not, he threatened to go on killing people in the night. The letters were signed with the killer’s logo, a cross inside a circle: it was a gunsight.

  The three newspapers went along with the mad gunman’s request; from a purely journalistic point of view it was a good story. Cryptographers worked to decode the secret message, and eventually a teacher called Dale Harden cracked it. He looked for a group of symbols that could stand for the word ‘kill’; in the circumstances it was the word most likely to be used. He found it and after many hours of work he deciphered the whole message: ‘I like killing people because it is so much more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous of all to kill.’ He boasted that he had killed five people in the San Francisco area; when he was reborn in paradise, he believed, his victims would be his slaves.

  When the killer’s strange message was published, it produced a massive public response. Newspaper readers volunteered all kinds of information, none of which led anywhere. Then the killer himself volunteered a clue of a kind, a nickname for himself that he must have known would ensure headlines; ‘DEAR EDITOR, THIS IS ZODIAC SPEAKING.’ The police were being fed clues, but no positive leads. Meanwhile the killings continued.

  On 28 September 1969, another young couple were having a picnic on the shore of Lake Berryessa, about fifteen miles north of Vallejo. They were twenty-year-old Bryan Hartnell and his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend Cecelia Shepard. It was half past four in the afternoon and they had finished eating. They were lying on a rug, kissing, when they saw a stocky man with brown hair walking towards them across the clearing. He disappeared for a moment into a wood, then reappeared wearing a mask and carrying a gun. As this alarming figure approached, Bryan saw that the mask had painted on it a circle with a cross inside it.

  The gunman had a soft voice and his manner was not particularly threatening. But it was all deception, and the encounter quickly turned into an horrific nightmare. He allayed the couple’s worst fears by pretending that he had a simple robbery in mind. He said, ‘I want your money and your car keys.’ Bryan explained that he only had less than a dollar, but that the gunman was welcome to that. The gunman started to chat, explaining that he was an escaped convict and that he would have to tie them up. After tying them up, the awful truth of what he was dawned. He said, ‘I am going to have to stab you people.’ Bryan asked him to stab him first, because he couldn’t bear to watch his girlfriend being stabbed. The gunman agreed, knelt calmly down beside Bryan and stabbed him several times in the back with a hunting knife. Bryan felt dizzy and sick, but was still conscious when the madman turned to Cecelia. After the first stab, he went berserk, stabbing again and again while she frantically thrashed about to try to avoid the blows.

  Finally the girl lay still. Zodiac regained his composure, walked over to their car, pulled a felt pen from his pocket, drew something on the car door. A fisherman heard their screams and ran over to find that Bryan and Cecelia were still alive. The police arrived almost immediately, having had an anonymous tip-off; ‘I want to report a double murder.’ The caller had given them the exact location. When the police arrived, Cecelia was unconscious. She died two days later in hospital, without regaining consciousness. Bryan made a full recovery and was able to describe the killer. The symbol the maniac had drawn on the car door was a gunsight, so it was obviously Zodiac again. The police identified the telephone where the tip-off call had been made, and were able to lift three high-quality fingerprints from it. Unfortunately the owner of these prints did not have a criminal record. Still the police were unable to identify this dangerous killer.

  Two weeks later, on 11 October 1969, a fourteen-year-old girl was looking out of the window at her home in San Francisco. She saw a stocky man sitting in the passenger seat of a parked taxi, going through the pockets of the driver, who appeared to be dead. She called her brothers to come and watch. Together, they watched the man get out of the taxi, leaving the driver slumped across the seat, wiping the door handle with a piece of cloth before walking off.

  They called the police but the details were not taken down correctly, possibly because the children were over-excited, and the police understood – mistakenly – that they were looking for an NMA, a negro male adult. The killer was actually white. A police patrolman stopped a stocky white man near the scene of the crime to ask him
if he had seen anything unusual; he had not, he said, so the policeman let him go. There was a kind of irony in this exchange. What to most of us would be extremely unusual and grotesque would register as normal in the mind of a psychopath like Zodiac. He wasn’t lying to the police; he had seen nothing unusual; the grisly murder he had just committed was an integral part of his way of life. The patrolman thought nothing of the encounter, because the man did not answer the description of the suspect. The taxi driver was found to be dead from a gunshot wound in the head. He was Paul Stine, and he was only twenty-eight.

  Then Zodiac wrote a letter to one of the San Francisco newspapers. ‘THIS IS THE ZODIAC SPEAKING. I AM THE MURDERER OF THE TAXI DRIVER OVER BY WASHINGTON ST AND MALE ST LAST NIGHT, TO PROVE IT HERE IS A BLOOD STAINED PIECE OF HIS SHIRT.’ The piece of cloth did indeed match the shirt of the taxi driver. The bullet was a .22 fired from the same gun that had killed Bettilou Jensen and David Faraday. Just like Jack the Ripper, he had started sending the police souvenirs of his crimes, little bits of forensic evidence that he was the murderer.

  Just like Jack the Ripper, he taunted the police with their incompetence. ‘THE S. F. POLICE COULD HAVE CAUGHT ME LAST NIGHT. SCHOOL CHILDREN MAKE NICE TARGETS. I THINK I SHALL WIPE OUT A SCHOOL BUS SOME MORNING. JUST SHOOT OUT THE TIRES AND THEN PICK OFF ALL THE KIDDIES AS THEY COME BOUNDING OUT.’ The letter was signed with the now-familiar gunsight symbol. The state of mind he was parading was remarkable. It was the exact opposite of what any normal human being thinks and feels. The normal human response to children is to want to nurture them and protect them, to love them. He wanted to kill them. What Zodiac saw was easy prey. His way of talking about children was very far from ‘nice’. Whether he actually thought this, or was being deliberately provocative for the sake of publicity is hard to tell. His flamboyant outreach to the media suggests that he wanted cheap notoriety more than anything else; he wanted to be seen as Jack the Ripper, or the Phantom of the Opera, or Spring Heeled Jack. The more outrageous the better.

  The descriptions from the children who had seen the murder of the taxi driver and the descriptions from the earlier victims all matched. A composite image of Zodiac could now be drawn up and issued to the public. The killer was a white male between thirty-five and forty-five years old, with short brown hair, possibly with a red tint. He was five feet eight inches tall, heavily built, wearing glasses.

  Someone claiming to be Zodiac called the police in the middle of the night on 21–22 October 1969. The caller wanted the police to fix up an ‘appearance’ for him on a talk show. He wanted to talk, on air, to F. Lee Bailey or Mel Belli, the leading criminal lawyers in the United States at the time. Mel Belli agreed to appear on Jim Dunbar’s early morning talk show. At twenty past seven in the morning the man phoned in, saying that he was Zodiac, though he preferred to be called Sam. Then he blurted out, ‘I’m sick. I have headaches,’ The call was traced back to Napa State Hospital. The caller was a psychiatric patient, and so probably not the real Zodiac.

  Two months later, at Christmas, Mel Belli received a card from Zodiac. ‘DEAR MELVIN, THIS IS THE ZODIAC SPEAKING. I WISH YOU A HAPPY CHRISTMAS, THE ONE THING I ASK OF YOU IS THIS, PLEASE HELP ME. I AM AFRAID I WILL LOSE CONTROL AND TAKE MY NINTH AND POSSIBLY TENTH VICTIM.’

  It was very much a call for help. The killer knew that ahead must lie capture and trial, and that he would be needing help from a first rate criminal lawyer. But he was also admitting that he was running out of control and needed to be stopped. It was classic psychopathic serial killer territory. He had reached a point where he wanted to be stopped, wanted to be caught. In fact, the whole business of writing letters and giving the police clues was to do, at some level, with wanting or needing to be caught. A handwriting expert looked at the card and said that Zodiac’s mental state was deteriorating.

  On 17 March 1970, Kathleen Johns was driving through the Vallejo area, with her baby in the back of the car, when a white Chevrolet drew up beside her. The driver indicated that she had something wrong with her rear wheel, and she pulled over to see what it was. Kathleen said afterwards that he was a neatly dressed, clean-shaven man. He said her wheel was wobbling and offered to tighten the wheel nuts for her. She agreed to let him do this, but when she drove off the wheel came off altogether; she realized he must have loosened them rather than tightened them. Then the neat man offered to give her a lift to a service station, but when they reached it he drove straight past.

  ‘You know I am going to kill you,’ he said. When he slowed down on a bend, Kathleen had the courage and presence of mind to open the door and jump out, with her baby in her arms. She landed safely and ran and hid in an irrigation ditch. Zodiac stopped his Chevrolet and started searching for her with a torch. He was approaching the ditch where she was crouching when, luckily for her, a lorry came along and caught him in its headlights. This distracted him and he gave up looking for her. He got back in his car and drove off. Kathleen made her way to a police station to report the incident and while she was in the police station she saw the Zodiac ‘wanted’ poster on the wall; she identified the man on the poster as the man who had just abducted and threatened her. The police drove her back to her car and found that Zodiac had been back to it and, in frustration and revenge, set it on fire.

  In spite of the long series of incidents, the police were still a long way from identifying Zodiac. Detective Sergeant Lundblatt had an idea that he was Andy Walker, who had known Darlene Ferrin. Darlene’s sister had also identified him as the man who had waited outside Darlene’s apartment in the white car. Andy Walker also bore a strong resemblance to the man who stabbed Cecelia Shepard to death. Walker was known to suffer from bad headaches and said to get on badly with female colleagues. He had also been in the army where he had studied codes.

  This seemed promising, but there was a problem. Not everything matched. Andy Walker’s fingerprints did not match the one left in Paul Stine’s taxi. His handwriting did not match the writing in Zodiac’s notes. The police then discovered that Andy Walker was ambidextrous, and his handwriting varied according to which hand he used. It was also possible, the police believed, that the murder of Paul Stine had been planned so that Zodiac used the severed finger of an unknown victim to plant ‘fake’ fingerprints in the taxi in order to fool the police. It was a desperate line of thought.

  The police decided they needed to match Walker’s palm print with the one they found on the telephone after the Paul Stine murder. They decided to try to get a sample of Walker’s palm prints without arousing his suspicion. An under cover policeman managed to get Andy Walker to carry a goldfish bowl for him, but the palm prints he left on the bowl were not clear enough to be of any use. Naturally, Andy Walker realized he was being targeted by the police, and very properly got a court order to stop the police pestering him any more.

  More Zodiac letters arrived, again containing all sorts of clues, though none of them were crucial. It seemed he was a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, as he was taunting the police with a parody of a G & S song, listing those he wanted to kill with the chorus, ‘Titwillo, titwillo, titwillo.’ There were no killings during the entire run of The Mikado at the Presentation Theatre in San Francisco. He also seemed to be preoccupied with water and flooding, leading the police to believe that he might live in a low-lying area.

  The mad serial killer’s demands became more absurd with time. He was obviously a fantasist and a megalomaniac. He demanded that everyone in San Francisco must wear lapel badges carrying his symbol. They didn’t, of course, and when he realized it was not going to happen he arbitrarily threatened to kill Paul Avery, the crime writer on the San Francisco Chronicle. Journalists started semi-facetiously wearing, not the required gunsight badges, but badges bearing the slogan ‘I am not Paul Avery’. Avery unsportingly wore one too and took to carrying a gun.

  There were few new leads, though one correspondent suggested that Zodiac was responsible for an earlier murder, the killing of Cheri Jo Bates in November 1966. That murder
, just like the later ones, had been followed up with crank letters.

  On 7 April 1972, a law secretary called Isobel Watson was getting off a bus when a white Chevrolet swerved across the road and nearly hit her. The car stopped, the driver apologized and offered to give her a lift. She wisely declined. Then he jumped out and stabbed her in the back. She screamed and her neighbours ran out to help. The Chevrolet driver drove off. Isobel was able to describe her attacker. He was five feet nine inches tall, white, in his early forties and wearing black-rimmed glasses. He was almost certainly the Zodiac Killer.

  Time passed and the case was no nearer resolution. The inquiry was wound down. Eventually there was only Inspector David Toschi left on the case. Zodiac’s correspondence ceased for almost four years. It was possible he had committed suicide, which is what sometimes happens with psychopaths who recognize that they are beyond control and, at some level, want to be stopped. But Toschi believed that Zodiac got his kicks from the publicity rather than from the killings themselves. If he had killed himself, it was likely that he would have drawn attention to the fact by leaving a note or writing a letter to the press. On 25 April 1978, Toschi got confirmation that he was right; Zodiac was indeed still alive. Zodiac sent a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle. There were references in the letters to films, so it seemed likely that the killer was a film enthusiast. One of the local cinemas had the constellations painted on the ceiling, and that was probably the origin of Zodiac’s name for himself. It was hard to see any other origin. It was also possible that the gunsight logo was not intended to be a gunsight at all, but the symbol that appears on a cinema screen as a projectionist’s guide. A love of film would also match up with the killer’s evident love of display and mass communication. Perhaps he even saw his serial crimes in cinematic terms; the story of his career as a killer was in itself a kind of screenplay.