Johnny Halloween (4 page)

“What d’ya think we’ll get?”

“Last year they had pears and oranges.”

“Then why’d we save this house for last?”

“Don’t be stupid, sis.”

The door opened and the old man smiled down at them. “Well, hello kids! C’mon in, I’ve got someone here I want you to meet…a Munchkin, di -rect from Oz!”

“Oh boy,” Dorothy whispered. “I don’t think I can stand the excitement.”

The Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion giggled.

A tall man wearing a Munchkin costume danced across the room.

“You’re awfully big for a Munchkin,” Dorothy said.

“Ho ho, little miss! If you think
I’m
big, just wait till you meet the Scarecrow!”

****

“It’s Tiger!” Dorothy shouted as she ran up the hill. “My little kitty’s here!”

“Of course he is,” the Scarecrow said, stroking the animal. “What’s Dorothy without her Toto?”

The library burglars grabbed Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion. The big Munchkin grabbed the Tin Woodman’s Boy Scout ax, threw it into the bushes, and dragged the Tin Woodman up the hill. The boy’s costume rattled as if something had broken deep inside him.

Kicking, screaming, the three children were wrestled into the circle and tied to the fence posts. Frightened by their protests, the cat sprang from the Scarecrow’s arms.

Dorothy squirmed against her bonds. “Run, Tiger, run!”

The men piled high the tinder.

Squirted it with lighter fluid.

Sweat stung the Scarecrow’s cheeks. He scratched at his burlap mask, but that only made the itch worse.

“I know why you’re doing this,” Dorothy said.

The Scarecrow asked the library burglars for the book with the Yellow Brick Road on its cover. He squirted the worn pages with lighter fluid and hefted the book with one gloved hand.

“Light it up,” he said.

****

“You mean they never showed up?”

“Look, Vicky, kids will be kids. Maybe they’re still out running around the neighborhood. After all, it’s Halloween—”

“And they didn’t call?”

“Well, they didn’t call me. How about it, Mother? Did they phone you?”

“No, Dad. They sure didn’t.”

Vicky sighed. “Henry…Sally…I’m sorry to put you out. You’ve both been such good neighbors. When they show up, will you send them straight home?”

“Sure thing. G’night, Vicky.”

The door closed. Vicky turned away from the Johnson’s house, toward her empty, silent home.

She stared at the sky. A green haze lingered over the hills beyond town, hanging just below the purple darkness. A trick of reflected city lights, she imagined.

Vicky smiled. A green glow, like the lights of Oz.

Suddenly, a patch of red erupted amid the green.

Vicky watched, transfixed, And then realization and fear kicked in at the same instant, and she ran for the telephone.

****

The bullet-proof limo rolled out of town.

“Bishop, if everyone believes it, then can it be a lie?”

“No, not a lie. A parable, spread by the media with photos and videotape and physical documentation. A creative truth, if you will.”

“Guerilla theatre—that’s what the bleeding hearts call it.”

“Call it what you like, Woody.”

“But don’t call it murder?”

“Sometimes these things are necessary. Sometimes, as with David and Goliath, it’s a simple matter of them or us.”

“I know, Bishop. I know. But the way that Satan hides in the most innocent places, and the things we have to do to fight him…well, sometimes it disturbs me.”

“Of course it does. You wouldn’t be one of God’s creatures if it didn’t. But look at it this way: we’ve destroyed the evil in this town. Maybe in the entire state. After tonight, it won’t rear its ugly head in these parts ever again. Good folks won’t allow that. Believe me, Woody, they won’t forget what happened here anytime soon. They’ll be on guard from this day forward, and without our little drama, that would never have happened.”

“Still, the look in that little girl’s eyes…. The way she stared at me, without fear, as if she could see through my mask, as if she possessed some righteous power—”

Brother Bishop gripped the reverend’s arm. “That was the Evil One, Woody. Don’t you see? That was Lucifer himself, tempting you.”

The reverend nodded. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and massaged his cheeks, which were dotted with swollen red blotches.

“Bishop,” he said, “I don’t want to smell or see or feel burlap…ever again.”

THE MAN WHO KILLED HALLOWEEN

For kids growing up in the sixties, Halloween was the best of holidays. Costumed boys and girls hit the streets in packs. As night fell entire neighborhoods were transformed into creepshow carnivals.

Judging by today’s Spookshow Superstore standards, Halloween wasn’t anywhere near wild. In suburban America circa 1968, you’d be hard pressed to find a house with a full-on animatronic display in the front yard featuring giant wriggling arachnids, the way you can today. “Professional” haunted houses with chainsaw-wielding actors and soon-to-be bisected actresses were unknown as well, and you sure weren’t going to see any adult stepping out in full
Rocky Horror
regalia. Stuff like that just didn’t exist. In those days Halloween meant monsters, and America served up the old cinematic standards who’d been creeping around since the thirties: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Mummy.

So ’68 wasn’t exactly the Halloween that dripped blood. It wasn’t plug-in, and it wasn’t sexy. What it was was a hand-carved pumpkin on the porch, a big bowl of candy behind the front door, and a TV tuned to an old Universal Studios chiller. Barring the occasional old lady who’d dress up as a witch to scare any kiddies who dared to ring her doorbell, few adults wore costumes, or had parties, or did much more than dole out candy.

In those days, Halloween was for kids. Those who’d reached double digits age-wise mostly made their own costumes, while the under-ten population dressed in outfits purchased at the local five-and-dime. Kids transformed themselves into cut-rate fairy princesses and witches, hippies and soldiers, Tarzan of the Apes and George of the Jungle, and all four Beatles. They made the rounds of the neighborhood, collecting their booty in pillowcases or grocery bags, ringing as many doorbells as possible before the clock ticked its way toward the inexorable parental curfew.

If you started early and moved fast, you could get enough candy to last a month. And if you planned ahead and hit the right houses early enough, you could score stuff that was better than candy—some folks actually gave out homemade treats like popcorn balls and candy apples, and recipients didn’t worry that they’d end up choking on razor blades secreted in same. I mean, you got this stuff from your
neighbors
. You knew where they
lived
.

That’s the way it was in the town where I grew up. Vallejo, California, was home to Mare Island Naval Shipyard. The Yard brought lots of people to town during World War II, and many of them stayed once the war was over. By the time the sixties rolled around, Mare Island was turning out nuclear submarines and business was booming. Economically more blue collar than white, Vallejo was the kind of place where most of the dads worked at the shipyard and most of the moms stayed home to tend the kids.

That last score was a little different in my family. Both my parents worked. Mom was a railroad clerk, and Dad was a truck driver. The old man, in particular, loved Halloween, and in ’68 he went all out. That year he pulled up in the driveway after work, his pickup loaded with big cardboard boxes. It didn’t take me long to figure out that they were cases of Cracker Jack. I’m not talking special treat-size Cracker Jack, either. These were the real deal. Each case was filled with full-size boxes of caramel corn, nuts, and (as the old advertisement promised), a prize in every pack.

We stacked the cases in the entry hall. Arriving home from work, my mom took one look at all those boxes and nearly had a stroke—she was sure the old man had blown a week’s grocery money on trick-or-treat swag, but Dad had the only answer guaranteed to save his hide all ready to go. When Mom asked where he’d gotten all that Cracker Jack, he gave her his best Jimmy Hoffa Teamster smile and said: “Don’t worry, Ev. It fell off a truck.”

In all the years my dad drove trucks for a living, that load of Cracker Jack was the most memorable thing that ever “fell off” one of them. Around the neighborhood, word about the good stuff to be had at the Partridge’s house spread fast. We lived on a hill so steep that you had to cut switchbacks to climb it on a bicycle, but that didn’t matter. Our doorbell didn’t stop ringing all night. By the time I got home from my own trick-or-treating expedition, we were cleaned out. Every box of Cracker Jack was gone, and the old man was raiding my piggy bank for change to give the kids who’d climbed our hill expecting a box.

That was the Halloween I’ll always remember, and—just like the Cracker Jack—I was sorry to see it go. The next day we tossed out our candle-scorched jack-o’-lantern, flattened the big cardboard boxes that had held the Cracker Jack and tossed them, too. I started marking time until the next big holiday—Christmas—and when Christmas had come and gone I waited as the clock slowly spun toward summer vacation, and three fast months after that I was back in school counting the days until Halloween night, 1969.

But by the time that night arrived, everything had changed in my hometown. There weren’t many kids ringing doorbells that year. There weren’t many kids on the streets at all. Because someone was out there that Halloween, someone scarier than all the bogeymen I’d ever seen on television or at the movies, someone
pit-of-the-stomach-frightening
enough to keep me inside on my favorite night of the year.

That someone was a real monster.

He was a serial killer.

He called himself the Zodiac.

****

On December 20, 1968, two teenagers went out on a first date. David Faraday told Betty Lou Jensen’s parents that they were going to a Christmas carol concert, and maybe to a party afterwards.

David and Betty Lou were from opposite sides of town. They attended different schools, but that didn’t really matter. Most kids in Vallejo went to one of two public high schools—Vallejo High or James J. Hogan—and while the schools enjoyed a cross-town rivalry, students from both institutions shared the same drive-in’s, movie theaters, and burger joints. It was only natural that some of them would date.

David and Betty Lou decided to skip the Christmas concert and stopped for a Coke at Mr. Ed’s, a hangout located at one end of the local strip. After that they drove down Springs Road, maybe passing friends who were out cruising with their car radios tuned to KFRC or KYA, the local top 40 stations.

The pair left the strip and turned onto Columbus Parkway. Making that turn, David and Betty Lou would have known that they were leaving any possibility of going to a party behind. And following Columbus to Lake Herman Road would have meant only one thing to a couple kids from Vallejo—that they were heading toward the local lovers’ lane.

If you were a teenager looking for privacy, Lake Herman Road was one of the places you’d find it. It wasn’t the only place—there was the parking lot at Blue Rock Springs, and the overlook near the Carquinez Straits where young couples parked to watch “the submarine races,” and there was Benicia State Park, an inlet along the straits where frogs made music in the cattails while crickets sang on the dry hillsides on summer nights—but Lake Herman Road was the spot David and Betty Lou chose that night. A two-lane country road that snaked through rolling hills and ranch land, the twisting ribbon of asphalt cut away from Vallejo and meandered toward the outskirts of neighboring Benicia. There were few lights out there, and fewer people. Mostly there were cattle, sheep, and Lake Herman itself—a quiet, lonely spot that was usually deserted by sunset.

David knew where to go. He pulled off the blacktop, tires crunching over gravel, and parked near a chainlink fence that bordered the Lake Herman pumping station. From that spot he’d be able to watch Lake Herman Road for cops. Officers often swung through the area on nightly patrol—the place David had parked was a favorite of underage drinkers and dope-smokers, as well as lovers.

It was a dark night. Rolling hills behind the couple cut off the lights from town. Few cars passed by as the next hour ticked off. But one of those cars stopped, parking a short distance from David’s ’61 Rambler.

After some time, a man got out of that car and walked toward the Rambler. No one can say for certain what happened in the next few minutes. But when those minutes had passed, David Faraday lay dying on the ground. He’d been shot in the head, point blank, with a .22-caliber pistol.

Betty Lou Jensen lay dead less than thirty feet away.

She’d taken five bullets in her back.

She was running toward Vallejo when she died.

But she never made it out of that gravel lot.

She never even made it as far as Lake Herman Road.

****

The murders hit the town hard. For a few days, people talked of little else. The police interviewed a pair of hunters who’d noticed David’s Rambler parked off Lake Herman Road, but they hadn’t seen the killer. Perhaps more significantly, a couple in a sports car who’d parked not far from David and Betty Lou about an hour and a half before the murders came forward with a story about a driver who’d slowed to a crawl as he passed them, then quickly reversed course and tailed them to the Benicia cut-off when they grew frightened and drove off.

For my part, seeing the story plastered across the front page of the local newspaper was like seeing a nightmare come to life. The Faraday/Jensen killings had all the trappings of tales I’d heard from older kids on hot summer nights:
the deserted road…two teenagers alone in a parked car…a hulking stranger approaching in the dark….
The familiarity of the scenario gave me a strangely prescient fright. It seemed I knew this story all too well, and this story, after all, was
real
. I could almost see it happening, and that scared me most of all. I saw the killer in my mind’s eye the same way I saw the phantom hitchhikers in the stories told by my older brother and his friends. To tell the truth, if the couple in the sports car who escaped the phantom tailgater had reported that they’d found a hook-hand dangling from their car door when they hit the streets of Benicia, I wouldn’t have been surprised. For me, the killings on Lake Herman Road were like an urban legend come to life.

But the story didn’t last. It couldn’t. The police didn’t have any suspects. There were few leads. By all accounts, David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were a couple of good kids. The cold hard truth of it seemed to be that they’d died for one reason—they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Christmas came and went. The new year rang in on its heels.

More than half a year passed before the Zodiac marked another holiday with murder.

****

In June of ’69 I finished off the fifth grade at Pennycook Elementary School, and I didn’t even think about getting ready for the sixth. The summer stretched before me, three months that might include just about anything.

One thing that wasn’t on my list was a bike ride on Lake Herman Road. The lake had been a favorite destination during previous summers, but I didn’t know anyone who wanted to head out there after David and Betty Lou made their one-way trip in December. Not even on a brightly lit summer afternoon.

There were other places to go, though, places that wouldn’t conjure up images of awful winter nights. Oddly enough, many of the daytime destinations enjoyed by younger kids doubled as lovers’ lanes at night. Benicia State Park was a personal favorite of mine. So was Blue Rock Springs, a city park that bordered the local golf course. Nestled in a fragrant eucalyptus grove, Blue Rock was a place straight out of a fairy tale or an old Robin Hood movie. The trees were tall and dark, growing close together, and it was always cool in their shadows, even on the hottest days. A duck pond waited a stone’s throw from the parking lot, and there were plenty of picnic tables where you could stretch out on your back, sip from a cold bottle of Coke, and stare up at the passing clouds in the summer sky.

From one of those picnic tables, you could easily see the golf course parking lot where the Lake Herman Road killer made his next strike. The date was July 4, 1969. Again, the killer struck on a holiday, and again he struck late at night. Again, he chose a couple parked alone in a remote area (the golf course parking lot at Blue Rock Springs was little more than two miles from the site of the Faraday/Jensen murders). Again, he used a gun, killing waitress Darlene Ferin and seriously wounding Mike Mageau as they sat in Darlene’s ’63 Corvair. And again, he escaped on a dark two-lane road, disappearing into the night.

A few weeks after the crime, the killer wrote letters to three Bay Area newspapers (including the
Vallejo Times-Herald
) in which he claimed responsibility for the murders. These letters included details of the crimes that only the killer and the police would know, and ciphers which the writer promised would reveal his identity. Each letter ended with a threat—if the ciphers weren’t published, the writer promised to “go on a kill ram-Page Fry. Night. I will cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.”

All three ciphers were published, along with some text from the letters.

The killer wasn’t satisfied, however.