Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (9 page)

On 24 July 1970, the Zodiac Killer wrote a letter which spoke of ‘THE WOEMAN [sic] AND HER BABY THAT I GAVE A RATHER INTERESTING RIDE FOR A COUPLE OF HOWERS ONE EVENING A FEW MONTHS BACK THAT ENDED IN MY BURNING HER CAR WHERE I FOUND THEM.’ The woman was Kathleen Jones of Vallejo. On the evening of 17 March 1970, she had been driving in the area when a white Chevrolet pulled alongside her. The driver indicated that there was something wrong with her rear wheel. She pulled over and the other driver stopped. He was a ‘clean-shaven and neatly dressed man’. He said that the wheel had been wobbling and offered to tighten the wheel nuts for her. But when she pulled away, the wheel he had said he had fixed came off altogether. The driver of the Chevrolet then offered her a lift to a nearby service station, but drove straight past it. When she pointed this out, the man said, in a chillingly calm voice: ‘You know I am going to kill you.’

But Kathleen Jones kept her head. When he slowed on the curve of a freeway ramp, she jumped from the car with her baby in her arms. Then she ran and hid in an irrigation ditch. He stopped and, with a flashlight from the trunk of his car, started searching for her. He was approaching the ditch when he was caught in the headlights of a truck and ran off. An hour later, she made her way to a police station to report what had happened to her. When she looked up and saw the Zodiac’s wanted poster, she identified him as the man who had threatened to kill her. And when the police drove her back to her car, they found it burnt out. It seemed he had returned and set it alight.

Despite the new leads Kathleen Johns provided, the police got no nearer to catching the Zodiac Killer. Police in Vallejo believed that the man they were after was now the driver of a new green Ford. He had stopped and watched a Highway Patrolman across the freeway. When the Highway Patrolman decided to ask him what he was doing and cut around through an underpass, he found the green Ford was gone. It was now sitting on the other side of the freeway where the squad car had been moments before. This cat and mouse game was played every day for two weeks.

Detective Sergeant Les Lundblatt became convinced that the Zodiac Killer was a man named Andy Walker. He had known Darlene Ferrin and Darlene’s sister identified him as the man who had waited outside Darlene’s apartment in a white car. He also bore a resemblance to the description of the man seen near Lake Berrylessa when Cecelia Shepard was stabbed to death. And he had studied codes in the military. However, his fingerprints did not match the one left in Paul Stine’s cab and his handwriting did not match the Zodiac’s notes. But the police discovered that Walker was ambidextrous and believed that the murder of Paul Stine had been planned so meticulously that the Zodiac may have used the severed finger of a victim they did not know about. He was also known to suffer from bad headaches and he got on badly with women at work.

The police decided that they had to get his palm prints to see if they matched those on the telephone that had been left dangling after the Paul Stine killing. An undercover policeman asked Walker to help him carry a goldfish bowl. Walker obliged, but the palm prints he left were smudged. Walker realised what was going on and a judge issued a court order forcing the police to stop harassing him.

Zodiac letters threatening more murders were received. Some of them were authenticated, but they rendered few new clues. The only thing that detectives could be sure of was that the Zodiac was a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan. He taunted with a parody of ‘The Lord High Executioner’ listing those people he intended to kill – and used the refrain ‘titwillo, titwillo, titwillo’. And there were no letters or criminal activity that could have been ascribed to the Zodiac Killer during the entire run of the
Mikado
in San Francisco’s Presentation Theatre.

There may have been more Zodiac murders, too. On 21 May 1970, the naked body of Marie Antoinette Anstey was found just off a quiet country road in Lake County. Traces of mescaline were found in her body. She had been hit over the head and drowned. Her clothes were never found. The murder of Marie Antoinette Anstey followed the pattern of the Zodiac killings. It took place at a weekend, in the same general area around Vallejo, and near a body of water. Although she was naked, there were no signs that she had been sexually molested.

The Zodiac had some curious connection with the water. All the names of all murder scenes had same association with water – even Washington Street. In one of the Zodiac letters, he claimed that the body count would have been higher if he had not been ‘swamped by the rain we had a while back’. The police deduced that he lived in a low-lying area, susceptible to flooding. Perhaps he had a basement where he kept the equipment to make the long-threatened bomb.

A K-Mart store in Santa Rosa, California, was evacuated after a bomb threat by a man identifying himself as the Zodiac Killer. Two months later, the Zodiac wrote another letter to the
San Francisco Chronicle
claiming to have killed twelve people and enclosing the map with an X marking the peak of Mount Diablo – the Devil’s Mountain – in Contra Costa Country across the bay from San Francisco. From there, an observer could see the entire panorama of the area where the murders had taken place. But when detectives checked it out more closely, the spot marked was within the compound of a Naval Relay Station, where only service personnel with security clearance could go.

The letters continued, demanding that people in the San Francisco area wear lapel badges with the Zodiac symbol on it. When they did not, he threatened to kill Paul Avery, the
Chronicle
’s crime writer who had been investigating the story. Journalists, including Paul Avery, began wearing badges saying ‘I am not Paul Avery’. But Avery, who was a licensed private eye and a former war correspondent in Vietnam, took to carrying a .38 and put in regular practice at the police firing range.

An anonymous correspondent tied the Zodiac slayings to the unsolved murder of Cheri Jo Bates, a college girl in Riverside, California, on Hallowe’en 1966. The police could not rule out a connection, but could not prove a concrete link either. But when Paul Avery checked it out he discovered that the police had received what they considered to be a crank letter about the murder, five months after the killing. It was signed with the letter Z.

Cheri Jo Bates was an 18-year-old freshman, who had been stabbed to death after leaving the college library one evening. In a series of typewritten letters, the killer gave details of the murder only he could have known. He also said that there would be more and talked of a ‘game’ he was playing. But there were also hand-written letters, where the handwriting matched the Zodiac’s and Avery managed to persuade the police to re-open the Bates case in the light of the Zodiac murders.

During 1971, there were a number of murders that could have been committed by the Zodiac. Letters purporting to come from him confessed to them. But he could easily have been claiming credit for other people’s handiwork. However, on 7 April 1972, 33-year-old Isobel Watson, who worked as a legal secretary in San Francisco, alighted from the bus at around 9 p.m. in Tamalpais Valley and began walking home up Pine Hill. Seemingly out of nowhere, a white Chevrolet swerved across the road at her. The car stopped. The driver apologised and offered to give her a lift home. When Mrs Watson declined, he pulled a knife on her and stabbed her in the back. Her screams alerted the neighbours. The man ran back to his car and sped off. Mrs Watson recovered and gave a description: her assailant was a white man in his early forties, around five foot nine inches and he wore black-rimmed reading glasses. The police said that there was a better than fifty-fifty chance that this was the Zodiac Killer.

As time went on, other detectives dropped out of the case, leaving only Inspector David Toschi. The FBI looked at the files, but even they could take the case no further.

The correspondence from the Zodiac ceased for nearly four years. Though psychologists believed that he was the type who might commit suicide, Toschi did not believe he was dead. Toschi reasoned that the Zodiac got his kicks from the publicity surrounding the killings, rather than the killings themselves. Surely he would have left a note, or some clue in his room, that he was the Zodiac. Then on 25 April 1978, Toschi got confirmation. The
Chronicle
received a new letter from him. This time it mentioned Toschi by name. And the author wanted the people of San Francisco to know he was back. This gave the police a new opportunity to catch him.

Robert Graysmith, author of the book
Zodiac
, deduced that the killer was a film buff. In one of his cryptograms he mentions ‘the most dangerous game’ which is the title of a film. In another, he calls himself ‘the Red Phantom’, the title of another film. And he frequently mentions going to the cinema to see
The Exorcist
or
Badlands
, a fictionalised account of the murderous spree of Nebraskan killer Charles Starkweather. The police used this information and the Zodiac Killer’s obvious love of publicity to try and trap him. When a film about the Zodiac killings was shown in San Francisco a suggestions box was left in the lobby of the cinema. The audience were asked to drop a note of any information or theories they may have in it. The box was huge and a detective was hidden inside it. He read every entry by torchlight as it fell through the slot. If any looked like they came from the Zodiac Killer, he was to raise the alarm. None did.

The Oakland police thought that they had captured the Zodiac Killer. He was a Vietnam veteran who had seen the film three times and had been apprehended in the lavatory at the cinema masturbating after a particularly violent scene. The Oakland PD was soon proved wrong. His handwriting did not match the Zodiac’s. Soon there was a welter of recrimination. Toschi was transferred out of homicide after baseless accusations that he had forged the Zodiac letters for self-promotion. The police in the Bay area began to believe that the Zodiac Killer was either dead or in prison outside the state for another crime. Or it could have been, after the close call following the killing of Paul Stine, that he figured that his luck was running out.

But Robert Graysmith was not convinced. He managed to connect the Zodiac killings with the unsolved murder of 14 young girls, usually students or hitch-hikers in the Santa Rosa area in the early 1970s. Most of them were found nude, their clothes were missing but largely they had not been sexually molested. Each of them had been killed in different ways, as if the murderer was experimenting to find out which way was best. Graysmith reckons that the Zodiac’s body count could be as high as 40.

The Zodiac’s symbol, a cross in a circle, Graysmith believes, is not a stylised gunsight but the projectionist’s guide seen on the lead-in to a film. Through a cinema in San Francisco which has the constellations painted on the ceiling he traced a promising suspect. The man, Graysmith was told, filmed some of the murders and kept the film in a booby-trapped film can.

Another Graysmith suspect was a former boyfriend of Darlene Ferrin’s. He had also been a resident of Riverside when Cheri Jo Bates had been murdered. He lived with his mother, who he loathed, and dissected small mammals as a hobby. During the crucial 1975–78 period when the Zodiac Killer was quiet, he was in a mental hospital after being charged with child molestation at a school where he worked.

Although he had two promising candidates Graysmith could not pin the Zodiac murders on either of them. He published the story of his investigation in 1985.

But then, in 1990, a series of strange murders began in New York. The perpetrator claimed to be the Zodiac. The killer’s description does not match those given by the witnesses in California. But a man can change a lot in twenty years.

Chapter 6

The Family

Name: Charles Manson

Accomplices: Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houtten, Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel

Nationality: American

Born: 1934

Number of victims: 6 killed

Favoured method of killing: stabbing, shooting

Downfall: they were caught because Susan Atkins boasted about her crimes

Final note: ‘from the world of darkness I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment’

Charles Manson was born in 1934 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the illegitimate son of a teenage prostitute. Unable to support herself and her son, even through prostitution, his mother left him with her mother in McMechen, West Virginia. Later, he was sent to the famous orphans home, Boys’ Town in Nebraska but he was kicked out for his surly manner and constant thieving. He escaped 18 times from Indiana Boys’ School and served four years in a federal reformatory in Utah after being arrested for theft.

In November 1954, he was released. He married Rosalie Jean Willis before being arrested for transporting stolen cars across a state line and sentenced to three years in Terminal Island Federal Prison near Los Angeles. Rosalie divorced Manson after his arrest.

Out again in 1958, Manson became a pimp and was arrested repeatedly under the Mann Act for transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes. He started forging cheques. When he was caught, he was sentenced to ten years in the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island in Washington state.

Being small, just five foot two, he had a hard time in prison. He was raped repeatedly by the other prisoners, many of whom were black. This left him with a lifelong racial chip on his shoulder.

To survive in prison, Manson became shifty, cunning and manipulative. This set him in good stead when he was released in 1967. He soon discovered that he could use the manipulative powers he had learnt in jail on the long-haired flower children that inhabited Southern California. With his hypnotic stare, his Bohemian lifestyle and the strange meaningless phrases he babbled, he was the perfect hippy guru. His contempt for authority and convention made him a focus of the counter-culture and he soon developed a penchant for the middle-class girls who had dropped out of mainstream society according to the fashion of the times.

Manson travelled with an entourage of hangers-on, known as the Family. They comprised young women – who were all his lovers – and docile males who would do anything he told them to. They numbered as many as thirty at one time.

One typical recruit was Patricia Krenwinkel. She was a former Girl Scout from a normal middle-class family. Her expensive education earned her a good job at a big insurance company in Los Angeles. She met Manson on Manhattan Beach when she was 21 and abandoned everything for him. She ditched her car and walked out of her job without even bothering to pick up her last paycheque. She moved in with the Family on the Spahn Ranch, a collection of broken-down shacks in the dusty east corner of the Simi Valley where they hung out.

Leslie Van Houten was just 19 when she had dropped out of school. She lived on the streets on a perpetual acid trip until she met Manson. Twenty-year-old Linda Kasabian left her husband and two children and stole $5,000 from a friend to join the Family. She too began to see her seamy life through a constant haze of LSD.

Susan Atkins was a 2l-year-old topless dancer and bar-room hustler. A practising devil worshipper, she became Manson’s closest aide. But, like the others, she had to share his sexual favours. Manson quenched his insatiable sexual appetite with his female followers, one or two at a time – or even with all of them together. He knew the power of sex and drugs. When, for a short while in the 1950s, he had been a pimp, he had fallen in love with his main girl, who had dumped him. Then he had picked up two girls – Mary and Darlene – and had slept with them on a rota basis. Soon he had them in his thrall. With the girls in the Family, he used LSD and orgies to control them. He would choreograph his sexual activities with his followers, artistically positioning their naked bodies. He also promised each girl a baby in return for their devotion, while Susan used the situation to plant her Satanist ideas into their receptive minds.

One of the few men in the commune was 23-year-old former high-school football star from Farmersville, Texas, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson. He had once been an honours student, but in Manson’s hands he had become a mindless automaton.

Surrounded by these compliant sycophants, the drug-addled Manson began to enjoy huge delusions, fuelled by Susan Atkins’ studies of Satanism. She convinced him that his own name, Manson, was significant. Manson, or Man-son, meant Son of Man, or Christ, in her twisted logic. He was also the devil, Susan Atkins said.

The lyrics of the Beatles’ songs were also dragged into Manson’s growing delusions. He was blissfully unaware that a helter skelter was a harmless British funfair ride and interpreted the track ‘Helter Skelter’ on the Beatles’
White Album
as heralding the beginning of what he saw as an inevitable race war. The blacks would be wiped out, along with the pigs – the police, authority figures, the rich and the famous, and what Manson called ‘movie people’.

Manson fancied himself as something of a popstar himself and took one of his feeble compositions to successful West Coast musician Gary Hinman. Manson also learned that Hinman had recently inherited $20,000. He sent Susan Atkins and Bob Beausoleil – another Family hanger-on – to steal it and to kill Hinman for refusing to put Manson at the top of the charts, where he believed he belonged. They held Hinman hostage for two days and ransacked the house. The money was nowhere to be found. Out of frustration, they stabbed him to death. Then devil-worshipper Susan Atkins dipped her finger in Hinman’s blood and wrote ‘political piggie’ on the wall.

The police found Beausoleil’s fingerprints in the house and tracked him down. They found the knife that killed Hinman and a T-shirt drenched in Hinman’s blood in Beausoleil’s car. He was convicted of murder and went to jail – without implicating Atkins or Manson.

Next Manson tried to get his composition recorded by Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher. Melcher was a big player in the music industry and refused to take Manson’s material further. Meanwhile Manson’s followers formed a death squad. They dressed in black and trained themselves in the arts of breaking and entering abandoned buildings. These exercises were known as ‘creepy crawlies’. They were told that they should kill anyone who stood in their way.

On 8 August 1969, Manson’s death squad was dispatched to Melcher’s remote home on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. Melcher had moved, but this did not matter to Manson. The people he saw going into the house were ‘movie types’. Their slaughter would act as a warning.

The house at the end of Cielo Drive was indeed occupied by ‘movie people’. It had been rented by film director Roman Polanski, who was away shooting a film in London. But his wife, film star Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, was at home. Coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and her boyfriend Polish writer Voyteck Frykowski were visiting. So was Sharon Tate’s friend, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring.

Manson ordered Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian to kill them. They were armed with a .22 revolver, a knife and a length of rope. Kasabian lost her nerve at the last minute and stayed outside. When Tex Watson, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel pushed open the wrought-iron gates, they bumped into 18-year-old Steven Parent, who had been visiting the caretaker. He begged for his life. Watson shot him four times.

Inside the house, Manson’s disciplines told Sharon Tate and her guests that the house was simply being robbed and no harm would come to them. They were to be tied up, but Jay Sebring broke free. He was shot down before he could escape. Fearing they were all going to be killed, Voyteck Frykowski attacked Watson, who beat him to the ground with the pistol butt. In a frenzy, the girls stabbed him to death. There were 51 stab wounds on his body.

Abigail Folger also made a break for it. But Krenwinkel caught up with her halfway across the lawn. She knocked her to the ground and Watson stabbed her to death.

Sharon Tate begged for the life of her unborn child. But Susan Atkins showed no mercy. She stabbed her 16 times. Tate’s mutilated body was tied to Sebring’s corpse. The killers spread an American flag across the couch and wrote the word ‘pig’ on the front door in Sharon Tate’s blood. They changed their bloody clothes, collected their weapons and made their way back to the Spahn Ranch.

Manson got high on marijuana and read the reports of the murders in the newspapers as if they were reviews. To celebrate this great victory, he had an orgy with his female followers. But soon he craved more blood.

On 10 August, Manson randomly selected a house in the Silver Lake area and broke in. Forty-four-year-old grocery-store owner Leno LaBianca and his 38-year-old wife Rosemary, who ran a fashionable dress shop, awoke to find Manson holding a gun to their faces. He tied them up, telling them they would not be harmed. He only intended to rob them.

He took LaBianca’s wallet and went outside to the car where the rest of his followers, including 23-year-old Steve Grogan, were waiting. Manson sent Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel back into the LaBiancas’ house. He said that he was going to the house next door to murder its occupants. Instead, he drove home.

Watson did as he was told. He dragged Leno LaBianca into the living-room, stabbed him to death and left the knife sticking out of his throat. Meanwhile, Van Houten and Krenwinkel stabbed the helpless Mrs LaBianca as they chanted a murderous mantra. They used their victim’s blood to write more revolutionary slogans on the walls. Then the three killers took a shower together.

The killers thought of their senseless slayings as a joke. They also expected them to set off ‘helter skelter’, the great revolutionary race war. When it did not, they knew they were in danger and the Family began to break up.

Susan Atkins turned back to prostitution to support herself. She was arrested and, in prison, she boasted to another inmate about the killings. When the police questioned her, she blamed Manson.

On 15 October 1969, Manson was arrested and charged with murder. Basking in publicity, Manson portrayed himself as the baddest man on Earth and boasted that he had been responsible for 35 other murders. But at his trial he pointed out a simple truth.

‘I’ve killed no one,’ he told the jury. ‘I’ve ordered no one to be killed. These children who come to you with their knives, they’re your children. I didn’t teach them – you did.’

It did not make any difference. He, Beausoleil, Atkins, Krenwinkel, Van Houten, Watson and Grogan were all sentenced to death in the gas chamber. But before the sentence could be carried out, the death penalty was abolished in California. Manson and his followers had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment and they are now eligible for parole. So far, only Steven Grogan has been granted it.

Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel have all got skilful lawyers working on legal loopholes. Susan Atkins became a born-again Christian and like Leslie Van Houten she became a model prisoner, although she was denied parole for the eleventh time in 2005. At the California Institute for Women in Frontera, Van Houten, who was denied parole in 2004, graduated with degrees in literature and psychology. She could also argue that she did not actually kill anybody. She stabbed Mrs LaBianca, but only after she was dead. Even Vincent Bugliosi conceded that the three women will be released eventually.

Tex Watson has less of a chance. He was doing well when he found God and became assistant pastor at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. But he made Bruce Davis, another Family member, as his assistant, and Kay suspected he was trying to build himself a powerbase in prison. Watson was denied parole in 2005 and is now working, inside, as a motor mechanic.

Former Family member Lynette Fromme made a half-hearted attempt to get Manson out in 1975 when she pulled a gun on US President Gerald Ford. But she did not pull the trigger and succeeded only in putting Manson back in the headlines again.

Manson constantly asks for parole. He does it, not because he has a reasonable chance of getting out, but because it gains him publicity. He revels in his image as the ‘baddest man on Earth’.

Stephen Kay, a Los Angeles County district attorney who worked as Vincent Bugliosi’s assistant during the trial, keeps an eye on the parole hearings and turns up to oppose any release. In 1981, at a parole hearing, Manson said that Kay would be murdered in the car park as he left. But he was present again, alive and well, for the next parole board hearing.

The following year, Manson was transferred to a maximum security cell at Vacaville prison after the authorities learned he was planning an escape by hot-air balloon. A ballooning catalogue, a rope, a hacksaw and a container of flammable liquid were found in the jail.

At one parole board hearing, Manson was asked why he unravelled his socks and used the yarn to make into woollen scorpions. He rose from his seat and said quite seriously: ‘From the world of darkness I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment.’

Parole was refused.

In 1986, Manson’s parole request was opposed by California’s governor George Deukmejian. In response, Manson read a 20-page hand-written statement which was described, by those who heard it, as ‘bizarre and rambling’. Three years later he refused to appear before the parole board because he was made to wear manacles. These, he said, made the board think he was dangerous.

In 1992, his hearing was held within hours of the first execution held in California for over a decade. Of course, Manson’s death sentence cannot be reinstated. Nevertheless, Manson did not do his chances of getting parole much good when he told the parole board: ‘There’s no one as bad as me. I am everywhere. I am down in San Diego Zoo. I am in your children. Someone had to be insane. We can’t all be good guys. They’ve tried to kill me thirty or forty times in prison. They’ve poured fire over me. They haven’t found anyone badder than me because there is no one as bad as me – and that’s a fact.’