The Haunting of the Gemini (5 page)

Tears rolled down my face. How I needed to hear those words. I managed to ask her name.

“Why, my name is Sally,” she said. “I just want to give you this pamphlet. It may just save you. He sent me right to your door.” She shook the paper at me, knowing I was still watching behind the door. “My child, I have more to fear than you—a little ole gal like myself spreading the Good Word.”

I straightened my clothing and tried to get the courage to open the door. Sally continued to talk in that beautiful voice. “Jesus loves you, yes, he does, 'cause the Bible says he does . . .”

I froze. The phrase was wrong. Such a simple one to know, and it was off. Demons never got it right. I flung open the door and stepped outside—wanting to confront her, wanting someone solid I could grab and demand an answer from for everything that was going on. There was no one there. Her pamphlet was stuck on the door. I ripped it off and tore through the empty pages until I got to the last one. In red crayon, scrawled like a child had written it, were the words, “Stay dead. Stay dead.”

I knew then I couldn't stop it. I couldn't just go back inside and be safe. So I decided to walk right into it, whatever it was.

I turned and walked out my front gate and into a great space, enclosed in darkness. Then the lights came on, big fluorescent ones, one at a time. It was another tunnel, lined with mirrors. The light bounced everywhere, and I moved farther in, pushing on the mirrored walls with the hope of finding a door that would lead me back to my own world. Then I heard the keys.

Jingling keys and a rolling cart. One wall of mirrors became transparent, and through it I could see a nurse with grayish-brown hair and chipped teeth as brown as wood, pushing that cart down a pitiful hallway of dingy green paint and water stains. I noticed that the cart was full of medications, and the hallway was full of locked doors. I followed her along on my side of the mirrors as she screamed at the people who must be behind those doors. She stopped and unlocked door number 7, then turned and looked in my direction.

I was still on my side of the mirror, frozen in place. I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped the nurse couldn't see me. I peeked, which always gets me into trouble. I should know better by now, but honestly, every time I really have no choice. When I looked, I saw that the woman stood staring at me; then she smirked and followed my gaze down to her name tag.

“Ha. Yeah, that's my name. Nurse Sally to you.” Her smirk stayed in place. “Oh dear, and you thought Jesus loved you.”

She started to laugh, but she suddenly had a man's voice. She turned and went into room 7, her man's voice trailing after her. “Keep going, Jackie. You came for a reason.”

That was it. I panicked, running from mirror to mirror but seeing only tragedy and pain. I heard something coming toward me, again from the other side. It was the old wooden wheelchair, coming to collect what was left of me.

But I wasn't the one strapped to it this time. Another woman sat there in a ripped and filthy hospital gown. She pushed back her matted hair and shamefully pulled her torn gown together to cover her exposed breast. We stared at each other, and she slowly put her hand out as though she could touch me. I did the same. I saw a hospital ID band around her wrist. To my surprise, there was an identical one around my wrist as well.

As our hands touched, I felt her sorrow crash through the mirror and into me. Shards of pain pierced my chest like razor-sharp teeth, plunging deep into my flesh. I closed my eyes and tried to take her agony. Her childlike whimpers became shrieking screams. They suddenly stopped, and I peeked—again. The wheelchair lay on its side, wheels spinning and covered in blood. Instead of the woman in the hospital gown's hand, through the mirror I touched the hand of the tall man in black. He was able to grasp me fully, tightly.

“You see me, Jackie, and feel me. Can you feel my power? I am god, I am the fire in hell . . . I'm the reason little boys and girls look under their beds . . . I am seeping into you, every pore of your flesh will reek of me, for I am the Gemini. I am the Two . . .”

I wrenched my hand away and ran. The mirrors started to dissolve, exposing that other side. I was running for my life. I could not let myself get stuck in hell. I ran. He yelled my name. I slipped and fell in a puddle and scrambled up. I could see home.

I ran through my front gate and found my front door wide open. I ran into my bathroom and locked the door behind me before I looked down at myself. I was covered in blood. I ripped off my pajamas, panting in fear. I was under attack, and I couldn't breathe. I grabbed a washcloth and began frantically scrubbing my arms and legs with soap and hot water.

After a while, I looked around my bathroom, puzzled and confused. My skin was raw from scrubbing with the washcloth, but there was no blood anywhere. The door was still locked, but now I could hear my cats right outside, meowing hungrily. I threw open the door and stomped into the kitchen. The coffee pot was off, and their food bowls were empty. How was this possible? I had done all of this already. I was on the verge of losing it.

“What do you want? What is it?” I yelled, waving my arms in the air. The room began to spin out of control. Or maybe it was just me. This tall man in black said he was the Gemini, that the astrological sign lived and breathed somehow. I knew that now. And he was after me. If I was the one who always helps others, who would save me? The room spun faster. I yelled for God, but that man answered.

“Now, open the door and let's play fair.”

I wouldn't. I couldn't open my front door again.

“Jackie, I will blow this door in. Here I come. You can't run. You're in me. Open the fucking door!”

I screamed and sat up in bed. Wracked with pain, I leaned over the side and began to vomit. The whole thing had been a vision. My husband rushed in.

“What's wrong?” Will looked worriedly at the soiled floor and me huddled in pain. I asked him what time it was. “It's 7:30 a.m.,” he answered. “I was going to let you sleep. It seems like you've been out working all night. Where were you?”

“I don't know. I don't know.”

He asked if the doorbell had awoken me. I stared at him. Who was there?

“Just some old lady spreading the Good Word, I guess. You know, all the Lord stuff.”

I exploded. “You didn't let her in, did you?”

“No, I didn't,” he said, trying to calm me. “Come on. I'll get you some coffee.”

More coffee. My God. I could no longer distinguish between what was real and what was not. My waking hours and my dreams were intertwining. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

God help me.

FOUR

Just like any other kind of business, my psychic profession includes paperwork, filing, scheduling, and lots of other logistical duties. These things are, shall we say, not my areas of expertise. So I have an assistant who performs wondrous feats—like finding room on my calendar for all the clients who want to see me, booking the right travel arrangements, and scheduling my television and radio appearances. She is the first person anyone talks to when they try to reach me. She is my right hand, and I would never get any work done without her.

But the absolutely best thing about her? She's my daughter, Joanne. I am so lucky to get to work with her every day. And as I sat and thought about my recent visions, I knew she was just the one to help me with my latest project. We needed to figure out who Patricia Fonti was. Joanne tracks and monitors all of the paperwork for my cold cases, homicides no one has been able to solve, and she knows how important they are—she prioritizes homicide and missing-person cases when she does my scheduling. For Patricia's case, all I knew, from that headline in the newspaper that had drifted through the subway in my vision, was that she had been found dead at age thirty-nine on August 10, 1992. That seemed enough to start with, so Joanne and I sat down at the computer and started searching the Internet.

Patricia Fonti's name didn't show up in any of the usual places. No obituary. No name included in a list of local award honorees, or club members, or any of the places you can usually find some mention of a person. We couldn't even find any stories from 1992 about her death. Talk about a cold case! But then her name finally popped up—on a list of victims attributed to the New York Zodiac Killer.

Well, shit,
I thought.

That discovery led Joanne and me in a whole different direction. And we slowly began to piece together the story of the hunt for one of New York's most infamous serial killers.

* * *

Not much scares New Yorkers. Certainly not back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the city saw more than two thousand murders a year, along with rampant assaults and drug dealing. It took a lot back then for a criminal to rise above the ordinary horribleness of the crime wave. But one person managed to do it, with a combination of shootings, symbols, and carefully stoked terror.

The killer started with a letter, sent to police at the end of 1989, insinuating that deaths would come the next year and would be linked to the zodiac signs. Four months later, early on a Thursday in March 1990, a forty-nine-year-old man named Mario Orozco, who had a limp and used a cane, was shot in the back while walking along a Brooklyn street. He did not die, but neither had he seen the shooter, so he couldn't give police a description.

Exactly three weeks later, again in the early hours of a Thursday, another man was shot in the back, only six blocks away from the first one. Jermaine Montenesdro was thirty-three years old. He also survived, but like Mario Orozco, he was unable to describe his attacker. The next shooting came two months later, just after midnight on a Thursday morning, this time in Queens. A seventy-eight-year-old man named Joseph Proce, who—like Mario Orozco—was using a cane to walk down the street, was approached by a man who asked him for a glass of water. Joseph started to walk away and was shot in the back. The man fled but left a letter decorated with astrological symbols nearby. Before dying of his injuries, Joseph gave police a description of his attacker as a disheveled black man in his early thirties, roughly six feet tall and about 180 pounds.

The next week, the killer sent letters to the
New York Post
and TV's
60 Minutes
naming all three victims and providing details of the shootings that only he would know. Detectives concluded that the handwriting on those letters matched the letter left by Joseph's attacker, and officially linked all three crimes.

Knowing that his letters to the media now had the cops looking for someone in the Brooklyn-Queens border area, for his next shooting, the killer traveled farther afield. He couldn't change the rest of his pattern, though. He stuck with his preference for attacking the weak and helpless, this time shooting Larry Parham, a thirty-year-old homeless man asleep on a bench in Central Park, early on a Thursday morning exactly three weeks after his previous attack, and again leaving a letter with astrological drawings nearby. This letter had a fingerprint on it, which police carefully recorded.

Larry Parham survived the shot to the chest and was able to tell the police that someone had asked for his birth date several hours before he was shot. Larry's description of the man matched the one Joseph had given three weeks earlier. For the next six years, this would be the only physical description that existed of the man police were now calling the Zodiac Killer.

So far, the killer had shot a Scorpio, a Gemini, a Taurus, and a Cancer. And he had electrified the city. People walked around in a panic. Police warned everyone to immediately report any strangers asking for their birth dates. They could not figure out how the shooter knew the signs of the first three victims. They tried in vain to link the gunman's four targets, but no connection among them was ever found. It appeared that the Zodiac struck at random, or at least did not personally know his victims beforehand, and seemed to possess knowledge he should have no way of knowing—the most terrifying combination a serial killer could have.

The killer embraced the Zodiac name and all the terror that came with it. Just after the Central Park shooting, he sent another letter to the
Post
, claiming that he was the same Zodiac who'd killed at least six people in the San Francisco area in the late 1960s. Investigators and psychologists doubted this claim from the start—the West Coast Zodiac seemed to have been a weapons expert who enjoyed torturing his victims, while the New York Zodiac kept his distance while killing, and signs pointed to his using homemade guns, since the bullets found at the crime scenes did not have characteristics typical of ones fired by properly manufactured guns. And a homemade gun would likely fire only one round, which would explain why the killer hadn't finished off his wounded victims right then and there. But the association did nothing but increase his mystique and the public's hysteria.

Psychologists guessed that the Zodiac was a poorly educated loner who probably lived alone near the Brooklyn-Queens neighborhoods where the first three shootings took place, and that he desperately wanted attention. So the police were pretty worried when the Thursday three weeks after Larry Parham's shooting rolled around, worried enough to gather a task force of fifty detectives, the largest group assembled since the Son of Sam manhunt in the mid-1970s.

That Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the task force spread throughout the city, searching for the Zodiac. They understandably concentrated in the sections of Woodhaven, Queens, and East New York, Brooklyn, where the first three attacks had occurred. And they weren't the only ones out patrolling. Groups of citizen vigilantes roamed the streets in that area, looking for suspects. And, proving that all kinds live in New York, still other residents actually held tailgating parties and outdoor get-togethers to boast of being unafraid.

The police questioned more than thirty-six men throughout that night, but none turned out to be the Zodiac. The most famous person in New York stayed away, still safely unknown.

* * *

No attacks came that Thursday, or the next month, or even the next year. In fact, the Zodiac Killer waited two years before killing again. For the first time, he used a knife; and for the first time, he attacked on a day other than a Thursday. Patricia Fonti was a thirty-nine-year-old mentally ill homeless woman who frequented Highland Park in Queens. She was stabbed more than one hundred times just after midnight on Monday, August 10, 1992. The amount of time that had passed, and the changes to the killer's modus operandi, meant that her death wasn't immediately connected to the Zodiac Killer. In fact, like Joanne and I had found, it wasn't even reported by most newspapers. Patricia was a Leo.

Almost a year after that, on June 4, 1993, a man named James Weber was shot and injured near Highland Park. It was a Friday, and he was a forty-year-old Libra.

Seven weeks later, the Zodiac Killer came back to near Vermont and Cypress Avenues where James had been attacked and fatally shot forty-year-old John Diacone, a Virgo.

Only five more signs to go.

The killer stayed in Highland Park for his next attack. Diane Ballard was on a park bench near Jamaica Avenue when he shot and wounded her in October 1993. She was left partially paralyzed. And she was a Taurus, the only known duplicate sign among the Zodiac's victims.

The police didn't dwell on her astrological sign, however, because they had no idea these four latest attacks were connected to one another at all. And they definitely had no clue that they had been committed by the same Zodiac Killer they'd hunted so frantically in 1990. This time, he left no letters behind, nothing to draw attention to himself.

That is, until he decided to send another letter to the
New York Post
, in August 1994.

“Hi, I'm back,” it read. In it, he claimed credit for the four attacks in 1992 and 1993, as well as another one, in June 1994, that detectives could find no evidence of having actually happened. Detectives could not confirm to their satisfaction that the writer of the letter was in fact the same person who had started the reign of fear in 1990, but they knew the author at least had knowledge of the crimes that an ordinary person would not have. They were quite eager to track him down, and they hoped that a partial fingerprint left on that
New York Post
letter would help. But, having made his spectacular splash in the largest media market in the country, the Zodiac again fell silent, patiently waiting until it was time to strike again.

The police still had no idea who the Zodiac Killer was. No one did—until 1996. Then the case broke wide open. And my research got more and more interesting.

* * *

On June 18, 1996, Heriberto “Eddie” Seda was mad at his half sister. He did not like the people she was hanging out with. So he shot her. Hit in the lower back, she ran out of the family's small apartment in a drug-dealer-infested building in East New York, and someone called the police. Eddie Seda fired at the first responders from his window, which sent officers swarming all over the neighborhood, sealing off several city blocks. Residents took cover as the gunfight continued. The scale of it was unusual, but in one of the worst sections of the city at that time, gunfire was not. As one neighbor told
The
New York Times
, “People know what to do around here when they hear shots.”

The police negotiators eventually convinced Eddie to surrender and give up his weapons. He ended up handing over thirteen homemade zip guns, putting them into a bucket officers lowered down to his window from the roof. They were treating him as one dangerous son of a bitch, and with good reason. Once Eddie was under arrest, police found two finished pipe bombs inside his apartment, along with enough materials to make at least nine more.

Initially, the police were just relieved to have the twenty-eight-year-old in custody. But soon, they were delighted. Because Eddie couldn't help himself. At the end of a written statement about that day's standoff, he signed his name and put a strange little symbol. One of the detectives interviewing Eddie showed it to a colleague, who took one look and knew that the man who had written it was the Zodiac Killer.

The colleague had worked on the huge task force in 1990 and immediately called another detective who he knew had copies of the Zodiac letters. They compared the handwriting. Same
s'
s, same crossed
t'
s. Same guy. They went back to Eddie, who was still cooling his heels in a police station interview room. He denied it. He debated guilt and absolution with the cops for a while. Then the detectives showed him photos of his victims. Then Eddie read the Bible for a bit. And then, finally, he dictated a confession. He told them he'd had to kill his victims because they were evil.

And so Heriberto Seda was arrested in connection with eight attacks over four years. He was a recluse, a religiously devout man who railed against the drug dealers that infested his neighborhood. Growing up, his mother supported him and his half sister with welfare and small odd jobs, but she didn't maintain much control over his behavior. He still lived with both of them in that small apartment on Pitkin Avenue, where he'd stocked his tiny bedroom with the pipe bombs, along with things like a bow and arrow, plastic models of military equipment, gun magazines, and ammunition he ordered through the mail. Neighbors said he seemed to sleep all day and went out only at night. He wore black and pulled his hair back in a thin ponytail. As far as neighbors could tell, he'd never held a job and had never had any contact with his father.

His fingerprints matched the 1994 letter to the
New York Post
, as well as the print on the letter left at the scene of Larry Parham's shooting, in Central Park. Armed with that evidence and Eddie's confession, prosecutors prepared for trial.