The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (81 page)

The letter went on to jeer at the police for not making a thorough search of the Presidio, and commented on how much the killer detested the sound of the police motor cycles. It continued: “Schoolchildren make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the tyres and then pick off all the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”

The letter was signed with the mark of the Zodiac. By that time, a check on the bullet that had killed Stine showed that it came from the same .22 that had killed the first two victims ten months before. There could be no doubt that the letter was genuine. The bloodstained piece of cloth was from the tail of a shirt, and it fitted the torn shirt left on Paul Stine.

Was the killer serious about shooting children from a school bus? Probably not—he had never, so far, taken any real risk; he liked to kill stealthily, then run away. But the threat could certainly not be ignored. Armed deputies started to ride on all school buses, not only in San Francisco but in all the surrounding towns. Drivers were instructed not, on any account, to stop even if shots were fired; they were to drive on at top speed, sounding the horn and flashing the lights.

But all these precautions proved unnecessary. The murder of Paul Stine was the last officially recorded crime of the Zodiac killer. The murderer may well have felt that the hunt was getting too close; the police by now had good descriptions of him, and had issued “Wanted” notices showing a man with a crew-cut and horn-rimmed glasses. Police from Napa to San Francisco were permanently on the alert; and there was a noticeable drop in the number of courting couples using lovers’ lanes at night. The team hunting Zodiac now believed they were getting close, and that it would only be a matter of time before their net snared the man whose fingerprints matched those found on the telephone. But this optimism proved to be unfounded.

Zodiac had decided to stop killing, but his craving for publicity was unsated. In the early hours of 21 October, ten days after the murder of Paul Stine, the switchboard operator of the Oakland Police Department heard a gruff voice saying, “This is Zodiac”. He went on to make a number of remarks that later convinced police that he was the man who had so far killed five people. What he really wanted, said the caller, was to give himself up. He would do that on condition that he was represented by a famous lawyer—preferably F. Lee Bailey or Melvin Belli, both well known lawyers at the time. He would also, he said, like to speak on a famous television talk-show that went out on breakfast television.

The requests sounded absurd, but the Zodiac squad decided that it was worth a try. They immediately contacted Melvin Belli, who had an office in San Francisco, and asked if he would be willing to try to help them trap Zodiac. He agreed without hesitation. Then they asked the chat-show host, Jim Dunbar, if he would reserve space for a telephone call on his show at six forty-five that morning. The police then got in touch with the only three people who had heard Zodiac’s voice: victim Bryan Hartnell and the two switchboard operators who had taken Zodiac’s calls.

When the show went on the air at six forty-five a.m., silver-haired Melvin Belli was sitting beside the presenter Jim Dunbar. Dunbar told his audience that they were hoping for a call from the Zodiac killer, and asked them to keep the telephone lines clear. The audience cooperated. Those who saw the opening moments of the show rang their friends to tell them what was happening and, as a result, the show reached a record audience for that time of day in the San Francisco Bay area.

Almost an hour went by, while Belli and Dunbar discussed the murders. Then, at seven forty-one a.m., a soft, boyish voice came on the line. He rang off immediately, but rang back five minutes later. This time he identified himself as Zodiac, but said he preferred to be called Sam. In the studio, Bryan Hartnell and the two switchboard operators shook their heads. Unless Zodiac had been deliberately lowering his voice when they heard him, this call was a hoax.

Sam rang off and rang back fifteen separate times. He stated that he had been suffering from headaches “since I killed that kid last December”, and he frequently groaned with pain, explaining, “it is the headache speaking”. Belli tried twice to persuade Sam to give himself up, without success. But finally, with the broadcast sound cut off so that the television audience could not hear, Belli persuaded the caller to meet him in front of a shop in Daly City, south of San Francisco.

Predictably perhaps, the mysterious caller failed to arrive. Members of the Zodiac squad hidden at various points near the shop told themselves in consolation that they did not believe the caller was Zodiac anyway. Yet that conclusion is by no means as obvious as it looks. If the caller was a hoaxer, then it would seem logical to expect that the real Zodiac would lose no time in denouncing him. Nothing of the sort happened. And when, that Christmas, the lawyer Melvin Belli received a letter from a man who called himself Zodiac, it began “Dear Melvin”, as if he and Belli were old acquaintances. To confirm his identity, the writer enclosed another piece of Paul Stine’s bloodstained shirt. Handwriting experts confirmed that this letter bore strong resemblances to the earlier ones. The letter seemed to indicate that the writer’s mental state was deteriorating. The spelling was worse than usual, and there was a note of desperation that sounded genuine: “The one thing I ask of you is this, please help me. I cannot reach out for help because of this thing in me won’t let me. I am finding it extremely difficult to hold it in check and I am afraid I will lose control and take my ninth and possibly tenth victim. Please help me I am drowning . . .”

The claim that he had killed eight people, not five, led to frenzied activity in the San Francisco Police Department, where records were checked and re-checked for other possible Zodiac murders that had gone unrecognized. The only unsolved case that seemed to fit Zodiac’s pattern was the murder of an eighteen-year-old student, Cheri Jo Bates, who had been found dead in her car in the college car park with her throat slashed. If she was a Zodiac victim, then she pre-dated all the others, and it seemed odd that Zodiac had not taken the opportunity to boast about this crime at some time, as the had done about the others. If Cheri Jo Bates was the first victim and Zodiac was counting the two men who had recovered, that would explain the “eight” mentioned in his letter.

One big problem for the police was that hoaxers and mentally disturbed people were jumping on the Zodiac bandwagon; some of these showed a disturbing note of sadism. In one letter, the writer threatened to torture his victims before he killed them by tying them over anthills to watch them squirm or driving splinters under their nails. In some cases, the writers snipped out letters or words from newspapers and glued them to postcards. One read: “The pace isn’t any slower! In fact it’s just one big thirteenth. Some of them fought. It was horrible.” But police were able to dismiss most of these; the real Zodiac usually went to some trouble to prove his identity. On 16 March 1971 the
Los Angeles Times
received a Zodiac letter, postmarked from Pleasanton, near Los Angeles, in which the murderer taunted the police for being unable to catch him. This letter included the figure “17 + ”—an attempt to imply that the death toll was rising.

Three years passed. In January 1974 Zodiac was still hungering for attention; a letter postmarked San Francisco hinted that the number of his victims had now reached thirty-seven; it added that he would “do something nasty” if the letter was not publicized. Internal evidence suggested that this time the letter was genuine—and there were others, too, which appeared to be authentic communications from the killer.

The 1974 letter is, in its way, as significant as any of the crimes themselves. What it reveals is a man whose deepest craving is for attention; he clamours for it like a badly behaved child. This point was noted by one of the USA’s top psychiatrists, Dr Laurence Freedman, who commented, “He kills senselessly because he is deeply frustrated. And he hates himself because he is an anonymous nonentity. When he is caught he will turn out to be a mouse, a murderous mouse.” He added that he was convinced that Zodiac was insane.

Freedman’s psychological portrait of Zodiac is based on the crimes themselves which, studied closely, reveal a certain pattern. The first element is a complete lack of courage. It appears that Zodiac ordered David Farraday out of the car, then started to shoot almost immediately, as if afraid he himself might be attacked. He approached the car containing Michael Mageau and Darlene Ferrin and began to shoot immediately; then he jumped into his own car and drove off so fast that he burnt the rubber of his tyres.

It is also significant that two of his male victims survived. In the case of Bryan Hartnell, it is obvious that the killer’s real interest was in his friend Cecilia Shepard, who was a beautiful girl. He stabbed Hartnell only in the back. But when he began to stab Cecilia he lost control, stabbing her repeatedly in the back then turning her over and stabbing her another twenty-three times in the stomach. In all probability, this violence brought him some kind of sexual satisfaction, but there was no evidence of rape or attempted rape in the case of any of his three female victims. This seemed to suggest a man who was repressed and inhibited in his relations with women.

The case of the taxi-driver Paul Stine again illustrates the same combination of nervousness and extreme caution. It took place at a late hour on a foggy night, and he ordered the driver to pull up in a deserted street. The motive was robbery, but he was not willing to risk simply holding him up and taking his money; he preferred to guard against being identified by shooting his victim in the back of the head. When he realised he was being watched, he fled instantly. The next day, his courage restored, he wrote the police a jeering note and enclosed a fragment of his victim’s bloodstained shirt.

As significant as the killer’s cowardice is his craving for attention. After the first double murder, he drove off hastily, perhaps alarmed by the headlights of the oncoming car whose driver noticed the bodies only minutes after they had been shot. He made no attempt to contact the police or to publicise the murders. Yet immediately after shooting Michael Mageau and Darlene Ferrin, he rushed to the nearest telephone to inform the police of what he had done. And it was after this shooting that he wrote the letters to three newspapers, including one in code, and threatened to go on a murder rampage and kill twelve people. By then he was convinced he had got away with it and wanted to boast, to defy authority, to make people cringe. He was no longer an “anonymous nonentity”. He would force the world to pay attention.

If, in fact, the telephone caller to the Jim Dunbar show was Zodiac—and the later letter to Melvin Belli makes this highly probable—then this episode is rather ironic. The “anonymous nonentity” had caused shock waves all over California; he had had the satisfaction of knowing that hundreds of people were trying to puzzle out his cryptogram—it must have felt rather like being a bestselling author. He had certainly achieved a kind of fame. The murder of the taxi-driver brought him yet more publicity, and after the threat of an attack on a school bus, he was the most talked-about man in the USA. When he rang the San Francisco Police Department on 21 October, he undoubtedly wanted to appear on Jim Dunbar’s show. The fact that the caller to the show had a “boyish voice” is no proof that he was not Zodiac. Various other people described Zodiac as having a gruff voice, but any man can lower his voice to make it sound gruff—in fact, this is the easiest way of disguising the voice. And if “Sam” was not Zodiac, then who was he? One thing that seems fairly certain is that if Zodiac had changed his mind about ringing through to the programme and a hoaxer had taken his place, Zodiac would have lost no time in denouncing the phoney; his sense of publicity would have guaranteed that.

Yet all this fame was ultimately self-defeating since, though he could walk along a street and think, “I am famous”, nobody knew him—he was still an anonymous nonentity. He could address the famous lawyer as “Dear Melvin”—but he did not dare to sign his own name. He tried to keep the excitement alive with more letters, hinting at more killings, but he was crying wolf too often and the newspapers eventually relegated him to the back page. The only way of keeping the excitement alive would be to commit more murders, but next time he might be caught. Besides, being a temporary “celebrity” had released some of the frustration that had turned him into a killer. As it was, the police had come dangerously close, with an accurate description of him and three fingerprints. So the “murderous mouse”—unless he has since been arrested and jailed for another crime, perhaps in another state where he was not recognized—has presumably lapsed back into obscurity, telling himself that at least he had made the world sit up and take notice of him. Other police theories are that he is in hospital or has died. The Zodiac killings could be used to illustrate one of Freud’s most disturbing assertions: that if a child only had the power, it would destroy the world.

There is one more speculation. In his first letter, Zodiac asserted that the decoding of the cipher message would reveal his identity. It did not do so. The logical assumption is that the killer never meant to reveal his identity, but intended the claim to act as bait and cause widespread effort to crack the code. Yet one thing that may strike anyone who looks at the first few lines of the cipher message is that Zodiac sometimes used the letter “Z” to signify an “E”. Might the killer have, in fact, hidden his own name in the message, and could the solution to the case now lie in the hands of another cryptanalyst?

(Florence Bravo, 1876)