Table of Contents
to JANE
acknowledgments
All the material in this book is derived from official records or interviews Ive conducted over a thirty year period in my search for Zodiac. My heartfelt thanks to Inspector Dave Toschi, Detective George Bawart, and the editorial, legal, and production staff of this book: Gary Mailman, Liz Perl, Hillary Schupf, Heather Conner, Jill Boltin, Pauline Neuwirth, Esther Strauss, and especially, Natalee Rosenstein, my editor.
Zodiac in Costume by Robert Graysmith.
Authors line-cut illustration of Zodiac in costume at Lake Berryessa.
introduction
Zodiacs unmasked features first came into focus one blazing summer day upon the crystal face of a watch. The detectives inside the cramped office studied the large, expensive timepiece on the wrist of their prime suspect with dread. Such a commonplace object should not arouse fearyet it did. It had taken them almost three years to winnow 2500 suspects down to a handful, among them a man named Starr. Now they saw Starrs broad, smiling face reflected in that watch and they knew. The watch had been a catalyst for murder. Its stark black and white markings had inspired an unprecedented reign of terror. Its logo had given the killer his symbol, a crossed circle, like a gun sight, and his nameZodiac.
After Jack the Ripper and before Son of Sam there is only one name their equal in terror: the deadly, elusive, and mysterious Zodiac. Since 1968 the hooded murderer had terrified San Francisco and the Bay Area with a string of cold-blooded killings. He hid his true features beneath a black homemade executioners hood, emblazoned in white with his symbol. Zodiac, in taunting letters sent to newspapers, provided hidden clues to his identity with cunning codes. This is the Zodiac speaking, he began as always. By the way have you cracked the last cipher I sent you? My name is His cryptograms defied the greatest code-breaking minds of the FBI, the CIA, and NSA.
To terrify the public, Zodiac employed arcane terminology and purposely misspelled words. Sometimes he forgot himself and spelled a word correctly within the same letter. He used mispunctuation and un-grammatical language in his letters, yet understood subtle grammatical usages such as shall and will. I shall no longer announce to anyone when I comitt my murders, Zodiac printed in blue felt-tip pen in November 1969. They shall look like routine robberies, killings of anger, & a few fake accidents, etc. The police shall never catch me, because I have been too clever for them. And Zodiac was clever, wearing glue on his fingertips to keep from leaving prints, and changing bizarre weapons with each attack. Among his weapons were a gun that projected a beam of light so he could hunt people at night, electronic bombs in his basement (targeted for school children), a homemade knife in a decorated scabbard, and guns of every caliber. We were all afraid. Single-winged planes trailed school buses manned by armed guards, a reaction to Zodiacs threat to pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out. With each whispered phone call and cryptic message, each bloody scrap of victims clothing mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle, where I worked as a political cartoonist, a resolve grew within me to uncover his true face.
What made Zodiac so irresistible to the human imagination was not only that he offered so many hints to his true identity, but that he was always just out of reach. Who could forget the phone receiver, still damp with sweat and swinging from its cord, that Zodiac had used only moments before? He had brazenly called police from a booth four blocks from their headquarters. Directly after an attack, he was compelled to gloat, heartlessly calling his victims families, breathing silently into the phoneas if he were about to speak his name.
We knew Zodiac, whoever he was, as a man of many partscryptographer, criminologist, chemist, artist, engineer, bomb-builder, poet, weapons master, and above all a practioneer of the rope, the gun, and the knife. The tension grew as Zodiac, unquenchable in his blood lust, hinted at previously concealed murders. Had he made a past mistake that might reveal his true face? They are only finding the easy ones, he wrote. There are a hell of a lot more down there. Zodiac may have been referring to the October 30, 1966 murder of a Riverside, California coed. Zodiac was drawn to attack or write on holidaysthe Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, Christmas, Halloween, and Labor Day. In Southern California a double murder on a beach on Whit Monday, a Virgin Island holiday, may have been his first, a rehearsal for a double stabbing at a lake six years later. Zodiac had connections to the Virgin Islands, as did one of his victims.
Though highly intelligent, Zodiac was not an original man. He had stolen his image and method of murder from a watch, movies, comic strips, and a short story. His M.O. had been laid out in advance on the pages of his favorite adventure tale. Obsessed with the idea of hunting men as game, Zodiac stalked young couples because man is the most dangerous animal of all to kill. His rampages occurred on weekends at dusk or at night under a new or full moon. He cloaked himself in astrology (though that may have been a sham) and apparently cast his own horoscope to determine when he struck. Or was Zodiac only moon mad, affected by the moon as the tides are?
Almost all the homicides attributed to him involved students killed in or around their cars near bodies of water and places named after water. Water always figured in his crimes somewhere. Possibly Zodiac was a swimmer, boatman, or sailor. Whatever he was, he knew Vallejo, a Navy town where the Northern California murders began, intimately. I was convinced Zodiac was a longtime Vallejo resident who knew his victims and had stalked two for a period of time, one in particular.
Zodiac still walked among us from the 1960s into the 1990s. He was not at work elsewhere. His massive ego and easily identifiable methods would have made him known instantly. He intended to play his game of outdoor chess to the death and on home turf. Surviving victims and horrified witnesses fled into hiding. Investigators themselves were fearful. In their hearts they knew there was no defense against the compulsive, random killer. Some eyewitnesses were never interviewed by the police or recontacted to be shown photos of suspects. I only found them decades afterward. One had seen Zodiac unmasked and could identify him. Others had seen him cloaked in darkness, or in his hood, or at a distance. All of the witnesses had untapped and important information to give. The prime suspect had unique body language and, unbidden, the eyewitnesses all commented on Zodiac as lumbering like a bear, clumsy, not very nimble.
Included in this book is an in-depth analysis of the two films that inspired Zodiacs costume and M.O. and the short story that obsessed him. Popular culture and the face of a watch may have inspired him, but Zodiac himself inspired not one, but three copycat murderersin New York, Vallejo, and Japan. Beginning in 1986, I set out to tell the end of Zodiacs chilling storyusing the complete FBI file on Zodiac, confidential state and police files and internal and intradepartmental law enforcement memos, psychological and parole officer files, psychiatrists sessions with the chief suspect, lie-detector tests, never-published newspaper stories, unused reporters notes, and outtakes from television interviews. I have tried to make this book as accurate an account as thirty years of research can provide.
