Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killers Revealed Page 10
Robert was the eighteen-year-old son of a well-to-do Lompoc rancher; Linda was to be eighteen in three days. For both it had been a day of farewell and anticipation as they looked forward to their nuptials in October. The teenagers were roughly twenty miles west of Santa Barbara and three miles from El Capitan Beach. Robert dug a large blanket from the trunk, and the couple crossed the highway and over railroad tracks running between them and a low bluff. From the bluff, one of the chain of unstable sea cliffs tracing the shoreline, they had a view of the mile-and-a-half-long state beach below. Beyond stood the Channel Islands—San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz. Robert and Linda commenced down a steep, partially hidden path to the beach, running the last twenty yards. Banana palm trees lining Refugio Creek gave the area a tropical atmosphere. Where the creek flowed into the ocean, a freshwater lagoon had formed.
Robert and Linda reached an isolated spot frequented only by the occasional local fisherman. They saw evidence of recent activity. Long ago this beach had been the chief contrabandista port on the coast, visited by genteel smugglers and ferocious pirates. At the mouth of the canyon, buried in the sand, lay traces of an ancient adobe foundation. In early California days a grand rancho, La Nuestara Señora del Refugio, stood there. It faced the sea boldly until the French pirate Hyppolyte de Bouchard—by gun, by knife, by rope, and by fire—put an end to that. His buccaneers wounded the servants, cut the throats of the horses, tied up the Ortega family, and burned their impressive hacienda.
The teenagers spread out their blanket on the sand near the rocky shoreline. The day before, at just the same spot, a man with reddish hair had been shooting at seagulls with a rifle. Rich tide pools, swarming with life, moved with each surge of salt water. Spray exploded against black rocks, and the sharp tang of sea air filled the teenagers’ lungs. Sailboats danced in Santa Barbara Channel, and in the sky aircraft droned lazily—an airport was nearby. The laughing pair lounged in their swimsuits at the surf line as the day passed and the sky clouded over. Of all transitional domains, those between sea and land are the most disparate and prone to alteration. Robert and Linda grew drowsy, barely aware of the boom of the waves and wavelets rustling eel grasses at the sea edge. The crack of a twig on the path made them start. The lowering sun flashing off the water and gusts of sand blinded them. They drew back as a squarish shadow fell upon the sand. Peering up, they saw a man leveling a .22-caliber rifle at them.
By Rope—He barked orders. First came fumbling attempts to tie them—the man had brought along precut lengths of narrow cotton clothesline. First he coerced Linda to bind Robert. She had tied a loosely knotted length around his wrist, and was still clinching a rope in her hand when the stranger knelt. With trembling fingers, he began to finish the tying himself—first with a few granny knots and then marline hitches, a knot not commonly used by laymen. In the midst of this, Robert and Linda leaped to their feet and plunged into the steep creek bed leading uphill from the blanket. The couple tried to run in the soft sand of the creek bed. They lurched in the general direction of a shack, which had been barely visible from the blanket.
By Gun—The interloper thundered after them, firing on the run. Slugs ripped into the young man first, hitting him in the back as he ran screaming for help. There was no one to hear them. The bullets were closely grouped, astonishing accuracy for shooting while moving. Robert dropped face down. The stranger then swung the rifle toward Linda, firing into her back. He approached slowly until he stood over the couple. He pumped more bullets into the boy’s back, striking him in all eleven times. Linda had fallen onto her back, and so a fusillade of bullets penetrated her chest. Altogether, she was hit eight times.
The killer’s viciousness had not abated as he continued to inflict injuries upon the corpses. Dragging Robert face down by his legs away from the shoreline, he left welts and abrasions just above the boy’s surfer’s trunks. Rocks scraped his chest and face, leaving deep contusions. The stranger was sweating by the time he completed the first part of his gruesome task—hiding the corpse in the woodpile shelter by the nearly dry creek bed. The primitive structure lay halfway between the shore and the railroad embankment. Almost lost among dense shrubs and trees, it was used mostly by transients.
By Knife—He returned to the woman, cut down the front of her swimsuit with a knife, and exposed her breasts. He slashed her body, the wounds describing a curved river. Next, he dragged her feet-first to the shack, and because Linda was supine, all the abrasions were to her back and buttocks. After pulling her inside the lean-to, he ripped off her swimsuit and tossed it callously over her fiancé. Then he draped Linda’s body, face up, over the boy.
By Fire—Now the stranger looked around for things to burn. He gathered up his leftover lengths of rope and empty cartridge boxes and tossed them into the shack. Smashing the lean-to, he ignited it with wooden matches he had brought along. A funeral pyre would hide all traces of his crime. Although he tried several times, the structure refused to catch, or he might have returned to his car on the road above believing that everything behind him was blazing.
Tuesday, June 4, 1963
When Linda and Robert failed to return, Domingos’s father filed a missing persons report. The Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department issued an all-points bulletin. The father, along with other family members, joined the search party, and that night located the missing boy’s car in the turnout. A Highway Patrolman took the trail to the beach below to look further. The lean-to shack was so concealed it took searchers thirty hours to discover the teenagers. Tracks and postmortem marks on the bodies showed they had been dragged there. That there were no usable latent prints meant the killer had likely worn gloves. It was an incomparably evil crime.
No sexual attack had taken place, and that was uncommon. At least there was no presence of semen, though the relatively primitive forensic techniques of the time might have missed it. Still, that was doubtful. The board-certified forensics pathologist who performed the autopsies was highly qualified, having been trained at the L.A. Coroner’s Office.
A contingent of jail inmates roved the crime scene. Prisoners had been bused there to scour the brush and comb a three-mile section of desolate beach for evidence. The lead sheriff’s detective, William Baker, feared they might have compromised the integrity of the crime scene. “You have an inkling of what I am up against,” Baker told me, “as I strive to resurrect from the ashes the reality of the case. You have to figure it was 1963. We’d go out with either Search and Rescue, or sometimes get other explorers. This time they had trustees out there going on searches for cartridge casings or whatever else they could find. I shudder when I think about it, but that’s the reality. And they did find some casings, quite a few, expended along the victims’ flight path—a dry creek bed that led from the blanket near the beach up towards the shack where the kids were actually found. Two distinct points where more casings were located served to pinpoint where the victims were initially dropped.”
One convict spotted twenty .22-caliber shell casings glimmering in the canyon creek bed. Detectives spied something too—shoe tracks cut deeply into the light sand and sparse grass leading to and from the ragged shelter. The tracks came from a Navy or Air Force shoe similar to Wing Walkers. Both the ammo and shoes were sold through base exchanges. Vandenberg Air Force Base, a SAC unit, lay near Lompoc, and was only an hour’s drive from the murder site.
“And since this was an early experience for the killer,” Baker noted, “he may have held onto his weapon and even the same ammo to use again.” The murderer had used Winchester .22 ammo, long-rifle—the same brand and caliber Zodiac would use five and a half years later on dark Lake Herman Road just outside Vallejo. “The location where Domingos and Edwards chose to spend ‘Ditch Day’ was isolated,” Baker said, “and not a site where one would expect to find young couples, even with the presence of the victims’ car at the turnout. Given that, the killer, armed with a firearm and knife, along with precut lengths of rope and wooden matches, descend
ed upon our victims with apparent murderous intent. Were they followed there? Had he selected his victims beforehand and was there a way to find a connection between the victims and the killer?”
Though Baker could not name them, he suspected items were missing from the crime site. In his studies, he scanned six eight-by-ten-inch police glossies. One showed the arson attempt upon the lean-to, the male victim in situ within the shack. Another photo showed Sheriff James W. Webster, Chief of Detectives Charles Taylor, and a local TV anchorman by the lean-to. The newsman was posed with his hand on the shack and a cigarette in his mouth. Baker studied three pictures of Robert on the autopsy table showing contusions and abrasions on his knuckles. The discoloration on the knuckles of his right hand (Baker could not see the left in the pictures) led him to suspect Robert had fought with his attacker. “Those abrasions on his face were perimortem or postmortem when he was dragged face down by his feet to the shack,” said Baker. “I suspect the same thing would have happened to the Berryessa victims if they had broken loose from Zodiac. Zodiac would have dropped his knife and gunned them down. As for the red-haired man [seen the day before], police found him and determined to their satisfaction that he wasn’t involved. Other circumstances didn’t lead me to give it any particular emphasis. As for Riverside, I felt Zodiac had only taken credit for that murder. But the attack had occurred in Southern California and Zodiac talked about there being a lot more of them down here. He might have meant our case.”
Wednesday, June 5, 1963
Edwards and Domingos had just been killed and were in everyone’s thoughts. Certainly the tragedy occupied Panzarella and Cheney’s minds. They had discussed the murders at length. Because of that, they were able to accurately recall the exact weekend Allen appeared suddenly at their door. In Lompoc the high school graduations ceremonies were still held, but conducted around two empty seats. Above those lonely chairs, a flag fluttered at half-mast. Six months passed as the terrible and motiveless murders remained unsolved.
Monday, December 9, 1963
Allen, still qualifying for his teaching credentials, continued to apply for various positions at the Department of Education in Sacramento. While he was waiting, his scholastic record and military background allowed him to teach school at Travis AFB in Fairfield, not far from Vallejo. Though he preferred elementary classes, he settled for instructing seventh- and eighth-graders in spelling, health, and P.E. He was permitted to shop at the base exchange, purchasing goods at discount—everything from ammo for his hunting trips to boots. However, Wing Walker shoes were not sold there until two years later when the Weinbrenner shipment was dispersed. After a year at the Travis school, he was fired for habitually leaving an assortment of deadly weapons lying about his car in plain sight.
“The thing that got me,” recalled Panzarella, “was that when Leigh lost a teaching job, he came down in his Austin Healey sports car and tried to convince us guys that he lost the job because they had a security check and he was carrying a revolver. But the real reason was child molesting. He used the phrase that it made him so angry that he wanted to ‘kill the little kiddies as they came bouncing off the bus.’ That stuck with me all my life. And that’s the phrase that was later used by the Zodiac killer.”
In 1964, Leigh taught at Watsonville, north of Salinas, and heard a strange story. In the San Bernardino area at Pacific High School, a young student in dark-framed glasses with a black elastic band strode unannounced to the front of the classroom. The teacher had not yet arrived. “In very large letters, he wrote ZODIAC on the blackboard,” said a student there, “along with a few codelike symbols I cannot recall.”
In August 1965, Leigh lacerated his leg in an accident that required plastic surgery, and though his mishap hobbled him well into 1966, he still sent out feelers for a new teaching job. “The injury,” he wrote on December 23, 1965, “put me out of commission until recently.” But he was reportedly able to work a little for his friend Glen Rinehart’s brother, Dale, at an airfield in Texas, where he got his pilot’s license. His weight was now 220 pounds.
Saturday, June 18, 1966
Claiming a state credential in General Elementary and four years’ teaching experience, Allen applied by mail to the Calaveras Unified School District in San Andreas for work. “I also enjoy the country,” he wrote, “and I can’t stand smog.” He listed the grades he wanted to instruct in order of preference—“4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.” “I can teach physical education and art and music, but not too well.” The elementary school subjects that most interested him were “athletics, science, nature study, and music appreciation.” He gave his height as six feet, altered his weight to reflect another ten pounds gained because of his incapacity, and mentioned membership “until this year” in two professional organizations—the NEA and CTA. Leigh exaggerated the time he had actually taught, and claimed a present salary of $300 per month. He quickly altered the figure to $400. “When can you come in for an interview?” he was asked. “Mondays or Tuesdays would be best as I am involved in recreation on other days,” he answered.
He began honing his teaching skills at a school called Mountain Town in the Sierras and at Valley Springs Elementary School in Valley Springs, a Northern California town just west of San Andreas. On the Valley Springs application he wrote down Ted Kidder as a reference. Leigh taught his first year of grade school at Valley Springs uneventfully, but soon old problems arose—his improper attentions toward children and poorly concealed hatred of women.
“Leigh sent out a lot of resumes,” Cheney told me, “and worked hard to find a teaching job. But I didn’t know about the teaching jobs that he had had. He didn’t speak about that. I knew he taught at Travis, but I didn’t see or visit him while he was there. He looked a lot like Dan Blocker, ‘Hoss’ Cartwright on the Bonanza television show, so in the sixties, when Leigh used to go to a big sporting event or there were a lot of people around, he had a big white cowboy hat he would wear. He wanted people, especially kids, to think he was Dan Blocker. As for that cowboy hat, Leigh had that before I met him, and probably had been pulling that deception since the show came on the air in 1959.” Leigh would smile and say, “‘Hoss’ is Scandinavian for Good Luck.”
Sunday, October 30, 1966
Leigh Allen, wearing his white cowboy hat and “Big” Dan Blocker smile, traveled to Riverside to attend the Los Angeles International Grand Prix. That autumn afternoon, he watched the race along with approximately eighty thousand people. At 6:10 P.M. Cheri Jo Bates, an eighteen-year-old Riverside City College freshman, set out along Magnolia to the RCC library. The library closed between 5:00 and 6:00 P.M. In order to realize her ambition to become an airline stewardess, Cheri Jo had to meet education and age requirements. She would qualify by the end of her sophomore year and had contacted many of the major airlines. Cheri Jo had just visited her fiancé of two years, Dennis Earl Highland, at San Francisco State University. Inexplicably, she told two girlfriends, “I’m going to the library to meet my boyfriend.” However, Highland was at that moment playing football in San Francisco at S. F. State. Police later conjectured that she had meant a former suitor.
A friend observed the strikingly attractive, blond cheerleader speed by in her lime-green VW. A 1965-66 bronze Oldsmobile followed closely behind. She parked, leaving the right passenger window partially down. Ten minutes later Cheri Jo checked out three books from the local college library. Though her friends were at the small, cramped library between 7:15 and 8:57 P.M., none recalled seeing her there. At 9:00 P.M., when the archives closed, she returned to her car to discover the engine would not catch. And here she had been working part-time at the Riverside National Bank just to pay for the vehicle. Parked behind her car was a Tucker Torpedo that had not been there before.
In her absence, someone had gained access to the engine, yanked out the distributor coil and condenser, and disconnected the middle wire of the distributor. As Cheri Jo ran the battery down, a man approached from the shadows and stepped to the partially rol
led-down right-side window. “Having trouble?” he said. “Let me take a look at the engine.” After failing to start the auto, he said, “My car is over in the parking lot. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.” She left her books on the seat and keys still in the ignition. Did she know the man, or had he forced her to accompany him?
The unlit gravel road to the parking lot was long, dark, and silent. The pair walked approximately two hundred feet away and paused in a dirt driveway midway between two vacant frame houses at 3680 and 3692 Terracina. Their conversation was later detailed in a typed “confession letter” sent to the police. “It’s about time,” he said. “About time for what?” she asked. “It’s about time for you to die.” A knife was in his hand. Between 10:15 and 10:45 P.M. a female neighbor heard an “awful scream.” At 10:30 another heard “two screams.” After a couple of minutes of silence, an old car started up. In that time the killer, trailing drops of blood, had gone back to search for something he had dropped.
Monday, October 31, 1966
A groundskeeper discovered Cheri Jo at 6:28 A.M. From the forty-two stab wounds, estimates were the knife blade was approximately three and one-half inches long and one and one-half inch wide. The motive was mystifying—she was fully clothed and had not been sexually attacked or robbed. During a ferocious, earth-churning battle, Bates had scratched her killer’s face and ripped a paint-spattered Timex watch from his wrist. The black band, broken away from one side of the watch face, measured seven inches in circumference. The Timex had been purchased at a military base exchange. The B.F. Goodrich heel prints found near Bates’s body indicated a size-8-to-10 Wing Walker-like shoe manufactured for the military by Leavenworth prisoners and sold by military exchanges. Just outside Riverside city limits lay March Air Force Base, a SAC base. A number of greasy finger and palm prints were discovered on the left door of the victim’s car. Four workmen had been seen across the street from where Bates’s car was parked on Terracina. The prints were sent to Washington and the Timex to CI&I.