Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killers Revealed Page 3

  And Starr might be placed down south for the murder of a coed in Riverside, just east of Pomona, where he visited his brother, Ronald, and Cheney and Panzarella at college. Robert Hall Starr had attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the late 1950s and early 1960s while studying to become an elementary school teacher, had even taught at Atascadero State Hospital for the Criminally Insane just to the north of the university. Langstaff assembled some new information, drafted a letter, and sent it flying up to the San Francisco Bay Area—where Starr lived, worked, and hunted.

  Monday, July 19, 1971

  Langstaff’s letter containing Panzarella and Cheney’s suspicions arrived at Armstrong and Toschi’s Bryant Street Headquarters. In contrast to the summer sun, the Hall of Justice was a chilly structure, and massive—750,000 square feet, 885 rooms. The morning light glinted on gold lettering carved into the facade—“EXACT JUSTICE TO ALL . . .” The messenger carried the letter past the metal detector and armed guard and into an elevator to the fourth floor—Homicide and Sex Crimes Detail. He paused at black hand-painted lettering on frosted glass, which read, “Room 454.” A handmade sign above the door read, “City Zoo.” He saw that the room beyond was huge, with polished floors, gray file cabinets, and wooden desks. Finally, the letter landed on San Francisco Homicide Inspector John McKenna’s desk.

  McKenna, an intelligent man, well read, a former banker, had already been alerted by an earlier phone conversation with Detective Amos. He scanned the letter avidly, then rang up Cheney. “We want you to attempt to obtain samples of Starr’s handprinting,” he said. “Any specimens acquired and any new disclosures should be sent directly to Inspector Toschi.” The following day, Toschi’s partner, Bill Armstrong, opened a second letter from the Manhattan Beach police. It provided more details—fascinating details. Pulses began to race. The old black clock on the wall ticked faster.

  World-famous attorney Melvin Belli returned late from the theater and unlocked his opulent Montgomery Street office. His broad face, lit by the warm glow of a Tiffany lamp, was pensive. He sat at a magnificent desk, gazed out his sidewalk picture window, and for long moments rubbed his brow. “The King of Torts” was thinking of Zodiac and his friend Inspector Dave Toschi. Toschi had never forgotten his first meeting with the lawyer. “The elevator door opens and a dozen or so TV people and reporters are there,” Toschi recalled. “And here Belli comes with a black hat slanted very low over his right ear and this long, black cashmere coat draped over his shoulders. I never saw a scarf so long. It must have gone down to his knees because it was wrapped around his neck half a dozen times. You could barely see his face. His wife, dressed in a beautiful tan fur, towered over him. I told the assistant D.A., ‘The Great One has arrived.’ It was Belli’s show and after he entered the packed courtroom, it must have taken him a couple of minutes to unwind that amazing scarf.”

  Zodiac had written the silver-maned solicitor just before Christmas, 1969. “School children make nice targets,” he threatened. “I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning.” “In 1969,” Belli recalled, “the San Francisco papers were full of a one-man crime wave called the Zodiac killer, a real loony who’d attacked three couples in lovers’ lanes in the Bay Area and a cabdriver, killing five of them, and leaving his mark [a crossed circle like a gun sight] at the scene. On October 13, 1969 [twenty-two months after Starr’s discussion with Cheney], the Zodiac had threatened to shoot the tires out on a school bus and ‘pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.’ The police were guarding the school buses and some parents were driving their kids to school in their own cars. The public was frantic, and the police were under a good deal of pressure to find the Zodiac.”

  For some reason Zodiac not only mentioned Belli in his letters, but phoned him more than once. In some twisted way he either admired Belli’s flamboyant courtroom bravado (a bravado second only to his own) or presumed that Belli might offer a lifeline to him. The attorney had defended both Mickey Cohen and Jack Ruby. Now Belli climbed a hard rope ladder to the unique bed he kept fifteen feet up in his living room. He slept fitfully, unable to escape the thought that he actually possessed a clue that might solve the case.

  Thursday, July 22, 1971

  The San Francisco detectives failed in their attempt to get Cheney to obtain samples of Starr’s handprinting. “I didn’t have any source for that,” Cheney told me much later. “Armstrong kind of hinted around: Would I write a letter to him to try and get some response out of him? If I had been a single man at the time I would have done anything they wanted, but I had a wife and two little kids and I didn’t want to open any doors. He could have found me by just looking in the phone directory.”

  Next, the Department of Justice requested samples of Starr’s handprinting from Dr. Frank English, District Superintendent of Valley Springs Elementary School, where Starr had once taught. Dr. English complied immediately, and exemplars of Starr’s handprinting were rushed to the SFPD. By car Toschi hand-delivered the blockprinted applications to CI&I’s Mel Nicolai in Sacramento. Nicolai quickly submitted the samples to Sherwood Morrill, the state agency’s crack documents examiner. The scholarly analyst compared them to Zodiac’s letters and reported to Nicolai the following Thursday. A. L. Coffey, Chief of the Bureau and Nicolai’s boss, wrote the SFPD the same day.

  “Enclosed are the exemplars for Robert Hall Starr,” Coffey stated. “Mr. Sherwood Morrill . . . has compared the printing on the submitted documents with the printing contained in the Zodiac letters and advised they were not prepared by the same person.” Agents returned Starr’s original applications, and they were replaced in his employment file with no one the wiser. In spite of this setback, the San Francisco detectives were not deterred. Zodiac was the most intelligent criminal in their experience. He would know a way around Morrill and how to fake handprinting. That had to be the answer. They rushed on, heedless in their excitement.

  Saturday, July 24, 1971

  In 1970 Detective William Baker joined the Major Crimes Unit of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department and was assigned to several unsolved cases. One was the tragic double murder on a remote beach of two Lompoc High School seniors, Robert George Domingos and Linda Faye Edwards. “I picked up the case seven years after it occurred,” Baker told me. “Several of the investigators on the case were still active, so I took every available opportunity to bug them about it.” One morning Baker came across a Halloween card Zodiac had written to the Chronicle on October 27, 1970. The killer had drawn an arcane “Sartor Cross,” accomplishing this by crossing two words—“Slaves” and “Paradice.” However, Zodiac had printed other words on both sides. These riveted Baker’s attention. The killer had neatly painted, “By ROPE, By GUN, By KNiFE, By FiRE.” Rope, gun, knife, and fire had been part of Baker’s unsolved case.

  “I immediately sent out a statewide Teletype asking for similars,” he said. “I was soon called, in succession, by Bill Armstrong and Mel Nicolai. To make a long story short, both told me that just on the basis of the description I offered them, there was a good possibility Zodiac was responsible and our cases might be linked. However, inconsistent with the other cases attributable to Zodiac, our victims were killed on a Monday. It is unknown if the murders occurred at dusk or later, but it’s unlikely, judging by how the victims were dressed—in swimsuits.” At every possible opportunity Baker worked the Domingos and Edwards case. A long road lay ahead. He began traveling to speak with most of the detectives in most of the precincts where the crimes were attributable to Zodiac.

  Monday, July 26, 1971

  Inspector Armstrong was traveling too. The handsome, silver-haired investigator, sharp-featured and strong-jawed, arrived in Torrance and reached Cheney and Panzarella at Science Dynamics. “Down comes this guy,” Panzarella recalled, “a poster guy for the FBI, but very sensitive for a cop.” Armstrong heard essentially the same story that Amos and Langstaff had. Cheney unerringly re-created the conversation he’d had with his friend. But Armstrong, not satisf
ied, began to probe. “Mr. Cheney,” he asked, “could you have read some news accounts about the Zodiac killings and associated those articles with your conversation with Starr?”

  “That’s not the case,” he replied. “I can recall the conversation and the date. I can recall my responses to what he said. I could testify to the same under oath in court.” Armstrong could not shake him on the date of the conversation. A background investigation revealed Cheney, born in Bakersfield on April 25, 1934, had attended Cal Poly Pomona from fall 1959 until winter 1964 while studying to become a mechanical engineer. Currently he lived in Pomona with his wife and children. He had no criminal record.

  Armstrong spoke next to Sandy Panzarella, Cheney’s boss and longtime friend. He too had studied at Cal Poly Pomona—from fall 1961 until his graduation in spring 1964 with a degree in electronic engineering. Panzarella characterized Cheney as a “very solid person not given to exaggeration or the telling of falsehoods. He’s a very methodical, logical thinker.” Later on Starr’s sister-in-law and brother confirmed Cheney’s reliability. “If Don Cheney said that to you,” Starr’s brother, Ron, said, “I would believe the same to be true.” Armstrong promptly returned to San Francisco to bring Toschi up to speed.

  He and Toschi painstakingly searched for an ulterior motive on Cheney’s part. “Why would he make such a statement to the police if it were not true?” asked Toschi. For Starr to call himself Zodiac, to lay down the method of procedure, the M.O. of the murders, long before Zodiac named himself, was highly incriminating. Unlike Jack the Ripper, who had, in all likelihood, gotten his name through the ingenuity of a London reporter, Zodiac had chosen the sobriquet by which he was now known. The homicide detectives felt that if that conversation were true, then Starr had to be Zodiac. And what had accounted for the long delay in Cheney coming forward to the police? Sometime later Cheney explained how he had come to recall the conversation he had with Starr that fateful New Year’s Day 1969.

  “When I left college,” Cheney told me, “I got a job at G. J. Yamas in San Francisco. I was there a couple of years. Then, when I lived in Concord, I had an unsuccessful period trying to sell life insurance, and moved back to Pomona to start working at the Fluor Company. Fluor was an engineering company, but primarily they were in refineries and chemical plants. At one time Bechtel and Fluor and Parsons were all partners—they built the Bay Bridge together.

  “One evening Ron and Karen, Starr’s brother and sister-in-law, were at my house in Southern California for dinner. We were sitting around the kitchen table chatting, and Karen told us about Starr going to a painting party in his suit. Ron was on the guest list. Ron and his brother were at the party and Starr was the guy in the suit. She was using that as an example of him being unadjusted to social things. She was ragging him on that. She was a little afraid of her brother-in-law because she recognized he was not squared away with the world at all. With her education in social work she had been exposed to such things.

  “One morning I was having breakfast in the new cafeteria at Fluor in what they called the Task Force Center. I had been at the company about three months or four months then. My brother-in-law, Ron Ebersole, had a newspaper and he was pointing to a composite drawing. ‘That looks like your buddy,’ he said. And I looked, and that composite was a picture of Starr—except for the hair and absence of glasses. Ron was the only guy at Fluor who could have recognized him from a prior time. I said, ‘Yes, that looks like him,’ but I didn’t think much of it.”

  What was unique about the sketch was that it was not the round-faced composites from Zodiac’s attacks at Lake Berryessa or in San Francisco, but a profile that Toschi and Armstrong had never seen. “My brother-in-law passed me the paper and I read the article,” Cheney continued. “Up to this moment I had forgotten the crucial details of my conversation with Starr—that he was going to call himself Zodiac. I hadn’t remembered even when I had seen the occasional stories about Zodiac. That sketch was a coincidence, I thought, but a few months later [November 16, 1970] I saw Zodiac’s threat in the Times about shooting out the tires of a school bus and shooting kids as they came bouncing out, something Starr had said to me. I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. I couldn’t ever get over that. That’s when it absolutely clicked. Then I remembered everything he had said.

  “It was another year before I called the police. I was at Fluor in 1969 and 1970. We finished a big contract and they had had major layoffs, so I had about a year where I was working at a big paper mill in Laverne, which was just a few miles up from my house. I didn’t talk to the San Francisco police about it right away, I sat on it a while and just thought about it. I just couldn’t get around the fact that it couldn’t be chance. That was too specific a quote. The 1971 killings in the Grass Valley area had also brought my suspicions to a focus.

  “I went to the Pomona police station since I was living in Pomona at the time, and had an interview with an officer. I spent an hour there and I thought that might execute my responsibility on the business, but nothing ever happened. Apparently what I told him was never reported because they were getting hundreds of tips. Then Sandy Panzarella asked me to come down and work for him in 1971 at Science Dynamics. We were always good friends. After college, Sandy had become an electronic engineer and worked at that for a few years. Then he went into this computer bookkeeping business on his own and did very well. He had the magic touch. He got his foot in the door and soon was doing billing for medical practices and hospitals—that sort of thing.

  “I was the operations manager at Science Dynamics—hiring and firing, managing the keypunch department and twelve girls, two couriers that made all our pickups and deliveries in Los Angeles County, and three or four boys in the mailroom to handle the logistics of the paper. I was responsible for all the material logistics. We had another team that ran the computer part of the business. Of course I’ve used computers in structural analysis and pipe stress, but was never a computer guy. Then one day the subject of Starr came up again and I finally told Sandy of my suspicions.

  “Later, Ron came down to Torrance and we all talked over our apprehensions. Once we got on that discussion, we decided to do something about it. ‘I can see that the police have basically ignored you,’ said Sandy. He was a real ‘take-charge guy.’ I had never spoken to Manhattan Beach police, but for some reason that’s who responded to Science Dynamics in Torrance that afternoon.”

  “Don kept telling me the story,” Panzarella told me later. And he said, “No policeman will answer my call.” I said, “Bullshit! Let’s get on the phone here.” And that’s how it got started. Don was trying and no one took him seriously. He was not an aggressive guy. There was a Torrance policeman named Amos, and I knew if I called him that would get things going. “I know you guys get a lot of crank calls about who the Zodiac killer may be,” I told him. Amos then called up to San Francisco, asked who was on the case, and they referred him to Inspector Bill Armstrong. Armstrong advised, “Get the local P.D. to send us a report.” And then Amos called me back. “Come on over and talk to us,” I said.

  Meanwhile in Vallejo, another investigator was fast becoming an expert on Zodiac—Detective George Bawart (Bow-art), a stocky, powerful man, relentless as a bloodhound. “Cheney had already talked to Panzarella about his suspicions,” Bawart told me later, “and at that time Cheney still was friends with Starr. Then he became non-friends. There was an inference that Starr may have become too friendly with his daughter, and Cheney broke off the relationship because of that. And I was concerned that was the reason he might be making up a story.

  “I don’t really trust polygraphs to any great degree, but that was one of the reasons we afterward ran Cheney on a polygraph up in the state of Washington. The Washington state police ran Cheney on a poly and he came out clean. He was telling the truth. I tend to agree with the results of that because Panzarella claims and Cheney claims that before the falling-out occurred, he had alluded to this incident to Panzarella.”

  In
mid-1967 Starr and Cheney and his wife and daughter, who was two or three at the time, went camping and fly-rod fishing up near Valley Springs in the Mokelumne. The daughter came up and said, ‘Daddy, Uncle Bob touched my bottom.’ Cheney, noting his daughter wasn’t upset or hurt, had no reason to believe that his friend had really done something like that. However, from that point on when Cheney was around his friend, he didn’t have his family. “He stayed friends with Starr for a year and a half after that,” said a source. “Of course the daughter couldn’t communicate very well. If Cheney was upset he wouldn’t have stayed friends afterward for so long, right? They were pals long after that.”

  Tuesday, July 27, 1971

  Lieutenant Ellis of SFPD Homicide relayed Armstrong and Toschi’s findings to Vallejo Police Sergeant Jack Mulanax, alerting him the two inspectors would soon pay a visit. At the time Mulanax inherited the Blue Rock Springs murder case (and with it the Zodiac investigation), his chief, Jack E. Stiltz, had made a comment. “Zodiac keeps putting out clues for us,” Stiltz lamented, “taunts us and doesn’t indicate in any way that he suffers from the slightest feeling of remorse. He is a thrill killer and the most dangerous person I’ve ever encountered in all my years of law enforcement.” Mulanax agreed. Mulanax was also a man known to get white hot about a suspect, and once he scanned what the SFPD had learned so far, his temperature rose. His first order of business was to learn as much as possible about Zodiac’s true physical appearance and compare it to the new suspect’s.