Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killers Revealed Read online

  Two Lees were crossing paths in Darlene’s life. “Robbie” or “Lee” (she apparently called him by both names) lived close enough to see into Darlene’s house on Wallace Street. Thus, he had no reason to park out front to watch her. That had to be a second “Lee.” I asked Mulanax about him. “Assuming that Zodiac is one of Darlene’s new friends, did you ever put together a list of her new acquaintances? Did you come across a Robbie?” “The people interviewed were her family basically and her coworkers,” he answered. “There are numerous people there she was associated with, but whether they were her new friends, I don’t know.”

  On June 29, 1969, Darlene confided to her friend Bobbie Ramos, at a county fair, that “Lee” was the name of a man who had lived across the street from her. A Terry’s waitress had also observed a man in a white car, its vertical grill bars blacked out like a Mustang, following Darlene. She had jotted down his license number, and this enabled me to track the car down. The vehicle was a 1968 white hardtop Cougar Mercury coupe (only hardtops were made until 1969). I was disappointed. That car could not have been the one Zodiac used at Lake Berryessa. His worn tire tracks showed two different-size tires and a width between the wheels of 57 inches. The Cougar had the widest wheelbase around—111 to 123 inches. Its wheelbase width was closer to the white four-door hardtop 1959-60 Chevy Impala seen at the murder site on Lake Herman Road. Coincidentally, the Cougar’s owner had traded in a 1960 Impala sedan in April 1969 for the Mercury.

  Only one apartment building, 553, stood on Wallace Street. After a long search, I found and interviewed the Cougar’s registered owner, a Robbie Lee Moncure, who had once lived at the Wallace Street apartment house and worked at Kresge’s and Mare Island Naval Station. In 1971, he had moved to Fresno, California, and in April 1977, sold and junked the Cougar. However, he was black-haired, too thin (165 pounds), and too young (twenty-five at the time of the murders) to be Zodiac. My hope was that if he had been watching Darlene, he might have seen the older man named “Lee” who was watching her.

  “We were real close . . . friends,” Robbie told me, “and that was it! She didn’t share the names of her friends with anybody. Each was sort of separate. I didn’t pry. . . . I was just into her. These little games she played with different people were like you could see on TV or in a movie. A series that was going on and on. Darlene was petite. Full of devilment. She was on Wallace Street and flying a kite one night. But I remember that she called me another night from the Coronado Inn to come out and pick her up. She didn’t trust this guy—an older man. The guy I saw was stocky. At the time I wasn’t paying too much attention to him because she told me she wanted to come home right away.” Robbie could recall no more.

  A year after this encounter, a Vallejo resident, Marie Anstey, vanished from the Coronado Inn parking lot on Friday the thirteenth. Anstey, bludgeoned, then drowned, had not been sexually molested and was found near water—like the Santa Rosa victims. I believed Robbie Lee had seen Zodiac unmasked.

  Leigh Allen could be linked to Darlene through the painting party and her friends who knew of a shadowy figure named “Lee.” Could he now be connected to Darlene on the night of her murder? I had sought Lynch’s advice. He was not totally unaware that a man named “Lee” might be Zodiac. He had searched out tips on a variety of men with the middle name Lee. One owned a .22-caliber gun, a .45, and a 9-mm gun. “There was a guy here who thinks he’s Zodiac, a local nut,” said Lynch. “He’s been in and out of Napa. In fact I knew him. I didn’t think I knew him when I got that tip by letter from out of state by his ex-wife. He was a sadistic two-hundred-pounder, six feet tall, with a fetish for leather. He told his wife, ‘You will be my slave in the hereafter, ’ a phrase similar to Zodiac’s ‘slaves in the afterlife’ remark. You can’t really pin anything down with those guys. None of them will ever talk to you.”

  “Who tipped you to Leigh Allen as Zodiac?” I asked the last time we spoke. “Was the informant anonymous?”

  “I think the information came through the local sheriff’s office . . . Les Lundblad, he’s dead now. I think the information came through him. Yeah, everything was coming second-hand. You could never talk to anyone directly.”

  “You talked to Darlene’s sister, Linda, in San Jose.”

  “I did talk to her—many times.”

  “Did you ever speak to this ‘Lee’ from the painting party?”

  “No.”

  “They dug a perfect bullet out of the car,” I said, “one that wasn’t smashed. It probably went through the fleshy part of Darlene’s body and had just enough momentum to penetrate the upholstery. That copper-coated ammo was pretty new. It had only been out for six months. Did you ever get a lead on that?”

  “No,” said Lynch. “I admit I don’t know much about guns. A guy on Skyline Boulevard south of San Francisco was firing his gun and he had that kind of ammo. I had that guy in, trying to find out out how he got that. Nothing came of it. I never thought that Zodiac chased Darlene and Mike to Blue Rock Springs. I believe that guy just came upon them at random. He was just out there to shoot somebody and he found them.” I disagreed with that. Zodiac had to have stalked them to some degree. At last I came to that fatal Fourth of July.

  “It was an exceptionally hot Fourth,” Bobbie Oxnam told me. “Everyone was down by the waterfront.” The sky was filled with a spectacular display of pyrotechnics. The staccato pop-pop-pop of firecrackers was like gunfire. The smell of gunpowder was in the air. Earlier in the day Darlene had her hood up by a bowling alley when she had an altercation with a man driving a white van. He was later described to police as thirty years old, six feet tall, 180 to 185 pounds, with hair “the color of champagne combed straight back.”

  “Darlene was all excited when she came into Caesar’s that evening,” Carmela Leigh told me. Caesar’s stood at 1576 Vervais Street, near Elmer Cave School, where Leigh Allen worked. “All I knew was she was going to get to ride on a boat in the parade. When Darlene left at 7:00 P.M., she said, ‘I’m going to have a party,’ and wanted me to come. I said, ‘Yeah, OK, OK,’ but she knew I wouldn’t be there.”

  Darlene and her sister, Christina, went out to Mare Island for a ride on a decorated and lighted boat, the General French Genora. Leigh Allen’s boat reportedly was also in Vallejo’s Traditional Boat Parade on the channel. “A friend of hers had a boat,” Mulanax told me. “There were two guys on a boat and two guys flying that Darlene knew.” At 10:00 P.M., after the Mare Island parade, Darlene and Christina stopped by Caesar’s again. Darlene had planned a small party at her house after the restaurant closed. Fifteen minutes later she called her sitters and learned Bobbie Ramos wanted to talk to her. At 10:30 P.M. Darlene and Christina arrived at Terry’s, and Darlene went inside to talk to several waitresses. “Darlene did not speak to anyone other than some of the girls who work at Terry’s before she took me home,” Christina recalled.

  But outside the restaurant Darlene had a second confrontation. She argued with a man in his “thirties or forties” in a blue car with out-of-state plates. Earlier in the evening, Deputy Ben Villareal had seen a blue 1967 Ford sedan sitting out at Blue Rock Springs. Christina (the “most stable and honest member of Darlene’s family”) said she “sensed a tension in the air and in the conversations.” Darlene came away “very upset.” She asked Darlene, “What’s going on?” “Don’t worry about it,” Darlene answered, “you’ll read about it tomorrow in the papers.” Only a day or two before, Darlene had told her the same thing. “Really, something big is gonna happen. . . . I can’t tell you yet, but it’s going to be this week.” Christina later mentioned the out-of-state car, the stranger, and her sister’s odd remarks—none of which appear in the final VPD report—to a detective:“DEE and CHRISTINA went to Terry’s Restaurant where DEE talked with several waitresses and, outside the restaurant, talked to a man (nfi) parked outside in a blue car with out-of-state plates (nfi). CHRISTINA claims to have sensed a tension in the air and in the conversations and reportedly asked DEE w
hat was going on to which DEE allegedly replied, “Don’t worry about it—you’ll read about it tomorrow in the papers.” Her description of the car was later modified in a notation made by Lt. Jim Husted in the left margin: The car was “1) all white. 2) larger than Dee’s Corvair. 3) Older than Dee’s Corvair (1963).”

  Pam also confirmed the argument in Terry’s parking lot. “All I know was when she came back to the car,” she told me, “the story I got was that he wanted to take her out. She didn’t want to go out with him because she was married . . . he was between thirty-five and thirty-eight years old.” One argument had been in daylight; the other an hour and a half before the shooting at Blue Rock Springs. Investigators had confused the nighttime argument with a morning confrontation. Just like Robbie and Lee, they were two different things at two different times. At 10:45 P.M. Darlene dropped Christina off at the family Vallejo home. The sitters, Janet Lynn Rhodes and Pamela Kay, were anxious to go. They had been sitting since early afternoon. Janet Lynn had sat for Darlene only that Fourth of July. The girls told Darlene “an older-sounding man” had been calling her repeatedly. Darlene changed from her patriotic jumpsuit of red, white, and blue stars. Quickly, she donned blue shoes and a white-and-blue flower-patterned slack dress, a pattern Zodiac would later describe.

  “Dee knew the teenagers killed out on Lake Herman Road,” Janet Lynn confirmed to me. “She had said that. ‘He’s back from out of state. I once saw him kill somebody.’” Later, from his hospital bed, a heavily sedated Mike Mageau told police what happened next.

  “Dee came [via Georgia Street east] to MAGEAU’S home at 864 Beech-wood [west of Hogan High where Betty Lou Jensen had attended],” read the official statement. “At approximately 11:30 P.M. . . . and picked him up in her car. Since both were hungry, he said, they headed down Springs Road and went toward Vallejo. However, at approximately Mr. Ed’s Restaurant, Dee said she wanted to talk with him about something.”

  An eerie parallel here—Betty Lou and David had stopped at Mr. Ed’s Drive-In too just before being shot. The teenagers had visited Sharon, a friend, on Brentwood Avenue at 8:20 P.M., and remained until 9:00 P.M. At 10:30 their Christmas concert was over and they went from there to Mr. Ed’s, then Lake Herman Road. Mr. Ed’s phone number was later found scrawled on a photo envelope in Darlene’s purse along with the words “hacked,” “stuck,” “testified,” and “seen.” Had Zodiac, December 20, 1968, mistaken Betty Lou for Darlene? Betty Lou Jensen bore an uncanny resemblance to Darlene Ferrin at age seventeen (I had two photos of them at the same age). The odds of Zodiac happening upon two women who could be twins in pitch blackness and in widely separated, remote areas were incalculable—unless he trailed them. On several occasions Betty Lou had cautioned her older sister, Melody, to close the blinds. On occasion, their mother found the gate leading to the side of the house open and tracks in the garden.

  Did Zodiac mistake the teenagers for Darlene and her friend Steven Kee, whose parents lived on Cottonwood one street over from Jensen’s friend, Sharon? Did he trail them to Mr. Ed’s, Darlene’s hangout? Or was Betty Lou’s murder meant as a warning to Darlene, who claimed to know her?

  “They turned around and at his suggestion,” continued Mageau’s report, “drove east on Springs Road to Blue Rock Springs where they could talk.”

  “The minute they drove off, Mike told Dee they were being followed,” Linda said. “Just that phrase, ‘We’re being followed.’”

  “How did you hear that?” I asked.

  “I heard that through Sergeant Lynch and Sergeant Mulanax. Darlene started just going down any side streets and this car just kept following them. . . . I don’t know what made her go toward Blue Rock Springs.” Linda had also spoken to Mike in the hospital after Zodiac shot him, and I was anxious to hear what else she had learned.

  “They knew they were being followed?” I asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “And Darlene thought it was someone named Lee.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She did say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the police understand that Zodiac’s name was supposed to be Lee?”

  “I don’t think so, but Mike knows who Zodiac is. He does.”

  Pam agreed. “Zodiac knew Darlene,” she told me, “because he called her by name . . . she was known by ‘Dee’ and he called her ‘Dee.’”

  “He did this when he shot her?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And this is something Mike told you.”

  “And this is something Mike told me in the hospital.” His acute tongue injury had prevented him from providing a description to police for two days.

  “One unconfirmed source states that MAGEAU claimed they were followed from the time they left his house by a similar suspect car.”

  Was this true? Sue Ayers, a legal secretary and friend, talked to Mike in the hospital. “Dee and the shooter,” he told her, “had an argument at Terry’s on July 4. They drove away and the man followed them to Blue Rock Springs where the argument continued and shooting followed.” The daughter of the caretaker at Blue Rock Springs reportedly witnessed the argument in the lot, and seconds before shots rang out told her father there was going to be trouble. Mike’s offical statements continued the story:

  “After five minutes there,” MAGEAU said, a car [reportedly a 1958-59 brown Ford Falcon with old California plates] pulled in from Springs Road, the driver turned off his lights and pulled around to the left of their car (east of their car) some six to eight feet from Dee’s car. The car remained there for about one minute.

  Mike said he asked Dee if she knew who it is and she stated, “Oh, never mind. Don’t worry about it.” Mageau said he did not know if this meant she knew who it was or not. The car left after one minute at terrific speed, hurtling toward Vallejo on Springs Road, and they were left alone in the darkened lot overlooking the golf course. About five minutes later the man returned. He parked on the passenger side and to the rear of their car, headlights still on. A man came up to them carrying a flashlight with a handle on it. Were Darlene and Mike followed to Blue Rock Springs? I asked Mulanax. “I wouldn’t have that feeling because my thought is these Zodiac killings are not planned,” he said. “They’re opportunity things. That’s my feeling.”

  “But Zodiac did describe what Darlene was wearing and it was pretty dark.”

  “He was also shining a heavy big flashlight in there too.”

  “That’s true.”

  “It’s a flashlight that has a handle on it like you’d use in a boat. The kind that floats.”

  “MAGEAU said they thought it was the Police and they started to get some identification out of their purse/wallets when suddenly the man started shooting. MAGEAU said it sounded like the gun had a silencer on it.”

  This was a fact never reported, something only Zodiac would know. In 1991, after the search of his home, Leigh Allen told a friend, “They missed a few things—like the silencer I had hidden in my socks in the dresser.” Had Zodiac turned away, not to reload, but to install a silencer? Darlene, Mike, and the stranger had already attracted the attention of George R. Bryant, twenty-two, a Selby Smelter employee and son of the Blue Rock Springs caretaker. “The groundskeeper’s son saw three people arguing,” Mulanax told me. “Bryant was in a two-story house looking out the window and trying to get some shut-eye. Fifteen minutes later, he heard gunshots.” Bryant was some eight hundred feet from the lot lying on his stomach when he heard “one shot, a short interval, another shot, a pause, then rapid fire.” Finally he heard “a tire screeching as a car left the scene.” Bryant’s recall of the number of shots was insufficient. Zodiac fired a total of seven shots.

  “After firing repeatedly the man turned to walk back to his car, but MAGEAU believes he cried out and the man returned and fired two more shots at him & twice more at Dee.”

  Mageau, wounded in his neck, left leg, and right arm, was thrashing his legs when Zodiac fired a second time. “Mike got the door ope
n,” Lynch told me, “and fell out of the car, and the only time he even looked at the guy was when the guy got back into his car and he opened the door and he got a clear profile view of him. You know, where some people kind of comb their hair up in a kind of pompadour and then back.” Mike described Zodiac as having “a large face, thirty years old, with short curly light-brown hair worn in a military-style brush cut. As for his build, he was beefy, heavyset without being blubbery fat, 195-200 pounds and had a slight potbelly.”

  Sergeant Richard Hoffman, responding to the crime scene, took up the story from there. “I was working juvenile division as a plainclothesman in a plain car when the call came out that night,” he told me. “It was dark at Blue Rock Springs, elms swaying in the wind, the wild cries of strutting peacocks roaming the grounds coming to my ears. Roy Conway and I had been the first officers to reach Blue Rock Springs [four miles from downtown Vallejo and two miles from the site of the earlier Lake Herman murders]. Mike Mageau had originally been in the backseat, but I found him outside on the ground on his back. His eyes were wide and he lifted his arms upward as if imploring me for help. When he opened his mouth to call for aid, blood gurgled out. CPR had just come in, and the doctor removed Darlene’s sweater and began applying pressure to her chest. With each downward pressure the little tag on her bra fluttered as air exited the bullet hole. The M.E. took this probe and put it in each of Mike’s wounds—he was staring upward and fully conscious—feeling every bit of it.”