Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed

522 Pages·2002·14.43 MB·English

by  Robert Graysmith

THE IDENTITY OF AMERICA'S MOST
ELUSIVE SERIAL KILLER REVEALED
ZODIAC
unmasked
ROBERT GRAYSMITH
B E R K L EY B O O KS • NEW YORK
A Berkley Book
Published by The Berkley Publishing Group
A division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
Copyright © 2002 by Robert Graysmith.
The line drawing and maps found on pages ii, 522, and 523 are courtesy of the author.
Text design by Pauline Neuwirth.
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
BERKLEY and the "B" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley hardcover edition / April 2002
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Graysmith, Robert.
Zodiac unmasked : the identity of America's most elusive serial killer revealed /
Robert Graysmith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-425-18332-7
1. Starr, Robert Hall. 2. Serial murders-California-San Francisco Bay Area.
3. Serial murderers-California-San Francisco Bay Area. 4. Serial murder
investigation-California-San Francisco Bay Area. I. Title.
HV6534.S3 G73 2002
364.15'23'0979461-dc21
2001058968
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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to JANE
acknowledgments
All the material in this book is derived from official records or interviews
I've 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.
Author's line-cut illustration of Zodiac in costume at Lake Berryessa.
introduction
Zodiac's 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
fear—yet 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 Starr's 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
name—Zodiac.
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 executioner's hood, emblazoned in white with his sym
bol. 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 pur
posely misspelled words. Sometimes he forgot himself and spelled a word
correctly within the same letter. He used mispunctuation and un-gram-
matical 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 finger
tips 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 (tar
geted for school children), a homemade knife in a decorated scabbard,
vi
and guns of every caliber. We were all afraid. Single-winged planes
trailed school buses manned by armed guards, a reaction to Zodiac's
threat to "pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out." With each
whispered phone call and cryptic message, each bloody scrap of victim's
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
phone—as if he were about to speak his name.
We knew Zodiac, whoever he was, as a man of many parts—cryptog
rapher, 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 holidays—the Fourth of
July, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, Christmas, Halloween, and Labor
Day. In Southern California a double murder on a beach on Whit Mon
day, 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 astrol
ogy (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
Vii
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 fear
ful. In their hearts they knew there was no defense against the compul
sive, 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 Zodiac's 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 murderers—in New
York, Vallejo, and Japan. Beginning in 1986, I set out to tell the end of
Zodiac's chilling story—using the complete FBI file on Zodiac, confi
dential 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 reporter's notes, and outtakes from television
interviews. I have tried to make this book as accurate an account as
thirty years of research can provide.
Most importantly, in this book, for the first time, are all the Zodiac
letters and envelopes previously unreproduced. Quoted are copycat let
ters and possible Zodiac letters mailed anonymously to me. Automatic
writing done under hypnosis by Starr's sister-in-law indicates she saw
Zodiac ciphers in his hand before they appeared in the press. Starr had
bragged to friends, long before there was such a person as Zodiac, that
he would hunt couples with a gun that projected a beam of light, taunt
the police in letters, and call himself Zodiac. As one detective said, "If
this story is true, then he almost has to be Zodiac." Recorded interviews
with detectives and witnesses I conducted almost thirty years ago took
on new meaning as I incorporated hundreds of facts never revealed in
viii
print before.
The long pursuit and lure of the case, its mystery, tragedy, and loss,
ruined marriages, derailed careers, and demolished the health of a bril
liant reporter. Zodiac's story began with obsession, but its ending was a
study in frustration. Police were beaten back time and again. Would the
most elusive killer in history, a cerebral, modern-day Jack the Ripper,
escape them? Or would the dedicated teams of detectives and amateur
sleuths all over the world uncover the final secret of Zodiac? It was a
toss-up whether or not police could ever prove that Starr, their brilliant
and physically powerful chief suspect, was their man. Zodiac's murders
had taken place in different counties and, due to interdepartmental jeal
ousy (Zodiac was the biggest case of all), each police agency withheld
vital information from the others. Not only that, but sexual sadists like
Zodiac (who achieve pleasure through the pain they cause others)
become amazingly proficient at concealing their identities.
We begin unmasking Zodiac on a sultry July Fourth, and conclude on
another, more lethal, Fourth of July. In between we learn of murders
unsuspected, a lonely man in his basement home, and a shadowy figure
who might be Zodiac's accomplice. But it had all begun with a watch. In
that stifling room on that summer day the cops kept reminding them
selves, "It's only a watch." But they were still afraid. That watch was the
stuff of nightmares.
—Robert Graysmith
San Francisco
July 2001
zodiac
Sunday, July 4,1971
Starr's face was everywhere. Across the illuminated showroom, his
round face was reflected in the brass compass, duplicated in the shiny
varnished sides of the Chris Craft, reflected in the deep and highly pol
ished floor, mirrored in the brass work around him, and copied in a hun
dred polished shaft bearings. His stocky form was reproduced full length
in the floor-to-ceiling show window. Finally, the showroom closed, the
holiday sale ended, the lights were extinguished, and Robert Hall Starr
departed. He lumbered toward the lot, an immense shape against the
summer night. As he went, he fished for keys to one of his many cars.
Keys to cars he did not own jangled in his pocket.
At the end of the lot, Starr was a hazy blur—momentarily visible in
the flash of the Volvo's interior lights. He slid behind the wheel, gunned
the engine, and expertly merged into freeway traffic. Soon, he reached
Vallejo, a town typical of many other small California towns baking in a
sultry summer night. Black skeletal derricks flashed by; battleships and
three-tiered warehouses crouched in silhouette. Mare Island loomed as
a shadowy mass across the straits, and sailboats fleeted as oily smudges
on San Pablo Bay. Skyrockets flared briefly above. The staccato pop-pop-
pop of firecrackers was like gunfire. The smell of gunpowder was in the
air. San Francisco towered thirty miles away, Oakland less than twenty,
and to the north the fertile Wine Country stretched through sun
drenched Napa and Sonoma counties.
The town was ideal for a man with so many vehicles. Interstate 80,
the main coast-to-coast route of the West, neatly bisected the suburb.
California 29 and 37 and Interstate 680 twisted veinlike to its heart.
Vallejo occupied a strategic position between San Francisco and the
capital—right where the river snaked down from Sacramento to greet