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

380 Pages·2007·1.89 MB·English

by  Robert Graysmith

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Chapter 1 - zodiac
Chapter 2 - robert hall starr
Chapter 3 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 4 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 5 - robert domingos and linda edwards
Chapter 6 - avery and the dark alley
Chapter 7 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 8 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 9 - policeman and sailor
Chapter 10 - the devil
Chapter 11 - atascadero
Chapter 12 - witches
Chapter 13 - the voice of zodiac
Chapter 14 - suspects
Chapter 15 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 16 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 17 - zodiac suspects
Chapter 18 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 19 - zodiac’s “dangerous game”
Chapter 20 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 21 - zodiac at treasure island
Chapter 22 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 23 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 24 - zodiac II
Chapter 25 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 26 - zodiac II returns
Chapter 27 - the big tip
Chapter 28 - the search
Chapter 29 - belli
Chapter 30 - media starr
Chapter 31 - jack zodiac
Chapter 32 - the german hippie
Chapter 33 - zodiac
Chapter 34 - zodiac
Chapter 35 - the conference
Chapter 36 - zodiac III
Chapter 37 - arthur leigh allen
Chapter 38 - the city at the bottom of the lake
Chapter 39 - unmasked

epilogue
appendices
sources
selected references
index

A Berkley Book

Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

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New York, New York 10014

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2002 by Robert Graysmith.

All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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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.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67746-5

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

Most Berkley Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book

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For details, write: Special Markets, The Berkley Publishing Group, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

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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 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 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—cryptographer, 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 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 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, 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 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 letters 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 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 brilliant

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 jealousy (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 themselves, “It’s only a watch.” But they were still afraid. That watch was the stuff of
nightmares.

—Robert Graysmith San Francisco July 2001

1

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 polished floor, mirrored in the brass work around him, and copied in a hundred
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 the Bay Area—right where salt water embraced fresh. Here, a deepwater channel for
seagoing traffic linked the Sacramento and San Joaquin River ports. Surrounded by water on three sides, Vallejo was a water town—home for
Zodiac, a water-obsessed killer—a sailor of the knife, a mariner of the gun and of the rope.

Starr braked at a chestnut-colored stucco two-story house slouching on the east side of Fresno Street. Spanish tiles traced the rooflines of the

low-pitched dwelling. At the rear, a modest chimney peeked over a field of weathered shingles. Left of the entrance stairs, a portico shrouded a
conventional stile-and-rail door. From a brilliantly lit picture window, a woman’s lean shadow stretched to grotesque lengths across the sunburned
lawn. Bernice glowered at her son. Frequently, he stood for hours at the same Venetian window, motionless as if at the length of a chain.

Years ago he had been a trim athlete, a potential Olympic swimmer, a former lifeguard at “The Plunge.” Now weight had swollen a face once lean

and sun-bronzed from innumerable days of sailing and swimming. His light-colored hair, reddish in the summer, had thinned perceptibly, and a
noticeable paunch disrupted the line of his athletic torso. Bernice considered his increasing girth a dreadful failing. Soon he would be nearly
unrecognizable. She was a tall woman, almost as tall as her son. Starr’s health, splendidly robust in his youth, had perceptibly faltered. His hunter’s
eyes had dimmed. His flat feet and injured leg made any activity but swimming and trampolining difficult. Aimless hours spent guzzling Coors beer
from quart jars had taken their toll. He frequently parked in secluded rural areas, legs curled against the dash, until he cramped and could sit and
drink and watch no more. His violent outbursts terrified Bernice. Squabbles between mother and son had always been fierce, but since his father’s
death last March their dinner table skirmishes had escalated. She often observed her son at the open trunk of his car, peering intently inside. Little
eyes looked back. “Damn chipmunks,” she thought.

In his spare time Starr, a crafty and silent Sagittarius, stalked chipmunks with a bow and arrow. Sometimes he used a .22, and at other times set

traps. The tiny squirrels he snared alive were popular with the neighborhood children. On weekends kids circled him gleefully, flags flying behind
their two-wheelers. Disregarding their parents’ warnings, the offspring flocked to see the “Chipmunk Man.” They adored feeding peanuts to his
pets.

Now Starr slammed the trunk lid shut and strode to the northeast side of the house. He trudged down a driveway to where a white Mercedes

glowed luminously in the dusk. The darker silhouette of a detached two-door garage skulked further back. A black shroud of ivy cascaded over the
fence.

A creak at the side screen door alerted Bernice, and she hastened to fix supper. Wriggling chipmunks squealed, clinging to Starr’s broad

swimmer’s shoulders. Giving his mother’s back a disdainful look, and still wearing his living-fur wrap, Starr dropped down into his cellar room.
Bernice was most fearful of what her son stored in that basement. In that dreary tomb ticked something he had once called his “death machine.”

It had been almost two years since Zodiac had murdered a taxi driver in San Francisco—longer than that since he shot and stabbed the others.
But in all that time Homicide Inspectors Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi (pronounced Tahs-kee) had not forgotten the elusive Zodiac. Twenty-nine
minutes away from the turbulent household on Fresno Street, past the lonely Emeryville mudflats and just across the Bay Bridge, they continued to
labor at the Hall of Justice. On the street below, the red-neon “OK Bail Bonds” sign flashed twenty-four hours a day. “Zodiac actually set out a
challenge,” Inspector Toschi recalled. “‘I’m better than you,’ he taunted us. ‘Smarter than you,’ he said. ‘Catch me if you can.’ We intended to do just
that.”

As Zodiac terrorized the Bay Area, inundating local papers with his chilling letters with bizarre references to popular culture, he invariably belittled

the SFPD for failing to halt his string of murders. Zodiac had made it personal, tantalizing them with masterly cryptograms—some so unbreakable
that they baffled the brightest code-breakers the FBI, NSA, and CIA could field. All but two homicides attributed to him involved couples—young
students killed in or around their cars on weekends. He hinted at unknown murders, past and present.

“Zodiac struck out in savage rage,” speculated one psychiatrist, “against those who flaunted an intimacy he craved with an intensity only the

deeply frustrated human can imagine.” Sex was never a factor in his motiveless attacks. Sadism was; the more pain he caused, the more pleasure
he felt. Directly after an attack, Zodiac was compelled to gloat, pitilessly writing or phoning his victims’ families, breathing silently into their ears—a
sound like the rushing of wind. He used a different weapon each time, and when possible took something from each victim—car keys, a bloody
shirt, a wallet—trophies. He still had them somewhere. Now if only Toschi and Armstrong could find them.

Zodiac’s rampages occurred at dusk (when he sometimes wore a grisly executioner’s costume) or at night under a new or full moon. Bodies of

water and places named after water drew him as metal to a lode-stone. Perhaps Zodiac was a sailor, swimmer, or boatman. Whatever he was, he
knew Vallejo intimately—its back lanes and pebbled shortcuts, its black country roads and echoing quarries. Toschi was convinced he was a
longtime resident of Water Town.

And so Toschi and Armstrong developed new facts and shuffled yellow sheets under the burning fluorescent lights of their fourth-floor office. They

watched the minute hand of the big clock jerking intermittently, like a barely beating heart. At times it hardly seemed to move. Toschi leaned back in
his swivel chair, its springs complaining loudly. “What we need now,” said Toschi, looking across at Bill Armstrong, “is a good snitch.” Between the
ticks of that clock something happened—the detectives were about to come up with their most important lead yet in Zodiac’s seemingly endless
reign of terror. It would arrive by letter, the killer’s chosen medium.

Thursday, July 15, 1971

Manhattan Beach is northernmost in a succession of all-American beach towns running south from LAX to the Palos Verde Peninsula. It roosts
some twenty miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles. Scores of wealthy white Angelenos inhabit the rows of pastel cottages hugging its shores.
The town’s main drag is Highland, and at 2:50 P.M. bronzed surfers were catching the best waves of the day as an unmarked cop car hurtled south
along the broad avenue. Detective Richard Amos and his partner, Art Langstaff, were following up a tip that had originated in Pomona. Two
Torrance men had information about Zodiac.

The skies were smog-tinged, the air muggy, but traffic was light. Amos sped east on Artesia, then spun onto lengthy Hawthorne Boulevard. A red

light halted them. Impatiently, Amos drummed the wheel. The car idled, pumping exhaust onto the shimmering asphalt. He considered Zodiac—
uncaught and insubstantial as vapor. Years of effort, and yet no one seemed able to lay a hand on him.

Both informants were waiting in front of Science Dynamics, a computer bookkeeping business, as Amos pulled to a stop. Santo Paul Panzarella,

“Sandy” to his friends, was a Lawndale resident and owner of the company. His employee and college roommate, Donald Lee Cheney, was the
more anxious of the pair. The South Bay investigators had no sooner climbed out than Panzarella and Cheney got to the point—they knew the
identity of Zodiac.

Out of the stifling heat, they named their man—Robert Hall Starr. They had known Starr almost ten years, since 1962, known him while attending

Cal Poly in Pomona with Starr’s brother, Ron. Cheney had last seen Starr on a day as cold as today was blistering. Though Panzarella had made
the call that had summoned them, it was Cheney who told them the story.

“It was New Year’s Day afternoon,” Cheney said. “I was living in the Bay Area then—I drove to Starr’s home on Fresno Street in Vallejo. I’m

positive my visit was not later than January 1, 1969, because I moved to Southern California on that day. I remember specifically it was the New
Year’s after Starr was fired from Valley Springs School up near the Mokelumne River. That had been in the early summer. As to Starr’s reason for
leaving Valley Springs, he hemmed and hawed more than he said anything, and gave me some kind of lame excuse about it, but I never heard the
straight story. I helped him move back to Fresno Street. On New Year’s Day I came over to his house because my wife and I had been arguing and I
just had to get out of the house.

“We had gone to his apartment—at this time it was a one-car garage that had been converted into a room. You didn’t step down, the basement

lair came later. You just walked in at ground level. It had three exterior walls—a window in the front, a window in the side, a small window in the
back. There was a bathroom at the rear which had a window which let some light in there. The other part of the house was fairly well isolated from
that room. I don’t remember ever hearing activity unless the mother was cooking. It was early afternoon.”

Starr read a lot of science fiction. On the table that day lay the August 1967 Fact and Amazing Science Fiction open to Jack Vance’s 15,000-

word story, “The Man from Zodiac.” On their last hunting trip Starr had talked about science fiction with Cheney. On several previous occasions he
and Cheney had gone hiking and hunting in the woods northeast of San Francisco. In the twilight, rifles lowered, Starr had shared long, sometimes
unsettling, discourses with him—talks about death. He was a huge silhouette in the dark, and his eyes glittered in the firelight as he expounded
bizarre theories. “With Starr,” said Cheney, “you just get into conversations about ‘What if this?’ and ‘What if that?’ He had a way about him.”

On their final hunting trip Starr had abruptly changed the subject from science fiction to something totally unrelated. He first mentioned hunting,

then guided the conversation to an adventure story he had read in the eleventh grade—“The Most Dangerous Game.” Richard Connell’s taut,
classic tale concerned the hunting of men in a forest with bows and arrows and guns.

“Have you ever thought of hunting people?” said Starr.

“What?” said Cheney. Cheney recalled other weird conversations with his friend before, and took this one in stride. He was well acquainted with

Starr’s way of drawing people into his own interior fantasy world.

“It would be great sport to hunt people,” Starr elaborated in the night, using personalized expressions such as “If I did this” or “If I did that . . .” At

times he cast his remarks in the form of a novel he intended to write someday. He was a powerful man, gesticulating in the dark.

“Beneath that fat,” said Cheney, “was steel.”

That day Starr’s eyes strayed to the unique watch he had gotten on his birthday only days before. “He showed me the watch first,” Cheney told the

detectives. “I remember the unusual logo symbol just above the pinion in the dial. When he showed the watch to me, it was pretty much like he
wanted an opinion about the quality of the watch. ‘I don’t think this is a very good watch,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s a fine Swiss watch,’ I told him. ‘That’s a
quality watch.’”

Starr began talking about his career. “It’s time to look for a new job,” he said. “I’m thinking about becoming a private eye, a private investigator

like ‘Mike Hammer.’ That would be fun and interesting. I’m looking for something I can do on my own without having to be hired.”

Cheney thought this was because he was having problems getting hired. “You don’t really have the training,” said Cheney. “And you really don’t

have a base of people who know who you are that you can get business from.” Cheney was not so much amazed at Starr’s idea, but honestly
concerned that his frend was ill-equipped for such a job. Starr seemed to read his thoughts.

“Well, maybe I can create my own business by being a criminal,” said Starr, “And if I was, here’s what I’d do.”

Starr suggested he might go to a lovers’ lane area to seek out victims at night—attach a flashlight to a gun barrel and shoot them. “I would use the

light as an aiming device,” he said, “enabling me to walk up and gun down people in total darkness. As the shootings would be without motive,
imagine how difficult such murders would be for the police to solve. They would never catch you. You could then send confusing letters to the
police”—he might have said “authorities,” Cheney amended in an aside to Amos and Langstaff—“letters to harass and lead them astray.

“And I would sign them ‘Zodiac.’”

“‘Zodiac,’” said Cheney. “Why that? Why not something else? That’s stupid.” Cheney paused and said to the investigators, “I might have used the

phrase ‘childish.’ I don’t remember exactly. Whichever word I spoke, it had a remarkable effect on him. He became emotional, very emotional, and I
was sorry I had said anything at all.”

“I don’t care what you think,” Starr had snapped. “I’ve thought about it a long time. I like the name ‘Zodiac’ and that’s the name I’m going to use.

Yes, I would call myself ‘Zodiac.’”

As Starr queried him about methods to disguise his handwriting and makeup to disguise himself, Cheney’s eyes roved over Starr’s room—to the

disheveled piles of papers and maps, and the rows of books on aviation and sailing lining the walls, the stacks of Mad magazine. In the shadowy
room, among the clutter, he observed Starr’s Ruger single-six and Harrington Richards long-barrel. “The Harrington Richards was kind of old and
battered and had the nine-shot cylinder,” he recalled. “That was his arsenal as far as I knew, though he did come up with a rifle for deer hunting from
somewhere, that and a pair of .22-caliber revolvers.”

On December 20, 1968, twelve days earlier, Zodiac had used a .22-caliber semiautomatic J. C. Higgins Model 80 to murder two teenagers out

on Vallejo’s lonely Lake Herman Road. These were his first known Northern California murders. The killer utilized .22-caliber Super X copper-
coated long-rifle Winchester Western ammo—the same brand used in double murders south of Lompoc in 1963. “Earlier in the day,” added
Cheney, “he took me out Lake Herman Road and pointed out a roadside turnout. He didn’t signify its importance, but I think that’s where the two
kids had recently been killed.”

Starr discussed shooting the tire off a school bus and picking off “the little darlings.” He would shoot them as “they came bounding out” of the bus.

Cheney doubted his friend would actually be doing these things. “It was like we were talking about a plot for a book or something in that order,” he
told the detectives. “It was not quite as if we were talking about real events. He kind of slipped in and out of the present. We were having that kind of
conversation. It gave me the shivers a little bit. Even then. That was the last time I ever saw him. I knew it was in my mind that I wasn’t going to see
him again.”

When Cheney got home that night, he told his wife, Ann, his friend was “acting strange.” “I moved quite shortly after that,” Cheney concluded. “I

had the opportunity for a job in Los Angeles. It didn’t have to do with him. It had to do with me finding work.”

There was silence. His words seemed to the detectives to be reasonable enough, the kind of things an honest man might say. The afternoon had

waned. The detectives had spent over an hour with the men. Both Cheney and Panzarella cautioned Amos and Langstaff as they left. “He is a very
intelligent man, but also a very impatient person. We think he carries a weapon at all times.”

Returning to their headquarters on 15th Street, the detectives asked Criminal Identification and Investigation (CI&I) in Sacramento to expedite

Starr’s “yellow sheet,” a record of previous arrests, to them by Teletype. While they waited they had time to think. When Starr had made the remarks
to Cheney was crucial. By Amos’s calculations those words were uttered only days after the first known Northern California Zodiac murders.
Additionally, all letters in which the murderer identified himself as Zodiac had been mailed after Starr and Cheney’s New Year’s Day discussion.
Not until August 4, 1969 (though Toschi and Armstrong’s files said August 7) had Zodiac baptized himself in a three-page letter to Bay Area
papers. Until then the phantom had no shape, no name, only a crossed circle scrawled at the bottom of three letters and ciphers delivered at the
end of July. There was no way around it. Panzarella backed up Cheney’s story, and both seemed upstanding, astute, credible. Their words had the
ring of Gospel. If what they said was true, then Robert Hall Starr had to be the notorious Zodiac.

Amos and Langstaff assessed what motives the two local men might have to lie. The length of time it had taken them to come forward puzzled

the detectives. Zodiac had been a menace for years. A previous headline (“ZODIAC LINKED TO RIVERSIDE SLAYING”) spanning the Los
Angeles Times’s front page on November 16, 1970, had not flushed the friends out. For some reason a more recent letter had galvanized them.

Four months before (March 13, 1971), the “Cipher Slayer” had written the Times from Pleasanton, a small, sleepy town in Alameda County

across the Bay from San Francisco. As was his practice, Zodiac affixed excessive postage—two inverted six-cent Roosevelt stamps. As was his
rule, he exhorted in block printing: “Please Rush to Editor.” The words “AIR Mail” took up a third of the envelope. Zodiac was a highly impatient
maniac. His letter covered most of the Times front page—big black headlines, bold as a declaration of war.

“This is the Zodiac speaking,” he began as always. “Like I have always said I am crack proof. If the Blue Meannies are evere going to catch

me, they had best get off their fat asses & do something. Because the longer they fiddle & fart around, the more slaves I will collect for my after
life. I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones, there are a hell of a lot more
down there. The reason that I am writing the Times is this, They don’t bury me on the back pages like some of the others.” He had signed the
letter with a box score: “SFPD-0” and “[Zodiac’s symbol: a crossed circle]-17+.”

Something about the recent communication, possibly a telling phrase, may have rung a bell with Cheney and Panzarella. Zodiac had used the

term “Blue Meannies,” meaning, Amos surmised, the cops. Music-hating “Blue Meanies” had terrorized the Beatles in a 1968 animated film, The
Yellow Submarine. Starr had once wanted to be a submarine sailor, so that made a little sense. “Fiddle & fart around,” an odd, crude expression,
was spoken regionally in Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Lubbock, Texas. Marines and sailors said it. Maybe Starr, an ex-Navy man, used it too.
Cheney said no, but recalled his friend often used the phrase “Do my thing,” a popular phrase Zodiac had used in a letter. Initially, Zodiac had
concealed his murderous connection with Southern California (belatedly capitalizing on it). Until now he had been predictable—governed by a daily
horoscope he wanted police to believe he cast himself, and drawn to water-related sites to murder. Afterward, he unfailingly wrote the San
Francisco Chronicle to boast of his atrocities and taunt the police. But by writing an L.A. paper Zodiac had broken his pattern. For what reason?

Possibly he had made a mistake down south. Perhaps he intended his Times letter as a warning to people who still remembered him there. If he
did, the letter had had the opposite effect.

It alerted Cheney instead, attracting him for the first time to a composite drawing and written physical depiction of Zodiac. Of course, all of this

was speculation. Something had delayed Cheney in coming forward with his fears. Was it possible that Cheney had a motive in fingering Starr and
that there was ill will between the two? This was not the case with Panzarella, who knew what had alerted him. “All of a sudden,” Panzarella said,
“Zodiac was writing letters to the Times near where we were living. It didn’t bother me, though I suspected Starr was the author, but it bothered
Cheney a lot. Starr fits everything I ever thought about Zodiac. He is incredibly intelligent and has a great deal of problems with any type of authority
figure.” Panzarella had told the detectives that Starr was “a very intelligent man, but also emotional-type person.” As far as Panzarella could tell,
Starr matched the descriptions in every respect. Ten days after the Times letter, Zodiac had resumed his old ways. He dispatched a four-cent
postcard to the Chronicle, affixed with a stamp of Lincoln, his head lowered in mourning. On the opposite side was a drawing of a man digging in a
snowy, wooded encampment. The phrase “Don’t bury me” implied someone in Zodiac’s life had died. By May, the maniac was cynically pleading
for help by phone—begging to be stopped before he killed more.

The staccato clatter of keys and the insistent ringing of the Teletype bell interrupted the detectives’ theorizing. Amos laid the CI&I report next to

the old black phone that had unleashed them on the scent scant hours ago. The printout provided basic facts: File #131151/Social Security #576-
44-8882; date of birth, December 18, 1933—unmarried—living with his mother in Northern California. Langstaff noted job application entries
running from 1958 through 1964, among them “NON/CERT Personnel, Watsonville Public Schools.” They found one arrest: “6-15-58 Vallejo P.D.
60278, D.P. [disturbing the peace], dismissed on 7-8-58.” There were no wants. Gradually, Amos added to the data by phone. The suspect’s
family, he learned, had some money and his father, a Navy flier of some note, had passed away in March—just when Zodiac had broken a five-
month-long letter-writing dry spell.

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.