Chronicle editors eventually cast a jaundiced eye upon two former employees. The editors went over their employment records to see if any days taken off , or other times corresponded with crimes of the “Zodiac”. One worker suffered bouts of severe depression had disappeared during the night shift, leaving behind a note for four years sick time.
The other worker vanished leaving behind four pay checks that he never picked up.
In North Sacramento , two days after Avery’s files were stolen , twenty eight year old court reporter and juvenile court aide, Nancy M. Bennallack failed to show up at work. Friends discovered her bloody body , throat slashed in her second-floor flat. The unknown killer had entered via a sliding glass door Miss Bennallack had left open so that her cat could get in. She was engaged to get married November 28. She had not been sexually assaulted. Her apartment was half a mile from nurse Judith Hakari’s apartment. Hakari a twenty three had been kidnapped in front of her North Area apartment after leaving her job at a local hospital. Her badly beaten body was found in a shallow grave in a remote section of Placer County. She too had not been sexually assaulted. Like Miss Bemmalllack , she was engaged to be married.
When the Zodiac began writing his letters, the newspaper was at the point of attempting to enter the electronic age with a computer system then known and referred to a “Braegen”. The “Braegen” System and procedures worked that as opposed to generating a tape punched copy for the Linotype machines on Fairchild TTS machines , copy was generated on IBM “typewriters ” - trade name IBM Selectric Electric Typewriters . The finished product was then then single fed into scanners. The scanners then generated tape that was sent to the Linotypes. The paper used for typing was narrow , fan-fold , cheap bond type of paper. This was the exact type of paper that the Zodiac himself routinely used in his messages.
A Chronicle printer believed that the Zodiac worked there ,”Many of the Zodiac cipher symbols were actually printer’s proofreaders”. ” The Zodiac symbol itself is a proofreader’s mark used to line up corrections on a tissue overlay and for color registration. ” In addition the Zodiac’s method of numbering pages is also the printer’s method /16,2/6 one of six , two of sox etc… to alert the typesetter and proofreader to follow the flow of copy. In addition the arrows used by the bus diagrams are as well printer’s arrows. Not just a line with an inverted “V” but with the “V ” filled in.
Avery filed a story , then returned promptly to his vehicle. The right vent window of the car had been smashed — the mark of an experienced car booster. Only a few things were missing. His Wells Fargo checkbook, containing checks numbered 118 to 125, had been taken or removed. It was as if Warren Wilshire had spotted the checkbook and proudly announced “Look What I Have Found”. His expensive , then high tech Sony tape recorder , which held an interview with a Zodiac tipster - a man with a muffled voice - was also gone - as if removed with forethought. Avery was concerned enough to call the Police. Officers Gerald Derham and William Thiffault reported.
It was then that Avery noticed that his large gray briefcase , emblazoned with his initials ,”P.A.” had been stolen. He had stuffed the briefcase with a complete clipping file on Zodiac. He looked up and down the darkened street. It began to dawn on him how close the killer may well be. He seemed to be privy to reporter’s notes and Sunday features even before they had been published ; indeed he used newspaper and Teletype paper and supplies that might of been purchased from Woolworths down the street. What if Zodiac was getting into the building late at night ? The paper was a twenty-four 24/7 operation, but manned by a skeleton crew during the nighttime. Security at the building consisted of one lonely solitary guard at the front desk area on the fifth street entrance but there were two sets of back stairs and two elevators that led to the editorial offices. Additionally there was a passage between the Examiner and the Chronicle that spanned Minna street that allowed people to walk from one building safely to another. Zodiac was not watching the hunters, he might be entering the paper at night.
The Zodiac case was already affecting Chronicle reporter’s Paul Avery’s health. It would eventually destroy it. In the early morning hours he drove his car onto the narrow little Mary street. Mary lay in the shadow behind the Chronicle and continued on Northwest running behind the Old Mint. Avery parked where Mary intersected Minna, the dank alley sepeeating the Chronicle from the Examiner. It was a rough area at the time and Minna and Minna at that time held the dubious honor. It was the site of more murders than any other place in the Bay area city. He was not gone long - from 12:40 A.M. until 1:40 am , but more than long enough. During that time , he traversed a long dimly lit corridor into the city’s room. The Chronicle was a huge three story barn like building with a tower at Mission and Fifth Street corner.
The quality of light was yellow green at best. Beneath his feet Avery felt the tremble of tremendous presses grinding otu an early morning edition. Teletype keys rattled nervously in a little room to his left - a ghost was on the line. Line of rubber cement pots , rows of battered Smith Coronas, and stacks of used photo zincs , copper backed and etched with acid. crowded desktops.
The “Favorite Pastime of Man is Fooling Himself” , Chan observes. “So far no one has collected ( on the challenge). not even the great Dr. Zodiac”. One bet you could be sure of winning was that the Zodiac killer had seem this film and was more than inspired , motivated and indeed guided by it.
“Charlie Chan on Treasure Island” was Leigh’s favorite movie as a kid , was a fact noted by Leigh’s friends . Not only that Leigh’s father worked at Treasure Island.
It was said many times and by many authorities that “Zodiac is not an ordinary criminal”. That was certainly an understatement if ever one was said of a criminal , or a criminal residing in the Bay Area of the state of California. The Zodiac was certainly a man of great ego , or perhaps lacking ego. The Zodiac found great pleasure in laughing at , indeed tormenting the police authorities. To this day he has stumped and confounded the trained authorities both the lay and the highly specialized.
The police used such new and novel tactics including the bait of the newspaper trade and its agents and actors - including crime reporters , experienced staff and the powers of the front pages of the newspapers to try to entice and trap the Zodiac with his very poisons . The cryptic phrase “RHADINI Challenges Dr. Zodiac” was one such attempt.
The apparent background and research of this cryptic message was to tap into the lore of Dr. Zodiac. In the movie a dapper magician “Fred Rhadini” (actor Caesar Romero) of the Temple of Magic on Treasure Island joins forces with Chan to expose Zodiac. “I accept your challenge” , Zodiac replies in a note pinned to a wall with a knife. In the end , Rhadini turns out to be Zodiac himself.
He saw a film about Treasure Island that became a last blueprint for Zodiac - the 1939 20′th Century-Fox film “Charlie Chan at Treasure Island” starring Sidney Toler. In the 1960’s local Bay area TV station KRON-TV screened its 72 minutes in length cut to 59 minutes. “Zodiac” asks detective Charlie Chan ( who is arriving in San Francisco by plane from Honolulu - Allen’s birthplace. “Yea he is a big shot in the spook racket around here”, says another passenger. Dr. Zodiac is a crooked medium dressed in black robes , uses his guise as a psychic consultant to blackmail his clients and patients. He answers the phone, “This is Zodiac speaking”, carries an odd knife and shoots a crossbow. One of his victims blockprints “CAN’T ESCAPE ZODIAC” - Eve Cairo reads the minds of assembled subjects at a party and says - “Doctor Zodiac . I hear the name Dr. Zodiac in his thoughts…. I cannot go on! I hear death among us. I am frightened. There is evil here ! Someone here is thinking murder!”
After the war, Naval Commander Ethan Allen was stationed at the U.S. first stop for Navy men returning at the rate of twelve thousand a day. In 1947 , a fourteen year old Leigh Allen wandered the artificial island where his father worked. The Naval Station housed 4 commands, The Naval Receiving Station, Naval Schools Command , the Naval Station itself , which administered the island and the Naval Sea Frontier Headquarters. Movies changed daily and only cost a quarter to see. “He used to watch movies at Treasure Island all the time”, a friend of Leigh’ confirmed. “My mom worked as a secretary on Treasure Island and she saw him there often and may of been his “date” at the movies. The “Excorcist” was a favorite of his “.
Ciphers - ” On the basis of the frequencies , it appeared on analysis that there should of been two symbols in the Zodiac Killers ciphers. Noting the apparent frequency of the letter “L” in his messages , it appeared that the Zodiac switched after the enchiphering was begun and initiated to using the square half-black, and fully black , thus giving himself another symbol for the letter “L”. For greater variety in the double L’s he gave up “alternation” regularity. A first major discovery on analysis was the identity of the two squares and B ( all the symbols for L). Zodiac’s symbol for A appears, seemingly by error an S and S as A. More dust in the solver’s eyes. There is no mistake in that. It appears that the Zodiac Killer of the Bay Area was fully trying to confuse the decipherers . That is for sure.
The Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40 opened in Febuary . Under bright , blue skies, visitors drove across the bridge or came by steam ferry to enter Aztec-India “Elephant Gates”. The exposition features included Pacifica , her hands raised in benediction , the four hundred foot Tower of the Sun” an amusement zone packed with rolercoasters, ferris wheels and nude dancers.
Streets named Sturgeon , courts named Halibut and Flounder intersected, and an Avenue of Palms, buttressed the island’s west side. An enclosure of tile and once been the Fountain of Western Waters. It had been cascaded before a seventy-five terra-cotta-colored statue of the goddess Pacifica. Then ,Treasure Island had been the city of light, floating upon the waves in the very climes where Robert Louis Stevenson once trod. It shimmered briefly at the end of the 1930’s era as a beacon of peace, flickered and then went out. But for a while the night had been lit with pastel searchlights illuminating domes and towers: colored lights were reflected in still pools and sparkled in falling cascades.
Treasure Island began as as series of jagged surf-washed shoals north of Yerba, Buena Island. Prevailing summer winds from the Golden Gate forced workers to first construct a ten-foot seawall. They massed thousands of tons of boulders to erect a barrier thirteen feet above sea level around a square mile area. The resulting lagoon, a mile long , and two thirds of a mile wide, was then filled in with twenty million cubic yards of seafloor mud. A ramp soon connected with Treasure Island. Finally , San Francisco decided to hold its third world’s fair on the man-made California Island.
Though no real sex was involved in Zodiac’s assaults, technically he was more than a real sexual pyschopath and predator. Even more accurately the Zodiac Killer was a sexual “Sadist” or Sexual PyschoSadist. Stanford University’s expert on the matter was Dr. Donald T. Lunde reported and described that “Sexual Sadists” and “Sexual Pyschopaths” are known and described to carry out the most sadistic impulses in their early years and early teens. These may include such despicable acts as torturing and killing cats, dogs and assorted small animals. “They will torture and kill so called “substitute victims” small animals and the like. There appears to be a need to kill and hurt anything and something at certain even regular intervals. Lunde postulates that in adulthood , such a individual , or monster, if it were made difficult for him to kill and attack human beings , might yet revert back to killing and torturing small animals. After all something is better than nothing.
Leigh had been in such a hurry that he had left his trailer door open - wide open. The door was standing open. Had he somehow known that “they” were coming and fled rapidly with incriminating evidence. His immediate flight was suspect , but nothing could be done about it. The suspect - a police “groupie” , was more than friendly with many police officers and might have been warned that “If you get friendly with cops and you hear things,” said Toschi. Perhaps his relatives had had a last minute change of heart. The detectives just did not know for certain. All that they knew for certain was that they were dealing with a most intelligent and cunning man.
Or is it the gruesome nature of the killings ? Or is just plain fear of the unknown and of the “dark” ?It has been a very long time period indeed since the San Fransisco Bay area newspapers received their first alarming letters. As time drew on the letters became more and more elusive in nature , more and more chilling.
Mrs. Stella Borge’s ranch sat off Fairgrounds Drive and abutted the Syar Rock Quarry on American Canyon Road. To the east was Borge’s Summit Resevoir, and a creek that rushed year round with water. The big man swam in the water and stood like an apparition at her gate. Mrs. Borges , an important witness in the Lake Herman murders, saw him there herself. Forty minutes before midnight, December 20, 1968, she had set out for Benicia along Lake Herman Road. The lights of her car illuminated the crumpled bodies of two teenagers at the roadside. Her heart pounding , Mrs. Borges , raced all the rest of the way to Benicia, and flagged down a police cruiser. For some unknown and odd reason , the stranger reminded her of that most traumatic and unforgettable moment.
In the end the unsolved murders forever tainted the region. On that foresaken road a man in a white chevy car cruised under the full moon. Residents had taken to calling him “The Phantom of Cordelia”. A big man was also observed roving the territory on foot, stalking over a gravel path to the old pump house , scouting for game , practicing his shooting and moving through the quarry and watery areas where he could dive into like a ghost. The large man moved in other remote areas of Vallejo as well , tracking the watery outskirts of Vallejo , as if seeking something. Three astrological water signs - Scorpio , Pisces and Cancer seemed to determine the timing of Zodiac’s assaults . To prove this astrologers confidentally pointed to his later double shootings at Blue Rock Springs - committed during the sign of Cancer with the moon in pisces.
There were no shortage of theories and explanations.
Ignoring the buzz of his coworkers , Starr began scanning test results. He might be in a predicament - he was Zodiac’s weight , height and age. He had the same color and length of hair. He crossed his legs and removed the paper booties over his shoes. Absently he surveyed the unusual looking chucker type Wing Walker boots he was wearing . Like the Zodiac , Starr wore a size 10 1/2 regular. Two women he knew had seen him in those shoes and could testify to that. But in the end, perhaps he was only a man who liked people and to think that he could be the Zodiac killer.
To recap the beginnings of the chain of events that later went on to become known as the “Zodiac Killer” are as follows:
In a”Lover’s Lane” area on a desolate road , in the general bay area municipality known a Benicia - a couple of two young lovers were found murdered and lifeless. Had this been nothing more than a sad case of carbon monoxide poisoning of a young couple , in a parked car with a leaky exhaust, not much more attention would of been devoted to this case , and not much more said.
However this was not the case. The young couple appear to have been murdered in a cold blooded fashion. The police could find few cues , could not draw the case to and end , and thus left it as an “unsolved case” , hoping that further clues and evidence , would as in many cases arrive serendipitously and work towards solving this case.
Then again in a similar fashion , a few months later, a gunman , in a similar setting attacked another young couple parked for their enjoyment. The location was not exactly in Benicia , but was only a few kilometers away. What was amazing was that the perpetrator took the time to brag to the local police department. Amazingly the killer travelled to a payphone , to phone the nearby Vallejo Police station and read out what was almost a script , as if written down and prepared and rehearsed some time before. It was if the poor kids murdered - the murder victims , were part of a well prepared screenplay. The play had been prepared , practiced and almost rehearsed some time before. It was only that they were in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time in their lives but the chosen time and place for the Zodiac.
The exact script that was repeated to the Police Officer on duty , and has become an integral part oft he chilling legend of the Zodiac killer was “I want to report a murder. If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway , you will find kids in a brown car. They were shot with a 9 mm Luger pistol. I also killed those kids last last year. Goodbye”.
Three decades after the era of the “Zodiac Killer” , the “Zodiac” still fascinates the general public. What is the source of this fascination ? Is it the mystery ? Is it the unknown ? Or is it the gruesome nature of the killings ? Or is just plain fear of the unknown and of the “dark” ?
It has been a very long time period indeed since the San Fransisco Bay area newspapers received their first alarming letters. As time drew on the letters became more and more elusive in nature , more and more chilling.
May 13th, 2008 by 
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