the D.A. refuses to file charges against ALLEN, Vallejo Police Department will close it’s investigation on the ‘ZODIAC’ case. Vallejo has requested no further assistance on this case, and it is therefore recommended that this case be closed at this time.” The FBI, on noting the death of Arthur Leigh Allen, said in a final report, The San Francisco case be closed at this time…”
But who was that first tipster, the one alerted Lynch so many times in 1969? “I got that tip by letter,” Lynch told me without thinking the last time I saw him. In the absence of that anonymous tip, Allen wouldn’t have been a suspect until 1971. The Vallejo P.D. suspected that Allen’s own brother or sister-in-law had turned him into the police as a Zodiac suspect. They did later on. “Lynch told me he was tipped to Allen more than once, maybe three times, by some woman,” I told Toschi “She was calling up and tipping him. So I’m thinking it’s possibly the sister-in-law.”
“You’re reading my mind,” said Toschi. “I’m thinking it’s Karen too.”
If Allen had not died, the saga of Zodiac would have had a different ending.
On tuesday, March 24, 1992, upon his return from Germany and shortly before Leigh Allen’s death, George Bawart conducted an important interview.
“What I’m referring to is where I am finally able to recontact victim Mike Mageau,” he told me, “and I show him a six photo spread. It included Harvey Hines’s suspect. I had a picture of Arthur Leigh Allen in there; the rest where not INS, NIS and CHP officers, they were just fillers. My wife Jan was down in L.A. at the time for a company she was working for. I had to meet with Mike Mageau at some point in time, so I dovetailed this when she was down there for a week. I visited with her while I was there, stayed at the same hotel room, and saved the city some money. Now this is some twenty years after the Blue Rock Springs thing, so I’m not real hyped up about meeting Michael Mageau and showing him this photo spread. I’ll tell you how much credence I took to it – normally if I went down to an airport, I’d get ahold of airport security. They’d give me an office and I’d sit there and talk to the witness and show ‘em a photo spread. I thought so little of this, I was going to be there about ten minutes, that I just located him and found a small corner of the airport.
“There were people milling around and everything, but it was fairly quiet. And that’s why I showed him this lineup. ‘Cause I just knew that he’d look at this lineup and say ‘There’s nobody in there that I recognize.’ Well, I pulled this lineup out and they were driver’s license pictures from 1967 or ’68. Anyway they were of Arthur Leigh Allen and of ‘Larry Kane’ and fillers, all fat-faces people. And these were old-style photos. They were black and white. You got them from DMV in those days. These were blown up larger than a regular license picture. A regular license picture is about maybe an inch and a half square. They were not huge pictures, but they were fairly large pictures.
“I give Mageau the lineup admonishment, ‘Just because I’m showing you pictures, you don’t have to identify anyone as the responsible, he may not be in here — blah, blah, blah.’ So I hand him them.
“He looks at them for twenty , thirty seconds. Points to Arthur Leigh Allen and says, ‘That’s the man! That’s the man who shot me at Blue Rock Springs!’
“I was absolutely flabbergasted that he picked out Arthur Leigh Allen. I didn’t expect him to pick out anybody at all!”
to Ted Turner. “It was a tough decision,” Panzarella told me, “to give up a library which not only included Citizen Kane, and other beloved films, but The Most Dangerous Game.” The movie obsessed Zodiac would have appreciated the irony.
By May 2002, SFPD was reeling from a blistering expose in the Chronicle. Reporters David Parrish and Jaxon Van Derbeken’s three-part investigation was headlined: “SFPD LAST IN SOLVING VIOLENT CRIME. Inspectors function in flawed system.” The SFPD ranked last among the nation’s biggest city police forces, on average solving only 28 percent of violent crimes between 1996 and 2000 – the lowest violent crime “clearance rate,” among the nation’s twenty largest cities. The series spotlighted murder cases in which investigators failed to interview key witnesses, left vital leads unpursued and lost critical evidence.
As the Board of Supervisors moved to create an investigative panel, the SFPD was under fire. Buried beneath an avalanche of new cases, the current inspector on the Zodiac case took the unusual step of attempting to clear a suspect developed by their predecessors over thirty years earlier. They set out to prove by DNA that Arthur Leigh Allen, convicted child molester, was Zodiac. But the letters (kept in an old cardboard box from 1969 until May 14, 1981 , when SFPD inspector James Deasy drove them to Sacramento) had never been refrigerated to preserve DNA. It’s hard to believe any had survived. Years later they returned.
In June 2000, Dr. Cunde Holt, a criminalistics supervisor, had been hired to oversee the SFPD’s DNA lab. Her three-person team, she said, barely had the finances to investigate outstanding recent crimes that had occurred before the use of DNA-typing technology. The best lab in the region, in Berkeley, refused to process it’s DNA findings. Though that facility had opened nine years earlier, no San Francisco case had ever had a “cold hit.” The reason was simple, Dr. Holt told the Examiner. Cases weren’t sent because the Berkeley DOJ’s Convicted Felon Databank only accepts DNA profiles from accredited labs, which SFPD’s was not.
Dr. Holt told the media that she was able to replicate a DNA sample (saliva traces beneath a stamp on a bonafide Zodiac letter large enough to test a “partial print of DNA.” On October 15, 2002, the Chronicle reported:”DNA seems to clear only Zodiac suspect.” But, said detectives, ‘it is not enough at this time to submit [to DNA databases], but other new evidence may yield more usable DNA within weeks or months.” They seemed intent upon clearing Allen though he had known and stalked many of the victims, been placed at the crime scenes and had been identified by surviving witnesses. The point that was the inability to match him to the letters was the only reason Allen had not been arrested as Zodiac – witness the investigation of the German Hippie, the tall, black-haired young man, and the deceased art teacher as possible letter writers. “I’ve always wondered if there wasn’t more than one person involved,” I told the Chronicle, “someone running interference for Allen. It’s what make the Zodiac case one of the great mysteries of all times.” Stirring up people, getting things accomplished, making a difference, isn’t that what books should be about? plain person, other than he gave us the creeps. And he obviously followed us and obviously watched us. I remember his face as being square, all sides symmetrical. I don’t remember him at all being pudgy, just compact . . .stocky, solid. The minute you mentioned the suspect was a swimmer, that felt so right about his body type. I wouldn’t say he had a limp, but he favored one leg when he walked. He was clean-cut, nice looking and wearing dark-blue pants, pleated like suit pants, and a black sweatshirt with short sleeves, knitted at the ends.” Fouke had seen Zodiac wearing brown pleated pants.
The women estimated the man to be six feet to six feet two inches tall and between 200 and 230 pounds. Hartnell thought Zodiac weighed between 225 and 250 pounds. “I dont know how tall Zodiac was,” he told me, “maybe . . .six feet somewhere in there. I’m a pretty poor judge of height because of my own height . . .He was a sloppy dresser.” Allen, then thirty-five, stood six feet and weighed between 200 to 230 pounds. “I would say older than thirty-five – middle thirties ,”Lorna said. “He was clean-cut and had hair that was too perfect.”
“You mentioned his shirttail was hanging out,” I said, “and I realized how inconsistent that was with neatly parted hair.”
“I know” Lorna replied, “and it was exactly parted and combed and probably was a wig in such a breezy place. Other than in the gas station, I don’t remember any other people up there. I think the only reason we were safe is that we faced a marina. There was no activity, but there were mobile homes and boats at least parked there. We felt like there were people around, but I dont think we saw people. There were none in the beach. We were the only ones-none on the parking area. none on the road.”
At 3:50 P.M., the women looked up. The stranger was gone. When the didn’t see him again, they waited almost forty minutes to be sure it was safe. “At one point he disappeared and at that point we made a run for a car,” Lorna told me. “When we got to the car, Bryan and Cece’s car was park behind ours. They were directly around the corner from us probably with in three hundred yards. Later we were in one little cove and they were right around the corner. We didn’t know it at the time, but the car was parked right by ours. Cecelia and I maybe four or five rooms apart [at PUC] on the same dorm floor. She was our floor monitor. We weren’t close friends but i knew her well. She mann Ghia. Aerial police photos shot from a fixed wing aircraft eerily marked his path, each step covered over with a little cardboard box. As I studied the secluded lake, I realized I had under estimated how few people were visiting Lake Berryessa that terrible day. There had been virtually no one around. Zodiac had to have been without his hood.
Here’s who was at the lake: Bryan Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard (the victims), Park rangers Dennis Land and Sergeant William White (both in patrol car three miles away when the call came in), Ronald Henry Fong of San Francisco and his son on the lake fishing (who saw the couple and rowed for help), Archie and Beth White at Rancho Monticello (who arrived at the crime scene with White and Fong by boat, Land drove the scene from park Headquarters), Cindy, a waitress, a patron at Moskowite Corners, and a father and two young boys across the lake shooting BB-guns. They were all removed from the scene. At the scene were Dr. Clifton Rayfield and his son, David, three PUC college girls, and stocky man who walk oddly.
Originally I had discounted a description of a heavyset man at the lake because he had dark hair and Zodiac did not. That had been reinforced two weeks later when Officer Fouke described Zodiac as blondish, balding, and “graying in back.” An anonymous typewritten letter on Eaton Bond (like the Zodiac letters) sent to the Chronicle and bearing an FDR stamp read:
“Dear Sir: With the popularity of hair pieces today it would be a logical masquerade to remove whatever was the usual hair style if the Zodiac killer intended to strike. It would be normal to resume the hairstyle he usually appeared in for daily appearances. To illustrate my point, I have cut the hair styling from the picture of the victim [Cecilia Shepard], and superimposed it on the composite . . .Anything to help. I would as soon remain anonymous.”
Had Zodiac as far back as 1970 been telling us (as he mentioned a Zodiac watch) that he had worn a wig at Berryessa? Now I recalled Hartnell had gotten a sense of that before he was stabbed. “I remember a kind of greasy forehead,” he told me.
DAVE TOSCHI is now with North Star Security Services as a vice-president and member of the board. Retired detective lieutenant Mike Ciravolo, a chief investigator on New York’s Zodiac case, now runs a private investigation company in suburban New York City. He left the department when Zodiac Task Force should not be abandoned. He helped train Detective Sergeant Joe Herbert who recognized the hand of Zodiac II in Seda’s handwriting. Bryan Hartnell, married and the father of two sons, is a probate lawyer in Southern California.
“The Santa Rosa murders were never solved,” Sergeant Steve Brown, Sonoma Sheriff’s Department, told me. “In fact, were working them pretty hard right now. One was never found, but of the six that were I only have evidence on one of the girls, Kim Wendy Allen. What I’m still trying to do is find the rest of the evidence. We’re clearing out the Archival evidence that’s out at our Juvenile Hall facility. These old cases are though because who knows where the evidence goes. Hopefully, I’m going to find some more. I specially want to find the rope used to strangle Kim Wendy that they submitted to the FBI. They tested this rope in every possible way and there was nothing special about it. It was a nylon regular rope that you could buy anywhere.”
On the Presidio, where Zodiac was last seen and nurse Donna Last once worked, ten-story Letterman Hospital and its five-story annex remain only as desolate hulks. The hollowed-out concrete buildings will be demolished and replaced by a digital movie production campus, Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic. Sandy Panzarella sold Science Dynamics. With that money he purchased RKO-Radio pictures film library which he later sold.
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