verified that he was the suspect through he Santa Rosa District Attorney, John Hawkes.”
Leigh, signing himself “Drawer A,” wrote Jim in Somona. “If Zodiac writes one letter while I’m in here,” he wrote earnestly, “then that ill clear me of being the Zodiac.” The remark was puzzling. Everyone knew Leigh was imprisoned for child molesting, not for being Zodiac. He repeated the same remark to women he knew. In his long outdoor chess game with authorities, Allen seemed always one step ahead. For the second stage of his plan, he hoarded his daily medication and got a job in the dispensary. Like Zodiac, Leigh knew explosives. For his third step, he and a comparison began building a bomb to blast their way out of the prison.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1975
In order to pass various psychiatric tests during his incarceration, Allen boned up on the proper responses to make. He took all his tests in this fashion: :He would not smile or show emotion and would speak in a low monotone.” He took tests as a man drugged. During TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) evaluations, Allen was asked to make up stories based on simple line drawings portraying people in ambiguous situations. (“Explain what is going on in this picture.”) Indirectly, his answers revealed aspects of his subconscious feelings and personality–”he has a violent fantasy life… a hyperthymic (highly emotional) individual unable to establish normal social contact”
Finally police decided to give him a lie-detector test. “A polygraph machine is only a stress detector and anxiety detector,” Toschi told me. Lie detector, a favorite investigative tool, are fallible and register false positives about fifteen percent of the time. Polygraphs measure changes in pulse, blood pressure, and breathing, but can be tricked by really good liars. Even the term “lie detector” is a misnomer. Erle Stanley Gardner wrote in his Court of Last Resort, “Lie detection is impossible. What is possi-