Johnny Halloween (5 page)

A few days later, he mailed another letter to the
Vallejo Times-Herald
.

This time, he did reveal his identity.

The letter began:

Dear Editor

This is the Zodiac speaking….

****

Now the killer had a name, though he still didn’t have a face.

The Zodiac was a shadow, albeit a deadly one, and that meant he might be almost anyone.

Someone we knew…or someone we only
thought
we knew.

Someone who could fool us.

Whatever the case, most people in town were sure that the Zodiac walked among us. The killer seemed to know Vallejo a little too well. The argument went this way—an outsider couldn’t come into town and target two lovers’ lanes so easily. A stranger wouldn’t know his way around the way this guy did. Jesus, the killer was so sure of himself that he actually called the Vallejo P. D. from a pay phone in front of the Sheriff’s Office after he’d killed Darlene Ferin. And he sent that last letter to the
Vallejo Times-Herald
. He didn’t even bother to send it to the San Francisco papers. No one outside of Vallejo reads the
Times-Herald
. The Zodiac knows that, and he knows that
we
know that. That’s what gets him off. He wants us to know he’s
right here
.

Whether he was or whether he wasn’t, my neighbors could feel him, could almost see him out of the corners of their eyes when the shadows grew long and darkness fell. Some odd geometry put nearly everyone I knew in proximity to one of the Zodiac’s victims. My future sister-in-law lived just down the street from David Faraday’s house. My brother Larry used to eat breakfast at Terry’s, the restaurant where Darlene Ferin worked. Larry was a railroad switchman, worked lots of weird shifts, and came into the coffee shop at all hours. He thought he’d seen a white car around there, and a lone guy driving it. Nothing unusual about that, really. There were lots of white cars on the road, but word around town was that the Zodiac drove a white car, and that maybe he picked out Darlene Ferin as a victim because he knew her from Terry’s.

Rumors swirled around for years in the wake left by the Zodiac’s crimes, little bits and pieces of trivia that seemed to add up to something. I remember hearing a story about Mike Mageau, who survived multiple gunshot wounds at Blue Rock Springs. When police found him after the Zodiac’s attack, it was said that Mageau was wearing three pairs of pants, a T-shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, and several sweaters…all on a hot summer night.

Everyone had a different explanation for the extra clothes. Some said Mageau was expecting a fight with someone—maybe a drug-dealing biker—who’d have a club or a chain, and that the clothes were padding that would allow him to stand up to punishment. Others said that he’d gone to Blue Rock Springs expecting to find a wild Fourth of July party. Young people sometimes had “firecracker wars” in remote spots around Vallejo during the Independence Day holiday, and the extra clothes would have been protection against any fireworks that would have been tossed Mageau’s way.
[1]

But in 1969, in the middle of it, we weren’t concerned with mysterious little details like Mike Mageau’s wardrobe. We were worried about a man with a gun. That summer, my friends and I spent many afternoons talking about the killer, wondering who he might be, devising traps that the police might use to catch him.

One friend—I’ll call him Tim Alcott here—started a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the Zodiac. Tim was a kid who had a bookcase full of Hardy Boys Mysteries. I think he figured that he could crack the case if he could just put together the clues in the right way, the way Frank and Joe Hardy would.

Before the arrival of the Zodiac’s second letter, Tim was also convinced he could crack the three-part cipher the killer had mailed to Bay Area newspapers. One afternoon Tim took a bus down to the library, looking for some books on codes and crytography. He went to the card catalog and jotted down a few Dewey decimal numbers. Eager to get the books, he hurried to the stacks.

The library was cavernous, concrete, a disaster of sixties architecture bathed in dim florescent light. There were more shadows in the stacks than you were apt to find in that eucalyptus grove at Blue Rock Springs. Still, Tim went hunting for his books. He wanted to crack that cipher. He followed the Dewey numbers to 652.8, the section on codes and code-breaking.

Only problem was that the books weren’t there.

Every book on the subject was already checked out.

Tim swallowed hard.

He thought he knew who had them.

****

My friend Tim didn’t crack the Zodiac’s cipher, but a Salinas high school teacher and his wife did:

I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE

BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH

FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN

KILLING WILD GAME IN

THE FORREST BECAUSE

MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE

ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL

SOMETHING GIVES ME THE

MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE

IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING

YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL

THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAE

WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN

IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE

KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES

I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME

BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI

DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF

SLAVES FOR THE AFTERLIFE

EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

The last line was thought to be an anagram for the killer’s real name. My friends and I played around with it, trying out the names of adults we knew and didn’t much like, but none of them fit. That didn’t surprise me, but the message itself did. It sent a chill up my spine, because somehow it seemed…well,
familiar
. The part about man being
the most dangerous animal
reminded me of movies and television shows I’d seen where characters had uttered similar lines. And the part about collecting souls, well…that could have come from a dozen monster movies, the kind of movies I loved.

I reminded myself that this wasn’t a movie.

Someone all-too-real had written the Zodiac cipher.

Someone sick enough to believe what he was writing.

I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. My dad shook his head when he read the killer’s decoded message. “The guy’s a nut,” he said. “You watch—he’ll make a mistake, and they’ll get him for sure.”

But they didn’t. The Zodiac struck again at the end of September. This time, the scene of the crime was Lake Berryessa, a man-made lake north of Vallejo where locals enjoyed fishing and picnicking.

The Zodiac targeted two college students, Cecelia Ann Shepard and Bryan Hartnell, who were relaxing on a blanket near the water’s edge. The killer approached them with a drawn gun. He took their car keys and spoke to them. Hartnell tried to keep the man talking in hopes that the conversation might give him a chance to gain the upper hand. He began to think the whole thing was a simple robbery, only realizing how serious things were when the stranger decided to hogtie both his captives. Finally, the Zodiac attacked with a knife, killing Cecelia Ann and seriously wounding Hartnell.

Hartnell had noticed a lot about the killer. Recovering in the hospital, he described the Zodiac to the police—the man’s manner, his voice, his size. One thing he couldn’t describe was the Zodiac’s face. The killer had worn a hood. It was black, squared off over the man’s head like some strange executioner’s mask, with a hanging bib that covered the killer’s chest and bore the stitched “gunsight” insignia the Zodiac used in his letters.

Some people commented that the hood was almost like a Halloween costume.

****

A flip of the calendar page, and October came. But it wasn’t the kind of October I’d enjoyed before, because Vallejo had become a different town.

People were extremely cautious. My dad insisted that my mom stop working her once-a-week night shift at the remote railroad depot on Highway 29, the road taken by anyone traveling between Vallejo and Lake Berryessa. Business slacked off at both of Vallejo’s drive-in movie theaters. The burger joints on Springs Road were deserted after dark. And no one was cruising the strip.

With the whole town seemingly on alert, the Zodiac surprised everyone by taking his next victim in the heart of San Francisco. He killed a cab driver, Paul Lee Stine, and followed up the crime with another taunting letter to the
San Francisco Chronicle
that contained a piece of Stine’s blood-stained shirt and a new threat:

School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire & then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.
[2]

The threat was taken seriously. Armed police shadowed school buses in Napa. My friends and I were in the habit of walking to school or riding our bikes, but many parents thought that was too risky. Some started driving their kids to school, dropping them off, waiting and watching until they were safely in the classroom. Every day that passed increased the tension just a little bit, because everyone expected that there were more horrors to come.

The Zodiac’s murders were coming closer together now.

So were his letters.

It seemed the killer was gearing up for something big.

On Wednesday, October 22nd, I got up early and started to get ready for school. The television was on downstairs, tuned to a call-in show featuring an affable host named Jim Dunbar. His guest was Melvin Belli, a San Francisco lawyer who had a reputation as a publicity hound.
[3]
Belli had been summoned to the show by a caller who’d phoned the Oakland police the night before. The caller identified himself as the Zodiac killer and promised to phone the show if Belli or fellow barrister F. Lee Bailey appeared.

Belli and Dunbar talked. And then the phone started to ring. The brief conversations with the caller on the other end were urgent, intense—the stranger speaking of his fear of the gas chamber and the headaches that tortured him, Belli urging the man to turn himself in. The caller hung up repeatedly, and then called back just as fast.

Remember, this was 1969, a long time before tabloid television. No one had ever seen anything like this. By the time the show was over, Belli had arranged to meet the caller that afternoon. Of course, the meeting never occurred, but that didn’t matter. The seeds had been sown. When people arrived at work or school that day, they found that everyone was talking about the Dunbar show and the caller who claimed to be the Zodiac killer.

Later, the calls were traced to a psychiatric patient from Napa State Hospital, but no one knew that on October 22nd. The caller’s identity really didn’t matter, anyway. What mattered was that anyone who heard the calls was rattled. The end result was the same—the fear meter had increased another notch.

And Halloween was right around the corner.

****

Each year on Halloween day at Pennycook Elementary School, students wore costumes to class. Even the teachers dressed up, and that was always fun for the kids. A sixth grade teacher showed up one year in full-on Batman regalia, looking more like the caped crusader than Adam West ever did. Even the dour old-maid types got into the act. I remember one rather large teacher who was a dead ringer for Ma Kettle (but without the sense of humor). This woman wore the same “costume” every year, consisting of nothing more than a child’s plastic Cinderella mask. Looking back on it now, that mask makes me think that my fourth grade teacher was just a little sweeter than I ever might have guessed.

Each teacher hosted a little party for his or her class, and then the entire school paraded around the block, circling the playground while passing drivers honked their horns and waved. After that, students returned to their classrooms and waited for the final bell to ring, at which point they’d get down to the business of readying themselves for a long night of trick-or-treating.

None of that happened in 1969, of course. Sure, my friends and I wore costumes to school that day, but our celebration was confined to the classroom. The principal believed that a parade around the schoolyard might be just the thing the Zodiac was waiting for, and he decided not to tempt the killer.
[4]

At home, as night fell, the mood wasn’t any different. The few kids who were allowed out were restricted to a couple of neighborhood blocks where they were sure to know everyone. Most of my friends spent the night in front of the television, eating the few pieces of candy they’d managed to score, watching whatever monster was handy on television…and, most of all, remembering how wonderful Halloween had been just a year before.