The Cases That Haunt Us (36 page)

While investigators worked the scene, the search fanned out using dogs, patrolmen on foot, and military police from the nearby base. The Presidio was just a couple of blocks from where the murder took place, and neighbors told police they’d seen a person matching the general description of the
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rushing across a nearby playground and into the wooded base. For the next few hours, it must have seemed almost daylight as floodlights and flashlights illuminated the area. The search was called off at 2 A.M., about four hours after Stine was declared dead from a gunshot wound to the brain. A badly damaged, copper-covered bullet from a nine-millimeter was recovered at autopsy. The killer had fired only the one shot from his semiautomatic pistol. It was an uncommon type—under 150 were sold in the entire Bay Area over the previous three years. Damage to the skin of Stine’s right cheek indicated the gun had been held right up to his head. Defense wounds were on the cabdriver’s left hand.

Looking at the victimology, Paul Stine, twenty-nine, was married and working toward a doctorate in English from San Francisco State College. To pay for school, in addition to driving the cab at night he worked as an insurance salesman. At five feet nine and 180 pounds, he wasn’t a small man. In his personal life, with his interests, nothing would have labeled him a possible victim of violent crime, except that cabdrivers are highrisk victims by profession. Their job calls for them to pick up strangers and take them wherever they want to go at all hours of the day and night. Because they carry cash, they are frequent targets of robberies … and worse. Not even two weeks before Stine’s murder, another driver from his cab company was robbed, and just over a month earlier Stine himself had been held up by two gunmen.

Indeed, at first this looked like a botched robbery committed by a criminally unsophisticated subject. The offender would have fled with blood all over him, and he left valuables behind. When police reconstructed Stine’s earlier fares, they estimated the most the killer could have walked away with was about $25. On top of that, he left evidence: on the side of the car where the
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rested his right hand to balance as he reached in to wipe off the dash, he’d left two fingerprints in blood.

And then there were the witnesses. The kids at the party described Paul Stine’s killer as white, in his midtwenties to thirty years of age, with reddish blond hair cut short, like a crew cut. He wore glasses and darkcolored pants and a parka. He was stocky, maybe five foot eight. The description and the composite sketch were circulated among cab companies throughout San Francisco, warning of the killer’s MO.

Almost as quickly as the police bulletin made its rounds, a development in the case proved Stine’s murder was more than the standard cab robbery gone bad. In October, the
San Francisco Chronicle
received a letter on which the return address was simply a symbol: a circle with extended cross-hairs. It began as another had before it: “This is the Zodiac speaking …”

The author claimed credit for Stine’s murder and offered graphic evidence as proof, actually enclosing a piece of the victim’s bloody shirt. Then he referenced “the people in the north bay area,” taking credit for them as well. The lab confirmed that the swatch was from the cabdriver’s shirt, and when Toschi and Armstrong met with Detective Sergeant Narlow in Napa, he thought the handwriting matched their guy’s, a finding later confirmed by Sherwood Morrill, head of California’s questioned documents department in Sacramento.

The police were getting no credit for their hard work from the Zodiac, however. In this latest letter, he mocked their efforts to find him following Stine’s murder.

The S.F. Police could have caught

me last night if they had

searched the park properly

instead of holding road races

with their motorcicles seeing who

could make the most noise. The

car drivers should have just

parked their cars & sat there

quietly waiting for me to come

out of cover …

His message seemed to have an effect. San Francisco’s Chief of Inspectors Marty Lee put up a brave face before the press, saying that if the Zodiac had really been just outside police grasp that night, he would have mentioned the dogs and the floodlights used in the search. I suggest that if the killer had been the man the patrolmen spoke to, that would explain the level of scorn here. He almost got caught and he got scared, but he couldn’t admit that to law enforcement or himself. So he had to get cocky. We expect an offender like this to overcompensate for his feelings of inferiority by putting down those he actually secretly envies. He got lucky, but he had to perceive that he had outsmarted the police.

Another way for this type to prove his superiority is to once again find a way to get more control, more power. This one accomplished that by closing his letter with a terrifying threat:

School children make nice targ

ets, 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.

In cooperation with
SFPD
, the
Chronicle
did not release news of this threat for several days, after having released other portions of the letter and the composite sketch. This resulted only in a slight delay of the ensuing panic. Throughout San Francisco, Napa, and surrounding jurisdictions, steps were taken to protect schoolchildren: extra drivers were assigned to buses to watch for trouble and to take over in case a driver was shot; in some cases, armed police guards were on the buses. Pickup trucks from the forestry department and ranger stations at Lake Berryessa were put into service. Airplanes even monitored bus routes from the sky.

You have to be careful with a threat like this. Obviously, this guy is capable of killing people and you have to take precautions. But I find the actual threat more designed to, once again, put the fear of God in the community and manipulate public emotions. If the Lake Berryessa and San Francisco attacks were high risk, you really couldn’t get much riskier than shooting at a bus full of kids in broad daylight. From the offender’s point of view, this would be almost a suicide mission. But all the police activity generated by this threat becomes the ideal face-saving scenario: he would have carried out his threat, but the heat was just too great.

Some attempts were made to proactively reach the Zodiac via the media. California attorney general Thomas Lynch issued a formal statement in which he assured the killer he would receive help and his legal rights would be fully protected if he turned himself in. Lynch tried to appeal to the Zodiac’s vanity, saying that as an “intelligent individual” the killer realized he would eventually be caught and would recognize surrender as the best course. The
Examiner
also tried, but neither approach brought the killer to the police.

In another approach, Dr. D. C. B. Marsh, who headed the American Cryptogram Association, issued a challenge to the killer. Using the Zodiac’s own code, Marsh composed a message providing a phone number for the Zodiac to call when he had a coded message that did actually contain his identity. Dr. Marsh’s challenge, published in the
San FranciscoExaminer
, went unanswered. Despite this, I would still consider it a great idea and the type of technique I advise, as it was tailored to the personality of the
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.

Less than two weeks after the Stine murder, a major meeting was convened at the San Francisco Hall of Justice. Investigators from Vallejo, Napa, Benicia, Solano, San Mateo, and Marin met with representatives of the
FBI
, the state Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, Naval Intelligence, the California Highway Patrol, U.S. Postal Inspectors, anyone who had a hand in the case. The seminar covered each crime known to be linked thus far and a comparison of all the evidence available.

If I’d been involved, along with interjurisdictional cooperation, I would have been stressing the need to be proactive. Ironically, one approach I counsel police to try in cases like this was initiated … but by the offender.

I can imagine the Zodiac in late October 1969, seeing that the news programs and papers were devoting less and less coverage to the school bus threat, wondering how in the hell to top that. While I would not necessarily have been able to predict exactly what shape it would take, I would have been able to tell you that the
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was going to need to do something to get himself back in the limelight. He was probably still reeling from his close call after he killed Stine (although he wouldn’t have admitted it), so he wasn’t ready for another murder. And since he hadn’t carried out his last written threat, he probably sensed that anything he put in another letter would have muted impact. What he needed was a publicity stunt.

Now, one technique I used to recommend was to identify someone in the public eye as a sympathetic character. We know most subjects follow their own press, so depending on the dynamics of the case and the type of offender, I’d advise police to establish someone the offender would feel comfortable contacting in some way. So, for example, at the same time that a local law enforcement bigwig was branding the
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a crazed maniac, you could offer newspaper reporters access to a leading psychiatrist whose message would be 180 degrees in opposition: “This man isn’t crazy. In fact, he’s highly intelligent, which is why the police haven’t caught him. But he is misunderstood …” You could photograph the shrink at his office, conveniently mentioning where the office is located and making sure the number and address are in the book. Then you sit back and hope the
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makes contact with the one person he sees as capable of understanding his message, of serving as his voice to correct misperceptions.

What the Zodiac did was bypass the setup. At 2 A.M., a call came in to the Oakland Police Department, across the Bay from San Francisco. The caller identified himself as the Zodiac and requested a phone conversation with high-profile criminal attorney F. Lee Bailey or, if he was unavailable, famed local attorney Melvin Belli. The caller said he wanted one of these two to appear on a local morning talk show. I find the Zodiac’s choices interesting. F. Lee Bailey had a reputation as a master of acquittal, after successfully defending all but three of the more than one hundred killers he had represented, and Belli had made headlines by defending infamous characters such as Jack Ruby and Mickey Cohen. As the years since then have proved, both attorneys had a flair for attracting media attention. And clearly this was what the Zodiac sought.

As it turned out, first-choice Bailey couldn’t make it, but Belli appeared that morning on Channel 7, next to host Jim Dunbar. They began the show one half hour earlier than normal. As they anxiously waited and viewers watched, the first of many calls came in a little after 7 A.M. The caller kept hanging up and calling back, identifying himself as “Sam” and giving Belli and Dunbar details of his headaches and loneliness. A dozen of the thirty-five phone calls were actually broadcast, and a meeting was arranged. Belli led a parade of police and media to the appointed spot at 10:30 that morning. You can probably guess the rest: “Sam” never showed. Later phone calls to Belli from this caller were eventually traced to a mental patient at Napa State Hospital. The police officer who had answered the phone when the call first came in to the Oakland PD thought the caller to the TV show sounded different from the one he had talked to. But it really didn’t matter who called Belli that morning as far as the Zodiac was concerned. He’d gotten his press, live. He’d succeeded in manipulating everyone in the viewing area, had a whole region on the edge of its seat, and had a famous personality at his beck and call with just a few hours’ notice. On top of that, precautions were still being taken to make sure he didn’t take out a school bus. And police were no closer to identifying him.

He still had to keep his hand in, though. In early November he sent two communications to the
San Francisco Chronicle
, consisting of a greeting card (“This is the Zodiac speaking”), another cryptogram, a seven-page letter, and a hand-drawn diagram of a bomb designed to destroy a school bus. To establish credibility, another swatch of Paul Stine’s bloody shirt was enclosed in one envelope, although by now the Zodiac’s handwriting—along with his odd habit of using more postage than required—were recognizable. The extra postage was simply practical; he could just pop the envelopes into a mailbox somewhere without having to come in contact with a human who could later identify him, and he knew for sure his mail would be delivered. We would later see the Unabomber employ this same technique.

Although much attention was paid to the drawing and references to the Zodiac’s bomb, I think other aspects of these communications, particularly the seven-page letter, are more significant. Consider the following:

… I have grown

rather angry with the police

for their telling lies about me.

So I shall change the way the

collecting of slaves. I shall

no longer announce to anyone.

when I comitt my murders,

they shall look like routine

robberies, killings of anger, +

a few fake accidents, etc… .

In numerous subsequent writings, the Zodiac would make reference to his new and improved body count. And after each of these, police would reevaluate unsolved murders in their jurisdictions, looking for potentially linked cases. In the early 1980s, some thought that the Zodiac and the Trailside Killer were one and the same. The conviction of David Carpenter in 1988 for those murders disproved this theory, as he was serving time for other crimes when several of the Zodiac killings occurred. Depending on whom you ask, though, today there are upwards of fifty possible victims of the Zodiac. In a sense, it’s the opposite of linkage blindness, and we run into it with every large-scale unsolved serial case. To this day, people are still adding to the tally attributed to Seattle’s Green River Killer, even though the first of those serial murders occurred in January of 1982.