Popular Crime

  It is.

  Well, OK, what if you don’t wave the gun in his or her face, but you have a gun on you?

  If you have a gun, that’s still a violent crime.

  Sexual predator registries were intended to let people know if a child molester was living next door, which I am all in favor of—but sexual predator registries in practice are overrun with 28-year-old men who, when they were 18, had sex with their 16-year-old girlfriends, and guys who got drunk and left the house naked and got arrested for indecent exposure, and former teachers who lost track for a moment of how inappropriate it was to tell a dirty joke in front of their students.

  It sounds like I am arguing on behalf of criminals here. I’m not. I’m arguing on behalf of laws that work.

  Did you ever start on a three-day business trip with one small suitcase, only you started stuffing more and more things into the one suitcase until you wound up with a busted zipper? Prosecutors, by their nature, are zipper-busters. They chronically overstuff the suitcase. In order to have laws that work, you have to stop prosecutors from busting the zippers.

  XXII

  On December 20, 1968, a teenaged couple parked on a lonely road near Vallejo, California, was shot to death by an unknown person.

  On July 4, 1969, another young couple parked in the same area was ambushed and shot repeatedly. The woman died; the man survived.

  On September 27, 1969, a young couple enjoying a picnic in an isolated area near Lake Berryessa, north of Vallejo, was attacked by a knife-wielding man in a hooded costume. Both were stabbed several times, and the woman died.

  On October 11, 1969, a cab driver named Paul Stine was shot and killed near the Presidio, in San Francisco.

  Five murders in ten months.

  After the second in this series of crimes, the killer began contacting police and the media to claim credit for his kills. Within an hour of the July 4 attack (the second crime) he called the police to say where the bodies could be found, although in fact they already had. At the end of his phone call, just before hanging up, he added the words “I also killed those kids last year.”

  He wasn’t bluffing; he had. In the first days of August, 1969, letters were received by the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times-Herald from someone claiming to have committed the murders. The letters, all substantially the same, gave details of the July 4th crime not known to the public. Each letter also contained one-third of a cipher, a coded message. The letter stated that the cipher contained the killer’s identity.

  It didn’t. The cipher, de-ciphered by a high school teacher and his wife after all the really smart code-breakers had failed, read “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 the I 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 afterlife.” At the end of this there was a string of nonsensical letters, representing a scrambled name or, more probably, just a string of nonsensical letters.

  Between August 7, 1969, and March 15, 1971, eleven more letters were written to newspapers, newsmen or, in one case, the lawyer Melvin Belli. The killer had signed the August first letter with a symbol, a circle with crossed hairs. Beginning with the August 7 letter he began calling himself “the Zodiac”; his letters began with the phrase “this is the Zodiac speaking.” With the third attack, at Lake Berryessa on September 27, the killer wrote the dates of the three events (involving four murders) on the car door of his victim, and also drew his symbol, the Zodiac’s symbol. The killer also called police, in November (“This is the Zodiac speaking”), and demanded to speak to Melvin Belli—on television. He specified a morning show; Belli went on the show and sat there for a couple of hours, waiting for the Zodiac to call.

  The Zodiac wrote in long strings of one-syllable words, of which in some letters a very high percentage were misspelled, although in other letters his spelling was almost perfect. The murderer was seeking publicity—and he was continuing to kill, continuing to commit crimes. He committed at least two murders after he began writing to the newspapers about them. This unusual interaction between killer and public created a frenetic swirl of speculation and comment. The vortex of speculation began to suck in other crimes and other communications. People began to speculate that the Zodiac had committed this murder or that murder, or had written this letter or that letter, or had made this phone call or that one.

  This speculation swelled the scope of the Zodiac story to unmanageable proportions. The discussion of the Zodiac that continues today in books and on the internet involves dozens of crimes and dozens of alleged Zodiac communications. It is impossible to know for sure which of these other crimes and other communications are in fact the work of the Zodiac, and which are the result of people seeing Zodiacs in their breakfast cereal.

  There are three names that have become central to the Zodiac debate: Graysmith, Toschi, and Arthur Allen. Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time of the murders, has written two books about the crimes, Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked. Portrayed in a movie by Jake Gyllenhaal, he is the most successful of the dozens of amateur researchers who write about the case.

  Dave Toschi was the detective in charge of the Paul Stine case, and thus in charge of San Francisco’s Zodiac investigation. Toschi was a colorful, charismatic cop. Elements of his style and personality were adapted by Steve McQueen for the movie Bullitt and by Clint Eastwood for the Dirty Harry movies. He was haunted by his inability to identify the Zodiac, and his name also pops up in many other crime books.

  Arthur Leigh Allen was a man who, although never charged in any of the crimes, was publicly linked to the crimes before his death, and gave interviews denying that he was the Zodiac. Graysmith, in Zodiac Unmasked, argues that Allen was the Zodiac.

  Whereas almost all serial murderers kill from some concoction of sexual sadism, misogyny and anger, the Zodiac appears to have been driven by satanic beliefs and a desire to create terror. In June, 1966, a college girl had been murdered in Riverside, California, which is down by LA … 500 miles from Vallejo. Her murderer or someone convincingly pretending to be her murderer wrote a long letter to the police about the crime. Someone also sent rude eight-word notes to the local newspaper and to the victim’s father, and a “poem” celebrating the murder was found scratched into a library desk. In late 1970 an anonymous letter was sent to Paul Avery of the San Francisco Chronicle, suggesting that he check out the parallels between the Riverside murder and the Zodiac.

  From my standpoint, there appears to be little reason to link this murder to the Zodiac. The murder occurred two years before the first Zodiac murder, and hundreds of miles away. The Zodiac had not (up to this point) included it on his list of murders. The handwriting of the “poem,” although it is routinely described as being eerily similar to the Zodiac’s, is in fact vastly different. The Zodiac makes a “W” with pointed bottoms—a double V—and with the left half of the W small and cramped, the right half much larger. The Riverside killer makes a “W” with rounded bottoms—a double U—and with two halves of equal size. The Zodiac makes a “d” with a “loop” on the staff, and normally tilted sharply to the left. The Riverside killer makes a two-stroke “d” with no loop. The “o’s,” “b’s,” “g’s,” “r’s,” “n’s” and even the “i’s” are obviously different between the two.

  Of course, carving letters into enamel on a library desk is different from normal handwriting, and one might expect some differences, even if the Zodiac had written the poem. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is the absence of any meaningful link between the two cases. The fact that the handwriting is different doesn’t prove anything, but that’s the point: there is an absence of proof.

/>   The eight-word note mailed to the Riverside newspaper is printed in all caps. The Zodiac never did this (and rarely used capital letters, even when it would have been appropriate to use them).

  The eight-word note mailed to the victim’s father capitalized each word but not each letter, but the printing seems to bear no resemblance to the Zodiac’s. It has, again, the rounded-bottom “w,” an “h” made with three strokes when the Zodiac uses one, etc.

  There was, in the Riverside case, a letter mailed to the police. But that letter is as much like the Zodiac’s as Brahms is like Megadeath. The Riverside letter is coherent, and uses standard punctuation. Zodiac’s sentences are short, blunt and cold. The Riverside murderer’s sentences are long, elaborate and passionate—passionate about murder, unfortunately, but passionate. “Her breast felt very warm and firm under my hands, but only one thing was on my mind.” This guy reads romance novels. Zodiac never writes anything remotely like that.

  The Riverside killer is forthright in saying that he has attacked this woman (and will attack others) out of sexual frustration. This may be true of the Zodiac as well, but he would certainly never admit it. The Zodiac claims that he kills people because he enjoys it even more than sex, and he thinks this will make them his slaves in the afterlife.

  The only handwriting we have from Riverside is the letters mailed to the newspaper (months after the event) and to the victim’s father, and the envelope in which these were sent. I studied copies of these as best I could, to evaluate the handwriting. I was looking for common words, words that appear in both the Riverside documents and the Zodiac documents. I noticed the word “die” in the Riverside letters, so I thought I would compare this to the word “die” in the Zodiac letters. And you know what?

  It never appears. The Zodiac, in ten to fourteen communications totaling thousands of words, never uses the word “die.” The Riverside killer, on the other hand, uses the word “die” constantly; it’s his favorite word. In the “poem” scratched on the desk, the word “die” is used twice in 46 words, plus the word “death.” In the eight-word postcards mailed to the father and the newspaper, one of the words is “die.” In the longer letter mailed to police (about a page and a half) we have “dead” twice, “die” once and “died” once. The Zodiac never uses any of those words … die, died, dead.

  Why? Dying is what the victim does. The Zodiac’s victims weren’t real to him. He uses the words “kill,” “killed,” “murder,” “murdered” … he uses those all the time, because those are about him, about what he had done. Shot, shoot, stab, stabbed, pick off, wipe out … all kinds of active words about what the Zodiac has done or will do.

  The word “die” does appear once, not in Zodiac’s handwriting but in the translation of his cipher. When it is decoded, the word “die” appears—but he is talking about his death. When I die, these people I have killed will be my slaves in the afterlife. And the word “death” does appear twice in the Zodiac letters, but both times in the context of the Zodiac’s “death machine”—my death machine, once, and the death machine the other time.

  The Riverside case has become a standard, quasi-official part of the Zodiac story. The back cover of Graysmith’s Zodiac says, “The official tally of his victims was six. He claimed thirty-seven dead. The real toll may have reached fifty.” To get six victims, whoever counted was including Riverside.

  But here’s my real point. Including the Riverside murder in the Zodiac story gives us more information about the Zodiac, but unfortunately it is bogus information, as the Zodiac did not commit that murder. Dave Toschi in the early 1970s made public statements certifying as legitimate certain letters which are, in the view of the author, obvious forgeries and/or cases of mistaken identity. Toschi said that the Zodiac wrote letters that, in fact, he very clearly did not. Most likely he did this because he was trying to

  a) jerk the Zodiac’s chain, and

  b) keep the investigation alive.

  Toschi claimed that his document examiner had certified as legitimate what is known as the Exorcist letter, and what is known as the Badlands letter. The Exorcist letter, which is the basis of the statement that the Zodiac claimed 37 victims, is, in my opinion, a forgery—but at least it pretends to be from the Zodiac, and imitates his handwriting. The Badlands letter makes no claim to have been written by the Zodiac, makes no reference of any kind to the Zodiac murders, uses vocabulary and sentence construction massively inconsistent with the Zodiac’s, and was mailed to a newspaper four years after the murders definitely linked to the Zodiac had ceased. Nonetheless, at least according to Graysmith, Toschi claimed that it was a Zodiac letter, and claimed that his handwriting expert had identified it as such.

  There has never been a handwriting expert in the history of the world who was incompetent enough to say that that was a Zodiac letter. If in fact Toschi did say that, he was lying. He was trying to poke the sleeping story with a stick.

  But the inclusion of the Exorcist and Badlands letters in the Zodiac oeuvre gives us yet more information about the Zodiac—unfortunately, yet more bogus information. One of the things that the experts “know” about the Zodiac is that he was a movie fanatic, and the experts know this because of the Exorcist letter and some other jigamarole. It is an accepted part of the Zodiac’s legend, mentioned frequently by Graysmith and other writers, that the Zodiac is a huge movie fan. Graysmith quotes Toschi as saying that “Of course, this guy is a real nut on movies.”

  But in all of the legitimate communications from the Zodiac, he never mentioned any movie—none, nada, zero, zilch. Nothing. For all we know, the Zodiac never saw a movie in his life. The myth of the Zodiac’s interest in movies sprang from the passions of the people who were investigating him, projected onto the Zodiac. In the Zodiac’s first cipher, he refers (apparently) to the famous story “The Most Dangerous Game.” Toschi, Graysmith, and others investigating the case take this, inexplicably, as a reference to an obscure 1932 movie based on the story.

  Well, what kind of sense does that make? Let me ask you two questions:

  1) Do you know the story of “The Most Dangerous Game”? and

  2) Have you ever seen that movie?

  Everybody in my generation knows that story. The story was included in high school anthologies, and was read by virtually every high school student in America in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The popular radio series Suspense adapted the story as a radio drama three times, once with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten and once with Orson Welles and Keenan Wynn. To suppose that knowledge of that story is evidence of an interest in movies is like assuming that knowledge of a Bible verse is evidence of an interest in the Mel Gibson movie.

  The Zodiac is an extremely interesting case; the Zodiac murders, in my view, are probably the most interesting unsolved serial murder case in American history. But by including in the Zodiac’s story crimes that he did not commit and letters that he did not write, the people who write about him have made of the Zodiac a monster more fiction than fact. The most bizarre thing that people say about the Zodiac, of course, is that he is some kind of genius. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was in San Francisco at this time, and there are numerous sites that speculate on the possibility that Kaczynski was the Zodiac, because, you know, Kaczynski was a genius, and the Zodiac was a genius.

  The notion that the Zodiac was a genius is based on four misunderstandings.

  First, people assumed that, in order to commit numerous murders and avoid arrest, he must be some kind of super-criminal.

  Second, people assumed that the Zodiac was a man of superior intelligence because of his construction of codes that have not been broken.

  Third, people credited the Zodiac with intelligence because he could design bombs.

  And fourth, people over-estimated the Zodiac’s intelligence because they lumped together his actions and his letters with the letters and actions of fifteen other people. Of course, if you credit him with the skills of several different people, it makes it look like
he is very capable.

  But none of this stands up to a rigorous review. The nation’s worst serial murderer, Gary Ridgway, was often imagined by police, in the 25 years that they hunted for him, to be a criminal mastermind. When finally caught, he turned out to have the IQ of a Labrador retriever. Many serial murderers who get by with several crimes turn out, when finally caught, to be men of very limited intelligence, because it is just extremely difficult to identify an assailant who kills someone he’s never met before.

  There is nothing about the construction of a code, or even the construction of a difficult code, that requires intelligence. It requires that you have some understanding of codes or that you have a book about codes, and it requires that you put a couple of hours into it. That’s all. If the code isn’t broken, all that means is that the person who created the code failed to deliver the message that he was trying to deliver. Any idiot can create an unbreakable code, because any code is unbreakable if you don’t give the audience enough material to work with.

  The Zodiac’s handwriting has been analyzed at length by people who are determined to avoid the obvious conclusion: that the Zodiac didn’t actually write many of the letters attributed to him. Graysmith and others try to come to terms with the inconsistencies in the “Zodiac’s” handwriting by making him a super-genius who can re-construct his own handwriting to confuse the police.

  People associated the fact that Zodiac could design a bomb with superior intelligence. But (a) building a bomb does not actually require great intelligence. The task has, after all, been mastered by hundreds of poorly educated Middle Easterners, many of them persons of limited other accomplishments.

  And (b), his bomb didn’t work.

  I absolutely believe that the Zodiac did in fact build this bomb, and that he fully intended to kill a busload of people with it. It’s not like he mentions this once and then drops it; it is a theme that runs through several letters. He says he is going to build a bomb, he shows us the diagram, and then he tells us that he is having trouble with the trigger mechanism (misspelling “trigger” and skipping the word “mechanism”), and then he tells us that his bomb got wet when his basement flooded, and then he tells us that his bomb was a dud and draws up a new bomb diagram. Why would he make these things up? He’s not trying to portray himself as a blustering fool; he is trying to portray himself as a powerful master of the fates.