Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed

  “It was a terrifying experience for me,” Lorna said. “At Cece’s funeral, the FBI had me outside with them thinking he might show up. When I was interviewed by the police and the FBI, it was with the understanding no one ever knew who I was. It was probably irrational, but I had a lot of fear about this man knowing who I was and trying to find me. I think at the time, because my description was so different, the police had a tendency to discount what I had to say. It’s so coincidental that we were right there and this happened right there. What are the chances someone else would have followed us that day?”

  Amazingly, after March 1971, before Leigh Allen became a suspect, no policeman ever spoke with Lorna or showed her photos of suspects. Thirty-one years later she was still frightened. I provided her with photos of Leigh Allen. After first consulting with the Napa P.D., she insisted on consulting her attorney before giving me her evaluation. I waited.

  Moskowite Corners General Store stood across from Pearce’s Chevron Service near the lake. At noon the day of the stabbings, a round-faced man rushed into the cafe and asked anxiously for directions on the “fastest way out of the area.” A patron eating lunch found him suspicious, followed him out, and watched him drive off in an ice-blue Chevy. He matched Lorna’s description of the man watching her and her friends sunbathing. In 1974 the patron spoke with police and “tentatively” identified a middle-aged suspect as the man leaving the cafe. Within two weeks, the witness was killed in an explosion.

  “We have better witnesses,” Narlow had told me, “people who had seen the suspect closer to the scene of the crime both geographically and time-wise than that sketch there, but it could easily have been the guy. We have evidence that about a quarter mile down the road, about forty-five minutes earlier, Zodiac was seen without his mask by a doctor and his young son.” Dr. Clifton Rayfield, an ophthalmologist, and his son, David, had parked their car four-fifths of a mile further up the road from Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia and toward Oak Shores Park and Rancho Monticello. “Rayfield reported to me,” continued Narlow, “that at approximately 6:30 P.M. he and his son had parked their vehicle north of Park Headquarters . . . in the general area of the crime scene and walked down toward the beach. While en route Rayfield observed a WMA described as five feet ten inches, heavy build, wearing dark trousers and a long-sleeved dark shirt with red coloring.”

  David Rayfield had seen Zodiac unmasked. Thirty-two years had passed since anyone had asked him about the man he had seen. I tracked him down.

  “How many people would you say were up at the lake that day?” I began.

  “There were like zero,” Rayfield said. “There was no one up there—it was really desolate. I walked all around and was shooting my gun, a .22 with a scope. That’s why my dad and I went to the lake, because I could shoot my gun and not be bothered, wouldn’t be scaring or hurting anyone. My dad never saw him. He was fishing down at the lake. I saw Zodiac at a distance of about one hundred yards, so I wouldn’t be able to comment on his face. He was walking along the hillside about halfway between the road and the lake. But I remember him as being a stockier person. He wasn’t nimble when he was walking. And when he turned to walk away he wasn’t like a smooth, athletic person. To me he seemed a little overweight and on the clumsier side. Not having followed the story or ever having been re-interviewed by the police, I didn’t realize Zodiac came upon us just before he stabbed the young couple. I sort of assumed I saw him making his getaway. I’ll tell you one thing, he didn’t like the fact I was carrying a gun. He turns and looks at me and my gun (which with its scope was pretty intimidating) for probably five, six seconds, and then turned and went up the hill up in a southerly direction. I said to myself, ‘That was funny. This guy wasn’t carrying a fishing pole. There’s no camping equipment. There’s no gun. What’s he doing out here?’”

  “What you’re telling me fits the prime suspect. Everybody remarked how he lumbered, how clumsy he was. The reason his friends thought this was so interesting is that Arthur Leigh Allen was gorgeous in the water. When he’d go up to the diving board and waddle out, people would say, ‘Oh, my God, he’s so ungainly.’ The minute he was in the air or in the water he was fine. But on land everyone commented on how awkward he was.”

  “That’s what jumped out at me about the picture you sent of him walking. . . . He has the same body language of the guy I was watching from a distance. While I’m not sure I was close enough to say that much about his face, this is the same-size guy that I saw. I remember thinking that guy is not a small guy. His body type matches what police said at that time—two hundred pounds or more. He was pretty big and built, but he didn’t move like he was a real coordinated, smooth-walking guy. He didn’t move up the side of the hill easily.”

  “I can’t understand with the limited number of witnesses who had seen Zodiac, the police didn’t come back and speak with you at every opportunity,” I said.

  “I can’t either,” said Rayfield. “It continues to shock me. I came to think what I saw at the lake wasn’t related or they would have been all over me. They never came back or called me. I said, ‘Jesus. What’s going on that they would never want to talk to me again? It must not have been the guy. It must not have fit the scenario for them that he would have been there.’

  “It’s funny you should mention the composite sketches. ’Cause I saw the sketches with the hair on them and I didn’t remember black hair, neatly trimmed hair, on the man I saw.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I didn’t remember him having a full head of hair. The suspect in the driver’s license you sent would have been only thirty-six at the time, so of course he wouldn’t be bald.” Rayfield was telling me Zodiac was almost bald. Since he was wearing the same clothes as the man Lorna had seen, it meant he had taken off his wig. “Leigh Allen was almost bald at that age,” I told him. “He shaved the sides of his head close.”

  “Wow,” said Rayfield. “In retrospect, how could the man I saw not be Zodiac? I can’t believe the case was never solved and police had all those leads.”

  Zodiac had written, “I shall not tell you what my descise consists of when I kill.” Zodiac’s disguise consisted of hairpieces:October 30, 1966—a false beard on a stocky man at Riverside Library.

  February, 1969—“curly, wavy dark brown hair.”

  July 4, 1969—“combed hair up in a kind of pompadour, short curly, light brown hair.” Second description: “light brown hair in a military crew cut.”

  September 27, 1969—three girls see stocky man wearing an obvious wig, “dark straight hair parted neatly.” Rayfield sees him soon after, remarks he’s so young to be bald. Hartnell saw “dark brown sweaty hair” through the eyelets of Zodiac’s hood. “. . . it’s not impossible the guy was wearing a wig.”

  October 11, 1969—“reddish or blond crew cut” and “short, curly light brown hair in Military-type crew cut.” In the 1960s, crew-cut wigs were available for military men with long hair who did not want to cut their hair short. Long hair was then fashionable.

  “The kid had a .22 rifle,” Narlow summed up, “and Zodiac came down within one hundred yards of them across an inlet. The kid saw the guy over there and he was wearing the blue windbreaker jacket. But evidently this wasn’t what he was looking for because it was a father-and-son deal. So the killer went a quarter mile up this road, went back up to the road, and evidently came down the road this way and saw this single car parked here, and then pulled in behind it. Rayfield and his son both stated that they had not observed a vehicle parked in the area of their car, and had only noticed the subject at a distance of approximately one hundred yards. Rayfield did report that there was a man with two young boys in the area shooting BB guns, but didn’t know whether or not they saw the subject.

  “I think their time was off a little bit ’cause I think Rayfield actually saw the Zodiac killer just prior to him going south four-fifths of a mile to where Shephard and Hartnell had their car parked. It sure looks like he stumbled on them
and had not followed them. I’m convinced that Zodiac was just stalking any singular parked cars along the route. And that’s why he stopped when he saw Rayfield’s car there. When he saw the father and son and they saw him, he decided to go back up to his car. Then he drove down the road a little ways and saw the white Karmann Ghia. Then he came down here and saw a boy and a girl laying on this blanket under this oak tree, and this is what his game was, to kill the boy and the girl. This is why he struck here and not further up the road.”

  When I talked with Bryan Hartnell in the 1970s he had already gone through considerable anguish trying to recall all he could about Zodiac.

  “When Zodiac left he must have thought we were dead,” said Hartnell. “I was extremely fortunate to survive. I quit breathing! I just froze! What I heard was him walk away in a non-hurried fashion. And then after that there’s a little dead spot I don’t remember. In fact I don’t think I went out, but there is a slight haze in my memory. There was no way I could hear his car starting. It’s really some distance to the road up there. You’re going to get some white noise that may blur that out. But I remember starting to get untied and moving around. I had a ways to walk. It’s not impossible that first time I blacked out or something. All I had made it up to was the jeep trail when I saw a [pickup] coming. The toughest part was yet to go, but the way I was going, I would have made it [to Knoxville Road].

  “Now while I was in the hospital a couple of weeks,” he said, “it was basically to confirm I was all right, and in fact was. The stab wounds I received missed all the organs. Obviously they hit my lungs, and I needed some time for the lungs to heal up, and I had some scarring. But that’s nothing. A surgeon deciding he was going to make seven or eight holes in my back couldn’t have done it better. The guy I probably liked least in the whole mess was that psychiatrist Narlow got. He had an idea that I should do some hypnotism. That was such an abortion. I told him, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this. My church [Seventh-day Adventist] has kind of a taboo on those kind of things. I’m willing to give it a try, but I think it’s going to take more than a slam-bam, thank you, ma’am, to get me to go under. I think I’m fairly suggestible, but I don’t think this is going to work.’ He does his thing and I said, ‘I’m not under.’ ‘Don’t argue,’ he says, ‘just answer these questions,’ and had me run through it.

  “One question he asked me answer was describe the arm. ‘Do you want to experience it or see it on a television screen?’ I’m looking and I’m seeing a man with bare arms, but there was no question that guy was wearing a jacket. OK, I’m looking and I’m seeing bare arms. . . . ‘Tell me about the bare arms.’ ‘Well, they are fairly heavily haired.’ [Allen was not.] He thinks this is great shit. But the guy had a jacket on. I could be way out of line and I was hypnotized and really seeing it, but you know one of the early things I screwed them up on is that I had this guy as being really fat. I said either the guy was moderately heavy and wearing a windbreaker, or he was skinny and wearing a lined jacket . . . kind of a cotton poplin, crew collar, and gathered around the sleeves, ordinary garden-variety short jacket. How much he weighed depended on whether that was lined or unlined. If I went through all that kind of cerebration over a jacket, I know he didn’t have bare arms.”

  That evening I spoke to Toschi. After the stabbings, Zodiac had come down from the 440-foot elevation fast. A Vallejo police officer told me that another policeman had ticketed Allen speeding down from Lake Berryessa the day of the stabbing. On the seat of his car lay a bloody knife. Leigh caught the officer’s gaze and said, “I used that to kill a couple of chickens.”

  “Remember that on September 27, 1969, Allen was supposed to be going to Lake Berryessa,” I said, “and had a bloody knife in his possession?” I read Toschi part of an FBI report:“Conway indicated to the FBI that ‘a surviving victim of the ZODIAC series of murders had positively identified ALLEN as the ZODIAC killer.’ Lake Berryessa victim Bryan Hartnell thought Allen’s voice and build were compatible with Zodiac’s.”

  “I was never told that,” said Toschi. “To this day I’ve never heard any detective tell me that.”

  “First Hartnell went into Sonoma Auto Parts, to hear Allen’s voice,” George Bawart explained. “DOJ was working on it. This guy Jim Silver, the investigator for the DOJ, had him go in, make a purchase, and have him listen to Allen’s voice.” Hartnell looked at him and told Silver, ‘He could have been. There is nothing about what I saw or heard that would rule him out as the killer. His physical size, mannerisms, and voice are the same as the person who stabbed Cecelia and wounded me.’”

  Zodiac’s voice to Hartnell was “some type of drawl, but not a Southern drawl . . . [it] sounded uneducated, moderate in sound, not high or low pitched.” Others had heard Zodiac’s voice. Napa Officer David Slaight thought the “barely audible” caller sounded in his “early twenties.” Vallejo switchboard operator Nancy Slover heard an “even but consistent, soft but forceful” voice with no trace of accent. It sounded “mature, deepened and became taunting toward the end.” All these voices were Zodiac—were there several Zodiacs or did he have multiple personalities?

  Friday, June 23, 2000

  I continued to wait for Lorna, who was undergoing considerable anguish over the photos I had given her. Could Arthur Leigh Allen be placed on the day of the murder at Lake Berryessa within yards of the crime scene at a destination he had announced to friends? Finally, at 10:00 A.M., Lorna called to give me her answer.

  “When I looked at the older man,” she said, “my instant sort of response was fear by looking at his eyes, but I couldn’t say I recognized the face.

  “When I look at the young version, in the picture in the 1950s, that is exactly the way I remember the man looking that we saw at Berryessa. Even to the point that I never saw him fully face on, but a little in profile, and that’s how the photo was taken. So if I had seen this photo back then I would have said—absolutely!”

  Thus, Leigh Allen, wearing a wig, could be placed at the crime scene the day of the stabbings. “I do not always look the same,” Zodiac had said. He had spoken the truth.

  “Leigh told me he was at Lake Berryessa the day of the murder, hanging around hunting for squirrels,” Leigh’s friend, Jim, told me. “He told me he was there flat out. No question about it. And he had gone to an area of Berryessa with trees, but kind of open and remote. It wasn’t a high-visibility area, so that nobody would have seen him up there in that area of Berryessa. He would have been all alone. He did say it was the same day the kids were attacked. And he said that if anyone had seen him they would have seen he was off in a different area of the lake and had left before before it happened.” He later wrote Jim that he recognized Hartnell when he came into the parts store and “disappeared in the back of the store where cops were waiting. Hell, if I once got tired of all this crap and said I was the one, there’d be no way I could prove I wasn’t.”

  Sunday, December 10, 2000

  After leaving the Chronicle, Paul Avery wrote for the Sacramento Bee, then returned to San Francisco to report for the Examiner until his retirement in August 1994. For years he had suffered with emphysema and heart problems. Ironically, the reporter had fallen ill at the same time as Leigh Allen. He often visited the M&M, a famous Mission Street newspaper watering hole, dragging his oxygen tank with him. “The image that I’ll keep forever,” Examiner Editor Phil Bronstein said, “is of Paul, police radio attached to one ear, cigarette in his hand, oxygen supply hooked up to his nose, arm around my shoulder, sharing the scandalous details of the latest story he’d broken.” This morning on Orcas Island, Washington, Paul had died at age sixty-six at the West Sound home of the grandfather of his wife, Margo St. James. He had died without unlocking the riddle of Zodiac. But for many years the reporter had been divorced from his biggest story, and by 1980, when I visited him in Sacramento, he had forgotten most of the details.

  Harold Huffman died on June 19, 2001. “Leigh would write Harold from Atasc
adero,” Kay Huffman told me, “and include letters that were stamped and addressed and ask Harold to mail them on. I never figured out why if he could mail out to Harold why he couldn’t mail out to other people. I never saw the insides of them. Actually, I found one while I was going through some of Harold’s stuff. Harold never forwarded it on. Whether he ever sent the others on or not I have no idea. It sounds like something my husband might not have done. I never opened that letter. I figured if Harold wasn’t going to forward it, it wasn’t something I wanted to see either.” In Harold’s opinion, the contents of those letters were harmless. One of the unforwarded letters was a request for aviation charts and addressed to the Distribution Division (C-44), National Ocean Survey in Washington, D.C.

  “I get awfully lonely when I am ignored,” Zodiac had written. If “obsession” best described Zodiac’s hunters, “lonely” was a word that Zodiac had made his own. In that loneliness, the shape of Zodiac’s crimes unfolded like fireworks in the copper-colored sky above Vallejo. The secret lay with Darlene Ferrin on that long-ago July Fourth. Her murder held the secret of Zodiac’s identity. Zodiac had known Darlene, known her well, and more importantly, she had known him in his true identity and without the concealment of that hideous black veil.

  39

  unmasked

  Saturday, December 30, 2000

  “I spoke with Don Cheney,” Zodiac buff Tom Voigt told me. “Cheney, as you recall, had fingered Leigh Allen as Zodiac in 1971. He was up in Washington when I suggested we meet. He was willing to drive down here to Portland to the Hood River, which is about an hour from me, but four hours from him. We met at the Hood River Inn, which is right on the Columbia River. We had a whole section to ourselves. It was a beautiful view of the Columbia and he sat facing it. He was very relaxed and a nice pleasant guy, probably six feet tall.”