Criminal Minds (6 page)

The cryptogram revealed that he enjoyed killing. “It is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl,” he wrote. And he added, “the best part is thae when i die i will be reborn in para-dice and all the i have killed will become my slaves.” The idea that he was collecting slaves for the afterlife continued to be part of what would turn into a long and frustrating correspondence among the killer, the police, and the press. One of the symbols on the cryptogram was a cross inside a circle, like a gun sight, that would become his signature.

After the police announced that they had their doubts about the authenticity of these communications, the killer wrote again on August 4. This time his letter began, “This is the Zodiac speaking.” It was the first time he had revealed the name he’d picked for himself, but it was a name that would remain in the awareness of Bay Area residents for decades to come. The letter also contained details about the first two shootings, confirming that the person who had committed those murders had written this letter.

On September 27, two college students, Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard, picnicking at Lake Berryessa in nearby Napa County, saw a man approaching them. He ducked behind a tree and emerged wearing a four-cornered black hood with a bib that extended down to his waist, with the Zodiac’s crossed-circle design embroidered on it. On his belt he wore a knife in a sheath and an empty holster. With a gun in his hand, he walked up to the young couple and demanded money and their car keys. In the end, he didn’t take much money, just pocket change from Hartnell, and he left the car keys behind. But he made Shepard tie up Hartnell with a clothes-line, then he stabbed them both: Hartnell six times and Shepard ten. Hartnell survived the attack, but Shepard died two days later.

This time the Napa Police Department got the call. “I want to report a murder—no, a double murder. They are two miles north of Park Headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.” The switchboard operator asked him to identify himself, and he said simply, “I’m the one that did it.” Then he left the phone off the hook and walked away. He never again referred to this murder in any of his communications. The variations in MO and the fact that he didn’t bring it up again led some people to believe that the murders were committed by a different perpetrator, someone trying to confuse the police by making reference to the Zodiac’s crimes and his symbol, but the authorities believe that there are enough evidentiary links to attribute this one to the same man.

On October 11, a San Francisco cabbie named Paul Stine picked up a passenger in Union Square and drove him to the upper-class Nob Hill neighborhood. There the passenger shot him in the side of the head, took his wallet and keys, and removed a section of Stine’s shirt, with which he mopped up some of Stine’s blood. In later communications, Zodiac sent portions of the shirt to confirm his identity.

Stine’s murder was the last death positively connected to the Zodiac Killer. After that, a long succession of letters arrived. In June 1970, Zodiac claimed that he had shot an unidentified man in a car. He didn’t say precisely where or when that shooting took place, but the investigators believed that he might have been referring to the murder of a police officer in his car the week before. The last verified Zodiac letter showed up in 1974.

Police questioned and eliminated twenty-five hundred suspects without ever bringing charges against anyone. A man named Arthur Allen, a convicted pedophile with a collection of handguns and known interests in law enforcement and the criminal mind, was considered a serious contender, but no physical evidence ever connected him to the crimes, and he was eventually discounted.

In 2008 a man came forward to claim that while searching the belongings of his deceased stepfather, Jack Tarrance, he had found a bloody knife and the homemade black hood from the Lake Berryessa assault. In 2009, a Bay Area woman reported that her father was the Zodiac Killer and that at seven years of age, she had accompanied him on some of his crimes and had helped him write and mail his many letters. This woman has also claimed to be an illegitimate daughter of President John F. Kennedy and a witness to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

These claims, and all of the other theories that have been offered throughout the years, have never been proven to anyone’s satisfaction. Although the San Francisco Police Department has labeled the murder of Paul Stine an inactive case, Zodiac’s other murders remain officially open and unsolved.

Zodiac was a classic power and control killer. He liked to have absolute control at his crime scenes; the Lake Berryessa assault is the most vivid illustration of this, but even at the other murders, he was the man with the gun and he was the one who decided who died and in what order. He also wanted to have power over the authorities who investigated his crimes and the press that reported the crimes—hence the constant communication. He was extremely organized as well, planning his murders, leaving few clues, and presumably holding a job throughout. He is a rarity among murderers in that he simply stopped; if this was because he was arrested on some other charge, he never confessed to his crimes. Another possibility is that he died after his last letter in 1974.

 

 

JACK TARRANCE
isn’t the only man to have a family member claim that he was a killer, of course. Retired Los Angeles homicide detective and writer Steve Hodel is convinced that his father is the Zodiac Killer, the murderer of Elizabeth Short (the victim in the famous Black Dahlia case in Los Angeles), and, for good measure, the real killer behind the crimes attributed to William George Heirens, Chicago’s Lipstick Killer.

Heirens is mentioned in the first episode of
Criminal Minds
when a message he wrote with lipstick on the wall of one of his victims turns up on the computer of a victim in the show. While Heirens’s name doesn’t come up in “The Big Wheel” (422), an event in that episode could be reminiscent of the act that earned Heirens his nickname: serial killer Vincent Rowlings writing “Help me” at a murder scene. He’s recording every moment of his activities, and the videotape gets into the hands of the BAU.

Bill Heirens was undoubtedly a troubled boy. He was caught burglarizing homes at the tender age of thirteen, when he worked as a delivery boy for a drugstore. He wore women’s underwear that he had stolen, while he looked at pictures of Nazi atrocities. He liked guns and was once picked up for carrying a rifle on Chicago’s South Side. Heirens was a smart kid; he was only seventeen at the time but was already in his second year at the University of Chicago, having skipped senior year of high school.

The first murder attributed to Heirens was that of forty-three-year-old Josephine Ross, a divorced mother who lived with her two daughters on the city’s North Side. On June 5, 1945, Ross saw her daughters off to school, then went back to bed. Her daughter Jacqueline found her body when she came home for lunch at 1:30. The apartment had been ransacked; Ross’s throat had been hacked open, a dress was wrapped around her head, and her body was sprawled on her bed. Her underwear was found in a pool of bloody water in the bathtub.

On December 10 of that year, Frances Brown, thirty-three, a former member of the U.S. Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), came home to her apartment, which was not far from Ross’s, around 9:30 p.m. The next morning, a maid heard Brown’s radio playing loudly and noticed that her door was open. The maid went into the apartment, followed a bloody trail into the bathroom, and found Brown’s nude body slumped over the side of the bathtub. Her pajamas were wrapped around her head, she had a bullet hole in her skull and a butcher knife in her neck, and the following message was written on her living room wall in lipstick:

The apartment had been ransacked, but nothing was taken. One smudged, bloody fingerprint, presumably belonging to the killer, was found at the scene.

That won the Lipstick Killer his sobriquet, but it wasn’t until he was accused of the brutal murder and dismemberment of a six-year-old child that he instantly became Chicago’s best-known serial killer, a title he held until John Wayne Gacy stole it in 1978.

Chicago celebrated its first Christmas and New Year’s after the war ended. On January 7, 1946, Jim Degnan went to wake his six-year-old daughter, Suzanne, for school. Her door was closed, her window was wide open, and she was gone. A ransom note demanded twenty thousand dollars for her safe return. The FBI investigators later found smudged fingerprints on the note, but it had already been handled by dozens of cops and reporters.

The police searched everywhere for the girl. An anonymous caller suggested that they check the sewers, and when they did, they found Suzanne’s head. Not far away, they found more bits and pieces of her body. They discovered that the dismemberment had been done in the basement washtub; bits of flesh and hair clogged the drain.

Hundreds of suspects were interviewed and discounted. Months passed.

On June 26, 1946, Bill Heirens, still committing burglaries while attending college, was surprised as he was sneaking into an apartment. He ran, the police were called, and he was apprehended. During the scuffle, an off-duty police officer hit him on the head with three flowerpots, one after the other. Heirens was knocked out cold.

By the time he awakened, he was being accused of more than just petty burglaries. Police officers hit him, pinched him, and asked why he liked cutting up little girls. Heirens denied having anything to do with Suzanne Degnan’s murder, so they just hit him harder. After days of being beaten and ordered to confess—without being allowed to see the lawyers his parents had retained—he was given Sodium Pentothal, or truth serum.

Under the influence of the powerful drug, Heirens blamed “George Murman” for the murders. Murman, it turned out, was a name he had given a fictional character in a school writing assignment. The police told the press that it was his version of “Murder Man.” No transcript of the interrogation has ever surfaced, and in spite of the truth serum’s use as a tool to pressure Heirens to confess, one of the two doctors present says that at no time did Heirens claim responsibility—either as himself or as George Murman—for the crimes.

Other attempts were being made to pin the murders on Heirens. Although the fingerprints discovered at the Brown murder scene and on the Degnan ransom note were smudged, and some investigators had determined that they didn’t match Heirens’s, others insisted that they did. Heirens’s handwriting was said to match that of the message on the wall and the ransom note—or not, depending on which expert one consulted.

Heirens suffered through a spinal tap administered without anesthetic, apparently to rule out some mental deficiency, and then, without being allowed to recover first, he was given a polygraph test. The police declared it inconclusive. Later it was shown to be entirely conclusive, but the conclusion was not the one the police wanted. Anyway, it was argued, a coldhearted killer could beat a polygraph.

Six days after his arrest, Heirens was finally allowed to see his lawyers. He was arraigned, then he promptly collapsed from exhaustion, spending the next ten days in the hospital. His attorneys and his parents pressured him to accept the plea bargain that, he was told, was the only thing standing between him and the electric chair.

Finally he agreed. The police had been feeding every detail of the investigation to a voracious press—five daily Chicago newspapers competed for readers, and the slightest hint of an exclusive on the case skyrocketed circulation. When Heirens relented and accepted the deal, which required a confession, the
Chicago Tribune
jumped the gun, printing a fictionalized confession written by its own reporter with no input from the supposedly guilty party.

The response was enormous. Newspaper sales went through the roof, and the other papers picked up the story. All of Chicago read a confession that Heirens had yet to deliver. Heirens claimed later that he tried to match the
Tribune
’s phony confession, because when he tried to give his own version of the “facts” of the killings, if he deviated too broadly from the
Tribune
’s tale, his lawyers would guide him back toward that reality. His attorneys worked out a deal with State’s Attorney William Tuohy for three life sentences, served concurrently; with good behavior, Heirens could be out in twenty years.

On July 30, Heirens was to give his confession in public, before the state’s attorney. When the time came, he later explained, “after assembling all the officials, including attorneys and policemen, he [Tuohy] began a preamble about how long everyone had waited to get a confession from me, but, at last, the truth was going to be told. He kept emphasizing the word ‘truth’ and I asked him if he really wanted the truth. He assured me that he did. Now Tuohy made a big deal about hearing the truth now, when I was being forced to lie to save myself. It made me angry . . . so I told them the truth, and everyone got very upset.”