Shooting for the Stars (16 page)

But, sitting there in that dark bar, she looked wistful as she
talked about it all. Maybe it was the memories of Laura Marlowe. Maybe it was memories of her long-ago death. Or maybe it was the memories of herself back then, the young girl with the southern accent who came to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a famous movie star.

Sure, she'd made it in Hollywood in a different way.

She was a player.

But she wasn't a star.

Sometimes the dream dies hard.

Chapter
29

I
DROVE
up to Barstow the next day to see Sally Easton, the surviving member of Sign of the Z. I took the freeway out of Los Angeles, then headed north up into the mountains and through the desert until I got there. Barstow was like another world compared to Hollywood. A sleepy little place surrounded by sand, sagebrush, and cactus. Easton lived about thirty minutes beyond the town, at the end of a long gravel road with no other houses around. If she was trying to get away from it all, she'd picked the right spot.

I'd called her the night before and said I was coming. I went through several scenarios in my head beforehand about how to play this. I thought about telling her I was interested in buying her property. I thought about posing as some sort of federal law enforcement official and bluffing her into talking to me. In the end though, I wound up just telling her the truth. Or at least most of it. I said I was a journalist who wanted to do a story about her new life after prison. She was fine with that. She told me to come up.

Sally Easton was in her early fifties now. She had gray hair and lines in her face, and looked a lot different than she did in the newspaper picture taken when she was arrested. But she still had that lost little girl quality to her. It was as if she'd never found what she was looking for so she buried herself in whatever life she was in
at the moment—whether it be a cult like Sign of the Z or a lonely farm in the middle of the desert.

She met me at the front door holding a bible in her hand. Inside there were several pictures of Jesus in the living room and a large cross hung over the fireplace.

“I discovered Jesus in jail,” she said. “He gave me the peace that I'd been seeking. All my problems, all my worries, all my anxieties disappeared as soon as I accepted Jesus as my savior. Have you accepted him, Mr. Malloy?”

“Actually, I have,” I said.

I told her I'd been baptized as a young boy growing up in Ohio.

“Have you continued to accept him as your friend and savior since then?”

“We've drifted apart a bit over the years.”

“You should reaffirm those vows,” she said.

“Maybe you're right.”

“Jesus can change your life.”

“My life could use some changing,” I said.

She told me she'd bought the farm after she got out of jail with money her parents left her. She raised chickens, sold eggs and vegetables she grew, and lived a quiet life here. She was a member of the local church and taught Sunday School. I pretended to be interested, waiting for a chance to ask her about her days with Zorn and the cult.

“How much do you remember about Sign of the Z?” I asked.

“That was a long time ago.”

“But it's part of the story of your life.”

“Yes, of course it is.”

“What was Russell Zorn like?” I asked.

I thought it might be difficult to get her to talk about Zorn and the cult, but it wasn't. She seemed almost eager to relive those days. Like they were happy times, not a nightmare of blood and
violence and insanity that had put her in jail for most of her adult life. Maybe Russell Zorn was like Jesus was to her now. He was the answer to all of her problems back then, someone she could believe in no matter what.

“He was an amazing man,” she recalled. “The first time I ever saw him was in a coffee shop on the boardwalk along the beach in Venice. I was living on the street, broke and desperate. Russell was like a beacon in the night providing me with a safe sanctuary. I don't remember what he said to me or what I said to him. It really didn't matter. He just stared at me with those beautiful blue eyes, and I was drawn to him immediately. I sat down and I stayed with him from that moment on.

“We all lived together in the desert. We cut ourselves off from the rest of the world. We had our own world. Russell's idol was Charles Manson, you know. Manson was in prison, but Russell said he was the embodiment of Charlie's spiritual presence outside that cell. It was almost like Charlie was living with us there too. That song “Helter Skelter”—which is where Charlie got the name for the coming war he said would overthrow the establishment—was always playing in the house. And Russell was constantly quoting from Manson sayings to us. I remember some of them like it was yesterday: ‘Total paranoia is just total awareness'; ‘Pain is not bad, it's good. It teaches you things'; ‘Death is the greatest form of love'; and—my favorite Russell–Charlie Manson quote—‘No sense makes sense.' ”

No sense makes sense. That phrase had been on one of the threatening notes sent to Abbie before her death.

“Were you Russell Zorn's girl?” I asked.

“We were all his girls.” She said it with an obvious sense of pride, even after all these years. “Me. Gail. Clarissa. Any of the women who passed through our collective. Russell wasn't like other men. I was never jealous of the others. I was just gratified to
be close to him. He was a very complicated and unique individual.”

“He killed people, didn't he?”

“Yes, he did.”

I waited to see how she would explain that one away. It could be a thorny kind of moral dilemma, what with her being saved by Jesus and all now.

“Russell explained to me that sometimes killing was necessary for the good of society,” she said. “He said it was like in a war. A soldier becomes a hero for killing the enemy because doing so saves a lot of other lives in the long run. That's what we were doing, he said. Fighting a war.”

“Against who?”

“The oppressors. The rich. The powerful. He wanted to lead a revolution against the oppressors. When Manson killed Sharon Tate and all those other Hollywood people, it was the first step in the revolution. Russell wanted to carry on that fight.”

“Did he specifically say he wanted to kill famous people?” I asked.

“Yes, he said it would make a statement to the people.”

“How about movie stars?”

She nodded. “He believed movie stars and all the other celebrities of our culture were the symbols of an evil and corrupt society. He wanted to burn their big houses and distribute their wealth among the poor and the downtrodden. He wanted to punish them, to make them pay for all the damage they had done to our planet.”

I took out the list of names Abbie had written down. I showed it to Sally Easton and asked if the names meant anything to her.

“They were famous people,” I said. “Celebrities, stars.”

“Okay.”

“And they're all dead.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“I think they may have been killed by Russell Zorn and the Sign of the Z. Do you recognize any of the names on the list?”

She pointed to the name of Deborah Ditmar, the actress who'd been shot on her doorstep in Los Angeles three years before Laura Marlowe's murder.

“Just that one.”

“How do you know her?”

“Sometimes when he got high or had a lot to drink, Russell used to brag to people that he had killed an actress named Deborah Ditmar to teach the pigs of Hollywood a lesson—to scare them, just the way Manson had done with that other actress, Sharon Tate.”

I stared at her in amazement. This all seemed too easy.

“I was never sure if I believed him though,” Easton said. “Russell sometimes made up stuff like that to impress us or the new recruits in the group. I think he liked to see the look on our faces when he talked about murdering someone famous in cold blood. He thought it was really funny. Russell liked to make jokes like that. I know this is probably difficult for you to understand, but he was an awful lot of fun to be around.”

Yeah, that Russell Zorn sure sounds like he was a lot of laughs, I thought to myself.

“So you don't know whether or not he killed Deborah Ditmar?”

“No.”

“And you don't recognize any other names on the list or remember Russell ever bragging about killing any of them?”

She shook her head no.

Damn.

“The only people I know we killed was during that holdup at the store,” Easton said. “Then Russell and me were arrested. The rest all died. Russell, Bobby Mesa, and me survived. Russell and Bobby are dead now too. The Sign of the Z has been history for a long time.”

“Maybe somebody else in the group decided to keep the dream alive.”

“Who?”

“There were others over the years, weren't there?”

“Yes, of course.”

“So who were they?”

“Most of them were just people that came and went. There was Doug and Clarissa and Jerry and Gail and Billy and Heather, I think. None of them stayed. Clarissa and one of them ran off together after about six months. Or maybe Russell banished them, I don't remember. Billy died of a drug overdose. Jerry got busted for shoplifting and went to jail before the robbery. Heather went back to her parents' house in upstate New York. None of them were dedicated. None of them were true believers. They never would have carried on Russell's mission after he was gone.”

I showed her a picture of Ray Janson. I knew now Janson didn't kill Laura Marlowe, but he was stalking her. There had to be some connection between him and Sign of the Z. I was desperate at this point.

“Did you ever see this man before?” I asked her.

“No.”

“You're sure.”

“Absolutely.”

I sighed and took the picture of Janson back. I'd found out some stuff from this woman about the case. I had a potential connection to at least one of the deaths on Abbie's list of victims. But no connection to Laura Marlowe that I could see. Or anyone else on the list.

Sometimes, when you're all out of ideas, it's the simplest thing that works. That's what happened here. I had a picture of Laura Marlowe with me. I showed it to Easton now just to see if it jogged anything in her memory.

“Clarissa,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“That's Clarissa.”

I stared down at the picture of Laura Marlowe in my hand.

“She was so beautiful,” she said.

Suddenly it all made sense. There'd been a girl named Clarissa, who'd spent six months with the group, Easton had told me. And there was a missing period of about that time in Laura Marlowe's life before she showed up in Hollywood and eventually became a star, according to Sherry DeConde and Jackie Sinclair.

Laura Marlowe wasn't some random target of the Sign of the Z. She'd been a part of the group.

“Clarissa,” Sally Easton said again, looking down at the thirty-year-old picture of Laura Marlowe.

“Clarissa,” I repeated.

PART FOUR

NO SENSE MAKES SENSE

Chapter
30

B
EFORE
I left Sally Easton's farm, she told me more that she remembered about the girl she knew as Clarissa.

Like most of the people who'd passed through there, Clarissa had been pretty much of a mystery. No past, no future—just the present. That's what Zorn used to preach to them, she said. You seize the day, you live for now. But some details slipped out during the time Clarissa was there. She came from New York, she hated her mother, and she hardly knew her father. She seemed very confused, Easton remembered. She also seemed fragile and delicate and ­innocent—like a little girl in a woman's body. It was as if she'd never really experienced anything about life until she came to Zorn's ranch.

“One day we were talking about school,” Sally Easton had told me. “I said I hated it, because all the other kids made fun of me for being different. I asked her if that happened to her too. She said no, because she never knew any other kids. She'd never gone to school. She said her mother had tutored her at home. Her whole world had been what her mother had planned out for her.”

With Zorn's group, Clarissa began making up for lost time. She drank, did drugs, and—most importantly—discovered sex. Easton said Zorn had a no-sex rule among the members of his group. That
is they weren't allowed to have sex with anyone besides him—or without his permission.

Clarissa—or Laura—began sneaking off with one of the men in the group. Sally didn't remember his name, because he wasn't there for very long. They went off for long walks together, deep in conversation and almost oblivious to the others in the group. Then one day they were just gone. But people came and went from the ranch like that all the time, Easton said, so she never thought much more about Clarissa.

Until I showed her the picture.

I had a couple of questions about Sally Easton's story. First, how could she not know that the woman she once knew as Clarissa had gone on to become one of American's most famous movie stars a few years later? Her answer was that she never paid attention to popular culture. Movie stars, TV shows—they meant nothing to her. Of course, if Zorn had put out the order to kill Laura, Sally Easton would have known who she was then. But she said nothing like that had ever happened. Zorn never mentioned Clarissa again. She'd only been with them a short time, and so her absence from the group wasn't really missed that much.

She could have been lying to me, of course, but I didn't think so. She'd already told me everything else. Why lie about this?

There was also the question of what happened to the guy Laura ran off with. But finding him would be a nearly impossible task at this point. No name, no real description. I didn't figure he was very significant anyway. He was only in the cult for a few months, according to Sally. He probably just faded off into obscurity.

Which brought me back to the five dead celebrities on Abbie's list.

If Zorn really did kill Deborah Ditmar, what about Laura and the other three?

I drove back to my hotel in Los Angeles. I ordered a big pot of coffee from room service to keep me going, took out my laptop, and went to work.

First, I downloaded pictures of all five of the people from the web. Then I went through what I knew about each death. Other than the fact they were all celebrities, I couldn't see any real similarities. Laura Marlowe. Deborah Ditmar. Susan Fairmont. Stephanie Lee. Cheryl Carson. They all died in different places, in different ways, over a span of several years.

The only concrete connection to Sign of the Z—except for the fact that Laura had once been a member—was what Sally Easton had said about Deborah Ditmar.

I went online and read as many articles as I could find about the Ditmar murder. There weren't a lot. Most of the coverage had occurred thirty years ago before newspapers even thought about putting their stories online. But I found one article that had been written just several months earlier as a Sunday piece for the
Los Angeles Times
. The headline was
DEBORAH DITMAR: HOLLYWOOD'S FORGOTTEN TRAGEDY
. The piece delved into the long-ago murder of the rising young star, all the unanswered questions about the case, and how her rise to stardom had been cut tragically short.

In reading it, I was surprised that—like with Laura Marlowe—many of the so-called “facts” of the case turned out not to be true. The fan who everyone thought at first had killed Ditmar was apprehended by police. But it turned out he'd been arrested on another charge in another state—and was in custody there at the time of the murder. No other suspect was ever found.

The byline on the article was someone named William Crider. I figured he might be a grizzled veteran who covered the original murder. But instead he turned out to be a young guy in his twenties who'd graduated from the University of Missouri journalism school
a few years earlier and gotten a job at the
Los Angeles Times
—first on the Style section and now on the news desk.

“I've always been fascinated by unsolved cold cases,” he said when I got him on the phone. “So I pitched this idea to my editors for a Sunday piece, they liked it, and now I'm up for some nice awards for it. Hell, one day I might even become as famous as you, Malloy.”

He knew all about me. My triumphs and my disasters. I guess my career was pretty much an open book in the journalism world. To be honest, he seemed a bit in awe of me. Which isn't a bad thing when you're trying to get information out of someone.

“Do you think this might be connected to the Laura Marlowe murder?” he asked me at one point.

“Why would you say that?”

“You wrote an article about the Laura Marlowe case for the
Daily News
. Now you're asking me about another unsolved celebrity murder from thirty years ago. I don't have to be Bob Woodward to figure out why you're so interested.”

I didn't want to tell him any more than I had to. I didn't want him to steal my story. So I said I was just fishing around, looking for any possible angle.

“What did you find out about the investigation into the Deborah Ditmar murder?” I said, trying to change the subject.

“After the crazy fan thing fell through, they never found another suspect. The most likely scenario is that it was some
other
crazy fan. But they were never able to pinpoint anyone. That's what made it so fascinating for me. A rising star's life is snuffed out and no one has any idea who did it or why.”

“So you're saying the cops back then never really had any other leads?”

“Well, they thought they had one at the beginning. But it fizzled out too. Someone speculated that the Ditmar woman had tried to
write something in her own blood before she died. But then the ME's office determined she died instantly from the first shot. The authorities decided in the end it didn't mean anything.”

“What did they think she wrote?”

“They hoped it was a clue to her killer.”

“You mean a name?”

“Actually, it looked like it was just a letter.”

“Which letter?”

“The blood was smeared so badly that they couldn't really tell for sure.”

“Any guess?”

“Yeah, the cops at the time said it looked like . . . well, it looked sorta like someone had tried to write the letter
Z
.”

“A
Z
?” I said.

“Uh-huh. Weird, huh?”

“And the cops never made any sense out of it?”

“Nope. But even if it was a
Z
, and even if Ditmar had somehow tried to write the killer's name or initials, no one could figure it out. I mean how many names start with
Z
? Zeke, Zelda? Zorro? C'mon, now. Anyway, like I said, they determined that Ditmar died instantly and couldn't have written it.”

I sat there stunned. Sure, it didn't mean anything to the cops back then. Or even to Crider now. But they didn't know what I knew. They didn't know about Sign of the Z.

“What if the killer left it?” I said.

“Now why would the killer do something like that?”

To leave his signature behind, I thought to myself. So he could brag about it to his followers later.

“You're right, it doesn't make sense at all,” was the only thing I said to William Crider though.