The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (80 page)

Six months passed and David Farraday and Bettilou Jensen became just two more statistics in California’s huge file of unsolved crimes. It looked as though their murders were an isolated incident until, shortly before midnight on 4 July 1969, another young couple parked their car in Blue Rock Springs Park, Vallejo, only two miles (three kilometres) from the place where David and Bettilou had died. The car, a brown Ford Corvair, belonged to the girl, twenty-two-year-old Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, a Vallejo waitress and mother of a young child. With her was nineteen-year-old Michael Renault Mageau, who worked for his father, a Vallejo businessman.

Soon after the couple drove into the car park, another car came and parked beside them. They were not particularly disturbed at this: there were various other cars in the park, the nearest of which contained several people. In any case, this second car soon went away, leaving them in peace. Ten minutes passed, and suddenly the same car returned, this time parking on the other side of the Corvair. A blinding beam of light, like a searchlight, shone through the window on the passenger side, which made the couple think that it was a police patrol car. A man opened the door and came over towards them. Suddenly there was an explosion of gunfire. Two shots struck Darlene Ferrin as she sat at the wheel; another ploughed into Michael Mageau’s neck and went up into his mouth, causing him to scream with agony. Then the man turned and walked back to his own car. He paused and fired another four shots, then drove away, backing out so fast that he left a smell of burning rubber behind him.

Michael Mageau, still conscious, saw him drive away. By this time he was lying on the ground beside the car, trying to reach the nearest other car in the park. But before he succeeded, this car also drove away: the occupants were obviously anxious not to get involved. Michael Mageau lost consciousness.

At four minutes past midnight, the switchboard operator at the Vallejo Police Headquarters received a call. A man’s voice told her, “I want to report a double murder. If you go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to a public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They are shot with a 9 mm Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye.” Then the line went dead.

When the police patrol car arrived at Blue Rock Springs Park, the officers discovered that the caller had been mistaken about one detail: it was not a double murder. Michael Mageau was still alive, although the bullet that had passed through his tongue prevented him from speaking. Darlene Ferrin was dead.

Michael Mageau slowly recovered. When he could speak, he was able to describe his assailant as a stocky, round-faced man, about five foot eight inches (1.72 metres) tall, with light brown wavy or curly hair. His age was around thirty. The gun he had used was not the same one as in the previous case; this one was a 9 mm whereas the other was a .22. But the Solano County Sheriff’s Department had little doubt that the caller was telling the truth when he admitted to killing David Farraday and Bettilou Jensen. And Lundblad now knew that his worst apprehensions were confirmed. The killer’s motive was not robbery, rape, or jealousy. This was simply a “nut”, a homicidal maniac who killed at random.

Again, there were no clues. Even the discovery that the killer had used a public telephone booth in a garage two miles from the murder scene failed to provide a lead. The garage had been closed at the time, so no one had seen the caller. The likeliest inference was that the killer was an inhabitant of Vallejo, or was at least familiar with the town, and knew where the garage was and that it would be closed. And since Vallejo was a small town, that seemed a promising lead. Surely somebody would recognize Michael Mageau’s description of the stocky, wavy-haired man who drove a brown car, probably a Ford?

But it seemed that no one did. And four weeks after the 4 July murder, the killer himself apparently became impatient with the police’s lack of progress and decided to liven up the investigation. On the morning of 1 August 1969 the editor of the
Vallejo Times-Herald
received a crudely scrawled letter, signed with a circle containing a cross, which looked ominously like the telescopic sight of a rifle. The letter-writer described himself as the man who had shot both couples, giving details that made it clear that he knew more about the murders than had been made public. For example, he gave precise details of the type of bullets that had killed Darlene Ferrin. He also mentioned the clothing worn by Bettilou Jensen, evidence that he had taken a close look at her body before fleeing from the scene.

The letter contained an enclosure—a third of a sheet of paper, covered with a strange cipher. What had happened to the other two thirds? The answer soon came. They were enclosed in two more letters, sent simultaneously to the
San Francisco Chronicle
and the
San Francisco Examiner
. The letters to all three newspapers were identical; the code was not. But the letter-writer explained that if the three fragments of the ciphered message were decoded and joined together, they would reveal his identity.

It was the signature on the letters—the circle with a cross inside it—that provided the killer with his nickname. The sign is the astrological symbol for the zodiac, the circle of twelve heavenly constellations. From then on, the newspapers called the killer “Zodiac”. All three letters contained the same threat: that if they were not published that same day, 1 August, the writer would “go on a rampage”: “This will last the whole weekend and I will cruise around killing people who are alone until Sun night or until I kill a dozen people.”

The letters were published—but not in their entirety. Certain details were withheld, including the murder threats. Most major murder cases provoke false confessions from the mentally ill; by withholding part of the letters, the police had a useful method of distinguishing between a harmless crank (who would not be able to say what was missing) and the real killer, if they were to make an arrest.

All three newspapers published the complete text of the cryptogram, together with a request that the letter-writer should provide more proof of his identity. Zodiac responded promptly, sending the
San Francisco Examiner
a letter beginning: “This is Zodiac speaking”, in which he gave more details of the crimes. But he provided no further clue to his identity.

Public attention now centred on the cryptogram. It was sent to naval code experts at the nearby Mare Island Naval Yard, but they failed to crack it. Amateur cryptanalysts all over the state experienced the same lack of success. But one man—a schoolteacher named Donald Harden, who lived in Salinas, California—had the inspired idea of looking for groups of signs that might fit the word “kill”, on the grounds that this word would be used more than once. When he had found the suspected group of signs, he began the long, slow business of working out other letters that might be associated with it—for example, endings like “-ing” or “-ed”. It took Harden and his wife ten hours to decode most of the letter. It read:

The decoding was made more complicated by the fact that the cryptogram was full of spelling errors (such as “forrest” for forest and “sloi” for slow), and it ended in an incomprehensible jumble: “ebeori st me thh piti.”

But the threatened massacre (the “rampage”) did not materialize. Perhaps Zodiac was satisfied with the partial publication of his letter, or perhaps he never had any intention of going on a murder rampage on a weekend when every police officer in California would be looking for him. The threat was simply to cause the maximum amount of panic.

The public offered more than a thousand tips, and every one was checked by the police. Yet ten weeks after the murder of Darlene Ferrin, they were still apparently no closer to solving the crimes. The long, blazing hot summer drew to a close. On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 September, two students from Pacific Union College, a Seventh Day Adventist institution above Napa Valley, went out for a picnic on the shores of Lake Berryessa, about thirteen miles (twenty kilometres) north of Vallejo. Bryan Hartnell was twenty years old, and Cecilia Shepard was 22. They had just finished eating at about four-thirty p.m. when they heard a noise behind them. From the shadow of a tree, a hooded figure stepped out. On the part of the hood covering the figure’s chest was a zodiac sign, drawn in white. The short, pudgy figure advanced towards them, a gun in one hand and a knife in the other.

In a gruff voice, the man asked Hartnell for money, and the young man said he was welcome to the small amount he had on him. The hooded man then declared that he was an escapee from Deer Lodge State Prison in Montana, where he had killed a guard, and said that he needed to take their white sports car so that he could get to Mexico. Then he produced a length of plastic clothes-line and proceeded to tie them both up. As he tied Hartnell’s hands, the young man was able to see through the eye-slits in the hood that their assailant wore glasses and had brown hair. When he had tied both victims by the wrists and ankles, the man announced: “I’m going to have to stab you people.” Hartnell replied, “I’m chicken. Please stab me first—I couldn’t bear to see her stabbed.” “I’ll do just that,” said the man, and plunged the knife again and again into Hartnell’s back. Sick and dizzy with pain, Hartnell then watched the man attack Cecilia. This, obviously, was what the killer had been looking forward to. After the first stab he went into a frenzy, driving the knife again and again into her back. Then he turned her over and stabbed her repeatedly in the stomach. When he had finished, he went over to their car, took out a black felt-tipped pen and wrote on the passenger door. Then he left.

Fighting off unconsciousness, Bryan Hartnell managed to struggle over to Cecilia and undo her wrist bonds with his teeth. It made no difference; she was too weak to move. But fortunately help was already on the way. A fisherman on the lake had heard their screams and had seen the two bodies lying on the shore. He rowed straight to the headquarters of the park ranger and within half an hour Ranger William White was kneeling by the two victims, who both looked close to death. They had just been rushed off to hospital when the Napa police arrived. They, however, had not been summoned by the fisherman or the ranger. They had been alerted by an anonymous telephone call, a man with a gruff voice telling them: “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. I’m the one that did it.” There was no click to end the call; the man had apparently left the telephone to dangle off the hook.

Bryan Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard arrived at hospital in Napa; neither was able to speak. Cecilia died two days later without recovering from her coma; Bryan Hartnell recovered slowly, and was later able to describe their attacker. But by then the police already knew they were dealing with Zodiac. They found his sign on the passenger door of the sports car. He had also written two dates, 20 December and 4 July, the dates of the first two attacks; and a time, four-thirty, the time of the third attack.

Only six blocks from the police headquarters in Napa, the police found the public telephone from which Zodiac had made the call; the telephone receiver was still hanging off the hook. Technicians found three fingerprints on it, but this clue also led nowhere. The killer’s prints were not on police records in California; apparently he had no criminal record in the state. A check with Montana’s Deer Lodge State Prison revealed what the police already took for granted: the killer’s talk about escaping and killing a guard there was pure fantasy.

Two weeks later, on the evening of 11 October 1969, a student and part-time taxi-driver named Paul Stine picked up a passenger near the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco; he was a stocky man with brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses. A quarter of an hour later, two youths standing at the intersection of Washington Street and Cherry Street heard the sound of a gunshot. It came from a yellow cab that had pulled in to the kerb. As they watched, a man got out of the back seat, and leaned through the window into the front of the cab. There was a tearing noise, then the man began wiping the cab with a piece of cloth. Suddenly aware that he was being watched, he left the cab and began to walk rapidly along the street towards the great open space called the Presidio.

The youths alerted the police, who were at the spot within minutes. Paul Stine was slumped forward over the wheel of the cab. The twenty-nine-year-old student of San Francisco State College was dead, shot in the back of the head. The motive was robbery—his, wallet was missing and so was the cash from previous fares. The tearing noise the witnesses had heard had been Stine’s shirt, which the killer had used to wipe the cab, presumably to eliminate fingerprints.

It looked like a typical armed robbery, the kind that often occurs in San Francisco on a Saturday night. The only unusual feature about this particular crime was its sheer ruthlessness—the driver had been killed when he could just as easily have been left alive. It was not until the following Tuesday that the police realized that they had come close to catching Zodiac. The
San Francisco Chronicle
received a letter that began: “This is Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington and Maple Street last night. To prove this here is a bloodstained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in the south bay area. The SF [San Francisco] police could have caught me last night if they had tried . . .”