The Most Dangerous Animal of All (23 page)

Van now had the freedom to prowl for victims whenever he wished. That was part of the fun—the knowledge that he held the life of every person he saw in his hands. It must have been a heady feeling for the narcissistic killer, and people on the California coast had good reason to be terrified.

On March 22, 1970, Van was driving along Highway 132, which runs through Modesto, in the Central Valley, on his way back from Mexico, when he spotted a woman in a maroon-and-white station wagon. Kathleen Johns, a pretty, blond-haired mother, was on her way from San Bernardino to visit her family, almost seven hours away in Petaluma. She began to get nervous when she noticed that the car that had been following her since she passed Modesto was still behind her. It was late, around midnight, when Kathleen decided to slow down so the car could pass.

Van flashed his lights and honked his horn, trying to get her to stop.

Kathleen had her ten-month-old daughter, Jennifer, in the car and was not about to stop. She kept driving slowly, waiting until he finally passed her near Interstate 5. Thinking the driver might have been trying to tell her something was wrong with her car, she stopped to check.

My father stopped a short distance ahead, then backed up.

“Your rear tire looks a little wobbly,” he said when he approached her car. “That’s why I was trying to flag you down. I’ll fix it for you.”

The nervousness Kathleen had felt while driving dissipated. Van was well dressed, harmless-looking. A good Samaritan.

She watched while he returned to his car and retrieved a tool, then walked back and knelt down by the tire. He pretended to tighten the lug nuts.

“Thanks,” Kathleen said, feeling grateful to the helpful stranger. Her mother had warned her that driving alone at night was dangerous, especially with a child in the car, and the incident had been worrisome.

Relieved, she got back into her car and started the ignition. As she attempted to drive away, the car lurched to a stop. She got back out to see what had happened.

The left rear wheel had fallen off.

Watching in his rearview mirror for what he knew would happen, Van made a quick U-turn.

“Come on. Get in my car. I’ll bring you to a service station,” he told Kathleen, pulling his car alongside hers.

Stuck in the middle of nowhere, Kathleen did not see any other option. She picked up her baby and got into Van’s car.

Van had not noticed the baby.

Undeterred, he drove west on Highway 132 until he saw a Richfield gas station on the corner of Chrisman Road. He pulled in, but it was closed.

He got back onto the highway and began driving down country roads and then through the small town of Tracy. They passed service station after service station.

“Why didn’t you stop?” Kathleen asked each time.

“It wasn’t the right one,” Van replied.

Kathleen was getting nervous again, even though the man seemed friendly enough. She pulled her baby closer.

“Where do you work?” she asked, trying to initiate conversation to quiet her fear.

“I usually work for two months at a time, then just drive around, mostly at night,” he said, his answer doing nothing to alleviate the tension that was building in the car.

“Do you always go around helping people on the road?”

“When I get through with them, they won’t need my help,” Van informed her.

Kathleen could feel fear tightening her stomach. She sat there quietly as they drove for more than an hour, waiting for an opportunity to make her escape. She hoped he would stop the car.

He didn’t.

She distracted herself by memorizing everything about him that she could: his face, what he was wearing. The backseat and dashboard of the car were covered with books and papers, as if the man worked out of his car. She noticed that his shoes were extraordinarily shiny, spit-shined like a military officer’s.

Finally, Kathleen noticed a stop sign ahead and began praying her captor would stop.

He did.

She jumped from the car with the baby in her arms and began running as fast as she could across a nearby field. Looking back, she saw that Van was still in the car. He had turned off the lights and was sitting there watching her, contemplating his next move.

Kathleen climbed up an embankment before turning around to discover that he was driving away. Fearful that he would come back, she ran toward a nearby road and flagged down a passing car, whose occupants drove her to the police station in Patterson, a suburb of Modesto about twenty-seven miles from Tracy. It was 2:30 in the morning.

Van had waited for her to leave. He drove back to her car and carefully wiped his fingerprints from the hubcap he had touched. Enraged that his victim had escaped, he set the car ablaze before he drove away.

Sergeant Charles McNatt took Kathleen’s statement. As he listened to her story, suddenly the young woman began screaming.

“What’s wrong?” the startled officer asked.

Kathleen pointed to a police sketch that had two pictures hanging side by side on the wall. “That’s him. That’s the man who picked us up,” she cried.

“Which one of those men was your abductor?” McNatt said.

“That one,” Kathleen replied, pointing to the one that had been amended by Detective Fouke, who had seen Zodiac in the Presidio Heights neighborhood moments after he had killed Paul Stine.

“Have you ever seen this picture before?” the officer asked.

“No.”

“That’s a sketch of the Zodiac,” McNatt told her.

Kathleen became hysterical, and McNatt spent the next moments trying to calm the distraught woman before calling the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Department and asking that a deputy be sent to the area where Kathleen had left her car.

Deputy Jim Lovett found the car on Maze Boulevard about two miles east of Interstate 5. It had been completely burned.

Police were not quite sure how to handle the incident. They did not know if it was actually a kidnapping. Kathleen had told them that the man did not threaten her or her child. She had been scared, yes, but she had not been physically forced at any time to stay in the vehicle.

Later, Kathleen would change her story and tell people that the man had looked at her and said, “You know you’re going to die. You know I’m going to kill you. I’m going to throw the baby out.”

I don’t know if that is true, but if it is, that was certainly something that Van had done before.

The
San Francisco Chronicle
received another letter from the Zodiac on April 20, 1970. It read:

This is the Zodiac speaking

By the way have you cracked the last cipher I sent you?

My name is ______________

Van was telling police that the 340 cipher contained only his name. Investigators who tried to crack the 340 cipher were destined to fail because the symbols weren’t standing in for letters. There was no message—just “Earl Van Best Junior,” written backwards in plain sight.

My father then included a new cipher with thirteen characters, including letters and symbols—the exact number of letters in “Earl Van Best Jr.”

According to the Zodiac, the number of his victims was now at ten, but police had not yet connected any other murders to him.

Paul Avery also did not connect the fact that this letter was postmarked exactly seven years from the date he had published his article “Love on the Run: Ice Cream Romance’s Bitter End” in the
Chronicle
.

35

Her mirror told her what she already knew—she looked good. Judy had spent the past hour carefully applying her makeup and choosing the perfect outfit for her date. Although she had her fair share of admirers, she was much more selective now.

Cautious.

She had learned the hard way where her impetuous nature could lead her. She ran a brush through her hair one last time and went into the living room to wait for her date.

Since her return to San Francisco, Judy had turned her life around. She had graduated from high school and taken a job caring for a woman with degenerative bone disease. Although it had been difficult, she had finally forgiven her mother for forcing her to give me up for adoption.

That had not been easy.

Verda had banned the mention of my name, and Judy had been left to deal with what had happened on her own. In silence.

It was like she had never had a son.

As Judy grew into adulthood, the life she had shared with Van influenced her emotional reactions to almost everything. She had a fear inside of her that she couldn’t quite shake. A lack of trust.

But on this night, she determined to let her guard down. She happily contemplated the evening as she waited for her date to arrive.

She waited.

And waited.

He didn’t call. He didn’t show up.

When her sister, Carolyn (or Lyn), dropped by, Judy was busy nursing a bruised ego.

“Don’t worry about him,” Lyn said. “Come out with me instead.”

“I don’t feel like it,” Judy said. She didn’t want to go out and pretend she was having a good time when her feelings were so hurt.

“Come on,” Lyn said. “We’ll have fun.”

Finally Judy relented, and the girls headed off to a nearby club.

“Oh, look who’s at the bar,” Lyn said, making her way over to a tall, good-looking black man she had met through her job at a legal firm.

“This is Rotea Gilford,” she said, pulling Judy closer. “He’s a cop. Rotea, this is my sister, Judy.”

“Hi,” Rotea said, unable to say much else for a moment. Lyn’s sister was beautiful.

Stunning.

“You have lost some weight,” Lyn observed when Rotea stood up to offer his seat.

“Fifty-two pounds,” Rotea said proudly. “High blood sugar. I had to.”

“How did you do it?” Lyn asked.

“High protein, low carbohydrates,” Rotea responded, but he didn’t want to discuss his weight with her. He wanted to talk to the attractive blond woman standing next to Lyn.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked Judy when the band began playing the first notes of a slow song.

She nodded, and Rotea took her hand and led her onto the small dance floor, liking the way the tall girl fit snugly against him.

Judy forgot all about being stood up as Rotea twirled her around the dance floor. She liked this big, strong man. She felt safe in his arms.

They spent the rest of the evening flirting and laughing, learning all they could about each other.

Rotea was forty-six. Judy was twenty-two. He was black. She was white.

None of that mattered.

By the end of the night, Rotea was smitten.

He had no way of knowing that the face that had instantly captured his heart was the very same face that had fueled a serial killer’s rampage.

36

Van wrote five more letters in 1970, using his threats to generate terror while mocking police efforts to catch him. On April 28, eight years to the day since he had kidnapped Judy from the Youth Guidance Center, he mailed what would become known as the Dragon Card to the
Chronicle
and again threatened to set off a bomb.

On the cover he had placed a Santa Claus character riding a dragon and another character riding a donkey. Written on the card were the words “Sorry to hear your ass is a dragon.”

I hope you enjoy your selves when I have my Blast.

P.S. on back

If you don’t want me to have this blast you must do two things. 1. Tell everyone about the bus bomb with all the details. 2. I would like to see some nice Zodiac butons wandering about town. Every one else has these buttons like,
, black power, Melvin eats bluber, etc. Well it would cheer me up considerably if I saw a lot of people wearing my buton. Please no nasty ones like Melvin’s

Thank you