The Most Dangerous Animal of All (25 page)

The reporter also did not realize that his “secret pal” was someone he knew—a man he had met in a jail cell in the Hall of Justice. He had made a mockery of Van’s love for Judy, had insinuated that he was a child molester, and my father had not forgotten.

The methods of killing mentioned in the card prompted further investigation by police. Zodiac had not been linked to murders using rope, although there were many murder cases in the area involving women who were strangled during the years Zodiac was killing. The card made them go back and look at those cases to see if they could be linked to Zodiac, but the pieces didn’t fit. His modus operandi was different.

The
Chronicle
published the Halloween card on October 31 on the front page of the paper.

Chronicle
staff members soon began sporting buttons that stated,
I AM NOT PAUL AVERY
.

In November, an anonymous tip would lead Avery to make the connection between Zodiac and the Riverside murder of Cheri Jo Bates. Sherwood Morrill, the document examiner who had validated the Zodiac letters, soon confirmed that the handwriting in the Zodiac letters matched the letters and the desktop poem in the Riverside case.

Suddenly Avery, in addition to the police, was being bombarded with leads. He checked out every one, obsessed now with this killer who had singled him out. In a television documentary aired in 1989, titled
Zodiac: Crimes of the Century
, Avery explained, “At one point, I received a phone call from Anton LaVey, who was the founder and the high priest of the Church of Satan, which was very big in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He thought one of his parishioners, one of his members, might be the Zodiac killer. And he provided me with some material. I mean, the Zodiac killer was so bad that even the Church of Satan didn’t want him.”

Did LaVey’s association with Van prompt that phone call? Unfortunately, I will never know, because Avery never publicly revealed the name LaVey had given him. On March 13, 1971, the
Los Angeles Times
received its first correspondence from my father. It had been almost five months since he had sent anyone a letter. He wrote:

This is the Zodiac speaking

Like I have allways said, I am crack proof. If the Blue Meannies are evere going to catch me, they had best get off their fat asses + do something. Because the longer they fiddle + fart around, the more slaves I will collect for my after life. I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones, there are a hell of a lot more down there. The reason I’m writing to the Times is this, They don’t bury me on the back pages like some of the others.

SFPD – 0
– 17+

Van’s alleged victim count had climbed even higher. Again, police could not positively link him to any new murders during that time.

Then, just as suddenly as he appeared, the Zodiac stopped communicating. It would be three years before anyone heard from him again.

It is unknown why my father disappeared from the limelight during those years, but I know that he spent some time in Austria forging documents, and he also spent a lot of time in Mexico.

Weary from living in fear, California residents prayed they had heard the last of the Zodiac.

37

In 1971, Rotea finally realized his dream by becoming the first African American officially invited to join the SFPD’s homicide team. He eventually chose Earl Sanders to be his partner, bringing his young friend up the ranks with him. Rotea soon learned that things were different in homicide. In the lower ranks, black officers felt like they could not depend on white officers.

In his book
The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights
, Earl Sanders recalls a time when he and Rotea were pursuing a suspect, and Rotea radioed for help. “We need some buddies as backup,” he said.

“For a moment, there was silence,” Sanders recalls in the book. “I’ll never forget what I heard next. A man—we never found out who—came on and said, ‘You two ain’t got no buddies out here.’ ”

This was indicative of the kind of racism that Rotea and Sanders had experienced in robbery, but in homicide, detectives had to work together to be able to solve the murders that came across their desks. Rotea recognized that he was a token black, there only to make the department look good, but he was determined to prove he was just as capable as his white counterparts.

He made his point by rapidly solving the murder of a Muni bus driver. This was a major coup for the detective and earned him a place in newspaper headlines.

But that wasn’t the only murder Rotea wanted to solve. Even though it had been two years since Paul Stine was killed in his taxi, Toschi and Armstrong were still following up on the multitude of leads that continued to flow into the department regarding Zodiac. When they were too busy or had time off, Rotea ran down leads for them. That was the way it was in homicide. All of the detectives helped each other.

Rotea knew that the keys to finding the killer were in the letters and in the types of victims Zodiac had chosen. He reviewed the evidence from each case, noticing similarities and writing down crucial points. He knew from the viciousness directed toward the women that they seemed to be the main target of Zodiac’s rage. He observed that they resembled one another. Rotea, like so many detectives across California, hoped, prayed, that they would soon get a lead that would break the case. He knew the answer had to be right in front of them.

It was.

Right in front of him.

All of the victims looked like his new girlfriend.

But Rotea, enamored of the beautiful young woman, missed that clue completely.

Professionally, Rotea was building respect in the department and in the community, but his personal life was in a shambles.

His oldest son, Michael, a college football lineman, had been in a terrible car crash that ended all hope of a football career. The young college star now required constant care. The accident had been devastating for the family, driving Rotea and Patricia further apart. The tension in his marriage had gotten progressively worse, until Rotea felt compelled to move into his own apartment in the Upper Haight. He spent the next year moving in and out of the home he shared with Patricia. Reconciling, breaking up, reconciling.

Rotea was not a man who liked being alone. When he was alone, he drank. Sometimes his partner came by to play dominoes, but more often than not Rotea stayed home alone when he wasn’t working, drowning his sorrow in a bottle.

The one bright spot in his life was Judy. After the night they had danced together, he had asked her out for a dinner date, and she agreed to go. She liked his manners, his big, friendly smile. The respect he commanded. He liked her youth, her enthusiasm, her beauty.

They began dating, even though they knew others might not understand. Rotea explained to her the situation with Patricia, sharing his pain over their impending divorce. He talked about his son. Judy held his hand and listened empathetically.

My mother didn’t mention me or my father. It was too soon for that. A police officer might not understand that she had once run away with a criminal who had abandoned their son.

My father, meanwhile, obsessed with reading newspapers to see what kind of press he was getting, couldn’t help but notice the SFPD’s black detective on the rise.

38

Every day that went by without a Zodiac murder allowed the city to breathe a little more easily. During this time, Rotea continued to woo Judy, asking her repeatedly to marry him after his divorce from Patricia became final.

Judy resisted. She was leery of becoming a stepmother. Her parents had not exactly provided a model for how to raise children, and her own experience with a child had been horrific.

But Rotea was relentless. A man needed a wife, and that was that. He was just as determined as Van had been that Judy would be his.

He was equally determined to correct the way of thinking at the SFPD. Rotea became instrumental in forming a group of black police officers named Officers for Justice. In 1973, the group filed a civil suit against the department for discrimination. The good-old-boy network within the SFPD did not take kindly to the suit, and Rotea and Sanders soon found themselves working in an environment filled with hatred and bitterness. The tension boiled over one afternoon when Rotea and Sanders left the Federal Building after giving a deposition. Several hundred fellow officers were waiting on the steps when they left the building, shouting out derogatory slogans, even calling them “niggers.”

Such an environment did not make Rotea’s job easier, but he always maintained his composure and didn’t let anything distract him from the job at hand, which at the time was to catch the perpetrators of a series of racially motivated murders that were terrorizing San Francisco.

The Zebra murders began October 20, 1973, when a young white couple, Richard and Quita Hague, were abducted while out walking and later viciously hacked with a machete by three African American men. Richard survived. Quita did not.

Over the next six months, Rotea and Sanders would spend almost every waking moment helping the lead detectives on the case, John Fotinos and Gus Coreris, track the murderers. Rotea and Sanders were invaluable to the team, because members of the black community who did not trust white officers would talk to them. Rotea used his contacts in the Fillmore to help uncover valuable clues.

On October 29, the next victim, Frances Rose, was shot several times by a man who had stopped her in her vehicle, demanding a ride as she approached the University of California campus in Berkeley. Saleem Erakat was next; on November 25, a man entered his grocery store, tied him up, and shot him execution style. On December 11, Paul Dancik was at a pay phone when he was shot three times.

On December 13, Art Agnos, who would eventually become the mayor of San Francisco, was shot twice in the back after leaving a meeting in a black neighborhood. That same night, Marietta DiGirolamo was shot three times while walking along Divisadero Street. She did not survive the attack.

Just before Christmas, on the 20th, Ilario Bertuccio died from four gunshot wounds in the Bayview District. That same evening, Theresa DeMartini was shot on Central Avenue, but she survived. On the 22nd, Neal Moynihan was killed, shot three times on Twelfth Street after leaving a bar. Only minutes later, Mildred Hosler was shot four times near her bus stop on Gough and McCoppin Streets.

On Christmas Eve, two women made a gruesome discovery on North Beach—the dead body of a man, whom police named “John Doe #196.” The man had been dismembered and decapitated. His identity would forever remain a mystery, and although he sustained no bullet wounds, many investigators believed his death was connected to the Zebra murders.

In December 1973,
The Exorcist
was released in theaters to stunned audiences. Based on the 1949 exorcism of Roland Doe, the movie featured a young girl, played by Linda Blair, who is possessed by a demon that a pair of priests attempt to exorcise. For many, the satanic theme of the psychological drama was offensive, but few could resist watching, and
The Exorcist
became the top-grossing horror film of all time. Others embraced the film’s focus on the power of evil, but everyone who saw it was frightened.

Everyone but Van.

On January 28, 1974, the Zebra killers went on a rampage, committing five separate shootings—Roxanne McMillan, Tana Smith, Vincent Wollin, John Bambic, and Jane Holly. McMillan was the only victim who survived.

As the families of the dead mourned their losses, in a cramped bedroom on Noe Street, Van stared at the announcement in horror.

There she was . . . beautiful and sweet. Smiling.

Staring into her eyes was the black homicide detective he had seen in San Francisco newspapers.

And the date of their nuptials.

On January 29, my father, devastated and enraged, wrote the first letter he had written in three years. He addressed it to the
San Francisco Chronicle
.

Out of the foggy mist, Zodiac reemerged to terrorize the city even further.

“I saw + think ‘The Exorcist’ was the best saterical comidy that I have ever seen,” he wrote.

“Signed, yours truley:”

Van then predicted the figurative death of Zodiac using quotes from
The Mikado
.

He plunged him self into the billowy wave

and an echo arose from the sucides grave

tit willo tit willo

tit willo

PS. if I do not see this note in your paper, I will do something nasty, which you know I’m capable of doing

Me – 37

SFPD – 0

His purported victim count had more than doubled during his absence. While no murders bearing the Zodiac’s signature in Austria or Mexico during those three years have come to my attention, I have to wonder if my father might have left a mark in those places. Or was he simply manufacturing victim tallies to keep police guessing?