antique, RobertUnmasked 24 страница

“Before he had that Hal oween Day press conference,” recal ed Bawart, “Beeman got hold of me and said, ‘I’m going to do this exposé. I know alstuff. I want you to investigate this.’ So I went down and met him at his office. ‘Do you have any documentation?’ I asked. ‘Wel, no I haven’t doneof that,’ he said.” Handprinting samples provided by Beeman had not matched those of Zodiac. But so far nobody’s handprinting had, andnobody’s ever would. I stil believed that Zodiac might have been a different personality when he wrote his letters. No matter, we al had tountil Hal oween to hear what Beeman had to say.

zodiac, October 31, 1991welled up in Val ejo lawyer Wil iam Steadman Beeman’s eyes. One tear coursed down a broad cheek, dampening his starched whitear. Shyly, the seventy-one-year-old man brushed a lock of straight dark hair from his glasses and peered over a podium crowded with. Beeman, succeeding beyond his dreams, had attracted a multitude. Television cameras glinted in the light and cables snaked at his. He saw Chronicle reporter Paul Avery entering the Solano County Fairgrounds, and consulted his watch. They were a little late getting started.had scheduled the press conference for 10:30 A.M. and spent almost $600 to stage the meeting, not including the cost of mailing invitations toand investigators. He had a lot riding on this event. He let them stew a bit longer. After al, he was ready to reveal who Zodiac was—justthe biggest story there was.

“There is no apparent motive behind the timing of the announcement,” said reporter Jackie Ginley, “but it dovetails with a Val ejo policeof Arthur Leigh Al en, a Val ejo man who was once a prime suspect in the stil unsolved 1969-70 kil ings.” Since Tuesday Ginley hadout her dialing finger trying to reach Al en for comment on what Beeman might say. Was Beeman, like Spinel i, about to name Al en as the?almost an hour Beeman presented the verification that led to his conjecture. “There are at least 101 points of circumstantial evidence,” he. “I have a real problem with revealing the identity of this person. I had to do a lot of soul-searching.” Beeman began to build to his revelation,his suspect variously as “a recluse,” and “a woman-hater.” He was “so disordered that he could not hold down a job,” said the attorney.

“He could not even face a woman in the unemployment office without flying into a rage. ‘Women are subhumans,’ he told me. ‘They cannot thinky and they act on emotions,’ he said. He had done occasional work for me and sometimes repaired television sets. He particularly hatedow Cab drivers,”before noon the big moment arrived. Beeman held up Jack the Zodiac, a two-part paperback book he had published under the pen name

“Doctor O. Henry Jiggelance.” Volume One of the set opened with the warning: “This story is entirely fictional.” Light began to dawn in the eyes ofassembled throng.

“‘Jack the Zodiac,’ was my own brother.”Beeman, a long-haired, dignified sixty-six-year-old, had died in Phoenix seven years earlier. “Jack the Zodiac,” Beeman said, “came closekil ing me. If he hadn’t been drunk, and I hadn’t moved like a mongoose, he would have.” In spite of the acrimony between them, Beeman hadJack in minor run-ins with the law. He also believed that his brother had been responsible for the 1983 death of a Val ejo prostitute.pointed out that Jack misspel ed the same words as Zodiac. “He used the same phrasing as that in the letters,” he said.audience was not persuaded.

“I feel you’re sincere in this,” said Avery. “It’s a pretty heavy trip to be laying on your brother, but you’ve offered nothing more than circumstantial.”

“I wouldn’t be wrong in saying there are one hundred people who have cal ed with the same kind of generalities,” Bawart later said. “We look into, but I’m not going to pay $58 for his book [the cost for the privately printed two-volume set].” Besides, Bawart had no time for readinghe did it on a plane—he had just gotten a lead connecting Arthur Leigh Al en with Zodiac. That lead would take him to the other side of the.

german hippie

“When I retired they kept me on the case—you know that,” Bawart told me, “and anytime anybody would cal, ‘My brother or brother-in-law’s the,’ they cal ed me in. However, the department was total y satisfied that Arthur Leigh Al en is the Zodiac. I used to use Zodiac like a Bible,I could never keep al the dates straight. I’d use your book to figure out when stuff real y happened.”

“I always thought that would be the best value that such a book could have,” I said.

“There was a guy that was a friend of Al en’s from high school and col ege. His name was Robert Emmett Rodifer.”

“Robert Emmett?” I said. That was the name anagramists had deduced from the garbled last symbols of Zodiac’s three-part 1969 cipher—EMET THE HIPIE or “Robert Emmett the Hippie.” Emmet was an Irish patriot who had been hanged. A statue of him stood in Golden Gatein front of Morrison Planetarium—a room ful of stars and the hal of biology—Al en’s passions. Al en’s father, Ethan, was named after Ethanen, an American patriot who had been hanged. Robert Emmett had been born in 1803, Al en’s father in 1903. “And was Robert Emmett a?” I asked.

“He was a hippie-type. Rodifer was a guy Al en knew at Poly where he went to col ege in Southern California and stretching back to the time ofearliest murder. Robert Emmett had also been manager of the Val ejo High swim team. Later he became a hippie attending the University ofat Berkeley and at U.S.F. Apparently there was some real y bad blood between the two. I found Rodifer, but it wasn’t any great sleuthon my part. Because of the search of Al en’s house, Leigh’s name came out in the press. A woman in Val ejo saw it. She had gone to schoolArthur Leigh Al en, bought your book, and read the portion where it says [in the last line of the deciphered 340-symbol code of November 8,

], ‘My name is Robert Emmett the Hippie.’ And she said, ‘My goodness, I know Robert Emmett. Emmy Lou—Robert Emmett Rodifer. She gothold of me.”

“They cal ed him Emmy Lou?”

“I don’t know why. Talented. Rodifer was a real outgoing guy. In fact he was a mime and he played on The Ed Sullivan Show and al that kind of. Arthur Leigh Al en actual y hated the guy. Maybe it was because Al en was an introvert and this guy was an extrovert, although they were—let’s say, had been friends.

“We tracked the guy down. We found out about Rodifer through his classmate. We thought he might be working in concert with Arthur Leigh Al en.was now living in Germany. Rodifer was around children al the time at the base where he worked. Jim Lang went with me. He was the chiefof the district attorney. Ironical y, Jim Lang spent twenty years with the LAPD, the last portion of which was working homicide. He retired, butwas stil a young enough man that he went to law school and got a law degree. He was the district attorney of a county up north. He came downand worked initial y in the public defender’s office, then transferred over to the D.A.’s office for a number of years. Youthful-appearing, a realmind, and he knows the homicide business too because he worked in it. In any event he wrote al these letters of rogatory, and it started inof 1991.”

“This seems to be a very important time,” I said. “Everything coming together.”

“Right. It took a hel of a long time. We ended up in Germany in the dead of winter in February 1992. It was kind of a fun trip. We actual y spentweeks over there. One week we were actual y working. One week we were touring. We made some very good friends. The captain in charge ofhomicide division in Heilbraun, Germany, and his wife turned out to be good friends. They’ve been out here visiting us and we’ve got a bigyacht and we took them out on the Delta. We had a great time with them.

“Basical y, what happened in Germany was this—in order to speak with Rodifer, we had to go through letters of rogatory, which is requests of thegovernment to come over and interview a person within their country. Even though this guy was an American citizen living on an American, we stil had to go through the German laws. I brought my own copy of your book, Zodiac, and a second copy. My German aide read Englishasked for one of the copies. The magistrate, who under German law determines whether it is permissible for U.S. officers to speak with, al owed it after some deliberation. Then he looked over my copy of your book and asked if he could have it. Of course I gave it to him. Wewith the police in Heilbraun and explained the whole situation, and they felt they had enough to write a search warrant for Rodifer’s place, whichultimately did. We went there with about half a dozen German policemen, al of which were in plain clothes. They did a real thorough search ofplace. We didn’t find anything connected with the Zodiac. I found a bunch of kid stuff. They kinda thought it might be important, but I wasn’t surethat either.”theorized Rodifer might have been aiding Al en. “I didn’t know if there were actual y two kil ers, but there might have been two individualsgot their jol ies doing this. We couldn’t talk to him at the time of search, although he did talk to me quite a bit. He volunteered to. Rodifer was a man, five six at most. Kind of a bubbly kind of guy. He had been a number of places. He worked with the Department of Defense and he ranDependents’ Activities Program. If you’re a sergeant or something and you’re going to be overseas long enough, you get to bring your family. The families sometimes don’t relate to the new country, so the Army has community centers and he ran those community centers where yourcould go there and learn to wrestle and play basketbal and shoot pool and just have different functions. It was so kids could occupy their timein a foreign country. He had been doing it a long time. He was in Japan. In fact he was married while in Japan. I was never able to locate hiswife.

“We had to ultimately go before a German judge. We served the papers on him, and a day or two later we went to the courthouse and al the[of Rodifer] was done before this judge. It was an extensive questioning and he was under oath and he had to answer truthful y. I don’thow much that means. He gave us a story about him knowing Al en. He was never real close friends with him. ‘I was real y popular in schoolLeigh was not,’ he told me. ‘He was jealous of me.’ There was apparently some animosity between him and Al en because of this. Then afterhe volunteered to talk to me at length, and I jammed him pretty good. In fact he had a German-appointed attorney who got upset with me. I tendbelieve him. I came back and I interviewed a lot of classmates who were in that era when they were together—junior col ege. We interviewedand I’m satisfied that ‘Robert Emmett the Hippie’ is a guy that Arthur Leigh Al en didn’t like.”

“Did you get handwriting samples from Rodifer?”

“It was one of the things we went to talk to Rodifer about. We got samples of Rodifer’s handwriting from the Department of the Army, where hefil ing out requests to go here, there, and everywhere. There was both printed and cursive matter on it. He wouldn’t be disguising histo fil out an application. We had our guy who was doing al our handwriting analysis, Cunningham from San Francisco, and he lookedit, compared it to the Zodiac letters, and said, ‘No, he didn’t write these.’”

“Where was Rodifer in 1968 and 1969? Al those Zodiac letters then had had local postmarks on them.”

“He was out of the country, I think. Oh, wait a minute. He was going to school in Berkeley.”

“How about 1974-1977?” That had been the period when no Zodiac letters had been received.

“He was out of the country, but I don’t want to say that for sure.”

“Did Rodifer have a lie-detector test as wel?”

“No,” said George, “Germany doesn’t al ow it. And as for Rodifer, he was not useful to testify.”detectives retooled and began once more looking for evidence. If they were to interview Al en again they would need some expert guidancethe FBI. When Toschi had gotten in trouble, Al en had said to his P.O., “Now he’l know what it feels like.” Toschi had this to say about him:

“Al en had a great resentment anyway, but after al that public humiliation—now he’s real y going to start hating cops.”, February 4, 1992media storm blew over and Leigh went on with his life. His good friend, Harold Huffman, one of the first to offer solace after last year’s search,to check on his health. “When he and Leigh made contact again,” his wife, Kay, told me, “they agreed to never talk about what he went tofor. If Leigh was going to speak about any of his perverted feelings or what had led him to do it, Harold could not be his friend. Thosethe rules that were laid down. Harold said, ‘I can deal with Leigh al right, but I do not want to know the particulars and I don’t ever want to talkit.’ Leigh tried to discuss it a few times. He made a couple overtures, but was met with silence. When my husband said ‘no,’ people listened.Leigh that Harold knew was not necessarily the Leigh I knew. When my son Rob got a little older he said, ‘Mom, did you know Dad took me outthe Zodiac?’ I said, ‘Dad took you out with Leigh?’ He said, ‘Yeah, Mom.’”and Leigh went on day trips, shooting and diving around the North Bay. Though lame and legal y blind, Leigh could stil shoot accurately. Inwater he was almost his old self. Harold told his son how Leigh had recently visited the coast to dive for abalone. A party of frog-men, deckedin expensive gear, were taking lessons. Before they could dive, Leigh appeared in his trunks, knife clinched between his teeth, and plunged intosurf. “In a few minutes,” Rob recal ed, “he returned with the legal limit suctioned onto his large bel y. He loved to gloat in the surprise ofspectators. He shined when the spotlight was on him.” While Leigh even drove on occasion, he let Huffman take the wheel, onlyhim to drive them near Blue Rock Springs or Lake Herman Road. “If the cops are tailing me, they might use it against me,” he said.

“They’l go, ‘What were you doing cruising Blue Rock Springs with your friend?’ I don’t want to see you hassled.”was very familiar with Lake Herman Road. Once, he and Kay were driving around the outskirts of Val ejo when they stumbled on a bleedingby the road. It was a scene much like the Lake Herman Road attack. “In 1956, Leigh and I were coming back on American Canyon Road,” Kay, “and saw a man standing outside his little car pul ed off the side of the road. He was waving his arms. We got out. He and his wife haddrinking a lot of wine out of a jug and some kids had come along and asked him for a match. When they rol ed down the window, the kidsed him out, cal ed him a wino, and beat him up. So Leigh took the jug and he threw it far as he could out into the field. I never figured out howI agreed to this—when you’re young you do dumb things—I sat in the car with the doors locked with these two little people while he went andfor a highway patrolman. He drove up on Highway 40 and did al sorts of loops and il egal things before he final y attracted the attention ofHighway Patrol. They fol owed him back down to where we were parked.”

the last two years Toschi had been chief of security for the posh Pan-Pacific Hotel at 500 Post Street. As director of twenty-four-hour securityconducted discreet surveil ance of the VIP’s floor and coordinated with their security people—grueling work. “Many times computer companiesme to meet with their own corporate security manager... do a walk-around of the hotel and the rooms where equipment is going to be,”said. “Times people would cal me and I would be so tense and exhausted—missing luggage and missing items from rooms.” And yet,each bend in the hotel’s labyrinth of corridors, Toschi’s nemesis stil lurked. A stone’s throw away Zodiac had flagged down Stine’s cab thatago Columbus Day. Toschi recal ed the legions of Zodiac suspects. Had there ever been a greater mystery? The legend grew. A newbecame obsessed.if he had never vanished, Zodiac turned up later as fodder for television dramas. One day location directors for the Nash Bridges televisionarrived unexpectedly from Hol ywood and checked into the Pan-Pacific. As Toschi inspected their five rooms, one asked him, “Are youwith the Zodiac kil er story? That’s our next project.” He laughed, knowing how many years he had spent hunting Zodiac. “What was it like toon the hunt for a serial kil er?” they asked, and so he told them. When Toschi saw the completed show, he said, “At least they didn’t make me a. I even got to save the life of Nash Bridges [Don Johnson] through the character of his former mentor. The plot is that Bridges hears his mentorhomicide, Dale Cutter, a retired inspector, is having family problems. After many years, he goes hunting for Zodiac again. The drama ends with real Zodiac stil alive and making a cal to Bridges.”Mysteries would profile Zodiac, and the Fox Network program Millennium filmed an episode in which the hero (Frank Black)Zodiac’s trailer through the brush in Santa Rosa. The climax occurs in a theater like the Avenue. In the darkened movie house Blackupon Zodiac—gun pointed, one foot advanced, the square-cornered black hood with the crossed circle in stark contrast—the drawing ofin costume come to life. The figure, through, is a dummy that al ows Zodiac to escape as effectively as the actual Zodiac had., March 4, 1992had not yet given up on Leigh. Weary manhunters, realizing they were up against a wily and clever opponent, thought they hadsome clue. Painstakingly, they scrutinized items seized from the suspect’s house, sought out the FBI for strategy. The bureau’spage Zodiac file mentioned only Arthur Leigh Al en in detail, his dossier accounting for ten percent of the file. Agents studied periodicalsfrom Leigh’s basement, especial y an article on Dave Eastman, the “Bird Man of Eaton,” that had seized the suspect’s interest. The FBIout a second article on Eastman in The Irregular, a New Hampshire free periodical dated April 19, 1989. Of what import to Leigh Al enEastman, a former helicopter pilot and birdhouse builder? Leigh was a flyer (that association alone might have sparked his interest), but itmore sense if he had hidden something in a wilderness birdhouse. They noted that Eastman wore glasses like those in the Zodiac wanted. Detectives fine-combed their bounty again. Perhaps they already had that clue, but did it lie there unrecognized on a table heaped withrecovered articles?

“As an experienced homicide investigator,” retired Detective Baker remarked, “I recognize that, for purposes of search warrants and forthe validity of suspects’ admissions/confessions, the existence of such items would not be made public. However, unless the mentionspecific items was somehow redacted/deleted from the publicized versions of the warrants to search Al en’s residence, this may not be the case

(items not named with any specificity in the warrant may not be seized). This would lead me to believe that any souvenirs he may have col ectedbe more esoteric or abstract than would otherwise be recognized by the investigators. Then again... perhaps the investigators of that periodhave lacked the present-day sophistication to have recognized the absence of such items from the scenes.”what was there? A pile of recipe cards that had words humorously misspel ed, a slip of yel ow paper and a Zodiac Sea Wolf Watch thehad expected to find. They anticipated clippings on Zodiac; they were there. A serial kil er who craved publicity would be compel ed tocuttings of his newspaper appearances. He not only had videotapes of news programs mentioning Zodiac, but had retained a copy of theof service of a search warrant Toschi had handed him in 1972. Al en had smiled then, as if he knew a joke that the police did not.thought of Lynch’s anonymous tip in 1969. Without that tip, Leigh would not have been a suspect until he spoke freely to the three detectives atoil refinery. He seemed to want to interact with the police, and enjoyed it when he was final y a suspect. What if Leigh had turned himself in? If, who had been the tipster?

“I probably hadn’t seen Leigh in twenty-five or thirty years,” Kay Huffman told me later. “I hadn’t kept in touch. I knew he had been down inand I knew what for. And that blew me away because I had had no inkling of anything like that. Harold and Leigh had gone to an airand he brought him home here. There was this little old man. I don’t know what happened to the young vigorous person I knew, but he wasn’tanymore. Now the diabetes had made him look terrible and aged. I was devastated for days afterward. I couldn’t believe it was the same.

“My dad was very il too and so I’d go up to Val ejo to visit him. I usual y did that about every other weekend and if Leigh was in, I’d stop by andhim a little bit. The first time I stopped by, he wanted to tel me about how he had burglar-proofed the house ’cause there had been a break-in.he wanted to know if I wanted to see the guns and knives he kept in the basement room his mother built for him. We used to cal it ‘The.’ I looked at him and said, ‘That isn’t what I came to see. I came to see you.’ And he says, ‘You don’t want to talk about my guns?’ ‘No, I’t want to talk about them and I don’t want to see them ever.’”, March 23, 1992FBI special agent met with Conway while Bawart was fol owing up leads. On Monday morning Conway advised the agent they were reinitiatingZodiac serial murder investigation. “This was because of information concerning a possible suspect—Arthur Leigh Al en,” the S.A. wrote of the.

“Conway and Bawart were interested in designing an interview strategy for ALLEN should it become necessary to confront him,” said theFBI report [252B-SF-9447]. He stated he “met on two separate occasions with Conway and Bawart.... These two meetings lastedtotal of approximately ten hours. These investigators were interested in an interview strategy for a possible suspect ARTHUR LEIGH ALLEN., they indicated they had a considerable amount of investigation to conduct prior to contacting ALLEN.” The memo mentioned the

search and indicated VPD had subsequently interviewed him again twice. On al occasions, ALLEN was “calm and cooperative,” but any involvement. This case was left pending because the Val ejo police indicated that they wanted additional assistance in theiras information developed. Therefore this case was left open until 3/23/92, when Bawart was contacted to provide a status report the case. Because of SA caseload during the last year with priority matters... no regular memos have been placed in the [Al en] file explaining the reason to have the case remain open.”, March 24, 1992Bawart and Conway prepared “Report, Case #243145,” they discovered more circumstances that indicated Arthur Leigh Al en was in fact thekil er. “They got a lot of stuff that Mulanax did, then went and talked to some of the same people,” I was told. “A lot of what the informantstel ing Conway and Bawart in the early nineties they didn’t tel Mulanax. Maybe they were afraid back then to come forward, but now in 1992’re not so afraid anymore. They just wanted to nail Zodiac.”had advised the bureau that there “were two additional interviews to be conducted with people who had known the suspect for a long... with a man who had known Al en at the time of the kil ings [Cheney].” Once these interviews were conducted, Conway indicated, he and“wil present a ful review of the case to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office for an opinion regarding possible prosecution for. If the D.A. refuses to fil charges against ALLEN, Val ejo Police Department wil close its investigation on the ‘ZODIAC’ case.”located Cheney. “When George Bawart tracked me down,” Cheney told me, “he contacted me by telephone, I talked to him. Then theyme come down to be interviewed by them in Val ejo. They flew me down to Sacramento, and George met me at the airport and drove me toejo. We spent a couple of hours together with Roy Conway. What I had told Armstrong (and the other detectives) I told them. They recordedI said, and they pumped me for everything I could give them.

“Al en loved to outsmart the other guy, I told them. In a 1967 conversation Leigh asked me how to alter his appearance. We discussed theatricaland what you could accomplish with it. I wasn’t curious why he was asking me this. It wasn’t unusual to talk about something like makeup.”the time Al en became a known suspect, he had already altered his appearance to an astonishing degree by burying his athletic physique in fat.

“With Leigh,” said Cheney, “you just get into conversations about ‘What if this’ and ‘What if that.’ It was just more of knowledge for knowledge’s. Leigh was always interested in al kinds of things. And I was too. Leigh enjoyed misleading people. He liked to trick people or influence themthings that they otherwise wouldn’t do.”

“In January 1969 Al en had a conversation with Donald Cheney, a friend of his,” wrote Bawart in his report. “He guised this conversation ashe were going to write a novel. Al en indicated to Cheney that he would cal himself Zodiac and use the Zodiac watch symbol as his symbol.he would kil people in lovers’ lanes by using a weapon with a flashlight attached to it for sighting at night, that he would write letters to theto confuse and taunt them and sign them as the Zodiac. Al en stated he would get women to stop on the freeway indicating they had somewith the tires, he would loosen their lug nuts so their tire would later fal off and he could take them captive.”arranged for Cheney to be polygraphed back in Washington State. “Bawart gave me a polygraph in his presence,” Cheney told me. “Itso short I couldn’t believe it. A month later, I went and took another one in the same police station in Kennewick, South Central Washington,of the tri-cities here where I live, but without Bawart being present. I gathered that in the first they didn’t have the right test questions. They flew afrom Seattle over here to run the polygraph. It was a little on the dul side except for feeling some stress. They hooked me up so theymeasure my respiration and blood pressure. It seemed to me there might be four to five responses—the number of needles on the paper.

“They asked questions that required yes-or-no answers. He told me to just answer in a calm and monotone way, no emotion. In the second test—’l tel you why they gave me two tests. In the second test, when we had gone through al the questions—they start off with ‘What’s your name,’ thenask the questions about the case. Then when I thought he was finished with that, he kept asking me more questions. It didn’t seem to matterthe answers were, but the questions were mainly rephrasing of things. I tripped up and made a misstatement. It wasn’t a lie. I wasn’ty making a misstatement, but I just said something I didn’t intend to say. Al the needles made a jump, flopped around. Then he was. That was what he wanted. I guess that they were looking for something that would gauge.” It turned out, as Bawart told me later, “Cheneytel ing the truth.”biggest obstacle stil was that Al en’s handprinting did not match the Zodiac’s. ‘The experts explained that the only explanation for this wouldif ALLEN would have been able to develop a ‘false handwriting, ’” Bawart wrote. Al en had once asked Cheney if books on how to disguiseexisted, and later studied books on fake handwriting. The FBI noted: “Val ejo has requested no further assistance on this case, and it is recommended that this case be closed at this time.”Bawart’s workplace, a cabinet shop, he was mul ing over a possibility that had intrigued him for years—one that might explain everything.might be two Zodiacs working as master and slave. That theory had been one of the reasons George had tracked down Al en’s friend Robert. “I conjectured that there might be two Zodiacs, partners working together,” he told me later. “After that trip to Germany and seeing the man,came to believe there was only one. As for Donald Lee Cheney, he’s now a retired mechanical engineer in Washington. Panzarel a is wealthy, hashis stock, and become owner of RKO Pictures Film Library. I even went down to interview him. Panzarel a was just a regular guy, but he had almoney.”for Ralph Spinel i, the other known tipster, he had reportedly been incarcerated 290 miles north of San Francisco on the Oregon border. Al en,the Stine murder, had kicked in his door and beaten him a second time., August 26, 1992a nice August afternoon about 3:00 P.M., George Bawart was working in his garage, the smel of new lumber and sawdust sweet in his lungs. Acop phoned him at home and Bawart hustled to the phone. It had a special attachment for his hearing disability and made voices extra loud.

“The cop was kind of a joker,” Bawart recal ed.

“Are you stil investigating Arthur Leigh Al en as the Zodiac?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Bawart said. “Arthur Al en.”

“Wel, I’m in his house and he’s laying on the floor.”

“What’s he doing laying on the floor?”

“Wel, he’s dead and he’s lying here with a great big bump on his forehead.”listened careful y to the rest.put the phone down. The room seemed to swim. They had waited too long. He steadied himself. Had someone, perhaps Zodiac’s partner orafter revenge, gotten Zodiac before they could?

, August 26, 1992

“A street cop got detailed there,” Bawart told me. “Al en wasn’t answering his door. He had a girl living upstairs. When they didn’t hear from him forlong time, Al en’s upstairs boarder found his body. The cops went there. They opened the door, got in the house, and there’s Al en lying face downthe floor. I rushed over. I had to make sure he died of natural causes. His name has been published. He’s been showing up on TV. He’s beeninterviews and drawing al sorts of attention to himself. The Ferrin family had cal ed me a number of times and said, ‘Do you real y think heit?’ I told them, ‘Yeah.’ And the Ferrin family can be kind of goofy. I thought, ‘Jesus, did one of them do something?’ So I went on down there andwas in fact dead.”stood in the dim basement, his intent face lit by the glow of Leigh’s new computer. He steadied himself, looking thoughtful y at the bigin the bathrobe on the cold floor. The professional side of the detective took hold. Bawart began assessing the facts. He recal ed Al en’s wordstelevision: “About the only way the heat wil stop is if I die, that wil cure it for me or if Zodiac himself confesses.... They haven’t arrested me..

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