Shooting for the Stars (17 page)

Chapter
31

A
FTER
I hung up, I could barely contain my excitement.

All serial killers were different, but there were often some similarities in the cases I'd covered. One of them was that a serial killer always walked a fine line between not wanting to get caught and still having the need to leave something behind to let people know what he had done. That was the high for a serial killer, to leave behind his signature. A note. An object. Some kind of sign to show the world he was there.

The
Z
could have been that sign.

Plus, writing the letter
Z
in the victim's blood was similar to what Manson and his followers had done in the murders of Sharon Tate and the others. They wrote
pigs
in large letters on the wall of the actress's home after killing her and four other people there. Later, at the home of the next victims—supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary—they used the victims' blood to write
Death to Pigs
,
Rise
, and
Helter Skelter
on the walls and refrigerator.

“Helter Skelter” was, of course, a reference to the Beatles song of that year. Manson played it constantly and thought it was a signal—a sign for him—of the upcoming war against the establishment that he predicted was coming. The Tate and LaBianca killings were supposed to be the first blows against the rich and famous in this apocalyptic battle.

Okay, the Manson family left their signature behind at these crime scenes.

Russell Zorn idolized Manson and tried to emulate him with his own group of fanatical followers.

So did Russell Zorn write the letter
Z
in Deborah Ditmar's blood as his signature?

And if he did, was there a sign left behind at any of the other four murders?

The biggest problem with my Sign of the Z theory for the five celebrity killings was that the timeline didn't match for any of the victims besides Ditmar. Laura Marlowe was killed in 1985. Russell Zorn couldn't have been responsible for that because he was in jail. Sally Easton too. Most of the other members of the Sign of the Z were either dead or incarcerated by then. And the other three ­murders—Stephanie Lee, Susan Fairmont, and Cheryl ­Carson—were carried out in 1988 and 1989. Zorn had already been executed by then.

Then I remembered something. One of the Sign of the Z members had escaped after the convenience store holdup and the shootout with police at the ranch where the others died or were arrested.

His name was Bobby Mesa.

Mesa had been Zorn's right-hand man.

I tracked down as much information as I could about Mesa. Like Laura Marlowe, he seemed to be a strange candidate to be a member of a crazy cult like Sign of the Z. Born to wealthy parents in Philadelphia, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as a Phi Beta Kappa and then studied political science as a graduate student for a year at Princeton until he dropped out to travel around the country. He landed in Los Angeles where he tried without success to make it first as an actor, then as a musician.
He wound up working off and on as a roadie for different musical groups—but mostly just panhandling on the street and doing drugs.

Eventually he met Zorn and moved to the ranch in the desert with the others. Everyone said he worshipped Zorn and the two were inseparable. I found a picture of Mesa. He was a burly man with big, bushy, dark hair. After the shootout where the others died or were captured, he remained on the run for several years.

I cross-referenced that time period against the other murders on Abbie's list. It matched. All of the other murders on Abbie's list besides Ditmar—including Laura Marlowe—took place during those years when Mesa was still at large. He was finally captured at a New York City hotel in 1989. Several years later, he died in a prison cafeteria brawl.

After Mesa was in custody, there were no more celebrity killings. At least none that I knew about. Also, all of the last three murders—after Ditmar and Laura—had occurred after Russell Zorn was executed in early 1988. I wasn't sure if there was any significance to that, but it seemed intriguing.

There had to be some kind of a link here. If I could just figure out what it was . . .

I spent a long time trying to find any possible connection between Mesa and Laura or any of the other killings.

I googled different names in hopes of getting lucky and stumbling across a clue. Mesa's name. The victims' names. There was nothing until I typed
Sign of the Z
. Before I could type another name as a possible link, my screen auto-filled with references to
Sign of the Z
. A lot of them said
sign of the Zodiac
. Of course. That's what Sign of the Z might mean.

Sure enough, I checked and discovered that Russell Zorn had
been a big astrology buff. I had always just assumed Sign of the Z was because of Zorn's last name. But it was really a reference to Sign of the Zodiac according to those who knew him. Zorn had astrology charts everywhere at the ranch. He never made any kind of decision without checking his horoscope first. He truly believed his fate—and the fate of his followers—was predestined in the stars. Everyone on the ranch was expected to believe and embrace astrology and the secrets of the Zodiac the same as he did. I also remembered something Abbie had written in the notes I'd found in her office. “It's all about the stars.” I thought she was referring to the fact that all of the victims were celebrities. But maybe she meant stars as in astrology.

That opened up some new possibilities. I started checking each murder again for astrology connections.

I found one with Susan Fairmont, the cable TV talk show host murdered outside her Denver studio. Police at first thought her murder was a robbery gone bad and checked to see if any of her possessions—purse, jewelry—were missing. They weren't. But they did find something very perplexing. There was a necklace around her neck that no one had ever seen her wear. It was a Zodiac necklace with a pendant that had an astrological sign as its centerpiece. It was a bull, the sign of Taurus. The Fairmont woman's birthday was in September, which meant she wasn't a Taurus.

On a hunch, I checked out Russell Zorn's biographical information again. It turned out that Zorn had been born on May 12. He was a Taurus.

Not definitive proof of anything. But interesting. I moved on to the other cases.

Stephanie Lee, the New Mexico TV anchorwoman, was tougher. She'd disappeared right after her newscast, and then her body was found, shot to death and dumped into an animal cage at a local zoo in Santa Fe. I read through an article about it until I found
the type of animals that were in the cage. They were lions. It was a bit of a reach, I know. But a lion was the astrological sign of a Leo. I found Bobby Mesa's birth date. August 14. Yep, he was a Leo. Of course, it could have been a coincidence that the victim's body was found in a lion cage, but I didn't think so. I was convinced now that astrology was the Sign of the Z connection to all these murders. And that Mesa, or someone else, had left astrology references at all of the crime scenes as their signature for the bizarre killing spree.

I couldn't find any astrological connection to Cheryl Carson though. Plus, she wasn't shot or even murdered as far as we knew. She died of a heroin overdose. People around her said she'd been battling drug addiction for much of her career. But when I dug deeper into the long-ago accounts of her death, I found that members of her entourage said they'd been concerned about a suspicious man who had turned up at several of her concerts and might have been selling her drugs. He was described as a big, bushy-haired man. Which sounded like Bobby Mesa. And Mesa had done part-time work as a roadie for music groups. Maybe he kept doing that to make money while he was on the run during those years.

So did Mesa sell Cheryl Carson the drugs that killed her?

Were the drugs what he used to murder her, the way I now believed he murdered Stephanie Lee and Susan Fairmont?

It all made a certain kind of logic when you put it together like that.

But if Mesa did kill Cheryl Carson, why didn't he leave an astrological link behind at her death?

I found the possible answer in one of the articles about the drugs that killed her. It described the heroin she took as a powerful new brand of heroin being sold under the street name of Scorpio. There it was. The astrological reference I was looking for. The connection to Sign of the Zodiac.

But why Scorpio? The other two murders had been Zorn and
Mesa's astrological signs. Who in the hell was a Scorpio? That stumped me for a while, until the answer hit me. It was so damn obvious I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it before.

I looked up Charles Manson's birthday.

Manson was born November 12.

He was a Scorpio.

And he'd been Russell Zorn's idol.

Of course, none of this really proved anything. It was all speculation and conjecture.

And there was no astrological connection to Laura Marlowe's murder that I could find. But I was convinced I was onto something. Russell Zorn had killed Deborah Ditmar. Bobby Mesa, maybe to carry on his leader's mission, had killed at least three others—and maybe Laura Marlowe too.

So what about Abbie Kincaid? How did her murder fit into all of this? Or did it? Mesa was dead now. He'd been dead for a long time. Zorn too.

Still, one of those threatening letters to Abbie that Lt. Wohlers showed me contained the phrase “no sense makes sense.” That didn't mean anything to me or to him at the time. But Sally Easton had said it to me again during her interview. She said it was Russell Zorn's favorite phrase. He was constantly repeating it; so did all the rest of his followers.

And then it showed up again in a letter to Abbie Kincaid just before she was shot to death.

“No sense makes sense.”

Was there still someone out there from Sign of the Z after all these years who murdered Abbie as part of Zorn's twisted vendetta against stars and celebrities?

Chapter
32

O
N
the flight back home, I excitedly went through my notes on everything I'd found out. It was all coming together now. I didn't know all the answers, but I had a lot of them. This is what I lived for. Breaking the big story. It was the biggest high in the world. And I was riding that high now.

I was on the verge of finally solving the murder of legendary Hollywood movie star Laura Marlowe.

And maybe linking it to a series of other unsolved celebrity murders over the years too.

It all made perfect sense when you put all the pieces together. Russell Zorn wanted to be just like his idol Charles Manson—who'd killed a movie star, Sharon Tate. What better movie star to kill than one who'd abandoned his own flock? Even though he was in jail, maybe he somehow convinced Bobby Mesa, his right-hand man, to carry out Laura Marlowe's murder. It would have been fitting symbolism to Zorn's followers who thought he was a god. And even though I didn't find any astrological reference connected to Laura's murder, that didn't mean there wasn't one somewhere.

For some reason, Mesa then continued to kill celebrities—or at least that was what I now believed—even after Zorn was in jail and following his execution in the gas chamber.

Yep, the more I thought about it, the more I liked that scenario.
I ordered a drink from the flight attendant, took a big sip, leaned back in my seat, and congratulated myself on what a great job I'd done in California. I was still a helluva reporter. I still had the old news instinct. Malloy's the name, scoops are my game.

Of course, I still didn't know exactly how Thomas Rizzo fit into all this, but he had to be involved somehow. He'd had an affair with Laura, he'd helped her become a movie star, and then he'd gone back to his wife and family. Now, thirty years later, his son—all grown up—had begun dating a TV journalist who was investigating what really happened. Then she winds up dead at the same hotel where Laura died.

There were too many coincidences here to ignore.

What I couldn't figure out was how a mob boss like Rizzo and a wacky cult like Sign of the Z could be part of the same story.

Who did what and why?

Was there some connection between all of this that I was missing?

When my plane landed at Kennedy Airport, I got some startling news. After being without Wi-Fi for more than five hours on my flight, I turned on my iPad and saw a series of breaking news messages flashing across my screen. They said that a suspect had been arrested for the murder of TV star Abbie Kincaid. He was identified as Bill Remesch of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The story had broken on the rival
New York Post
website just about the time I was boarding my plane for the flight back.

I checked the
Daily News
site. I saw that our story didn't go up until an hour or two later. It was clear from the way it was written that we'd had to scramble just to match the basic information of the
Post
story. There wasn't a lot of detail. Remesch had been arrested at his home in Milwaukee for the Abbie Kincaid murder. New York
City police had gone there with a search warrant for the house and also for his auto parts and body shop. They discovered a series of threatening letters directed at Abbie Kincaid—similar to the ones she'd been receiving at her studio in the weeks before her death. Even more importantly, they found a gun. A .45 caliber handgun. The same kind of gun that had been used to shoot Abbie. Final ballistics tests were still pending, but a police spokesman said they were confident it would turn out to be the murder weapon.

Her ex-husband. The one she'd humiliated on national television.

It made sense, I guess, and everyone had said the cops were zeroing in on him.

Except I wished it had been somebody else.

I'd wanted to believe all along that Abbie's death really had something to do with Laura Marlowe. That way, by solving the Laura mystery, I would somehow gain some sort of closure on Abbie's death too. It would have been a nice neat little package if it turned out that way. But as I'd found out a long time ago, life doesn't usually work out the way you want it to.

Abbie was gone, and there was nothing I could do about that now.

All I had left was Laura Marlowe.