The Annals of Unsolved Crime (19 page)

CHAPTER 20
THE ZODIAC

A series of attacks on young couples in Northern California in the late 1960s terrified the public after a serial killer, called “The Zodiac,” taunted newspapers with coded letters, a signature symbol of a circle bisected by one horizontal and one vertical line, and bloody artifacts from his crimes. Even though the murders themselves stopped in 1970, Zodiac letters extended the journalistic fascination with the case.

The first two victims were high school students, Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday. Both were shot to death on a secluded lover’s lane in the town of Benicia at about 11:00 p.m. on December 20, 1968. Police found no motive, witnesses, or clues.

A similar incident occurred on July 4, 1969, in the parking lot of a park in Vallejo, California. Michael Renault Mageau, nineteen, and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, twenty-two, were shot by an unknown man. Ferrin died, but Mageau survived.

Up until August, these attacks had not been connected by police. But on August 1, 1969, letters were sent to the
Vallejo Times-Herald
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and the
San Francisco Examiner
that linked the attacks. Each letter contained one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram, which, the writer claimed, revealed the identity of the killer. He not only challenged these newspapers to investigate his murders but warned that unless each paper printed his letter on their front page he would shoot “a dozen people over the weekend.” The
Chronicle
immediately published its third of the cryptogram, and there were no murders that weekend. But the press had now become deeply involved in the killer’s activities. Two amateur cryptographers, Donald and Bettye Harden, managed to crack the code on August 8, but it contained no names or clues, other than to say that the killer was collecting “slaves” for the afterlife.

The next letter received by the
San Francisco Examiner
provided non-public details about the two previous attacks. It was signed “The Zodiac,” which, as with the “Jack the Ripper” case, provided the media with a vivid name for their headlines.

The next killing came on September 27, 1969, near Lake Berryessa in Napa Valley. This time the killer wore a Zodiac costume, consisting of a black hood, clip-on sunglasses, and a bib with the same cross-hair Zodiac symbol that was in the letters. When he appeared in the park, he carried a gun in one hand and held pieces of a clothesline in the other. He then approached Bryan Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard and ordered Shepard to tie up Hartnell. He then stabbed them both repeatedly, leaving them in a pool of blood. He then drew his Zodiac symbol on Hartnell’s car door. Shepard died from her wounds, but Hartnell survived to tell the story.

The final murder attributed to the Zodiac was in San Francisco on October 11, 1969. According to three teenage witnesses who watched the attack, a taxicab stopped and the passenger shot the driver, Paul Lee Stine, to death. The passenger then calmly cut off part of his victim’s bloodstained shirt and fled the scene on foot.

Police speculated that this murder was committed by the Zodiac merely to get bloody swatches from Stine’s shirt. He sent these swatches with his next round of letters to newspapers in which he demanded that a lawyer meet him. He named two of America’s most celebrated defense lawyers, F. Lee Bailey and Melvin Belli, and said that either would be acceptable
to him and that they should await his call on the Jim Dunbar television show. Belli came on the show in front of a television audience in Daly City, California. Although Belli followed the Zodiac’s directions, the Zodiac did not show up. However, Belli himself later received in the mail a swatch from Stine’s shirt with a letter asking for his professional help. That was the last Belli heard from the Zodiac, and the last bloody swatch to appear. Letters of unknown provenance continued to be received by newspapers with coded messages, but none could be deciphered. The Zodiac, or the letter-writers claiming his identity, eventually took credit for no less than thirty-seven murders. This led to a new journalistic enterprise: mining the police cold case files for similar killings over the past decade. Although this pursuit continued for a decade, none of the unsolved cases could be tied by evidence to the Zodiac. The police were also stymied by their inability to match evidence at the four crime scenes, or to match the crime scenes to the letters. Even when DNA analysis became available in the 1990s, investigators were unable to match DNA found in the saliva on the stamps on the letters to any crime scene or suspect.

The only suspect identified by a victim was Arthur Leigh Allen, a convicted child molester. At the time of the Zodiac murders, he was in his mid-thirties, lived with his parents, and was a gun collector. In 1991, Michael Mageau, the first survivor, identified Allen from a picture on his 1968 driver’s license as the man who shot him. Allen also worked only a few miles from where victim Darlene Ferrin was killed, and he wore a Zodiac-brand watch (with the same symbol found in the letters). However, Allen’s fingerprints did not match those taken from the fourth crime scene, Stine’s taxicab. Nor did Allen’s DNA match the DNA found on the envelopes of the letters, when DNA testing became available. And Sherwood Morrill, head of the Questioned Documents Section of California’s Criminal Identification and Investigation Bureau, could not match
the handwriting in the Zodiac letters to Allen. So no charges were ever filed. With no other eyewitness identifications, and no murder weapon, the trail was cold.

Based on the lack of any matching evidence at the different crime scenes or in the letters, I assess that a single person could not have both attacked all the victims and written all the letters deemed authentic by the police. It is possible that the letter-writer was not the killer, but he must have had access to the police files, since the early letters contained unpublished details of the first two attacks. One possibility is that the letter-writer was a police investigator who wanted to link the crimes and justify a hunt for a serial killer, or a journalist who learned these details from his or her investigation. In my view, a copycat killer or killers attacked both the couple in Napa Valley and the taxi-driver, Paul Lee Stine, and the police’s departments chief suspect, Allen, may indeed have been the killer in the first two attacks. If so, he was wrongly exonerated when police found his fingerprints and DNA did not match DNA and fingerprints found in Stine’s taxicab.

An investigation can become the prisoner of its own flawed assumption. In the Zodiac case, police assumed they were dealing with a single perpetrator. The police therefore wrongly ruled out their chief suspect, because his fingerprints and DNA did not match evidence collected at one of the crime scenes. Yet, the later attacks were possibly the work of a copycat killer who adopted the Zodiac’s modus operandi. If that is true, by remaining locked into the assumption of a lone killer who was also sending letters, the police sacrificed solving a key part of the larger mystery.

CHAPTER 21
THE VANISHING OF JIMMY HOFFA

James Riddle Hoffa, one of America’s best-known labor leaders, vanished without a trace in 1975. The son of a coal miner, he had built the International Brotherhood of Teamsters into the largest, richest, and most politically powerful union in the United States. He had also famously made an enemy of Robert F. Kennedy in 1959 when he was called before the Senate sub-committee investigating organized crime, known as the McClellan Rackets Committee, for which Kennedy was the general counsel. Since Hoffa’s union’s pension fund had financed the building of much of the casino economy of Las Vegas, Kennedy relentlessly questioned Hoffa about the union leadership’s involvement with mobsters. Hoffa answered by mocking Kennedy. The enmity between Hoffa and Kennedy intensified in 1961 when his older brother John F. Kennedy became president, and appointed him attorney general. One of Robert Kennedy’s first acts was to create a “Get Hoffa” task force at the Justice Department. He ordered no-holds-barred surveillance and wiretaps on Hoffa and minute scrutiny of all his past activities. As a result, Hoffa was convicted of jury tampering and fraud, and, in 1967, sent to prison. Even after his conviction and jailing, Hoffa was reelected president of the Teamsters. Finally, in 1971, his sentence was commuted by President Richard M. Nixon after Hoffa agreed to officially resign the Teamster presidency. The FBI remained involved in the case, investigating Hoffa’s behind-the-scenes influence to maintain control over the Teamsters, and Hoffa remained under surveillance until his death.

VANISHINGS

On July 30, 1975, Hoffa went to a limousine-service office in Pontiac, Michigan, where he had told a friend he was meeting with Tony Giacalone, reputedly an organized crime figure in Detroit, and Tony Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster official. His calendar had the notation “TG—2 p.m.—Red Fox,” which apparently referred to his meeting with Tony Giacalone at the Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Hoffa arrived at the Red Fox shortly before 2:00 p.m., but no one met him, according to witnesses. At 2:15 p.m., Hoffa telephoned his wife from a call box and said “I wonder where the hell Tony is.” He said he was still waiting. He never returned home. When police investigators, called by his wife, went to the restaurant, they found Hoffa’s car but not Hoffa. The subsequent investigation found no signs of a struggle, no weapon, and no witnesses to his departure. Both Tony Giacalone and Tony Provenzano, when questioned, categorically denied that they had had any plan to meet Hoffa. They both also had alibis: Giacalone had spent the afternoon in a steam room at the Southfield Athletic Club on the outskirts of Detroit; Provenzano had been at a local Teamsters meeting in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The FBI launched one of the largest investigations in its history to find out what had happened to Jimmy Hoffa. It lasted longer than a quarter of a century and is summed up in 1,879 pages of FBI files recently released on a CD-ROM. At one point, they checked out every meat-packing plant in the Detroit area looking for frozen body parts, but found none from Hoffa. After a source on the TV show
A Current Affair
claimed to be a Mafia hitman who witnessed Hoffa’s killing, the FBI spent months investigating and polygraphing him before determining that his story was a fabrication. On various tips, the FBI excavated graves, construction sites, and garbage dumps without ever
finding Hoffa’s body—or proof that he was dead. As late as September 28, 2012, the FBI tested soil in a driveway in a suburb of Detroit for DNA traces of Hoffa but found none. No one has ever been charged with Hoffa’s murder.