The real Zodiac continued his correspondence. He wrote to Inspector David Toschi of the San Francisco homicide squad, threatening to commit more murders. In another letter, he claimed to have killed seven people— two more than the official Zodiac body count so far. Later he claimed to have killed ten, taunting the San Francisco Police Department with the scoreline: “ZODIAC 10, SFPD 0.” He gave cryptic clues to his name and fantasized about blowing up school children with a bomb.
The following Christmas, Melvin Belli received a card saying:
DEAR MELVIN, THIS IS THE ZODIAC SPEAKING. I WISH YOU A HAPPY CHRISTMAS. THE ONE THING I ASK OF YOU IS THIS, PLEASE HELP ME… I AM AFRAID I WILL LOSE CONTROL AND TAKE MY NINTH AND POSSIBLE TENTH VICTIM.
Another piece of Paul Stine’s bloodstained shirt was enclosed and forensic handwriting experts feared that the Zodiac’s mental state was deteriorating.
On 24 July 1970, the Zodiac killer wrote a letter which spoke of
THE WOEMAN [sic] AND HER BABY THAT I GAVE A RATHER INTERESTING RIDE FOR A COUPLE OF HOWERS ONE EVENING A FEW MONTHS BACK THAT ENDED IN MY BURNING HER CAR WHERE I FOUND THEM.
The woman was Kathleen Johns of Vallejo. On the evening of 17 March 1970, she had been driving in the area when a white Chevrolet pulled alongside her. The driver indicated that there was something wrong with her rear wheel. She pulled over and the other driver stopped. He was a “clean-shaven and neatly dressed man”. He said that the wheel had been wobbling and offered to tighten the wheel nuts for her. But when she pulled away, the wheel he had said he had fixed came off altogether. The driver of the Chevrolet then offered her a lift to a nearby service station, but drove straight past it. When she pointed this out, the man said, in a chillingly calm voice: “You know I am going to kill you.”
But Kathleen Johns kept her head. When he slowed on the curve of a freeway ramp, she jumped from the car with her baby in her arms. Then she ran and hid in an irrigation ditch. He stopped and, with a flashlight from the trunk of his car, started searching for her. He was approaching the ditch when he was caught in the headlights of a truck and made off. An hour later, she made her way to a police station to report what had happened to her. When she looked up and saw the Zodiac’s wanted poster, she identified him as the man who had threatened to kill her. And when the police drove her back to her car, they found it burnt out. It seemed he had returned and set it alight.
Despite the new leads Kathleen Johns provided, the police got no nearer to catching the Zodiac killer. Police in Vallejo believed that the man they were after was now the driver of a new green Ford. He had stopped and watched a Highway Patrolman across the freeway. When the Highway Patrolman decided to ask him what he was doing and cut around through an underpass, he found the green Ford was gone. It was now sitting on the other side of the freeway where the squad car had been moments before. This cat and mouse game was played every day for two weeks.
Detective Sergeant Les Lundblatt became convinced that the Zodiac killer was a man named Andy Walker. He had known Darlene Ferrin and Darlene’s sister identified him as the man who had waited outside Darlene’s apartment in a white car. He also bore a resemblance to the description of the man seen near Lake Berrylessa when Cecelia Shepard was stabbed to death. And he had studied codes in the military. However, his fingerprints did not match the one left in Paul Stine’s cab and his handwriting did not match the Zodiac’s notes. But the police discovered that Walker was ambidextrous and believed that the murder of Paul Stine had been planned so meticulously that the Zodiac may have used the severed finger of a victim they did not know about. He was also known to suffer from bad headaches and he got on badly with women at work.
The police decided that they had to get his palm prints to see if they matched those on the telephone that had been left dangling after the Paul Stine killing. An undercover policeman asked Walker to help him carry a goldfish bowl. Walker obliged, but the palm prints he left were smudged. Walker realized what was going on and a judge issued a court order forcing the police to stop harassing him.
Zodiac letters threatening more murders were sent. Some of them have been authenticated, but rendered few new clues. The only thing that detectives could be sure of was that the Zodiac was a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan. He taunted them with a parody of “The Lord High Executioner”, listing those people he intended to kill and using the refrain “titwillow, titwillow, titwillow”. And there were no letters or criminal activity that could have been ascribed to the Zodiac killer during the entire run of the Mikado in San Francisco’s Presentation Theatre.
There may have been more Zodiac murders, too. On 21 May 1970, the naked body of Marie Antoinette Anstey was found just off a quiet country road in Lake County. Traces of mescaline were found in her body. She had been hit over the head and drowned. Her clothes were never found. The murder of Marie Antoinette Anstey followed the pattern of the Zodiac killings. It took place at a weekend, in the same general area around Vallejo, and near a body of water. Although she was naked, there were no signs that she had been sexually molested.
The Zodiac had some curious connection with the water. All the names of all murder scenes had some association with water—even Washington Street. In one of the Zodiac letters, he claimed that the body count would have been higher if he had not been “swamped by the rain we had a while back”. The police deduced that he lived in a low-lying area, susceptible to flooding. Perhaps he had a basement where he kept the equipment to make the long-threatened bomb.
A K-Mart store in Santa Rosa, California was evacuated after a bomb threat by a man identifying himself as the Zodiac killer. Two months later, the Zodiac wrote another letter to the
The letters continued, demanding that people in the San Francisco area wear lapel badges with the Zodiac symbol on it. When they did not, he threatened Paul Avery, the
An anonymous correspondent tied the Zodiac slayings to the unsolved murder of Cheri Jo Bates, a college girl in Riverside, California, on Halloween 1966. The police could not rule out a connection, but could not prove a concrete link either. But when crime writer Paul Avery checked it out he discovered that the police had received what they considered to be a crank letter about the murder, five months after the killing. It was signed with the letter Z.
Cheri Jo Bates was an 18-year-old freshman, who had been stabbed to death after leaving the college library one evening. In a series of typewritten letters, the killer gave details of the murder only he could have known. He also said that there would be more and talked of a “game” he was playing. But there were also handwritten letters, where the handwriting matched the Zodiac’s and Avery managed to persuade the police to re-open the Bates case in the light of the Zodiac murders.
During 1971, there were a number of murders that could have been committed by the Zodiac. Letters purporting to come from him confessed to them, but he could easily have been claiming credit for other people’s handiwork. However, on 7 April 1972, 33-year-old Isobel Watson, who worked as a legal secretary in San Francisco, alighted from the bus at around 9 p.m. in Tamalpais Valley and began walking home up Pine Hill. Seemingly out of nowhere, a white Chevrolet swerved across the road at her. The car stopped. The driver apologized and offered to give her a lift home. When Mrs Watson declined, he pulled a knife on her and stabbed her in the back. Her screams alerted the neighbours. The man ran back to his car and sped off. Mrs Watson recovered and gave a description. Her assailant was a white man in his early 40s, around five foot nine inches and he wore black-rimmed reading glasses. The police said that there was a better than fifty-fifty chance that this was the Zodiac killer.
As time went on, other detectives dropped out of the case, leaving only Inspector David Toschi. The FBI looked at the files, but even they could take the case no further.
