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 Introduction

 Investigative Method

 My San Francisco

Year of the Zodiac:

 Lake Herman Rd. 12-20-1968

 Blue Rock Springs 7-4-1969

 The Zodiac Speaks

 Lake Berryessa 9-27-1969

 San Francisco  10-11-1969

Gamester of Death:

 Poison Pen Pal

 Claims and Mistakes

 The Kathleen Johns Incident

 Cheri Jo Bates

 Zodiac & The “Nightingale Murders”

On the Track of The Zodiac:

 Gaviota Revisited

 Gaviota Crime Scene Investigated

 The Case of “Sandy”

 Cracking the 340 Cipher

 Blue Rock Springs Reconstructed

 Blue Rock Springs: Silencer or Not?

 Benicia: Where the Cross Hairs Meet

 From Folklore to Fact: cases in detail

 “Nary a Conspiracy”

 The Zodiac Speaks: A Pattern

 Zodiac: a profile in person & paper

My Suspect:

Steve

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Following the path up the knoll

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         In the late 1960s a serial killer
quickly and clumsily killed his victims as
     an ante in a game he was developing. It was
       Murder and Seek. He named himself The ZODIAC,
           the master controller. He was both the hunter and he made
             himself the hunted. His costumes ranged from the bland and
                 obsolete to bizarre theatricality. Sadly, he was successful in his game.
                     To this day nobody knows his identity. Over 40 years later, only
                               amateur sleuths and private detectives hound his trail.

 The Zodiac Killer

Crime Scene Investigations

Napa County:

Lake Berryessa 9-27-1969

Cecelia Shepard
Bryan Hartnell
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   It was an early evening, this September 27, 1969. Lake Berryessa is far removed from the North Bay. Here folks can enjoy the huge, quiet lake and the wooded grounds. Many fingers of land intrude upon the lake. In between them there are little fjords. Think of Norway’s coast,

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Video from Mackenzie Point, starting on “The Hill” overlooking the peninsula and “Zodiac Island”

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only on a smaller scale. Instead of the lush green of Norwegian forests, the coast of Lake Berryessa is cluttered with stands of California oaks. Now, past 6 p.m., their shadows stretch over the dry grass and the first fallen leaves of autumn.

     In late September, the colors of fall had not yet daubed the landscape. Nor had the winter rains swelled the lake. The levy marks, those little striations along the shoreline, still marked the various past descending summer water levels. This area was known as the “beach”  though it was really only dirt and pebbles. Brown grass marked the area where the water level would normally rise and go no further in the winter. Knolls on these long fingers would become islands in winter. The rest of the peninsula would slip below the water and the fjords would expand.

     It is on the “beach” of one of these knolls that Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard were lying on a blanket. He was now 20, and she was 22. They had been good friends in the past, and were now just reminiscing about ‘old times.’ Bryan was in college at Pacific Union in nearby Angwin. She was a student at Riverside College in southern California, and she had only been up around Angwin visiting a friend. Tomorrow she was leaving to go back south.

     The lazy Saturday afternoon was ebbing to dusk. Those that had been out and about the lake were now no longer to be seen. The lake can be unnervingly quiet at this time. Knoxville Road is on the shoulders of the surrounding mountains. Thus the noise of sporadic country traffic is not even heard at the shoreline. It is so quiet that a duck can be heard flapping its wings hundreds of yards away. (Video from the top of the knoll.)

                         Bryan and ‘Celia’ were barely talking now. He lay on his back, she
                     lay on her stomach, with her head on his shoulder. He now heard
                     rustling behind them on the knoll. Three great oaks capped  this little
                     knoll, and crunchy dried leaves peppered the ground. “You have
                     your specs on,” he said to Celia. “Why don’t you see what the deal
                     is over there.”

     She raised her head and looked. There was a man standing next to one of the oaks. It was right at the edge of the “beach,” in the furry brown grass of the knoll. “Oh, it’s some man,” she replied carelessly.

     “Is he alone?” asked Bryan.

     “Yeah. . . He just stepped behind a tree.”

     “What’s the idea of that? To take a leak? Well, keep looking and tell me what happens.”

     She said nothing. Only moments passed. She squeezed his arm. “Oh my God, he’s got a gun!”

       The man came quickly out from behind the tree, pointing an automatic pistol at them. The first thing Bryan could think of was that the man was coming to rob them. This didn’t frighten him too much because he knew he only had 75 cents on him. He bolted up and looked over his shoulder. Video.

       The man wore a peculiar and quite elaborate hood. It struck Bryan as ceremonial. This was an odd contrast to the plain, if not old fashioned, clothes he wore. His dark pants were pleated, which was quite out of fashion, especially for the young. That fashion went out in the 1950s. He wore a dark blue ski type wind breaker, with fabric cuffs, collar and waistband. The gun’s holster was affixed to his belt on the right side. On the left there was a long, deadly knife in a sheath. The man was thick, a bit heavy, possibly close to 6 feet tall. Since Bryan was about 6’7” it was hard for him to judge height.

     The hood was remarkable, though. It was black fabric. It was neatly sewn about the edge so that it conformed to what seemed a square grocery store bag underneath. The top of the hood therefore did not conform to the head but was square like a graduation cap. Two eye holes were cut into it, and clipped over these was a pair of clip-on shades. The hood was attached to a surcoat that fell over the shoulders and extended down near to the waist in front and in back. On the center of this surcoat, where the heraldic symbol is usually emblazoned on a knight’s surcoat, there was a strange symbol. It was a circle about 3 inches wide, with a cross in it, which extended about an inch beyond the circle. It was, of course, the Zodiac symbol, though Hartnell did not know what it was.

         “What do you want?” asked Hartnell.

         “Now take it easy,” replied the hooded man, “all I want’s your money. There is nothing to worry about. All I want is your money.” The man spoke precisely, evenly, in a drawl that Bryan could not identify.

     “OK, whatever you say. I want you to know now that I will cooperate so you don’t have to worry. Whatever you say, we’ll do. Do you want us to come up with our hands up or down?”

   “Just don’t make any fast moves. Come up slowly.”

     “But we don’t have any money. All I have is 75 cents.”

     “That doesn’t matter. Every little bit helps.” The hooded gunman paused for a moment. “I’m on my way to Mexico. I escaped from Deer Lodge Prison in Montana, Deer Lodge. I need some money to get there.”

     “You’re welcome to the money I have, but isn’t there something else I can do for you?  Give you a check or get some more?”

     “No.”

     “I can give you my phone number and you can call me.”

     The hooded gunman said nothing.

     Hartnell spoke up. “I want to get in contact with you. I am a sociology major, and maybe I can even offer you more help than you think you need.”

     “No.”

     “Well, is there any other thing you need?”

     “Yes. One more thing. I want your car keys. My car is hot.”

       Bryan reached into his front pockets, then patted his all his pockets. Nothing.

“I guess in all the excitement I don’t remember where I put them. Let’s see. Are they in my shirt? In the ignition? On the blanket? Say! Would you answer a question for me? I’ve always wondered. On T.V. movies and in an article in the Reader’s Digest they say that thieves really keep their guns [un]loaded. Is yours?”

   “Yes, it is!” replied the hooded gunman excitedly. He may have just been exasperated at all this. For he now calmly declared. “I killed a couple of men before.”

     It isn’t necessary to go into all the dialog here. But Zodiac claimed that he killed a couple of guards when breaking out of Deer Lodge.  Cecelia insisted that Bryan now listen to him and do what he says.

     “Now I want the girl to tie you up,” the hooded man said. He reached around and pulled from his back pocket some cut up nylon clothes line.

   “This is really strange,” replied Hartnell. “I wonder why someone hasn’t thought of this before. I’ll bet there’s good money in it.”

     The hooded gunman said nothing.

   “What was the name of that prison?”  According to his sociology classes, this was a good method. Just keep talking, 

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 The old gnarled oak on ‘The Hill.’ If only it could speak.

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Video from ‘The Hill’

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keep humoring the assailant. It wasn’t working obviously. There was no reply again. Hartnell reiterated: “No really, what did you say the name of it was? I’m just curious.”    

   Begrudgingly, the hooded man replied: “Deer Lodge in Montana.”

     At this point Celia was tying Bryan’s hands behind his back. She did it very loosely. After she finished, The Zodiac holstered his gun and tied her hands behind her back and then came to Bryan and retied his hands tightly. He then put them on their stomachs and tied their ankles and tied them up to their wrists, so they were essentially trust up like pigs for the market.

     Bryan then asked him: “Now that all is said and done, was that gun really loaded?”

     The hooded gunman replied. “Yes, it was.” He pulled out the cartridge from the handle and thumbed out a bullet. He put it back and holstered his gun. He now was standing over Hartnell. Unbeknownst to either of them he had pulled out the long knife from its scabbard.

     Hartnell immediately went into shock from the “chomping” sounds coming from his back. There was no pain yet because of the shock, but each “chomp” indicated the impact of the long knife’s blade deep into Hartnell’s back. Celia Shepard went berserk. After 6 thrusts into his back, Hartnell feigned death. The Zodiac then stepped over to Shepard and started stabbing her. She writhed and turned about and over, but could not avoid the thrusts. None of this stopped The Zodiac from plunging his knife repeatedly into her. He stabbed her in the back and in the front. After 20 thrusts, she had stopped writhing. He stopped and casually walked away.

     Both Shepard and Hartnell started talking right away to each other about getting loose and surviving. They worked on getting each other’s bounds undone, and Bryan shouted and screamed at a boat on the lake. As its occupants sat out on the lake trying to figure out what to do, Bryan tried to go for the road for assistance. But he blacked out twice. By the time the occupants came to their assistance, they had both bled severely. Shepard could only kneel and rock forward, saying “it hurts, it hurts . . .” Yet help was now on its way.

     Meanwhile The Zodiac had walked the quarter of a mile or so back and up the shoulder of the hill and stood by Bryan’s white 1956 Karmann Ghia. Bryan had parked it on the road, where most everybody else parks along here to access the shoreline. It was about 6:40 p.m. now. The Zodiac leaned on the passenger side door and scribbled this message.

                                             Zodiacsymbol
                                             Vallejo
                                             12-20-68
                                             7- 4- 69
                                             Sept 27-69 6:30
                                             by knife

     It was basically his score to date. He now added Bryan and Celia to the list of his victims. He was both taking credit and keeping score.

     This would be confirmed at 7:40 p.m. that night. Napa Police got a phone call. Officer Slaight answered the phone.

           “I want to report of murder, no, a double murder,” said the voice on the other end. “They are two miles north of Park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.”

       Slaight could hear voices in the background and the sounds of traffic. The caller must have been at a public pay phone. Then he spoke again. It was barely audible, as if he was no longer close to the receiver. “I’m the one that did it.” Then there was the sound of the receiver being put down. Not hung up, mind you. But put down.

       “Is there anyone there?” asked Slaight.

       It was forever silent except for the background sounds. 

       Investigation, of course, would confirm that this attack was done by the North Bay killer now known as The Zodiac.     

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   Collating his attacks up to this point reveals much here. There is much similarity to his other strikes and there is vast difference. The differences are obvious. For one, the hooded outfit is quite unnecessary. Why wear it? A ski mask would do for hiding his face, and it would certainly be far more congruous with his impoverished story about heading to Mexico. He wasn’t trying to scare them. He didn’t jump out from behind the tree and declare “I’m the Zodiac! I’m going to blast you away”— and then feed on their fear. They didn’t even know what he was up to. And we must recall that neither victim was meant to have survived. We were never supposed to know that he wore this hood. It clearly meant something to him, something he had no need to share with them or even brag about. What was important to him was that he trust them up and stab them here sacrificially.

     Yet he bungled it. By the time he wrote on the car door and even called Napa Police about an hour later both Hartnell and Shepard were still alive. She would not die for a day and a half, finally succumbing on the morning of September 29. Bryan Hartnell, like Mike Mageau, would survive. Like at Blue Rock Springs, The Zodiac was not in a condition to notice his surroundings. There he hadn’t noticed the name of the park sign, though the sign was as obvious as the mark on banished Cain. At Lake Berryessa, he didn’t hear Bryan and Celia speaking to each other right away. He knew what he had done. He wasn’t that out-of-it. He went up the hill and kept score on Hartnell’s car door. In Vallejo he drove to the gas station and reported his murder to Nancy Slover. But he didn’t take stock of things immediately after his strikes. He was certain sure he had killed both Hartnell and Shepard. Perhaps he was anxious to play his game. On the phone he also didn’t specify which park. This was a glaring oversight. At Vallejo, he told them which park to go to.

     The Zodiac clearly went out of his way at Lake Berryessa, and this becomes his most enigmatic killing. He took unnecessary risks with the hood and, moreover, with the gun. He obviously had no intention of using the gun. His intent to use the knife indicates he knew the area to some extent. It is so deathly quiet out there that a gunshot of that caliber could be heard for miles. (From the looks of it, the gun could have been his 9 mm or even a .45 caliber). Yet he didn’t seem to understand police jurisdictions. Napa is a long drive away. No one could be so ignorant to think that Napa Police had jurisdiction over this lake, and he didn’t even specify which park. Lake Berryessa, naturally, is county jurisdiction. That would mean the sheriffs. And indeed as he was confessing on the phone, Slaight was getting on the horn with Napa Co. sheriffs. Police investigation proved he hadn’t called them because theirs was the only number he knew. He, in fact, didn’t know the police department’s number. He dialed the operator and asked her to connect him with the police. He refused to give his phone booth call number, so she finally put him through.

     Logically, the sheriffs deduced he must have been stalking his ground for a while, at least that day, and this makes sense. They began to seek witnesses-before-the-fact. This brought forth some interesting but frustrating evidence.

     Three young college girls from Angwin went to soak up some sun on the “beach” that day. They went to a spot about a couple of miles north of the Sugar Loaf A&W roadside rest area.  When getting out of their car and walking to their spot, they noticed a late model light (or sky) blue Chevrolet pull in to the parking area and head south, then back up until its bumpers almost touched their bumpers. It was a 2 door sedan. California plates. Rear window tinted very dark. In it was a man in his 20s. They provided a significant clue about the car. These were either car savvy women or they talked to their boyfriends first. They held it to be a late model 1966/67 because of a key difference in it. Its tail lights were long, not round (inaccurately reported on one report to be square headlights; all headlights were round back then but those on the Mustang). This tidbit of information pinpoints the car easily: it had to be a 66 or 67 (most likely 66) Impala. The tail lights on an Impala had remained round through 1965, then the three round tail lights on either side were replaced by three rectangular red tail lights affixed to each other for the 1966 year. The Chevy Caprice was as yet its own model. It was merely a higher end Impala. The other two contenders were the Biscayne and Belair, but these last two had only two round lights, which in turn were replaced by only 2 square lights. Only the Impala had “long” brake or tail lights.

     This is indeed not a car a younger man would be driving. There was some disagreement, however, between the girls, as to just how old this man was. One got a better look than the other two. They thought him closer to 40. But the remaining girl watched him a bit more, for he had come to the beach area and sat back about 50 yards and watched them (looking away when they looked at him). He even walked within 20 feet of her as if just taking a stroll and then walked away. She estimated he was about 28. He was a bit heavy set. His hair, dark or black and straight,  surprisingly, was possibly styled. This was hardly a fashion of 1969. Stylized hair is something like Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers or even Roy Orbison. By mid 1960s, men were simply wearing short hair. Post Summer of Love, there was only one median for men’s hair cuts— a simply short cut hair. But there was no pomade thick and styled hair as a norm. His eyebrows were straight, his nose was medium, rounded eyes, thin lips, small ears, medium skin tone. He was considered fairly good looking. He might have been over 6 feet tall, about 225 pounds. This man wore a black sleeve sweater shirt and dark blue slacks. His T-shirt hung out behind.

     Is this The Zodiac? The stylized hair fits with the obsolete fashion of wearing pleated pants. But, alas, the girls do not say he was wearing pleated pants. The hair also differs from Mageau’s description. He said that the shooter had curly brownish hair, almost blond. Yet both accounts agree in that The Zodiac was heavy set.

     The problem with all this is that tire tracks were found 20 feet behind Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia. These could have been from The Zodiac’s car, but they could not possibly be those of a Chevrolet sedan Impala. These were only 5 and a half inches wide. These type of “pizza cutter” tires were on old cars, dragsters, those little Munster-like hotrods kids had (though only the front tires would have those). Even the rinky dink Corvairs came with 6.5 inch tires. Some Chevy trucks came with 5.5 inch tires. And some early issue Corvairs might have them as well. (1 tire was actually 4.5 inches and of a different tread.)

     This leaves us with one of two deductions. Either the girls didn’t see The Zodiac or he parked his Impala on the other side of the road or further up or down and left no tracks. Those 5.5 inch tire marks could therefore represent only some car that stopped for a while, some hot-rodder who stopped to quick tune his motor, or some old truck that stopped for some unknown reason.  If they were The Zodiac’s, then he was driving an old Corvair or truck or some old car. The “voyeur” in the Impala was simply some guy out in his dad’s or mom’s car getting a kick out of watching girls in bikinis.

     Yet this weight thing on The Zodiac is not entirely subjective. Footprints were left near Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia and at intervals along the path to peninsula. Detective Sergeant Hal Snook, the forensics man, measured, studied, and cast some. It eventually turned out that the person wearing the boots that made these prints was probably around 210 to 220 pounds. They definitely seemed to belong to The Zodiac. They were found by the passenger side door, where he had to stand to write on the car door. The prints showed they came from a military boot called a Wing Walker. They were size 10 1/2.

   Unfortunately, though Snook really knew his thing, there is no evidence that Napa sheriffs went to the area where the girls reported their benign admirer. Though a track might not be found, even a couple of days later an isolated print or parts thereof could have been found that would tell us he too wore the Wing Walkers. If they did we could be certain that the man the girls saw is one and the same with The Zodiac. That would mean he was driving the blue Impala. The tread prints that were found behind Hartnell’s car therefore are relegated to incidental.  Snook’s report does not say whether the footprints were found leading back to or coming from these tire treads, so we may rightly wonder if that was The Zodiac’s car that had been parked behind Hartnell’s Volkswagen.

     The Zodiac leaves us with another curious message here to the police. Not only did he get his jurisdictions grossly wrong, he gives us a wonderful redundancy. “They were in a white Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia.” Why not just say Karmann-Ghia?  It is a minor point, but is may reflect habit. After all, who would say Chevy Corvette? At Blue Rock Springs, he only says “brown car.” Yet there he is specific about the park. Here he is specific about the car but nebulous about which park.

     Within his phone call the Zodiac also told us he was a poor judge of distance. The spot where Hartnell and Shepard were attacked is only 7 tenths of a mile north of park headquarters. It is not two miles as he said. We find this same misjudging of distance in his call to the Vallejo Police. He said Blue Rock Springs Park was a mile east. From where he called it is about 2 miles east to Columbus Parkway and then over a mile north to the park. Curious consistency in error.

     But he also told us something else. His phone call told us he raced to Napa to call the police. It takes about 55 minutes to get from the area of Knoxville Road where he parked to the phone booth at the Napa Car Wash from where he called. Since he called at 7:40 p.m., he must have left Lake Berryessa around 6:40 p.m. and had perfect traffic all the way in to Napa. This being said, his notation “6:30” on Hartnell’s car door could mean that he wrote it at 6:30. It does not necessarily signify the time when he stabbed them and, from his understanding, when he killed them both. This is more probable. It would take 10 minutes back up to the car, then write on the car door and walk across the street or to wherever he parked. I tend to think he wrote on the car door around 6:30 p.m. If not he made it to Napa and found a phone booth quickly. Or, of course, the possibility is that he knew where the phone booth already was.

     All in all, the Lake Berryessa stabbings throw a kink into the realm of Zodiac theorizing. They represent a complete change in his MO. Here he ceased to be the opportunistic drive-by shooter of teens at petting spots. Here he became some cult wraith in a costume. From the point of view of his new game of kill and seek, this was all pointless. Was he acting out the requirements of some occult religion? His costume wasn’t meant to reveal himself to his victims. It had some meaning, but what? He had to stab them. Why Lake Berryessa? Why 1/4 mile from the safety of a quick getaway?

     To follow The Zodiac’s game is to see him develop it as he went along. He wasn’t the master criminal devising and acting out a complex murder grid. But he also wasn’t just a drive-by killer anymore. He went way out on a theatrical limb at Lake Berryessa and succeeded. What indeed was his game?

  

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