Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [36]
The gunman talked some more then calmly announced: ‘I am going to have to stab you people.’
Bryan Hartnell begged to be stabbed first.
‘I couldn’t bear to see her stabbed,’ he said.
The gunman calmly agreed, sank to his knees and stabbed Hartnell in the back repeatedly with a hunting knife. Hartnell was dizzy and sick, but still conscious when the masked man turned his attention to Cecelia. He was calm at first, but after the first stab he seemed to go berserk. He plunged the hunting knife into her defenceless body again and again, while she twisted and turned frantically under him in a futile attempt to escape the blows. When she finally lay still, the man grew calm again. He got up and walked over to their car. He pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and drew something on the door. Then he walked away.
A fisherman heard their screams and came running. Bryan and Cecelia were both still alive. The Napa Valley Police were already on their way, alerted by an anonymous phone call. A gruff man’s voice had said: ‘I want to report a double murder.’
He gave a precise location for where the bodies were to be found, then left the phone hanging.
Cecelia Shepard was in a coma when the police arrived. She died two days later in hospital without regaining consciousness. Bryan Hartnell recovered slowly and was able to give a full description of their attacker. But the police had already guessed who he was. The sign he had drawn on the door of their car was a circle with a cross in it. The police found the phone that the man with the gruff voice had left hanging. It was in a call box less than six blocks from the headquarters of the Napa Valley Police Department. And they managed to get a good palm print off it. Unfortunately, it matched nothing on record.
Two weeks after the stabbing, on 11 October 1969, a 14-year-old girl was looking out of the window of her home in San Francisco and witnessed a crime in progress. A cab was parked on the corner of Washington and Cherry Street and a stocky man, in the front passenger seat, was going through the pockets of the driver. She called her brothers over to watch what was happening. The man got out of the taxi, leaving the cab driver slumped across the seat. He wiped the door handle with a piece of cloth, then walked off in a northerly direction. The children called the police, but they did not give their evidence clearly enough. The telephone operator who took the call, logged at 10 p.m., noted that the suspect was an ‘NMA’ – negro male adult. An all-points bulletin was put out and a patrolman actually stopped a stocky man nearby and asked whether he had seen anything unusual. But as he was white, the police officer let him go.
Later a stocky man was seen running into the nearby Presidio – a military compound that contains housing and a park area. The floodlights were switched on and the area was searched by patrolmen with dogs. In the cab, the police found the taxi-driver, 29-year-old Paul Stine, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. The motive, they thought, was robbery.
Then, three days later, the San Francisco Chronicle received a Zodiac letter.
‘THIS IS THE ZODIAC SPEAKING,’ it read. ‘I AM THE MURDERER OF THE TAXI DRIVER OVER BY WASHINGTON ST AND MAPLE ST [sic] LAST NIGHT, TO PROVE IT HERE IS A BLOOD STAINED PIECE OF HIS SHIRT.’
San Francisco criminologists managed to match the piece of cloth with the letter exactly with the shirt of the murdered taxi-driver. And they discovered that the bullet that had killed Stine was a .22 and fired from the same gun that had been used in the murder of Bettilou Jensen and David Faraday.
The letter went on to say: ‘I AM THE SAME MAN WHO DID IN THE PEOPLE IN THE NORTH BAY AREA.
‘THE S.F. POLICE COULD HAVE CAUGHT ME LAST NIGHT,’ it taunted, concluding, ‘SCHOOL CHILDREN MAKE NICE TARGETS. I THINK I SHALL WIPE OUT A SCHOOL BUS SOME MORNING. JUST SHOOT OUT THE TYRES AND THEN PICK OFF ALL THE KIDDIES AS THEY COME BOUNCING OUT.’
The letter was signed with a circle with a cross in it.
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