Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [37]
But the Zodiac Killer’s appetite for publicity was endless. At 2 a.m. on 22 October 1969, 11 days after the murder of Paul Stine, a man with a gruff voice called the police department in Oakland, which is just across the bay from San Francisco. He introduced himself as the Zodiac and said: ‘I want to get in touch with F. Lee Bailey. If you can’t come up with Bailey, I’ll settle for Mel Belli. I want one or other of them to appear on the Channel Seven talk show. I’ll make contact by telephone.’
The men he was asking for were the two top criminal lawyers in America. F. Lee Bailey has been more recently defending O. J. Simpson. But he was not available on such short notice and Melvin Belli agreed to appear on the Jim Dunbar talk show at 6.30 the next morning. The show’s ratings soared as people throughout the Bay area got up the next morning and tuned in. At 7.20 a man called in and told Belli that he was the Zodiac, though he preferred to be called Sam. He said: ‘I’m sick. I have headaches.’
But the two police switchboard operators who talked to the Zodiac when he reported the murders said his voice was that of an older man. The mystery caller was eventually traced to Napa State Hospital and proved to be a mental patient.
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 fantasised 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 Jones 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 Jones 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 ran 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