Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [38]
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 realised what was going on and a judge issued a court order forcing the police to stop harassing him.
Zodiac letters threatening more murders were received. Some of them were authenticated, but they 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 with a parody of ‘The Lord High Executioner’ listing those people he intended to kill – and used the refrain ‘titwillo, titwillo, titwillo’. 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 same 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 San Francisco Chronicle claiming to have killed twelve people and enclosing the map with an X marking the peak of Mount Diablo – the Devil’s Mountain – in Contra Costa Country across the bay from San Francisco. From there, an observer could see the entire panorama of the area where the murders had taken place. But when detectives checked it out more closely, the spot marked