Public Safety | Daily Report

I inherited the Zodiac beat from Paul Avery, the crime reporter who broke many stories about San Francisco’s most enduring murder mystery.

That’s how I wound up getting a thank you note from the man who emerged, posthumously, as Hollywood’s prime Zodiac suspect.

Zodiac, of course, was a publicity-mad gunman who between 1966 and 1969 killed six people in unprovoked attacks in Vallejo, Riverside and San Francisco, then disappeared.

During the spree, he wrote letters to the newspapers, defying police to stop him from killing again. Avery, a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, tried to track the Zodiac down. (Avery was played by Robert Downey Jr. in the 2007 movie.) At one point, Zodiac threatened to kill Avery, too.

But as I wrote earlier this year, by the time he came to work at the old San Francisco Examiner, Avery had left the Zodiac story behind.

In 1987, the Ex’s metro editor assigned me to write a series about unsolved murders in San Francisco: The city had weird crime, and the police clearance rate for murders was low. The Zodiac was an obvious part of the project – but what was the angle on those old, unsolved murders?

Avery helped me out. In a cardboard box, he kept letters from people all over the world who claimed they had solved the Zodiac case. They wanted Avery to tell them they were right.

The amateur sleuths were earnest and deeply committed to solving the case. But their suspects were ridiculous – friends, neighbors and ex-spouses who usually could be ruled out simply by age or because they had never been to California. Some of their investigative methods were odd, too. A man in San Angelo, Texas wrote that he tried to induce a confession from his suspected Zodiac by suggesting that the two of them kill and eat some songbirds that lived in a backyard birdhouse.

So I wrote a feature about Avery’s Zodiac hunters. After that, when an editor came up with a Zodiac idea, Avery told them to give it to me.

Thus, in 1991, I was assigned to chase a report in the Napa Sentinel: Vallejo police had quietly reopened the Zodiac case the previous year and raided a suspect’s home.

When the court clerk wouldn’t give me the warrant, I called up the suspect and interviewed him.

His name was Arthur Leigh Allen, a disabled school teacher who had served three years in a mental hospital for molesting a child. He said he had been targeted as a Zodiac suspect in 1971 and subjected to intense scrutiny. But Allen’s fingerprints didn’t match the killer’s, and experts said his handwriting didn’t match either, and he passed a polygraph test that Allen said went on for 10 hours.

Nevertheless, more than 20 years later police came back at him. By Allen's account, they even seized a letter that he said he had received from state investigators, reporting on the results of the polygraph and absolving him of the Zodiac murders.

“No way in hell could I go out and kill innocent teenie-boppers – no way,” he told me, referring to the Zodiac victims shot at a lover’s lane. “But with (the police), I’m guilty until proven innocent, and I figure the case will be around until I die.”

At another point, Allen said: “This damned thing has been haunting me for 22 years … If I was prone to suicide, I’d have already done it … The only thing in my favor is, I’ve never killed anyone.”

I also interviewed Dave Toschi, SFPD’s lead Zodiac investigator, who described the results of Allen’s lie detector and handwriting analysis.

“Allen looked very, very good for a while,” Toschi said. “(But) everything turned out to be negative.”

My story ran in the Ex on July 26, 1991 – alas, it’s not online. TV stations followed it. Allen liked the coverage and sent a thank-you note, getting my first name wrong.

“Perhaps now I can resume what’s left of my life in peace,” he wrote.

A diabetic with many health problems, Allen died in 1992.

Interest in Allen as a Zodiac suspect flared again after the movie came out. It hinted strongly that Allen, who was played by John Carroll Lynch, was the killer. Robert Graysmith, who wrote the book on which the film was based, has said Allen is still his prime suspect, despite the evidentiary issues. 

Did I interview the Zodiac? One thing you learn covering crime is that you just never know about people. And so, based on a 30-minute phone interview, I have no idea if Allen was the Zodiac or not.

But I am convinced that, absent a confession, Allen would never have been convicted of the murders if the case had come to trial. The fingerprint and handwriting analysis provided powerful evidence of innocence. A good defense lawyer would have figured out a way to get the lie detector results in front of a jury, as well.

Avery died in 2000.* I don’t think we ever talked about Allen.

* This corrects a typo in the original post.

Arthur Allen to "Wayne" Williams