Part V: The Zodiac Killer is born. Self esteem in 1968. Good fishermen don’t steal from the dead.

There’s a gate here, but it’s not the original. Sturdy steel, clad in chipped yellow paint, it serves as the latest in a decades-old succession of useless structures designed to warn you that someone wants you to go back the way you came, but doesn’t feel strongly enough to do something serious about it. If you climb over the gate, or squeeze between its horizontal bars, or go around it to the left or the right (be careful of small dead mammals and used condoms and nails and rusty sheet metal screws and broken glass, and ticks who wait and wait, desperately clinging to the ends of quivering stalks on the off-chance that you’ll be their one true blood meal)--if you keep going and take this road, well then, you’re probably a damned idiot and I shouldn’t care what mess you find yourself in. I’ll warn you anyway, though, because I cannot bear to see a person run afoul of badness.


The road is made of dirt and gravel, and it runs south from the little turn-out on Lake Herman Road where Zodiac claimed his first victims in the cold waning minutes of Autumn in 1968. There are many stories about what might wait for you down this road, and most of them are as authentic as Carol Doda’s breasts. That is, they contain a lot of artificial filling, but are held in place by just enough truth to get the job done. It is within this zone of jiggling, fleshy semi-reality that we must complete our examination of Zodiac’s motives for his heinous acts. This little dirt road on the outskirts of Benicia is a good place to do it, but first you have to get here.

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We pick up the thread of the non-redacted and empirically deficient Zodiac Killer profile and pseudo-history where we left it: August 30, 1968. Zodiac was on that day some 43 crow-flyin’ miles to the northeast, enduring a blistering 106 degree afternoon mowing his cousin’s lawn-bowling court under an unforgiving Sacramento sun. It was the only work he could get after breaking nearly all of his fingers in a martial arts zydeco competition the month before. Before the day was out, Zodiac would adopt his now famous moniker for the first time, and to this day his cousin Biff wonders if perhaps he was the one who unwittingly set the whole thing in motion.

Zodiac left the River City determined to lighten his mood. Cousin Biff's self esteem was always sore, like it had just finished passing a stool of large caliber and insufficient moisture content. Biff never acknowledged this, since no one in 1968 even knew what self esteem was. On this occasion, he’d taken that permanently negative head-state and turned it on Zodiac, castigating him repeatedly for his unfamiliarity with power lawnmowers. Zodiac had been raised on the high plains of the Dakotas and knew only of the scythe and the goat as methods of grass management. He endured Biff’s taunts for as long as he could, then made as if to kill him with his boning knife. Biff fled to the neighbors’, and Zodiac took his car, a fine, ten year old glossy black Cadillac.

Zodiac drove that car in a style of wild, anti-cognitive abandon, later  employed by Charlie Sheen as he piloted the craft that carried his boss, Mike Huckabee, to little country grocery stores and juke joints all across the south. This whip was a mighty fine automobile, and its twin dorsal fins cleaved the hot, dry air like glistening machetes slicing through beef jerky. Speeding south on Franklin toward the county line, he thought he just might outrace his demons for good this time.

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Rio Vista Bridge

Arriving in Rio Vista (a better town than Petaluma), Zodiac sought relief from the heat. He pulled off the main road and found a shady spot under the bridge just inside the city limits. A hobo named Bob approached and offered some advice: Stay out of the old part of town, because the police chief was an inveterate gambler who was always looking for vagrants to lock up, stealing their cash to place bets on the dog fights in Paintersville. Zodiac told the old bum he wasn’t a vagrant, and Bob replied that a vagrant was anyone the chief wanted him to be. He said this while picking at his scalp, and I am moved at this time to reflect that many luckless people seem to do their best thinking while using their sharp, unclipped nails to gently tweeze hemophages from their heads. I figure it must have something to do with patience, the time to exercise that patience, and the bitter beauty of self discovery so often rendered inaccessible to polite society. That’s a load of crap and you know it.

Bob’s home was under the Highway 12 bridge on the banks of the deceptively languid Sacramento. He had an old pink lawn chair and some fishing equipment and a good view of the river.

What he didn’t have anymore was his .38, having lost it on a bet with some bikers from Cordelia. Zodiac took advantage of the opportunity, putting four slugs from his grandpop’s Army Colt right into Bob’s smooth forehead. Damn, but didn’t that old man have an unnaturally smooth forehead before he got shot.


Afterward, Zodiac took Bob’s fishing rod over to the pier and caught a few undersized stripers, which he kept to eat later. Unbothered by the  conscience he didn’t have, he saw no difference between killing a harmless old man, breaking fish and game laws, and indexing the dominance hierarchy of gulls as they quarreled over bits of tuna sandwiches tossed skyward by a screaming mob of first graders shepherded by two harried teachers.

Given the choice, would you lead a simple existence under a bridge, free to fish for whatever swims beneath the streaking traffic above, beholden to no one, or would you keep accumulating useless things and sunbathing in the glowing accolades of your fair-weather friends for your ultimately insignificant contributions to society? Bob tossed all that aside, voluntarily. It’s a powerfully tempting thought sometimes, to just shuck it all and take up residence near a pier jutting into a fabled waterway, offering opinions to all who pass regardless of their political or religious affiliation, wearing a red boatman’s cap and calling boisterously to those rich bastards floating by on their mahogany or fiberglass-hulled dick-replacements. Warning them to tell the rest of their tax-dodging, hand-washing brethren that in the end they’re nothing more than maggot shit and rich fertile loam, same as everyone else. If I were to adopt the Way of the Hobo, I’d tell those property-grabbing bastards they don’t know how to kick-start a recalcitrant mule, let alone a V-twin motorcycle. I’d challenge ‘em to go ahead and stop that boat, and ahoy there you sons o’ bitches hop on up here and I’ll show you what real life can do to a man’s face. Pull yourself on up here, you pinched-face pikers.
I dare you.
 

Zodiac became Zodiac when he killed Bob and found an old, wrinkled horoscope in the dead man’s back pocket: “You will see a mountain, cloak a visage, master the photovoltaic arts, quarter a circle, and eat a mango.”
 

© Pseudocognitive

Non-Redacted Zodiac Killer Profile Part II: He’s dead, Jim

Lake Berryessa Zodiac crime scene

Even the most experienced and highly trained criminal profilers acknowledge that profiling is more art than science. This is another way of saying that when you try to apply the generalizations of psychology to specific unknown individuals, it is utterly impossible to control for even a fraction of the variables that affect behavior. Any profiler who doesn’t acknowledge this is just a quack. I base this view primarily on my innate skepticism of most things; I performed no searches of the legitimate literature on the topic. If someone would like to argue the point, I encourage it.


Zodiac is dead. If you cling to the hope that he’s alive and you might be the person who catches him, I suggest that you get comfortable in your mom’s moldy basement, stock up on ganja and DiGiorno, and get a new keyboard to replace that one with the overused CAPS LOCK key. If I have a few spare minutes, I’ll look for you on the various
fora every December 20 and see what you’re up to.
As I possibly described in part one of the profile, Zodiac is rumored to have had ties to a PETA precursor group somewhere in the high wheat country of western Kansas, perhaps very close to the small town of Holcomb. I got my start on the path to this tentative conclusion when I discovered a previously overlooked piece of evidence: Zodiac’s right Wing Walker shoe. I am not currently prepared to explain the circumstances of this discovery, as it may have been found on federal BLM land, but the shoe has been examined and authenticated by somebody in some agency someplace.  Please remember that many to most of the statements herein are complete dreck. Zodiac was possibly terrified of small insects as a child. It has been suggested that it may have been the sight of scurrying creatures small enough to chew on his eardrums that did more than anything else to steer him toward his eventual fate. Each of his thumbs had a highly flexible metacarpal phalangeal joint. He ventured into two-bit seedy dives in the worst part of every town he passed through in order to hone his fighting skills. It was in one such place that he almost met his doom when the bartender shot at him point-blank with an old 10 gauge his grandpa had used to hunt geese out of season on Suisun Bay. The gun misfired.

A possible former Zodiac haunt in an undisclosed location

Secret place in Rio Vista, thought by some to have an undefined role in the etiology of Zodiac's mental pathology

There are tantalizing hints of Zodiac’s passage in the dry summer of 1960 through many places around the arid southwest. In Needles, California, which sits across the mighty Colorado from Arizona, there was later discovered, carved in the riverbank silt at the spot made famous by Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” a symbol eerily similar to the one Zodiac scrawled on his letters to Bay Area newspapers (and on the door of Bryan Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia).

This is rumored in many zones to be a former Zodiac hideout/staging headquarters.

If the Zodiac murders were happening now, who would the killer be? These crimes are to be treated here—in order to free our minds from the the stultifying atmosphere created by the anti-think mass media/politico-corporate complex—as a scourge of the current day, and we examine the characteristics that may lead us to Zodiac. He’s your neighbor, the friendly guy who’s always willing to help you unload large pieces of furniture but who invariably lets you know that he has a better way to do it.  He’s your other neighbor–the guy who refuses to talk to anyone and takes his solitary meals in the backyard under an old mulberry tree, cradling a varmint gun in his lap in case the squirrels or pigeons bother him. He works at a mini market and buys all the Penthouse and Hustler magazines before they go on the rack. His job involves, as I said before, long-distance driving, usually along deserted roads across the high desert. Last year he tried to prospect for a local second-tier 1% motorcycle club. He didn’t make it, of course, but he still uses the slang he picked up, and this bothers some people. He is the proprietor of a bait shop near Steamboat Slough and he refuses to sell jumbo minnows to any customer who does not first promise to render each of them unconscious with ice water before running a gleaming 1/0 hook through its lips. He is a five foot-six vice principal of the old school who calls everyone “slacker.” He gave up trying to grow hair years ago, and now shines his pale, globe-like head with ski wax. He wears Pendleton® shirts hanging out with only the top button fastened because he once read a book about the history of Los Angeles gangs. He’s your podiatrist, and he’s angry whether you know it or not.

Returning to the actual time of Zodiac’s activities, if you will consult any 60′s era gas station map you will discover—with the aid of a ruler and pencil—that the driving distance from North M and Vine in Needles to the summit of Mt. Diablo is 555 miles.  If you add that to the 111 miles from Washington and Cherry Streets in San Francisco to an unspecified spot alongside US 50 west of Cameron Park, you get 666 miles. These are possibly coincidences, but as hardwired pattern-seekers, you want to accept it, so I suggest that you do.

The gravel turn-out at the Lake Herman Road Zodiac crime scene.

We could, under some circumstances, know incontrovertibly that Zodiac can definitely be placed in the Bay Area by 1961, perhaps. Legends of possibly unexplained phenomena involving gravitational anomalies, mysterious ice blue (or white or gray or silver or pearl-colored) pursuit cars skulking along dark roads, as well as several nearly-confirmed disappearances within a 50 mile radius of Samuel P. Taylor State Park from January 1955 to July 1967 tend to support this contention. This kind of behavior, according to several persons identifying themselves as experts, often escalates to homicide. That these incidents occurred within a nearly 8,000 square mile area over a twelve and-a-half year time frame just about nails it down. Additionally, the socio-chronological progression along a vaguely described continuum of moral permissiveness in that era set the stage for all kinds of undifferentiated behavioral permutations. The time was ripe, and by the end of this period, Zodiac was ready to take his twisted games to the ultimate level.

© Pseudocognitive