Two figures in real-life Zodiac drama discuss the case

By DIXIE REID
Friday, March 02, 2007

To this day, writer Robert Graysmith believes that the Zodiac serial killer was Arthur Leigh Allen, a one-time schoolteacher and convicted pedophile who died in 1992.

Retired cop Ken Narlow doesn't think so, and he has a feeling Zodiac is still alive.

"I think he's out there somewhere," says Narlow.

The five murders Zodiac claimed _ four young people and a San Francisco cabbie _ remain unsolved, and his identity is uncertain.

Graysmith and Narlow were major players in the sensational drama that surrounded the Zodiac killings more than 30 years ago _ and in the making of the documentary-style thriller "Zodiac." It's based on Graysmith's true-crime best sellers "Zodiac" and "Zodiac Unmasked."

Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhall) was a young editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969. He was in the publisher's office getting a cartoon approved when the first of Zodiac's taunting letters _ with crytogram "clues" to his identity, many misspellings, endless threats and Zodiac's trademark cross-inside-a-circle signature _ arrived in late July.

In similar letters delivered to the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times-Herald, Zodiac bragged about killings in Vallejo a few weeks earlier, on July 5, and in December 1968.

"The thing that galvanized us all was that he was sending us ciphers, and they were all slightly different, and no one knew which one came first, in order to break the code," Graysmith says from his home in San Francisco. "The threat that went with it was that he was going to start killing people on a rampage if (the newspapers) didn't print his cipher on the front page. After a lot of soul-searching, all three papers did (on Aug. 1, 1969)."

Narlow (Donal Logue plays him in the movie) was an investigator with the Napa County Sheriff's Department in late September 1969 when he learned that two college students were stabbed while picnicking at Lake Berryessa, 30 miles north of Napa. He rushed to the hospital and was waiting when the ambulances arrived. Cecilia Ann Shepard died two days later. Her companion, Bryan Hartnell, survived six stab wounds and now practices law in Southern California.

As for Narlow, he retired from the department 20 years ago but is still working the case, unofficially. He was a technical adviser on "Zodiac."

He and his wife, Marie, were on location at Lake Berryessa when director David Fincher re-created the attacks on Shepard and Hartnell for the movie.

"I tell you," Narlow, 76, says from his home in Napa, "I always pictured myself as a hard-nosed cop. I've sat through autopsies. I've seen a lot of blood and gore over the years, but that scene there really affected me. It got me teary-eyed. I didn't break down, I'm not gonna go that far."

Shepard and Hartnell were Zodiac's third pair of victims. The first were Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday, high-school kids out on a date Dec. 20, 1968. They were supposed to be at a Christmas concert but instead had parked at a popular "lover's lane" spot near Vallejo's Lake Herman. She was shot five times in the back, and he was shot once in the head. They both died.

Zodiac was quiet for a while, until just after midnight on July 5, 1969, when he shot Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau as they sat in her car at Blue Rock Springs golf course in Vallejo. Ferrin died.

On July 31, the three newspapers received their first correspondence from Zodiac, in which he demanded (the misspellings are his):

"I want you to print this cipher on your frunt page by Fry Afternoon Aug 1-69, If you do not do this I will go on a kill rampage Fry night that will last the whole week end. I will cruse around and pick off all stray people or coupples that are alone then move on to kill some more untill I have killed over a dozen people."

A high-school teacher and his wife broke the code a few days later, after studying the letter published in the Chronicle.

"They were so gripped by this case," says Graysmith, 64. "It was the kind of case that gripped everybody and wouldn't let you go. I don't think Zodiac expected anybody to break the code. It told why he killed. His inspiration. It told everything except his name. The last 18 symbols he implied were his name. No one has broken that. It's still there."

Zodiac's last known killing occurred Oct. 11, 1969, when he shot San Francisco cab driver Paul Stine point-blank in the head. Witnesses saw him take Stine's wallet and keys, and cut away a piece of the man's bloody shirt, as proof of the crime.

The last anyone heard of Zodiac was in 1974, when he sent out more letters.

The Zodiac case was all-consuming for a lot of folks in law enforcement and the media, including Chronicle police reporter Paul Avery (who wrote for the Sacramento Bee in the mid-1980s before returning to San Francisco for a stint at the Examiner).

Avery (played by Robert Downey Jr. in the movie) suffered from emphysema, and died in 2000.

Graysmith, still an editorial cartoonist, started looking into the Zodiac killings on his own, hoping to find something the cops and reporters hadn't. His investigations would lead to the books "Zodiac" (1985) and "Zodiac Uncovered" (2002).

His favorite suspect in the Zodiac case is Arthur Leigh Allen, whom Vallejo police began investigating in 1971 after Michael Mageau (who survived the July 5, 1969, shooting) identified Allen in a photo lineup.

"I think it was him," says Graysmith of Allen, "and I'll tell you why. One thing is the intuition you get as an artist when your skin just crawls around this guy. And he was at Lake Berryessa that day, he wears the same shoe size, is the same height and weight."

Nope, says Narlow: "Convince me. The evidence is not there."

Both Narlow and Graysmith hope the movie, which Fincher insisted be historically accurate, will lead to new clues in the Zodiac case.

(The Sacramento Bee's Dixie Reid can be reached at dreid@sacbee.com.)