Johnny Halloween Read online

  In all the years my dad drove trucks for a living, that load of Cracker Jack was the most memorable thing that ever “fell off” one of them. Around the neighborhood, word about the good stuff to be had at the Partridge’s house spread fast. We lived on a hill so steep that you had to cut switchbacks to climb it on a bicycle, but that didn’t matter. Our doorbell didn’t stop ringing all night. By the time I got home from my own trick-or-treating expedition, we were cleaned out. Every box of Cracker Jack was gone, and the old man was raiding my piggy bank for change to give the kids who’d climbed our hill expecting a box.

  That was the Halloween I’ll always remember, and—just like the Cracker Jack—I was sorry to see it go. The next day we tossed out our candle-scorched jack-o’-lantern, flattened the big cardboard boxes that had held the Cracker Jack and tossed them, too. I started marking time until the next big holiday—Christmas—and when Christmas had come and gone I waited as the clock slowly spun toward summer vacation, and three fast months after that I was back in school counting the days until Halloween night, 1969.

  But by the time that night arrived, everything had changed in my hometown. There weren’t many kids ringing doorbells that year. There weren’t many kids on the streets at all. Because someone was out there that Halloween, someone scarier than all the bogeymen I’d ever seen on television or at the movies, someone pit-of-the-stomach-frightening enough to keep me inside on my favorite night of the year.

  That someone was a real monster.

  He was a serial killer.

  He called himself the Zodiac.

  ****

  On December 20, 1968, two teenagers went out on a first date. David Faraday told Betty Lou Jensen’s parents that they were going to a Christmas carol concert, and maybe to a party afterwards.

  David and Betty Lou were from opposite sides of town. They attended different schools, but that didn’t really matter. Most kids in Vallejo went to one of two public high schools—Vallejo High or James J. Hogan—and while the schools enjoyed a cross-town rivalry, students from both institutions shared the same drive-in’s, movie theaters, and burger joints. It was only natural that some of them would date.

  David and Betty Lou decided to skip the Christmas concert and stopped for a Coke at Mr. Ed’s, a hangout located at one end of the local strip. After that they drove down Springs Road, maybe passing friends who were out cruising with their car radios tuned to KFRC or KYA, the local top 40 stations.

  The pair left the strip and turned onto Columbus Parkway. Making that turn, David and Betty Lou would have known that they were leaving any possibility of going to a party behind. And following Columbus to Lake Herman Road would have meant only one thing to a couple kids from Vallejo—that they were heading toward the local lovers’ lane.

  If you were a teenager looking for privacy, Lake Herman Road was one of the places you’d find it. It wasn’t the only place—there was the parking lot at Blue Rock Springs, and the overlook near the Carquinez Straits where young couples parked to watch “the submarine races,” and there was Benicia State Park, an inlet along the straits where frogs made music in the cattails while crickets sang on the dry hillsides on summer nights—but Lake Herman Road was the spot David and Betty Lou chose that night. A two-lane country road that snaked through rolling hills and ranch land, the twisting ribbon of asphalt cut away from Vallejo and meandered toward the outskirts of neighboring Benicia. There were few lights out there, and fewer people. Mostly there were cattle, sheep, and Lake Herman itself—a quiet, lonely spot that was usually deserted by sunset.

  David knew where to go. He pulled off the blacktop, tires crunching over gravel, and parked near a chainlink fence that bordered the Lake Herman pumping station. From that spot he’d be able to watch Lake Herman Road for cops. Officers often swung through the area on nightly patrol—the place David had parked was a favorite of underage drinkers and dope-smokers, as well as lovers.

  It was a dark night. Rolling hills behind the couple cut off the lights from town. Few cars passed by as the next hour ticked off. But one of those cars stopped, parking a short distance from David’s ’61 Rambler.

  After some time, a man got out of that car and walked toward the Rambler. No one can say for certain what happened in the next few minutes. But when those minutes had passed, David Faraday lay dying on the ground. He’d been shot in the head, point blank, with a .22-caliber pistol.

  Betty Lou Jensen lay dead less than thirty feet away.

  She’d taken five bullets in her back.

  She was running toward Vallejo when she died.

  But she never made it out of that gravel lot.

  She never even made it as far as Lake Herman Road.

  ****

  The murders hit the town hard. For a few days, people talked of little else. The police interviewed a pair of hunters who’d noticed David’s Rambler parked off Lake Herman Road, but they hadn’t seen the killer. Perhaps more significantly, a couple in a sports car who’d parked not far from David and Betty Lou about an hour and a half before the murders came forward with a story about a driver who’d slowed to a crawl as he passed them, then quickly reversed course and tailed them to the Benicia cut-off when they grew frightened and drove off.

  For my part, seeing the story plastered across the front page of the local newspaper was like seeing a nightmare come to life. The Faraday/Jensen killings had all the trappings of tales I’d heard from older kids on hot summer nights: the deserted road…two teenagers alone in a parked car…a hulking stranger approaching in the dark…. The familiarity of the scenario gave me a strangely prescient fright. It seemed I knew this story all too well, and this story, after all, was real. I could almost see it happening, and that scared me most of all. I saw the killer in my mind’s eye the same way I saw the phantom hitchhikers in the stories told by my older brother and his friends. To tell the truth, if the couple in the sports car who escaped the phantom tailgater had reported that they’d found a hook-hand dangling from their car door when they hit the streets of Benicia, I wouldn’t have been surprised. For me, the killings on Lake Herman Road were like an urban legend come to life.

  But the story didn’t last. It couldn’t. The police didn’t have any suspects. There were few leads. By all accounts, David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were a couple of good kids. The cold hard truth of it seemed to be that they’d died for one reason—they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Christmas came and went. The new year rang in on its heels.

  More than half a year passed before the Zodiac marked another holiday with murder.

  ****

  In June of ’69 I finished off the fifth grade at Pennycook Elementary School, and I didn’t even think about getting ready for the sixth. The summer stretched before me, three months that might include just about anything.

  One thing that wasn’t on my list was a bike ride on Lake Herman Road. The lake had been a favorite destination during previous summers, but I didn’t know anyone who wanted to head out there after David and Betty Lou made their one-way trip in December. Not even on a brightly lit summer afternoon.

  There were other places to go, though, places that wouldn’t conjure up images of awful winter nights. Oddly enough, many of the daytime destinations enjoyed by younger kids doubled as lovers’ lanes at night. Benicia State Park was a personal favorite of mine. So was Blue Rock Springs, a city park that bordered the local golf course. Nestled in a fragrant eucalyptus grove, Blue Rock was a place straight out of a fairy tale or an old Robin Hood movie. The trees were tall and dark, growing close together, and it was always cool in their shadows, even on the hottest days. A duck pond waited a stone’s throw from the parking lot, and there were plenty of picnic tables where you could stretch out on your back, sip from a cold bottle of Coke, and stare up at the passing clouds in the summer sky.

  From one of those picnic tables, you could easily see the golf course parking lot where the Lake Herman Road killer made his next strike. The date was Ju
ly 4, 1969. Again, the killer struck on a holiday, and again he struck late at night. Again, he chose a couple parked alone in a remote area (the golf course parking lot at Blue Rock Springs was little more than two miles from the site of the Faraday/Jensen murders). Again, he used a gun, killing waitress Darlene Ferin and seriously wounding Mike Mageau as they sat in Darlene’s ’63 Corvair. And again, he escaped on a dark two-lane road, disappearing into the night.

  A few weeks after the crime, the killer wrote letters to three Bay Area newspapers (including the Vallejo Times-Herald) in which he claimed responsibility for the murders. These letters included details of the crimes that only the killer and the police would know, and ciphers which the writer promised would reveal his identity. Each letter ended with a threat—if the ciphers weren’t published, the writer promised to “go on a kill ram-Page Fry. Night. I will cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.”

  All three ciphers were published, along with some text from the letters.

  The killer wasn’t satisfied, however.

  A few days later, he mailed another letter to the Vallejo Times-Herald.

  This time, he did reveal his identity.

  The letter began:

  Dear Editor

  This is the Zodiac speaking….

  ****

  Now the killer had a name, though he still didn’t have a face.

  The Zodiac was a shadow, albeit a deadly one, and that meant he might be almost anyone.

  Someone we knew…or someone we only thought we knew.

  Someone who could fool us.

  Whatever the case, most people in town were sure that the Zodiac walked among us. The killer seemed to know Vallejo a little too well. The argument went this way—an outsider couldn’t come into town and target two lovers’ lanes so easily. A stranger wouldn’t know his way around the way this guy did. Jesus, the killer was so sure of himself that he actually called the Vallejo P. D. from a pay phone in front of the Sheriff’s Office after he’d killed Darlene Ferin. And he sent that last letter to the Vallejo Times-Herald. He didn’t even bother to send it to the San Francisco papers. No one outside of Vallejo reads the Times-Herald. The Zodiac knows that, and he knows that we know that. That’s what gets him off. He wants us to know he’s right here.

  Whether he was or whether he wasn’t, my neighbors could feel him, could almost see him out of the corners of their eyes when the shadows grew long and darkness fell. Some odd geometry put nearly everyone I knew in proximity to one of the Zodiac’s victims. My future sister-in-law lived just down the street from David Faraday’s house. My brother Larry used to eat breakfast at Terry’s, the restaurant where Darlene Ferin worked. Larry was a railroad switchman, worked lots of weird shifts, and came into the coffee shop at all hours. He thought he’d seen a white car around there, and a lone guy driving it. Nothing unusual about that, really. There were lots of white cars on the road, but word around town was that the Zodiac drove a white car, and that maybe he picked out Darlene Ferin as a victim because he knew her from Terry’s.

  Rumors swirled around for years in the wake left by the Zodiac’s crimes, little bits and pieces of trivia that seemed to add up to something. I remember hearing a story about Mike Mageau, who survived multiple gunshot wounds at Blue Rock Springs. When police found him after the Zodiac’s attack, it was said that Mageau was wearing three pairs of pants, a T-shirt, a long-sleeved shirt, and several sweaters…all on a hot summer night.

  Everyone had a different explanation for the extra clothes. Some said Mageau was expecting a fight with someone—maybe a drug-dealing biker—who’d have a club or a chain, and that the clothes were padding that would allow him to stand up to punishment. Others said that he’d gone to Blue Rock Springs expecting to find a wild Fourth of July party. Young people sometimes had “firecracker wars” in remote spots around Vallejo during the Independence Day holiday, and the extra clothes would have been protection against any fireworks that would have been tossed Mageau’s way. [1]

  But in 1969, in the middle of it, we weren’t concerned with mysterious little details like Mike Mageau’s wardrobe. We were worried about a man with a gun. That summer, my friends and I spent many afternoons talking about the killer, wondering who he might be, devising traps that the police might use to catch him.

  One friend—I’ll call him Tim Alcott here—started a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the Zodiac. Tim was a kid who had a bookcase full of Hardy Boys Mysteries. I think he figured that he could crack the case if he could just put together the clues in the right way, the way Frank and Joe Hardy would.

  Before the arrival of the Zodiac’s second letter, Tim was also convinced he could crack the three-part cipher the killer had mailed to Bay Area newspapers. One afternoon Tim took a bus down to the library, looking for some books on codes and crytography. He went to the card catalog and jotted down a few Dewey decimal numbers. Eager to get the books, he hurried to the stacks.

  The library was cavernous, concrete, a disaster of sixties architecture bathed in dim florescent light. There were more shadows in the stacks than you were apt to find in that eucalyptus grove at Blue Rock Springs. Still, Tim went hunting for his books. He wanted to crack that cipher. He followed the Dewey numbers to 652.8, the section on codes and code-breaking.

  Only problem was that the books weren’t there.

  Every book on the subject was already checked out.

  Tim swallowed hard.

  He thought he knew who had them.

  ****

  My friend Tim didn’t crack the Zodiac’s cipher, but a Salinas high school teacher and his wife did:

  I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE

  BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH

  FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN

  KILLING WILD GAME IN

  THE FORREST BECAUSE

  MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE

  ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL

  SOMETHING GIVES ME THE

  MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE

  IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING

  YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL

  THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAE

  WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN

  IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE

  KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES

  I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME

  BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI

  DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF

  SLAVES FOR THE AFTERLIFE

  EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

  The last line was thought to be an anagram for the killer’s real name. My friends and I played around with it, trying out the names of adults we knew and didn’t much like, but none of them fit. That didn’t surprise me, but the message itself did. It sent a chill up my spine, because somehow it seemed…well, familiar. The part about man being the most dangerous animal reminded me of movies and television shows I’d seen where characters had uttered similar lines. And the part about collecting souls, well…that could have come from a dozen monster movies, the kind of movies I loved.

  I reminded myself that this wasn’t a movie.

  Someone all-too-real had written the Zodiac cipher.

  Someone sick enough to believe what he was writing.

  I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. My dad shook his head when he read the killer’s decoded message. “The guy’s a nut,” he said. “You watch—he’ll make a mistake, and they’ll get him for sure.”

  But they didn’t. The Zodiac struck again at the end of September. This time, the scene of the crime was Lake Berryessa, a man-made lake north of Vallejo where locals enjoyed fishing and picnicking.

  The Zodiac targeted two college students, Cecelia Ann Shepard and Bryan Hartnell, who were relaxing on a blanket near the water’s edge. The killer approached them with a drawn gun. He took their car keys and spoke to them. Hartnell tried to keep the man talking in hopes that the conversation might give him a chance to gain the upper hand. He began to think the whole thing was a simple robbery, only r
ealizing how serious things were when the stranger decided to hogtie both his captives. Finally, the Zodiac attacked with a knife, killing Cecelia Ann and seriously wounding Hartnell.

  Hartnell had noticed a lot about the killer. Recovering in the hospital, he described the Zodiac to the police—the man’s manner, his voice, his size. One thing he couldn’t describe was the Zodiac’s face. The killer had worn a hood. It was black, squared off over the man’s head like some strange executioner’s mask, with a hanging bib that covered the killer’s chest and bore the stitched “gunsight” insignia the Zodiac used in his letters.

  Some people commented that the hood was almost like a Halloween costume.

  ****

  A flip of the calendar page, and October came. But it wasn’t the kind of October I’d enjoyed before, because Vallejo had become a different town.

  People were extremely cautious. My dad insisted that my mom stop working her once-a-week night shift at the remote railroad depot on Highway 29, the road taken by anyone traveling between Vallejo and Lake Berryessa. Business slacked off at both of Vallejo’s drive-in movie theaters. The burger joints on Springs Road were deserted after dark. And no one was cruising the strip.

  With the whole town seemingly on alert, the Zodiac surprised everyone by taking his next victim in the heart of San Francisco. He killed a cab driver, Paul Lee Stine, and followed up the crime with another taunting letter to the San Francisco Chronicle that contained a piece of Stine’s blood-stained shirt and a new threat:

  School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire & then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.[2]

  The threat was taken seriously. Armed police shadowed school buses in Napa. My friends and I were in the habit of walking to school or riding our bikes, but many parents thought that was too risky. Some started driving their kids to school, dropping them off, waiting and watching until they were safely in the classroom. Every day that passed increased the tension just a little bit, because everyone expected that there were more horrors to come.