February 26, 2019 • 40 mins
Toschi's investigation led to a dead end, but independent investigators are chasing down other leads.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not necessarily represent those of I Heart Media,
How Stuff Works, or its employees. I spent a week
on call with Potsky and Armstrong, going to murders with
them in the middle of the night. That was pretty
amazing to know. What was it like to actually be
(00:21):
a homicide cop. I mean, it's pretty gritty. I'd got
a call at three in the morning. It was TASKI
saying meet us at such and such, and so I'd
go out in the mission district and then some guy
laying there with a with a knife in the middle
of his belly. I loved it. I mean, I thought
it was I love that stuff. TASKI was so unique.
He and Armstrong or or nothing alike. Armstrong was, by
(00:42):
the book, very reserved. Toski had a flair and he
was much more of a dynamic, sort of interesting, you know,
real gregarious kind of guy. That's Duffy Jennings, the former
reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. He worked with Detective
Dave Toski, the lead Zodiac investigating for the San Francisco
police department tasks. Personality and style won him attention, but
(01:06):
it also put him in the crosshairs. The Zodiac had
gone quiet and press coverage of him had all but disappeared,
but that was about to change. So in April of
ninety Zodiac had not been heard from for four years.
There has been no letters, but just in case, the
newspaper still put samples of Zodiac's earlier letters and envelopes
(01:30):
tacked onto the mail slot cabinet where the copy boys
sorted the daily mail, just in case they saw anything
that remotely resembled these old letters. So in in April one,
one morning, the copy boys are sorting mail. I'm at
my desk. I haven't even thought about Zodiac for a
(01:52):
long time. A copy boy named Brent Ward walks up
to my desk with an envelope in his hand, and
he said, hey, um, take a look at this. Does
this look familiar to you? It went off like a flash.
Oh my goodness, that definitely looks like Zodiac. A man
(02:14):
in a mask robbed and tied and stabbed them, leaving
them for dad. Subject stated, I want to report a murder,
no a double murder. I did it. A man who
wore an evil style executioner's hood, carried the knife and
gun and intended to use them. They haven't Arrestie because
(02:35):
they can't. I'm not damn Zodiac. Who is the Zodiac
and where is he? From my Heart Radio, How staff
works and Tenderfoot TV. This is monster, the Zodiac killer.
The Zodiac craved at tension in the media obliged him.
Even the major detective Dave Touski and his suspect Arthur
(02:58):
Lee Allen received their share of the spotlight, and their
stories provide an important lesson to other investigators, the independent
investigators who hunt for the Zodiac on their own, exploring
leads that others ignore, finding new suspects that had previously
escaped notice, and making connections that others dismissed as coincidence.
(03:20):
I got on the phone to call Dave Toski. I
couldn't reach him. He was out of the office. He
came back to the office and they told him you
got a call from Duffy at the Chronicle. He thinks
he has a Zodiac letter, so he came down and
together we opened the letter. Dear editor, this is the
Zodiac speaking. I am back with you. Tell herb Kane.
(03:45):
I am here, I have always been here. That city
pig Toski is good, but I'm smarter and better. He
will get tired then leave me alone. I'm waiting for
a good movie about me. Who play me? I am
now in control of all things yours truly, Zodiac guess
(04:10):
San Francisco Police Department zero. He said, I'm gonna take
it over to Paul Shimoda for verification. Paul was the
documents expert at the US Postal Service. An hour or
two later, he called me back and said, Shimoda says
it's the guy. So we did a story. Zodiac is back.
(04:32):
It's his usual taunting of police for failing to catch him,
and some reference to that city pig Tosky. San Francisco
Police displayed a blackboard with excerpts of the latest Zodiac letter.
Police are convinced it's authentic. DRD. San Francisco Police Chief
Clemdamika said it's the sixteenth letter received from the Zodiac Killer.
I'm the first since Letter number sixteen has breathed new
(04:55):
life into the investigation of at least six leaders named
on the Zodiac files will be reviewed again. For the
last nine years, the Zodiac investigation has been headed by
homicide Inspector David Tusky. I had Lewis beating that he
was not dead and that he was out there somewhere,
and that he would communicate. I was always looking that
(05:16):
he would communicate and and not commit an act. A
letter I can handle, you know, it's a front page story.
Zodiac had not been heard from for four years. What
happened after that was we had a column going on
in the paper at that time, a serialized fiction column
called Tales of the City, and it was being written
(05:38):
by a writer named Armistead Mopan. Mopan's column included a
character based on Detective Dave Toski. He'd sometimes received fan
mail about that character, anonymous fan mail that Mopan suspected
had been written by Toski himself. Toski is on the
fire for writing phony fan letters about himself to a
newspaper feature writer, and Mopan today came up with farm
(06:00):
more serious charges that there are similarities between the letters
Tuski admits writing to Mopan and the most recent Zodiac
letter of last April. I received the bogus fan letters
in the fall of nine seventy six. I took no
official action on them at the time because I regarded
them as harmless. As a harmless if somewhat reckless action
on the part of a police officer, I chose to
(06:21):
turn the matter over to police only when I noticed
certain similarities between the tone of the letters and the
tone of the last Zodiac letter. Because there had been
no Zodiac news for four years, there were people who
thought this was Tusky trying to regenerate interest in the
case and attention on him. So an investigation ensued internally
(06:42):
in the police department, and Tusky was questioned about this.
He denied that he'd written it. He acknowledged that he
had written anonymous notes to Armistead Mopen. His credibility was
called into question. The police chief removed him from the
homicide detail, put him back in robbery and pawn shop detail,
(07:04):
and it was the beginning of the end of his
career on the San Francisco Police Department. This letter and
the suspicions around it tarnished his credibility, and ultimately he
retired out of the force, having never caught Zodiac and
under a cloud of suspicion that was some of his
own doing. And I know Dave started to go downhill
(07:27):
after that emotionally. Because he investigated over a hundred murders
in his career and had all this attention, Dave had
become a icon of his own. He wore an upside
down shoulder holster, he wore bow ties, He had his
favorite snack, this trademark box of animal crackers, and he
(07:49):
had a persona that was gregarious. He was an Italian kid,
grew up in San Francisco, and you know it's sad
because he loved the attention. Well, I think it affected
his work on a day to day basis. I don't
believe he ever did write a zodiac letter. I just don't.
I just know him well enough to know that that
wasn't true. But he became reclusive after that. This much
(08:13):
can be said with certainty. There is no official police
clamp on INSPECTATASKI talking with the media. That matter is
entirely up to him. He would never talk to another
media person besides me. He would tell the story about
going back to the Paul Stein crime scene every year
on the anniversary to reflect on it, and he was
(08:34):
candid with me about how it ate at him that
he had never caught the guy Dave Toski died on
January six, two eighteen. Toski is survived by his wife,
his two daughters, and two granddaughters. Toski died convinced that
Arthur Lee Allen was the Zodiac and haunted by the
(08:56):
fact that he was never convicted of the crime. Toskis
story of obsession is familiar for many cold case investigators.
He's not the only one to get swept up in
the Zodiac case, and Arthur Lee Allen wasn't the only
promising suspect. Ed Rust was the Valeo police officer on
duty when Darlene Farren was shot and killed at Blue
(09:16):
Rock Springs Park. For years, there had been no progress
in the case, but then, through a chance meeting at
a conference, a suspect would finally catch Rust's interest. They
had a guest speaker who was going to do a
presentation on the Zodiac killer, a man named Harvey Hines
h I n e. S. Who was actually a police
(09:38):
officer his investigation. It started out as a term paper
in one of his police classes, and I believe this
was somewhere around it in the early nineteen seventies. He
began investigating the case on his own and became absorbed
in when I met him. This was in late nineties,
(10:00):
so he had been working on this case and following
it on his own time for all these years and
had developed a suspect he felt was the Zodiac Killer
as a man named Larry Caine. Harvey Hines was absolutely
convinced that Larry Caine was the Zodiac. There is no
(10:21):
question in my mind that my suspect is a Zodiac.
Every fiber, every part of my being tells me that
he is the Zodiac Killer. He had initially identified him
when he went to South Lake Tahoe, where Donna Last
had disappeared. Donna Last was a night shift nurse at
(10:44):
a casino in Lake Tahoe. She'd recently moved there from
San Francisco, and then on September six, after finishing her
shift at two a m. Last disappeared. The next day,
a man called her work in her landlord and told
them she left suddenly because of a family emergency and
wouldn't be coming back. But Lass's car was parked in
(11:06):
front of her apartment and there was no family emergency.
Police searched her apartment. They found no signs of struggle
or anything suspicious, but her possessions were all there and
they suspected foul play. Lass was never seen again and
her body was never found. Six months later, on March twenty,
(11:29):
a postcard arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle with a
zodiac symbol in the corner. It was addressed to reporter
Paul Avery and scrawled writing. Attached to the postcard was
an image a winter scene from a condo development ad
and words clipped for newspapers Sierra Club around in the snow,
(11:51):
sought victim twelve peek through the Pines pass Lake Tahoe Areas.
Police and media quick we connected this postcard with Lass's disappearance,
and Harvey Hines learned in his criminology class that the
crime was still unsolved. Lake Tahoe was only a few
hours away, so he drove out to investigate himself. Hines
(12:13):
went through the Lake Tahoe police records and started collecting
information that he'd later compiled into an extensive report. The
following are excerpts of his report, read by a voice actor.
I reviewed the two South Lake Tahoe supplemental police reports
filed on March. Both subjects came forward after seeing a
television newscast stating the Zodiac Killer had sought his twelfth victim.
(12:36):
In the Tahoe area, two women had filed police reports
after wondering if a strange man they had encountered might
be the Zodiac Killer. The first report was filed by
Mary Highlander, a blackjack dealer. At an eyehap, Mary met
a man with horn rimmed glasses. He offered to read
her horoscope, telling her he was an expert at the zodiac.
(12:58):
He said the reading would take time and asked for
her number. When he called her later, he told her
that he had to give her the reading in person.
Mary arranged to meet him at her house, but something
felt off, so she invited her friend Nancy over. When
the man arrived, he seemed annoyed at Nancy's presence. He
looked at Nancy, indicating that he wished she would leave
(13:19):
him alone with marrying. Nancy stayed, fearing to leave her
friend alone with the subject. He stated he had recently
read a chart of a murderer and continued talking about
this subject, seemingly preoccupied with death. The man was very
evasive about questions asked of him by both women, and
another woman reported a strange encounter that also occurred around
(13:39):
the time of Donn Alas's disappearance. That woman, who wished
to remain anonymous, said that a man sat down next
to her at a pizza parlor and struck up a
conversation about zodiac signs. He told her he sold real
estate and said that a woman he had been watching
at work would quote be sorry for rejecting him. The
anonymous woman at the pizza parlor felt unnerved and made
(14:02):
up an excuse to leave. Hines was intrigued by the
police reports, so we interviewed three of Lass's former co workers.
He asked if there was anyone in Lass's life who
seemed suspicious or had shown a particular interest in her.
I asked the same basic questions of each person I
spoke with, without exception. Each person promptly gave me the
(14:23):
name of Larry Caine. They all agreed Kine and Donna
las knew each other. They said he was mostly a loner.
They described him as being strange. He was forty five
years old, had dark hair or horned, grimmed glasses, and
had sort of a pot belly. I asked if they
(14:44):
knew who he worked for now and They stated they
did not know, but thought perhaps for an Alan M. Dorfman,
the manager of Arizona Real Estate at the time that
the victim, Lass disappeared. Although Haines was working the case
in his free time, he used his connections as a
police officer to determine Kane had moved to Lake Tahoe
(15:05):
from San Francisco right around the time of Lass's disappearance.
Kine had multiple social security numbers and names on file.
He'd been arrested ten times between nineteen forty six and
nineteen sixty eight, including for battery. A probation report from
nineteen sixty four said Kane had sustained brain damage after
(15:26):
a head on collision with a cement truck. The report
said his injury was serious and that his recent involvements
with the law indicated a quote lack of control in
self gratification, and scientific studies show that people who've experienced
head trauma can become more likely to commit violent crimes.
(15:46):
Hines now had a suspect, but he still had no
clue what happened to don Alas he turned back to
the zodiacs card, What did it mean pass Lake Tahoe
areas and why did it say Sierra Club? Were those
phrases clues as to the location of Lassa's body. After
leaving the police department, I spent several hours studying the
(16:08):
postcard and driving around the lake. I began to notice
several signs marking local ski areas, and the postcard made
a reference to areas. He decided to follow the postcard's directions.
He drove out of Lake Tahoe, past the ski areas
and spent hours trying to find a location somehow related
to the Sierra Club. I drove north of Lake Tahoe
(16:31):
and found the Claire Tap and Lodge and was a
private club for Sierra Club members. Only after getting out
of my car and walking up the driveway, I realized
the scene was not unlike the picture depicted on the
Zodiac postcard. I took pictures of the area without making
contact with anyone at the club. I then left and
returned to my motel room. I believed if I followed
(16:54):
the directions on the postcard, I would find Donna Lass's grave.
I believed she was buried near see A Club. Hines
(17:22):
had now identified Kine as a suspect, and he had
located a Sierra club outside Tahoe that matched the postcards description,
so Hines returned to the club to investigate. He learned
that the town's old postmaster, Mr. Fredericks, had stumbled upon
a strange area out in the woods behind the club.
Frederick said he thought it was a burial site made
(17:44):
out of logs. He described it to me as a
circle fourteen ft in diameter, and within the circle was
a six ft by six ft square with a triangle
within all these made by careful placement of locks. Within
the triangle was across like that of a grave marker
made from thirteen stones. Mr Fredericks related that he was
(18:05):
very frightened, but he was convinced it was a grave
site and took pictures of him. The postmaster led Hines
out to the site. We dug a cone shaped hole
within the center of the six by six foot area
to a depth of approximately four to five ft. No
human remains were located, However, indications were that at some
earlier point in time, the ground had been disturbed down
(18:28):
several feet. At this point, because of lack of time,
I had to return to Sonaro, but Hines wasn't ready
to give up. He was still convinced that Caine was
the promising suspect. Hines learned that shortly after Lass's disappearance,
Kine had moved to Las Vegas, and so Hines too
(18:48):
went to Las Vegas to investigate. He asked law enforcement
there if any crimes in the area had matched the zodiacs.
M O Sergeant Anderson related the following information. On Sunday,
April seventy four, at approximately ten thirty six pm, victim
Lull accompanied by her boyfriend Roy. We're in a lover's
(19:09):
Lane area of Red Rock Canyon. Well. They were parked.
A vehicle approached from the rear. According to the boyfriend,
the car was a white convertible with a black cloth
top and it was missing its front grill. A man
got out of the convertible and approached their car. He
(19:30):
was wearing horn roomed glasses and black gloves, and he
was holding a pistol. He then ordered Roy and Lull
out of their vehicle at gunpoint. Roy complied, but the
victim remained in the vehicle. The suspect then went to
the passenger side to remove the victim. While he was occupied.
(19:52):
Roy fled and hid in a ditch. The suspect coerced
Lull into his car and drove off. That night, in
identified man called Lowell's parents and told them, your daughter's dead.
Two weeks later, Lowell's body was found. She'd been dropped
down a mine shaft a hundred and twenty five miles
away in San Bernardino County, California, and it appears Lull's
(20:15):
killer may have barely escaped capture, at least according to
an investigative technique that has become controversial, a NI County
deputy sheriff who felt he had made a stop on
the suspect's vehicle, was placed under hypnosis and recounted the
following information. The vehicle bore a California license plate. The
deputy recalled the suspect getting out of his vehicle. He
(20:38):
described the driver as being heavily tanned, wearing a sports
type jacket, horn rimmed glasses, and black leather gloves. He
further related there seemed to be something strange about the
female passenger. He stated she was very still and never
turned around to look in his direction or made any movement.
The encounter took place in the middle of a desert,
(20:59):
out side of radio range, so the deputy hadn't called
in the man's license plate, and no bulletin had been
issued about Lull's abduction because police had initially been skeptical
of her boyfriend's story, so the deputy let the man
go with just a warning. A month later, the boyfriend
(21:19):
thought he spotted the killer at the Spring Inn and
called the police, but by the time the police arrived,
the suspect had left. Hines looked to see if Kane
could be connected to this killing. He discovered that Kane
lived just down the road from the Spring Inn. What's more,
Heinz said that Kane's old boss, Alan Dorfman, told him
(21:42):
that Kane often went to the Spring Inn, and according
to d MV records, Kane had owned a white convertible
with a black cloth top at the time of Lull's murder.
Heinz suspected Kane was responsible for the murders of both
Donna Lass and Dana Law. He felt it all lined
up too well to be a coincidence. The horn rimmed glasses,
(22:05):
the white convertible, the sighting at the Spring Inn. But
even if Kane killed Lass and Lull, was he the zodiac?
As Hines continued to investigate the coincidences piled higher and higher.
Kane had not only been living in San Francisco during
the Zodiac murders, but he lived just a few blocks
away from where cab driver Paul Stein had picked up
(22:28):
the Zodiac. He had traded in a car six days
after Darlene Ferron was murdered in Valleo and acquired a
Tan Sedan similar to the car used to abduct Kathleen
John's in her infant daughter. And it wasn't just Kane's
whereabouts and his vehicles that seemed to line up. Some
of the suspected Zodiac victims, like Kathleen John's, thought Kane
(22:51):
was the Zodiac. John's identified Kane out of the lineup
of eighteen photos. I asked, are you sure, and she
said yes, And it's not just my eyes telling me
I know it in here. And she clenched her blouse
with her fingers, nodding into a fist and pushing into
the pit of her stomach. I'm dest behind and I'm
(23:18):
her behind son. When I was growing up, my dad
was talking about the Zodiac since as early as I
can remember. In the later nineties, that's when I actually
started paying more attention to it, and my father and
I had sat down and started looking at the Prince
the fingerprints from the Lake Berryessa killings. After stabbing Cecilia
(23:42):
Shepherd and Brian Hartnell at Lake Berryessa, the Zodiac wrote
the dates of his killings and his symbol on the
door of their car. Apparently he had kind of squatted
in his left hand left four prints on the window
of the Karma Ghia. So my dad had those prints
and his suspect, Lawrence Kane. Larry Kane, he had been
(24:03):
arrested for being a peeping tom and so my dad
had the booking prints from that. I scanned them in
and used Photoshop to kind of overlay and align the Prince,
and what we saw was very distinct, very convincing matchup
of those prints. So my dad made an appointment with
(24:24):
one of the investigators at the Vallejo Police Department and
we went up there and met with him and we
showed him the Prince, and he said that they weren't
able to confirm that it was Larry Kane or that
the Prince match, but it also didn't discount them, so
in other words, it could very well have been the
same person. But there just wasn't enough print evidence there
(24:47):
to be able to make a definite match. We wanted
to know just how good this fingerprint evidence was, so
we spoke to Dr Kimberly Moran. She's the director of
forensic Science at Rutger's univer City Camden. We sent Dr
Moran a digital version of Kane's booking fingerprints from when
he was arrested and the latent prints from the car
(25:08):
at Lake Bury Essa. I'm basically flicking back and forth
between the booking print and the latent prints. So looking
at the latent fingerprints, they are pretty poor for glass
because glass is usually a great substrate and these are
very very faint. So is there enough data within that fingerprint?
(25:29):
Can you see enough of the ridges and the individual
ridge flow. I mean, the right little finger I would
rank as no value, The right ring finger I would say, yes,
it has value. I can definitely see that this is
a world. I can count individual ridges. The right middle finger. Yes,
(25:51):
I would also say that's a print of value. The
right thumb. You know, there's too much uncertain but all
you need is one finger. You don't need any more
than that. Let me look at the booking prints, Okay,
so what what this person has marked out On the
right ring, They've marked out a scar at the top
(26:14):
of the fingerprint. They've marked out two bifurcations where a
single ridge splits into two separate ridges. Let me just
compare the two. So looking at the latent fingerprints, I
really do not see the scar or these bifurcations. I mean,
(26:36):
there's one that maybe I could be talked into, but
one point of agreement is just not enough to say
these two fingerprints are the same. These probably are not
from the same source. I don't feel like there's enough
data to say for certain that they're not from the
(26:56):
same source. But from what little I can see, I
do not think that they are from the same source.
Harvey Hines compiled a report with all of his collected evidence,
(27:18):
but no one would take it seriously. The San Francisco
police were focused on Arthur Lee Allen, and when Heinz
shared his report with the FBI, they seemed interested at first,
but nothing came of it. Here's Harvey Hind's son Destri again.
One of the interesting things was when a new FBI
agent would contact my dad, they'd be interested in the story.
(27:40):
They'd be investigating that they'd you want to know who
my dad's suspect was, more about him why he thought
that the suspect was the zodiac um And they were
always really excited about, Wow, this is this is great information.
I'm going to follow up as soon as I get
back to the office, I'll give you a call and
we'll move this forward. And they would just go away
(28:04):
and my dad would have to call him up and say, hey, yeah,
if you followed up on any of this or what's
happening with it, and they just wouldn't be able to
talk about it. So my dad was starting to wonder
if Larry Kine turned witness on someone because he was
part of the MOP, he may have turned somebody in
(28:24):
and they put him into protection program. Once you go
in there, there's just there's limits to what the FBI
can do. And I started investigating you. The mafia connection
sounds outlandish at first, but remember Kane's old boss, Alan Dorfman.
Dorfman was linked to organized crime. He was indicted by
a federal grand jury and convicted of conspiracy to bribe
(28:48):
as senator. Three days before his sentencing, he was shot
and killed, presumably to prevent him from cooperating with authorities. However,
it was difficult to either confirm or dis roof that
Dorfman was actually Kane's old boss. That was information we
could only find in Heine's report. I fact, Larry Kane,
(29:08):
he was probably a hit man for this syndicate of
real estate and developers, and not like real estate and
developers you think of today, the guys that were backed
by the mob out of the gambling world. My name
is writer McDowell, and many years ago I was an
investigative reporter and s coovered a lot of kind of
(29:32):
interesting crimes. You know, I seem to pursue the psychopaths.
They are the boogeyman, but they don't look like it.
So when somebody is exposed as being a mass murderer,
he just it's like fascinating. Writer McDowell met Hines in
the nineteen nineties and he wrote a long piece about
him for the San Francisco Examiner. Somebody had called me
(29:55):
up and said, you know, writer, there's this guy that
thinks he's caught the Zodiac killer. And I I had
coincidentally recently read that Robert Gray Smith book called Zodiac
and was really intrigued Harvey was a really driven guy,
kind of shy. There's a sadness around the guy, and
he felt that people were mocking him and no one
(30:15):
would take him seriously. So I did. I think Harvey
was a bit of a crusader, you know, had this
kind of quixotic view of good and evil. You know,
he was going to get this guy because this guy
was the ultimate bad guy. Early on, the name Kane
was floated, and it did make sense in terms of
(30:36):
the woman in South Lake tow and then it started
to make sense in terms of the taxi driver killing
and other things. What's clear is that the guy Larry
Caine really was an odd person. You know, he was
up to something. One time, Kane asked a female real
estate agent to show him a house out in the
middle of the desert. She went out there to show
(30:56):
this house and there was nobody there, but she went
into the house looking around. You know, you're in the
middle of nowhere, really vulnerable, and you realized, you know, well,
I'm actually have been more careful than this thing shows
up a hearse pulled up and it was a guy
from the mortuary and he said, well, I had a
call here to pick up a body and it was
(31:20):
just so creepy, and this so freaked out this woman
that she just quit her job. And Larry Kane was
just a creepy, odd character full of stories like that.
Writer wanted to get Kane's side of the story, but
Kane kept a low profile. I finally got his number,
and I got it in some clever way because it
(31:42):
was unlisted and he had this kind of recording you
could buy that had Alfred Hitchcock, Writer prepared himself to
talk with the man he thought might be the Zodiac killer.
Bring out leave your name and numba and we're with
(32:04):
them your core vish breathe interruption. It was so chilling
if that really was, And I almost forgotten that. Eventually,
writer did meet Larry Kane, and Kane denied being the Zodiac.
(32:26):
I interviewed Kane one time. He was a very creepy guy,
but not so you'd necessarily notice if you're behind him
in a store or something. I don't know what his
life is like, but he lived in this condo and
walk around and go into town and have coffee and
and his voice is so um it had this Brooklyn accent,
(32:49):
you know, this New York accent seemed to me that
that would have been noticeable and either the phone calls
to the cops or at Lake DARRISA but writer says
one time he played a recording of Kane's voice to
Brian Hartnell, the survivor of the Lake Barry Esa stabbing,
and he said there was similarities too, because it was
a little bit of a hiccup. Cane. He would not stutter,
(33:10):
but there was a little kind of pause. But but
I am confident who wasn't Larry Kane. Hart Behinds did
have a certain amount of tunnel fishing, which was fascinating
because he seemed to have chanced upon this this other
bad guy. You know, he had been a keeeping tom
(33:33):
for years and some kind of gun story that he
pulled a gun on a couple of people, and you know,
he was up to no good. I've all added up
to being a really odd character that probably capable of murder.
But it was frustrating dealing with Harvey because in the
beginning he would get a clue, somebody would tell him something,
(33:53):
and then he would just go there, and he wouldn't
chronicle all the steps, and so I couldn't really unwind
us and go back and see what who did you
talk to you there? What was this? Because I was
really going over this with a fine tooth calm. I
don't think he fabricated anything. I think you just so
oversell us that he would go to the next thing.
(34:14):
And I think it was like a pit bull. But again,
like a pit bull, he raised the head without getting
his facts tight. Harvey Hines and Larry Caine have now
both passed away. Although Hines could never find any conclusive
evidence against Kane, he went to the grave convinced that
Larry Kane was the Zodiac. But the more you look
(34:37):
into the Zodiac case, there's so many guys like the
Harvey because it's it's such a compelling case. It brought
the amateur sleuths out of the woodwork, and it really
had an interesting way of doing that. I think Harvey
was part of that legion of amateur sleuths, even though
he was a policeman by day. Harvey Hynes was a
precursor to a huge movement in the Zodiac investigation in
(35:00):
the nineteen nineties. The Internet brought access to a treasure
trove of Zodiac related information, and independent investigators like Hinz
would go on to make major discoveries. One of the
first websites dedicated to the case was Zodiac killer dot com.
My name is Tom Voyd and the webmaster at Zodiac
killer dot com. There was nothing on the internet back
(35:22):
then about Zodiac. It's a lot of porn that was it.
So I decided I wanted to get some Zodiac stuff
on the web. When I finally got my own website,
there were people I was talking to who had the
Zodiac information that I wanted, and they thought that since
I had a website, that I must be like a
genius or a millionaire or some secret agent or something,
and so they would give me documents and tell me
(35:42):
information that that they would never have told me. For
over twenty years, these amateur investigators have been sharing information
across Void's website. They even meet up in person on
the anniversaries of the crimes to discuss the case and
honor the victims. We met Tom Voyd in a large
group of these self described zodiologists at a restaurant in Vallejo.
(36:04):
It was the night of the fiftieth anniversary of the
murders of Betty lu Jensen and David Faraday. We've done
a lot of these events called them task force meetings,
and the first one was in two thousand two in Riverside,
and it went really well, and there were people that
showed up and had good information to share, and so
I started doing them, you know, yearly. The big payoff
of b if there's ever a conclusion and it turns
(36:26):
out my suspect is is the zodiac. So I got Angie.
Angie's this. I've just proposed her today at crimes. This
is Angie. So I've met Angie at Lake Berry, SA
in two thousand four. That's where we met. It was
invitation only, you know, people had to red cabins and
I didn't want to be a cabin next to some
(36:46):
nut I'd never met or anything like that. You took
a chance on me. Well, we communicated through you know,
through you me on stuff. I'm still like kind of
a denial. I mean, we've been together for fifteen years,
but I never in a millionaires expecting to get down
on is the I hadn't been there in a long time,
and I wanted to see it in the fog. It
was really cool. He was talking about how he doesn't
want it to be a sad place anymore, and that
(37:08):
there should be something good to think about when we
come back. So I never thought I would get formally
engaged at a crime scene. Yeah, that's what I can
honestly say. I can't imaginely happened to other place. Well,
I kind of can't either, honestly. We're all, I mean, liquorious,
and maybe it would have been a little more appropriate.
But that's okay. Maybe we'll get married there. Who knows.
Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, we're back Lake Herman.
(37:33):
It's all a blur at some of the anniversaries. I'm
so sick of. I didn't want to do this again,
these gatherings and so forth. It's just we want to
just make some advancements, you know, and get something major.
I think I've come up with something major. It's an
interesting bit of information that nobody knew about before. And
I think we're fifty years I do it. It's time
to solve the case. Next time one monster, the Zodiac Killer.
(38:04):
I have thousands of theories and tips proclamations from people
who believe they've solved the Zonia. A lot of people
have criticized it and ripped it apart online and called
me an idiot. One person said that they wouldn't have
been more surprised if I had named the Easter Bunny.
People are so influenced by the fact that three of
those coades didn't get solved. Well, they're just rubbish. There's
(38:26):
no solution to be had. It's just fake news. Zodiac
could have edited. There is a sort of intoxicating effect
when you plug in what do you think Zodiac might
have said, and it happens to fit. If you're walking
around and you have no idea what happened and who
the Zodiac is, then he could be anybody. He could
be your uncle, he could be a guy living next
door or whatever. But if someone tells you, oh, I
know who it was, and he's locked up in prison
(38:48):
or it's dead or whatever, that's comforting. It's comforting to think, oh,
they solved it. It's been figured out. Monster the Zodiac
Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced by iHeart Radio,
How Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Donald Albright and I
(39:12):
are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV, alongside producers
Meredith Stepman, Mason Lindsay, and Christina Dana. Jason Hope is
executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works, along with
producers Trevor Young, Miranda Hawkins, ben Kybrick, and josh Than Scott.
Benjamin provides additional voice talent. Matt Frederick is our host.
(39:34):
Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you
haven't already, make sure to check out the first season
of Monster called Atlanta Monster, about the Atlanta child murders
from the late seventies to the early eighties. Download the
ten episode season right now. Have questions or comments, email
us at Monster at how stuff works dot com, or
(39:54):
you can call us at one eight three eight five
six six six seven. Thanks for listening. M
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not necessarily represent those of I Heart Media,
How Stuff Works, or its employees. I spent a week
on call with Potsky and Armstrong, going to murders with
them in the middle of the night. That was pretty
amazing to know. What was it like to actually be
(00:21):
a homicide cop. I mean, it's pretty gritty. I'd got
a call at three in the morning. It was TASKI
saying meet us at such and such, and so I'd
go out in the mission district and then some guy
laying there with a with a knife in the middle
of his belly. I loved it. I mean, I thought
it was I love that stuff. TASKI was so unique.
He and Armstrong or or nothing alike. Armstrong was, by
(00:42):
the book, very reserved. Toski had a flair and he
was much more of a dynamic, sort of interesting, you know,
real gregarious kind of guy. That's Duffy Jennings, the former
reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. He worked with Detective
Dave Toski, the lead Zodiac investigating for the San Francisco
police department tasks. Personality and style won him attention, but
(01:06):
it also put him in the crosshairs. The Zodiac had
gone quiet and press coverage of him had all but disappeared,
but that was about to change. So in April of
ninety Zodiac had not been heard from for four years.
There has been no letters, but just in case, the
newspaper still put samples of Zodiac's earlier letters and envelopes
(01:30):
tacked onto the mail slot cabinet where the copy boys
sorted the daily mail, just in case they saw anything
that remotely resembled these old letters. So in in April one,
one morning, the copy boys are sorting mail. I'm at
my desk. I haven't even thought about Zodiac for a
(01:52):
long time. A copy boy named Brent Ward walks up
to my desk with an envelope in his hand, and
he said, hey, um, take a look at this. Does
this look familiar to you? It went off like a flash.
Oh my goodness, that definitely looks like Zodiac. A man
(02:14):
in a mask robbed and tied and stabbed them, leaving
them for dad. Subject stated, I want to report a murder,
no a double murder. I did it. A man who
wore an evil style executioner's hood, carried the knife and
gun and intended to use them. They haven't Arrestie because
(02:35):
they can't. I'm not damn Zodiac. Who is the Zodiac
and where is he? From my Heart Radio, How staff
works and Tenderfoot TV. This is monster, the Zodiac killer.
The Zodiac craved at tension in the media obliged him.
Even the major detective Dave Touski and his suspect Arthur
(02:58):
Lee Allen received their share of the spotlight, and their
stories provide an important lesson to other investigators, the independent
investigators who hunt for the Zodiac on their own, exploring
leads that others ignore, finding new suspects that had previously
escaped notice, and making connections that others dismissed as coincidence.
(03:20):
I got on the phone to call Dave Toski. I
couldn't reach him. He was out of the office. He
came back to the office and they told him you
got a call from Duffy at the Chronicle. He thinks
he has a Zodiac letter, so he came down and
together we opened the letter. Dear editor, this is the
Zodiac speaking. I am back with you. Tell herb Kane.
(03:45):
I am here, I have always been here. That city
pig Toski is good, but I'm smarter and better. He
will get tired then leave me alone. I'm waiting for
a good movie about me. Who play me? I am
now in control of all things yours truly, Zodiac guess
(04:10):
San Francisco Police Department zero. He said, I'm gonna take
it over to Paul Shimoda for verification. Paul was the
documents expert at the US Postal Service. An hour or
two later, he called me back and said, Shimoda says
it's the guy. So we did a story. Zodiac is back.
(04:32):
It's his usual taunting of police for failing to catch him,
and some reference to that city pig Tosky. San Francisco
Police displayed a blackboard with excerpts of the latest Zodiac letter.
Police are convinced it's authentic. DRD. San Francisco Police Chief
Clemdamika said it's the sixteenth letter received from the Zodiac Killer.
I'm the first since Letter number sixteen has breathed new
(04:55):
life into the investigation of at least six leaders named
on the Zodiac files will be reviewed again. For the
last nine years, the Zodiac investigation has been headed by
homicide Inspector David Tusky. I had Lewis beating that he
was not dead and that he was out there somewhere,
and that he would communicate. I was always looking that
(05:16):
he would communicate and and not commit an act. A
letter I can handle, you know, it's a front page story.
Zodiac had not been heard from for four years. What
happened after that was we had a column going on
in the paper at that time, a serialized fiction column
called Tales of the City, and it was being written
(05:38):
by a writer named Armistead Mopan. Mopan's column included a
character based on Detective Dave Toski. He'd sometimes received fan
mail about that character, anonymous fan mail that Mopan suspected
had been written by Toski himself. Toski is on the
fire for writing phony fan letters about himself to a
newspaper feature writer, and Mopan today came up with farm
(06:00):
more serious charges that there are similarities between the letters
Tuski admits writing to Mopan and the most recent Zodiac
letter of last April. I received the bogus fan letters
in the fall of nine seventy six. I took no
official action on them at the time because I regarded
them as harmless. As a harmless if somewhat reckless action
on the part of a police officer, I chose to
(06:21):
turn the matter over to police only when I noticed
certain similarities between the tone of the letters and the
tone of the last Zodiac letter. Because there had been
no Zodiac news for four years, there were people who
thought this was Tusky trying to regenerate interest in the
case and attention on him. So an investigation ensued internally
(06:42):
in the police department, and Tusky was questioned about this.
He denied that he'd written it. He acknowledged that he
had written anonymous notes to Armistead Mopen. His credibility was
called into question. The police chief removed him from the
homicide detail, put him back in robbery and pawn shop detail,
(07:04):
and it was the beginning of the end of his
career on the San Francisco Police Department. This letter and
the suspicions around it tarnished his credibility, and ultimately he
retired out of the force, having never caught Zodiac and
under a cloud of suspicion that was some of his
own doing. And I know Dave started to go downhill
(07:27):
after that emotionally. Because he investigated over a hundred murders
in his career and had all this attention, Dave had
become a icon of his own. He wore an upside
down shoulder holster, he wore bow ties, He had his
favorite snack, this trademark box of animal crackers, and he
(07:49):
had a persona that was gregarious. He was an Italian kid,
grew up in San Francisco, and you know it's sad
because he loved the attention. Well, I think it affected
his work on a day to day basis. I don't
believe he ever did write a zodiac letter. I just don't.
I just know him well enough to know that that
wasn't true. But he became reclusive after that. This much
(08:13):
can be said with certainty. There is no official police
clamp on INSPECTATASKI talking with the media. That matter is
entirely up to him. He would never talk to another
media person besides me. He would tell the story about
going back to the Paul Stein crime scene every year
on the anniversary to reflect on it, and he was
(08:34):
candid with me about how it ate at him that
he had never caught the guy Dave Toski died on
January six, two eighteen. Toski is survived by his wife,
his two daughters, and two granddaughters. Toski died convinced that
Arthur Lee Allen was the Zodiac and haunted by the
(08:56):
fact that he was never convicted of the crime. Toskis
story of obsession is familiar for many cold case investigators.
He's not the only one to get swept up in
the Zodiac case, and Arthur Lee Allen wasn't the only
promising suspect. Ed Rust was the Valeo police officer on
duty when Darlene Farren was shot and killed at Blue
(09:16):
Rock Springs Park. For years, there had been no progress
in the case, but then, through a chance meeting at
a conference, a suspect would finally catch Rust's interest. They
had a guest speaker who was going to do a
presentation on the Zodiac killer, a man named Harvey Hines
h I n e. S. Who was actually a police
(09:38):
officer his investigation. It started out as a term paper
in one of his police classes, and I believe this
was somewhere around it in the early nineteen seventies. He
began investigating the case on his own and became absorbed
in when I met him. This was in late nineties,
(10:00):
so he had been working on this case and following
it on his own time for all these years and
had developed a suspect he felt was the Zodiac Killer
as a man named Larry Caine. Harvey Hines was absolutely
convinced that Larry Caine was the Zodiac. There is no
(10:21):
question in my mind that my suspect is a Zodiac.
Every fiber, every part of my being tells me that
he is the Zodiac Killer. He had initially identified him
when he went to South Lake Tahoe, where Donna Last
had disappeared. Donna Last was a night shift nurse at
(10:44):
a casino in Lake Tahoe. She'd recently moved there from
San Francisco, and then on September six, after finishing her
shift at two a m. Last disappeared. The next day,
a man called her work in her landlord and told
them she left suddenly because of a family emergency and
wouldn't be coming back. But Lass's car was parked in
(11:06):
front of her apartment and there was no family emergency.
Police searched her apartment. They found no signs of struggle
or anything suspicious, but her possessions were all there and
they suspected foul play. Lass was never seen again and
her body was never found. Six months later, on March twenty,
(11:29):
a postcard arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle with a
zodiac symbol in the corner. It was addressed to reporter
Paul Avery and scrawled writing. Attached to the postcard was
an image a winter scene from a condo development ad
and words clipped for newspapers Sierra Club around in the snow,
(11:51):
sought victim twelve peek through the Pines pass Lake Tahoe Areas.
Police and media quick we connected this postcard with Lass's disappearance,
and Harvey Hines learned in his criminology class that the
crime was still unsolved. Lake Tahoe was only a few
hours away, so he drove out to investigate himself. Hines
(12:13):
went through the Lake Tahoe police records and started collecting
information that he'd later compiled into an extensive report. The
following are excerpts of his report, read by a voice actor.
I reviewed the two South Lake Tahoe supplemental police reports
filed on March. Both subjects came forward after seeing a
television newscast stating the Zodiac Killer had sought his twelfth victim.
(12:36):
In the Tahoe area, two women had filed police reports
after wondering if a strange man they had encountered might
be the Zodiac Killer. The first report was filed by
Mary Highlander, a blackjack dealer. At an eyehap, Mary met
a man with horn rimmed glasses. He offered to read
her horoscope, telling her he was an expert at the zodiac.
(12:58):
He said the reading would take time and asked for
her number. When he called her later, he told her
that he had to give her the reading in person.
Mary arranged to meet him at her house, but something
felt off, so she invited her friend Nancy over. When
the man arrived, he seemed annoyed at Nancy's presence. He
looked at Nancy, indicating that he wished she would leave
(13:19):
him alone with marrying. Nancy stayed, fearing to leave her
friend alone with the subject. He stated he had recently
read a chart of a murderer and continued talking about
this subject, seemingly preoccupied with death. The man was very
evasive about questions asked of him by both women, and
another woman reported a strange encounter that also occurred around
(13:39):
the time of Donn Alas's disappearance. That woman, who wished
to remain anonymous, said that a man sat down next
to her at a pizza parlor and struck up a
conversation about zodiac signs. He told her he sold real
estate and said that a woman he had been watching
at work would quote be sorry for rejecting him. The
anonymous woman at the pizza parlor felt unnerved and made
(14:02):
up an excuse to leave. Hines was intrigued by the
police reports, so we interviewed three of Lass's former co workers.
He asked if there was anyone in Lass's life who
seemed suspicious or had shown a particular interest in her.
I asked the same basic questions of each person I
spoke with, without exception. Each person promptly gave me the
(14:23):
name of Larry Caine. They all agreed Kine and Donna
las knew each other. They said he was mostly a loner.
They described him as being strange. He was forty five
years old, had dark hair or horned, grimmed glasses, and
had sort of a pot belly. I asked if they
(14:44):
knew who he worked for now and They stated they
did not know, but thought perhaps for an Alan M. Dorfman,
the manager of Arizona Real Estate at the time that
the victim, Lass disappeared. Although Haines was working the case
in his free time, he used his connections as a
police officer to determine Kane had moved to Lake Tahoe
(15:05):
from San Francisco right around the time of Lass's disappearance.
Kine had multiple social security numbers and names on file.
He'd been arrested ten times between nineteen forty six and
nineteen sixty eight, including for battery. A probation report from
nineteen sixty four said Kane had sustained brain damage after
(15:26):
a head on collision with a cement truck. The report
said his injury was serious and that his recent involvements
with the law indicated a quote lack of control in
self gratification, and scientific studies show that people who've experienced
head trauma can become more likely to commit violent crimes.
(15:46):
Hines now had a suspect, but he still had no
clue what happened to don Alas he turned back to
the zodiacs card, What did it mean pass Lake Tahoe
areas and why did it say Sierra Club? Were those
phrases clues as to the location of Lassa's body. After
leaving the police department, I spent several hours studying the
(16:08):
postcard and driving around the lake. I began to notice
several signs marking local ski areas, and the postcard made
a reference to areas. He decided to follow the postcard's directions.
He drove out of Lake Tahoe, past the ski areas
and spent hours trying to find a location somehow related
to the Sierra Club. I drove north of Lake Tahoe
(16:31):
and found the Claire Tap and Lodge and was a
private club for Sierra Club members. Only after getting out
of my car and walking up the driveway, I realized
the scene was not unlike the picture depicted on the
Zodiac postcard. I took pictures of the area without making
contact with anyone at the club. I then left and
returned to my motel room. I believed if I followed
(16:54):
the directions on the postcard, I would find Donna Lass's grave.
I believed she was buried near see A Club. Hines
(17:22):
had now identified Kine as a suspect, and he had
located a Sierra club outside Tahoe that matched the postcards description,
so Hines returned to the club to investigate. He learned
that the town's old postmaster, Mr. Fredericks, had stumbled upon
a strange area out in the woods behind the club.
Frederick said he thought it was a burial site made
(17:44):
out of logs. He described it to me as a
circle fourteen ft in diameter, and within the circle was
a six ft by six ft square with a triangle
within all these made by careful placement of locks. Within
the triangle was across like that of a grave marker
made from thirteen stones. Mr Fredericks related that he was
(18:05):
very frightened, but he was convinced it was a grave
site and took pictures of him. The postmaster led Hines
out to the site. We dug a cone shaped hole
within the center of the six by six foot area
to a depth of approximately four to five ft. No
human remains were located, However, indications were that at some
earlier point in time, the ground had been disturbed down
(18:28):
several feet. At this point, because of lack of time,
I had to return to Sonaro, but Hines wasn't ready
to give up. He was still convinced that Caine was
the promising suspect. Hines learned that shortly after Lass's disappearance,
Kine had moved to Las Vegas, and so Hines too
(18:48):
went to Las Vegas to investigate. He asked law enforcement
there if any crimes in the area had matched the zodiacs.
M O Sergeant Anderson related the following information. On Sunday,
April seventy four, at approximately ten thirty six pm, victim
Lull accompanied by her boyfriend Roy. We're in a lover's
(19:09):
Lane area of Red Rock Canyon. Well. They were parked.
A vehicle approached from the rear. According to the boyfriend,
the car was a white convertible with a black cloth
top and it was missing its front grill. A man
got out of the convertible and approached their car. He
(19:30):
was wearing horn roomed glasses and black gloves, and he
was holding a pistol. He then ordered Roy and Lull
out of their vehicle at gunpoint. Roy complied, but the
victim remained in the vehicle. The suspect then went to
the passenger side to remove the victim. While he was occupied.
(19:52):
Roy fled and hid in a ditch. The suspect coerced
Lull into his car and drove off. That night, in
identified man called Lowell's parents and told them, your daughter's dead.
Two weeks later, Lowell's body was found. She'd been dropped
down a mine shaft a hundred and twenty five miles
away in San Bernardino County, California, and it appears Lull's
(20:15):
killer may have barely escaped capture, at least according to
an investigative technique that has become controversial, a NI County
deputy sheriff who felt he had made a stop on
the suspect's vehicle, was placed under hypnosis and recounted the
following information. The vehicle bore a California license plate. The
deputy recalled the suspect getting out of his vehicle. He
(20:38):
described the driver as being heavily tanned, wearing a sports
type jacket, horn rimmed glasses, and black leather gloves. He
further related there seemed to be something strange about the
female passenger. He stated she was very still and never
turned around to look in his direction or made any movement.
The encounter took place in the middle of a desert,
(20:59):
out side of radio range, so the deputy hadn't called
in the man's license plate, and no bulletin had been
issued about Lull's abduction because police had initially been skeptical
of her boyfriend's story, so the deputy let the man
go with just a warning. A month later, the boyfriend
(21:19):
thought he spotted the killer at the Spring Inn and
called the police, but by the time the police arrived,
the suspect had left. Hines looked to see if Kane
could be connected to this killing. He discovered that Kane
lived just down the road from the Spring Inn. What's more,
Heinz said that Kane's old boss, Alan Dorfman, told him
(21:42):
that Kane often went to the Spring Inn, and according
to d MV records, Kane had owned a white convertible
with a black cloth top at the time of Lull's murder.
Heinz suspected Kane was responsible for the murders of both
Donna Lass and Dana Law. He felt it all lined
up too well to be a coincidence. The horn rimmed glasses,
(22:05):
the white convertible, the sighting at the Spring Inn. But
even if Kane killed Lass and Lull, was he the zodiac?
As Hines continued to investigate the coincidences piled higher and higher.
Kane had not only been living in San Francisco during
the Zodiac murders, but he lived just a few blocks
away from where cab driver Paul Stein had picked up
(22:28):
the Zodiac. He had traded in a car six days
after Darlene Ferron was murdered in Valleo and acquired a
Tan Sedan similar to the car used to abduct Kathleen
John's in her infant daughter. And it wasn't just Kane's
whereabouts and his vehicles that seemed to line up. Some
of the suspected Zodiac victims, like Kathleen John's, thought Kane
(22:51):
was the Zodiac. John's identified Kane out of the lineup
of eighteen photos. I asked, are you sure, and she
said yes, And it's not just my eyes telling me
I know it in here. And she clenched her blouse
with her fingers, nodding into a fist and pushing into
the pit of her stomach. I'm dest behind and I'm
(23:18):
her behind son. When I was growing up, my dad
was talking about the Zodiac since as early as I
can remember. In the later nineties, that's when I actually
started paying more attention to it, and my father and
I had sat down and started looking at the Prince
the fingerprints from the Lake Berryessa killings. After stabbing Cecilia
(23:42):
Shepherd and Brian Hartnell at Lake Berryessa, the Zodiac wrote
the dates of his killings and his symbol on the
door of their car. Apparently he had kind of squatted
in his left hand left four prints on the window
of the Karma Ghia. So my dad had those prints
and his suspect, Lawrence Kane. Larry Kane, he had been
(24:03):
arrested for being a peeping tom and so my dad
had the booking prints from that. I scanned them in
and used Photoshop to kind of overlay and align the Prince,
and what we saw was very distinct, very convincing matchup
of those prints. So my dad made an appointment with
(24:24):
one of the investigators at the Vallejo Police Department and
we went up there and met with him and we
showed him the Prince, and he said that they weren't
able to confirm that it was Larry Kane or that
the Prince match, but it also didn't discount them, so
in other words, it could very well have been the
same person. But there just wasn't enough print evidence there
(24:47):
to be able to make a definite match. We wanted
to know just how good this fingerprint evidence was, so
we spoke to Dr Kimberly Moran. She's the director of
forensic Science at Rutger's univer City Camden. We sent Dr
Moran a digital version of Kane's booking fingerprints from when
he was arrested and the latent prints from the car
(25:08):
at Lake Bury Essa. I'm basically flicking back and forth
between the booking print and the latent prints. So looking
at the latent fingerprints, they are pretty poor for glass
because glass is usually a great substrate and these are
very very faint. So is there enough data within that fingerprint?
(25:29):
Can you see enough of the ridges and the individual
ridge flow. I mean, the right little finger I would
rank as no value, The right ring finger I would say, yes,
it has value. I can definitely see that this is
a world. I can count individual ridges. The right middle finger. Yes,
(25:51):
I would also say that's a print of value. The
right thumb. You know, there's too much uncertain but all
you need is one finger. You don't need any more
than that. Let me look at the booking prints, Okay,
so what what this person has marked out On the
right ring, They've marked out a scar at the top
(26:14):
of the fingerprint. They've marked out two bifurcations where a
single ridge splits into two separate ridges. Let me just
compare the two. So looking at the latent fingerprints, I
really do not see the scar or these bifurcations. I mean,
(26:36):
there's one that maybe I could be talked into, but
one point of agreement is just not enough to say
these two fingerprints are the same. These probably are not
from the same source. I don't feel like there's enough
data to say for certain that they're not from the
(26:56):
same source. But from what little I can see, I
do not think that they are from the same source.
Harvey Hines compiled a report with all of his collected evidence,
(27:18):
but no one would take it seriously. The San Francisco
police were focused on Arthur Lee Allen, and when Heinz
shared his report with the FBI, they seemed interested at first,
but nothing came of it. Here's Harvey Hind's son Destri again.
One of the interesting things was when a new FBI
agent would contact my dad, they'd be interested in the story.
(27:40):
They'd be investigating that they'd you want to know who
my dad's suspect was, more about him why he thought
that the suspect was the zodiac um And they were
always really excited about, Wow, this is this is great information.
I'm going to follow up as soon as I get
back to the office, I'll give you a call and
we'll move this forward. And they would just go away
(28:04):
and my dad would have to call him up and say, hey, yeah,
if you followed up on any of this or what's
happening with it, and they just wouldn't be able to
talk about it. So my dad was starting to wonder
if Larry Kine turned witness on someone because he was
part of the MOP, he may have turned somebody in
(28:24):
and they put him into protection program. Once you go
in there, there's just there's limits to what the FBI
can do. And I started investigating you. The mafia connection
sounds outlandish at first, but remember Kane's old boss, Alan Dorfman.
Dorfman was linked to organized crime. He was indicted by
a federal grand jury and convicted of conspiracy to bribe
(28:48):
as senator. Three days before his sentencing, he was shot
and killed, presumably to prevent him from cooperating with authorities. However,
it was difficult to either confirm or dis roof that
Dorfman was actually Kane's old boss. That was information we
could only find in Heine's report. I fact, Larry Kane,
(29:08):
he was probably a hit man for this syndicate of
real estate and developers, and not like real estate and
developers you think of today, the guys that were backed
by the mob out of the gambling world. My name
is writer McDowell, and many years ago I was an
investigative reporter and s coovered a lot of kind of
(29:32):
interesting crimes. You know, I seem to pursue the psychopaths.
They are the boogeyman, but they don't look like it.
So when somebody is exposed as being a mass murderer,
he just it's like fascinating. Writer McDowell met Hines in
the nineteen nineties and he wrote a long piece about
him for the San Francisco Examiner. Somebody had called me
(29:55):
up and said, you know, writer, there's this guy that
thinks he's caught the Zodiac killer. And I I had
coincidentally recently read that Robert Gray Smith book called Zodiac
and was really intrigued Harvey was a really driven guy,
kind of shy. There's a sadness around the guy, and
he felt that people were mocking him and no one
(30:15):
would take him seriously. So I did. I think Harvey
was a bit of a crusader, you know, had this
kind of quixotic view of good and evil. You know,
he was going to get this guy because this guy
was the ultimate bad guy. Early on, the name Kane
was floated, and it did make sense in terms of
(30:36):
the woman in South Lake tow and then it started
to make sense in terms of the taxi driver killing
and other things. What's clear is that the guy Larry
Caine really was an odd person. You know, he was
up to something. One time, Kane asked a female real
estate agent to show him a house out in the
middle of the desert. She went out there to show
(30:56):
this house and there was nobody there, but she went
into the house looking around. You know, you're in the
middle of nowhere, really vulnerable, and you realized, you know, well,
I'm actually have been more careful than this thing shows
up a hearse pulled up and it was a guy
from the mortuary and he said, well, I had a
call here to pick up a body and it was
(31:20):
just so creepy, and this so freaked out this woman
that she just quit her job. And Larry Kane was
just a creepy, odd character full of stories like that.
Writer wanted to get Kane's side of the story, but
Kane kept a low profile. I finally got his number,
and I got it in some clever way because it
(31:42):
was unlisted and he had this kind of recording you
could buy that had Alfred Hitchcock, Writer prepared himself to
talk with the man he thought might be the Zodiac killer.
Bring out leave your name and numba and we're with
(32:04):
them your core vish breathe interruption. It was so chilling
if that really was, And I almost forgotten that. Eventually,
writer did meet Larry Kane, and Kane denied being the Zodiac.
(32:26):
I interviewed Kane one time. He was a very creepy guy,
but not so you'd necessarily notice if you're behind him
in a store or something. I don't know what his
life is like, but he lived in this condo and
walk around and go into town and have coffee and
and his voice is so um it had this Brooklyn accent,
(32:49):
you know, this New York accent seemed to me that
that would have been noticeable and either the phone calls
to the cops or at Lake DARRISA but writer says
one time he played a recording of Kane's voice to
Brian Hartnell, the survivor of the Lake Barry Esa stabbing,
and he said there was similarities too, because it was
a little bit of a hiccup. Cane. He would not stutter,
(33:10):
but there was a little kind of pause. But but
I am confident who wasn't Larry Kane. Hart Behinds did
have a certain amount of tunnel fishing, which was fascinating
because he seemed to have chanced upon this this other
bad guy. You know, he had been a keeeping tom
(33:33):
for years and some kind of gun story that he
pulled a gun on a couple of people, and you know,
he was up to no good. I've all added up
to being a really odd character that probably capable of murder.
But it was frustrating dealing with Harvey because in the
beginning he would get a clue, somebody would tell him something,
(33:53):
and then he would just go there, and he wouldn't
chronicle all the steps, and so I couldn't really unwind
us and go back and see what who did you
talk to you there? What was this? Because I was
really going over this with a fine tooth calm. I
don't think he fabricated anything. I think you just so
oversell us that he would go to the next thing.
(34:14):
And I think it was like a pit bull. But again,
like a pit bull, he raised the head without getting
his facts tight. Harvey Hines and Larry Caine have now
both passed away. Although Hines could never find any conclusive
evidence against Kane, he went to the grave convinced that
Larry Kane was the Zodiac. But the more you look
(34:37):
into the Zodiac case, there's so many guys like the
Harvey because it's it's such a compelling case. It brought
the amateur sleuths out of the woodwork, and it really
had an interesting way of doing that. I think Harvey
was part of that legion of amateur sleuths, even though
he was a policeman by day. Harvey Hynes was a
precursor to a huge movement in the Zodiac investigation in
(35:00):
the nineteen nineties. The Internet brought access to a treasure
trove of Zodiac related information, and independent investigators like Hinz
would go on to make major discoveries. One of the
first websites dedicated to the case was Zodiac killer dot com.
My name is Tom Voyd and the webmaster at Zodiac
killer dot com. There was nothing on the internet back
(35:22):
then about Zodiac. It's a lot of porn that was it.
So I decided I wanted to get some Zodiac stuff
on the web. When I finally got my own website,
there were people I was talking to who had the
Zodiac information that I wanted, and they thought that since
I had a website, that I must be like a
genius or a millionaire or some secret agent or something,
and so they would give me documents and tell me
(35:42):
information that that they would never have told me. For
over twenty years, these amateur investigators have been sharing information
across Void's website. They even meet up in person on
the anniversaries of the crimes to discuss the case and
honor the victims. We met Tom Voyd in a large
group of these self described zodiologists at a restaurant in Vallejo.
(36:04):
It was the night of the fiftieth anniversary of the
murders of Betty lu Jensen and David Faraday. We've done
a lot of these events called them task force meetings,
and the first one was in two thousand two in Riverside,
and it went really well, and there were people that
showed up and had good information to share, and so
I started doing them, you know, yearly. The big payoff
of b if there's ever a conclusion and it turns
(36:26):
out my suspect is is the zodiac. So I got Angie.
Angie's this. I've just proposed her today at crimes. This
is Angie. So I've met Angie at Lake Berry, SA
in two thousand four. That's where we met. It was
invitation only, you know, people had to red cabins and
I didn't want to be a cabin next to some
(36:46):
nut I'd never met or anything like that. You took
a chance on me. Well, we communicated through you know,
through you me on stuff. I'm still like kind of
a denial. I mean, we've been together for fifteen years,
but I never in a millionaires expecting to get down
on is the I hadn't been there in a long time,
and I wanted to see it in the fog. It
was really cool. He was talking about how he doesn't
want it to be a sad place anymore, and that
(37:08):
there should be something good to think about when we
come back. So I never thought I would get formally
engaged at a crime scene. Yeah, that's what I can
honestly say. I can't imaginely happened to other place. Well,
I kind of can't either, honestly. We're all, I mean, liquorious,
and maybe it would have been a little more appropriate.
But that's okay. Maybe we'll get married there. Who knows.
Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, we're back Lake Herman.
(37:33):
It's all a blur at some of the anniversaries. I'm
so sick of. I didn't want to do this again,
these gatherings and so forth. It's just we want to
just make some advancements, you know, and get something major.
I think I've come up with something major. It's an
interesting bit of information that nobody knew about before. And
I think we're fifty years I do it. It's time
to solve the case. Next time one monster, the Zodiac Killer.
(38:04):
I have thousands of theories and tips proclamations from people
who believe they've solved the Zonia. A lot of people
have criticized it and ripped it apart online and called
me an idiot. One person said that they wouldn't have
been more surprised if I had named the Easter Bunny.
People are so influenced by the fact that three of
those coades didn't get solved. Well, they're just rubbish. There's
(38:26):
no solution to be had. It's just fake news. Zodiac
could have edited. There is a sort of intoxicating effect
when you plug in what do you think Zodiac might
have said, and it happens to fit. If you're walking
around and you have no idea what happened and who
the Zodiac is, then he could be anybody. He could
be your uncle, he could be a guy living next
door or whatever. But if someone tells you, oh, I
know who it was, and he's locked up in prison
(38:48):
or it's dead or whatever, that's comforting. It's comforting to think, oh,
they solved it. It's been figured out. Monster the Zodiac
Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced by iHeart Radio,
How Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Donald Albright and I
(39:12):
are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV, alongside producers
Meredith Stepman, Mason Lindsay, and Christina Dana. Jason Hope is
executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works, along with
producers Trevor Young, Miranda Hawkins, ben Kybrick, and josh Than Scott.
Benjamin provides additional voice talent. Matt Frederick is our host.
(39:34):
Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you
haven't already, make sure to check out the first season
of Monster called Atlanta Monster, about the Atlanta child murders
from the late seventies to the early eighties. Download the
ten episode season right now. Have questions or comments, email
us at Monster at how stuff works dot com, or
(39:54):
you can call us at one eight three eight five
six six six seven. Thanks for listening. M
Monster: The Zodiac Killer News
Hosts And Creators
Payne Lindsey
Matt Frederick
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