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Collating his attacks up to this point reveals much here. There is much similarity to his other strikes and there is vast difference. The differences are obvious. For one, the hooded outfit is quite unnecessary. Why wear it? A ski mask would do for hiding his face, and it would certainly be far more congruous with his impoverished story about heading to Mexico. He wasn’t trying to scare them. He didn’t jump out from behind the tree and declare “I’m the Zodiac! I’m going to blast you away”— and then feed on their fear. They didn’t even know what he was up to. And we must recall that neither victim was meant to have survived. We were never supposed to know that he wore this hood. It clearly meant something to him, something he had no need to share with them or even brag about. What was important to him was that he trust them up and stab them here sacrificially.
Yet he bungled it. By the time he wrote on the car door and even called Napa Police about an hour later both Hartnell and Shepard were still alive. She would not die for a day and a half, finally succumbing on the morning of September 29. Bryan Hartnell, like Mike Mageau, would survive. Like at Blue Rock Springs, The Zodiac was not in a condition to notice his surroundings. There he hadn’t noticed the name of the park sign, though the sign was as obvious as the mark on banished Cain. At Lake Berryessa, he didn’t hear Bryan and Celia speaking to each other right away. He knew what he had done. He wasn’t that out-of-it. He went up the hill and kept score on Hartnell’s car door. In Vallejo he drove to the gas station and reported his murder to Nancy Slover. But he didn’t take stock of things immediately after his strikes. He was certain sure he had killed both Hartnell and Shepard. Perhaps he was anxious to play his game. On the phone he also didn’t specify which park. This was a glaring oversight. At Vallejo, he told them which park to go to.
The Zodiac clearly went out of his way at Lake Berryessa, and this becomes his most enigmatic killing. He took unnecessary risks with the hood and, moreover, with the gun. He obviously had no intention of using the gun. His intent to use the knife indicates he knew the area to some extent. It is so deathly quiet out there that a gunshot of that caliber could be heard for miles. (From the looks of it, the gun could have been his 9 mm or even a .45 caliber). Yet he didn’t seem to understand police jurisdictions. Napa is a long drive away. No one could be so ignorant to think that Napa Police had jurisdiction over this lake, and he didn’t even specify which park. Lake Berryessa, naturally, is county jurisdiction. That would mean the sheriffs. And indeed as he was confessing on the phone, Slaight was getting on the horn with Napa Co. sheriffs. Police investigation proved he hadn’t called them because theirs was the only number he knew. He, in fact, didn’t know the police department’s number. He dialed the operator and asked her to connect him with the police. He refused to give his phone booth call number, so she finally put him through.
Logically, the sheriffs deduced he must have been stalking his ground for a while, at least that day, and this makes sense. They began to seek witnesses-before-the-fact. This brought forth some interesting but frustrating evidence.
Three young college girls from Angwin went to soak up some sun on the “beach” that day. They went to a spot about a couple of miles north of the Sugar Loaf A&W roadside rest area. When getting out of their car and walking to their spot, they noticed a late model light (or sky) blue Chevrolet pull in to the parking area and head south, then back up until its bumpers almost touched their bumpers. It was a 2 door sedan. California plates. Rear window tinted very dark. In it was a man in his 20s. They provided a significant clue about the car. These were either car savvy women or they talked to their boyfriends first. They held it to be a late model 1966/67 because of a key difference in it. Its tail lights were long, not round (inaccurately reported on one report to be square headlights; all headlights were round back then but those on the Mustang). This tidbit of information pinpoints the car easily: it had to be a 66 or 67 (most likely 66) Impala. The tail lights on an Impala had remained round through 1965, then the three round tail lights on either side were replaced by three rectangular red tail lights affixed to each other for the 1966 year. The Chevy Caprice was as yet its own model. It was merely a higher end Impala. The other two contenders were the Biscayne and Belair, but these last two had only two round lights, which in turn were replaced by only 2 square lights. Only the Impala had “long” brake or tail lights.
This is indeed not a car a younger man would be driving. There was some disagreement, however, between the girls, as to just how old this man was. One got a better look than the other two. They thought him closer to 40. But the remaining girl watched him a bit more, for he had come to the beach area and sat back about 50 yards and watched them (looking away when they looked at him). He even walked within 20 feet of her as if just taking a stroll and then walked away. She estimated he was about 28. He was a bit heavy set. His hair, dark or black and straight, surprisingly, was possibly styled. This was hardly a fashion of 1969. Stylized hair is something like Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers or even Roy Orbison. By mid 1960s, men were simply wearing short hair. Post Summer of Love, there was only one median for men’s hair cuts— a simply short cut hair. But there was no pomade thick and styled hair as a norm. His eyebrows were straight, his nose was medium, rounded eyes, thin lips, small ears, medium skin tone. He was considered fairly good looking. He might have been over 6 feet tall, about 225 pounds. This man wore a black sleeve sweater shirt and dark blue slacks. His T-shirt hung out behind.
Is this The Zodiac? The stylized hair fits with the obsolete fashion of wearing pleated pants. But, alas, the girls do not say he was wearing pleated pants. The hair also differs from Mageau’s description. He said that the shooter had curly brownish hair, almost blond. Yet both accounts agree in that The Zodiac was heavy set.
The problem with all this is that tire tracks were found 20 feet behind Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia. These could have been from The Zodiac’s car, but they could not possibly be those of a Chevrolet sedan Impala. These were only 5 and a half inches wide. These type of “pizza cutter” tires were on old cars, dragsters, those little Munster-like hotrods kids had (though only the front tires would have those). Even the rinky dink Corvairs came with 6.5 inch tires. Some Chevy trucks came with 5.5 inch tires. And some early issue Corvairs might have them as well. (1 tire was actually 4.5 inches and of a different tread.)
This leaves us with one of two deductions. Either the girls didn’t see The Zodiac or he parked his Impala on the other side of the road or further up or down and left no tracks. Those 5.5 inch tire marks could therefore represent only some car that stopped for a while, some hot-rodder who stopped to quick tune his motor, or some old truck that stopped for some unknown reason. If they were The Zodiac’s, then he was driving an old Corvair or truck or some old car. The “voyeur” in the Impala was simply some guy out in his dad’s or mom’s car getting a kick out of watching girls in bikinis.
Yet this weight thing on The Zodiac is not entirely subjective. Footprints were left near Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia and at intervals along the path to peninsula. Detective Sergeant Hal Snook, the forensics man, measured, studied, and cast some. It eventually turned out that the person wearing the boots that made these prints was probably around 210 to 220 pounds. They definitely seemed to belong to The Zodiac. They were found by the passenger side door, where he had to stand to write on the car door. The prints showed they came from a military boot called a Wing Walker. They were size 10 1/2.
Unfortunately, though Snook really knew his thing, there is no evidence that Napa sheriffs went to the area where the girls reported their benign admirer. Though a track might not be found, even a couple of days later an isolated print or parts thereof could have been found that would tell us he too wore the Wing Walkers. If they did we could be certain that the man the girls saw is one and the same with The Zodiac. That would mean he was driving the blue Impala. The tread prints that were found behind Hartnell’s car therefore are relegated to incidental. Snook’s report does not say whether the footprints were found leading back to or coming from these tire treads, so we may rightly wonder if that was The Zodiac’s car that had been parked behind Hartnell’s Volkswagen.
The Zodiac leaves us with another curious message here to the police. Not only did he get his jurisdictions grossly wrong, he gives us a wonderful redundancy. “They were in a white Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia.” Why not just say Karmann-Ghia? It is a minor point, but is may reflect habit. After all, who would say Chevy Corvette? At Blue Rock Springs, he only says “brown car.” Yet there he is specific about the park. Here he is specific about the car but nebulous about which park.
Within his phone call the Zodiac also told us he was a poor judge of distance. The spot where Hartnell and Shepard were attacked is only 7 tenths of a mile north of park headquarters. It is not two miles as he said. We find this same misjudging of distance in his call to the Vallejo Police. He said Blue Rock Springs Park was a mile east. From where he called it is about 2 miles east to Columbus Parkway and then over a mile north to the park. Curious consistency in error.
But he also told us something else. His phone call told us he raced to Napa to call the police. It takes about 55 minutes to get from the area of Knoxville Road where he parked to the phone booth at the Napa Car Wash from where he called. Since he called at 7:40 p.m., he must have left Lake Berryessa around 6:40 p.m. and had perfect traffic all the way in to Napa. This being said, his notation “6:30” on Hartnell’s car door could mean that he wrote it at 6:30. It does not necessarily signify the time when he stabbed them and, from his understanding, when he killed them both. This is more probable. It would take 10 minutes back up to the car, then write on the car door and walk across the street or to wherever he parked. I tend to think he wrote on the car door around 6:30 p.m. If not he made it to Napa and found a phone booth quickly. Or, of course, the possibility is that he knew where the phone booth already was.
All in all, the Lake Berryessa stabbings throw a kink into the realm of Zodiac theorizing. They represent a complete change in his MO. Here he ceased to be the opportunistic drive-by shooter of teens at petting spots. Here he became some cult wraith in a costume. From the point of view of his new game of kill and seek, this was all pointless. Was he acting out the requirements of some occult religion? His costume wasn’t meant to reveal himself to his victims. It had some meaning, but what? He had to stab them. Why Lake Berryessa? Why 1/4 mile from the safety of a quick getaway?
To follow The Zodiac’s game is to see him develop it as he went along. He wasn’t the master criminal devising and acting out a complex murder grid. But he also wasn’t just a drive-by killer anymore. He went way out on a theatrical limb at Lake Berryessa and succeeded. What indeed was his game?
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