Zodiac: The Shocking True Story of the Hunt for the Nation's Most Elusive Serial Killer - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Graysmith is the New York Times bestselling author of several true crime novels including Zodiac, Zodiac Unmasked, Auto Focus, and Amerithrax. The major motion pictures Zodiac and Auto Focus are based on his books. A San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist and artist for fifteen years, he lives in San Francisco.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Robert Graysmith's New York Times bestselling account of the desperate hunt for a serial killer and his own investigation of California's unsolved Zodiac murders.



A sexual sadist, the Zodiac killer took pleasure in torture and murder. His first victims were a teenage couple, stalked and shot dead in a lovers' lane. After another slaying, he sent his first mocking note to authorities, promising he would kill more. The official tally of his victims was six. He claimed thirty-seven dead. The real toll may have reached fifty.



Robert Graysmith was on staff at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969 when Zodiac first struck, triggering in the resolute reporter an unrelenting obsession with seeing the hooded killer brought to justice. In this gripping account of Zodiac's eleven-month reign of terror, Graysmith reveals hundreds of facts previously unreleased, including the complete text of the killer's letters.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen

Friday, December 20, 1968

When he hiked in the rolling hills overlooking Vallejo, David Faraday could catch glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge, the saltwater fishermen, sailboats and speedboats on San Pablo Bay, and the wide, tree-lined streets of the town. He could make out the black skeletal derricks, the piers, battleships, brick smokestacks, and three-tiered warehouses of Mare Island, the great gray mass lying across the straits.

In World War II thousands swarmed to the area to do navy work, and Vallejo was transformed into a boom town. Cheap housing units of plywood and plasterboard were thrown up, temporary constructions. By the 1960s they had become permanent black ghettos, fosterers of race hatred and gang violence that reached into the high schools.

David Arthur Faraday, seventeen, a scholar and varsity athlete, was one of the top students at Vallejo High School. As 1968 drew to a close, David had met a pretty, dark-haired sixteen-year-old, Betty Lou Jensen, who lived across town. He had been going over to see her almost every day since. Today, at 5:00 p.m., David and Betty Lou were talking with some friends on Annette Street about their date for that night. It was to be their first date together.

David left at 6:00, and at 7:10 drove his sister, Debbie, to a meeting of the Rainbow Girls at the Pythian Castle on Sonoma Boulevard. David told Debbie that he and Betty Lou might be going out to Lake Herman Road at the end of their date because he'd heard "a bunch of the kids were going out there tonight."

David returned home, to his parents' green, brown-shingled, T-shaped house on Sereno Drive, surrounded by a manicured hedge and two massive round shrubs, all dwarfed by the soaring poplar tree on the right.

By 7:20 David was dressing for his date. He wore a light-blue long-sleeve shirt, brown corduroy Levi-type pants, black socks, and tan, rough-leather, low-cut boots. He put his Timex wristwatch with chrome case and band on his left wrist, and shoved a dollar and fifty-five cents, all in change, in his right front pants pocket. He pocketed a white handkerchief and a small bottle of Binaca breath drops. On the middle finger of his left hand he fitted his yellow metal class ring with its red stone. David combed his short brown hair diagonally across his forehead, above large, intelligent eyes and a generous mouth, then slipped on his beige sportcoat.

David said good-bye to his parents and left the house at 7:30. He took a deep breath of the very cool night air (it was only 22 degrees), and walked to the 1961 Rambler brown-and-beige four-door station wagon that was registered in his mother's name.

He backed the Rambler out of the driveway and took Fairgrounds Drive to Interstate Highway 80 for the one and one-quarter miles to the Georgia Street exit. From Georgia, David made a right turn on Hazelwood and rode on Hazelwood until he came to 123 Ridgewood, a low, flat house bordered by ivy and lean, tall trees. David pulled to a stop in front. It was 8:00.

Betty Lou Jensen, like David, was hardworking, studious, serious, and had a spotless reputation. As far as her parents knew she and David were going to a Christmas carol concert at her school, Hogan High, only a few blocks away.

Betty Lou took one last look in the mirror and adjusted the colored ribbon in her hair; her long brown straight hair framed her face and came down over her shoulders. She was wearing a purple mini-dress with white cuffs and collar that made her dark, widely spaced eyes look mysterious. She had on black T-strap shoes.

Betty Lou looked nervously over her right shoulder toward the window to be sure the blinds were drawn. She often told her sister Melody that she thought a boy from school was spying on her, and on several occasions Mrs. Jensen had found the gate open leading to the side of the house. A classmate? Or was someone else spying on her?

While he waited for Betty Lou, David spoke with her father, Verne. Her parents were from the Midwest, but Betty Lou had been born in Colorado, like David's mother.

When Betty Lou came out, David helped her with her white fur coat. Purse in hand, she kissed her dad good-bye, told him that they were going to a party after the concert, and at 8:20 left, promising to be back by 11:00.

Instead of going to the concert, the two went to visit Sharon, another student, on Brentwood, close to the school. At 9:00 Sharon walked them out to their car. They didn't say where they were going next.

At about the same time, out on Lake Herman Road, a few miles east of the Vallejo city limits, two racoon hunters, who had just parked their red pickup inside of the Marshall Ranch, noticed a white four-door hardtop '60 Chevrolet Impala parked by the entrance to the Benicia Water Pumping Station. There was a truck coming out of the pumping station gate onto the isolated road at the time.

At 9:30 an unusual incident occurred on this spot. A boy and his date had parked the girl's sports car just off the winding road so he could adjust its motor. Both saw a car, possibly a blue Valiant, coming down the road from Benicia into Vallejo. As the car passed the couple, it slowed, went a few yards down and stopped in the middle of the road. They saw its white backup lights come on. And then the car started backing up toward them with excruciating slowness. There was such menace, such an aura of malignancy about the actions that the youth put his date's car in gear and took off at high speed. The Valiant followed them. When the couple got to the Benicia turnoff, they turned. The other car continued straight ahead.

At 10:00 p.m., Bingo Wesher, a sheepherder at the Old Borges Ranch, was checking his sheep in the area east of the Benicia pumping station when he noticed a white Chevrolet Impala sedan parked by the entrance to the station in front of the gate. He also saw the racoon hunters' '59 Ford truck.

After Betty Lou and David had a Coke at Mr. Ed's, a local drive-in, they drove east on Georgia and turned left onto Columbus Parkway. At the city limits of Vallejo, David turned right onto narrow, winding Lake Herman Road.

They passed the great towers of the SVAR Rock and Asphalt Paving Materials Company, its machinery eating away at an orange-and-tan mountainside. There were silver mines here, and David had heard of two men who planned on operating a quicksilver mine in the farmland. Small ranches crowded the road the first mile. By day the hillsides were dotted with black-and-white cows grazing on the pale yellow hills against sharp blue skies. Now, the night slid thick and black behind the beams of the Rambler's headlights. David and Betty Lou headed east to a remote lover's lane. Police traveled it periodically, warning couples of the possible dangers of parking in such an isolated area.

Just before 10:15, David pulled off the road to the right and parked fifteen feet off it, facing south, in the graveled area outside gate #10, the chain-link-fenced entrance to the Lake Herman pumping station. He locked all four doors, put Betty Lou's white fur coat and purse and his own sportcoat on the seat behind the driver's seat, and turned on the car heater. He tilted the adjustable front seat back to a forty-five-degree angle.

There were no lamp poles, and the rocky clearing was surrounded by gently mounded hills and farmland. The spot was popular for lovers because the kids could see the lights from any police cruiser as it came around the curve in the road, which gave them time to get rid of beer or...