Zodiac Killer: Newly Discovered Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  Yes, I did make that call to you also. It was just a warning. Beware…I am stalking your girls now.

  CC. Chief of police

  Enterprise

  The police had also recovered a handwritten letter from the library where Cheri Jo had been studying:

  Sick of living/unwilling to die

  cut.

  clean.

  if red/

  clean.

  blood spurting,

  dripping,

  spilling;

  all over her new

  dress.

  oh well

  it was red

  anyway.

  life draining into an

  uncertain death.

  she won’t

  die.

  this time

  someone’ll find her.

  just wait till

  next time.

  That note confused Holmes a bit. If the Zodiac Killer truly had left that note, then had he not meant to kill Cheri Jo? Had he just meant to hurt and frighten her?

  The killer sent another letter straight to the Los Angeles Times.

  This is the Zodiac speaking

  Like I have allways said, I am crack proof. If the Blue Meannies are evere going to catch me, they had best get off their fat asses + do something. Because the longer they fiddle + fart around, the more slaves I will collect for my after life. I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones, there are a hell of a lot more down there. The reason I’m writing to the Times is this, They don’t bury me on the back pages like some of the others.

  “Cheri Jo could have quite possibly been his first murder, or at least his first in the area,” Holmes said. “If we’re assuming this killer is Jack, then we know for certain she is not the first woman he has brutally killed.”

  “What happened to the poor girl?” Watson asked.

  Holmes explained the events of the case, ending with the police’s discovery of Cheri Jo’s body in the alley.

  “Was it a robbery, too?”

  “No, Cheri Jo’s purse and belongings were found at the scene. There was some speculation that she was attacked by an old boyfriend or someone she had brushed off, but that was just a theory. There was a size-ten shoeprint found in blood near the body, and that ruled out the boyfriends the police interviewed.”

  “So the police are not sure the Zodiac committed this murder?” Watson asked.

  “No, but there is enough of a possibility that they included the case in the file just to be safe. I think the Zodiac was practicing with this one; he was seeing what he could get away with and how it made him feel. He did send another note saying that Cheri Jo had to die and that she would not be the last.”

  “If this really was the Zodiac, why are there so many misspellings in the letter to the Times, while the first is written in an entirely different style?”

  “We must remember he’s a clever man,” answered Holmes. “He would have started out wanting recognition, but afraid of being caught. He wouldn’t have developed that pride or feeling of invincibility just yet. The misspellings and different styles of writing could very well have been his attempt to gain attention but keep his true identity safe.”

  There were a few more killings the police had tentatively attributed to the Zodiac Killer, and Holmes now turned his focus to those. On December 20, 1968, a couple was murdered on a lover’s lane. The couple had originally intended to go to a Christmas play but instead went to eat and then ended up parking outside of Vallejo, California. Holmes was still appalled that young people engaged in such a scandalous activity as “parking” before marriage, but Lydia insisted he must change with the times, and he was trying.

  David Arthur Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were sitting in David’s brown Rambler when someone walked up to the car and shot out the right rear window and the left rear tire, trying to scare the couple out of the car. It worked, and David threw open the passenger-side door and tried to run. He didn’t get farther than the right front wheel when the killer shot him in the head; the young man fell to the ground—dead. Betty Lou fled on foot, but the killer had incredibly accurate aim at only ten feet away; she was shot five times down the spine and died instantly.

  The witness who discovered the bodies claimed she saw a light-colored Chevrolet speeding away from the scene, but the ground was frozen, and there were no tire prints. It seemed the Zodiac Killer had the luck of the devil.

  Chapter 7

  American Dream

  July 1969

  The Zodiac Killer—he had now entirely stopped thinking of himself as Jack the Ripper—was pleased with how his life in the United States was working out. It truly was the land of opportunity, and he was living his own twisted version of the American dream. He had an apartment and a job as an aide at a mental hospital, which paid the bills and left him with flexible hours in which to pursue his new hobby. He was here on this earth to do one thing and one thing only, and he was having a jolly good time doing it. Keeping the police at bay was now a large part of what turned him on. After all, he couldn’t murder someone every day, or he would certainly be caught. The next best thing was being chased and watching his pursuers grow increasingly desperate and frustrated.

  On that hot July night in 1969, he pulled his car to a stop in a lonely parking lot in Vallejo, California. He knew it was a popular parking place for lovers where he could easily find another pair of victims. It was a little after midnight. He spotted a Corvair and exited his car with a flashlight.

  As he approached, he saw the couple fumbling to pull out their identification. They must think I’m a cop, he thought to himself with amusement.

  He started firing his nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol without warning. He hit the twenty-two-year-old girl, Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, three times and the nineteen-year-old boy, Mike Renault Mageau, twice. The car was splattered with blood, and the Zodiac’s heart pumped with adrenaline and the sick joy he felt when taking lives. As he turned to walk away, he heard the young man let out a scream of pain. The Zodiac grimaced, leaned back into the car window, and fired two more shots into each victim. Satisfied that both were dead, the Zodiac returned to his own car and drove away, throwing the gun into the seat beside him.

  What a rush, he thought as he drove away. I’m glad I made sure the boy was dead because he got a good look at me and could certainly set the cops on my tail.

  Since the parking lot had been empty except for the couple, the Zodiac decided to call the police station and report the crime.

  “Hello, I have just committed two murders,” he said when the dispatcher answered the phone.

  “Say again.”

  He repeated it.

  “I am also responsible for the Faraday/Jenson murders in December of 1968. I am the Zodiac, and I will start giving you clues to my identity. You must decipher the code, and then you’ll know who I am.”

  He went on to describe the previous crime with details that only the killer would know. By the time the police arrived on the scene with sirens blaring, he was long gone—back to his nest to make plans for the game he had initiated with Sherlock Holmes.

  The Zodiac didn’t realize then that he had made his first mistake—Mike had somehow survived, even after being riddled with bullets. When he regained consciousness, he would eventually tell the police that his attacker was a white man about five eight or five nine, in his late twenties or early thirties, and with a stocky build, round face, and brown hair.

  For the time being, though, the Zodiac was still high on his drug of choice—murder. As he walked up the stairs into his nondescript apartment, which he had carefully decorated to be bland and unmemorable, he knew it was time to turn his attention toward how he would torture Holmes. He poured himself a whiskey and sat down to think. He looked around at his home and missed what he used to have in London—the walls in the apartment here were paper thin, meaning he had no privacy from the mediocrity of his neighbors’ lives; he
often wished he could shoot them just to shut them up. His furniture was cheap and lumpy, and the pictures on the walls were probably the same as those that hung in thousands of other homes. Even the curtains were limp and brown. He wondered if always being on the run was worth eternal youth. He had changed jobs and identities so frequently since immigrating to America that he had never managed to amass wealth, and for some months, he could barely make ends meet. His childhood, in his mind, assumed a golden glow of comfort and prosperity. He conveniently blocked out his periods of being a vagrant on the London streets.

  And, of course, given the Zodiac’s special taste in hobbies, he had no friends. He could let no one grow close to him. Instead, he relied on the occasional prostitute to serve as both companion and release, but he could rarely afford the luxury. He was surprised he had not killed any of them this time; his rage at the profession seemed to have faded. His tastes had changed. Now, he wanted to destroy young couples in love and see their futures disappear down the barrel of a gun.

  As the Zodiac pondered these bleak thoughts, his resentment of Sherlock Holmes started to grow as well. Holmes had somehow become a success even in America; he was wealthy and had a family who loved him. The Zodiac wanted to feel the thrill of pursuit again, which was why he had first contacted the man, but perhaps now he also wanted to make Holmes pay as well. After all, it was Holmes’s fault that he had been forced out of his beloved homeland.

  Perhaps Holmes would even discover more of the Zodiac’s victims—the bumbling police couldn’t connect the dots in some of the cases. The Zodiac was frustrated that he wasn’t receiving the credit he deserved. He had even recently thought about killing some of his patients in the hospital but did not really relish the idea. He wanted his victims to know what was going to happen to them, and he wanted them to lose their futures, just as he had. Most of the people at the mental hospital under his care would never live normal lives again anyway, and some of them were not lucid enough to even grasp the concept of their own deaths.

  He was startled from his thoughts by the rumble of his stomach—he had not eaten all day. He got up and went into his small kitchen to open a can of spaghetti. As he ate straight from the can, he thought of his plan. He would get the chase started back full force. He typed another misspelled letter to send to the newspapers…onward and upward.

  I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO

  MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD

  GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE

  MOST DANGEROUE ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL

  SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING

  EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING

  YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST

  PART OF IT IS THAE WHEN I DIE I WILL BE

  REBORN IN PARADICE AND THEI HAVE KILLED

  WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE

  YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO

  SLOI DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF

  SLAVES FOR MY AFTERLIFE

  EBEORIETEMETHHPITI

  He had not used a cipher at the end of a letter in a while, but he knew that decoding such a message would be just the thing to set Sherlock’s brilliant brain on fire, and perhaps hasten him down the Zodiac Killer’s trail…

  Chapter 8

  Letters

  September 1969

  Holmes knew the murders would continue—it was as if the killer was taunting him, daring him to step fully back into the world of cat and mouse, hunter and prey. The most recent murder was recounted in the paper Holmes had read that morning, and San Francisco’s citizens were existing in a state of blind panic. The killer was ramping up.

  The killer had also sent another letter to the newspaper that revealed details of the murders that only he could know.

  Dear Editor,

  This is the murderer of the 2 teenagers last Christmass at Lake Hermon + the girl on the 4th of July near the golf course in Vallejo. To prove I killed them I shall state some facts which I + only the police know.

  Christmass

  1 Brand name of ammo

  Super X

  2 10 shots were fired

  3 the boy was on his back with his feet to the car

  4 the girl was on her right side feet to the west

  4th July

  1 the girl was wearing patterned slacks

  2 the boy was also shot in the knee.

  3 Brand name of ammo was western

  Here is part of a cipher the other 2 parts of this cipher are being mailed to the editors of the Vallejo Times + the SF Examiner.

  I want you to print this cipher on the front page of your paper. In this cipher is my identity.

  If you do not print this cipher by the afternoon of Fry 1st of Aug 69, I will go on a kill rampage Fry. night. I will cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night then on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.

  Zodiac (symbol)

  The most recent murder had happened as follows…

  Cecelia Ann Shepard and Bryan Calvin Hartnell had been having a wonderful day picnicking by a lake near Napa, California, when Bryan heard the bushes rustle. Suddenly a man came out. He was wearing what looked like a hooded vest with a circle and an X on it. Bryan moved protectively in front of Cecelia; the expression on the stranger’s face was frightening.

  “I escaped from prison, and I need money and a car,” the stranger told them. His voice was flat, without expression, and Cecelia’s heart started to race with panic. What sort of stranger admits to being a convict? What does he really want? she wondered.

  Bryan hurriedly pulled his car keys and his wallet from his back pocket and offered them up. “Take it,” he said. “I don’t have much money, but you can take what I have and the car. It’s parked over there behind the trees.”

  The man ignored Bryan completely. Instead he tossed a rope at Cecelia. She didn’t reach out to catch it, and instead it fell limply against her legs. “Tie your boyfriend to that tree,” the man told her. “Do it fast, or you’ll be sorry.” To emphasize his words, he pulled a long, wicked-looking knife from his sleeve.

  She shakily did what she was told. She was afraid to scream—the area was remote, and she realized if no one was around and she made this man angry, anything could happen. Cecelia tried to apologize to Bryan with her eyes as she tied the last knot.

  Then she felt a shove from behind. The man pushed her up against the tree and turned her around, tying her up as well.

  Bryan was still trying to hold out hope that the man would tie them up, take the car, and not hurt them; perhaps he only wanted a head start without them calling the police. He realized that he was living a nightmare when a sharp, searing pain knocked every other thought out of his head—the madman was stabbing him.

  The Zodiac was almost frenzied in his rage as he stabbed Bryan four more times and then turned his anger to Cecelia, slashing her ten times with his knife. He was covered in warm blood, a bath of death, and he basked in it. Oh, won’t the police have fun with this one! the Zodiac thought. And Holmes, wherever you are, this will make you renew your search for me. Every person I kill is on your head now.

  Bryan, perhaps wiser than Mike, feigned unconsciousness and waited until he was sure the attacker was far away before he cried for help. He used all of his remaining strength, calling out again and again, pausing in between to speak to Cecelia, who was hanging pale and limp against her bonds.

  “Don’t die, sweetheart,” he said over and over. “Someone will help us and get us to the hospital. Just please don’t die.”

  Eventually, a passing fisherman heard the anguished yells and alerted the park rangers, who arrived on the scene to find the distraught, gore-drenched couple.

  Cecelia had woken up and, together with Bryan, had managed to untie their restraints; they huddled in fear and pain, clinging to one another.

  It took nearly an hour for the ambulance to arrive, and within forty-eight hours, Cecelia was dead. Bryan, though he survived, woul
d be scarred physically and emotionally by the attack for the rest of his life.