Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle Read Online Free Page B

a military man—perhaps a sailor.
    Like Dad, Stanko thought.
    Stanko had Zodiac pegged as not much of a stud. If he was any kind of lover boy, he’d have worked it so that he got a piece before he snuffed them. Stanko assumed a lot of these “gun does my talking” types suffered from erectile dysfunction.
    At the scene of a cabdriver’s murder in San Francisco, a bloody fingerprint, presumed to belong to Zodiac, was found. Over the years, there had been a handful of suspects in the Zodiac murders. Some didn’t pan out, and some stuck around.
    The best suspect was the late Arthur Leigh Allen, whose spending records revealed him to be frequently in Zodiac’s vicinity. He also had proximity with several of the victims, and may have been an acquaintance with one of the victims. His handwriting looked like Zodiac’s; he had a history of doing really sick things; and his demeanor, when he was questioned, was oddly defiant, very much the type of personality to use the mail to laugh at authority figures, while simultaneously terrifying all of Northern California. Some said the case against Allen was a construct of a true-crime writer, and, in reality, was much weaker than presented. Allen was said in a couple of books to have received a speeding ticket in the vicinity of one murder. This was declared untrue by a third source. Plus, his thumbprint didn’t match the bloody one found at one of the murder scenes.
    One thing that everyone could agree on, Stanko discovered, was that Zodiac—along with Charles Manson and the murder at Altamont—was part of that “death of the counterculture” gestalt, symbols of the end of an era, the 1960s—such a hopeful decade turned horrible by violence—giving way to the disastrous 1970s.
    The killer not only wrote taunting letters to police and press, sometimes using code, but he established his bona fides in a shiveringly creepy fashion, enclosing in the envelopes bloodstained cloth torn from a victim’s shirt.
    Maybe, some theorized, Zodiac was more than one guy. Did a conspiracy theory fit? Maybe the one writing the letters was never the one shooting the gun. Paranoids noted that the case resembled a military mindcontrol experiment that had gotten out of hand.
    There were a lot of theories—some almost solid, others wacko—and the Zodiac letters continued for years. One guy thought that he turned into the “Unabomber.” Zodiac claimed for years in his writing that he was still killing people; after the initial burst of murders, no more bodies could positively be linked to him.
    In some ways, Stanko thought, the Zodiac killer was the most legendary of the serial killers.

    Stephen Stanko also exhaustively researched “Son of Sam,” aka David Berkowitz. Son of Sam was a derivation of the Zodiac theme a few years later. He also shot teenagers and young adults in the nighttime.
    Unlike Zodiac who prowled the plentiful desolation of Northern California, Son of Sam patrolled the side streets of New York City. He found victims on front stoops, walking down the sidewalk, and (like Zodiac) necking in parked cars.
    Son of Sam always used the same gun: a fearsome .44 bulldog. He shot couples or females alone. Never males alone. Because of the girth of his bullets, he cruelly maimed the victims he didn’t kill.
    Like Zodiac, Son of Sam wrote taunting letters to the police and press. But the East Coast version was an upgrade in a way. His prose was written by a deviant poet, exhibiting a well-honed terroristic craft. Stanko was a writer and noticed the difference right away.
    The similarities in the messages of mayhem were compelling as well. The chilling taunts of the Zodiac and the Rimbaud-like prose-poetry of Son of Sam bubbled up from the same misogynistic vat.
    Berkowitz was caught and arrested, and the police said he was the Son of Sam. But, just as some people believed Zodiac was a team effort, there was a compelling theory that Berkowitz did not act alone. Perhaps Son of Sam, which