The Haunting of the Gemini by Jackie Barrett Read Free Book Online Page A

with, so Joanne and I sat down at the computer and started searching the Internet.
    Patricia Fonti’s name didn’t show up in any of the usual places. No obituary. No name included in a list of local award honorees, or club members, or any of the places you can usually find some mention of a person. We couldn’t even find any stories from 1992 about her death. Talk about a cold case! But then her name finally popped up—on a list of victims attributed to the New York Zodiac Killer.
    Well, shit,
I thought.
    That discovery led Joanne and me in a whole different direction. And we slowly began to piece together the story of the hunt for one of New York’s most infamous serial killers.
    * * *
    Not much scares New Yorkers. Certainly not back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the city saw more than two thousand murders a year, along with rampant assaults and drug dealing. It took a lot back then for a criminal to rise above the ordinary horribleness of the crime wave. But one person managed to do it, with a combination of shootings, symbols, and carefully stoked terror.
    The killer started with a letter, sent to police at the end of 1989, insinuating that deaths would come the next year and would be linked to the zodiac signs. Four months later, early on a Thursday in March 1990, a forty-nine-year-old man named Mario Orozco, who had a limp and used a cane, was shot in the back while walking along a Brooklyn street. He did not die, but neither had he seen the shooter, so he couldn’t give police a description.
    Exactly three weeks later, again in the early hours of a Thursday, another man was shot in the back, only six blocks away from the first one. Jermaine Montenesdro was thirty-three years old. He also survived, but like Mario Orozco, he was unable to describe his attacker. The next shooting came two months later, just after midnight on a Thursday morning, this time in Queens. A seventy-eight-year-old man named Joseph Proce, who—like Mario Orozco—was using a cane to walk down the street, was approached by a man who asked him for a glass of water. Joseph started to walk away and was shot in the back. The man fled but left a letter decorated with astrological symbols nearby. Before dying of his injuries, Joseph gave police a description of his attacker as a disheveled black man in his early thirties, roughly six feet tall and about 180 pounds.
    The next week, the killer sent letters to the
New York Post
and TV’s
60 Minutes
naming all three victims and providing details of the shootings that only he would know. Detectives concluded that the handwriting on those letters matched the letter left by Joseph’s attacker, and officially linked all three crimes.
    Knowing that his letters to the media now had the cops looking for someone in the Brooklyn-Queens border area, for his next shooting, the killer traveled farther afield. He couldn’t change the rest of his pattern, though. He stuck with his preference for attacking the weak and helpless, this time shooting Larry Parham, a thirty-year-old homeless man asleep on a bench in Central Park, early on a Thursday morning exactly three weeks after his previous attack, and again leaving a letter with astrological drawings nearby. This letter had a fingerprint on it, which police carefully recorded.
    Larry Parham survived the shot to the chest and was able to tell the police that someone had asked for his birth date several hours before he was shot. Larry’s description of the man matched the one Joseph had given three weeks earlier. For the next six years, this would be the only physical description that existed of the man police were now calling the Zodiac Killer.
    So far, the killer had shot a Scorpio, a Gemini, a Taurus, and a Cancer. And he had electrified the city. People walked around in a panic. Police warned everyone to immediately report any strangers asking for their birth dates. They could not figure out how the shooter knew the