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

signs of the first three victims. They tried in vain to link the gunman’s four targets, but no connection among them was ever found. It appeared that the Zodiac struck at random, or at least did not personally know his victims beforehand, and seemed to possess knowledge he should have no way of knowing—the most terrifying combination a serial killer could have.
    The killer embraced the Zodiac name and all the terror that came with it. Just after the Central Park shooting, he sent another letter to the
Post
, claiming that he was the same Zodiac who’d killed at least six people in the San Francisco area in the late 1960s. Investigators and psychologists doubted this claim from the start—the West Coast Zodiac seemed to have been a weapons expert who enjoyed torturing his victims, while the New York Zodiac kept his distance while killing, and signs pointed to his using homemade guns, since the bullets found at the crime scenes did not have characteristics typical of ones fired by properly manufactured guns. And a homemade gun would likely fire only one round, which would explain why the killer hadn’t finished off his wounded victims right then and there. But the association did nothing but increase his mystique and the public’s hysteria.
    Psychologists guessed that the Zodiac was a poorly educated loner who probably lived alone near the Brooklyn-Queens neighborhoods where the first three shootings took place, and that he desperately wanted attention. So the police were pretty worried when the Thursday three weeks after Larry Parham’s shooting rolled around, worried enough to gather a task force of fifty detectives, the largest group assembled since the Son of Sam manhunt in the mid-1970s.
    That Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the task force spread throughout the city, searching for the Zodiac. They understandably concentrated in the sections of Woodhaven, Queens, and East New York, Brooklyn, where the first three attacks had occurred. And they weren’t the only ones out patrolling. Groups of citizen vigilantes roamed the streets in that area, looking for suspects. And, proving that all kinds live in New York, still other residents actually held tailgating parties and outdoor get-togethers to boast of being unafraid.
    The police questioned more than thirty-six men throughout that night, but none turned out to be the Zodiac. The most famous person in New York stayed away, still safely unknown.
    * * *
    No attacks came that Thursday, or the next month, or even the next year. In fact, the Zodiac Killer waited two years before killing again. For the first time, he used a knife; and for the first time, he attacked on a day other than a Thursday. Patricia Fonti was a thirty-nine-year-old mentally ill homeless woman who frequented Highland Park in Queens. She was stabbed more than one hundred times just after midnight on Monday, August 10, 1992. The amount of time that had passed, and the changes to the killer’s modus operandi, meant that her death wasn’t immediately connected to the Zodiac Killer. In fact, like Joanne and I had found, it wasn’t even reported by most newspapers. Patricia was a Leo.
    Almost a year after that, on June 4, 1993, a man named James Weber was shot and injured near Highland Park. It was a Friday, and he was a forty-year-old Libra.
    Seven weeks later, the Zodiac Killer came back to near Vermont and Cypress Avenues where James had been attacked and fatally shot forty-year-old John Diacone, a Virgo.
    Only five more signs to go.
    The killer stayed in Highland Park for his next attack. Diane Ballard was on a park bench near Jamaica Avenue when he shot and wounded her in October 1993. She was left partially paralyzed. And she was a Taurus, the only known duplicate sign among the Zodiac’s victims.
    The police didn’t dwell on her astrological sign, however, because they had no idea these four latest attacks were connected to one another at all.