Zodiac Cracked Read online

  The new Estes family was actively involved in the growing Riverside community. Fred was a lifetime member of the Riverside Order of the Elks Lodge #643 and became a member of the original Riverside Symphony Orchestra that was organized in the mid-1950s. He was a violinist and one of the fifty to sixty charter members of the orchestra, which rehearsed upstairs in the Riverside Municipal Auditorium. The group played locally in Riverside and did not travel; however, they soon became experienced professional symphony musicians who performed classical operas from Aida to Carmen. In my interview with one of the now-retired original musicians, I had to ask him if the orchestra ever performed The Mikado, the Gilbert and Sullivan opera that Zodiac quoted arias from in his letters. I was firmly advised that “they did not play that kind of stuff.”

  In 1957, Fred attended the Seasonal Park Naturalist Training Camp at California’s Big Basin State Park in Santa Cruz County and was assigned to the Cuyamaca Rancho District as a uniformed California State Park naturalist. He worked as a seasonal ranger, putting in his time during the off-school summers. Fred possessed keen outdoor skills that enhanced his personal entomology specialty—butterfly collecting—and was an active member in one of the popular butterfly collecting clubs in Southern California. One of Fred’s junior high school students actually credits Fred with enhancing his career as arbovirologist and professor by nurturing his interest in collecting at such a young age. Fred was very disciplined and proficient in teaching the “art” of making museum-quality mounting boxes and wooden cases with glass tops for insect displaying. Interested students would work in Fred’s home garage workshop … the same workshop where Warren would also perfect his skills and use them to make his own wooden cases and glass houses for his live “collection.”

  During the 1950s and into the early 1960s, Fred and Warren operated a small business called the ETC (Estes Telescope Company) out of the family garage workshop. Everyone who lived in a clear sky location wanted a telescope. Warren soon became known locally for his extraordinary ability to make telescopes out of scrap parts he would gather by scouring for discards behind electronic businesses, aircraft factories, and other dumpster sites. He was a rogue, creative, designing inventor. He knew advanced mathematics and electrical technology and was an expert amateur astronomer. With his woodworking and welding skills, he and his father turned out many precision telescopes over the years.

  On November 25, 1944, at the age of eighteen, Warren enlisted in the navy and was sent to the South Pacific. By October of 1945, World War II had ended, and the ramping down had begun. The USS ATA 177, a navy ocean rescue tug, was sunk at Okinawa during hurricane Louise. No sailors were lost, and the boat was refloated in December 1945, returning to duties in the South Pacific. Warren was mustered onto the ATA 177 at Subic Bay, Luzon Island, Philippines, on April 30, 1946, when the boat moved into Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Warren was again mustered aboard on May 27, 1946, and transported from Pearl Harbor to San Francisco. He was officially released from the navy on July 3, 1946, having served for one year and seven months. The only thing Warren had to say about his navy experience was that everyone was always harassing him and he was glad to get out.

  Warren’s parents, wasting no time, immediately enrolled him in college. But two years later, Warren needed to get away. He wanted to attend the University of Hawaii. Florence arranged for Warren, his father, and herself to take a trip to Hawaii on the SS Lurline leaving Los Angeles Harbor on August 13, 1948. The SS Lurline launched in 1932 and was downed for the war but was later commissioned for passenger travel in April of 1948 in time for the Estes family trip. The ship was permanently scrapped in 1987.

  It was not long before Warren returned home to complete his studies by obtaining a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Redlands. He never excelled to any height in a formal career capacity, but he did not have to … he was well provided for all his life. His parents always gave him a car, a house to live in, expenses, and vacations. He now had all the tools he needed to become the wild practical joker who could fix anything except himself.

  Warren, at the age of thirty-one, had been teaching the sixth grade for several years in the Mission School District in Riverside. In February of 1957, the local newspaper carried a small article describing the change of two Mission staff members. Personal and educational information about the two incoming teachers and one of the outgoing teachers is noted in the article. The reference to Warren simply states, “A vacancy was made by the resignation of Warren Estes”—no thanks, no accolades, no regrets. Warren was never going to teach children again … but he did. He continued living at home and was soon teaching in the San Bernardino City School District.

  In May of 1957, Warren was presented with an opportunity to get involved with his lifelong passion of astronomy by answering an advertisement in the local newspaper asking for a response from any amateur astronomers who would like to form a club. Warren became a charter member and remained an active club member until his death in 1978. He acted as the club’s chief observer, bringing his expert knowledge of astronomical observations and techniques to the position. He offered a report each month to the members of what to look for in the upcoming month’s sky and gave lectures and demonstrations at the meetings as well as at other astronomical societies, schools, and organizations around California, including the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, and the Sierra Club. He participated in planning and setting up many of the star parties the club offered. He also hosted many private star parties at the Estes family homes in both Riverside and Joshua Tree. It was an exciting time to be an amateur astronomer with the American space program missions aimed at the moon.

  By 1961, Warren was working for the Alvord School District in Riverside as director of the outdoor curriculum lab and was also teaching non-credit astronomy A and B adult education classes at the Riverside Community College. He applied for “regular member” standing in the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and was accepted. Along with his astronomy and outdoor science teaching career, he also maintained his amateur astronomer status by continuing his astronomy lectures.

  Besides being an accomplished amateur astronomer, Warren’s herpetology avocation was a daily indulgence. He kept his live collection in small glass houses and cages inside the family house and garage. Everyone who knew or met Warren knew he was a collector. If they had not seen the collection, he would tell them about it. Warren never let go of his herpetology and insect collecting—he had been handling and capturing both live and dead wild creatures since his childhood, along with his lifelong friend, who went on to become a macro photographer. In the 1970s, this friend ultimately got involved with the movie industry and directed Warren onto a path of made-for-TV movies that needed an insect handler. Warren’s collection included snakes, lizards, tarantulas, scorpions, and various wild desert furry creatures, all of which could be overwhelming to those who visited the Estes home. In 1965, Warren’s mother and father bought a new house located four blocks from the Riverside Community College. His creatures were not welcome there, so he moved most of them to the house and property in Joshua Tree, splitting his time freely between the two locations but always officially listing his residence as the house in Riverside.

  Warren had a serious leg injury, and in July of 1976 he reinjured that same leg and spent several days hospitalized. Six months later, in January of 1977, Warren’s father, Fred, at age seventy-four, died suddenly of a heart attack. He was cremated and buried in an unmarked grave in Evergreen Memorial Historic Cemetery in Riverside. No headstone was ever erected. Two months later, in March, Warren at age fifty would get married for the first time—to a twenty-three-year-old girl. They would live in the retreat house in Joshua Tree, where Warren had relocated his collection from the Estes’s home in Riverside. Ten months later, and one month after the December 1977 airing of his made-for-TV film Tarantula: The Deadly Cargo, in January of 1978, at the age of fifty-one, Warren died suddenly of a heart aneurysm while in the shower at his house in Jos
hua Tree. His astronomy club friends assisted in selling off his telescope and binocular equipment. His young widow moved back to Riverside. Within the course of the next two years, Warren’s mother, Florence, sold the Riverside family house and the family retreat properties in Joshua Tree and moved to Boulder, Colorado, where she joined the Ashrams of Truth Consciousness, whose sacred mountain is located twelve miles west of Boulder. Florence Miller Estes, at the age of eighty-three, died on February 16, 1987, in Boulder, Colorado, preceded in death by her husband, Fred, and only child, Warren Earl Estes.

  On the surface, this family history seems quite normal. Just a family making their way through life—that is, until we investigate and uncover the real Warren Estes and the bizarre goings on behind the closed doors of the Estes’s homes. Like so many serial killers—Albert DeSalvo a.k.a. the Boston Strangler, Gary Leon Ridgeway a.k.a. the Green River Killer, Dennis Rader a.k.a. BTK (bind/torture/kill), John Wayne Gacy a.k.a. Killer Clown (Pogo Clown), and Warren Earl Estes a.k.a. the Zodiac killer—they all worked and volunteered, had families, and the neighbors never suspected a thing. But after the dark sides of these evil killers were exposed, families’, neighbors’, friends’, and coworkers’ strange stories about the killers start to collectively form a very different picture that is far from normal.

  So many people are reluctant to discern what normal is, but there is some human behavior that is just not normal by any stretch of the imagination. In Warren’s case, he never had a chance to be normal. His mother and father were both educated, smart people. But as was the custom in the 1920s, women stayed home and had children and the men went about their business freely—Warren’s father, Fred, was no exception. He taught school, was a forest ranger in the summers, played in the local orchestra, belonged to many clubs, constantly went to meetings and training classes, and actively pursued his butterfly collecting hobby … all activities that kept him away from home. Warren, as a small child, was left alone with his mother for long stretches of time, allowing both of them to succumb to their own wiles.

  In the 1920s, communication was thin, to say the least. If you did not hear or read the news for yourself on the radio or in the newspapers, you were informed by word of mouth, more commonly known as gossip. By the time stories were repeated, they were surely distorted. But what was being reported in 1928 Riverside newspapers and on the radio was not distorted. The gruesome news pouring in was all too real and all too much for the young Florence Estes to handle on her own. Her husband, Fred, was so busy keeping up with his crammed schedule he never noticed the toll the reports were taking on his young wife. She, like other mothers of small boys in the Riverside area, was terrorized by the discovery of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders.

  In September of 1928, when Warren was hardly more than one and a half years old, news on the radio and headlines in all the local newspapers in and around Riverside flashed detailed stories of the discovery of the dismemberment, axe killings, and child molestation of young boys who had been lured and kidnapped by the degenerate twenty-one-year-old Gordon Stewart Northcott. Headlines read: “ABUSED AND THEN KILLED HIS VICTIMS.” “USED AXE TO SLAY.” “BODIES HUNTED UNDER CONCRETE.” “BONES ALSO UNEARTHED.”

  Boys as young as ten years old were discovered to be victims of the gruesome killings. The daily accounts raged on for two years during further discoveries on the chicken farm and throughout the trials of the young killer and his mother. Gordon Stewart Northcott was found guilty of multiple murders. Between 1893 and 1937, 215 people were executed by hanging at San Quentin State Prison. On October 2, 1930, Northcott, at the age of twenty-four, became part of that statistic. His mother, Louisa Northcott, admitted murdering Walter Collins, the young boy whose story was featured in the 2008 movie Changeling (from Universal Pictures). She was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to San Quentin, where after four years she was transferred to the Institution for Women in Tehachapi, California, serving seven more years before being paroled at seventy-one years of age.

  Warren was hardly two years old when the Wineville news broke and four years old when Northcott was hanged. Both the killings and the trial had taken place in Riverside County. Florence, like all mothers with small boys who lived especially close to the area at the time, walked each day in fear that there could still be other killers involved and that her son could be next. She could not be faulted for the fear she experienced as grown men had a hard time coping with the horrors of the slaying of innocents right in their back yard. Every parent around pained over the unthinkable—“It could have been my child.” The emotional trauma of the horrible killings left a stigma attached to Wineville not unlike the stigma to this day that the mention of Chicago brings forth gangsters and Al Capone. On November 1, 1930, the name Wineville was officially changed to Mira Loma.

  Florence kept her boy close to her—too close. She taught Warren how to act like a child younger than he was and how to act like a girl. This persona would keep him safe from fiends looking for young boys to kidnap. She taught him how to speak softly and how to dance like a girl. Like all children who want to please their mothers, he learned and he liked it. The problem with this behavior was that it never stopped.

  The women I interviewed told me about witnessing Warren in his forties tiptoeing like a ballerina around his mother in her house while she sat in a chair and beamed. Another woman advised me that Warren brought her to the family home in Riverside when she was a teenager. She stopped going in after witnessing this “sickening display” put on by a man she admired, being fully taken in by his cunningness toward her. Another young woman told me how Warren disguised his maleness and danced around naked in front of her, acting like a girl. She, too, was shocked at the behavior. She had also witnessed Warren “fluttering” around his mother while she sat and enjoyed his attention. Another had heard the stories but had never witnessed the behavior herself and did not want to discuss what she had heard. For Warren’s mother to have continued to be entertained by this behavior displayed now by her adult son reveals she must have been the one who had nurtured its beginnings.

  Warren, having learned how to charm and entertain, perfected those charms in his adulthood and used them to attract and entertain the young high school and college girls he lured toward him. He wanted to be one of them and was able to interact up close by spending whole days and nights wandering around with these young girls, one on one, sometimes overlapping them but always keeping them separated from each other.

  Cemeteries have always been and still are favorite places for all sorts of gatherings. From lovers to drug users and homeless persons, the isolation among the dead is a safe place to meet where no one would intrude. One of Warren’s favorite spots to be alone and play with a young girl was in the cemetery at night. He would talk for hours about how he wanted to “disappear” and how he could make someone disappear. He would stroke the girl’s skin and hair with the back of his hand and admire their youth and softness, the same youth and softness that he had experienced with his mother. Warren spoke with an even, unique voice, soft, pleasant, and hypnotic … a voice he liked to use to imitate various sounds. One of his favorite imitations was to use a stethoscope to make the sound of a jet airplane. He taught one of the young girls how to do this. Please remember here that we are speaking of a forty-year-old man sitting in a cemetery with a high school girl in the middle of the night. I certainly have no qualms deciding if this behavior is normal … or not. One of his young girls told me how Warren would make a noise with his mouth, “sort of a smacking sound.” I need to present here a statement made by Bryan Hartnell, the young man who survived the brutal hooded Zodiac knife attack that took place on September 27, 1969, in Napa County at Lake Berryessa. Hartnell was interviewed the next day in his hospital room at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa. He tells us that after Zodiac finished tying up Cecelia Shepard, the young girl who had accompanied Bryan Hartnell that afternoon but did not survive the attack, Zodiac “clonked her down and then he goes … Sswoos
h … a sound with his [Zodiac’s] mouth.”

  By the mid-1970s, Warren was doing some serious drugs that included needle use. He managed to level off enough to begin his made-for-TV movie career. At a 1977 New Year’s Eve party, he met a girl that he would ask to marry him. He was fifty years old, and she was twenty-three. She was a smart young woman and an astronomy buff. Warren could not help latching on to her. He always had the need to dominate any social conversation, and now he had met a girl who actually challenged him when he incorrectly pointed out the current phase of the moon one evening with some friends. She told him it was a waning gibbous moon … she had impressed him. Although Warren’s father died that January, his mother insisted the wedding should still go on in March as planned. At the end of the wedding day, the couple returned to Riverside, but Warren dropped off his young bride and went home to his parents’ house, spending the night with his mother. The couple eventually settled down together at the house in Joshua Tree … but the marriage was never consummated. One of the young girls Warren had been seeing tells of how one night after years of running around with Warren, she tried to seduce him. She did everything she could, but he finally convinced her that he respected her too much to have anything other than a loving “friendship” with her. Warren was impotent. No sexual assaults occurred in any of the Zodiac murders.