The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father . . . And Finding the Zodiac Killer by Gary L. Stewart

Author:Gary L. Stewart [Stewart, Gary L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062313164
Amazon: 0062313169
Barnesnoble: 0062313169
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2014-05-13T05:00:00+00:00

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By the end of 1969, the Fillmore, once a thriving community, had deteriorated into a ghetto filled with unemployed workers who had been laid off from the shipyards that had attracted them to San Francisco and a better way of life. LSD had been replaced with the more lethal heroin, and addicts plagued the Fillmore, pilfering from residents and business owners to feed their growing habits. The hippie movement—and the proliferation of drugs it brought—had left destruction in its wake. The city of San Francisco began implementing a plan of urban renewal, changing the facade of the neighborhood as rows of quaint Victorian homes were smashed by bulldozers and gentrification wiped away the past.

Slowly, the music that had attracted so many to the Fillmore began to disappear as club owners moved to other, more profitable parts of the city. A few die-hards remained on Divisadero Street, just outside the Fillmore—the Both/And Club, featuring the Ike and Tina Turner Revue on occasion, and the Half Note, where a young George Duke first heard Al Jarreau mimic percussion with his voice. Other legends, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Sarah Vaughan, frequented the Half Note, where Duke and Jarreau had become regular performers.

Over the years, the Half Note also became a favorite watering hole for police officers, who gathered there after their shifts to discuss their cases, and reporters, who lingered at the bar eavesdropping on their conversations, hoping for a scoop. Barkeep Lionel Hornsby was more knowledgeable than most about the latest developments in the Zodiac case and passed along what he heard from police to patrons and reporters. The conversation was good for business.

Rotea Gilford liked to stop by the Half Note on his way home from work. There, he often visited with fellow black officers who were similarly discouraged by the discrimination they felt they experienced in the SFPD. Rotea felt as though it was his duty to pump them up and organize the fight for equality.

But in November 1969, the talk was not about discrimination. It was about the serial killer who had the audacity to taunt them in such a public manner.

As Rotea sipped on his drink, he listened to the conversations around him, wishing he were working the case. Like many other SFPD officers, he had puzzled over the ciphers, hoping to be the one to discover my father’s identity. He knew nothing about homophonic substitution, a method of creating ciphers that uses more than one symbol or letter for a single high-frequency letter of the alphabet, which experts would later theorize the Zodiac had used for the 408 cipher. He simply scanned the ciphers, hoping that a word, a name, would jump out at him. Though he had worked his way up through the ranks, Rotea had not made it into homicide; still, that didn’t stop him from learning everything he could about the case. He worried about this killer, worried who and where he would strike next. The Zodiac had brought his war to the SFPD, and Rotea wanted to help Toschi and Armstrong take him down.

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