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Who was the Zodiac Killer?

In 1980 conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell identified Robert Linkletter, son of the famous Hollywood entertainer and celebrity Art Linkletter as the Zodiac Killer. Brussell’s source of information was a letter from a woman who lived in Woodland Hills who knew Robert personally and also knew him as the Zodiac.

Zodiac, a serial killer in the San Francisco Bay area, wrote a series of letters to local newspapers boasting of his murders and appending sophisticated cryptograms that defied the best efforts of amateur and professional codebreakers. Using many deliberately misspelled words, he made mocking jabs at the police, laughed at their futile efforts to catch him, and described in detail how he would dispatch future victims. In a letter sent to the San Francisco Chronicle on October 13, 1969, he wrote, “School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning.” A letter sent to the same newspaper on June 26, 1970 threatened that if people did not start wearing Zodiac buttons, he would punish them “by anilating a full School Buss.” The disappearance of a school bus full of children in 1976 prompted many to believe that this was the work of the Zodiac. It also prompted Mae Brussell to reveal on her weekly program Dialogue: Conspiracy the existence of a letter that identified the Zodiac by his real name. [1]

The afternoon of July 15, the last day of summer school at Dairyland Elementary in the farming community of Chowchilla, a school bus departed with thirty-one children, ages ranging from five to fourteen. Traveling on ruler-straight roads past cotton fields and almond groves, the driver, Frank Ray, dropped off five youngsters at three separate stops.

Proceeding west on Avenue 21 toward the intersection at Road 15, he noticed a white van straddling the road with its door open. As he came around to pass, he saw jumping out of the van a man wearing a nylon stocking mask and brandishing a shotgun and revolver. He signaled Ray to stop the bus and in a deep voice demanded that he open the door. He was a big man, 6 foot 2, medium to heavy build, tan short-sleeve shirt, white gloves, light tan corduroy pants, light brown belt with horsehead buckle, cowboy boots, and an eagle tattoo on his right arm. Grayish white hair and moustache were discernible through the nylon. He appeared to be about 50 years old.

Two more men wearing stocking masks came out of the van. One of them was armed with a pump shotgun, about 23 to 27 years old, very thin, 5 foot 7, collar length brown hair, light complexion, moustache, and a hairy mole on the right side of his chin. He wore a white T-shirt, white gloves, blue corduroy pants, cowboy boots, and silver watch. He had a blue-green tattoo on his right wrist. He spoke with a foreign accent, possibly French. He came into the bus and ordered Ray to go to the back seat.

The third man was unarmed, stocky, 5 foot 6, white hat, white gloves, blue-checkered shirt, brown pants, and blue tennis shoes. Over his mask, he wore black, thick-framed glasses. His age might have been anywhere from 28 to 45. He had sideburns, a one-inch scar on his right cheek, and a chipped front tooth. His stocky appearance was deceptive, for up close one boy observed that he had “a pillow stuffed in his shirt to make him look fat.” He settled into the driver’s seat and took control of the wheel.

Continuing west about a mile, the bus and van turned left into a clearing off the road and drove into a dry creek bed. After hiding the bus in a heavy thicket of bamboo, the three men herded their captives into the white van and into a green van parked nearby. As Ray climbed in through the back doors of the green van, he glanced at the license plate number of the white van.

Chowchilla bamboo grove

Aerial view of the bamboo grove where kidnappers abandoned the school bus.

Neither Ray nor the children could see where they were going – plywood and a coat of paint blocked the windows. They sped along highways for many hours, never stopping at a gas station. Those who needed to urinate had to do so in their pants. Several times along the way, the abductors stopped to put more fuel in the gas tanks from gas cans stowed onboard. After eleven hours on the road, they finally stopped at their destination. They told Ray and the children to get out and directed them to descend a ladder through a three-foot opening in the ground into an underground chamber. As they went in, one by one, a man asked for their names, ages, parent’s names, and took from each a shoe or an article of clothing.

Using a flashlight given to him to guide the children in, Ray could see that they were inside the trailer of a truck about eight feet wide and sixteen feet long, buried underground. He saw some mattresses and box springs, two wooden boxes with holes on top that served as improvised toilets, ten five-gallon containers of water, some dry breakfast food, bags of potato chips, two loaves of bread, and six 4×4 vertical posts that extended eight feet from floor to ceiling. Mounted in two holes, one cut through the front and the other through the right side, were battery-operated fans that circulated air through flexible hoses, four inches in diameter. (One hose was thirty-five-feet long, hidden from view in the branches of a tree.)

After pulling up the ladder, the captors put a heavy metal plate on top of the hole and weighed it down with a pair of hundred-pound truck batteries and a wooden box full of dirt. Using wire-cutters, they cut cables holding back a wire-mesh fence. An avalanche of dirt and gravel poured down upon the roof of the trailer, covering the plate, batteries and box to a depth of six to seven feet above the roof of the trailer. Inside, the captives watched fearfully as the ceiling buckled from the weight of earthen material, but the standing posts kept the roof from collapsing.

Trapped in the darkness of their dungeon with only the flashlight and a candle for illumination, children cried from terror and despair. As the hours dragged on, the heat inside rose to an oppressive level. The makeshift ventilation system was inadequate for proper airflow. One of the air vents stopped working, and the children gathered together trying to breathe around the one air vent remaining. Many were coughing from the lack of fresh air, or vomiting amid the odors of urine and filth.

As the driver and children viewed with increasing alarm the horror of their situation, in the world outside they became the number one news story, pushing aside Jimmy Carter’s speech accepting the nomination for president at the Democratic Convention in New York City. One major news development was the discovery of the missing bus just before dark by an airplane doing an aerial search. Reporters found people who blamed the kidnapping on black radicals or anti-capitalist leftists. An anonymous person called the San Francisco Chronicle and said “Chowchilla, Weatherman,” obviously referring to a radical leftist group. A spokeswoman for New World Liberation Front, when questioned by reporters, denied that the group had anything to do with the kidnapping. The following day, a group of birdwatchers found children’s notebooks, shoes, clothing, and Frank Ray’s wallet and pants, on an embankment near Saratoga in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The discovery indicated that hippies dwelling in communes nearby might be responsible for the kidnapping.

Meanwhile, the people of Chowchilla prayed for their children. God heard their prayers, and a miracle occurred.

After some hours passed, the sound of shoes above the captives ceased. The kidnappers had apparently left the site. After waiting for what seemed an eternity, the oldest boy, Mike Marshall, age fourteen years, decided he was going to dig his way to freedom. The bus driver, who had already given up in hopeless despair, discouraged him from trying and told him that their time had come “to kick the bucket.” Mike refused to give up.

He kicked one of the box springs apart and found a suitable stick of wood, eighteen inches long. Piling up mattresses to reach the plate covering the hole in the ceiling, he dug and clawed around the plate. At last Ray and another boy came to help. Using all their strength, they pushed up on the plate and managed to open a gap sufficient to jam a stick underneath it. The gap was enough to enable continued digging. As they dug upward, increasing amounts of earth trickled down. Periodically the diggers doused themselves with water to keep from passing out in the suffocating heat.

Their efforts were finally rewarded when they saw a streak of sunlight and felt the fresh cool air. Continuing to tunnel upward, they moved the plate and opened a space large enough for a boy to squeeze through. It was 7 pm, and the sun was still up. He saw around him the heavy machinery of a rock quarry. It had been sixteen hours since they descended into their underground tomb. After climbing out, Ray and the children wandered around until they found a welder on a nearby elevator, who notified the police.

The quarry belonged to the California Rock and Gravel Company, near the city of Livermore in Alameda County, 95 miles north of Chowchilla. Since travel time from Chowchilla to Livermore was normally an hour and a half, the eleven hours on the road indicated the abductors used a roundabout way to get to the quarry.

Chowchilla trailer

Interior view of trailer.

Once they returned everyone home, law enforcement officials began collecting information. The bus driver remembered the last three digits of the license plate for the white van, 414. This corresponded with the license number 1C91414, obtained from an insurance secretary in Los Banos, Mrs. Mary Phillips. She had observed a suspicious white van parked in front of her Chowchilla office the evening of July 14. It was still in the same spot when she came back the following morning. At about 1:30 in the afternoon a second van identical in every way except in color parked next to the white van. A passenger got out and conferred with the driver of the white van for a few minutes. There appeared to be an exchange of money. Then the passenger climbed behind the wheel of the white van, and the two vehicles left the area and headed east on Highway 152. Before the vans drove off, Mrs. Phillips jotted on a piece of paper the license number of the white van. She gave this information to sheriff’s officers later that same day after hearing about the disappearance of the children and bus driver. 

The solid lead of the plate number enabled investigators to trace the two vans to a San Jose warehouse. An unidentified individual purchased them at an auction of military vehicles in Alameda on November 24, 1975. The trailer used to entomb the captives came from a moving and storage company in Palo Alto, purchased four days before the two vans. The man who bought it used the alias “Mark Hall,” and gave a non-existent address.

Thanks to information garnered from the driver and children, apprehension of the culprits was almost within reach. They were not, as initially believed, scruffy hippies or hotheaded radicals. Frederick Newhall Woods III, a member of one of California’s wealthiest and most prominent families, rented the San Jose warehouse where the two vans were found. He was also the owner of the rock quarry. His home was sixty miles from the quarry in Portola Valley, a lavish estate in San Mateo County – 100 acres of oak-studded rolling hills near Stanford University. Woods was a major stockholder in the Newhall Land and Farming Co., which had enormous investments in agriculture, cattle, oil, gas, and real estate. Its best-known asset was Magic Mountain, a popular and immensely profitable amusement park near Los Angeles. In May 1976, just two months earlier, it opened a spectacular rollercoaster ride called the Great American Revolution.

Newhall estate

Vehicles and buildings on the Portola Valley estate of Frederick Newhall Woods III.

Some sixty lawmen armed with riot guns, tear gas, and automatic weapons surrounded the family home in Portola Valley to search for evidence. Welcoming them graciously was an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Woods, the only persons around. As they searched, they gazed with curiosity at the dusty, rusting, second-hand vehicles lined up in rows among the buildings, including Malibus, Impalas, Thunderbirds, station wagons, jeeps, bulldozer, fire engine, red hearse, orange vans, school bus, tow truck, an Allied Van Lines moving trailer, vintage campers, police cars, police motorcycles, many in working order. These vehicles, numbering about a hundred, might have been used in other previously unknown criminal activities, according to a suggestion made by Mae Brussell on one of her programs [2]. Among the vehicles on the property was a World War Two-era truck-tractor that matched the buried trailer in the Livermore quarry. With the help of a bulldozer, it was used to pull the trailer out of the pit.

Chowchilla quarry

Truck-tractor found at the Portola Valley estate being used to haul trailer out of pit at the rock quarry

A search of the main house yielded a paper bag with the scribbled names of the twenty-six children and a ransom note demanding five million dollars. All totaled, from various locations searched, investigators piled up “an astronomical amount of physical evidence,” according to a spokesman for the Alameda County sheriff’s office. According to the Sacramento Bee and the Fresno Bee, at least seven members of a gun and drug cult, sons of wealthy San Mateo County families, were suspects in the hijacking of the school bus. Soon after this article appeared, the police took into custody three suspects:

(1) Frederick Newhall Woods IV, son of the quarry owner, 25 years old, 6 foot, 145 pounds, brown hair and blue eyes;

(2) James Schoenfeld, son of a podiatrist in Atherton, 25 years old, 6 foot, 170 pounds, red hair and blue eyes;

(3) James’ brother Richard Schoenfeld, 22 years old, 5 foot 11 inches, 150 pounds, blonde hair and blue eyes.

Whatever part these men had in the Chowchilla plot, if any, they were not the ones seen by Ray and the children. According to AP reporter Mike Dunston on July 26, “The victims’ descriptions of their abductors appeared quite different from the descriptions of the Schoenfeld brothers and Woods in an all-points bulletin issued Thursday night.… Investigators said some of the apparent discrepancies in the original descriptions can be explained, but they declined to offer an explanation.”

Chowchilla kidnappers

Left to right: Frederick Woods IV, James Schoenfeld, and Richard Schoenfeld leaving courthouse August 26, 1976.

Law enforcement officials assigned to the case got an earful from Mae Brussell, who pointed out to them that the suspects arrested lacked the specific details mentioned by the bus driver and the children – gray hair, glasses, tattoos, chipped tooth, hairy mole, foreign accent, shortness of stature. They tried to brush her off with superficially plausible explanations or evasive non-sequiturs. An assistant to the Alameda County Sheriff said the children were too young to give credible descriptions of people.

“What about the bus driver?”

“Oh, the bus driver? He has no concept of what was involved, or who was involved.” [3]

On August 2, the expiration of a gag order on evidence found at the Woods estate allowed sources within law enforcement to provide reporters of the Sacramento Bee and the Fresno Bee a few more specifics. The ransom note demanding five million dollars was signed, “We are Beelsabub,” a misspelling of Beelzebub, which is the biblical name for the devil. Several other documents contained “strange references to Satan,” and others were coded in Sanskrit. Also found were paraphernalia indicating an obsession with satanic ritual. The following day, Stan Bohrman, on the six o’clock news for a television station in San Francisco, reported on these same findings, but he went one step further by mentioning the Zodiac. He said, “The [ransom] letter found in the home of Frederick Woods resembled the writing of the Zodiac killer. The markings above and below the letter and references to the occult were on this letter.”

The importance of this information can be measured by how quickly it was suppressed. One hour after the letter was released, Judge Howard Green put a new gag order effective at that moment. Repeat broadcasts of Bohrman’s report on the letter scheduled for the seven o’clock and the eleven o’clock news were cancelled, Bohrman was fired, and the Zodiac connection made no further appearances in the news media. Except for updates on insignificant court matters from time to time, there was almost a complete news blackout on the Chowchilla case from that evening on. [4]

Since schoolchildren were a prime target of the Zodiac, the Zodiac-style markings on the ransom note is another clue to his participation in the hijacking of the Chowchilla bus. A comparison of the Zodiac on the left shows resemblance to a composite sketch made of the kidnapper wearing the hat and glasses.

Zodiac                          Zodiac Chowchilla

Heavy dark-rimmed glasses are a characteristic feature of the Zodiac. Bryan Hartnell, who survived an attack on September 27, 1969 near Vallejo, said the Zodiac was wearing a black executioner-style outfit. Over his hood, he had clip-on sunglasses and underneath the hood was another pair of glasses. The killer was about 5 foot 8 inches, light brown curly hair, possibly a wig, 26 to 30 years old, 195 to 200 lbs.

The composite sketch of the Zodiac wearing heavy, horn-rimmed glasses came from three teenagers who witnessed the murder of cab driver Paul Stine in San Francisco on October 11, 1969. They said he was about 25 to 30 years old, 5 foot 8 to 9 inches tall, heavy build, short brown hair.

Kathleen Johns saw the composite sketch of the Zodiac on a poster at a local police station in Patterson and recognized him as the man who tried to kidnap her and her baby on March 22, 1970. She said he wore black, heavy-rimmed, plastic-lensed glasses held firmly in place by a thin band of elastic around his head. He was about 30 years old, 5 foot 9 inches, 160 pounds, short dark hair, jaw “not weak”, dark windbreaker jacket, navy blue bell-bottom pants, military shoes highly polished. After surreptitiously disabling her car, he posed as someone trying to help and lured her and her baby into his own car. Alarmed by his menacing manner, she managed to get out of the car and escape with her baby at a freeway off-ramp. Four months later, the Zodiac wrote in a letter, “So I now have a little list, starting with the woeman + her baby that I gave a rather intersting ride for a couple howers one evening a few months back that ended in my burning her car where I found them.”

A man wearing black-rimmed glasses, overweight, 5 foot 8 inches, curly hair, neatly dressed, frightened Darlene Ferrin with his visits. [5] Mike Mageau, boyfriend of Darlene and survivor of the shooting on July 4, 1969, said that the shooter was about 5 feet 8 inches, “real heavy set, beefy build… possibly 195 to 200, or maybe even larger… short curly hair, light brown almost blond”, combed up in a pompadour style. Mageau further said he was not wearing glasses. Evidently, the Zodiac did not need them all the time.

Glasses of a similar type was a prominent feature in the Manson case. When Charles Manson announced to his followers at Spahn Ranch on August 8, 1969 “Now is the time for Helter Skelter,” he told Tex Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Susan Atkins, and Linda Kasabian to get knives and changes of clothes. Shortly after midnight, they entered the home of actress Sharon Tate at 10500 Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon and brutally murdered her and four other people. The following night the same four and two others killed Leo and Rosemary LaBianca at 3301 Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz Hills.

Originally, the police believed the slaughter at the Tate house was the work of one man. A clue to his identity was a pair of glasses found in the living room.  A lieutenant for the Los Angeles Police Department, Robert Helder, showed them to the press on October 23 and said that the killer probably lost them during the struggle with the victims. There were fingerprint smudges on it but no identifiable ridges. The owner was extremely near-sighted and could not operate a vehicle without them. An unusual feature was the plastic lenses. Unlike glass lenses, plastic resisted shattering and was the choice of very active people such as athletes. The amber-colored, horn-rimmed frames were of a specific type manufactured by the American Optical Corp. The customized bend of the temple shafts showed that the left ear was about one-fourth to one-half inch higher than the right. Police sent flyers to thousands of eye doctors, hoping that someone might provide information about the man who bought them. (The article Zodiac Killer at the Tate House has more details on the glasses.)

Glasses Tate House

Glasses found at the Tate house.

What the news media hailed as a major breakthrough in October quickly became an almost forgotten loose end in December after the arrest of Charles Manson, Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Linda Kasabian, none of whom wore glasses.

When the case came to trial, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi feared that defense attorneys might bring up the glasses and make the reasonable assertion that at least one killer was still at large. From that standpoint, they could argue that the wrong people were on trial. [6] Augmenting the effectiveness of this strategy would be to identify and locate the doctor who prescribed the glasses. That man, as will be shown below, was Dr. Victor Ohta, a wealthy ophthalmologist in the town of Soquel in the Santa Cruz area, 350 miles north of Los Angeles. As one of the state’s busiest eye surgeons, he specialized in the removal of cataracts. He and his family lived in a secluded mansion designed by Aaron Green, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, on a hilltop ten-acre site overlooking Monterey Bay.

On October 19, 1970, three days before the glasses came up during the testimony of prosecution witness Roseanne Walker at the Manson family trial, [7] Mrs. Ohta was driving her green Oldsmobile station wagon home at about 5:00 pm. Calvin Penrod, a sales manager for mobile home parks, who knew Mrs. Ohta, was driving in close proximity to her car and noticed she had three passengers, young people with long hair. Behind Mrs. Ohta in the back seat was a man with a moustache; next to him was a woman with straight, long black hair; and a second man sat in the rear compartment behind the back seat. As it shortly turned out, the three passengers were highly trained, well-prepared killers. At the house they bound, blindfolded, and shot from behind Dr. and Mrs. Ohta, their two young sons, and the doctor’s secretary. Then they set fire to the house. The fierce blaze attracted the attention of two sheriff’s deputies, who called the fire department. Firemen attempting to reach the scene found both driveways blocked, one by Dr. Ohta’s Rolls Royce and the other by the secretary’s Continental, with the ignition keys snapped off in both locks. By the time they could push the cars aside, the mansion had already suffered extensive damage. While looking for a source of water, they found five bodies in the swimming pool.

Ohta map

Map showing locations of the murder site and sightings of Mrs. Ohta’s car

On the windshield of the Rolls Royce was a note, typed on Dr. Ohta’s typewriter, declaring war against those who “misuse the environment,” presumably referring to the bulldozers used to cut a driveway on the steep wooded hillside and to clear off a place for the mansion. Signing the note were Knight of Wands, Knight of Cups, Knight of Pentacles, and Knight of Swords, figures represented on tarot cards. Pentacles is a five-sided figure associated with witchcraft and Satan. It appeared to be a note written by crazed hippies enamored with the environment and the occult.

Mrs. Ohta’s station wagon served as the getaway car, driven wildly, nearly running other cars off the road. Witnesses saw three long-haired people in the careening car. At a campsite in the Bonny Doon area, witnesses saw three long-haired people, one of them a woman, near the station wagon. The following day the car was about a mile inside the Rincon railroad tunnel. An off-schedule Southern Pacific switch engine banged into it at 4:45 pm. Someone had driven it into the tunnel and set the seat cushions on fire (a destructive act similar to what happened to Kathleen Johns’ car). The engineer put out the flames with a fire extinguisher and then used his engine to push the car out of the tunnel. The motor was still warm from recent use. Three sets of footprints led from the spot where the car was abandoned to outside the tunnel.

Mrs Ohtas car

Mrs. Ohta’s car at the entrance to the railroad tunnel

Alerted by a tip from “three long-haired persons” who provided the address of a woman who in turn gave directions to her husband’s tiny ramshackle hut in a wooded area in the Santa Cruz Mountains, sheriff’s deputies arrested John Linley Frazier, an auto mechanic who had dropped out of society and was living the hippie life-style. As soon as they took him into custody, the search for more suspects was discontinued. When newsmen asked District Attorney Peter Chang how one man could have bound, blindfolded, and shot five people with two pistols, a .38 and a .22, he said, “It sounds ridiculous, but it’s possible that it happened.”

image-1

Originally, Frazier denied killing the Ohtas. He said that three persons went into the Ohta house while he waited outside at the driveway entrance. He changed his story later, confessing to a psychologist that he killed the Ohtas single-handedly. The original story is probably the correct one, and his role that day was to serve as lookout.

According to a letter written by a woman who lived in Woodland Hills (near Los Angeles), Dr. Ohta was the man who prescribed the glasses found at the Tate house, and the owner was none other than the Zodiac himself. In late September 1970, less than a month prior to the Ohta slayings, she saw the Zodiac with Frazier in Woodland Hills. They “looked exactly alike” except that the Zodiac wore glasses. The implication is that Frazier was a Zodiac double. If he wore glasses, the resemblance would be greater. Pictures of Frazier at the time of his capture and all during his trial show him without glasses. However, a driver’s license photo released by the sheriff’s department shortly before his capture shows him wearing glasses. Perhaps he needed them to drive a car, yet the weird Zodiac-like appearance is certainly striking.

Frazier no glasses                       Frazier glasses

The author of the letter goes on to identify the Zodiac by his real name and said that he was a member of a white supremacist organization called the International White Guard.

Somehow a copy of this letter came into the possession of Mae Brussell. On July 19, 1976, she called up Sherwood Morrill, a documents specialist for the Bureau of Criminal Identification in Sacramento and chief expert on the handwriting of the Zodiac. She read the letter to him and stated her belief that the Zodiac was involved in the Chowchilla case. He was not a deranged man working alone, as commonly believed, but rather he was part of a group of extreme rightwing fascist killers. She urged him to be on the lookout for a ransom note and check it for Zodiac handwriting characteristics. (A few days later, newspapers reported the finding of a ransom note at the Woods house. Bohrman’s revelation of the Zodiac markings would not emerge until almost two weeks later.)

After speaking with Morrill, she called David Toschi, the detective for the San Francisco Police Department in charge of the Zodiac files. After reading the letter, she asked him if he knew the name of the man identified as the Zodiac. He said he did. As she continued to ask more questions, he became increasingly angry, rude, and hostile.

Brussell                                                                            Toschi

   Mae Brussell                                                                                          David Toschi

“We had that name five years ago” [1971].

Has he been cleared?”

“No, he has not been cleared.”

“Has he ever been arrested or called before a grand jury?”

“No, he has never been arrested or called before a grand jury.

“Have you asked him any questions about it?”

“No, we’re not asking him any questions.”

“Have you seen the composite sketch of the Chowchilla suspect wearing the hat and eyeglasses, who looks like the Zodiac?”

“Where did you see that picture?”

“On the front page of the San Francisco Examiner. Did you talk to the Chowchilla police department?”

“I am not involved in the Chowchilla case.”

“If the Chowchilla authorities and the Los Angeles authorities think the Zodiac might be involved, how come you have not thought of it?”

Toschi said they would never bring him in, and he had no interest in pursuing Brussell’s proffered lead. [8] (Five days later, his partner, Bill Armstrong, suddenly quit and transferred to the Bunco division, leaving Toschi to become the only San Francisco detective working on the Zodiac case. [9] The dispute between them might, or might not, have something to do with a Zodiac connection to Chowchilla.)

While relating these conversations on her Dialogue: Conspiracy program on radio station KRLB in Carmel, Brussell never mentioned the name of the woman who wrote the letter and only said that she lived in Woodland Hills and worked as a school bus driver. She did however reveal the name of the Zodiac – after an interval of four years. At the end of her program on September 21, 1980, she said:

[Next week I want to bring up] the death of Art Linkletter’s son. He was killed in an automobile accident. I have hinted many times and suggested through a letter that I have that went to a judge at the time of the trial of John Frazier for the killing of the Ohta family in California, that Robert Linkletter was the Zodiac. Now that he’s dead, I feel it’s safe that I can mention that I did call David Toschi, the chief [investigator assigned to the Zodiac case] of police in San Francisco in 1976 and talked to him about this. He said that they would never bring him in. They had this information, that they didn’t clear it, that they had no interest in pursuing it. It’s a subject that has to do with a massive entanglement of California violences. Mr. Toschi was later removed from the police department for forging letters of the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco. Now, I am not saying this is true, or not true. It will be interesting to see if the Zodiac letters, or that person, ever surfaces again. But next week I’ll read to you a letter that was sent to the judge about a group, of the white organization. It’s like the “Hooded Ones,” the Cagoulards in France, and it has to do with an organization of killers called the International White Guard. This letter to the judge at the time of the trial did mention Robert Linkletter. He was killed this last week in an automobile accident. No charges have been filed against the [driver who caused the] head-on collision. We’ll bring that up next week, because there isn’t time for the details. It has to do with Reagan and the California violences.

On September 12, 1980, Robert Preston Linkletter, son of television interviewer and Hollywood celebrity Art Linkletter, was at his apartment, where his mother came to visit him. An hour later, he got into his car, a 1979 Saab. With him was his lawyer, Charles Crozier. Shortly after leaving his apartment, as he was driving west on Santa Monica Boulevard near Thayer Avenue, Gracie Jones travelling eastbound in a 1976 Buick crossed the center divider and rammed head on into the Saab. Robert died an hour later at the Los Angeles New Hospital from chest injuries. His passenger, Mr. Crozier, survived the accident, suffering from rib and face injuries. Jones’ explanation was that a car made a U-turn in front of her, forcing her to swerve into oncoming traffic. In January 1981, she pleaded no contest to the charge of vehicular manslaughter and was given a year probation.

Linkletter family

The Linkletter family. Behind Art in the back are Jack, his wife Lois, Robert, and Dawn. In front are Diane and Sharon.

The letter that Brussell read on her program of September 28, 1980 was the second of two letters written by the Woodland Hills woman. Excerpts of the earlier letter appeared in an article on the front page of the Redwood City Tribune, Saturday, November 20, 1971.

RWC heading 2

RWC title

Below is the complete article:

Letter-Writer Links Frazier and ‘Zodiac’

By Duane Sandul, Tribune Staff Writer [10]

The Zodiac killer also was an accomplice of John Linley Frazier in the mass murders of Soquel eye surgeon Victor Ohta and four others on Oct. 19, 1970, a woman from Woodland Hills claims in a letter to the Tribune.

The woman, Mrs. Marie Vigil, asked the Tribune to forward the letter to Frazier’s attorney.

She said that Dr. Ohta once prescribed glasses for the Zodiac killer, sought for multiple murders in San Francisco. Mrs. Vigil identified the Zodiac killer as Robert Linkletter and said she saw Linkletter with Frazier before the Ohta murders.

She said she knew Linkletter as a man who has been killing since 1966 but declined to elaborate in a telephone conversation with the Tribune from her San Fernando Valley home. She said she had not intended her letter to become public information but as “confidential” to the defense.

James Jackson, attorney for Frazier, said last night the letter writer “probably is eccentric,” but that he would have an agent “check out the letter.”

“I’ve received seemingly wild letters before which indeed did help produce witnesses,” Jackson said. He added he had received other letters linking the Zodiac killer with Ohta.

The typewritten letter claims that the Zodiac killer also is one of the killers of Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas. Charles Manson and his “family” were convicted for those murders earlier this year.

When the Tribune spoke with Mrs. Vigil, she declined to discuss specifics “over the telephone.”

Frazier’s trial, shifted to Redwood City from Santa Cruz by order of the California Supreme Court, ended Wednesday. The four-man, eight-woman jury which must decide his guilt or innocence will begin deliberations Friday.

Frazier has pleaded innocent and innocent by reason of insanity.

Mrs. Vigil, who said she is over 50 years old, told the Tribune she had reported her information to police departments linking the Zodiac killer with Frazier although she wouldn’t say which police departments.

Sgt. Frank Witt of the Woodland Police Department told the Tribune police have no record of Mrs. Vigil filing a report with them.

Asked why she thought Frazier and the Zodiac killer are accomplices, Mrs. Vigil said, “Because they were together.” She added, “I’ve seen them; they were in Woodland Hills.”

She would give no further information about her acquaintance with the “Zodiac killer.”

Excerpts from the letter:

“I do have some information about the accomplice of Frazier. He is Robert Linkletter, one of the killers of Miss Tate, La Bianca never brought to trial here, the killer who lost one pair of glasses the night of the Tate killings.

“Less than one month prior to the execution of Dr. and Mrs. Ohta and three other people, Robert was with them here one Sunday pointing me out to them because I knew those glasses did belonged (sic) to him. Dr. Ohta must have prescribed them. A few days later, I was to see Robert again with Frazier driving a light-colored van, kind of old. Robert was driving, was also wearing a blonde wig and some round oversized glasses with pink lenses …

“If the two daughters of Dr. and Mrs. Ohta know of some connection with their father and Robert Linkletter, their lives are in danger …. [11]

“… This killer has been dropping bodies since 1966, a knife killing in Riverside he has admitted. He moves constantly from San Diego to the High Sierra killing here and there. He must believe the Law and Order is willing to cover up all of his murders

Sincerely,

Mrs. Marie P. Vigil” [12]

According to the above excerpts, Robert Linkletter had a discussion with Dr. and Mrs. Ohta on a Sunday in late September. Mrs. Vigil apparently was not part of this discussion but somewhere nearby, close enough so that Robert could point her out as someone who knew about the glasses at the Tate house. A few days later she saw him with Frazier.

The last paragraph says he “has been dropping bodies since 1966, a knife killing in Riverside he has admitted.” On October 30, 1966, Cheri Jo Bates, a student of Riverside Community College, was brutally beaten and stabbed to death. One month later, nearly identical typewritten letters were mailed to the Riverside police and the Riverside Press-Enterprise, titled “The Confession,” describing how he killed her. A third letter, handwritten, was sent to Cheri Jo’s father, Joseph Bates. It said, “Bates had to die, there will be more,” and it was signed with the letter “Z.” Going on an anonymous tip, Paul Avery wrote an article for the San Francisco Chronicle on November 16, 1970, linking the Zodiac to the Bates murder. Five months later, on March 13, 1971, the Zodiac mailed a letter to the Los Angeles Times acknowledging he had indeed killed Bates.

Avery further said in his article that a janitor found a poem carved into the bottom side of a desktop in the Riverside College library. [13] Its language and handwriting resembled that of the Zodiac. Titled “Sick of living/unwilling to die,” it was signed with the initials rh. It is possible that the h was originally an l. There are three h’s in the poem. The first two were made with a continuous motion without lifting the pen, and the descending part of the arch ends at, or near, the baseline. Unlike the first two h’s, the slight overlap of the left foot of the arch on the vertical line in the third h indicates a two-step operation. Furthermore, the termination of the descending part of the arch in the first two h’s have an assurance that is lacking in the third h, with the right side of the arch trailing hesitantly below the baseline. Since Sherwood Morrill saw distortion and disguise in the formation of letters in the letter to Joseph Bates, the initials at the end of the desktop poem might been subjected to the same treatment to disguise the writer’s identity.

First h                    Second h                      initials

Vigil said that Robert travelled constantly between San Diego and the High Sierra. In the second letter that will be quoted below, he is said to have sometimes stayed with his sister at Lake Tahoe and that he was a member of the Sierra Club. His parents often spent their weekends at a skiing cabin in Alpine Meadows.

Six weeks prior to the Ohta massacre, on September 6, 1970, Donna Lass, a nurse at the Sahara Tahoe hotel and casino, disappeared. Six months later, the Zodiac sent a postcard to the San Francisco Chronicle claiming responsibility for the nurse’s disappearance. The postcard was a collage featuring a scene from an advertisement for Forest Pines condominiums in Incline Village and pasted letters and texts from magazines including one that read “Sierra Club.”

Lake Tahoe postcard

Vigil wrote her second letter on November 21, 1971 to Judge Charles Franich, the presiding judge of the Frazier trial, forwarded through the Redwood City Tribune. [14] Apparently it never appeared in print, and its contents are only known through Mae Brussell. She read excerpts on two of her programs, sometimes word for word, sometimes paraphrasing, in order to leave out information she wanted to keep confidential. Below is one excerpt:

“The Los Angeles Times of today finally had a story about the trial and murder of the Ohtas and their secretary. You asked if I was certain it was John Frazier who was with Robert Linkletter. They were here in Woodland Hills less than a month prior to those killings. He looked exactly like Frazier, when they were arrested, except for one thing. He also wears glasses. About the van, there were two people in the car and it was Robert who was driving it. I do not recall something in the newspaper about that at the time.

According to Frazier’s original story, he drove a white van to the Ohta house where he met three persons. They went into the house, while Frazier stood in the driveway. After they came out, Frazier drove Mrs. Ohta’s car. Witnesses saw three people in the car. That leaves one to drive the white van. Probably on the following day, in accordance with Vigil’s letter, two people were in the white van and the other two were in Mrs. Ohta’s car as they drove toward the railroad tunnel.

I have some reason to believe that Robert was driving north just last Thursday. So if you are observant, you will see him snickering in the courtroom to see how his murders are done and taken care of. He is the man that John Frazier is trying to find at the rear of the courtroom. Does Frazier know about the organization of killers called the International White Guard? Does he fear his wife will be killed if he were to name Robert Linkletter and his father as being heavy in this honorable organization of killers?

 On the day “Robert was driving north,” Thursday, November 18, the court had gone into recess. Frazier apparently expected to see him prior to the recess. The Los Angeles Times article mentioned in the letter, dated November 21, said, “Frazier’s appearance in court seems strangely in contrast to the magnitude of the crime he is accused of. Much of the time, the 5-foot, 6-inch defendant sits slumped in his chair, turned from the judge and jury, focusing his soft hazel eyes impassively toward the rear of the sparsely occupied courtroom.”

Linkletter might have been in the back of the courtroom on Monday to hear the closing arguments. He might have been “snickering” as the jury convicted Frazier of mass murder on November 29. Ten days later, the same jury declared him legally sane, leaving the way clear for the judge to impose the death penalty on December 30. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment after the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty on February 18, 1972.

Robert was also identified as the Zodiac by his sister three days before her death. She had read his first message, that was partly coded. I never believed that she committed suicide any more than her brother-in-law, John Zweyer, did. He had been shot by Robert. These two  were witnesses the night of the Tate murders. John did turn down a bribe that was offered to him concerning the killings. These are the kind of killers that this state has been cultivating and nurturing.

Robert is 27. Sometimes he lets his beard grow. He wears a wig, and sometimes he looks almost bald. Within the past two years, I have seen him in all colors and wig lengths. I know him as Robert Linkletter and also as the Zodiac. I drive a school bus in Los Angeles, and I used to see him on Van Nuys and Ventura Boulevards. He sometimes waits for me on Ventura Boulevard, driving on my way to pick up some children from school. He follows behind and then moves to the side until he is sure I recognize him. Someone must know how smart he is.

He stays sometimes at Lake Tahoe with his older sister, who is a widow, and belongs to the Sierra Club, which is interested in the misuse of the environment.

This Robert, may I say, has the eyes and fingerprints that should be checked. Also I believe Dr. Ohta must have prescribed those glasses that were lost the night of the Tate murders.

A plea of not guilty by reason of insanity is no defense at all [referring to Frazier], because of the horror of those murders. They should convict everyone who is brought in before the courts.

 Zweyer

John and Dawn Zweyer

John Zweyer married Robert’s older sister Dawn in 1959 at the Westwood Methodist Church in Los Angeles. John was a lieutenant in the Air Force, serving as a public information officer at Stead AFB, just north of Reno, Nevada. After getting out of the Air Force, he and his wife moved to Hollywood where he became an insurance salesman. On July 15, 1969, he died of a gunshot wound to the head beside the swimming pool of their home while his wife was on the phone. The coroner ruled it as “a possible suicide.” Supposedly his failing insurance company was the cause of his depression. A more probable cause for his death was murder.

As read by Mae Brussell, the letter seems to say that Zweyer was a witness the night of the Tate murders. Probably while simultaneously reading aloud and condensing parts of the letter, she had accidentally conflated key sentences and obscured the original message. Perhaps what Vigil actually said was that Zweyer was a witness to the planning stage of the impending massacre, and his refusal to be silenced by a bribe was the reason he had to be killed.

On October 3, three months after her brother-in-law died, Diane Linkletter, a roving Hollywood reporter, left the doctor’s office in a cheerful mood. “Suicide seemed as far from her mind as the sun,” her doctor said afterwards. Later that night, at 3:00 am, her friend Ed Durston got a call from Diane asking him to come to her apartment, which was on the sixth floor of the Shoreham Towers in West Hollywood. He went there and found her to be “extremely emotional, extremely despondent, and very irrational.” Six hours later, while Durston was still there, she called Robert and told him she felt like committing suicide. He told her to calm down and said that he would be right over. Robert then spoke to Durston and asked if he could handle her until he got there. He said he could. For a few moments, Diane seemed to relax and even seemed cheerful. Then without warning, she rushed toward the kitchen window. Durston tried to grab the belt loop of her dress but could not prevent her from jumping out. Robert arrived on the scene shortly after the ambulance took her away. A private funeral service was scheduled for Tuesday, October 7, but Robert, his father, and his mother did not attend, having gone into seclusion at their cabin at Lake Tahoe.

According to Vigil, Diane Linkletter died because of what she knew about the Tate murders. She certainly had a connection to the Sharon Tate milieu. Her name was in the address book of Abigail Folger, one of the five victims killed at the Tate house. Diane’s live-in boyfriend of several months, Harvey F. Dareff, allegedly went to the Cielo house on August 8, shortly before the massacre, to buy or sell drugs. [15] A Los Angeles Police Department homicide lieutenant admitted to UPI reporter Vernon Scott, “Yes, Diane Linkletter knew Abigail Folger, and probably was an acquaintance of Sharon Tate.” Diane’s friend, Ed Durston, knew Polish filmmaker Voityck Frokowski, another victim in the Tate house. According to Vernon Scott, “Only one element ties the death of Miss Linkletter with the multiple murders in the canyon home of Miss Tate and her director husband, Roman Polanski – drugs.” The article again quotes the lieutenant regarding this Hollywood subculture, describing it as “a patchwork of peripheral celebrities such as Sebring and Miss Tate, offspring of movie stars and jet setters, hangers-on (Frokowski) and the cast-off children of the big rich. . . . The Hollywood-oriented 600 to 800 go in for bigger kicks, the eerie, weird and freaked-out. They are not militants, protestors or idealists. They groove to their own bag and stick together in the event of a bad trip.”

According to Art Linkletter, his daughter was going with a group that was experimenting with drugs and died from the effects of ingesting LSD. He blamed LSD advocate Timothy Leary and the music industry, particularly the Beatles, for fostering a tolerance for dangerous drugs. The drug-induced suicide version of his daughter’s death was later contradicted by the autopsy report. Coroner Thomas Noguchi said, “We have not been able to pick up any trace of lysergic acid, heroin, marijuana, any narcotics or alcohol in the body of Diane Linkletter at this time.”

Monti

The day after Diane’s funeral, October 8, Toni “Connie” Monti, apparently depressed by the death of Diane, took her own life with an overdose of pills, according to her husband Nick Monti. He said he and his wife were friends of Miss Linkletter. This was contradicted by Sheriff’s Lt. Richard Griffin, who said, “There was no indication she even knew the Linkletter girl.” Connie’s mother disputed the suicide version of her daughter’s death and said she never took drugs and would never consider taking her own life. Perhaps the true reason behind her death is the fact that she lived in an apartment across the street from Shoreham Towers at 1211 N. Horn Ave. From this vantage point, she might have seen Diane’s fatal plunge. An interesting coincidence is that Ed Durston also lived at 1211 N. Horn Ave. [16]

Untitled

According to Vigil, Diane identified her brother as the Zodiac three days before her death and read the “first message, that was partly coded”. Her discovery would have been several days after the slaying of a woman and the severe wounding of a man at Lake Berryessa on September 27. The weekend following Diane’s death, the Zodiac killed cab driver Paul Stine in San Francisco on October 11. The “first message, that was partly coded” had a 408-character cryptogram and was sent to three newspapers in the San Francisco Bay area on August 1. Three days later, a Vallejo newspaper dated August 4, printed the contents of a letter mailed to the San Francisco Examiner, which said, “This is the Zodiac speaking,” the first time the Zodiac name become public. Four days later Manson sent four of his followers to the home of Sharon Tate. Linkletter was also at the Tate house that fatal night and somehow lost his glasses. As mentioned earlier, the right temple stem of the glasses found at the Tate house was lower than the left. A picture of Linkletter showing both ears appears in the Minnesota Star Tribune on November 19, 1965. Since newspaper editors sometimes reverse pictures for various reasons, I have taken the liberty of changing the picture to an alternative orientation. It shows the right ear lower than the left.

RL 1965 front view

Robert Linkletter was born in San Francisco on October 15, 1944. He was a “free-spirited, curious explorer,” according to his brother Jack, very capable of designing and making things. As a teenager, he built his own electric guitar, when his father refused to buy him one. He went to Santa Monica City College, where he acted in a musical comedy. His goal was to become a theater arts major at the University of Southern California and then become an actor. Instead of going to college, he became the guitarist for a surfing music band, called the Cornells. From December 1962 to November 1963, the band released four singles and one record. In May 1963, it appeared on a television show called “I’ve Got a Secret.” Their secret was “We’re all the sons of Hollywood celebrities.”

Linkletter went into the Air Force, spending some time in Australia. During the last six months of his enlistment, he was at Sheppard Air Force base in Wichita Falls, Texas. At that time, war protest songs such as Barry Maguire’s “Eve of Destruction” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” were becoming popular. Linkletter believed such songs, put out by “radical nuts,” had a depressing effect not only on military morale, but also on the nation as a whole, even to the extent of causing the Watts riot of 1965. He also hated “long-haired freaks” like the Beetles. When he left the Air Force in October 1965, he began a nationwide tour singing songs with a “positive” outlook, speaking out against war protesters, and urging people not to give in to the demoralizing influence of those dominating the pop music field.

RL 1965

From Detroit Free Press, November 26, 1965

Linkletter was a prolific inventor, with many patents to his credit. His best-known invention was the childproof safety cap for bottles containing medications. After his death, his father set up “Robert Linkletter Associates” to promote the safety cap and placed as its head Charles Crozier (the attorney who was with Robert in his fatal crash). In 1983, the company was expected to produce eight billion caps for the pharmaceutical industry.

A search of the newspapers.com website shows no pictures of Robert for the six years following November 1965. Then on December 13, 1971, his picture appeared in the Los Angeles Times – smiling like Cesar Romero playing the Joker in the TV series Batman. The accompanying article said he had joined the board of trustees for Los Amigos del Pueblo, a citizen’s group dedicated to preserving and restoring historic landmarks of the Old Plaza, the birthplace of Los Angeles.

RL 1971

The timing of this odd picture is interesting. On January 25, 1971, a jury found Manson and his female co-defendants guilty of murder. Defense attorney Paul Fitzgerald brought up the eyeglasses during the closing arguments at the trial, but no attempt was made to identify the owner. Neither was the owner identified during the trial of Tex Watson, who was convicted of murder on October 13, 1971. In 1971 detective David Toschi became aware of Linkletter but never questioned nor arrested him. In July of 1971 Donald Cheney told Manhattan police that his friend Arthur Leigh Allen used the name Zodiac and said he liked to kill people. Allen then became a prime suspect in the Zodiac case. On December 9, 1971, a jury found Frazier legally sane, which meant either the gas chamber or life imprisonment. Considering the favorable outcome of these related events, it is no wonder that he is smiling.

In September 1980, a few days before his fatal accident, Robert attended a social event at the Westwood Methodist Church in Los Angeles. Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark (cousin of Prince Philip, married to Queen Elizabeth) bestowed the Commander Cross of Merit on General Omar Bradley [17] and Michael DeBakey, a heart surgeon, and on Alice Tyler, the honor of Dame of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. She was the widow of John C. Tyler, one of the founders of Farmers Insurance Group. In 1973, she established the prestigious Tyler Ecology Award to honor individuals who had done significant work in preserving the environment (such as Russell Train, President of the World Wildlife Fund). Included with the article was a picture of Robert Linkletter congratulating Mrs. Tyler. The caption read, “This is the last photo of Robert Linkletter before his tragic accident a few days later . . . He was a favorite of Mrs. Tyler.” [18]

RL and Mrs. Tyler

Robert Linkletter mingled easily among the rich and powerful. He was also a man of many talents – singing, acting, guitar playing, inventing useful things. It is hard to believe that he could be the Zodiac. Yet the letters of Marie P. Vigil, corroborated by Mae Brussell’s interview of David Toschi, indicate that he was. The letters further show that he participated in the slaying of the Ohta family, and that he worked with the Manson family in murdering people at the Cielo and Waverly residences. As a member of the International White Guard, he would have been simpatico with Charles Manson, who believed in the superiority of the white race.

For those who believed in equality of rights regardless of skin color, the emergence in 1975 of a civil rights advocate for president offered a bright future. Governor Jimmy Carter from Georgia had received the endorsement of many black leaders. His principal rival was George Wallace, who was making his fourth run for president as a Democratic candidate. Despite health problems, Wallace’s role as spoiler looked promising until he suffered a setback at the Florida Democratic Convention in Orlando on November 16. A straw ballot poll of delegates gave Carter a whopping victory over Wallace. White supremacists must have seen the handwriting on the wall and believed they needed to do something to stop Carter’s march to the White House. Conceiving the diabolical idea of kidnapping a school bus, they began making arrangements by purchasing a trailer on the 20th of November and, four days later, two vans.

The Democratic National Convention of 1976 was notable for heartfelt demonstrations of racial inclusiveness. It opened on July 11 with a rousing speech by Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman to be the keynote speaker, and it closed on July 15 with a fiery benediction by Martin Luther King, Sr., which led delegates to join hands in an emotional finale, singing “We Shall Overcome.” The seizure of the school bus in Chowchilla was deliberately timed to coincide with the evening when Carter would make his acceptance speech. It effectively stole the news media spotlight just when he needed it most. His staff lost many opportunities for news updates, sound bites, and interviews with reporters to kick off the campaign. Another feature of this plot was putting the blame for the kidnapping and possible murder of twenty-six children and their bus driver on black radicals and radical leftists. The racial harmony that prevailed at the convention would dissolve in the aftermath into an ugly display of dissension and finger pointing. What saved Carter and the Democratic Party from a ruinous debacle was the unforeseen use of a piece of wood to prop open the plate so that the captives in the trailer could tunnel their way to freedom.

Just as in 1972 a piece of tape on a hotel door fundamentally changed the politics of the country by bringing down a president and his administration, so a short piece of wood prevented the overturning of a dynamic movement toward a more integrated society in 1976.

Sources

  1. Much of this article came from newspaper articles too numerous to cite individually. To find sources, go to newspapers.com or newspaperarchives.com and use their search engines.
  2. Dialogue: Conspiracy, July 26, 1976 at 16:20. This and other programs are accessible at the Worldwatchers Archive website.
  3. Dialogue: Conspiracy, August 2, 1976 at 34:30.
  4. Dialogue: Conspiracy, August 9, 1976 at 07.20; September 13, 1976 at 00.58; and July 11, 1977 at 34:30. On his popular late night television show in Los Angeles, Stan Bohrman interviewed Raymond Broshears, a friend of David Ferrie, who said he met a “Bert” who turned out to be Clay Shaw. Shortly after this interview, the television station fired him. In 1975 he interviewed the brother of Manuel Pena, a key figure in the police investigation of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. According to the brother, Manuel Pena was in the CIA.
  5. Graysmith, Robert, The Zodiac, Berkley Books, 1987, pp. 17-19.
  6. Bugliosi, Vincent, Helter Skelter, W.W. Norton and Co., 1974, pp. 106, 109, 380. On May 26, 1970 Paul Fitzgerald, defense attorney for Patricia Krenwinkel submitted a formal motion charging that the police and district attorney investigators were withholding from the defense photographs of the location of the glasses in the Tate house. Seven months later, on December 28, Fitzgerald mentioned the glasses during his final argument, saying that the person who owned those glasses was the true perpetrator of the crime. This argument proved unavailing, for on January 25, 1971 the jury found all four defendants, Manson, Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel guilty of first degree murder.
  7. According to the testimony of Roseanne Walker, she and Atkins heard a newscast about the glasses in October 1969. Susan’s comment was “Suppose they found the person. Wouldn’t it be too much if they found the person that owned the glasses? The only thing they were guilty of was dropping a pair of glasses there.”
  8. Dialogue: Conspiracy, July 19, 1976 at 27:50; July 11, 1977 at 34:30; July 14, 1978 on side one at 05:58; September 21, 1980 on side two at 23:41; and September 28, 1980 on side two at 03:18.
  9. Graysmith, Robert, The Zodiac, Berkley Books, 1987, pp. 197.
  10. One daughter, Taura Ohta, “committed suicide” by taking an overdose of pills and asphyxiating herself with carbon monoxide in her garage on May 27, 1977. Dr. Ohta’s mother, Aiko Ohta, age 78, “committed suicide” by hanging herself in the bathroom on December 5, 1979. The other daughter, Lark, is still alive but lives in seclusion, according to the website Santa Cruz Ghost Hunters.
  11. Duane Sandul was a reporter for the Redwood City Tribune and the San Mateo Times until 1985. He then became a public relations consultant for the Port of Redwood City for 30 years. When he retired in 2016, he moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. I was able to contact Mr. Sandul by telephone. When asked about the article, he said he has no memory of writing it nor of any of the details mentioned in the article.
  12. A search of the internet shows a Marie P. Vigil, who at one time lived at 20412 Lander Drive, Woodland Hills, died at the age of 98 in Fort Myers, Florida on November 11, 2015.
  13. Graysmith, Robert, The Zodiac, Berkley Books, 1987, pp. 170-173.
  14. Dialogue: Conspiracy, July 14, 1978 on side one at 12:03 and September 28, 1980 on side two at 03:18.
  15. “Second Homicide Investigation Progress Report” on the website vdocuments.net.
  16. Ed Durston was implicated in another mysterious death, that of blonde actress Carol Wayne who appeared as the “Matinee Girl” on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. They were in Mexico in the resort town of Manzanillo for a vacation. She disappeared, and he returned to Los Angeles. Three days later, her bloated body was found in Santiago Bay. The official version was that she accidentally drowned while swimming, even though she was deathly afraid of swimming. Mexican police believed she was murdered but were never able to question the mysterious Durston. From John Austen, Hollywood’s Greatest Mysteries, S.P.I. Books, 1994, pp. 87-99.
  17. Omar Bradley was chairman of the board of Bulova watches from 1958 to 1973. On June 4, 1968 twenty-three Bulova salesmen were in the Ambassador Hotel the night Robert F. Kennedy was shot. Two of the salesmen might have been CIA agents. From Shane O’Sullivan, Who Killed Bobby? Sterling Publishing, 2008, pp. 471-474.
  18. Los Angeles Times, supplement section, October 19, 1980.

Author: William Weston, researcher of conspiracies for over 25 years. Among articles written are “On the Death of JFK: Spider’s Web at the Trade Mart” and “The USS Indianapolis Conspiracy.”

Zodiac Killer at the Tate House

Ecofascist Zodiac

Ecofascism is a movement that calls for repressive, coercive, even violent measures to solve complex ecological or environmental issues. Additionally, ecofascists insist on the purity of the white race as an essential component in a healthy environment. Tom Metzger, a typical ecofascist, said “The best interests of the environment will meld into the best interests of race. The health of the race and the health of the environment will be one.” (Source: Voices of Terror, 2004, by Walter Laqueuer, p. 482) 

Robert Linkletter was both a racist and an environmentalist. A letter written by Marie Vigil to Charles Franich, presiding judge of the trial of John Frazier, accused murderer of the Ohta family, points out that Linkletter was a member of an extremely violent white supremacist group.

Does Frazier know about the organization of killers called the International White Guard? Does he fear his wife will be killed if he were to name Robert Linkletter and his father as being heavy in this honorable organization of killers?

In the same letter, Vigil wrote:

He stays sometimes at Lake Tahoe with his older sister, who is a widow, and belongs to the Sierra Club, which is interested in the misuse of the environment.

The Sierra Club is a conservation group headquartered in Oakland, California. Although widely touted as a progressive organization that aggressively defends the natural environment against the encroachments of capitalist greed, it nonetheless has white supremacist roots that go back to its founding in 1892. Wilderness champion and founder of the club, John Muir, made derogatory remarks about blacks and indigenous peoples. Early leaders such as Joseph LeConte, a UC Berkeley professor of geology and botany, and David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University, argued in favor of forced sterilization of black people in order to preserve the integrity of the white race. Jordan wrote a collection of essays, Blood of the Nation: A Study in the Decay of Races by the Survival of the Unfit, in order to bring the eugenics movement to the attention of a mainstream audience. It was not until July 2020 that the executive director of the Sierra Cub made an announcement repudiating the racism of the founders. 

Likewise, the Save-the-Redwoods League, another California conservation group, passed a resolution in September 2020 denouncing the racism of its founders. Established in 1918, its three founders were: John C. Merriam, a noted paleontologist at UC Berkeley and founding member of the Eugenics Education Society; Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who believed  that a proper application of eugenics could preserve the Nordic or Anglo-Saxon Race; and Madison Grant, a lawyer and zoologist from New York, who believed that the Nordic race was inherently superior to all other races and advocated the sterilization of “undesirables” and “weaklings.” As president of the Bronx Zoo, he put Ota Benga, a member of the Mbuti tribe kidnapped from Congo, on display in a cage with apes in 1906. Grant’s best-known work, The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History, written in 1916, expounds on the primacy of race, the worship of modern science, the subordination of the individual to the state, the need for positive and negative eugenics, and the connection between eugenics and animal husbandry.

A great admirer of Madison Grant was Adolf Hitler. He wrote him a letter thanking him for writing The Passing of the Great Race and declared it to be “my Bible.” (Source: The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kuhl, p. 85) Indeed, Hitler’s own book, Mein Kampf, has many passages that seem to have been directly inspired by The Passing of the Great Race (Source: Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant by Jonathan Peter Spiro p. 357).

Many high-ranking officials of the Third Reich were enthusiastic and committed environmentalists. Although military and public necessities demanded significant increases in technological development and industrial capacity, Nazi rulers nevertheless made serious efforts to contain and curtail the consequent deleterious effects of factory sprawl and pollution. They proceeded to reduce the amount of  hazardous chemicals commonly used in agriculture, implement programs to protect forests and wildlife, and seek renewable sources of energy. One of the great triumphs of engineering in the twentieth century, the construction of the Autobahn, was overseen by Reichsminister Fritz Todt an “advocate for the landscape,” whose task was to preserve environmentally sensitive areas as much as possible. He and his assistant Alwin Seifert were “radical ecologists” who dreamed of a “total conversion from technology to nature.” Hitler himself was very interested in non-polluting energy sources and could speak authoritatively and in detail on the advantages and challenges of hydropower, wind power, and tidal power.

An important book that discusses this subject is Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, published in 1996 and updated in 2011. The authors show that Nazi “ecologists” like Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, and Walther Darré made forest and water conservation, organic farming, vegetarianism, opposition to animal vivisection, herbal and homeopathic medicine, and other related themes the hallmarks of their Blood and Soil (Blut und Boden) ideology. Visionary Nazis could discern a mystical connection between ‘blood’ (the race or Volk) and ‘soil’ (the land and the natural environment). The Jews, they believed, had to be kept apart from the Volk, because they were a rootless, wandering people, who lacked a true appreciation for uncontaminated landscapes and undisturbed eco-systems (Source:  Ecofascism, p. 23).

Marie Vigil said that the Sierra Club was “interested in the misuse of the environment.” These words were meant to remind Judge Franich of a similar phrase that appeared in a typewritten note that was left by the real murderers of the Ohta family (and not the accused standing trial, John Frazier).

Halloween, 1970

Today World War 3 will begin as brought to you by the People of the Free Universe. From this day forward anyone and-or company who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the People of The Free Universe. I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom, against anything or anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die or mankind will.

Knight of Wands, Knight of Cups, Night of Pentacles, Knight of Swords

Wands, cups, pentacles, and swords are four suits in a Tarot deck. Each suit has a knight. The third knight in the above signature line lacked the initial k to form the ominous word “night.” The word “pentacles” refers to a five sided symbol used in witchcraft to summon the devil or his servants. 

Apparently, environmental maniacs went on a rampage, because Dr. Victor Ohta chose a scenic area of the Santa Cruz mountains to build his mansion. The true reason, however, was to wipe out any witnesses, who could reveal the identity of the owner of the mysterious, horn-rimmed glasses found at Sharon Tate’s house the morning after the murders. Dr. Ohta was the ophthalmologist who prescribed them.

Aerial view of hills near Soquel showing proximity of the Ohta house and Frazier property

In the months before and after the slaying of the Ohta family, a Zodiac look-alike named Lawrence Kane was operating at Lake Tahoe (a recreational area on the border of California and Nevada, where Robert Linkletter and his family often went). Kane was middle-aged, 5’9″, 160 pounds, stocky build, pudgy stomach, short brown hair receding slightly at the temples. He wore plastic horn-rimmed glasses. He was well-spoken and had a business-like appearance. He was the one who kept pestering Darlene Ferrin in Vallejo, California, shortly before she was killed by the Zodiac on July 4, 1969. The following year he followed a young nurse named Donna Lass from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe and stalked her until her disappearance on September 6, 1970 from the Sahara Hotel and Casino in Stateline, Nevada.

Kane had a habit of approaching single women in a restaurant and engaging them in a conversation about the signs of the zodiac. He was obsessed with murder and death. He looked deeply into the eyes of Mary Hylander and frightened her with a chilling prophecy that she would “die by water.” He gave her a self-help pamphlet on how to make her dreams come true. On the inside front cover of the pamphlet he had written his name and address: Kent Williams, General Delivery, Stateline Post Office, South Lake Tahoe, CA.

On March 22, 1971, the San Francisco Chronicle received a homemade postcard featuring a newspaper sketch of a condominium development in Incline Village on the north side of Lake Tahoe. Words cut from newspapers were pasted over the sketch, including “Sierra Club,” “sought victim 12,” “peek through the pines,” and “pass around Lake Tahoe.”  The cross hair symbol of the Zodiac appears on the bottom right. Above it in the top right quadrant is a hole, made by a hole punch, that seems to indicate the demise of the next victim on an enumerated list.

Ray Lauritzen, Chief of Police of South Lake Tahoe, publicly declared his belief that there was a connection between the Zodiac’s postcard and the disappearance of Donna Lass. He sent detectives to Incline Village to look for clues, but they failed to find anything. Because of heavy snow, the police discontinued their search until after the ground was clear.

In 1974 Harvey Hines, a police officer from Sonora, California investigating the Zodiac Killer, went to the South Lake Tahoe Police Department to find out what progress they had made in their search for Donna Lass. It turned out nothing was done since that trip to Incline Village three years earlier. They seemed to have a surprising lack of interest in the case.

Hines went to the Sahara Hotel and spoke to people who worked on the casino floor, in the restaurant, and in the management offices. He asked if there was anyone who showed a particular interest in Donna and might possibly be involved in her disappearance. Three women, each of whom requesting anonymity, broached the same name: Larry Kane. They said that he recently left his job and apparently moved away to some unknown location.

The police department allowed Hines to see their file on Donna Lass. It contained two reports of witnesses who came to the police shortly after the publication of the Sierra Club postcard. One concerned the aforementioned Mary Hylander. The other came from an unnamed woman. Both gave descriptions of a creepy astrologer who exactly matched the description of Kane given by witnesses at the Sahara Hotel. The only difference was that the astrologer used the name “Kent Williams,” not Larry Kane.

The file also contained a preliminary report that said that the name “Sierra Club” on the postcard referred to the Clair Tappaan Ski Lodge about 60 miles northwest of South Lake Tahoe and 35 miles west of Incline Village. The manager of the lodge was Kent Williams, the same name that Larry Kane used as an alias. Hines was amazed that no one from the police department or the sheriff’s office had gone to the lodge or contacted the manager.

According to an obituary, Kent Ellis Williams was born January 31, 1930, in Redwood City, California. He trained as a medic in the Army during the Korean War and attained the rank of lieutenant. He was later selected to attend the Army Language School in Monterrey, California where he studied Arabic. He and his wife Patricia (Hudnell) transferred to Germany, where they had a home in Heilbronn. There he and his wife “warmly welcomed a few of their old Language School friends who had also been assigned to Germany.” At the end of his Army tour, the couple moved to the Bay Area and lived there for several years. In 1969 the Sierra Club hired them to manage the club’s ski lodge at Lake Tahoe. After seven years, Kent left his wife and returned to San Francisco. There he worked for the Oceanic Society (an organization started in 1969 to preserve marine wildlife and habitats) and for a time he served as a drug and alcohol counselor for the Henry Ohlhoff House. He died August 25, 2021 in Palo Alto from a chronic heart condition.

The Clair Tappaan Lodge was named after a prominent leader in the Sierra Club who died in 1932. Over the next two years volunteers built the massive, rustic, three-story structure near the tiny community of Norden (about eight miles west of Donner Memorial State Park, where an ill-fated pioneer wagon train was stuck in snow during the winter of 1846 to 1847). It became a popular place for club members who liked to ski. With the coming of spring and the melting of snow, the lodge was reserved for club directors, their families, and friends to socialize and to go on organized hikes and climbs.

Hines went to the lodge to see what he could find out. When he discovered that the physical description of the real Kent Williams did not match the description of Kane, he dropped him as a potential suspect. 

Several years later Hines met with the ex-wife of Kent Williams, who was still living in the area of Norden. She told him about a curious discovery that was made on or near the property of the lodge.

In August 1976 Otto Fredericks, a retired postmaster of the Norden post office, was hiking on a trail past the lodge going northeast toward the Donner Ski Ranch when he discovered a ritualistic configuration of sticks and stones. A circle of wood fourteen feet in diameter enclosed a six-foot square of wood. Inside the square was a triangle of three sticks. Inside the triangle were thirteen stones arranged to form a cross. So intriguing was the design that Fredericks took pictures of it.

Cross-and-triangle configuration found by Otto Fredericks

The Rosicrucian figures were northeast of Clair Tappaan Lodge, probably somewhere near Lytton Creek. The lifts for Donner Ski Ranch are south of Lytton Lake.

Hines met with Fredericks, and together they went out to see it. Convinced that it was the burial ground of Donna Lass, he reported the find to the police. Exhibiting interest at first, their interest faded when they learned that it was out of their jurisdiction. The county sheriff’s department manifested only a remote interest in the find.

Hines returned to the site and, with the help of an employee of the lodge, dug to a depth of four feet. Their efforts yielded a pair of woman’s sunglasses but nothing more.

The significance of the symbols was explained in a letter by Dave Peterson:

When the symbols were described to me by Hines (I had been covering and investigating the Zodiac case since 1969 as a Vallejo Times-Herald police reporter now retired) I was able to identify them as symbols used by the Rosicrucian Society and pictured in their literature. The triangle and cross represented the Deity, although the society is not a religious organization. It calls itself an international mystic association and teaches astrology.

The use of Rosicrucian symbols by Zodiac confirmed my earlier discovery that Zodiac was a disciple of Aleister Crowley. He was a renegade Rosicrucian who led a breakaway cult called the Golden Dawn and was a notorious black magician.

Zodiac’s “killing hood” at Lake Berryessa displayed a crossed circle similar to Crowley’s ritual hooded robe featuring another crossed circle, the Rosy Cross of Rosicrucianism.

Cross and triangle of Golden Dawn Study Journal

Apparently, the Clair Tappaan Lodge harbored devotees of Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn. 

A Rosicrucian symbol – a rosy red crucifix – appears on a postcard sent by the Zodiac Killer to the San Francisco Chronicle on October 5, one month after the disappearance of Donna Lass and two weeks before the slaying of the Ohta family. Above the cross is the number 13. On the right side are thirteen punched holes. Evidently, Lass managed to elude the spot reserved for “victim 12,” but failed to escape becoming number 13. 

A similar tally of murdered victims appears on a cupboard door at Spahn Ranch: “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ALL GOOD CHILDREN go to heaven?”  The Manson Family were avid listeners of the Beatles and got the nursery rhyme from the ending refrain, repeated seven times, of the song “You Never Give Me Your Money” from the album Abbey Road, released in the UK on September 25, 1969 and in the US on October 1, 1969. The numbers represent five victims at the Tate house and two more at the LaBianca house.  

The Zodiac Killer wrote an abbreviated version of the rhyme in mirror reverse form on the envelope of a letter he sent to a television station in Los Angeles on May 2, 1978. The abbreviation “AIC” might stand for the return address “Anaheim in California” which was where the envelope was postmarked. Or it might (also?) mean “CIA” in reverse. The Beatles Apple logo is in the bottom left corner.

May 2, 1978 envelope

Channel Nine Letter. A full view of the letter can be seen at Tom Voight’s site here.

The cupboard door at Spahn Ranch had a misspelling of Helter Skelter: “HELTER SCELTER coming down fast.” The phrase comes from another Beatle song, “Helter Skelter,” which was on the White Album released on November 22, 1968 (the fifth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy).

Well, look out! Helter-skelter
She’s coming down fast
Yes, she is
Yes, she is
Coming down fast.

“Helter Skelter” became the code name for a domestic terrorism operation aimed at starting a race war between whites and blacks by killing rich white people and blaming the murders on the blacks. Charles Manson was a racist, who etched a swastika into his forehead. According to Jeff Guinn, author of Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, “Charles Manson was one of the most virulent racists that ever walked the planet.” Manson read Nietzsche, believed in the master race, and told his followers that Hitler was “a tuned-in guy who leveled the karma of the Jews.”

Like Robert Linkletter, Manson  was a devoted environmentalist. He conceived an ecological belief system called ATWA, an acronym for Air, Trees, Water, Animals. These are the forces of nature, Manson would say, which must be kept in balance in order to preserve the ecological harmony of the Earth.

In September 1975, about a week after Lynette Fromme attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford, another Manson follower named Sandra Good made a proclamation that “The International People’s Court of Retribution” was going after rich capitalists who were polluting the environment, cutting down the redwoods, manufacturing aerosol sprays, and so on. She released to the Associated Press a list of 74 corporation executives guilty of harming the ATWA and therefore worthy of violent death. She said that executives of “Exxon, ITT, Standard Oil, lumber company executives, Gulf Oil, must get out the country, or you’ll be killed.” Three months later, she and another ecofascist Susan Murphy were arrested for conspiring to mail 171 threatening letters to businessmen and government leaders in their fervent campaign to protect the ecology of the planet. On April 13, 1976 a judge sentenced Good to fifteen years in prison and Murphy five years.

Sandra Good (left) and Susan Murphy (right) arrive at Federal Court building in Sacramento for sentencing.

That same day, April 13, ecology was the theme of another article in the Los Angeles Times. Art Linkletter, chairman of the Tyler Ecology Fund’s board of governors, was the main speaker at an annual event bestowing an ecology award of $150,000 each on Dr. Abel Wohlman and Dr. Charles Elton, men noted for “conferring the greatest benefit on mankind in the field of ecology and improvement of the environment.” The event was held in the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and was attended by some of the most illustrious people in Los Angeles.

The Tyler Ecology Award was established by Alice Tyler as a memorial to her late husband, John C. Tyler, the co-founder of Farmers Insurance. Dr. Abel Wolman was given the award for his pioneering work in the use of chlorine to kill germs and parasites in municipal water supplies. Dr. Charles Elton, a British zoologist, was the author of the classic work Animal Ecology. His most notable achievement was finding more efficient methods of controlling the populations of rats, mice, and rabbits. Due to an illness that kept Dr. Elton from making the trip to the United States, Dr. Richard Miller of Yale University accepted the award for him.

Alice Tyler’s stature as a benefactor for environmental causes brought her a special recognition. Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, grand chancellor of the Sovereign Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem of Denmark, came to Los Angeles to officiate at the investiture of Mrs. Tyler as Dame of the Order. Also honored at the ceremony was heart surgeon Michael DeBakey and General Omar Bradley, who both received the Commander Cross of Merit. The Order was founded in 1164 during the reign of King Valdemar the Great. Originally it controlled the Island of Rhodes, then it moved to the Island of Malta. After Napoleon defeated the Knights of Malta and took the island, the Catholic Knights retreated to Rome and became the Knights of Malta. The Scandinavian Knights went back to their homeland to become the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.

The ceremony took place on September 4, 1980 at the Westwood United Methodist Church. Among those attending was Alice Tyler’s close friend, Robert Linkletter. A picture of them greeting each other had the caption: “Robert Linkletter a few days before his tragic accident. He was one of her favorites.”

The next picture shows Prince Peter and Alice Tyler at the reception in the Grand Trianon Room of the Beverly Wiltshire Hotel. 

Prince Peter on the left, Alice Tyler, with Fernando Flores leading the toasting song.

Prince Peter was a first cousin of Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth. Born in Paris in 1908, he had families ties to both the Greek and Danish monarchies. He went to the University of Paris where he got a law degree and he went to the London School of Economics where he got a doctorate in anthropology.

When the Germans invaded Greece during the Second World War, the King of Greece and the royal family fled to Cairo, Egypt. Prince Peter was an aide-de-camp for the king and had the task of reorganizing remnants of the Greek army to fight alongside Allied armies in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy.

British foreign service documents released by the public record office show that Prince Peter was a politically dangerous troublemaker in league with “discontented right-wingers” who were undermining the Allied war effort against the Nazis. An August 19, 1999 article for The Guardian by Alan Travis entitled “Prince Philip’s cousin ‘subverted war against the Nazis’” said that “Prince Peter, at one time second in line to the Greek throne, was regarded as ‘a constant source of trouble.’ He later made an unsuccessful attempt to become King of Greece.” Senior foreign office officials wrote in January 1943:

The general impression is that Prince Peter is a focus for intrigue by displaced or discontented rightwingers, who obviously think he has direct access to the King. Apart from the troublemaking aspects of his character, Prince Peter lacks the solid qualities of the King and Crown Prince. He made an essentially foolish marriage. To sum up, Prince Peter is a disturbing element in the Middle East, and his transfer elsewhere would be in the interests of the Greek war effort.

After the war, he and his wife Irene, a White Russian emigre, settled in Kalimpong, India, where he became an anthropologist studying the people and culture of Tibet. Kalimpong is a town in the state of West Bengal near the border of Tibet. He became an expert on the Tibetan custom of polyandry, or the practice of a single woman having multiple husbands.

The prince would have liked to conduct his field work within the country of Tibet itself, but the government repeatedly denied his requests for entry. Perhaps it feared that he was really a spy serving American interests. A newspaper column by Francis X. Norton dated April 4, 1959 said,

“the Communist press in India cried that Kalimpong, in Northern India at the border of Sikkim, the little kingdom which separates Tibet from India, was being used as a foreign subversive base against China. They claimed that Prince Peter of the Greek Royal Family, long settled in Kalimpong in pursuit of alleged “anthropological studies,” was the key foreign figure whose continued stay was not in the interests of Sino-Indian relations. It was actually headlined at this time that the “Foreigners Plan a Second Hungary in Tibet,” and “the American lobby was operating in Kalimpong with the obvious objective of bringing about a Hungary in Tibet against the Chinese government.” 

The Hungarian Revolt, instigated by the CIA and Hungarian ex-Nazis, was still fresh in the minds of people reading Norton’s column. The uprising lasted 12 days before being crushed by Soviet tanks and troops on November 4, 1956.

Among Prince Peter’s tasks were to collect Tibetan scripts for the Danish Royal Library and to take bodily and facial measurements. He accumulated data on 5000 Tibetans. His fascination with Tibet might have sprung from the same occult sources that inspired Heinrich Himmler to send an expedition of five scientists to Tibet in 1938. Their mission was to find descendants of the Aryan race in Shambhala and Agharti, to seek hidden subterranean cities beneath the Himalayas, and to make contact with the guardians of secret occult powers, especially vril. Although they failed to find subterranean cities and adepts with occult powers, they did find among the Tibetan ruling class those who had Aryan characteristics. The anthropologist of the team, Bruno Beger, used eye color charts, made face masks, and applied calipers to measure skulls, noses, ears, and eyes in order to determine racial characteristics of 376 people. He believed that he found “Europid traits” in the people he examined. The methodology that Beger used was the same one used by the Prince of Greece in the post-war years.

Since the fall of the Third Reich, the link between environmentalism and racism has for the most part remained unbroken. In the United States, government and private corporations have not hesitated to put onerous ecological burdens on non-whites. In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice published an influential report that showed that hazardous waste facilities were disproportionately located in minority communities and called this “a form of racism.” The environmental movement, the report observed, “has historically been white middle and upper-class.” The situation has not changed over the intervening years. An article in the New York Times, April 28, 2021, “People of Color Breathe More Hazardous Air,” said that a new study found that black people are exposed to more pollution from every type of source, including oil refineries and chemical plants. It further said that they are exposed to greater-than-average concentrations of a dangerous form of fine particulate air pollution, which is responsible for 85,000 to 200,000 excess deaths a year in the United States. A 2003 United States Commission on Civil Rights report concluded: “It appears, therefore, that minorities attract toxic storage and disposal facilities, but these facilities do not attract minorities.”

A 1990 study revealed that non-whites were less than 2% of the combined 745 employees of the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council (N.R.D.C.), and Friends of the Earth. Fred Krupp, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund, said: “Environmental groups have done a miserable job of reaching out to minorities.” The situation improved slightly by 2014, when a study revealed that non-whites occupied 11% of leadership positions in environmental organizations.

A long overdue reversal of this dismal situation occurred in 2020 when the Sierra Club and the Save-the-Redwood League both repudiated the racism of its founders. Executive director Michael Brune said that the Sierra Club once excluded people of color and catered to middle- and upper-class whites. He further said, “For all the harms the Sierra Club caused, and continues to cause, to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color, I am deeply sorry.” He then pledged to begin rectifying environmental and racial injustices. This is certainly a step in the right direction.