Original subtitles

How do you feel?

Really nervous.

- Why do you feel nervous? - I've...

'Cause I feel like I'm betraying someone that I cared about for a long time.

My sister and my brothers' lives were molded by him.

They are who they are because of him.

My siblings and I, we called him Mr. Allen.

I'll never forget the first time seeing him at the pool.

He was this big, heavy dude

that was just a clumsy kind of oaf.

But when he got on that dive board,

this transformation would happen.

You would swear he was a primo ballet star.

He would do stuff that nobody else could do.

I was just filled with pride. I was real proud to know him.

I really thought I knew him.

But I didn't.

If there was any information that we had that could help...

that would be what it's all about, really.

You know, you've got people that are close to you

that can lie so easy.

He hid behind us. He hid behind my mother.

You know, the families of the victims should know.

They have to know the whole story. They need to know if he was this person.

I feel like I'm betraying him, but he needs to be told on.

San Francisco apparently has a mad killer in its midst.

Since last December,

five persons have been murdered in the San Francisco area.

He calls himself Zodiac.

American law enforcement had never seen anything like this.

Before the Manson murders, Gacy, or the Golden State killer,

there was the Zodiac case.

Zodiac was different.

He got away with it.

He goes around killing people,

by rope, by gun, by knife.

And he says, "I'm gonna call myself Zodiac."

To add to the troubles of Bay Area police,

a person or persons who calls himself Zodiac

has made his presence known.

He's mailing letters and ciphers full of violence and threats.

He was terrifying.

This guy is just a killer, a mad killer,

and you have no motives.

It turned into a public obsession.

When you think about all the TV shows, the books, the movie.

I'm Robert Graysmith, at the Chronicle. I was wondering if I could buy you lunch.

I don't think there's anybody else that was there.

I was there.

Fifty years from now, we'll be talking about this case.

It's the case that will never die.

What haunts me is not knowing what might have been missed.

Why couldn't we catch him?

Somebody out there knows something.

We were just kids, but knowing now what we know now,

I'd have preferred to leave it in a box, hidden away, and never seen it again.

But my brothers convinced me

that very few people even knew about our family.

I asked him if he was the Zodiac.

He told me, "If I told you that, I'd have to kill you too."

The very beginning of 1961,

my mother enrolled us in the Santa Rosa Elementary School

in Atascadero.

I was in fourth grade.

Connie was third grade,

and Don was either kindergarten or first grade.

My brothers and me, we did everything together.

We were The Three Musketeers.

We were kind of scared because our last name being Seawater,

all the kids thought it was hilarious.

First day of fourth grade,

I remember we came around the corner, and I could see in the classroom.

The principal said, "This is your new teacher, Mr. Allen."

There's Mr. Allen, and there's me.

He was just a huge man, and the first male teacher I'd ever had.

He just was so nice and so friendly.

When I met him, I was... I was in awe.

He was like the Hoss Cartwright off of Bonanza.

Great, big, burly, smiley, friendly.

A few months after we moved to Atascadero and we started school,

Mr. Allen started tutoring me.

It would be too late to be walking home alone,

and so he started giving us rides home.

That's when he met our mother.

My mother had six children and soon to be seven.

She really had her hands full.

I think he knew our background.

He knew our father was in the state hospital.

He knew we had no father with us.

When I was seven and a half, maybe eight,

I had a friend staying the night.

I was telling her

that I didn't always like what my daddy did to me,

and she told me, "Daddies don't do that."

"They don't do that."

When I turned my father in, they made me go to court,

and it was pretty scary for an eight-year-old.

His excuse was he was teaching me to be the best wife anybody ever had.

And, uh, they locked him up.

My father was arrested and sent to Atascadero State Hospital.

They considered what he did was an offense of bad brain behavior,

and they felt like they could get you in there

and put you through group sessions and cure you.

My mother was alone.

She started having Mr. Allen over for dinner.

He'd be in the kitchen helping my mother get stuff together.

Mr. Allen would bring desserts and sodas for the kids.

Usually, he'd bring like a flower or two for my mother.

He hated his picture taken.

My mother was a picture taker.

Mr. Allen just endeared himself to us really quick.

And he treated us like royalty, like his own kids.

We thought he was just the best.

Those were the good years.

The last day of class,

right before Christmas break, was December 20th.

Vallejo was a small town. So, what did you do?

You had a boyfriend, you got a car in tenth grade,

and you'd go make out.

You had a choice of three places.

You could go to St. Catherine's Church or Blue Rock Springs.

But Lake Herman Road was... There was nobody out there at all.

It was a road you shouldn't really be out on.

Kids would go out there to race.

Take your cars up to 125 miles an hour and race on the back road.

A bunch of us were at somebody's house for a slumber party.

The morning that we woke up, on December 21st,

all we were thinking about was, "What's our day gonna be like?"

"Where will we have breakfast and what are we gonna do?"

My friend walks in with the newspaper.

Five, four, three, two...

Then she says, "Betty Lou Jensen was killed last night."

Killed on Lake Herman Road.

Lovers' Lane.

There was a picture of the door open and Betty Lou's body up in front.

It was horrific.

And I'd just seen her the day before.

Sergeant, could you briefly describe

what apparently happened last night?

Yes. We had a double homicide that took place out on a county road

sometime after eleven o'clock last night.

Victims were a 16-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy.

The boy was shot right at the side of the car,

and the girl apparently tried to run.

You have any idea

what the possible motive might be for this killing?

We have no motive at this time.

The freaky part, somebody knew the area well enough

to know that this is where people went if you wanted to be alone and not be seen.

They really had no leads.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

It was the Fourth of July in '69.

I was 16.

My sister Darlene was 22, and she was a new mother.

Fourth of July, they had a lighted boat parade down by Mare Island.

So I said, "Will you take me? She said, "Okay, sure."

We were on this boat. You know, you got fireworks.

And it was good. We had fun.

After that, we also stopped by Terry's.

She was a waitress at Terry's,

which was a really big coffee shop in Vallejo.

Customers loved her.

But she was off that night.

When we walked out of Terry's and got in the car,

a guy came over to the car,

and I don't remember what he said or what he even looked like.

I didn't know him.

When we got home,

Darlene did her best to beg my dad

to let me go and light off some fireworks at her house.

She was my big sister.

She always was so much fun.

But my dad said, "No. She's had enough excitement for one night."

So I hugged her and kissed her goodnight, and that was it.

And she was gone.

I was woken up a couple hours later by my dad crying.

He said, "It's your sister, Darlene."

I was just... You know, I was thinking, "Man, I..."

"I just spent a wonderful evening with her."

"Why is she gone?" You know? I didn't understand that.

He just told me that she was with Michael Mageau.

He was just a friend from Vallejo.

He told me they were parked at a golf course.

Just thought it was a cop pulled up behind her.

She rolled the window down.

My dad said that he had a flashlight shining into their eyes.

They were blinded.

And he just started shooting.

Mike flipped into the back seat

'cause he was shot in the knee and the mouth.

But he was laying there, and I guess he crawled out of the car.

And the killer shot some more.

Mostly in her.

I went to the morgue.

I saw her laying out on a slab.

She looked beautiful.

Like nothing was wrong. Like she was just sleeping.

I gave her a kiss, told her I loved her,

and that... and that I'm gonna find out who did this.

At that time, I was in my mid-twenties.

I was working for the San Francisco Chronicle,

and I was the political cartoonist.

Every day at ten o'clock, we'd go into the conference room.

I take the elevator upstairs, as usual.

Crank, crank, clank, clank, clank. It goes up to three stories.

Then you have to press the secret button code.

And we go inside.

That day, our secretary comes into the room.

And she says, "I got this strange letter."

This is the murderer of the two teenagers

last Christmas at Lake Herman.

And the girl on the Fourth of July.

She opens it up. It was terrifying.

To prove I killed them,

I shall state some facts, which only I and the police know.

First, girl was wearing patterned slacks.

Second, the boy was also shot in the knee.

Third, brand name of ammo was Western.

In the letter, he also sent this cipher.

Oh my goodness. It's crazy.

I want you to print this cipher on your front page

by Fry afternoon, August 1st, 1969.

If you do not do this, I will go on a kill rampage.

Of course, the publisher is just going crazy.

"Oh my God. Call the police."

I'm trying to look at it and write it down.

It's a challenge.

We have to crack it.

And I got hooked immediately.

I will cruise around and pick off all stray people

or couples that are alone,

then move on to kill some more until I have killed over a dozen people.

He signs "circle crossed."

This cipher has three parts.

He sent it to three newspapers, and they all decided to publish it.

The Chronicle's circulation just went through the roof.

He took over everything. That's all people talk about.

The whole Bay Area turned in.

No one could crack it.

Two schoolteachers, Don Harden and his wife,

sit down to work on the code.

They thought the word "kill" would be in the cipher.

So they looked for double L's. And they break that cipher.

I like killing people because it is so much fun.

It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest

because man is the most dangerous animal of all.

I will not give you my name.

Because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife.

That's pretty scary.

But the police didn't believe the letter came from the killer.

They said, "Okay, prove it."

So he does.

"Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking."

This is the first time he uses the name "Zodiac."

"In answer to your asking for more details

about the good times I've had in Vallejo,

I shall be very happy to supply you with even more material."

One of the things about Zodiac we noticed,

he would misspell words and then spell them correctly.

But he always used good English.

He knew the difference between "shall" and "will."

Last Christmas, in that episode,

the police were wondering how I could shoot and hit my victims in the dark.

What I did was tape a small pencil flashlight

to the barrel of my gun.

All I had to do was spray them as if it was a water hose.

There was no need to use the gun sights.

The whole thing was...

People were scared to go out.

I got detectives in my classroom, sitting in the back of the room.

It made Vallejo feel

like a much more dangerous city in general.

I was always thinking somebody was coming.

The kids were all scared.

Maybe he was somebody that I did see that night.

I've had 11 years patrolling this lake,

and I've seen a lot of people cut up by boat accidents and this,

but this is one of the worst things I ever witnessed.

For no reason at all.

Just a hooded man came up with a pistol drawn on them,

tied them up, and told him he had to kill them.

About the worst I ever seen, kids chopped up,

real nice college kids just stabbed for no reason at all.

I never witnessed anything like it before.

Cecelia Shepard and Bryan Hartnell,

both in their early twenties,

were sitting on this knoll of land overlooking part of Lake Berryessa.

They thought they were alone.

But there was a third man on this knoll,

a man who wore a medieval-style executioner's hood,

carried a knife and gun, and intended to use them.

So, what happens is he stabbed...

And I don't even want to talk about it, but stabs them.

Astonishingly, Bryan survives.

At the beginning, I did think I was going to die.

He had this black hood on, just little slits in the eyes,

and these clip-on glasses,

they were clipped into those little loops.

In my investigations, I talked to Bryan.

He said his hands were trembling.

The lengths of rope, it's actually nylon clothesline,

are pre-cut.

He's wearing these strange shoes, military combat boots.

I saw that little sketch that Bryan Hartnell did,

and I drew my own version.

He has a logo.

He's in this costume with the square hood. This guy's deadly and scary.

But before he leaves, Zodiac goes to their car.

He goes to the side that's away from the road,

and he writes the time and the date and what happened.

He also writes the dates of the other murders.

And then he draws the symbol.

We talked to a number of people here in the Napa area,

and there's quite a bit of fear.

People are walking around looking over their shoulder.

This is a man who you don't... None of us really understand,

and he might stop now, and he might continue.

I'm not personally afraid of my life.

They've got such tight security at this hospital.

There would be more chance for the average person

walking down the street.

Berryessa is isolated.

There were only ten people on that entire 25-mile peninsula.

The day of the killing,

one particular man was given a ticket for speeding.

The policeman says, "Why is there blood on your seat?"

He says, "I used the knife to kill a chicken."

"Oh, okay." That's it. "I believe you." That's it.

So he drives off.

It's a guy who lives in Vallejo.

Arthur Leigh Allen.

He had been skin diving in the area where that murder had taken place.

Mr. Allen was an amazing swimmer.

Whenever we would be with him, he'd be around the water.

Mr. Allen would dive for clams.

We'd sit there on the beach and wait for him.

We'd follow him down there,

and he'd have a wetsuit on that he made himself.

We'd watch him go out there. Incredible.

He'd go out there in these big waves and just be bobbing.

He'd disappear.

And we'd wonder, "Where'd you go?" You know?

I was in awe of his skills with swimming and diving.

Everybody at the pool knew that he was a state champion platform diver.

And I felt lucky that he was my swim coach.

He taught me how to dive.

He made me a Farmer John type of top

so that when I'd belly flop or hit my back on the water,

it wouldn't sting.

He taught me not to be afraid to do things.

For my siblings and I, he was Mr. Allen, the teacher.

It's hardwired into my brain forever.

I remember one of the first things Mr. Allen did.

He wrote the alphabet on the board

and then asked, you know, "What kind of sign goes on A?"

And somebody would go, "Oh, a circle. A circle."

"Oh, what sign do you want for B?"

"Oh, a squiggle."

In the classroom,

he taught us how to take codes apart and decipher letters and messages.

He started us with a grid,

by putting the letter A in the upper-left corner

and then putting the letters in order across rows.

You would create a matrix

where you could identify one of the squares using two numbers.

And so, for the first half of the year,

I think it was every Friday,

we would be given a cipher, and we would have to decode it.

He was just trying to teach us that there were other ways

to go about communicating.

He collected animals, and then bring them back to the class.

Lizards, a frog that he called Forg.

That's the way he was.

He would just change the names of things to just make you think outside the box.

And if we'd be doing studies, there would be music in the background.

He was a music freak.

He'd play "Tom Dooley."

♪ Hang down your head, Tom Dooley ♪

♪ Stabbed her with my knife ♪

That's how we got to know the Kingston Trio.

We didn't know that kind of music until he was playing it for us at recess.

And he would also play The Mikado.

♪ As someday it may happen That a victim must be found ♪

♪ I've got a little list! ♪

♪ I've got a little list! ♪

He would dance and sing along and just go all over the room.

After the murder at Lake Berryessa,

two weeks later, the Zodiac came to San Francisco.

This wonderful cab driver,

Paul Stine, who's a student,

picks up this guy

standing in front of a smoke shop next to a theater.

He gets in the cab,

and he tells him exactly where to take him.

And he commits this terrible murder.

He's in the back seat, gun against the head, whole thing.

But he's not leaving.

He goes around, he's pulling off pieces of a shirt.

He wipes the cab down with the shirt to get blood on it.

Two witnesses in the house across the street

saw him walking up the block.

And there's a police car coming. He could have been caught any second.

He goes up and he turns the corner.

The officers, they saw him.

They stop him.

"Did you see anybody do this?" they say.

"Yes, he's gone that way."

The police said, "Thank you for the help."

So he goes up and he turns the corner.

And he's gone.

A mere two days later,

I was in the Chronicle, drawing cartoons.

The publisher flings open the door. "Oh, look, guys, letter."

My God. We didn't go to the Zodiac, he came to us.

This is the Zodiac speaking.

I am the murderer of the taxi driver,

and did in the people in the North Bay area.

This bloody shirt belonged to the latest victim, the cab driver.

Zodiac mailed a small piece of it with his letter.

Handwriting analysis of a foreboding letter

indicates the writer is the same man who's committed five murders.

One here, three in Vallejo,

and one in Napa over the last ten months.

A composite drawing sketched from witnesses' descriptions

has been widely publicized.

Police Captain Martin Lee

read to reporters the Zodiac's latest threat.

"Schoolchildren make fine targets."

"I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning."

Oh!

"Just shoot out the front tire

and then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out."

At the bottom of the letter, the killer's signature,

the sign of the Zodiac.

Captain, what kind of a man are we talking about?

He appears to have no conscience at all,

no remorse for anything that he does.

There is no one suspect

that we're focusing on at this time.

He made a threat against children.

"Schoolchildren make nice targets."

Our kids are going to school. Oh, I hate this part.

My son rode that bus. That was terrifying.

Police cars trailed the bus.

Airplanes flew overboard following it.

Of all the things that he threatened, that's the one that people took.

And they took it seriously, everybody.

The case just took on a legendary status.

The next thing I know, Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong,

these are the two toughest, most famous policemen in the city,

they're in my city room.

Dave Toschi with his bow tie.

He's got charisma, he's got good looks.

The movie Dirty Harry was based off him.

So it just took on a legendary status.

How far along are you?

Does this latest communication do anything for you?

We are going under the assumption

that it is a communication from the man known as Zodiac.

So, here's my office. Well, it's technically the Art Department.

And we see all of this going on, and I'm trying to listen.

At the present time,

my partner and I are being literally swamped at our desk

with communications from the entire Bay Area.

Everyone was paranoid at this point.

Over 1,000 suspects were looked into.

In a case of this magnitude, we stay on top of it as much as we can.

What I learned is that these killers, they get comfortable,

and as they gradually believe in their own skills

and outwitting the police, they spread out.

Well, our guy spread out to San Francisco.

The Zodiac Killer seems to crave publicity.

When this guy hailed Paul Stine's cab,

he's in front of the theater

which was eventually playing The Mikado.

Well, here's the weird thing.

The Mikado is quoted in a letter the Zodiac writes.

♪ As someday it may happen That a victim must be found ♪

♪ I've got a little list! ♪

I've got a little list

of society offenders who might well be underground,

who would never be missed, who would never be missed.

He was trying to emulate the Lord High Executioner.

He has this wicked sense of humor and he's highly intellectual.

Coordinating the hunt for a psychotic mass murderer.

San Francisco apparently has a mad killer in its midst.

Unfortunately, the police believe The Zodiac Killer will try and kill again.

His chilling allusions to future slayings are being countered with an intense drive.

You don't walk around here at night?

No, no, no.

I will not come out at night.

No, I'd be kind of afraid, really.

In San Francisco,

two more communications have been received.

There was also a greeting card.

It said, "Sorry I haven't written sooner. I just washed my pen."

The murderer said he is so lonely he could do his thing.

I thought you would need a good laugh before you hear the bad news.

You won't get the news for a while yet.

P.S. Could you print this new cipher on your front page?

The new letters from The Zodiac Killer

were sent to the city room of the San Francisco Chronicle.

One of the letters is seven pages long,

and in it, Zodiac brags he's killed seven people.

He has demonstrated a hostility toward police.

Now we are "blue pigs."

The death machine is already made.

What you do not know is whether the death machine is at the site

or whether it is being stored in my basement for future use.

Have fun. By the way, it could be rather messy if you try to bluff me.

So now he's talking about making bombs.

There was such a fear.

This case, it touched everybody I knew,

in a city I love.

The letter says, "You'll never catch me." I'll show you, buddy. I'm gonna do that.

I wanted to see if there was anything that the police might have missed.

I couldn't let go.

I spent ages driving around to all the crime scenes,

trying to find something.

My friend once asked me, "What do you do when you're through with work?"

Well, like everybody, I go sit in front of a suspect's house.

You know, 10:00 at night.

I'm not good at puzzle solving,

but I don't give up.

They did something really unusual at Vallejo Police Station.

They take me into this big room with all the drawers,

and I'm facing the drawers.

And then the policeman says, "Oh, I think I hear the phone."

Or, "I have to go somewhere. You stay here."

I'm like, "Sure."

Clap my hands, I'm just sitting there, waiting.

He comes back, looks sort of displeased. "I have to go again."

And then I realize I'm supposed to open the drawers.

He's offering me everything.

So I would memorize, memorize,

and I'd run across the street,

and I'd buy a big chicken dinner,

and I'd eat it while I'm trying to remember every single word.

Then I reversed, and I started giving them stuff,

which is a major part of the David Fincher movie.

I've been doing research on the first cipher.

Everything an amateur would need to create it can be found in these books.

During my investigation, I'd read this book on psychology.

It said almost any of these killers,

they wanna find out what's going on, and they say things or they wanna help.

I went to Dave Toschi, and I said, "All these suspects..."

I mean, 2,500 at one point.

"Did any of these suspects ever offer to catch Zodiac for you?"

"How can I help?"

And he goes, "Only one."

And he leans over, pulls out the bottom drawer,

reaches in.

Up comes a white envelope.

He opens it.

"Sorry I couldn't help you catch your man. Arthur Leigh Allen."

Exactly. And I said, "He's your guy. He's gotta be."

The summer of '61,

Mr. Allen asked our mother if he could take us for a field trip

in his blue Austin-Healey.

I mean, she had a bunch of kids.

She was really overwhelmed.

I'm sure she was happy as heck

to get three of her monsters off her hands for a while.

I was like nine or ten, and we were thrilled.

He had several cars. He used to let us steer the car.

I sat on his lap.

I steered this big old car while he's guzzling his beer.

He cheered me on every time I made it past something without hitting it.

The gear shifter was right in between my knees,

so I learned how to shift that way.

He took us on all kinds of trips like that, that summer.

That summer, we would go to the movies.

Mr. Allen would take us to see documentaries on whales,

different animals, mostly Disney.

Just had a good old time.

Even when we were in Mr. Allen's class,

we got the sense that it was, you know, an informal relationship.

He did everything he could to be gentle because he was always so big,

and certainly towering over fourth graders.

The way I saw him, he was soft-spoken

until you ticked him off.

Like maybe we didn't listen or do what...

And then he would get a little loud, but nothing out of the ordinary.

But... Mr. Allen was really smitten with David's sister, Connie.

He really liked her.

He was always showing around, putting his arm around her,

giving her hugs and trying to make light of it.

David, he would make comments like, "Hmm. Mr. Allen really likes my sister."

I realized, yeah, probably some of the things he said and did

may have been improper.

Mr. Allen paid different attention to the girls than the boys.

He would occasionally compliment girls

in a way I thought was a little over the top.

He would address the prettier girls as "My beautiful..." then give the name.

Somebody said, "He was grooming you."

And I'm going, "I know nothing about that kind of stuff."

I didn't even know what "grooming" meant.

But then that freaked me out.

That, "Oh my gosh, did they really do that?"

And then thinking about it,

he'd put his arm around me and give me a hug.

He used to take me home from school sometimes.

Him and my dad were Navy vets, so they talked about Navy all the time.

It's like, why else would he come to your house all the time

and talk to your dad?

But that, to us, just seemed normal.

This is the Zodiac speaking.

By the way, have you cracked the last cipher I sent you?

My name is...

I have killed ten people to date.

It would have been a lot more, except that my bus bomb was a dud.

Have the ciphers, the symbols, and the letters themselves

been of any use to you to this point?

No, we haven't been too successful. We've had them out with experts.

The latest one we had, oh, six months ago,

when he sent us a cryptogram, was never broken.

But I see in his latest letter that he has said he's killed ten,

but he didn't specifically state that they happened in San Francisco.

At the Chronicle,

we were working every day on the Zodiac case.

We get this call one day.

This sheriff, he and his men believed that a murder in 1963 was the Zodiac's.

I thought, "What are the odds on this?"

It was senior ditch day.

My fiancé and I were supposed to go with Linda and Bobby to the beach.

Linda was one of my best friends.

She was going to be my maid of honor.

She called me and said,

"Hey, it's ditch day, why don't we just go to the beach?"

And we said, "Okay."

We were getting ready to go,

but then my fiancé, who was older, couldn't get off work,

and so we didn't go.

And Linda and Bobby went by themselves.

In the morning, my mother came in and woke me up.

Bobby's mom was on the phone.

They wanted to know if I knew where Linda and Bobby were.

Told my mom, "I know where they went."

There was a beach that we always went to

between Gaviota State Park and Refugio State Park.

Some people refer to it as Tajiguas.

It was a beautiful beach. It's secluded.

We drove to the location, and there was Bobby's car.

The sheriff walked up the creek,

where there was a shack that somebody had built,

and there was Linda and Bobby.

They found the shell casings.

They found twine.

It had been pre-cut to tie them up.

They were pulled to the shack.

He had laid Bobby's body down and laid Linda's over the top of his.

Had cut her bathing suit open.

The sheriff told my dad, "You don't want to see this."

All I could say was,

"But... But she just helped me pick out my wedding dress."

"How can this be? How can it... How can this be real?"

When we all started to go down there,

I thought, "Oh my God, this has to be..."

"It's so similar, it's beyond belief."

Always students, always about to graduate,

usually near water, usually it was a holiday.

He chases them, catches them.

It's every single piece.

They're tied, the pre-cut lengths of rope.

Like he's gone into the future and read everything that happened

at Lake Berryessa.

He's got a .22.

The same as the Lake Herman Road case.

That's when I realized this was a rehearsal.

This must be The Zodiac Killer.

At the end of the school year in 1963,

Mr. Allen showed up at the house

and wanted to know if we wanted to go with him to the coast,

and he was gonna go diving.

We took off south on the 101.

He had this other car.

It was a big primer-black car that just hauled ass.

It was just an incredible feeling.

When I got in that car, I was happy as a clam.

Beautiful sunny day,

and we were just cruising along, looking at the ocean.

We went down the coast a ways,

and then we pulled into Lompoc Military Commissary.

Mr. Allen was in the Navy before he was a teacher.

So he had PX privileges.

He goes into the PX

and comes out with a couple of bottles of beer under one arm.

And in the other hand, he had two boxes

that looked like cardboard boxes about that big,

and had metal configurations on each corner

holding the boxes together.

Mr. Allen got back in the car,

went down through Gaviota Pass,

and stopped at a place called Tajiguas Point.

We had been there before with him.

We had gone down and played on the beach.

But this time he told us to stay in the car.

And he got out, opened the trunk.

I was looking through the back window, and then he closed the trunk,

and whatever was in his hand, he walked away with.

There's a trail that goes down the bluff.

He goes down the hill alone.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure we stayed in the car,

on his way.

As soon as he got out of sight, we were out of the car.

We were messing around.

We got to play on the tracks for a long time.

My brother Donnie was putting rocks on the railroad track.

And I'm telling him not to do it

because the train's gonna come and derail and kill us all.

Mr. Allen may have been gone maybe an hour or less.

And then he comes climbing back up the bank of the bluff.

When he came up,

he was huffing and puffing, in a big hurry.

When he got up where I could see him, I saw something on his hands.

And I saw it was red.

So, being a little girl,

I ran over and grabbed a rag and was trying to help,

but he actually shoved me over.

Shoves her away,

and he gets her away, and he wipes himself off,

and puts something in the back of the car.

He was in a hurry.

He got in the car really fast.

And I asked him why he was bleeding.

We took off like a bat out of hell.