A reporter’s thank-you note from a Zodiac suspect

As mentioned here a month ago, a former CHP officer has a new book suggesting that the 1960s Bay Area serial killer known as the Zodiac is still alive, 90 years old, and living in Solano County. Although the crimes were never solved, another man by the name of Arthur Leigh Allen, who died in 1992, has for years been referred to as the prime suspect in the case. Interest in Allen flared again after the 2007 movie, Zodiac. And today, Lance Williams at California Watch, who inherited the Zodiac beat from the late Paul Avery while a reporter for the old San Francisco Examiner, reveals that he once got a thank you note from Allen after writing about him in 1991, when police in Napa quietly reopened the case the year before Allen’s death. An excerpt:

By Allen’s account, they even seized a letter that he said he had received from state investigators, reporting on the results of the polygraph and absolving him of the Zodiac murders.
”No way in hell could I go out and kill innocent teenie boppers – no way,” he told me, referring to the Zodiac victims shot at a lover’s lane. “But with (the police), I’m guilty until proven innocent, and I figure the case will be around until I die.” At another point, Allen said: “This damned thing has been haunting me for 22 years … If I was prone to suicide, I’d have already done it … The only thing in my favor is, I’ve never killed anyone.”

Williams doesn’t pretend to know if Allen did it. But he’s “convinced that, absent a confession, Allen would never have been convicted of the murders if the case had come to trial.”