FIVE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS
For this five days before Christmas Day addition, I’d like to send you back down the years and across the continents.
Thirty-nine years ago today, Friday the twentieth of December 1968, a parking area known as a lover’s lane in the Lake Herman Road area of Vallejo in California. Past eleven p.m.
It’s cold, so the young couple, both in their mid teens, put on the heater of the car in which they are sitting.
It’s a first date, so there is a mixture of nerves and hope for the future.
Which was about to be shattered.
Neither of the kids lived to tell the tale, but there was enough forensic evidence, and accounts of survivors from subsequent attacks to gather together what might have happened.
A car pulled up behind that containing Betty Jensen and David Faraday, and it’s headlights illuminated the interior of the vehicle.
The couple, still bathed in that innocence that the Sixties, the era of trust and love, projected, reached for their ID’s expecting it to be the law breaking up the party.
What they didn’t expect was for the stocky, heavy man in the glasses and wearing windbreaker and a crewcut to bundle them out of the car, arriving from the passenger side. They protested. The man reached in, put the muzzle of the gun against the boy’s neck and pulled the trigger. Ending the arguement. Winning the arguement.
The girl ran, screaming. The stocky man lifted his gun, switched on the torch he’d taped to the barrel, causing a small white circle to land in the middle of the fleeing girl’s back. He’d practiced enough to know that even the darkest night could be broken and that where the white light was most peircing was where the bullets would hit.
Betty Jensen died hit by five bullets.
The man got into his car, dumped his gun into the passenger seat, and calmly drove off.
And the first signs, the stirrings, that innocent behaviour might not always be rewarded by gentlemanly kindness, came down on the darkened countryside.
The two kids were dead, and even today, shocked reverberations affect the way we behave when out at night, no matter what our location and our intention.
The Zodiac killer had arrived, out of the dark, blasting kids, later killing by knife, and writing letters to the press, each letter more vicious in it’s insane celebration of reason out of control.
He was never caught. His last victim was officially that of San Franscio Yellow Cab driver Paul Stine. The letters carried on for a while, then petred out for no discernable reason. Just like him.
He might still be alive now. Matured out of the urge to get his kicks from firing a gun, the blast, the roar, at screaming, terrified, helpless youngsters, he might be sitting now, thinking about the past, maybe chuckling to himself, rasing a glass to the old him, king of the world, with his gun and that POWER. Maybe being stirred by a partly forgetten memory of something that happened many years ago, frowning, puzzled, then turning back to the smiling faces of his family, the thoughts eradicated by their light, noisy presence.
He might have even gone to see the filmed accounts of his crimes on the big screen, or watched them in the enclosed privacy of his own home. He might have copies of the books on his career shoved in a bookcase in his home.
He spawned at least two direct imitators, and a dozen speculative accounts.
He, in his own way, changed the way many people look at strangers, and alter their lives to make room for such dark entitites.
With that I’m going to draw back, on this five days before Christmas addition.
