New York Newsday, 27 July 1990

New York Newsday, 27 July 1990

Ex-Cop Recalls Frisco's Zodiac
By Mitch Gelman

The last message San Francisco police Insp. David Toschi received from that city's Zodiac Killer came to a local newspaper in January, 1974.

It was a box score: "Me - 37, SFPD - 0." The box score came in the last of 16 letters the San Francisco Zodiac Killer sent to local newspapers and northern California police departments from 1966 to 1974.

In the letters, he taunted police. Most of the taunts were cryptic and baffled detectives. The box score was straightforward. "It meant that he killed 37 people and we couldn't catch him," Toschi said yesterday. "I started to take it personally."

Toschi, 58, was the lead homicide detective on the case for nine years. He was transferred from the case in 1978 to the pawn shop detail after he admitted writing two to three letters to newspapers, under ficticious names, praising his work on the case.

Toschi retired from the department five years ago. Today, he is the head of security for the Pan Pacific Hotel on Post Street in San Francisco. But he cannot forget the biggest case of his life: the one that got away.

Every day for more than 3,000 days, Toschi said, his nerves were steeled by the excitement and frustration of the hunt. He said he woke up with one thing on his mind: "How can I catch this guy?" He never could. Instead, he got a bleeding ulcer.

When Toschi saw a copy of the San Francisco Examiner on Wednesday afternoon, a story with a New York City dateline jumped off the page. It was about the man in New York City who calls himself "The Zodiac" and wrote that he was shooting people based on their astrological signs.

"It all came back to me," Toschi said.

In a letter this city's gunman sent to the New York Post on Thursday, he claimed to be the San Francisco Zodiac Killer. But Toschi said that based on a description of the gunman provided by New York detectives, this new Zodiac is not the same man.

"He is a copycat," Toschi said. "Our killer was a Caucasian man who would be about sixty years old now. The one in New York is a black man, they say, in his thirties."

Still, a line from one of the San Francisco Zodiac's letters haunts Toschi and detectives here in New York. In the passage, the San Francisco Zodiac says that he used a disguise when he commits his crimes. "The rest of the time," the San Francisco Zodiac wrote, with poor spelling, "I look entirle different."

Speaking from his office at the hotel in San Francisco yesterday, Toschi said it is embittering to look back on the case he could never solve. He said he'd be flattered if the New York investigators asked for his help. But other than encouragement, the former detective does not know what he could offer.

"I would just tell your Chief of Detectives [Joseph] Borrelli and his team to never, never give up the hunt," Toschi said.

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