Riverside

After disabling her lime green Volkswagen by pulling out the distributor coil and the condenser, then disconnecting the middle wire of the distributor, the killer had apparently waited for Bates to return to her car and try to start it, whereupon he made a pretense of unsuccessfully tinkering with the engine.  After this ruse, and probably with the offer of a ride, he lured her into a dark, unpaved driveway between two empty houses owned by the college, where he stabbed her three times in the chest and once in the back [Footnote 1] and slashed her several times across the throat.  Police determined that the murder weapon was a small knife with a blade about 3 1/2" long by 1/2" wide [Footnote 2], but the wounds to Bates' throat were so deep and brutal as to nearly decapitate her, severing her larynx, jugular vein, and carotid artery. She had also been choked and beaten about the face. Found about ten feet from Bates' body was a paint-spattered man's Timex watch with a broken 7" wristband, stopped at around 12:23 [see illustration], which one source claims was later traced to a military PX in England.  The paint was analyzed, and was found to be a common exterior house paint [Footnote 3].  Also found at the scene were the heel-print from a shoe that appeared to be close to size 10 [Footnote 4], as well as hair, blood, and skin tissue found in the victim's hands and beneath her fingernails. Greasy, unidentified palm- and fingerprints were also found in and on her car, about 200 feet away. Although the library closed at 9:00 p.m. (and books found in her car verify that she had been inside before then), two separate witnesses reported hearing an "awful scream" at around 10:30, followed by "a muted scream, and then a loud sound like an old car being started up" [Footnote 5] about two minutes later, and this is generally accepted as the time of her death leaving a window of about an hour and a half that Bates may have spent conversing with the man who would kill her.

Judging by these details, the murder of Cheri Jo Bates would appear to be nothing more mysterious than a particularly vicious crime of passion, committed perhaps by a spurned suitor, an ex-boyfriend, or a subject somehow linked to Miss Bates.  The simple fact that Bates spent over an hour in the dark with the man who murdered her suggests that she knew and trusted him enough to converse more than casually.   It wasn't until almost exactly one month after the attack that the case approached a bizarre new level.  

On November 29, 1966, carbon copies of an anonymous letter were mailed to the Riverside Police and the Riverside Enterprise [see Illustration]. Typed using a portable Royal typewriter with either Pica or Elite typeface [Footnote 6], it was entitled "The Confession," and carried a "byline" that consisted of the word "BY" followed by twelve underscores. Both copies were on low-quality white paper eight inches wide and torn at the top and bottom so as to be roughly squarish, and had been sent unstamped and with no return address from a secluded rural mailbox.  Presumably, the author planned on the letters being sent by Postage Due mail.  At least one of the details referred to in this letter had not been made public, and at the time, investigators agreed that it was most likely genuine, though this opinion has changed over the years.

THE CONFESSION

BY _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

SHE WAS YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL BUT NOW SHE IS BATTERED AND DEAD. SHE IS NOT THE FIRST AND SHE WILL NOT BE THE LAST I LAY AWAKE NIGHTS THINKING ABOUT MY NEXT VICTIM. MAYBE SHE WILL BE THE BEAUTIFUL BLOND THAT BABYSITS NEAR THE LITTLE STORE AND WALKS DOWN THE DARK ALLEY EACH EVENING ABOUT SEVEN. OR MAYBE SHE WILL BE THE SHAPELY BRUNETT THAT SAID XXX NO WHEN I ASKED HER FOR A DATE IN HIGH SCHOOL. BUT MAYBE IT WILL NOT BE EITHER. BUT I SHALL CUT OFF HER FEMALE PARTS AND DEPOSIT THEM FOR THE WHOLE CITY TO SEE. SO DON'T MAKE IT TO EASY FOR ME. KEEP YOUR SISTERS, DAUGHTERS, AND WIVES OFF THE STREETS AND ALLEYS. MISS BATES WAS STUPID. SHE WENT TO THE SLAUGHTER LIKE A LAMB. SHE DID NOT PUT UP A STRUGGLE. BUT I DID. IT WAS A BALL. I FIRST CUT THE MIDDLE WIRE FROM THE DISTRIBUTOR. THEN I WAITED FOR HER IN THE LIBRARY AND FOLLOWED HER OUT AFTER ABOUT TWO MINUTES. THE BATTERY MUST HAVE BEEN ABOUT DEAD BY THEN. I THEN OFFERED TO HELP. SHE WAS THEN VERY WILLING TO TALK TO ME. I TOLD HER THAT MY CAR WAS DOWN THE STREET AND THAT I WOULD GIVE HER A LIFT HOME. WHEN WE WERE AWAY FROM THE LIBRARY WALKING, I SAID IT WAS ABOUT TIME. SHE ASKED ME, "ABOUT TIME FOR WHAT?" I SAID IT WAS ABOUT TIME FOR HER TO DIE. I GRABBED HER AROUND THE NECK WITH MY HAND OVER HER MOUTH AND MY OTHER HAND WITH A SMALL KNIFE AT HER THROAT. SHE WENT VERY WILLINGLY. HER BREAST FELT WARM AND VERY FIRM UNDER MY HANDS, BUT ONLY ONE THING WAS ON MY MIND. MAKING HER PAY FOR ALL THE BRUSH OFFS THAT SHE HAD GIVEN ME DURING THE YEARS PRIOR. SHE DIED HARD. SHE SQUIRMED AND SHOOK AS I CHOCKED HER, AND HER LIPS TWICHED. SHE LET OUT A SCREAM ONCE AND I KICKED HER IN THE HEAD TO SHUT HER UP. I PLUNGED THE KNIFE INTO HER AND IT BROKE. I THEN FINISHED THE JOB BY CUTTING HER THROAT. I AM NOT SICK. I AM INSANE. BUT THAT WILL NOT STOP THE GAME. THIS LETTER SHOULD BE PUBLISHED FOR ALL TO READ IT. IT JUST MIGHT SAVE THAT GIRL IN THE ALLEY. BUT THAT'S UP TO YOU. IT WILL BE ON YOUR CONSCIENCE. NOT MINE. YES, I DID MAKE THAT CALL TO YOU ALSO. IT WAS JUST A WARNING. BEWARE...I AM STALKING YOUR GIRLS NOW.

CC. CHIEF OF POLICE
ENTERPRISE

Neither envelope bore a complete address; they were handwritten with a felt-tip pen in the following manner.

Daily Enterprise
Riverside Calif
Attn: Crime

Homicide Detail
Riverside

One fingerprint was found on the envelope sent to the RPD Homicide Detail, but it has never been matched to a suspect, and whether it was left by the author, a postman, or a police officer is unknown [Footnote 7]

The killer's claim that "she did not put up a struggle" was contradicted by the flesh and hair found beneath Bates' fingernails and the churned-up ground at the scene, and while a contemporaneous newspaper report reflects uncertainty as to whether the knife actually broke in her body [Footnote 8], more recent pronouncements from RPD detectives are unanimous that the knife did not break [Footnote 9].  The phone call that is referred to near the end of the letter has never been elaborated on by authorities, though researcher Tom Voigt suggests that it was placed to the Riverside Press, rather than the police, and so went misunderstood and ignored.

The letters were delivered on the same day they were posted.  The next day, November 30th, both the Enterprise and the local police submitted their copies to the Riverside County Postal Inspector, who in turn notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Murder is not a federal crime, but extortion through the mail is, and the FBI briefly considered joining the investigation under this pretense.  However, since no specific victim of extortion was named or alluded to, there would be no federal aid in the investigation.  In an unexplained turn of events, what appears to be a photocopy of the "Confession" was attached to an FBI report declassified in the 1990s, but the typescript and number of words per line are different from those in the well-known copy that appears in a photograph of the letter lying either on a detective's or a reporter's desk.

Sometime either in December 1966 or April 1967, a janitor at the RCC Library discovered what appeared to be a poem describing the Bates murder written on the underside of a folding schooldesk [Footnote 10].  The desk had been in storage for an unknown period of time, but the contemporary receipt of the "Bates had to die" letters led many to believe that the poem described Bates' murder and was written by her killer.  However, some have noted that the style and tone of the poem indicate otherwise: that an unrelated student penned it following an unsuccessful suicide attempt [Footnote 11].  The handwriting is of debatable resemblance to the three "Bates" notes or any other Zodiac printing and the date of its origin is unclear, so the entire issue remains open to interpretation.  The poem read: 

Sick of living/unwilling to die
cut.
clean.
if red /
clean.
blood spurting,
dripping,
spilling;
all over her new
dress
oh well
it was red
anyway.
life draining into an
uncertain death.
she won't
die.
this time
someone ll find her.
just wait till
next time.
rh

[See Illustration]

The cryptic signature, "rh," may have been a reference to RCC's President at the time, R. H. Bradshaw.

On the six-month anniversary of Bates' death, the Riverside Press, the police, and the victim's father (whose name and address had appeared in the local newspaper the day after the murder) were each sent nearly identical copies of another letter, this one written in pencil on lined notepaper. Instead of a signature, two of the letters bore a symbol that resembled a letter Z joined with a numeral 3.  In what would become a hallmark of the Zodiac's epistolary style, the envelopes were franked with excessive postage: in this case, they each carried two of the necessary four-cent stamps [See Illustration].  The letters sent to the police and Press read as follows:

BATES HAD
TO DIE
THERE WILL
BE MORE

The copy without the heiroglyph signature, sent to Joseph Bates, substituted "Bates" with "She" [Footnote 12].  One latent fingerprint was developed on the letter sent to the Riverside Police Department, but its origins are not known, and it has never been matched to a suspect [Footnote 13].

* * *

In the wake of Bates' murder, Riverside Police worked the case under the assumption that the killer was known to Bates, or at least that Bates was known to her killer.  They even identified a likely suspect from a pool of viable candidates, an ex-boyfriend bitter over their breakup and resentful of her blossoming relationship with a football player.  (The RPD maintains a local man as their prime suspect in the murder, and in December of 1998 even went so far as to secure a warrant for samples of this man's hair, skin, and saliva, which were sent to the FBI crime lab to be checked against the evidence found at the scene.  While no formal report has been made public, rumor has it that the testing came back with no match to the local suspect.)  When the Zodiac case exploded into national news in the fall of 1969, though, RPD Chief L.T. Kinkead nevertheless sent a 3-page synopsis of the local murder and the events that followed to investigators in Napa and San Francisco, a letter that seems to have been largely ignored.  It wasn't until Paul Avery of the San Francisco Chronicle initiated a 1970 meeting between these investigators that they began to consider the elusive Bay Area serial killer as a possible culprit, though even then RPD Captain Irwin Cross "expressed doubt that the Zodiac [was] responsible" [Footnote 14].

Despite the stylistic similarities between the aftermath of Cheri Jo Bates' murder and the linked murders that would later take place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the current opinion of the Riverside Police Department and many other investigators is that the Riverside and Bay Area episodes were not related.  Opinion is split, however, as to who authored the 1966 and 1967 documents, and whether they were even written by the same person.