In 1966, fourteen days after Cherry Jo Bates was killed, the Riverside Police Department received an order to set aside all other matters and investigate the case until it was solved.
They gathered all sixty-two people who had been in the library on the night of the incident, had them wear the same clothes and sit in the same places, and reenacted what had happened.
Detective Earl Brown and District Attorney Roland Mitchell questioned them one by one according to a master list and recorded the entire process. Everyone had their fingerprints and hair collected.
The reenactment lasted from five in the afternoon until nine at night, when the library closed on Sundays. During the reenactment, people discovered that two individuals had not participated.
One was Bates. The other was a burly young man standing five feet eleven and a half inches tall, almost exactly the same height as a suspect, Leigh Allen.
It was easy enough to find a man of that height in America. Leigh Allen taught at the Christian Youth Association in La Honda-Garzi.
As everyone knew, capitalist bosses wished their employees would sell all their time to the company. Although weekends were stipulated by law, very few jobs actually allowed two days off, and even fewer gave time off for statutory holidays.
Zodiac almost always struck on Friday nights or holidays. Most crucially, he struck during summer vacation. Only teachers and school staff had schedules that matched those of the student victims, and judging by the postmark dates, nearly all of them coincided with school breaks. Few professions gave time off for every holiday.
Compared with the zoo-like environment of junior and senior high schools, elementary schools and universities were much easiergoing. Even a janitor was worth suspecting. But a janitor was unlikely to know so