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A string of heinous murders 40 years ago is brought to life, including a harrowing tale near Tracy. By Sam Matthews
The movie “Zodiac” bursts upon the big screen this weekend in a much-anticipated debut. The New York Times has described it as “magnificently obsessive.” But what Tracyites will see in the film about a series of killings and attempted killings more than three decades ago in California is that there is a local connection to the Zodiac case. The local element involves Kathleen Johns, a 23-year-old woman driving from San Bernardino to Petaluma on the evening of March 22, 1970. She escaped from a man who had hailed her over to the side of Highway 132 at Bird Road, 6 miles south of Tracy. He then kidnapped her and her infant daughter before she managed to break free on a rural Tracy road and flag down a passing car. Later, she identified her kidnapper as “The Zodiac Killer” from a composite sketch on a wanted poster. The identity of The Zodiac, as he referred to himself in numerous taunting letters to California newspapers, has never been established. He is known to have killed at least five people and could have killed up to 37 in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as he claimed in his letters to newspapers. The letters included several cryptograms and a cross-like symbol that became the symbol of the case. Johns is considered one of the possible victims whose case had inconclusive evidence. She is the only survivor of the possible victims. Cases filed by San Joaquin and Stanislaus county sheriff’s deputies and interviews by Johns have provided a glimpse into her harrowing experience that Sunday evening in March 1970. En route to visiting her mother in Petaluma, Johns, who was seven months pregnant, drove north on Highway 99 and then, in Modesto, turned west onto Highway 132. Near where Highway 132 crosses Highway 33, a man in a light-colored American car drove up in back of her and began honking his horn and blinking his lights. He then drove alongside Johns’ car and shouted that one of her wheels was wobbling and volunteered to repair it. Johns pulled to the side of Highway 132 at Bird Road. The man pulled out a lug wrench and pretended to tighten the lug bolts on her left-rear wheel. But when Johns got back into her car and started to drive off, the wheel came off. The man had removed all but one of the lug bolts. The man offered her a ride to the nearest service station. Johns and her daughter got into his car. He continued west on Highway 132 to a Richfield Station, most likely the one on Chrisman Road, but it was closed. The man drove through rural Tracy roads for an hour and a half, passing several open service stations. Johns is reported in one police report as asking, “What’s wrong with this station” The man replied it wasn’t the right one. The sheriff’s report noted, “She said she was very scared of this man, did want to get out, but did not tell him to stop the vehicle or let her out.” Conflicting stories told by Johns add some uncertain elements to her story, but she told one interviewer that the man threatened to kill her and her daughter. Finally, when the man stopped at a stop sign, believed to be on an off-ramp of Interstate 580, Johns jumped out with her daughter, ran across a nearby field and up an embankment where she hid in the shadows. The man turned off the headlights of his car, waited a few minutes and then drove off. Johns and her daughter were picked up by a passing motorist who drove them to the Patterson Police Station. That’s where Johns saw the composite sketch of The Zodiac Killer and ID’d him. He was described as about 30 years old, 5 foot 9 inches, 160 pounds with short dark hair and wearing heavy-rimmed glasses and dark clothing. Johns’ burned-out car was found beside Highway 132, where she had left it. The suspect apparently returned and torched it. Four months later, on July 24, 1970, the San Francisco Chronicle received a note from The Zodiac, bragging about giving a woman and her baby an “intersting (sic) ride for a couple hours one evening a few months back that ended in my burning her car where I found them.” In 1998, Johns gave a recorded interview to an author trying to tie The Zodiac and Manson Family killings. She died in 2002 after suffering a massive heart attack. Two years later, in 2004, the San Francisco Police Department closed The Zodiac case as unsolved. And now, movie-goers will see the film that includes the strange happenings that night in March 1970, just south of Tracy. • Sam Matthews, Tracy Press publisher emeritus, can be reached at 839-4234 or by e-mail at
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