The Zebra Murders: Civil Rights, Racial Revolution, and San Francisco's Season of Horror - Part 1
In 1973, a black nationalist cult in San Francisco sought to eliminate the white race. Their reign of terror made them the most prolific murderers of the counterculture. What were the Zebra murders?
On August 20th, 1619, twenty Angolans, kidnapped by Portuguese slave raiders in the Kingdom of the Kongo, were unloaded in Jamestown, the capital of the newly chartered crown colony of Virginia. These weren’t the first enslaved Africans in the Americas—the first shipment of slaves arrived in St. Augustine, Florida, almost sixty years earlier. They also technically weren’t slaves—as the institution of chattel slavery hadn’t yet been invented in British America, they were classified as indentured servants. And they had arrived in Virginia by pure chance. Originally on a ship bound for Veracruz, a raid by British privateers diverted a portion of the enslaved to the nascent Jamestown settlement instead.
The true poignancy of this day, instead, is derived in retrospect. 1619 marked the beginning of two-hundred and forty-six years of black bondage in the United States of America. Over this time, almost four-hundred thousand Africans were kidnapped and forced to undergo a harrowing journey to the United States. They were stripped of their names and languages. Their studded bangles were replaced with manacles, their headdresses with slave collars. Their only remaining rituals were the branding ceremonies on arrival to their plantation. Angolan chiefs, Congolese shamans, Gambian merchants, all became African slaves, their individuality utterly subsumed by a society that flogged their bodies and tortured their souls. Their existence was a horror of toil, brutality and anonymity.
By 1964, there were twenty-two million African-Americans in the United States, each an inheritor of this legacy of dishonor. And despite the Civil war, despite the 13th Amendment, despite three-hundred and forty-five years of progress, America had not overcome its original sin. Blacks still spent their days in subjugation to white institutions. Blacks faced discrimination in employment. Their schools were underfunded, their neighborhoods isolated and underserved. Slavery was abolished, but black men still toiled on prison farms and in chain gangs, or as sharecroppers on the very estates that enslaved them. Equality before the law was writ as law, yet the omnipresence of lynchings and false convictions and police brutality showed the law itself to be writ in water.
But as Martin Luther King wrote, “oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.” Subjugation always engenders resistance. And indeed, the story of American apartheid is incomplete without retelling the long and fitful history of African-American resistance. Starting from the Stono Rebellion in 1739, and proceeding through John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, slavery was vigorously and continuously resisted by the millions bound by its yoke. The Civil War, supposedly a moment of triumph, was immediately tarred by the failure of Reconstruction, carrying forth a tainted legacy of broken promises and reimposed oppression through new means. This perceived betrayal created new generations of recalcitrants unwilling to reconcile themselves to subjugation.
1.2 million African Americans fought for America in World War 2. They fought to make “the world safe for democracy,” but returned to a country that denied them a say in their own democracy. And as the country triumphantly slipped into the postwar exuberance of the 1950s, African-Americans, their eyes smarting from the sting of the renewed lash, turned their anger into a nationwide struggle. America, then emerging as a deeply ambivalent superpower riven with internal contradictions, shook under the strain.
The Civil Rights Movement, though in retrospect conceptualized as a single moral arc, was in reality a disparate movement of various threads emerging from the fraying American quilt, united only by a conviction that the “cup of endurance [had] run over,” and the “bleakness of corroding despair” must be replaced by true justice for all. The primary divide in movement hinged between integration and separatism: whether one believed that white America was redeemable and reconciliation—incorporating blacks into the American mythos—was possible, or that years of apartheid had poisoned American society root and branch, and the only reconciliation possible was revolution.
Malcolm X, the most vocal and eloquent proponent of black revolution, asked, in 1964: “How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours?” Speaking on the eve of the Civil Rights Act, the first triumph of the integrationists, he rejected the premise altogether. MLK spoke of a timetable for another man’s rights; Malcolm X posited the very existence of such a timetable was an abrogation of black humanity, and any society that accepted such a schedule was corrupted and irredeemable. The only rational course of action in such a society was secession.
The Nation Of Islam (NOI), the organization Malcolm X spent most of his life representing, sought to be the facilitator of that secession. Despite the name, it was barely Islamic—instead, Islam offered revolutionary garb to counter the Christian ethos of the integrationist wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Theologically, it munged together Garveyist separatism, which called for black economic self-sufficiency, with an undercurrent of black supremacist thought that aimed to forge a new nation for the Black race.
The NOI’s spiritual founder was Wallace Fard Muhammad, who, due to the paucity of evidence on his life and the political importance of his narrative to overall church history, is as close to a mythological figure as can emerge in 20th century America. His origins are unknown, as is his real name. Even his appearance is an ambiguity: only five photographs exist of Fard, one of which is the official NOI portrait and four of which are blurred mugshots. Whoever he truly was, Fard emerged from history’s void in 1930, preaching black nationalism with Islamic overtones in Detroit. His preaching targeted poor, black migrants from the South, promulgated by raucous sermons in the stacked tenements in the city’s west. By 1933, he was said to have accumulated twenty-five thousand converts in the city, but in 1934, before he could consolidate his nascent organization, he vanished without explanation. His disappearance was never solved.
His most important convert was Elijah Muhammad, an itinerant laborer who found Fard in 1931 and quickly became a devoted follower. Fard transferred leadership of the (not yet named) NOI to Elijah in 1933, shortly before his disappearance, and Elijah would lead the church until his death in 1975, presiding over its apogee in the 1960s along with some of its darkest moments. Under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership, the NOI became a national movement with mosques in every major city. It established recruiting pipelines in most black neighborhoods, college campuses, alcoholism and drug addiction support groups, and most especially, prisons. The incarcerated became a core demographic for the NOI, as disproportionately black prisons formed deep wellsprings of anger that was easily radicalized into fodder for the revolution.
By the 1970s, the NOI was the central organization leading the revolutionary wing of black activism. But as Muhammad, whose health was always frail, slipped into terminal decay, the formerly centralized NOI began to strain, and fringe groups began to sprout, operating semi-autonomously under the NOI banner.
In the late 1960s, one such group, from the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 26 in San Francisco, began to push a more irredentist view of NOI ideology. Blacks could not simply secede from white society, they said, because the machinations of the white man would always undermine them. Indeed, for them, the existence of the white man’s rule anywhere was an inherent threat to the black man everywhere. The only solution was to kill every “white devil,” and in doing so, retake the society they built with their blood and labor.
In 1971, Mosque No. 26 moved into a new building on 1805 Geary Boulevard, in the Fillmore district. This move was replete with symbolism: the Fillmore, formerly an African-American community once known as the “Harlem of the West” for its jazz legacy, was the most poignant victim of urban renewal in San Francisco. Much of the neighborhood was leveled to expand Geary, the main thoroughfare, and displaced residents fled southeast to the Bayview or west to Oakland. Amidst this graveyard of smog-belching cars and deteriorating commercial buildings, this extremist cult planned the requiem of white America. Drawing from NOI theology, they named themselves the “Death Angels:” the avenging soldiers of Allah.
In the Nation of Islam Mosque No. 26, on October 20th, 1973, about thirty men crowded into the upstairs loft. Folding plastic chairs, stacked horizontally, bent and creaked under their shifting loads, and the air, dank despite the chill of the autumn evening, was pregnant with anticipation. Standing before the assembled audience, a tall black man, dressed in a suit and shining black shoes, a greying, pointed beard curling from his chin, spoke with deathly pathos.
“For four hundred years, we, the true followers of Allah, have suffered at the hands of this grafted white devil who came from our very own diluted seed!” The room erupted in calls. “Evil!” “Hear!” The man continued. “And now that we know the enemy, what must we do about him? Simply read the laws of Muhammad. All Moslems will murder the white devil because he is a grafted snake.” The room again shouted affirmations. “Praise Brother Muhammad!” “Kill the white devils!” And then the calls coalesced into a low chant. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” The men pounded insistently with their feet, and in their steady psychedelic hum, each man felt an upwelling of sheer religious ecstasy. The speaker quietly left the room.
As the meeting broke, three men—Jesse Lee Cooks, Anthony Harris, and Larry Green—purposefully walked out of the building and towards an old Dodge van in the parking lot, emblazoned with the logo of the “Black Self-Help Moving Company.” They drove without direction, heading first down Mission street, then taking the freeway north to the Embarcadero. Finding the alight waterfront too conspicuous, they made a left on Chestnut and slowly prowled Telegraph Hill. And then they saw something.
Richard and Quita Hague had left their apartment that night for a languid after-dinner walk. They adored San Francisco’s cool October evenings, the stunning vistas they passed as they climbed its steep hills, the way Coit Tower looked enshrouded by fog and mist. They didn’t think anything of the white van they passed, and they didn’t notice when it pulled over and three black men stepped out, moonlight reflecting from the sheen of their unused .32 caliber pistols.
As they passed a street corner, someone grabbed Richard’s arm. “Hold on man, you’re coming with us,“ said the voice, as a gun leveled was leveled at him. His wife tried to run but Green, the youngest of the assailants, sprinted forward, grabbed her by the hair, and painfully threw her to the ground. Together, the Hagues were dragged into the back of the van, bound, bloodied, and face-down, and it immediately drove off.
“We’re not allowed to fuck her!” Green, the driver, yelled. He saw, in his mirror, one of his brothers fondling the white devil, and was appalled by the broach in protocol. “It should be a clean death.” But Green was ignored, and when he shouted again, the only response was a gruff “shut the fuck up.” Richard Hague laid unconscious beside her, bleeding profusely from his broken jaw.
Green turned on 23rd and Pennsylvania, drove south, and stopped beneath a freeway underpass. It was a desolate industrial neighborhood where freight tracks followed the spur of the Bayview into Hunter’s Point. He slammed open the back doors of the van, shoved Cooks away from Quita Hague, and dragged her by her hair to the train tracks, stopping only to grab a machete from van as he left. Quita screamed as he positioned her over the cold metal rail and swung the sword, gashing her throat and nearly decapitating her. She died instantly.
Cooks, enraged by his denied conquest, grabbed Richard and beat him with a lug wrench. He took the discarded machete and slashed at Richard’s unconscious face, and then tossed him roughly by the limp, unmoving body of his wife. “Let’s move,” Green shouted, and all three men rushed towards the moving van. Harris, as he passed Quita’s body, noticed a golden wedding band, and, lagging behind the others, slid it off of her finger. Theft, like rape, was banned by the Death Angels’ Commandments, but Harris was getting married the next week and he couldn’t afford a ring.
Against all likelihood, Richard Hague lived. Demented, covered in blood, and in crippling pain, this half-risen Lazarus emerged from his repose an hour later and staggered forward, collapsing again closer to a trafficked road, where he was seen by a passing car and reported to the police. Hague was taken to the hospital, and miraculously, he lived. Police followed the trail of his blood to the railroad tracks, where they found Quita Hague, lifeless and cold, her head dangling from her shoulders by a sinew. Police cars, news crews, and confused residents accumulated by the yellow crime scene demarcation, craning their necks to see the dead body.
Meanwhile, Jesse Lee Cooks fumed. He hadn’t been able to rape the white devil, and even worse, the man he’d attacked had lived. It took four male kills to become a true Death Angel—fewer if you got a woman, or better, a child—and he, who organized the entire sting, who was the most spirited Muslim of all, had credit for nothing. And a worse sin gnawed at his heart. After his failure, he had tried to redeem himself on a white girl, but after he raped her, he couldn’t bring himself to kill. He knew the four hundred years of slavery her kind had foisted on him, but as she lay there, prostrate, he couldn’t fire—he left her and walked away. His soul lacked conviction, he muttered, and as he read his victim’s account in the morning Chronicle, Cooks deeply regretted his weakness.
Frances Rose didn’t expect to die. Almost no one does, but on October 30th 1973, as the twenty-eight year old Rose parked by the University of California Extension on Laguna St, she could think of little beyond the class she was grievously late for. As she gathered her books, she saw a tall black man walking stridently towards her Mustang. Too late, she realized the passenger door was unlocked, and as the man confidently took the seat next to her, she froze, unsure. “Give me a ride,” he said. A command, not a question. Before she could respond, he raised a gun. Jesse Lee Cooks had decided that this time, he would not succumb to weakness. In broad daylight, on a crowded street, he fired four shots, hitting Rose in the face, neck, and chest. Rose slumped. Cooks, stained with blood, quickly put on a black sweatshirt and took off.
Cooks made a left onto Haight and walked, not slowly, not unduly fast, but purposefully, and, he hoped, inconspicuously. Police swarmed the streets, looking for a black man fleeing on foot. Cooks saw one police car pass, then two. He quickened his pace. As he reached Steiner, a Crown Victoria, sirens blazing, turned sharply in front of him. Two cops emerged and ordered him to stop. Cooks pretended not to hear. His right hand twitched towards his belt, where he kept his .32. The cops raised their guns and repeated their command. For a second, time itself froze, murder hanging in the air, until Cooks blinked and obeyed. He laid down, hands over his head, as the two cops cuffed him, disarmed him, and took him into custody.
Cooks’ arrest landed with a dull thud, for both the police and the Death Angels. It had been just ten days since the murder of Hagues, and the police were still treating the murders as separate incidents. Thus far, the only connection between the crimes was that in each case, the assailant was a black male—a similarity that applied to a depressingly large segment of the city’s homicides. And so, for the murder of Frances Rose, Jesse Lee Cooks was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. He never gave a motive for the crime, he never mentioned the rape of Linda Enger, and he never mentioned Richard or Quintana Hague.
As Cooks was marched to a familiar cell at San Quentin, the prison where he’d already spent almost a decade of his life, a black Cadillac stopped by a convenience store on the corner of Turk and Larkin. The three men sitting in the car peered through the open glass door at the Lebanese man standing at the counter. The driver, J. C. X Simon, a newly arrived Muslim from Houston, gripped the pistol nestled against his thigh, muttered Allahu Akbar, then opened the door and stepped out.
Unlike many of his brothers, J. C. X Simon did not come from a broken home. He was not raised in housing projects, he had never gone to prison, and he even had a bonafide college degree. His conversion, instead, was driven by ideology. Simon had spent most of his life in Texas, and like most African-Americans in the state, he found his opportunities steeply circumscribed by his race. Segregation and the daily humiliations it imposed burned Simon’s pride, while the menial labor he was relegated to, along with the meager wages it provided, kept his family on the edge of poverty.
In 1970, Simon found his way to a Nation of Islam meeting in Houston. The NOI members appealed to him: they were confident, well dressed, and motivated. Their black separatist ideology appealed to him far more than MLK’s civil disobedience ever had. These men preached that whites were an inferior race, that Blacks deserved to inherit the earth, and that direct action, not meek nonviolence, was the path toward Mecca. The NOI gave Simon’s frustration a deathly shape, and as his stature and devotion as a member grew, he strived to contribute ever more to a black future. So, when a tall, aging black man, dressed in a suit and polished shoes, arrived at a meeting and spoke about how San Francisco, a premier city of the white man, stolen from the brown Mexican, was buckling under the pressure of the weak-willed hippy movement and was ripe for the taking, Simon emptied his apartment, uprooted his family, and started the long drive to California.
The man that stepped out of the car with him, Manuel Moore, was of a different breed. Moore grew up in Los Angeles, as one of ten children, raised by an abusive father and an absent mother. In school, he never learned to read—instead, he was passed forward, year after year, until, at sixteen, he left school altogether. Moore then drifted between juvenile detention and homelessness, until finally, after a particularly violent armed robbery, the State of California put him in San Quentin. Like so many others, in prison, Moore fell in with the NOI. For Moore, though, his motivation was simpler than ideology. He was tired of fighting the white gangs, he wanted better food, and he wanted to belong to something—a feeling he’d been searching for his entire life. After prison, he followed his friend, Anthony Harris, to San Francisco, and met the Death Angels. Moore, unsophisticated and unopinionated, joined them almost by default. The white man had never personally wronged him, he thought, but he hadn’t done anything for him either.
The third man in the car was Anthony Harris. And Harris was intending to stay there, in the car, until Simon approached the backseat, leveled at the passive face looking out the window, and pointed. Harris, who was wary of the crowded intersection the store sat on, was about to refuse. But the look in Simon’s eyes—the dark brown irises clouded with cold, manic, bloodlust—gave him pause. He was afraid of Simon, and in this moment, that fear overcame his reluctance. Harris sighed and opened the door. The three men then sprinted forward, their guns glinting in the drops of sun reflecting from the wet sidewalk.
Simon strode to the counter. Moore browsed in the background, while Harris kept a watch outside. As-salaam-alaikum, he said. Walaikum as-salaam, the man replied. Peace be with you. Simon then raised the gun. “Come with me.” He dragged the man to the back of his store and pushed him to a chair, his arms fastened behind his back. The man pleaded as his assailant slowly walked behind him and raised his gun. With a single shot to the back of the head, the man recoiled lifelessly, blood spattering onto his clothes, his shoes and the floor. Saleem Erakat, the owner and sole proprietor of Erakat Grocery for almost twenty years, was dead.
Harris heard the shot and rushed inside. Moore followed him, his casual demeanor contrasting with Harris’ manic energy. The closet door slammed open, and both men saw Simon, his gun still reeking of sulfur, with Saleem Erakat slumped forward, blood matting his bushy beard, his limp body dangling from his bindings. All three were silent, until Moore, looking at Erakat, remarked: “You sure he’s white? We don’t get credit for no Mexicans.”
Saleem Erakat’s murder marked the first touchstone in the murder spree afflicting San Francisco. In the following two weeks, the black Cadillac, populated by three men, slowly prowling the Fillmore, Japantown, Lower Haight, and Upper Mission, became a fixture of San Francisco’s twilight hours. The car slowed as it approached lone white people, but usually then accelerated away once they merged with a group, or entered an apartment building, or passed a black man. Unseen hundreds saw it, most disregarding it with only a passing glance. But every so often, when conditions held, when the adrenaline of the occupants inside crescendoed, the car stopped, and a single man sprinted from passenger side, holding a pistol, and fired.
On December 11th, 1973, Paul Dancik, a twenty-nine year old artist, walked out of a housing project on Haight and Buchanan holding a scrap of paper and searched desperately for a payphone. A few minutes later, he found one—a decrepit booth, harshly lit by an overhanging streetlamp—and unrolled the scrap in his hand. As he dialed, Manuel Moore walked in behind him and forcibly hung up the phone. Dancik turned in surprise, only to hear the sound of a .32 caliber pistol launch two bullets into his forehead at point blank range. Moore strode away, his discarded cartridges winking in the moonlight.
Two days later, on the evening of December 13th, 1973, Arthur Agnos walked out of a meeting of the Potrero Hill health committee. A top legislative aide to assemblyman Leo McCarthy, Agnos was an energetic reformer working toward a run for supervisor himself. As he stopped by his car, J. C Simon emerged from the shadows and raised his gun, shooting Agnos twice in the back. The bullets punctured his lung, spleen, and kidney. Barely lucid, Agnos turned to face his attacker, who took off. Then, with help, Agnos staggered to a house nearby to call for an ambulance.
Agnos, though gravely wounded, would live, and go on to become the Mayor of San Francisco in 1988. Marietta Girolamo wasn’t quite as lucky. Just twenty minutes after Agnos was rushed to the hospital, Moore and Simon saw Girolamo walking casually down Divisadero, alone, peering into the shops and bars she passed. The street was well-lit and trafficked, but that particular block was empty of pedestrians. Moore stepped out and tried to inconspicuously stalk Girolamo, who continued to weave across the sidewalk. As Girolamo stepped into a doorway, intending to enter, Moore grabbed her roughly by the neck. She turned around, startled, and Moore fired two shots into her chest. Marietta died almost immediately, slumping forward into the door of a clothing store.
As Christmas approached, the Death Angels’ murderous rampage intensified. On December 20th, Illario Bertucci, an eighty-one year old man walking home from his factory job, was gunned down by Moore. That same night, Teresa DeMartini, a twenty year old walking home from a Christmas party, was shot three times in the stomach by Simon. DeMartini lived. Bertucci did not.
On December 22, in a triangular traffic island between Market and Van Ness, Larry Green was following Neal Moynihan. He traced him through the intersection, and, as they passed Stevenson, where the street lights faded and created a small spot of shadow, he raised a .32 and fired twice. Moynihan died immediately. Green took off, running west towards Gough. In the throes of his getaway, however, he saw another woman struggling uphill towards the bus stop just ahead. Green raised his gun, still warm, with a .32 caliber bullet already in the chamber, and fired again. Mildred Hosler collapsed. Police, racing from the Moynihan scene, arrived to Hosler’s body, just two blocks away, less than five minutes later, finding several witnesses but a missing suspect.
And then, there was the case of John Doe #169.
Late on Christmas Eve, 1973, Anthony Harris drove the Black Self-Help Moving Company van west from Fillmore, along Geary, until he reached Sutro Heights. As he drove, his mind reflected on the bizarre evening, where he’d arrived late to a Christmas party at the mosque, was greeted with derision and dismissiveness, and then pointed to a package to dispose of. The man making the request towered over Harris, emitting a sickening odor of iron and sweat. Harris couldn’t refuse. Terrified, he took the additional precaution of not asking what the package contained.
As he passed Land’s End, Harris stopped the van along the highway railing. He stepped out onto the empty road and watched mist emanate from the crashing waves on the shore, rising and fading in the all-encompassing black murk. He opened the back of the van, and with effort, dragged the inert package out of the trunk and onto the empty road. The silence was penetrating, broken only by the ocean and the sound of labored breathing, as Harris lifted the box over the railing and then, with a single push, launched it over. He didn’t watch it tumble along the cliff, nor see it splash into the roiling sea below.
The next morning, two women walking along the beach in Pacifica came upon a sodden cardboard box and tore it open. Inside, wrapped in plastic bruised from its long fall, they saw the bloody outlines of a human body. They called the police immediately, who unraveled the plastic tarp on a coroner’s bench, and then recoiled. The body found within was missing a head, hands, and feet. Its arms were bloody stumps, bound tightly to its sides by wire, while the legs were amputated through the tibia, then brought up to the torso and bound across the body. The decapitation was labored; the muscle fibers were frayed by repeated slashes from a blunted sword, and the skin below was littered with deep gashes.
The faceless, fingerless, toothless, and nameless victim evaded all identification attempts. There were no useful photographs that could be taken, no dental records that could be extracted, no fingerprints, no tattoos, no identifying birthmarks, no unique bruises. DNA forensics didn’t exist. No recent missing persons in San Francisco matched the description. To this day, John Doe #169 remains unidentified. And the state of his body, and the sheer barbarity it implied, raised the slowly brewing hysteria in San Francisco to cacophonous levels.
Since the arrest of Jesse Lee Cooks two months prior, the police had made considerable progress in the investigation. They identified a clear pattern in the murders. The victims were all light-skinned, and apart from Saleem Erakat, universally of Caucasian descent. The assailants were all reported to be young black men. Almost all of the murders took place within a two mile rectangle near the geographic center of San Francisco. Ballistics for every murder were the same—.32 caliber rounds, fired by automatics widely available in the underground markets. Police had even used impressions on the leftover bullet casings to prove that all of the murders were done with just two different guns.
The police also knew about the Nation of Islam Mosque on Geary. Many convicted criminals—Jesse Lee Cooks among them—stated they were members of the NOI and attended semi-regular meetings at the mosque. San Quentin Penitentiary had a near-permanent presence of NOI members, and they hosted weekly sermons exclusively for black prisoners. They also knew about its affiliates, the Black Self Help Moving Company on Market and the Shabazz Bakery across the street, which employed a disproportionate number of the black parolees that found their way to San Francisco.
And yet, despite this seeming directionality, the police still had no suspects, no motives, no persons of interest, and no damning evidence. The most they had to go on were maddeningly vague witness descriptions, which could match almost any of the thousands of young black men in the city. Over and over, the police commissioner and the Mayor were forced to give bleak press conferences, detailing the minimal progress they had made and their complete lack of suspects.
San Francisco itself entered a state of prolonged, deep-rooted anxiety. Sidewalks emptied by sunset. North Beach, the city’s busiest nightlife spot, was deserted on Friday and Saturday nights, week after week. Vacancies multiplied at the Westin, the St. Francis Drake, and the Hilton, as tourists fled to safer climes. The news was dominated by endless reruns of the killing. Herb Caen, a longtime columnist for the Chronicle, received a call from a man who threatened to murder double the number of blacks in retaliation.
As 1973 closed, San Francisco—and California as a whole—was reeling. The Zodiac murders still made front page news. There were reports of a spree of house burglaries in Visalia. The Symbionese Liberation Army had murdered a school superintendent in Oakland, and had started planning a fateful kidnapping. A new church, led by an enigma named Jim Jones, had grown to almost two thousand members. Their bizarre slogans littered utility poles across the city. Hysterical residents demanded more radical action to restore the safety and normalcy of their communities. The mayor, responding to these calls, established a new task force specifically for investigating the murder spree, led by two longtime homicide detectives, Gus Coreris and Jon Fotinos, along with a handpicked team to assist them. Everyone on the task force was cleared of existing responsibilities, assigned new offices, and given a new a frequency specifically for any incidents potentially related to this crime wave.
That frequency was coded as “Z” on every cruiser’s radio. In police slang, this frequency was referred to as “Zebra.” The press seized on the unintentional symbolism and gave the attacks their most enduring sobriquet: The Zebra murders.
Continued in part 2.