Did Zodiac killer spend final days in South Sound?

A California man is trying to convince the FBI that his stepfather, who died in the Olympia area about two-and-a-half years ago, was the San Francisco Bay Area's notorious Zodiac killer.

Dennis Kaufman, 41, of Pollock Pines, Calif., said his stepfather, Jack Tarrance, died in Thurston County in August 2006 at the age of 78.

Kaufman and his half-brother, Charles Tarrance of Olympia, have submitted some of Jack Tarrance's belongings to the FBI in Sacramento, Calif., for analysis. They include his dentures, a toothbrush and a comb that might have DNA that can be analyzed in a crime lab. The FBI confirmed that the agency was testing unnamed items Kaufman submitted.

The Zodiac killer is blamed in the murders of at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area starting in the late 1960s. He taunted police and bragged about his crimes in letters to Bay-Area newspapers. He placed ciphers in his messages, using symbols for letters, creating codes that had to be solved like puzzles. He has never been identified or caught. His unsolved crimes and flamboyant style — he wore a black hood emblazoned with his trademark, a circled cross, during his fatal attack at Lake Berryessa north of the city of Napa in 1969 — have made him an icon in popular culture.

In Hollywood, the villain "Scorpio" in the first "Dirty Harry" movie was loosely based on the Zodiac killer. In 2007, Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal starred in "Zodiac," a big-budget adaptation of former San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith's books on the killings — and law enforcement's futile attempts to find the killer.

But Tom Voigt, who is a critic of Kaufman's claims and runs the Portland-based Web site www.zodiackiller.com, said the FBI's involvement doesn't mean Kaufman's theory is valid.

"The reason why Dennis Kaufman is involved with the FBI is he's gone through more investigative agencies than you can count, and they've all found no evidence that Jack Tarrance was the Zodiac. Kaufman's claims have been investigated by numerous law enforcement agencies." Among those agencies are the San Francisco, Santa Rosa and South Lake Tahoe police departments and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, Voigt said.

Jack Tarrance, described by his Olympia daughter as a drifter who worked odd jobs before retiring to the Olympia area in 2003, is one of many people identified as possible Zodiac suspects by amateur sleuths. Others — including the San Francisco police, who investigated 2,500 suspects, according to Graysmith's book "Zodiac Unmasked" — have tried and failed to solve the case.

Graysmith's book puts forward the theory that Arthur Leigh Allen, a convicted child molester who lived in the areas of the killings and died in 1992, was the Zodiac. But in 2002, Allen's DNA was analyzed, and it did not match the partial DNA profile that had been analyzed from envelopes and materials Zodiac sent to the media over the years. Graysmith still thinks Allen was the Zodiac and says that the San Francisco Police Department's DNA samples could have been tainted from years of mishandling.

The Zodiac's identity remains elusive. Voigt's Web site includes a list of possible suspects; among them are Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the "Unabomber," and former Manson family member Bruce Davis.

To Olympia

Charles Tarrance, Kaufman's half-brother, says that from the evidence Kaufman has shown him, "there's a big possibility" that his father, Jack, was the Zodiac.

"I just basically look at it with an open mind," said the 30-year-old house painter who graduated from Timberline High School.

Kaufman's sister, Mary Larsen, 39, who also lives in Olympia, says the circumstantial evidence uncovered by Kaufman is "overwhelming." She added that she and Kaufman saw Jack Tarrance stab a man during a dispute in Concord, Calif., when she was 2.

"My dad was a violent person," she said. However, she added that Dennis Kaufman's full-time devotion to proving her stepfather was the Zodiac is disconcerting, and just because Tarrance had "a bad side" doesn't make him the Zodiac killer.

"Prove it to me with DNA and I'll believe it," Larsen said.

Larsen said that Jack Tarrance lived all over the Bay Area before he met her mother in 1971, when they were both living in South Lake Tahoe. Kaufman disagrees with the date of their meeting, contending Tarrance met their mother in 1970. In September 1970, a woman named Donna Lass went missing from her Lake Tahoe apartment, and her body has never been found. In March 1971, someone sent a postcard to the San Francisco Chronicle, signed with the Zodiac's circled cross symbol that includes the words, "pass LAKE TAHOE areas," and "sought victim 12," pasted from newspaper clippings, according to Graysmith's "Zodiac." It has been speculated that the postcard was sent by the Zodiac, taking credit for Lass's disappearance.

Larsen's husband, Rick, said Jack Tarrance once told him that he had lived on Lake Berryessa, where one of the Zodiac attacks occurred, "after he was released from a mental institution."

A Sacramento, Calif., FBI spokesman, Steve Dupre, confirmed that the FBI is testing several items Kaufman gave them. Dupre said he gets telephone calls from all over the world, every week, about the items Kaufman submitted.

"It's an interesting topic to a lot of people," Dupre said of the Zodiac case. He would not confirm what items are being tested, and he did not have a date for when the FBI would complete the testing.

Presumably, the items being tested by the FBI will be compared against a partial DNA profile for the Zodiac that has been obtained from letters he sent to Bay Area newspapers over the years.

Believers, debunkers

Kaufman, who sells a Zodiac documentary on his Web site, www.therealzodiackiller.com, says he became suspicious Tarrance might be the Zodiac in June 2000. That's when, while visiting his sister Mary in Olympia, Kaufman watched a cable TV documentary, "Case Reopened," about the Zodiac killings.

"I just started realizing who Jack was at that point," Kaufman said. "The man they were looking for was Jack."

Kaufman said that after watching the Zodiac documentary in 2000, he started investigating his stepfather in depth.

"The more I looked, the more I realized it was him," Kaufman said.

Other followers of the Zodiac case, such as Voigt, say Kaufman is a fraud.

Kaufman's Web site makes a circumstantial case for Tarrance being the Zodiac and includes his arguments that his stepdad drove cars similar to makes and models of vehicles seen during some of the Zodiac killings. Kaufman said Tarrance owned an "ice blue" Chevy Impala around the time that a similar car was seen in the Lake Berryessa area on the date of the Zodiac attack there in 1969. Tarrance also owned a white Chevy around the same time, Kaufman said, and a white Chevy Impala reportedly was seen in the area of one of Zodiac's fatal shootings in Vallejo on July 5, 1969.

Witnesses have consistently described the Zodiac as between 5 feet, 9 inches and 5 feet, 11 inches, weighing between 160 and 230 pounds, a smoker, with a pot-belly, according to Graysmith's "Zodiac."

According to Kaufman's Web site, in 1969, "Jack was 41 years old, height of 5'10-1/2", 225 pounds, with a paunch." Tarrance was a smoker, Kaufman said.

Other evidence on Kaufman's Web site to support his theory includes what appear to be handwritten bomb diagrams he found in storage among Tarrance's belongings before he died. In November 1969, Zodiac sent the Chronicle a letter that included a handwritten diagram of a bomb he threatened to place on a school bus.

Zodiac used complicated ciphers in his letters. Kaufman and Larsen say Tarrance served in the military in the 1950s, and his service is documented on Kaufman's Web site. It was common to teach service members cryptography in those days, and on Kaufman's Web site, he says that Jack's HAM radio experience would have given him expertise in Morse code and shows he had experience using code.

In the Lake Berryessa attack, a size 101/2 boot print belonging to Zodiac was found. The print showed Zodiac wore the rare military boots called "Wingwalkers." According to Kaufman, Tarrance wore a size 101/2 and would have had access to Wingwalkers from when he was "an aircraft supply sergeant in the U.S. Air Force."

Kaufman's Web site also shows similarities between Tarrance's handwriting and the notes sent by the Zodiac to Bay area newspapers.

The site includes composite drawings of the Zodiac based on witness descriptions paired side by side with photos of Tarrance. Tarrance shares facial characteristics with the composites. Audio recordings on the site include lengthy interviews Kaufman conducted with his stepfather. On the recordings, Tarrance, with a thick southern drawl, makes vague admissions to past misdeeds but does not state he is the Zodiac.

In Graysmith's book "Zodiac," he notes that a Vallejo police dispatcher said the Zodiac had "no trace of accent" when the killer called to report the shootings of Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau.

Bryan Hartnell, who survived the Zodiac's Lake Berryessa attack and spoke to him briefly, is quoted in the same book as saying that Zodiac had "kind of a drawl, not a Southern drawl though."

In the online community of amateur sleuths with Web sites devoted to the Zodiac case, many are unconvinced that Tarrance is the Zodiac.

Voigt, who runs www.­zodiackiller.com, said that based on Kaufman's recordings alone, Tarrance's thick southern twang would have to exclude him as a Zodiac suspect.

Voigt added: "I resemble the Zodiac composite more than Jack Tarrance."

Kaufman says that during the summer, he found an old black hood hidden in a public-address system he owns. He says he thinks it's the same hood worn by the Zodiac during his Sept. 27, 1969, stabbings of the couple picnicking on Lake Berryessa. The woman stabbed by the Zodiac died, but her companion, Hartnell, survived. Kaufman said the FBI has the hood.

Voigt said that the circled cross symbol on Kaufman's hood is too big to be authentic, based on Hartnell's description of what the symbol looked like. Voigt added that there would have been blood all over the hood, and because authorities have made no announcement about DNA or blood being on the hood, "I think that's an indication that nothing was found."

"I think that it's very convenient the finding of this hood coincided with the release of a DVD he has for sale on his Web site, about his theory of his stepdad being the Zodiac," Voigt said. "I've seen the pictures, it does not look authentic."

In a phone interview Friday, Graysmith said he has moved on from the Zodiac and is working on other books, but he still gets calls and correspondence from people who have new Zodiac suspects. Graysmith, now 65, says he will reserve judgment on whether Kaufman's theory about Tarrance is correct. Graysmith said that although he still thinks Allen was the Zodiac, he wouldn't mind being proved wrong.

"That's why they make final chapters," he said.

Graysmith added that the Zodiac case, like Jack the Ripper's, might be talked about, and argued about, 100 years from now.

"There's no case like the Zodiac," Graysmith said. "There's nothing even close. You could study it an eternity."

In Olympia

Dennis Kaufman says his stepfather, Jack Tarrance, moved to the Olympia area in 2003 to be closer to his adult children. Thurston County Coroner Gary Warnock confirmed Monday that a J.W. Tarrance died in a Neil Street home in Thurston County on Aug. 26, 2006, of complications from heart disease.

Tarrance's daughter, Mary Larsen, said that when Tarrance met her mother in 1971, he was a laundry truck driver. But before that, Tarrance worked for General Electric when he lived with his first wife, with whom he had four children. Larsen said she, Kaufman and her brother, Charles Tarrance, did not have a normal childhood growing up with their father, who moved the family around frequently, from trailer home to trailer home. She said the family spent stints living in California, Minnesota and Texas. She added that he was "verbally, physically, mentally and sexually abusive," while she was growing up.

Mary Larsen said Tarrance drank heavily during her childhood, and she and the other siblings had left home by age 14.

Her husband, Rick, said Tarrance once told him, "If you knew who I was, you wouldn't like me very much."

Rick Larsen said that after watching a documentary about the Zodiac killer on TV with Kaufman in Olympia, he flew Tarrance to Olympia from California and asked him whether he was the Zodiac killer. He said Tarrance took a swig of whiskey and angrily asked him to leave the past alone.

Rick Larsen said he wants to see proof of whether Tarrance is the Zodiac.

"We want nothing from this," Rick Larsen said. "I don't want any notoriety. I just want the truth."

Jeremy Pawloski covers public safety issues for The Olympian. He can be reached at 360-754-5465 or jpawloski@theolympian.com.