My Dance with the Zodiac Killer

By David Coutcher D.C. "David Gold"

At last! After a lifetime of silence; a man who actually knew the ZODIAC KILLER steps from the shadows and tells his story. Finally we hear the REAL truth about The ZODIAC KILLER. This is the story of America's most methodical planner and notorious serial killer. A man who was completely obsessed with death and who had two life-long accomplices. This is the story of the Zodiac Killer's personal relationship with the author of this book. A relationship that stretched throughout the author's entire life! Over and over this grim reaper and his accomplices would appear and attempt to lay claim to the souls that he professed would be his "Slaves in Hell". The author would lose many friends and acquaintances but he personally would always manage to skirt the edges of death and fool the reaper. There is a message for believers in this book. Find it, understand it, and be prepared for what is to come! MY DANCE WITH THE ZODIAC KILLER The killer's split personality made his relationship with the author of this book like an intricate dance of suspense, in and out of zones of friendship and grave and deadly danger. In addition to the true story of how they met and their ongoing relationship, this book also contains the author's recounts of some of his near-death experiences with "The Zodiac Killer".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640790353

Book preview

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all of the lives that were silently snuffed out by these three killers. And especially to their family members who never really knew what happened to their loved ones. I calculate their numbers to be in the thousands.

God rest all in his peace. And especially the ones who were my personal friends and acquaintances:

Little Karen: She was just seven years old.

Mr. Fussel: A retired gentleman friend of mine who owned a family dairy where he allowed me to help him with his cattle. These three murdered him for giving me a ride home one day when the three of them were chasing me.

Name unknown: A middle-aged gentleman who owned a used guns and parts store from which these three killers tried to abduct me as a boy. He was killed at his place of business shortly after my near abduction. I think my father saw his body as the paramedics were removing him after these three murdered him. And I am assuming that they stole a gun from him.

Names unknown: Several boys and girls and one of my teachers who were abducted, tortured, murdered, and buried in shallow graves around Buffalo Estates in Tampa, Florida.

Alice: My ex-coworker who was abducted, tortured, murdered, and buried in a shallow grave behind the Dairy Inn where we worked in Tampa, Florida.

Gwen and her family: My ex-girlfriend whose family, thank God, was smart enough to keep their doors and windows locked when these killers were stalking me around their house. They were never attacked because these killers would not break into buildings. They always looked for houses with unlocked doors!

Names unknown: The security guards who simply disappeared from their work guarding houses in the pest control business. I was to follow in their footsteps at that job, but I was carrying a gun at work the night these three killers showed up to take me.

Sharon Martin: The preacher’s daughter and girlfriend of my best friend Junior. She was abducted, beat, and stabbed to death in a field behind her house when her parents were not at home—while Junior and I watched from a distance. We were not sure exactly what was going on, but we did try our best to help her.

Junior: My childhood best friend who not only survived these three because he was a big man and a great fighter but also because he helped me to escape and avoid them many times. And I offer another dedication to Junior because he went to his grave (due to natural causes) without ever knowing who we were dealing with. That was about two years before I figured out that we were dealing with the Zodiac Killer(s). And again because they copied their zodiac mask from a mask that Junior had made while pulling an innocent Halloween prank on me.

Name unknown: A boy who they tried to drown at the lake behind King’s Forest in Tampa, Florida. That was another murder that we watched from a distance too great to be able to really understand or offer our help. We weren’t exactly sure what was going on as we watched.

Name unknown: The nine-year-old brother of a girl who lived behind me. They abducted and tortured him by cutting him repeatedly. He reported that they were drinking his blood. He was lucky enough to have escaped them with his life!

And keep in mind that at least two of these killers are still alive and among us as I am writing this book. But don’t worry. They are very old now.

Foreword

This book is about the Zodiac Killer, Dan Cooper, and The Escape from Alcatraz. I am one of the few people alive who knew the Zodiac Killer personally. And the others will never admit to it. Please read on with an open mind. Many surprises await you.

During the writing of this book I took a little trip to Lake Tahoe, Donner Pass area. For those who may not know, I went in search of the gravesite of a supposed Zodiac Killer victim. Her name is Donna Lass, and she was reported as missing in September of 1970. Strangely enough, I ended up meeting her killers in the summer of that same year in Mexico City. They explained to me how and where they buried her, and they even showed me pictures of the headstone that they made for her. They also had a picture of the tools that they used to carve the stone.

At this point, I am sure that you are thinking, This sounds like fiction to me. So if you want to treat it as fiction, then please, do so...and read on. But I give you my solemn promise that every thought and every claim that I tell you here is true! And the true story is so fantastic and unbelievable that I don’t have to make any of it up or add anything to it. It is earth shaking, as it stands, in and of itself. And it even rocked my world when I figured it all out in 2015 while writing this book; which I thought was going to be only about D.B. Cooper.

It was my fate to have met the Zodiac Killer, D. B. Cooper, and the guys that escaped from Alcatraz one lonely summer afternoon in Mexico City. That day I was walking to a nearby restaurant in search of a meal.

Now you are thinking: how can he possibly have come across all of these mystery people at the same time? Well, this book is really about Frank Lee Morris and his two accomplices, John and Clarence Anglin. They were the perpetrators of the three biggest and oldest unsolved cold case mysteries in America’s history. Well, actually the mysteries are four in number when one counts in The Texarkana Moonlight Murders. In this book, you will find the true story of how I met these three men in Mexico City after their escape from Alcatraz. And I will tell you their life’s story as it was told to me by Frank Lee Morris there in the streets of Mexico City.

Well, that being said, I found Donna’s grave within about twenty minutes of beginning my search up at the lodge in Donner Pass. I know you are asking how that could be. Well, the killer gave me a set of clues back in the 1970s that he told me I should use to look for her grave. Those clues can be seen by watching the videos that I have posted on YouTube on this subject. Just type Zodiac Killer David Gold into the YouTube search or into Google, and you will see eighty-plus videos that I have posted on this subject.

Now that you are reeling in disbelief, just remember my solemn promise. In this case, the truth is more incredible than fiction.

My goal in telling this story is to clear up these four mysteries. But most of all, I hope you enjoy this book.

Introduction

Frank Lee Morris was a genius psychopath whom, in my opinion and from my personal knowledge gained from actually having known him, probably killed at least 15,000 people throughout his life, starting back at least as far as the 1940’s. Many of them were just children. Frank once told me that they would take infants if they could get them. Later in this text, I will explain how I came to all my conclusions. But for now, just let me give you a little bit of biography on this genius mentality, psychopathic killer/thrill seeker. It should help you to know what kind of a person we are dealing with here.

Once you know who the killer really is and you begin to research his life as I have, you will find that there isn’t much biographical information on him and especially on his youth. I think that is one of the many reasons that made him so elusive and difficult to track. Robbing, stealing, deceiving, terrorizing, torturing and killing without being detected is probably easier when no one really knows anything about you. And to top that off, he had a very plain appearance and he was the quiet type. He could stand next to you in a crowd of people and you would never really notice him.

Add to that the fact that he himself admitted to me that he had a split personality. I can tell you from having known him that the good personality was very friendly and quite amiable. It was a personality which lent itself to bonding and forming of friendships.

On the other hand, once one saw the other personality of psychopathic rage mixed with schizophrenia and the look of a wild animal ready to kill, one could draw other conclusions. And it would come on him as a sort of metamorphisis much like that which comes over a mythical wolf man. But then the next day he would reappear into your life with that amiable, evenfatherly personality that would make you feel comfortable and safe.

Now I know what you are thinking. How could you mistake when someone is trying to kill you? Well, believe me. With Frank, it was nothing like what you see on television or in the movies. He would make it seem like a game. He would entice you to play along until he got you into a vulnerable spot and then it would be too late. I always managed to escape right before I fell into that vulnerable category. It seems I spent a good portion of my life dodging these killers without really knowing it.

You know, Frank once told me that my personality was a product of what he and the Anglin brothers had done to me over the years.

I want to give you a timeline as we go along. Hopefully, this will help you understand how events fall together and progress along the timeline of Frank Morris and the Anglin brother’s lives together. This will become particularly useful in understanding how Frank could have been in the area of such things as the Dan Cooper and Zodiac Killer events. It will also make it clearer where my relationship with Frank Morris falls along that timeline.

Frank Morris was born on the first day of September 1926. His astrological sign was Virgo. He has made use of that astrological symbol to create signatures that he used to sign his Zodiac Killer cryptograms, cards, and letters, and coded messages that he used to taunt the press and the police about the murders that he had committed.

Those signatures and symbols contained keys to his identity hidden within them. Until now, no one has been able to find his identity within his cryptograms. As he told me, "They are looking in the wrong place. My identity is not in the body of the letters. It is in the signatures that I put on the letters. Isn’t that what everyone does? Doesn’t everybody sign their letters at the bottom so people who read the letter will know who wrote it?"

Let’s move our focus to Frank’s childhood. Frank was abandoned by his parents when he was a child, and he was orphaned when he was eleven years old. It appears that there are some accounts out there that may put the age of abandonment as low as four years old. I remember Frank telling me that he could barely remember his mother. But if he was eleven at that time, that would have been in the 1930s.

At that time, he was sent to live in foster homes where he told me that he suffered severe beatings and abuse at the hands of his foster parents. At thirteen years of age, he was convicted of his first criminal offense and was sentenced to a boy’s training school. This was the same boy’s training school where Charles Manson spent time as an inmate.

There is significance in the number 13 that appears throughout Frank’s life. He elucidates and refers to this in his Zodiac Killer cards and letters to the press: One big Friday the thirteenth. We will see more on that later on in this book.

Again, Frank was born in 1926. His reform school life spanned up until about 1945. When Frank was nineteen years old, he got his first real prison sentence for robbery and narcotics possession. He was released around 1945 or 1946 on good behavior. That would have been during the same time that the Moonlight Murders of Texarkana took place. Frank told me (in clues and riddles) that he was the one that did those murders. In the interest of time and space here in this book, I will have to postpone that subject until I write my next book.

After those Texarkana Phantom Killer murders, Frank spent most of his life in prison in Florida, Louisiana, and California for multiple crimes. He once took an IQ test that he scored 133 on. He was considered to be a genius. But the man would spend his life and intellect on methodically planning crimes and murders. His obsession was all about death. And death would become more important than food to him.

As mentioned previously, his genius mentality landed him some real prison sentences in Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida. He was considered to be an escape artist. On January 18, 1960, he finally landed a sentence in America’s supposedly inescapable prison, Alcatraz. Note: That date is important because it occurs three days before my birthday. And Frank once spoke to me about that. I will give you more on that later.

From what Frank told me back in the summer of 1970, he liked Alcatraz a lot more than he liked the Florida State Penitentiary system. It seems he was made to work long hours in the hot sun on cattle ranches in Florida.

If you study the Zodiac Killer’s past murders, you will see that the image given to this kind of person is one of a desperate, terroristic strong man. In reality, the man I met was really just a cold, calculating killer who was nothing more than a genius coward who would let the bullets and knives or even his friends do the dirty work for him.

It seems he may have gotten as much pleasure out of watching a murder as he did out of doing the crime himself. He would allow the Anglin brothers to strike the first blows in order to incapacitate the victims and then he would take over. And all of that was mixed with necrophilia.

And he would rarely pick on someone who knew how to fight back, which is probably the reason why I am still here to write this book. Well, that and the grace of God! Frank and his friends tried on many occasions to make me one of their victims. While serving time in Alcatraz, Frank and his two accomplices, John and Clarence Anglin (known as the Anglin Brothers), managed an escape. The Anglin brothers were two bank robber friends of Frank. I believe the three of them may have been related. The escape from Alcatraz was on June 11, 1962. Keep that timeline in mind. I would have been about nine years old at that time.

Frank makes reference to that date on his Halloween card sent to the press in California. You can see that story in my YouTube videos on the Zodiac Killer. In order to get to my channel, you must type in David Gold Zodiac Killer. At the writing of this book, I have around eighty videos on the subject of Frank and the Anglin brothers. Much of that subject matter is more thoroughly covered in those YouTube videos and only referred to here in this book.

Contrary to popular belief, Frank and the Anglin brothers stayed together and fled California soon after their escape from Alcatraz. They worked their way to Florida, killing and robbing as they went. Their murderous activities in Florida would bring them into two different neighborhoods where I lived. There they would begin to stalk and attack me as a little boy.

Those activities took place in the area of Minnehaha Street in Tampa, Florida, where I nearly became their victim on more than one occasion, and in Six Mile Creek in a housing area where I lived called Buffalo Estates. There they built a dam in the creek to produce a swimming hole. It was a perfect place for them to catch kids off guard while they were playing. It led to the end for many of them. There, I was lucky—no, I was blessed to escape on many occasions.

Later on, they went back to live around the San Francisco Bay Area, stealing and killing until around 1972. And they left a string of dead bodies throughout several different states as they worked their way back to California.

Somewhere around the late 1960s and early ’70s, Frank was using the Zodiac moniker. He told me that he did not give himself that name but that the police and the press gave it to him. He also told me that his friends were calling him Zodiac because of a bar that he was hanging around in California. The name of the bar was the Zodiac Lounge. I did some research on the Internet and found that there was a lounge called the Zodiac Lounge in California where people were coming up missing after leaving the bar. That timeline coincided with the early murders of the Zodiac Killer.

Concerned that the FBI and US Marshalls might be closing in on him and the Anglin brothers, they left the SF Bay Area and went to live in Mexico City. I met them there in 1970, and Frank told me that he was going back and forth to San Francisco and other places in the states including Florida from time to time.

But before he left, he had one last thrill to attempt. And that was to prove that he could hijack an airliner for profit and leave the country with the money. He called his plan the system that beats the system.

Those three continued their murdering spree for at least twenty years in Mexico City, killing innocent people for what he called thrills, kicks, and petty profits to pay the rent. They rented small rooms that looked like jail cells in a house behind the Sanborn’s restaurant in Mexico City. I speak about their home in Mexico throughout this book and throughout my YouTube videos. I have posted pictures of that dwelling on YouTube. They murdered and robbed many people in the parking lot of that Sanborn’s and all over Mexico City.

I personally do not believe that Frank is still alive. The authorities say that he probably died around 1994. He was a chainsmoker all his life, and the last time I saw him in 1986, he was coughing and choking and asking me to bring him some narcotics because he was in pain. He appeared to be suffering from congestive heart failure or possibly lung cancer. But still the murdering went on.

I have reason to believe that he lived at least until 2009. And I did speak to him at least once in the early 1990’s.

I once asked him, How do you live without working and what do you do for money? His answer was, You don’t have to work to get money. You need money. You steal it.

I guess it takes a genius mentality to come up with a simple solution like that!

1

My First Trip to Mexico City Our First Meetings and Stories of Childhood Abuse

Please take a little journey with me back in time to when I was a teenager. My father, God rest, sent me to Mexico City, to learn to speak Spanish, during the summers of my junior and senior years in high school. There I attended a school of language and international relations for that purpose. My father was trying to prepare me to attend medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico. That school was very popular at that time, and many American doctors were sending their kids there to study medicine.

It was mid-June after high school had let out and I had just finished the eleventh grade. I was preparing to leave the next day to board a bus for Mexico City. It was a four-day and three-night bus ride from Tampa, Florida, where I lived, to Mexico City.

My dad asked the usual questions: Did I have my I.D. and money for the trip? Did I have my bags packed, etc? When he was sure that I was ready to go, he sat me down for a little talk.

"Okay, son, I’m going to give you a piece of advice. Now you need to listen carefully and pay attention.

Okay, Dad.

"Now I know you are a wrestler and you aren’t afraid to fight anybody, and I probably wouldn’t be sending you to Mexico alone if it weren’t for that. But Mexico City is a different kind of a place."

He made it a point to let me know that there would be a lot of people there in an overpopulated situation and that there were a lot of robberies going on there.

Then he said, "Don’t go out after dark. Don’t ever get into a car with anyone that I didn’t introduce you to because they will drive you away and kill you. Don’t go anywhere by yourself, and if you see a gun or a knife on someone who is talking to you, start fighting. Don’t ask any questions. Just start fighting and get the weapon away from them or they will rob you, and they will most likely kill you too! And you may have to kill them because they most likely will not stop, even when you get the weapon away from them!"

I’m not sure why my dad would send me to such a place as that but I felt proud that he felt that I could handle all of that. He did tell me not to go out of the areas where all the tourists hung out. Those areas, back then, were protected by police and military that (mostly) could be trusted.

That one piece of advice is why I am here writing this book today and not a deceased victim of the Zodiac Killer there in Mexico City. You will see why later.

Okay Dad, was my answer. And I reassured him that I could handle it.

Okay, son, I’ll be waiting for you when you get there.

He was going to fly down and wait for me in Mexico City.

He had rented a guest house for me where I was to stay for the entire summer while walking or taking the subway to school each day to learn to speak Spanish.

It was a fairly nice place that served us breakfast and lunch daily and a nighttime snack of fruit or pastries and a drink. It was located on a street called Rio Lerma. It was a dark and quiet street with few streetlights. It gave me an eerie feeling going out at night. I should really have done as my Dad had told me to and stayed in after dark. But this was the first time in my life that my Dad couldn’t stop me from going out after the sun went down. So I think I took advantage of that.

During that summer of 1970, I would make a new friend in Mexico City. It still amazes me that I would meet the man who would turn out to be Frank Lee Morris, the Zodiac Killer, and D. B. Cooper. And the Texarkana Moonlight Murderer—yes, all three! I would meet him because during that year my father had met a lady in Mexico City that he liked (he was divorced from my Mom by that time) and he would go to visit her when he was in Mexico. She lived in a colonia called San Cosme in Mexico City. Her’s was a small family of three women and several children, and they lived about five blocks from where the Zodiac Killer lived.

My dad eventually married this girlfriend of his. We will call her Maria for the sake of simplicity. When I was in Mexico, I would visit her frequently and would occasionally spend the night there at the town house where she lived with her sisters and cousins.

But let’s get back to the guest house where I lived while I was there. One evening I went out the front door of that place and I noticed a boy about my age standing across the street. I said hello. He made some gestures that let me know that he was looking for trouble. I just went on about my business; a bit baffled that someone whom I didn’t know would want to start trouble with me for no reason. When I returned, about an hour later, he was still there with similar gestures. When I got home, I mentioned it to the landlady. She said that there were a lot of people like him in Mexico City and that I should not pay any attention to him. She also mentioned that I should not be going out after dark. We will get back to this boy across the street thing later in this chapter.

So I went about my daily journeys to school and back. School would let out at noon or 1:00 p.m., and I would take the subway home and study my Spanish lessons. My dad spoke fluent Spanish, and he let me know that I had better be able to speak Spanish with him when I got back to Florida! So I worked hard at it.

Each night as evening would approach; I would get restless and want to go out to get a hot dog from my favorite street vendor. He had his stand about ten blocks away from where I was living and he was open late. He was about my age, so we would chat as I enjoyed my hot dog. He was quite surprised that I would brave the night streets of Mexico City by myself. He told me that a lot of people would get killed, regularly, on those streets. Still, my restlessness would win out over my good judgment on some nights. Some evenings I would run on the way home, just for the exercise. That probably, unwittingly, saved my life on many occasions.

Well, the problem with the boy across the street continued until I finally decided to go over there and try to make peace. I said hello, tried to shake his hand, and tried to make friends. He made it clear that he only wanted trouble. I told him that I did not want to fight but that I was a wrestler and was not afraid of him. With every word I would say, he would try to escalate everything into a fight.

Well, I wasn’t getting anywhere with him, so I decided to call it a day. I reminded him that I knew how to fight and wasn’t afraid of him even though he was much bigger than I was. So I crossed the street, and while walking away, we exchanged some choice words. I would see him regularly, and every time he would ask me if I was ready to fight him yet. I would always tell him that I was known for taking on five guys at a time and he would be embarrassed when he saw what I was going to do to him. It always made him laugh but I knew that he was not a trained fighter—and I was!

Now let’s move back to my father’s girlfriend’s place. One day, after I left her place, I decided to go for a walk down to the local Sanborn’s restaurant; which is located on a street called Calle de Insurjentes. Remember that we are in Mexico City and everyone around us speaks only Spanish. It was rare to have the opportunity to actually speak English with anyone, especially in that particular area of that big city.

So as I was walking down to the restaurant I heard this mysterious voice from behind me saying, Hey, gringo. Where ya’ goin’? The voice was in English and obviously wanted to get my attention. It was almost ghostly the way the voice sounded. It had a deep baritone timbre as though the person speaking was throwing his voice in a large room with lots of echo.

I thought, Well sure, I’ll take time to speak to someone who knows English. Little did I know that I was about to take a long walk on the dark side that would result in a lifetime of mentally blocking out a lot of events and issues (including the subject of murder); issues about that man who spoke to me that day. And that someday those blocked out events and issues would come back to me in a haunting nightmare laced with stories of prison escape, hijacking, and America’s most notorious serial killer stalking me and leaving me many times fearing for my life. All laced with my new friend’s paranoid, schizophrenic, psychopathic split personality that would be very kind and almost fatherly to me on the one hand and on the other hand would turn into an insane murderer bent on taking me out.

I hope this book will help you to understand and avoid people like him—if you ever have the misfortune to meet any!

So once he got my attention, he ran up to me there on the streets of Mexico City and began by saying, Don’t get mad at me! I just figured you’d be glad to hear somebody speak’n English.

He spoke with a very mild New York accent. And at first, he looked as though he wanted trouble.

None of these people around here are goin’ ta’ speak to ya’ in English.

He motioned his hand toward the people who were all around on both sides of the block talking to their friends or going about their daily routines.

He gave me a smile that seemed to be forced from a face that was not accustomed to smiling. But still, I took it as a friendly gesture from a fellow American. That was a mistake that I would pay for many times over and for many years!

So there I was in the streets of Mexico City having my first meetings with Frank Morris and the Anglin Brothers. And I had no clue who they were.

The dialogue went something like