Riverside papers & Cheri Jo Bates

In a prior post I mentioned that in searching for more information on Donna Lass I realized I was limiting myself to Bay Area newspapers. (For whatever reason, Google still has not indexed the Tahoe Daily Tribune, and I suspect it won't until the site's maintainers realize this and undertake a redesign.) One of the more surprising discoveries has to do with looking for sources related to Cheri Jo Bates' murder in Riverside. I scoured the Riverside Press-Enterprise site for articles but found precious few pertaining to the possible Zodiac 1966 event. Most of what I did find had to do with the recent David Fincher movie and was not particularly informative.

But then -- like a slap across the forehead -- I discovered another Riverside newspaper with more than a few articles on Cheri Jo Bates, including one from 1966. It's the Viewpoints online edition. Viewpoints is the newspaper of Riverside City College, where Bates was enrolled at the time of the murder as well as the location of the same. I should've gone looking for Viewpoints from the get-go, especially since every college and university worth its salt has a newspaper. It was too obvious.

Viewpoints' coverage isn't half-bad, especially since their staff seem to do the job the Press-Enterprise can't be bothered to do these days, namely (a) ask the Riverside police the obvious questions about Bates' death, since the case remains open and developments have occurred over the past thirty years, and (b) to make the articles available on the web for free rather than burying them in a pay-for-access archive. Turn up the applause machine for Viewpoints. Boo, hiss to the Press-Enterprise.

Links to Viewpoints articles on Cheri Jo Bates:

• 5 Nov 1996: On 30th anniversary, RCC murder still unsolved
  
• 5 Nov 1996: "She was young and beautiful. But now she is battered and dead. She is not the first and she will not be the last."
• 31 Oct 1991: There is a real murder in RCC's past; One of the Zodiac killings
• 4 Nov 1966: Police still lack clues in murder

Donna Lass and the Tahoe Daily Tribune

For me, the circumstances surrounding Donna Lass' disappearance is one of the more interesting and under-examined aspects of the Zodiac Killer mystery. Donna Lass was a nurse who worked at a nursing station in a South Lake Tahoe casino in 1970. She'd previously lived in San Francisco nursing at Letterman Hospital. On the early morning of 26 September 1970, she left the casino without anyone noticing and was not seen from again. The next day a man phoned her employer and her landlord to say she'd left town due to a family emergency; the call was bogus and the man was never identified. It's actually in dispute whether any crime was committed, as there's no real evidence of foul play. It's possible (and not unheard of) for a person to "disappear" on their own and establish a new life elsewhere under an assumed identity.

Six months later the San Francisco Chronicle received a postcard apparently from the Zodiac Killer. The card referred to Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Club, claiming the number of his victims was now twelve, and to "peek through the pines." If the card was the work of the Zodiac (which is disputed), it seems he was claiming Donna Lass as his twelfth victim. (Zodiac counted the wounded and the terrorized as well as the murdered as "victims".) Some note this is a miscount; according to Zodiac's prior correspondence, Lass should've been victim number ten, another reason to doubt the card's veracity.

So, to grid this all out, Lass has three possible fates: foul play by the Zodiac, foul play by someone else ("her real assailant"), and a peaceful disapperance on her own accord. There are three possible authors of the Lass card: the Zodiac, someone else responsible for Lass' disappearance ("her real assailant"), and a hoaxster. This maps out to:

• (a) the Zodiac kidnapped/murdered Lass and the card was written by the Zodiac (Zodiac/Zodiac);
• (b) the card is by Lass' real assailant who used the Zodiac scare to throw the police and the public off his scent (assailant/assailant);
• (c) the card is by the Zodiac claiming credit for a victim he did not assail (assailant/Zodiac);
• (d) the Zodiac had nothing to do with a crime committed against Lass and the the card is a hoax (assailant/hoax);
• (e) no crime was committed against Lass but the Zodiac claimed credit for her disappearance (peaceful/Zodiac);
• (f) no crime was committed against Lass and the card is a hoax (peaceful/hoax); or
• (g) Zodiac was responsible for Lass and the card is a hoax (Zodiac/hoax).

In playing this little game of possibilities, I should note there are two combinations that don't make logical sense:

• (h) Zodiac kidnapped/murdered Lass and the card was written by her "real" assailant (Zodiac/assailant); and
• (i) Lass disappeared on her own and the card was written by her "real" assailant (peaceful/assailant).

Since there was no "real assailant" in these two cases, the card would be a hoax, which is dealt with above.

This is exhausting. Why my interest in all of this? Because Donna Lass' case highlights the mystery and dead-ends and ambiguities circling the Zodiac. The fact that seven of the above possibilities can be reckoned (or even six if (g) seems terribly unlikely to you) is just a taste of the combinatorics involved with researching this case. Almost any facet of the Zodiac will lead to this game of combinations and guessing, and picking one will knock against another "certainty", which I put in quotation marks because there's so few certainties here.

Zodiac never kidnaps victims -- unless you find Kathleen Johns' story reliable. Zodiac operated exclusively in the Bay Area -- take a closer look at Cheri Jo Bates. The postcard was a collage and not his trademark handwritten screed -- examine the Halloween card he sent Paul Avery. Proving Lass was a Zodiac victim is difficult, but so is eliminating her on the basis of surface details or serial killer "psycho-profiles." The Zodiac is a Gordian knot crossed with a Jenga tower.

Try typing "donna lass" into the search engine and follow the trail it offers. One of the more interesting paths you may find yourself is the question of Zodiac suspect Lawrence (or Larry) Kane, sometimes referred to as "Larry Krew". An investigator named Harvey Hines put together a dossier against Kane which on first blush is damning, but like so many Zodiac researcher, Hines ignores certain facts that weaken or dilute his argument. The case against Kane depends a great deal on Donna Lass; research one and you'll wind up researching the other.

My interest in Donna Lass led me to test my search engine many times with her name to see what it was finding. The zodiackiller.com message boards came up with quite a bit of information, but very little elsewhere. What's more, I discovered her name had not been mentioned once in any of the newspaper articles I'd included, most of which came from the Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner. Only in the past few days did I add a series of articles by Harry V. Martin of the Napa Sentinel where she's briefly mentioned. (Martin's theory about Team Zodiac is either preposterous or fascinating, depending on how cynical I feel at any particular moment.)

It occurred to me then that my San Francisco-centrism was showing. I'd not bothered to locate newspapers outside of the city's two main dailies. A brief plain-Google search sent me to the Tahoe Daily Tribune, and in thirty seconds I located seven (!) articles written in the past five years about Donna Lass and her connection to the Zodiac Killer. (This led me to start scouring other cities' newspapers; more on that in a future post, including one source so obvious I slapped my forehead when I located it.)

But now the kicker: Google wasn't indexing any of the Tahoe Daily Trib's articles, therefore they don't appear in my custom search engine. I hoped that by adding links to my search engine the Google crawler would magically go out and index them, but enough time has passed to know that's not happening. Thus a key weakness of Google's Custom Search Engine: if it's not in Google's main database, it's not in mine either. That may not seem like much of a deficiency, but I'd wager a great deal of Web space goes unindexed by Google; maybe five to ten percent? In any event, the Trib's archive isn't being indexed and it's messing with the completeness of "This is the Zodiac searching ..."

I'm not sure why Google is ignoring the Trib's archive. I've checked their robots.txt file and the article's META headers and nothing appears to be excluding the archive. My guess is that there are no direct links on the crawlable pages that would allow for Google to discover the archived content; if the only way to find them is to search the archive, that effectively blocks them from Google's spider, who isn't going to spend all day guessing keywords.

So, praying that Google will index my blog and therefore crawl on over to the Trib's pages on Donna Lass, I've included all of them here. Hence another reason for this blog: I wanted some way to get Google to index unreachable articles as well as give those articles a little PageRank vote to boot.

Donna Lass at the Tahoe Daily Tribune:

• Investigator: Zodiac Killer struck in Tahoe (1 September 2000)
  
• Investigators look for clues in disappearance 30 years ago (10 October 2000)
  
• Suspicious circumstances make investigator nervous (10 November 2000)
  
• Zodiac killer's trail leads to Tahoe (10 November 2000)
  
• Still plenty of unsolved mysteries at South Shore (10 August 2004)
  
• Identity of Zodiac killer questioned (16 October 2002)
  
• Small-town ties strangle South Shore: Looking back on five years of reporting for the Tribune (26 April 2005)
  

Some interesting searches on this subject:

• donna lass
• (lawrence OR laurence OR larry) (kane OR cane OR krew)
• harvey hines

The initial building blocks

When I created "This is the Zodiac searching ..." a month or so ago, Google made the first steps incredibly easy. First I picked the name, which is a reference to the Zodiac's opening line in his 4 August 1969 letter to the San Francisco Examiner: "Dear Editor / This is the Zodiac speaking." Then it asked me for keywords to help target pages within the custom search engine. Again, a snap: zodiac and killer. Then it asked for relevant web pages and web sites. This, it turns out, is where the real fun lay. I started by adding eight or ten "obvious" web sites, sources I knew off the top of my head. As of today, "This is the Zodiac searching ..." lists 178 sites and pages. It's been an interesting little paper chase.

For now, I'll go over what building blocks I launched with and my initial impressions of Google's Custom Search Engine philosophy. The "obvious" web sites I entered were Wikipedia's Zodiac Killer entry (which I actively edit), Tom Voigt's zodiackiller.com, Labyrinth13's ZFiles, and Jake Wark's "This is the Zodiac Speaking." I also included pages from Mike Cole's site, zodiacmurders.com (which argues for a Manson-Zodiac connection), and a history of the case on crimelibrary.com (which was also written by Jake Wark). Adding that small selection of sites took no more than ten minutes. There was an initial rush of satisfaction once I tried out my new little search engine. I typed in "Paul Stine" and, sure enough, I received a full list of pages, all regarding Paul Stine and his fate.

But it only took a little thought to realize this was not quite as sweet as it first appeared. Essentially, Google provided me with a customized view of their database; since all these web sites had already been crawled and indexed, my custom engine was merely limiting a plain-jane keyword search to a very, very tiny slice of their database. Suddenly this all seemed less than revolutionary. In fact, it struck me as mundane.

What did work, however, was how it exploded "deep" sites, in particular the message boards on zodiackiller.com. A normal Google search would only list a couple of message board hits followed by link labeled "More results ..." My custom engine generated link after link on Paul Stine, from message board topics on Stine himself to the Presidio, cryptograms, blood analysis, and so on. Yes, this could have been done on plain-Google by limiting the search to the message board site, but it's not that straightforward; zodiackiller.com has three message boards systems, one of which is on a separate domain. A researcher would have to determine that on his own and then handcraft the search specifications with Google's advanced options. With my engine, it's all transparent. Why? Because I know about all three message boards.

With Google creating a situation where researchers now are confronted by too much information, at least with this custom engine Zodiac researchers are now confronted with too much Zodiac information. The alternative is wading through every web page which mentions the words "zodiac" and "killer", including articles on daily astrology, a copycat serial killer, boating equipment, and less-than relevant reviews of Zodiac-inspired movies which seem less-than inspired (not including David Fincher's latest production).

In essence, Google's Custom Search Engine philosophy is a fusing of their massive keyword-indexed database with the philosophy of Yahoo's, Open Directory Project's, and about.com's edited and reviewed catalogs, where links are considered before being categorized and added. I'll make a bolder claim: Google's CSE is an admittal that keyword search just isn't going to cut it for specialized research tasks. There's too much content out there and too much ambiguity in language (consider all the synonyms for zodiac) for two or three keywords to narrow down.

This initial -- if tepid -- success kept me at it.

An introduction to "This is the Zodiac searching ..."

One of my recent projects has been working on the Zodiac Killer entry on Wikipedia. I've long been fascinated with the Zodiac Killer, both as a real-life mystery (that more and more appears will never be solved) as well as an interesting avenue into the tumultuous history of the Bay Area, my home since birth (save for three years I lived in San Luis Obispo).

This blog is not a proper introduction to the subject of the Zodiac Killer. I would recommend visiting the Wikipedia entry for a comprehensive overview as well as Labyrinth13's ZFiles, Tom Voigt's zodiackiller.com, and Jake Wark's This is the Zodiac Speaking for further information and history on this fascinating (and tragic, and gruesome) crime spree that left five young people dead and two others seriously injured.

What this blog is is a running commentary on one of my side-projects which has sprung up over the past few weeks, my custom search engine titled "This is the Zodiac searching ..." By assembling a collection of links, Google allows for a customized view of their search database to be assembled and made available to the public free of charge.

Here's how this came about: A friend of mine made a custom poetry search engine (it is wonderful and can be found here). While playing with her creation, I was also editing the Zodiac Killer entry for Wikipedia. A group of us are working to clean it up and bring it up to a higher editorial standard. In particular, we were confronted with the task of citing reliable sources for all the information we were presenting. I discovered that a simple Google search on various keywords led to spending a long time wading through the results to find a source. (In particular, articles on the New York copycat killer Heriberto Seda produced much of the flotsam and jetsam.) It occurred to me that a targeted search engine would allow for specific information to be located faster.

I also wondered if Zodiac researchers were too reliant on Google. Its PageRank system may place relevant results low on the list simply because they hadn't been linked to properly in the first place, or not list them as they'd not been crawled by Google's spider. (Newspaper archives are the prime problem here; more on that in a future post.)

In the future I'll discuss other reasons I had for building this custom search engine, as well as new reasons I learned as I developed it. I'll also highlight interesting discoveries I've made of Zodiac information and web sites.

Note that this is not a general search, so topics which are not related to the Zodiac Killer will return bupkis. (For example, try "iTunes", a keyword which would normally result in millions of Google hits.) "This is the Zodiac searching ..." is configured to search a select set of web sites, and even on those it's focusing for pages dealing with the Zodiac. Try "Paul Stine" (a Zodiac victim) for one example of what's available.

If you know of a Zodiac Killer web site or news article of interest, please email me a link to it. I may not respond to your email, especially if the link has already been added.

For more information on Google's Custom Search Engine technology (CSE), as well as a starting point to make your own, go here.

Thanks,

-- Jim Nelson