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Karen told us about Starr going to a painting party in his suit. Ron was on the guest list. Ron and his brother were at the
    party and Starr was the guy in the suit. She was using that as an example of him being unadjusted to social things. She was ragging him on that.
    She was a little afraid of her brother-in-law because she recognized he was not squared away with the world at al . With her education in social
    work she had been exposed to such things.
    “One morning I was having breakfast in the new cafeteria at Fluor in what they cal ed the Task Force Center. I had been at the company about
    three months or four months then. My brother-in-law, Ron Ebersole, had a newspaper and he was pointing to a composite drawing. ‘That looks like
    your buddy,’ he said. And I looked, and that composite was a picture of Starr—except for the hair and absence of glasses. Ron was the only guy at
    Fluor who could have recognized him from a prior time. I said, ‘Yes, that looks like him,’ but I didn’t think much of it.”
    What was unique about the sketch was that it was not the round-faced composites from Zodiac’s attacks at Lake Berryessa or in San Francisco,
    but a profile that Toschi and Armstrong had never seen. “My brother-in-law passed me the paper and I read the article,” Cheney continued. “Up to
    this moment I had forgotten the crucial details of my conversation with Starr—that he was going to cal himself Zodiac. I hadn’t remembered even
    when I had seen the occasional stories about Zodiac. That sketch was a coincidence, I thought, but a few months later [November 16, 1970] I saw
    Zodiac’s threat in the Times about shooting out the tires of a school bus and shooting kids as they came bouncing out, something Starr had said to
    me. I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. I couldn’t ever get over that. That’s when it absolutely clicked. Then I remembered everything he had said.
    “It was another year before I cal ed the police. I was at Fluor in 1969 and 1970. We finished a big contract and they had had major layoffs, so I
    had about a year where I was working at a big paper mil in Laverne, which was just a few miles up from my house. I didn’t talk to the San Francisco
    police about it right away, I sat on it a while and just thought about it. I just couldn’t get around the fact that it couldn’t be chance. That was too
    specific a quote. The 1971 kil ings in the Grass Val ey area had also brought my suspicions to a focus.
    “I went to the Pomona police station since I was living in Pomona at the time, and had an interview with an officer. I spent an hour there and I
    thought that might execute my responsibility on the business, but nothing ever happened. Apparently what I told him was never reported because
    they were getting hundreds of tips. Then Sandy Panzarel a asked me to come down and work for him in 1971 at Science Dynamics. We were
    always good friends. After col ege, Sandy had become an electronic engineer and worked at that for a few years. Then he went into this computer
    bookkeeping business on his own and did very wel . He had the magic touch. He got his foot in the door and soon was doing bil ing for medical
    practices and hospitals—that sort of thing.
    “I was the operations manager at Science Dynamics—hiring and firing, managing the keypunch department and twelve girls, two couriers that
    made al our pickups and deliveries in Los Angeles County, and three or four boys in the mailroom to handle the logistics of the paper. I was
    responsible for al the material logistics. We had another team that ran the computer part of the business. Of course I’ve used computers in
    structural analysis and pipe stress, but was never a computer guy. Then one day the subject of Starr came up again and I final y told Sandy of my
    suspicions.
    “Later, Ron came down to Torrance and we al talked over our apprehensions. Once we got on that discussion, we decided to do something
    about it. ‘I can