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it after those first reports.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it was too morbid.”
    But Starr, later in the interview, made other statements that were in direct conflict with this remark. First, though, he volunteered this: “A Val ejo
    police sergeant questioned me after the Zodiac murders at Lake Berryessa.”
    Al three investigators were stunned.
    “We weren’t aware you had ever been questioned by the police before,” said Armstrong.
    “I told him,” said Starr, “that on that particular weekend [Saturday, September 27, 1969] I had gone to Salt Point Ranch near Fort Ross to skin-
    dive. [Salt Point Ranch lay in the opposite direction from Lake Berryessa.] I went alone, but I met a serviceman and his wife who were stationed on
    Treasure Island. I don’t recal his name, but I have it written down somewhere at home. I got back to Val ejo about 4:00 P.M.”
    Armstrong, Toschi, and Mulanax listened intently. Outside, a steam whistle blew and a foreman barked orders. Inside, Starr’s voice droned in the
    heat. They could almost hear wheels turning in his head. A palpable tension choked the little office. “I recal speaking to a neighbor shortly after I
    drove into my driveway,” Starr went on. “I guess I neglected to tel the Val ejo officer when he questioned me about being seen by this neighbor.”
    “And what was the neighbor’s name?” asked Armstrong.
    “[Wil iam] White. But he died a week after I was questioned so I never bothered to contact the police.” That was very convenient. Suddenly, Starr
    made a bizarre leap in subject matter—one so strange that Toschi caught Armstrong’s attention with a quizzical raising of his eyebrow. Without any
    questioning about a knife such as Zodiac had used in the Berryessa stabbings, the suspect made an astonishing statement:
    “The two knives I had in my car had blood on them,” he said. “The blood came from a chicken I had kil ed.”
    The day Zodiac stabbed two col ege students at Lake Berryessa, Starr was to have been there shooting ground squirrels and had told his sister-
    in-law so. His new story was that he had gone scuba diving instead—elsewhere. Starr both skin dived and scuba dived. To explain why Zodiac
    chose sites near lakes, a theory had circulated that Zodiac was a diver who hid his weapons and souvenirs in watertight containers underwater.
    And that’s why the kil er had a paunch—a weighted diving belt around his waist. To Toschi, that hypothesis now looked considerably less far-
    fetched. Starr was not only a boater, but an avid skin diver and spear fisherman.
    “Starr thinks we have some information regarding a knife,” thought Armstrong. “He thinks we know more than we do, but knowledge of that bloody
    knife is information we don’t possess.” Al the detectives could fathom was that someone had glimpsed the stained knives or knife on his car seat
    and Starr knew they had. Did he think that his neighbor, Wil iam White, had observed a bloody blade when he returned home that day and
    mentioned it to someone? More than likely, thought Toschi, Starr’s brother, Ron, or sister-in-law, Karen, were the ones who had spied the bloody
    blade. Starr was hedging his bets and explaining away in advance any information that the police may have received.
    “Were you in Southern California in 1966?” asked Armstrong.
    Once again, Starr volunteered startling specifics without prompting.
    “You mean about the Riverside kil ing?” he said. “Yes, I was in Southern California at the approximate time as the Riverside murder in which
    Zodiac is a suspect.”
    The information about a Zodiac stabbing in Riverside had been made public only ten months earlier. Phil Sins, a southern resident, had seen
    paral els between a local murder and Zodiac’s Northern California activities. The break ran in the Chronicle. But hadn’t Starr just stated he had long
    before ceased reading articles about Zodiac? The headline story suggested Zodiac had kil ed a Riverside