Dave Toschi, hunter of Zodiac serial killer, dies at 86
The letter arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle in April 1978, appearing much like some two dozen others the paper had received over the previous decade. Its handwriting was slanted, lacking capitalization, and it was signed with a symbol that resembled the crosshairs of a gun.
“This is the Zodiac speaking,” it began. “That city pig toschi is good but I am smarter and better he will get tired then leave me alone. I am waiting for a good movie about me. who will play me.”
The letter puzzled handwriting experts, many of whom said it was a fake, but its target was all too real. For nearly nine years, San Francisco police detective Dave Toschi had led one of the most widely covered murder investigations in American history, searching for a man who called himself the Zodiac and claimed to have killed 37 people.
In fact, authorities said the Zodiac had fatally shot or stabbed five men and women in the Bay Area, and had injured two others. The group of victims included two teenagers parked on the outskirts of Vallejo, two teens at a nearby park, a pair of students picnicking in Napa County and a taxi driver, Paul Stine, who became the first and only San Francisco victim when he was shot in the back of the head on Oct. 11, 1969.
His murder — the last confirmed Zodiac killing — brought the case to the desk of Toschi (pronounced TOSS-key), who died Jan. 6 at age 86 at his home in San Francisco. The cause was complications from pneumonia, said a daughter, Linda Toschi-Chambers.
At the time of the shooting, Inspector Toschi was perhaps San Francisco’s best-known officer. He donned brightly colored bow ties, smoked plastic-tipped Tiparillo cigars, munched on animal crackers and carried his gun in an upside-down shoulder holster that had caught the eye of actor Steve McQueen.
The two had met about two years earlier while McQueen was conducting research for his 1968 cop movie “Bullitt.” Toschi reportedly served as the model for the movie’s title character, played by McQueen and was also credited as an inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s roguecop antihero in “Dirty Harry” (1971).
Yet while the fictional Inspector Harry Callahan kicks down doors and tortures suspects in pursuit of a Zodiac-like villain, Toschi “was by the book, efficient and thorough,” said journalist Duffy Jennings, who covered Toschi in the 1970s for the Chronicle.
Toschi, his partner Bill Armstrong and their colleagues were never able to pin down the killer, who ridiculed their investigation in cryptic letters and an unrealized threat to “wipe out a school bus some morning.”
Toschi retired from the police in 1985. He told the Chronicle in 2009 that he still visited the site of Stine’s murder each Oct. 11.
“I always park exactly where I parked the radio car that night,” he said. “I look around the intersection and I wonder what the heck happened. Did we cover all the bases? Did we miss anything at the scene?
“Why didn’t we get this guy? I ended up with a bleeding ulcer over this case. It still haunts me. It always will.”