zodiac63.zod.3 Louis J. Sheehan

DNA tests being conducted by the FBI could soon reveal whether a former Seguin resident led a ghastly double life.

Two Seguin women awaiting the result say they wouldn’t be surprised if they confirmed that Jack Tarrance, who lived in a Seguin mobile home park in the 1990s, had also been San Francsco’s feared “Zodiac” killer of the late 1960s.

Authorities do not have a full DNA profile of the man who shot or stabbed at least seven people in the Bay Area — killing five — and sent notes to newspapers describing his dark deeds.

In 2000, Tarrance’s stepson, Dennis Kaufman, saw a documentary about the Zodiac slayings and aspects of the killer’s profile as portrayed in the piece seemed to fit the man who’d come into his mother’s life in 1970. The “Zodiac” killer was familiar with electronics and with codes — Tarrance was a Ham radio enthusiast — and used the codes in some of his letters, which described his deeds and in one case told of other killings he claimed to have committed.

Kaufman realized the killer sounded very familiar — and began wondering about his stepfather.

At first, Kaufman said he set out to convince himself Tarrance wasn’t the killer. But the more he looked, the more parallels he found.

Tarrance moved his family very regularly. He’d only stayed in Seguin a few years, near the end of his mother’s life, who died in a Seguin nursing home in 1997 and is buried in Lockhart.

Kaufman could demonstrate that his stepfather was familiar with the areas where the attacks took place.

On his Internet Web site, Kaufman displays examples of the handwriting of Tarrance and the “Zodiac,” and they look very similar.

Like “Zodiac,” Kaufman said, Tarrance would later claim other killings, and even expressed concern at one point that his stepson would put him in prison.

In his late years, Tarrance publicly disavowed being “Zodiac,” even though Kaufman has recordings that might suggest otherwise.

Kaufman, who was five years old when his mother married Tarrance, says he attended 30 different schools while growing up.

A Seguin woman who has known Tarrance for 32 years says he regularly moved between Texas, the California bay area and the Pacific northwest.

The woman, in her 70s, was one of two Seguin residents who gave interviews to the Seguin Gazette Enterprise on condition their names and addresses not appear in the newspaper because of their concerns about interest in the case — and about who might be interested.

“I’ve already been stalked,” she said, referring to a recent incident in which she called police because of a prowler on her property.

She said Tarrance moved here with his wife, Nora, and son, Charlie, in about 1990.

He lived on Social Security and not much else and was not gainfully employed when he came to Seguin — as he usually wasn’t.

“I think he moved here so they could eat at my house,” she said. “They’d come over every day about 3:30 p.m. and play dominoes — and of course, they’d stay for dinner.”

The woman said her husband had never trusted Tarrance and always told her to never allow him in the house if he wasn’t home.

But she was never worried, she said, because she knew Tarrance and the rest of his family loved her and always had.

“I knew him for 32 years,” she said. “He told me once he absolutely would have killed anybody in any place if they’d ever hurt me. He absolutely thought I’d hung the moon.”

That wasn’t necessarily a mutual feeling, though.

“He’s a thief. I always knew Jack was capable of anything, and he holds no surprises for me,” she said. “In fact, if he ever looked at anything of value in my house, I’d put it away.”

The last time he visited, in 2004 just two years before his death, the woman said she believed Tarrance took ornaments from her Christmas tree — and a Hallmark holiday train piece from a shelf.

While less than completely enamoured with Tarrance, she said in reflecting back over the years, he had made statements that offered some tantalizing hints about his past.

“I believe Jack is fully capable of (the killings) because he’s made some statements that don’t make me doubt it at all,” she said.

One example: one time he asked her how many people she’d seen die — which she believed was an odd question to ask a woman — and she said two, her mother and her first husband.

“He said, ‘I’ve seen so many people die, I lost count a long time ago,’” she recalled.

The FBI agents who visited just more than a week ago to collect the DNA sample told her the test results could come in about six weeks. She said she looked forward to finding out.

“They said they’d let me know, and depending on the results they’d know what questions they’d want to ask,” she said.

The second Seguin woman is related to the first, but asked that her name, the precise relationship and her address be left out of this story to protect her identity, as well.

“A lot of strange people are interested in this case,” she said.

She found out about her possible “Zodiac” connection after Kaufman called Seguin looking for someone who could provide the DNA sample.

Like the first woman, she said she was initially shocked to learn that a man she believed she’d known for years could be a serial killer.

“(She) called me and said, ‘Dennis says Jack’s the Zodiac killer,” the resident recalled. “I said, ‘No way!’ She said, ‘Google it.’ I read the information and said, ‘Yes, he must be. But he doesn’t seem like the type.’”

On reflection, though, she wasn’t so sure. Tarrance was no Santa Claus, either, she said.

He was a country boy who came from a tough, bad family out of North Texas, she said, and it likely shaped his personality, and made a point of saying that Tarrance was related to her only by marriage.

“My blood isn’t like that,” she said.

For about two years in the 1980s, the woman said, she and Tarrance had homes on the same lot in Austin — and both worked in service stations for the same oil company. She managed one, and he worked the night shift at another one nearby.

“He was very, very smart, but he never wanted to be a manager even though they would ask him,” she said. “He liked the graveyard shift. He was definitely a loner. He was the kind who stayed up all night and would sleep all day.”

She never knew Tarrance to have friends.

“You only saw him with family,” she said.

She said it was plain, in hindsight, that he had a dark side.

One time, she fought off a robber at her service station, telling him he’d have to shoot her before she’d give him access to the company safe, and she was struck later that day, she said, when she told Tarrance about the robbery.

“He told me, ‘It’s a good thing it wasn’t me — I’d have shot him on the spot.’”

Tarrance almost always carried a gun, and on the rare occasions he didn’t, the woman said, he always carried a big, ugly knife.

“It was big enough to definitely gut you,” she said.

He even recommended she carry one — and gave her a brief course in its correct use that makes her shudder today.

“He told me if I’d ever got in a fight to get them in the stomach and rip upwards,” she recalled. “Always stick it in and rip up — you don’t have the strength it would take to rip down.”

It never occurred to her then, she said, to ask, “How many times have you done this yourself?”

“I’m glad I never made him mad,” the woman said.



Was former Seguin resident Jack Tarrance California’s infamous “Zodiac” killer? His stepson, Dennis Kaufman says he believes he was — an assertion that has raised considerable controversy on the Internet. Kaufman makes his case at

http://thezodiackiller.digitalzones.com



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