Canonical Crime 4: PH vol.1 From Mason and Geary to Washington and Maple - a Wells-Fargo connection and other outliers

Canonical Crime_4_PH_vol_1_From MAG _to_Washington and Maple - a Wells-Fargo connection and other outliers

This is the revised and updated form of a note I wrote for – and posted at – Tapatalk, the message board of ZodiacKiller.com, Tom Voigt’s website and archive of original case documents concerning the Zodiac killer unsolved case. The note was posted on May 14, 2024. It was my first piece since my “return” to the message board and the first attempt to publicly communicate the method, tone, and scope of what I now call the “CHS” data-driven model (Contextual-Holistic-Systemic).

I label the original version as a “note” rather than a piece or article – the attempt was modest, and focused on taking “baby steps” in establishing a geo-spatial “reference index” that was provided by the “Stine death route” – my first of many attempts to link the killer’s decisions as part of a broader “reference index”, where the “Killer Historian” and the “Curator of Commemorating Events” becomes the system-building “cartographer of murder” – a reference index of the killer’s self-regulated “vengeance” upon two noted pillars: family and business. Union Square, the Dewey monument, St. Francis hotel on one end of the route (Mason and Geary) and the acclaimed Russell House on the other end (Washington and Maple) provide landmarks of precisely that – family and business. The geo-spatial outliers are as much “crime scene data” as “landmarks of historical echoes” of the city’s downtown “geography of finance”.

1. Introduction

Fifty-six years after the murder of Paul Lee Stine, the cab driver shot at Washington and Cherry Streets on the night of October 11, 1969, the event continues to yield new dimensions when examined through the overlapping grids of urban space, institutional memory, and family lineage. The present study, From Mason and Geary to Washington and Maple — a Wells-Fargo Connection and Other Outliers, approaches the Presidio Heights case not as an isolated crime scene but as the terminus of a longer civic trajectory whose origins lie in San Francisco’s early financial and architectural infrastructure.

By retracing Stine’s final route from the St. Francis Hotel at Union Square to the Washington and Maple corridor, I am in effect retracing the spatial evolution of the city’s economic elite—from Mason and Geary, where Wells Fargo, the Haas-Hellman-Lilienthal syndicates, and their architectural patronage shaped the urban façade, to the residential ridges of Pacific Heights and Presidio Terrace, where those same families established their domestic bastions.

This article is meant to capture and interpret this movement as a symbolic traversal of class and capital, mirrored in the very addresses, facades, and interlocking genealogies that defined San Francisco’s modern identity. It situates the Zodiac’s path alongside the architectural vocabulary of Erich Mendelsohn and Timothy Pflueger, the Wells Fargo and Union Trust buildings, and the residences of Abraham Haas, Isaias Hellman, and Madeleine Haas Russell, revealing an invisible continuity between the geography of finance and the choreography of crime. Archival materials—from The San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle pieces of 1939 to the Wells Fargo extortion note of 1968—serve as chronological waypoints linking the city’s historical self-image to the ciphered rhetoric that would surface in the summer of 1969 in the Zodiac letters.

Underlying the spatial reconstruction is a broader methodological aim: to demonstrate that the Zodiac correspondence and itineraries operate within a framework of civic semiotics, that is, the grammar of streets, institutions, and names whose repetitions encode both memory and intent. Each location invoked by the killer, deliberately or intuitively, resonates with a prior economic or genealogical referent.

The route from Mason and Geary to Washington and Maple is therefore not simply a cab fare but a passage through San Francisco’s palimpsest: from the public front of commerce to the private enclave of legacy, from performance to inheritance. It is within this layered topography that the Stine murder acquires its deeper interpretive weight and where the present volume seeks to anchor its analysis.

2. From Mason and Geary to Washington and Maple: cartography of business and family

The intersection of Washington and Maple Streets stands as the officially recorded destination of Paul Stine’s taxicab on the night of October 11, 1969, as documented in police reports and preserved through the archives of ZodiacKiller.com, the repository of primary law-enforcement material curated by Tom Voigt [1]. This location marks the terminus of the fatal trajectory—an endpoint that has prompted decades of speculation regarding its purpose. Why, many have asked, would the driver’s final stop have been logged for Washington and Maple, when the cab ultimately came to rest one block west, at Washington and Cherry, and not in any standard parked configuration?

My working hypothesis, still in refinement, is that the Zodiac employed a form of tier system in selecting both his victims and his locations—a coded hierarchy whose geographic and symbolic layers can be charted but not yet fully decoded. The details of this broader framework extend beyond the scope of the present study; here, the analysis remains confined to the Washington-and-Maple node as a single architectural and genealogical key.

Credit is due to Soze, whose early observation identified Madeleine Haas as a resident within the Washington and Maple sector and drew attention to the wider historical weight of the Haas family in San Francisco’s civic and philanthropic landscape. This line of inquiry complements Richard Grinnell’s 2020 research on the Wells Fargo extortion case of December 3, 1968, which may indicate offender activity in the city weeks before the first canonical attack at Lake Herman Road.

If authentic, that incident would also imply the prior public appearance of the Zodiac insignia—an advance manifestation of the symbol that would dominate the subsequent communications [2]. The interpretive consequences are substantial, since the Wells Fargo connection bridges the Zodiac’s rhetorical imagery with the deeper institutional and historical strata of the American West.

In this light, the recurring “Black Bart” motif—evoking the nineteenth-century Wells Fargo stage-robber turned folk legend—assumes renewed significance. For researchers who examine the case through a historical lens, such allusions are not trivial decoration, but possible indices of cultural memory embedded within the killer’s self-presentation. They suggest that the killer’s geography and vocabulary may have been chosen to resonate with California’s frontier mythology and its continuum of finance, movement, and control.

The "Haas" query on this forum brought up two interesting references, as shown in Figure 1: Janet Allyn White (nee Haas) of the obscure “Betty Lou” help ad that ran through December 10-12, 1968, in Vallejo Times-Herald, and the Walter Haas – Oakland A’s liaison.

Figure 1. Haas query results on Tapatalk ZodiacKiller.com message board

Decades-long researcher—and assault survivor—Sandy Betts has drawn attention to the Haas family’s connection to the Oakland Athletics, a detail that adds a modern commercial dimension to the family’s already extensive civic footprint [3]. In 1980, Walter A. Haas Jr. purchased the Oakland A’s franchise from Charles O. Finley, restoring local ownership to a team long emblematic of Bay Area identity. Both Walter Jr. and his father, Walter A. Haas Sr., were reportedly lifelong supporters of the Athletics, suggesting that the acquisition reflected personal affinity as much as financial strategy. This raises an intriguing contextual question: how widely known, prior to 1980, was the Haas family’s intimate connection to the team? If that enthusiasm was largely private, the Zodiac’s decision to send Oakland A’s tickets in 1970 could indicate access to insider or semi-private knowledge—a familiarity with details not broadly available to the public.

Fellow researcher Andrew O. has proposed that Zodiac may have acted as a kind of “middleman” within the unorthodox 1970 promotional scheme of the Oakland A’s—an arrangement that might explain both the tone and timing of the mailed tickets [4]. Whether or not that hypothesis ultimately holds, it situates the case within a broader web of Bay Area institutions where publicity, philanthropy, and commerce are intersected.

From a genealogical and historical standpoint, Walter A. Haas Jr. was the son of Walter A. Haas Sr. and the grandson of Abraham Haas, one of California’s pioneering merchant-capitalists. Abraham Haas, alongside figures such as Isaias W. Hellman, helped shape the financial architecture of the Western States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hellman himself is recognized as the first major banker of Los Angeles, and together the Haas–Hellman partnership formed part of the same economic network that would later consolidate under Wells Fargo Bank. Importantly, Abraham Haas served as a director of Wells Fargo in San Francisco, a fact that anchors the Haas lineage directly within the institutional matrix already linked to the Zodiac’s symbolic geography [5]. Whatever interpretive direction one takes, the recurrence of the Haas name—from the early days of California banking to the 1970s Oakland A’s correspondence—suggests continuity in the cultural and financial backdrop against which the Zodiac narrative unfolded.

Read semiotically, the Haas connection reframes the “A’s tickets” motif as more than a stunt: it is a continuity marker linking the Zodiac’s communications to the same institutional lattice that I have mapped downtown (Wells Fargo / Union Square / St. Francis). The Haas family sits at both ends of that lattice—nineteenth-century banking (Abraham Haas, Wells Fargo director) and late-twentieth-century sport/marketing (Walter A. Haas Jr., Oakland A’s). If Zodiac’s letters repeatedly “perform” insider fluency with civic nodes, then mailing A’s tickets in 1970 functions as a performative bridge between finance-lineage and mass-audience spectacle: it signals that he can touch the same channels elites use to shape public attention.

The Tagert family mailing sharpens that point. Vallejo is not random—it is the catchment city for two early canonical attacks and the media echo chamber (Times-Herald) that amplified Zodiac’s voice. Dropping Oakland A’s tickets into a Vallejo household in June 1970 achieves three things at once:

Geographic triangulation binds the East Bay franchise (Haas orbit) to Zodiac’s North Bay theater (Vallejo/Benicia), newspapers, and Union Square.
Para-insider signaling implies access to non-obvious promotional streams or to someone adjacent to them—consistent with the “middleman” hypothesis (an operator who parasitizes institutional pipelines without officially belonging).
Tier logic reinforcement matches my case study for a “tier system” for victims/locations; the gift-like insertion of tickets reads as status-coded bait—a soft power gesture that still asserts dominance (“I can enter your domestic sphere using the city’s own prestige tokens”).

In short, the Haas–A’s thread is not trivia; it is an institutional rhyme with my “reading” of a Wells Fargo/Union-Square grammar. The Tagert tickets are the field test of that rhyme: a local, family-level delivery that proves the killer could mobilize the very symbols and channels—bank, hotel, club, team—that encode belonging in the Bay Area.

Continuing with providing the banking background of the Haas family through its patriarch, I provide a direct quote from source [5]:

One of Abraham’s responsibilities was traveling to San Francisco to make arrangements for shipments to Los Angeles for his firm. There, he met the “vivacious” Fannie Koshland, daughter of one of the leading wool merchants in the county. Fanny Koshland and Abraham Haas were married in 1886 and set up housekeeping in Los Angeles. The couple returned to San Francisco in 1900, when Fanny’s widowed mother “needed company.”

An office of Hass, Baruch Co. was opened in his cousin’s Haas Bros. Building Abraham Hass also became a director of Wells Fargo Bank, the San Francisco Savings & Loan, the California Insurance League, and the Union Sugar Company.

Figure 2. Walter Haas Jr and the Oakland A’s

A newspaper article with text

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Figure 3. Walter Haas Jr and the Oakland A’s

Isaias Hellman was involved in the Wells Fargo history as well, with a Nevada and Lake Tahoe reference [6]. From the referenced source:

“In 1893, Hellman incorporated the first trust company in California, the Union Trust Company. He was president of the Nevada Bank from 1890 to 1898 and the Nevada National Bank from 1898 to 1905. In 1897, Hellman bought a large parcel of land next to Lake Tahoe where he built a mansion in 1903. He named it Pine Lodge after the sugar pines that dotted the property. His family later sold this land to the state of California, which made the property into Sugar Pine Point State Park. “.

[..] “In 1905, Hellman merged the Nevada National Bank with Wells Fargo Bank to form the Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the bank was operated in the residence of Hellman's son-in-law at 2020 Jackson Street while the headquarters was rebuilt.

At the height of his power, Hellman served as president or director of 17 banks along the Pacific Coast and controlled $100 million in capital.

He married Esther Newgass of New York on April 14, 1870. Her sister, Babette, was married to Mayer Lehman, one of the founders of Lehman Brothers. The couple had three children, including son Isaias William Hellman (1871-1920), Clara (1878-1959) and Florence (1882-1964).

At his death in 1920, Hellman was considered the leading financier of the Pacific Coast. His son and grandson, Isaias Warren Hellman, later became presidents of Wells Fargo Bank. The Union Trust Company was merged with Wells Fargo after his death and the original Farmers and Merchants Bank later merged with Security First National Bank.”

In the following graphs (Figures 4 and 5) the genealogy for Madeleine Haas and Abraham Haas is provided: Madeleine was the granddaughter of Abraham’s brother. This makes her a cousin to the Walter Haas Jr, lifelong fan who later purchased the team.

A screenshot of a computer

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Figure 4. Genealogy of Abraham Haas (Family Search)

A screenshot of a computer

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Figure 5. Genealogy of Madeleine Haas (Family Search)

As Sandy Betts has also observed, the Haas family is linked by marriage to the Levi Strauss lineage—an alliance that united two of San Francisco’s most enduring mercantile dynasties. Yet the family’s direct connection to Wells Fargo, and its possible relevance to the December 3, 1968, extortion scheme, has seldom been addressed in case discussion. This study raises this connection not as assertion but as an open vector for further archival research, since the overlap between the Haas–Hellman financial network and the corporate structure of Wells Fargo is historically verifiable and symbolically resonant.

Equally overlooked is the Russell House, located at 3778 Washington Street, which has appeared only once in prior message-board discussions [7]. The significance of this property extends beyond its elegant façade: it also represents another node in the Wells Fargo architectural network. Designed by Erich Mendelsohn, the house is unique as the only residential commission by this major European modernist ever constructed in the United States [8]. Its position near Washington and Maple situates it directly within the geographical locus of the Stine murder, making it a highly visible landmark in both aesthetic and historical terms.

The thematic parallel continues downtown. The Wells Fargo Bank Building on Sutter Street was designed by another visionary of Art Deco modernism, Timothy L. Pflueger, whose portfolio also includes the St. Francis Hotel at Powell and Geary Streets, bordering the western edge of Union Square [9]. This overlap of designers, financiers, and physical addresses reinforces the architectural continuity underlying San Francisco’s elite geography—a continuity that the Zodiac’s routes repeatedly traverse.

It was at the St. Francis Hotel—addressed as 950 Mason Street—that Abraham Haas resided and ultimately passed away on August 8, 1921 [10, 11]. Thus, the Haas association extends literally across the block bounded by Mason and Geary, the very grid from which the Stine cab began its final journey. When viewed through this lens, the Union Square–Wells Fargo–Haas triad defines not merely a historical coincidence but a structural backbone of spatial reference: the economic and architectural lineage of San Francisco itself, mirrored—perhaps consciously—in the killer’s choice of destinations.

Figure 6. Abraham Haas Obituary 1921 [12]

A person with a mustache

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Figure 7. Abraham Haas Obituary 1921 [13]

Figure 8. San Francisco City Directory 1970 (Ancestry) [14]

3. The Washington–Maple Axis as Cultural Crossroads

The 1970 San Francisco City Directory [14] lists Madeleine Haas—under her married name Madeleine Russell—as residing at 3778 Washington Street, the same address as the Russell House described above. Her marriage to Leon B. Russell situates this property at the intersection of two genealogically and culturally significant lineages: the mercantile-financial tradition of the Haas family and the creative-literary milieu of Russell’s ancestry.

Leon B. Russell’s background is particularly noteworthy. During the 1940s, he worked in Los Angeles for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studios, a period that has attracted renewed attention among researchers investigating early post-war Hollywood networks relevant to the Zodiac timeline. At that time, Russell was married to his first wife, Dorothy McEvoy, daughter of author and illustrator Joseph P. McEvoy, whose contributions to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker placed him at the center of American literary modernism. Leon B. Russell was also the grandson of Charles Henry Meltzer, a distinguished playwright, translator, and critic active in the late nineteenth century, whose works bridged Victorian drama and early twentieth-century journalism. Thus, the Russell line represents a cross-section of transatlantic letters and performance culture, adding an artistic counterpart to the Haas family’s financial and civic prominence.

With Madeleine Haas Russell occupying the Russell House at 3778 Washington, the intersection of Washington and Maple emerges not only as a geographic endpoint in the Stine narrative but also as a symbolic confluence of two distinct heritages: the commercial-industrial lineage of San Francisco’s early banking dynasties and the artistic-literary lineage of modern American theater and cinema.

Within this frame, the Zodiac’s movement through the area can be interpreted as a traversal across those same cultural vectors—a passage from capital to creativity, from the financial architectures of Wells Fargo and Union Square to the narrative architectures of script, stage, and screen. This convergence underscores the broader thesis of your work: that the killer’s selected geographies echo the social and symbolic strata of the city itself, where legacy, language, and geography form a single coded continuum.

4. Authorship, Performance, and the killer’s “Writer for Print” Persona

The Russell–Meltzer lineage, rooted in theater, translation, and cinematic production, provides a fitting cultural analogue to the killer’s own performative tendencies. Figures like Charles Henry Meltzer and Leon B. Russell occupied creative spaces where language, image, and timing were orchestrated for public effect—a structure strikingly similar to the Zodiac’s manipulation of media and correspondence. The killer’s letters demonstrate not merely a compulsion to communicate but an instinct for staging, voice control, and reader management—qualities central to dramaturgy and film direction alike. His oscillation between menace and irony, his calculated misdirection, and his awareness of typography and layout (what Soze aptly termed “writing for print”) reflect an understanding of audience dynamics comparable to that of a playwright or screenwriter.

By situating the Russell House and its occupants within this aesthetic lineage, the killer’s geographic and linguistic architectures appear to converge: the city becomes a stage, the letters a script, and the crimes an act of symbolic authorship. This does not imply direct personal connection but rather a mirroring of method—a shared cultural grammar between San Francisco’s artistic-intellectual elite and a figure who fashioned himself as both author and antagonist. The Washington–Maple sector, therefore, functions as a literal and metaphorical crossroads between inherited authorship and enacted authorship, between the scripted narratives of the early twentieth century and the ciphered performance that haunted its close.

5. Epilogue: The architecture of deliberate intent

Just as The Debut Letter: Volume 1 [15] demonstrated that linguistic outliers, misspellings, and glyph insertions were deployed according to a measurable rhythm rather than accident, the present study extends that principle from language to geography. The same deliberate pacing evident in the written word now emerges in the arrangement of physical space. Both the textual cadence of the early communications and the spatial choreography of the crimes appear governed by an internal metric—one that fuses word-count with route-length, text margins with city grids, and orthographic rhythm with architectural alignment.

Within this framework, the Presidio Heights episode ceases to read as a spontaneous act of violence; it becomes instead a material analogue to the killer’s written structures—a topographic manifestation of control, symmetry, and coded intention. The Washington–Maple analysis therefore completes a bridge first traced in the Debut Letter: from the micro-rhythm of linguistic deviation to the macro-rhythm of urban design. What emerges is a unified logic of construction, what may aptly be called the grammar of the Zodiac system, in which letters, lines, and landmarks are constituent elements of a single, coherent architecture of authorship.

Seen in retrospect, the Zodiac’s world is neither random nor reactive. It is architectural, built from repetition, hierarchy, and symbolic geometry. His routes are blueprints, his letters, floorplans of language. Each misspelling and each turn of a San Francisco corner reflect the same obsessive urge—to impose private order upon public space. Whether through a misspelled word or a chosen intersection, he inscribed himself upon the civic text of the Bay Area as both writer and surveyor, leaving behind a pattern where language and locality converge into one design.

In this light, the path from Mason and Geary to Washington and Maple is more than a cab route: it is a sentence written across the map of San Francisco, punctuated by landmarks, family names, and architectural signatures. The Zodiac’s cipher, once thought confined to paper, extends outward—into the streets, institutions, and lineages that shaped the very city he haunted. It is within this intersection of word and world, syntax and city, that his lasting enigma continues to unfold.

SDS

October 11, 2025

The original note on Tapatalk message board can be retrieved here:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/zodiackillerfr/viewtopic.php?p=270693#p270693

References

[1] https://www.zodiackiller.com/Stine.html

[2] https://www.zodiacciphers.com/zodiac-news/the-zodiac-wells-fargo-bank-robbery-note-december-3rd-1968

[3] https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/zodiackillerfr/viewtopic.php?p=137883#p137883

[4] https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/zodiackillerfr/viewtopic.php?p=270574#p270574

[5] https://www.jmaw.org/hass-jewish-san-francisco/

[6] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/isaias-hellman

[7] https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/zodiackillerfr/viewtopic.php?p=257642#p257642