Family Album: Synthia's and Eddie's official mug shots.   (Photo: Synthia-China Blast)

Synthia thought Eddie was cute. “Finally, I said, ‘Yo, Eddie, why don’t you write to me and tell me what’s on your mind?’ ” A couple of days later, Eddie poured out his heart to her in a “kite,” or letter, saying he thought she was special and wanted to be with her.

In April 2003, Alig, who is serving a ten-to-twenty-year sentence, was transferred into Attica’s protective-custody section. When he arrived, he says, the other prisoners quickly told him about Eddie’s past. “Everybody said he was the copycat Zodiac Killer, so I had this preconceived notion of what he would be like. He had this blank stare, which was kind of frightening. But then I got to know him, and he’s just like any other serial killer,” Alig says with a laugh. “Salt of the earth. He’s sensitive, emotional.”

Synthia had also heard through the grapevine that this introverted, smiling porter had gone on a killing spree through New York, and she was intrigued. Bad boys turned on Synthia, who was known as a “biker bitch” with countless tattoos, including a scorpion covering the right side of her face. “When Eddie gave me the kite, I threw out some Zodiac jokes,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Are you going to kill me? Are you going to ask for my birth sign?’ Eddie answered, ‘No, I would never hurt you.’ ”

“I don’t actually know anything about astrology,” admits Eddie, who included the star signs of his victims, along with the San Francisco Zodiac Killer’s trademark symbol of a circle over a cross, on his untraceable letters to the New York Post in the early nineties. At that time, Eddie had wanted them to think that the original Zodiac Killer had returned to continue the slaughter. Now, Synthia warns, he gets mad if you call him a copycat.

Eddie grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, in an apartment building he says was frequented by drug dealers, gangbangers, and prostitutes. He was a loner, raised by his single mother, and to this day he swears he has never touched cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs. As a teenager, he dreamed of joining the Green Berets. He read book after book about weapons, ammunition, and military maneuvers like how to evade capture. He thought he was ready for the Special Forces. But when it came time to take the entrance exam, he failed.

One summer evening last year, Eddie says, Synthia proposed. “I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I said yes,” he recalls. “She told me it means that you stay together like a team. I liked that.”

“That pissed me off,” he says. “I thought, ‘What am I going to do with all this information I have?’ ” Then, one day, he saw a PBS special about the original Zodiac Killer, who claimed to have killed about 37 people in the Bay Area in the sixties and the seventies. Eddie says he watched it and thought, “Holy smokes! This guy terrorized a whole city and never got caught. I got nothing to live for. I don’t got no job. I already got those skills. I could be famous. I could do that.”

From 1990 to 1996, Eddie shot at least eight victims at random. But since his homemade guns were inaccurate and held only one bullet at a time, only three of the people were killed. “Lucky for them, it wasn’t a real gun. I would have shot them twenty times if I’d had an automatic,” he says. One of the unlucky few was a woman to whom he offered a cigarette in Brooklyn’s Highland Park. When the bullet didn’t finish her off, Eddie stabbed her more than 100 times.

“I don’t think girls liked him on the streets,” Synthia says now. “I don’t know why.” After six years of evading police and obsessively reading the Bible, he gave himself away in June 1996 when he shot his half sister for inviting a man into their apartment. A three-hour shoot-out ensued, involving the NYPD and a swat team, before he finally surrendered. “I like the movie Black Hawk Down,” he says. “It reminds me of my own gun battle.”

One summer evening last year, Eddie says, Synthia proposed. “I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I said yes,” Eddie recalls. “She told me it means that you stay together like a team and look out for each other. I liked that.”

Synthia got a special tattoo on her ring finger with Eddie’s initials and a tiny zodiac symbol, which she shows me during one of our meetings. And the day after she got that one, she says, she went for a large tattoo on her back. It depicts her and Eddie’s intertwined astrological signs; she’s a Virgo and he’s a Leo. Synthia also started to decorate her cell: “I have zodiac symbols on my TV and all over my walls. It’s so romantic.”

She claims that before she met Eddie, she’d had sex with some of the most notorious rapists and killers in the New York prison system. “It seems that my only attractions are to society’s sickest and most twisted lowlifes,” she wrote in a letter to me. “I’m actually hoping to be incarcerated with the Son of Sam so I can sleep with him while awaiting my sex-change outcome in the courts.” And that fetish suits Eddie just fine: “I liked that she was excited by my murders. It was a little plus for us. She used to put the zodiac sign all over her cell as a tribute to me. I’d see one and say, ‘Is that a new one?’ And she’d say yes. It flattered me.”

Soon after they got “married,” Synthia told him, “Go take a shower and come back here.” Eddie did as instructed. Then she says she gave him oral sex through the cell bars. It was Eddie’s first time. “He was white as a ghost,” Synthia says. “He was so scared. He did not want to get busted by the officers. It was like he was stealing candy from a store or something.” After that, they repeated this scenario about twice a week—always with Eddie receiving and Synthia giving. That was how they both wanted it.

“I’m not gay,” Eddie points out. “I focus on her feminine exterior. I’m not interested in what’s down there, not until after the operation. I think of her as a woman.”