It is better sometimes to be first than right.
Take Robert Graysmith and his book Zodiac, a bestseller in its first printing and basis for the 2007 film of the same name. An entire generation of readers got pulled into the true-crime genre thanks to this sprawling tale of a California murder spree which officially ran from December 1968 to October 1969.
Yet the book itself is deeply confused, full of bizarre and absurd claims its author neither substantiates nor connects. Zodiac experts frequently play piñata with Graysmith’s version of the facts. Still, it is this account which dominates popular understanding of this absorbing mystery.
Reading Zodiac, I realized two things. One is if you want to tell a story, and want people to remember it, it is okay to fudge the truth, a lot. Like explaining how the last minutes of a woman’s life went down:
The car raced behind them at high speed. Darlene [Ferrin] kept turning to lose the stranger. She began going down side streets, but the car behind followed closer and faster.
No car chase appears in the official record of Ferrin’s final night; but Graysmith’s fast-and-furious version keeps you reading.
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| Darlene Ferrin was the third of these five people murdered in the Zodiac attacks of1968-69. Two additional men were wounded. Zodiac author Robert Graysmith examines other possible victims. too. Image from https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/zodiac/ |
What if someone who knew doomed Darlene tells you crazy things about her? Do you work to contextualize those quotes, or just throw them out there? Graysmith knows which approach will grab eyeballs:
“She was probably in an occult. She probably was mixed up with some goofy people only ‘cause she loved excitement…Her being married previously to the kind of guy she was, it could have been a life-style for her.”
What is “an occult”? What does Darlene Ferrin’s lifestyle or marital history have to do with her death? Graysmith never bothers to explain.
Graysmith dishes out lots of factoids, not to mention scores of other murders he suggests are somehow committed to Zodiac. But in all this meshuga, he does something I realized matters more in explaining the success of this book: he fingers someone for the crime.
Is it the right suspect? Not if you listen to police or other experts of the case. No matter. In the true-crime genre, like any other field of entertainment, it is better not to leave your audience hanging, even when reality doesn’t oblige.
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| Zodiac had a way of keeping people interested in his story, long after his murders ended. Above is a card he sent reporter Paul Avery in October 1970, a year after he killed Paul Stine, his last confirmed victim. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer |
Messy as it is, Zodiac is a fun read, which must be acknowledged. Wild as it is, it is never boring. And if you want to know what makes the Zodiac Killer case so fascinating to so many, almost 50 years after the killer was last heard from, this is a surprisingly engaging way to learn.
The book is divided into three sections of near-equal length. First, Graysmith presents the canonical attacks that left five dead and two more injured. Then he goes into the theories of who might have done it, spending much time on both investigators and suspects. Finally, Graysmith alights on his main suspect, a man whom he calls “Bob Starr” who absorbs the book’s remaining focus.
You probably know Bob Starr better as Arthur Leigh Allen, the only suspect publicly named as such by police, who is presented without a pseudonym both in Graysmith’s 2002 sequel Zodiac Unmasked and the 2007 film Zodiac, which adapts both Graysmith’s books.
In this book, Graysmith follows “Starr” to his workplace, locking eyes with the man while trying to get samples of his handwriting to compare with Zodiac-penned letters:
I had expected a mild, overweight man who would be, like Son of Sam, the last person you would suspect of being a mass murderer, but this man was powerful and dangerous looking.
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| Play 'Spot-the-Difference': A police sketch of the Zodiac Killer made from eyewitness accounts of the Stine murder, and a photograph of Graysmith's suspect Arthur Leigh Allen from the same period. Allen was a convicted pedophile whom Graysmith names as the killer. Image from https://www.sfweekly.com/news/yesterdays-crimes-news/yesterdays-crimes-the-zodiac-killer-dna-profile-that-never-was/ |
Graysmith also quotes investigators on how right it is to suspect Allen, not only for the Zodiac murders, but a string of other brutal killings in and around Santa Rosa, California. Saying the author gets tunnelvision is putting it mildly. When bloody fingerprints left on the cab of victim Paul Stine don’t match those of a particular suspect, Graysmith quotes unnamed investigators with this wowzer of an explanation:
“They were fingerprints but not his own. I can’t tell you how he accomplished this. We think it may have been with the use of reverse image prints or with the use of severed fingers from some victim we don’t even know about – whatever.”
Do you believe any real investigator would say something like that, unless maybe they were gaslighting Graysmith out of spite? Neither do I. But if so, the joke is on them, because it is now part of the story that millions of readers turn to first to learn about America’s most famous unidentified serial killer.
I haven’t even touched on Graysmith’s clumsy stab at solving a Zodiac cipher, or his linking dates of Zodiac attacks to movements of the sun and moon. There is a lot of ridiculous information in Zodiac which Graysmith doesn’t even attempt to organize coherently. Zodiac websites fill message boards with detailed explanations of what is wrong in “the Yellow Book,” as Zodiac used to be called for its pre-movie-tie-in cover. Certainly Graysmith gives those dissers a lot to work with.
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| Why people in the Zodiac community still call it "the Yellow Book." Zodiac was a success for many years before David Fincher made his famous movie about it. Image from https://www.amazon.in/Zodiac-Shocking-Nations-Elusive-Serial/dp/0425212181 |
But the guy was there first. Over the years, I have noticed a grudging respect for this fact. Not only did Graysmith’s entrepreneurial diligence make for a terrific movie, it kept eyes on the Zodiac case, maybe not enough for a solution, but enough so that its victims aren’t forgotten.
Graysmith makes a lot of hay about “sexual sadism,” but the shootings were notable not for excess cruelty or bloodthirstiness so much as the strange circumstances that surrounded them, most particularly the way the killer managed his own press with coded letters, phone calls, and even a bizarre costume.
The first attack, on December 20, 1968 at a turnout outside a water pumping station in Benicia, California, killed high schoolers David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, and was fairly atypical for its quiet, no-frills brutality. The second attack, at a parking lot in the neighboring town of Vallejo, left Darlene Ferrin dead. Her companion that July 4th night, Michael Mageau, was also shot repeatedly but survived.
Zodiac might have been just another forgotten nut taking out his lonely anger on the world but for his eagerness to interact with the police and media. After killing Ferrin, he called police dispatcher Nancy Slover to claim credit for the shootings, and those of Faraday and Jensen.
This was followed by a letter revealing details of the crimes, which included a cipher that the killer claimed would reveal his identity. Three newspapers received parts of this cipher, including the San Francisco Chronicle, where Graysmith then worked as a cartoonist.
Graysmith’s interest in the case, he explains, was instant and personal:
As an editorial cartoonist you develop a strong sense of justice, a need to change things, and as a painter and cartoonist I worked with symbols every day. The tools of my career were being misused, appropriated by a murderer.
Zodiac’s next attack, September 27th, was his most luridly iconic. At a public park overlooking Lake Berryessa in Napa County, he attacked another couple, this time with a knife, wearing a black hooded costume emblazoned with the same symbol he used to sign his letters. Cecelia Shepard died while her companion, Bryan Hartnell, survived.
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| The Zodiac Killer as he appeared during his Lake Berryessa attack, before he brandished a long knife. The illustration was drawn by Graysmith himself from a description by the attack's lone survivor, Bryan Hartnell. Image from https://medium.com/@charlierusso23/why-has-dna-evidence-not-yet-unmasked-the-zodiac-killer-26ed5cac40f3 |
The final killing happened two weeks later, in San Francisco’s exclusive Presidio district. Cab driver Paul Stine was shot and killed with a bullet to the head. Zodiac was seen removing a piece of Stine’s shirt which he would clip pieces from to prove his identity in later letters.
Graysmith writes: A killer had stalked the streets of this rich and elegant neighborhood and then vanished into the fog.
Zodiac has been linked to other attacks, though never definitively. Graysmith does what he can to build up the body count anyway, noting claims made both by the killer and others about murders and disappearances which run into the dozens.
Graysmith also shamelessly inserts himself into the narrative. If you saw the film, you might expect to read of Graysmith being snubbed by police officers, but in the book he presents himself as a trusted ally in their investigations. Lead investigator David Toschi becomes a confidante.
Graysmith also visits a home where he talks to a guy he is sure knows more than he is telling about another suspect Graysmith favors at that moment. Meanwhile, he notes footsteps on the floor above.
“I had a feeling that at any moment a stocky man in a black hood could step into the room holding a pistol,” Graysmith writes.
This is a scene you remember when you see it in the movie. In the book, any suspense is muted by the fact it occurs in 1978, nine years after Stine’s murder. Needless to say, no hooded stranger appears.
Graysmith’s
excess personalization of the case does give it some excuse for being so
totally subjective. It winds up being more about his own self-actualization
than about a killer who was never caught. Yet for its faults, it is shamelessly readable, compensating
for a garbled throughline with a certain conclusion, making for what is now the
official version despite itself.
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