catalog

Well-known member
Yeah, I'm curious to see if Kobek goes into more detail as to why he so readily dismisses Leigh. The film is pretty convincing.
i think he does but the level of detail in the second book is incredible / far too much to take in. i sort of got swept up in the argument even though i couldn't really follow precisely what he was on about.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
I get the impression that the Graysmith book isn't really taken that seriously nowadays by the majority of active "researchers" in the Zodiac "community".
In fact, I've seen some say that it did irreparable damage as, being the first major book about it, it has distorted the "facts" of the case, and it is better to go back to primary sources rather than waste time refuting Graysmith's theory.

If I was writing a Zodiac book I'm sure I would resent having to even read the Graysmith book as it is so dull, let alone rebut it point by point.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Zodiac is great, I never rewatch it though cos the reenactment of the lakeside murder in it is so disturbing to me (I had a similar and if anything worse reaction to a recreation of a murder by John Wayne Gavy in the Netflix Dahmer show).

Arguably the subject of the film is the ruinous effect of the obsession graysmith et al decelop with identifying the zodiac killer -- and the maddening impossibility of resolving the mystery.

Of course they heavily put their thumb on the scale by making it seem obvious that Arthur Leigh Allen IS the murderer, but there are elements of doubt sewn in like the handwriting thing, the creepy ass basement belonging to that creepy ass man etc.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Clearly what makes the film more disturbing than your average serial killer flick, aside from it recreating real murders, is that the killer is never caught or even 100% identified. And in real life when serial killers are caught and imprisoned and even executed, while there's some sort of closure to the story the question of who the hell they were to be able to do those things lasts forever.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Mindhunter was an extension of Zodiac I suppose (real life killers, stare into the abyss and it stares back, etc.) but I thought it was rubbish
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
re: zodiac

an interesting double bill is "Dirty Harry" & "Zodiac"

both based on the Zodiac killings, both feature a maverick going it alone

I watched both after reading the Kobek books, "Dirty Harry" is probably truer to the time ( casual racism, homophobia, and the fashion didn't require historical research by the wardrobe department ) and better paced

"Zodiac" had bad pacing, I started losing my interest towards the end ( I just wanted it to end to be honest )

Kobek makes a case for "Dirty Harry" being one of the best San Francisco films - his description of the panning shot in opening scene certainly heightened my enjoyment when I got around to watching it

In the Zodiac film the cop goes to see Dirty Harry in the cinema... there is a bit where they are reading a letter from "Scorpio" saying that he will kill someone every day until the city pays him a 100k or whatever it is. And that it says he might shoot children or maybe a "n*****" and the guy reading the letter trails off as he reaches that word and doesn't say it. And I thought that that was surprisingly sensitive for such a film... and then it occurred to me that I was being stupid they probably just censored it in the modern film.

As for Dirty Harry itself, I first saw that at a neighbour's house when I was really pretty young. Certainly I had no idea that Scorpio was based on anything else and I was probably too young to understand most of what was going on etc However I do remember that first shot with the rifle target thing travelling over the rooftops and so on... though that may have had less to do with the technical beauty and of the shot and the tension it achieves, than the fact that it featured a woman with no clothes on.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
it is all circumstantial evidence that's true, but then it always was/always will be. the kobek argument amounts to the difficulty of discounting doerr, whereas the other suspects can be.

the most interesting bit about the second book is to do with the cop and how he most likely fabricated letters in order to continue having a case.

They also touch on this in the film, Toschi is investigated by Internal Affairs for writing to the letters but, according to the film, he basically had his name dragged through the mud and then was fully cleared. Of course if he wrote that letter then it would blow up the claim about the time-line matching so it is in the interest of the film to say that.

I suppose another way of looking at it is that Anderson was Toschi's favourite suspect - he said "the minute I set eyes on him I knew he was The Zodiac" so, if we were to get conspiratorial, it's possible he kept an eye on Anderson and would have been aware that he was jailed, and thus able to write that comeback letter when he came out of prison so as to make the timeline fit.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
there's a whole in the Kobek book bit that quotes Toschi's claims to have been the inspiration for Dirty Harry, which builds up a picture of an egotistical fantasist - he really doesn't come off too well in the Kobek book
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Arguably the subject of the film is the ruinous effect of the obsession graysmith et al decelop with identifying the zodiac killer -- and the maddening impossibility of resolving the mystery.

Yes very true, they make out that it sucked in both Avery and Graysmith and drove them to the point of madness and beyond, and had a similar effect on Toschi until he managed to step back from the void... but I'm not sure that I found the portrayal of this that convincing, one minute they're going "Hmmm, this is intriguing" and next scene they're living in a cellar surrounded by boxes piled high filled with Zodiac clues and the walls covered in insane diagrams seemingly drawn by a mad professor and cross-referenced with cobwebs of pinned threads that look those experiments when they said "what happens when you give a spider crack cocaine?"

Of course they heavily put their thumb on the scale by making it seem obvious that Arthur Leigh Allen IS the murderer, but there are elements of doubt sewn in like the handwriting thing, the creepy ass basement belonging to that creepy ass man etc.

Surely that creepy basement scene was totally made up though, I can't believe that that happened, certainly not as it dramatised in the film. There is a bit towards the end where you have that and various almost jump scares which occur at Graysmith's house and it combines to give an impression that the Zodiac was somehow hunting him in return. I took that to be either a) a totally spurious bit of melodrama chucked in so as to stop the final act dragging so much or b) more charitably it was a way of showing how paranoid Graysmith had become, to the extent that he believed that the Zodiac was hunting him and, to give us some insight into how he felt, they give us events as he may have seen them in his paranoid fantasies rather than as they really were.

A more general question here, does, say, Andrerson's family have any way to take action against someone making a film and strongly implying "Your brother/father/son/whatever is a notorious serial killer" even though there was no really solid evidence to say that this was the case? Cos I have to say, if that were me, I'd be a little peeved about it. Especially as it was such a big film made by Fincher and with a stellar cast - now, you're telling me that Graysmith's book is mainly discredited and its conclusions are not taken too seriously... but how many casual watchers are going to dig into all the alternatives? When you have Fincher's juggernaut with Robert Downey Jr and so on vs on the other hand an actual book written on paper by someone who (as far as I know) isn't even a really handsome superstar then the former has far greater reach, regardless of how well the arguments stack up were one to go and research them independently.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Clearly what makes the film more disturbing than your average serial killer flick, aside from it recreating real murders, is that the killer is never caught or even 100% identified. And in real life when serial killers are caught and imprisoned and even executed, while there's some sort of closure to the story the question of who the hell they were to be able to do those things lasts forever.
Yes, one thing that struck me, and maybe this is obvious, but the dichotomy between, on the one hand "The Zodiac" who, when you meet him armed and masked in a lonely spot, is a terrifying figure, and, on the other hand, his day to day self, say it is Anderson - the serial killer is (probably) just a normal man. it's very strange to me that he mask and the darkness allows him to somehow become something else altogether. Like a Marvel character I suppose (though I hate to say that obviously).

I don't really know what I'm trying to say here that isn't completely obvious. I suppose that it sort of hit me harder than normal here, I really thought about that contrast and what it means. I've never known a serial killer (as far as I know - creepy thought) but when serial killers are unmasked their neighbours normally say either "He seemed perfectly normal, a quiet and polite guy who kept himself to himself etc" or else "There was always something odd about him, whenever we passed on the street I got this weird feeling" - I wonder how much these comments are real and how much they are just what people think they should say.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's s that feeling of power that gets a lot of them off (sexually) isn't it, probably most of them really. And for a lot of them it's a transformative experience compared to their humdrum powerless lives.

That scene is so gut wrenching to me, aside from knowing that something very like it actually happened to those people, its something about it happening in broad daylight on a beautiful day -- and imagining what it must feel like to be suddenly at the mercy of a sadistic psychopath.

I first saw it when I was stoned as fuck and I had to turn it off for about 15 minutes to recover lol
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Mindhunter was an extension of Zodiac I suppose (real life killers, stare into the abyss and it stares back, etc.) but I thought it was rubbish

I get the feeling that two things that are given a lot less credence than they used to be are - those kind of psychological profilers, and handwriting experts.

It seems to me that I've read a few things saying that the role of profilers in the past has been exaggerated and that these days they are not as important a part in investigations as one would think going from the stuff you've seen on telly and read in books.

As for the handwriting experts, it seems that they never agree which suggests to me that it is a very inexact science, also, I just cannot believe that it's not possible to do things to disguise your writing, if you fuck with the way you hold the pen or artificially handicap yourself or something. I dunno, I don't think I'd be happy saying so and so can't have written a certain letter.

That said, I asked this before, how come the Zodiac letters are given such credence? There seems to be a general acceptance that they were written by the killer, why is that? Just cos he seemed to know details that only the police would have had?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
there's a whole in the Kobek book bit that quotes Toschi's claims to have been the inspiration for Dirty Harry, which builds up a picture of an egotistical fantasist - he really doesn't come off too well in the Kobek book
Interesting, in the film he very much distances himself from Dirty Harry saying that his "old school" investigative tactics are stupid.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
A more general question here, does, say, Andrerson's family have any way to take action against someone making a film and strongly implying "Your brother/father/son/whatever is a notorious serial killer" even though there was no really solid evidence to say that this was the case?
Not sure if the family has protested but he was a convicted child molestor so maybe his family didn't care that much?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've made not one but two mistakes there – this is from Quora

" The most misunderstood aspect of the “Arthur Leigh Allen” saga is how he got to be a suspect in the first place. According to the actual police reports, etc, from the time:

  1. In 1967, Vallejo PD officer hack Mulanax investigated a complaint that Allen was molesting a student(s) at the school where he worked. Allen’s mother (again!) paid the victim’s family a settlement, and the charges were dropped. This REALLY bugged Mulanax, for obvious reasons. He did NOT let it go.
  2. In early October, 1969, a “profiler” described the guy writing the “Code Killer” letters as a probable latent homosexual and likely pedophile. That, plus the general description of the attacker at Lake Berryessa, reminded Mulanax of his favorite chubby pedophile—Arthur Leigh Allen, who was known to frequently visit Lake Berryessa.
  3. Mulanax suggested that Vallejo PD Sgt John Lynch, investigating the Ferrin murder, check into Allen. He did, once. To Lynch, Allen did NOT fit the description of the suspect described by Mageau, and did NOT fit the description of the shooter of Paul Stine. So that was that for the time being.
  4. LATER, (and Graysmith lies about the timeline on this in his book,) Allen became a potential suspect in the abductions and murders of female hitchhikers in the Santa Rosa area. In the meantime, Allen’s “friend,” Don Cheney, who also had an axe to grind with Allen over Allen’s behavior toward Cheney’s kids, started feeding not-completely-believable stories about Allen to various detectives acquainted with Mulanax. That’s right—it was Mulanax and Cheney who really beat the “Allen is Zodiac drum” in the early days. I think they were sincere, but some of the “evidence” was not entirely factual. But, lacking any other suspects, police started to look at Allen as a serious “Zodiac” suspect. And it didn’t help that Allen didn’t mind people THINKING he might be “Zodiac.”
  5. Unfortunately, fingerprints, handwriting, and DNA all rule out Allen as the so-called “Zodiac Killer.”
  6. And for the record, another pack of lies told by Graysmith concerns Allen’s family suspecting he was the Zodiac. They did NOT think any such thing. They sued Graysmith and his publisher, and won an out of court settlement. (So did several other people.)"
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
" There is a lot of Evidence tying Allen to the Lake Berryessa Attack. However all of the other attacks he has an Alibi and they have conclusively proven that he was not the one who contributed the DNA on the letters. I would like it noted however that the Zodiac Killer never directly took responsibility for the Lake Berryessa Attack, an Attack that didn’t fit the Zodiac Killer M.O.

The police say that Arthur Leigh Allen seemed to like being the Prime Suspect in the Zodiac Investigation and had notebook entries and tapes about the Zodiac Killer. These are all of the makings of a Copycat Zodiac Killer and not of the Zodiac Killer himself. If the police had arrested Arthur Leigh Allen they could have/should have convincted him for the Lake Berryessa Attack but where they went wrong is their attempt to link Berryessa to the Zodiac Murders.

Allen came back to his house on the day of the Attack with bloody knives in his car.

He had told friends he was going to Lake Berryessa.

He fits the Description of the Lake Berryessa attacker who was described as taller and fatter than the attacker at Presidio Heights and Blue Rock Springs.

Allen W A S N O T the Zodiac Killer, But he most likely was the Killer at Lake Berryessa.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Not sure if the family has protested but he was a convicted child molestor so maybe his family didn't care that much?
I wondered if that might count against him. Not really right is it, but child molesters are basically fair game it seems.,
 

william_kent

Well-known member
That said, I asked this before, how come the Zodiac letters are given such credence? There seems to be a general acceptance that they were written by the killer, why is that? Just cos he seemed to know details that only the police would have had?

he sent a letter just after the SF taxi driver murder that contained bloodstained cloth he snipped from his victim's shirt - that one was genuine
 
Top