THERE’S A STRONG POSSIBILITY that Robert Graysmith missed his vocation. He
could, perhaps should, have been a detective. “Oh, I don’t know about that,”
he shrugs. “I just like to find out answers to certain questions.” He does,
indeed. And one question in particular – the identity of the serial killer
known as Zodiac, who claimed five victims, probably many more, in Northern
California in the late Sixties and early Seventies – became an obsession
that has dominated Graysmith’s life for almost 40 years and turned him into
a sleuth, albeit in print.
“But I don’t want you to think that I just wrote about Zodiac,” he protests.
“I’m a dynamo. I love writing. I’ve had seven books published but I’ve
written a lot more.” And it’s true; at 64, Graysmith is one of the most
successful true-crime writers in America, with books including Unabomber:
A Desire to Kill and The Murder of Bob Crane, the latter about
the death of an American television actor filmed as the highly acclaimed Auto
Focus.
But it was the mass murderer Zodiac who was to change his own life for ever.
Graysmith’s fixation with the case cost him his marriage and completely
hijacked his chosen career as a political cartoonist.
“Yes, it did,” he agrees. “I got hooked on this thing and I couldn’t let it
go. I could see these other guys – reporters, police officers – who were
involved in the case all burning out in front of me.
“The Zodiac had been using different (police) departments against each other
by striking in different areas and on border lines and back then nobody was
sharing information. I just felt that somebody should collate the evidence,
write it all down and go through it.” Now, 21 years after his book was first
published, hindsight shows that his instincts were spot-on and his
painstaking research and investigative skills quite remarkable. Not only
does Graysmith believe he knows the name of the killer, the book has become
an international bestseller.
Zodiac is now on its 39th printing, has sold more than four million
copies and is about to sell a whole lot more thanks to an excellent film
version starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith and Robert Downey Jr as his
late, close friend, the hard-drinking crime reporter Paul Avery.
Directed by one of Hollywood’s hippest, and most talented, filmmakers, David
Fincher ( Seven, Fight Club), Zodiacis a gripping exploration
of the damage to the people caught up in the highly pressurised hunt for a
madman. It’s also a story of obsession and it has helped Graysmith better to
understand his own driving compulsion.
“People used to ask me why I started with the investigation in the first place
and I didn’t really know what to say. But was obvious when I saw Jake’s
performance. It’s an obsession. It is. It’s the way I am.
“I’m a type-A personality and I’m going to do it, whatever it is. My Dad
always said to me ‘never give up’ and I just don’t give up. That’s all there
is to it.” Fate also played a large part by placing Graysmith at the very
heart of the Zodiac story from the start. On December 20, 1968, the killer
claimed his first two victims, David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, a teenage
courting couple shot dead in their car on a lonely spot on the Lake Herman
Road on the outskirts of the small town of Benicia, near San Francisco.
In July the next year another couple were shot at a parking lot in Blue Rock
Springs golf course in Vallejo. Darlene Ferrin was dead on arrival at
hospital and Michael Mageau, miraculously, survived.
A few days later Graysmith was in the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle,
where his day job was poking fun at figures such as Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger, when the first of many taunting letters from the killer arrived.
Written in blue felt pen, it disclosed details of the murders that only the
killer could have known and a cipher, featuring arcane symbols, giving
warning that he would strike again unless it was printed. Decoded, it
boasted: “I like killing people because it is so much fun.”’ When the next
letter arrived he would sign himself “the Zodiac”. Graysmith, like the rest
of the editorial floor and, pretty soon, all San Francisco and the Bay area,
was transfixed. Here in the UK the Zodiac killings don’t, perhaps, strike
the same chord but in America a nation was gripped by the murderous exploits
of a serial killer comparable, at least in terms of media coverage, with the
Yorkshire Ripper.
Press him on why the Zodiac case cast such a spell on him – unlike other
national and international stories that crossed his desk every day – and he
admits that, partly, it was the desire to solve a puzzle.
As other lives were wrecked by their involvement with the killings and the
investigation, Graysmith was still drawn to the flame.
“The strangeness of the letters ensnared me. Irretrievably hooked, immediately
obsessed,” he wrote later. “I wanted to solve what I felt was to become one
of the great mysteries.” Push him on this now and he adds: “You would be
hooked on it. Just go read some of those files and you’ll be outside
somebody’s house at two in the morning. It’s a great case.” Over the next
years the Zodiac killings became the biggest story in the area, and
Graysmith had an intimate knowledge of the case thanks to his position on
the newspaper and his friendship with the reporters who worked on the story
– particularly Avery – and the officers investigating the killings including
Dave Toschi (played by Mark Ruffalo in the film), who remains a friend.
Avery, sadly, didn’t fare so well. Consumed by the case, he eventually left
the Chronicle for a smaller newspaper and slipped into alcoholism and
drug abuse and died in 2000. “Zodiac might just as well have shot Avery
because it had pretty much the same effect,” Graysmith says. Others too,
spent years on the case which, in the end, came to nothing.
One of the leading detectives, Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards in the film),
walked away from the murder squad because he simply couldn’t stomach
investigating any more killings. Toschi was also sidelined.
But Graysmith, the shy, young cartoonist, persevered. He started writing his
book in 1976 and it would take him ten years and 13 drafts. The first draft
was 1,300 pages long and took three years to edit it down. “Mainly for legal
reasons,” he says.
He reinterviewed crucial witnesses and spoke to many who had never given a
statement. He found links between the victims that the police had missed or
overlooked and increasingly he was drawn towards one prime suspect.
But there was a price to pay for the hours he devoted to his research and his
marriage, to his second wife, Melanie, broke up under the strain.
“We divorced in 1980 and it was due to Zodiac,” he says. “Everything was
Zodiac. In the early 1980s, I’d wander round with buttons missing and rips
in my shirt, I didn’t really take care of myself. But, you know, everybody
who was involved with that case went that way. It was an overriding
obsession and you knew you were going to catch it. And, anyway, I wasn’t
aware of it being an obsession at the time. You just do it. I’d finish work
and then go and park outside a suspect’s house at 2.30 in the morning. It
seemed perfectly normal to me.”
The police will officially attribute only five murders to Zodiac. But, years
later, the killer boasted of killing 37 and Graysmith believes that there
were many, many more. “I think it could be as many as 50,” he says.
There are many things that are known about Zodiac – he loved to taunt the
police and almost certainly had a grudge against them, he was a sexual
sadist who gained gratification from his victims’ suffering but never
inflicted sexual abuse and, unusually, he used many different weapons,
including guns of various calibres, and knives.
The police investigation became bogged down in bad communications and, before
computers, almost collapsed under a woeful lack of cooperation between rival
departments. Crucial evidence was lost or misplaced and luck – which plays a
part in every big crime investigation – was on the murderer’s side.
The one thing that is not certain is who Zodiac was, although Graysmith is
convinced that he was Arthur Leigh Allen, a convicted child molester.
Indeed, the killings stopped when Allen was serving three years in prison
for abusing young boys.
There is circumstantial evidence and, given the chance, Graysmith will talk in
great detail about why he believes that it was Allen. “I do think he’s the
guy. But there are other good suspects, too.” Allen, who died, aged 59, from
a heart attack in 1992, was questioned several times by police and knew that
Graysmith believed he was the killer.
After his death, police searched his apartment and found a computer file named
Zodiac. “When they opened it up there was a picture of Allen mooning at
them,” Graysmith says.
He was on set frequently as Fincher made his film and at times it was very
emotional. One scene, in which a young couple are stabbed and left for dead,
left him in tears.
“Every time they show the damn scene at the lake I get very upset. Here I go
again. More than I did in real life. That really got to me.” Unlike many
other writers whose books have been mangled by Hollywood, Graysmith is
delighted with the way that the movies have treated his work. Having a
handsome young star such as Jake Gyllenhaal portray you on the big screen is
pretty good, too.
The obsession is, he says, behind him now. Zodiac and its sequel, Zodiac
Unmasked, are in the past and the film and the latest book (about the
making of the film) provides a convenient full stop to the very last
paragraph he will write about the killer. “Oh definitely. I’m moving on.” He
pauses before adding: “But I’m also hoping that the movie could shake some
evidence up . . .”
Zodiac is in cinemas in Britain from May 18.
ZODIAC by Robert Graysmith Titan, £6.99;
Buy the book here for the Offer price of £6.64 (free p&p) timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
