Zodiac Movie: Undying legend of a killer
The Zodiac, the notorious Bay Area serial killer of more than 35 years ago who threatened schoolchildren, dodged police and incessantly wrote to local newspapers bragging about how clever he was, is the subject of a Hollywood movie opening Friday.
When you're sitting in that theater, take a hard look at that graying loner down there in the 10th row. You could be staring at the Zodiac.
This is the case that won't go away. The killer's catch-me-if-you-can taunting of police, the mind-puzzlers he sent to the press, the way he dropped off the face of the Earth in the early 1970s combined to give the Zodiac case a legendary status that in some ways outstripped the magnitude of the murders.
When it comes to American serial killers, the Zodiac hardly rates. He once hinted that he had killed 37 people, but the confirmed number of his victims is five, spread over late 1968 and 1969.
Yet the Zodiac managed to frighten the entire Bay Area, not merely with his killings but with his threats to blow up school buses or shoot the children as they got off the bus.
The 1971 movie "Dirty Harry," loosely based on the Zodiac case, ended with Clint Eastwood's SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan shooting "Scorpio" to death. In real life, it has not been so neat.
Police in Vallejo, where the Zodiac killed three people and wounded another, have long considered the chief suspect to be Arthur Leigh Allen, who died of cancer at age 58 in 1992 without ever being charged. Allen also is the preferred suspect of Robert Graysmith, the former Chronicle political cartoonist whose book on the killings was the foundation for the new movie, "Zodiac."
Police in San Francisco, where the Zodiac killed a cab driver, had their doubts about Allen as a suspect, but the department essentially washed its hands of the case three years ago and now does not talk about it. Mike Rodelli, a New Jersey researcher who has spent nearly 10 years delving into the case and has impressed some longtime Zodiac experts with his findings, is convinced the killer is a well-known San Francisco businessman now in his 80s.
Read entire article at San Francisco Chronicle
When you're sitting in that theater, take a hard look at that graying loner down there in the 10th row. You could be staring at the Zodiac.
This is the case that won't go away. The killer's catch-me-if-you-can taunting of police, the mind-puzzlers he sent to the press, the way he dropped off the face of the Earth in the early 1970s combined to give the Zodiac case a legendary status that in some ways outstripped the magnitude of the murders.
When it comes to American serial killers, the Zodiac hardly rates. He once hinted that he had killed 37 people, but the confirmed number of his victims is five, spread over late 1968 and 1969.
Yet the Zodiac managed to frighten the entire Bay Area, not merely with his killings but with his threats to blow up school buses or shoot the children as they got off the bus.
The 1971 movie "Dirty Harry," loosely based on the Zodiac case, ended with Clint Eastwood's SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan shooting "Scorpio" to death. In real life, it has not been so neat.
Police in Vallejo, where the Zodiac killed three people and wounded another, have long considered the chief suspect to be Arthur Leigh Allen, who died of cancer at age 58 in 1992 without ever being charged. Allen also is the preferred suspect of Robert Graysmith, the former Chronicle political cartoonist whose book on the killings was the foundation for the new movie, "Zodiac."
Police in San Francisco, where the Zodiac killed a cab driver, had their doubts about Allen as a suspect, but the department essentially washed its hands of the case three years ago and now does not talk about it. Mike Rodelli, a New Jersey researcher who has spent nearly 10 years delving into the case and has impressed some longtime Zodiac experts with his findings, is convinced the killer is a well-known San Francisco businessman now in his 80s.