UBC: Graysmith, Zodiac Unmasked

Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed by Robert Graysmith

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


See also Zodiac.

This book shares with Zodiac the inherently confusing, nebulous, ambiguous nature of its material, but it also has some problems of its own. The worst of which is repetition. Graysmith not only repeats information covered in Zodiac (which I totally admit he couldn't avoid), but he repeats information within Zodiac Unmasked. There was a symposium on Zodiac in 1993, and Graysmith not only gives large chunks of that verbatim, but he repeats the quotes, again verbatim, at other points in the text, without even flagging that that's what he's doing. It's annoying and unnecessary, and somewhere along the line a good editor should have dealt with it. Zodiac Unmasked is about twice the length of Zodiac, and it doesn't need to be.

The experience of reading these books, particularly Zodiac Unmasked feels like a matter of form mirroring content: endlessly going over the same ground, looking for things missed or new interpretations or can we get DNA evidence off these thirty-year-old envelopes? Hunting down witnesses who weren't properly interviewed in the 60s, arguing about whether a particular murder or a particular letter was or was not the actual Zodiac's work. (Graysmith loses points with me because he changes his mind about the authenticity of one of the letters and doesn't bother to SAY SO. And it's important because it's the 1978 letter, which he uses as part of his argument for Starr/Allen being the Zodiac--until suddenly, when the DNA doesn't match, he's like, Oh that letter. The fake.

(He also, incidentally, does a lousy job of the transition from calling the prime suspect Robert Hall Starr to using his real name, Arthur Leigh Allen.)

The matter of that 1978 letter, the one that is sometimes real and sometimes fake depending on whether it suits Graysmith's argument or not, is representative of what happens to evidence in the Zodiac case. Nobody can agree about any of it. And what's really frustrating--and this is not a frustration with Graysmith, this is a frustration that he does really an excellent job of exposing--is the degree to which the fact that this case is unresolvable is due to bad police work at the beginning. Not the part where they didn't have DNA analysis to help. The part where police didn't follow up with witnesses, didn't come back to see if they could identify the Zodiac from a photo line-up (and 20, 30 years later, when other detectives did track them down, they were remarkably consistent in identifying Arthur Leigh Allen, which would have been super helpful back in 1968), where the first guy to interview Arthur Leigh Allen decided, snap judgment, on the spot, that Allen wasn't the killer and therefore wrote the interview up in 100 words or less and never bothered to mention what sent him to interview Allen in the first place. And police departments and sheriff's departments not cooperating with each other, not sharing vital information, the Department of Justice stepping on everybody's toes, evidence getting destroyed, getting lost, getting "lost."

I think it's very likely that Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac killer. (If he wasn't, my god, that poor man spent the last twenty years of his life being harassed and stalked by professional and amateur detectives alike. If he was Zodiac, of course, that's not even close to as bad as he deserves.) I have no idea how many of the letters attributed to him he actually wrote (and it puzzles me that in Zodiac, Graysmith presents a complicated but entirely plausible method by which Zodiac could have disguised his handwriting and stymied every forensic document examiner ever born, and then in Zodiac Unmasked, that method just disappears and Graysmith talks about comparing suspect's handwriting to Zodiac's as if he'd never explained why that was pointless). I don't know how many of the possible Zodiac murders he committed. Graysmith got me so confused with the various detectives arguing for and against various murders (all of a sudden we're doubting Faraday and Jensen were killed by Zodiac? what? where did that come from?) that I'm not even sure what's reasonable and what's just tin-hat conspiracy theory bullshit.

And it bothers me that Arthur Leigh Allen is convicted--in both Graysmith's books--based on circumstantial evidence and the fact that everyone who talked to him, both detectives and journalists, were subliminally terrified of him. They "just knew" that he was Zodiac, and that's not actually evidence. Now, the circumstantial evidence--which includes things like pipe bombs found in his basement--is pretty damning, and I don't in fact believe that an innocent* man was hounded to his grave. But it worries me that that could be what happened.

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*"Innocent" being a relative term. Arthur Leigh Allen was a convicted child molester, and there were a lot of crimes they could have charged him for based on the 1991 search of his house (being a felon in possession of a firearm, for starters), even if none of them was what they were after.



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