Zodiac 

On 4 July 1969, a man followed a teenage couple to a secluded lovers’ lane in a public park in Vallejo, California, and shot them numerous times. Unbeknown to him, the boy survived, but he reported their deaths to the police in detail, claiming responsibility for the murders and describing exactly where they were and even what gun he used.

A month later, the killer sent letters to three major media outlets in San Francisco, each containing part of a cipher which he claimed contained his identity. The letters demanded that the cipher be printed on the front pages of their publications within a week, or else he would “[cruise] around all weekend killing lone people in the night”.

Each media outlet was reluctant to be the only one to deny the killer’s demands, lest they be accused of provoking further murders. All three buckled and printed the ciphers, feeding into an egomaniacal game of catch me if you can and introducing the world to the Zodiac, one of the most notorious serial killers in history.

Despite the best efforts of the CIA and FBI, the code was eventually cracked by a couple in Salina. Rather than the identity of the killer, all it contained was inarticulate ramblings about collecting slaves for the afterlife.

But the damage had been done. By succumbing to the Zodiac’s demands, the media had given him a taste for the limelight. He sent more threatening letters boasting of his crimes, containing maps and puzzles and once again demanding publicity. Two months later, after killing another couple, he sent another cipher. It was a cryptogram made up of 340 symbols, far more difficult to decode than the first.

It became known as Z-340, one of the most famous unsolved ciphers in history.

‘Z340’ (Image supplied)

Last week, after 51 years, it was finally cracked. It was decrypted through the combined effort of American software developer Dave Oranchak, Australian mathematician Sam Blake, and Belgian warehouse operator Jarl van Eycke.

But after all the fuss and scrutiny it was just more drivel. It read:

“I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASN’T ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH”

The references to a TV show is in response to a call made to a talk show a month earlier in which the caller, claiming to be the Zodiac, said: “I need help. I’m sick. I don’t want to go to the gas chamber.” The call was traced to a mental institution.

By giving the Zodiac the attention he craved, the media had opened the floodgates, egging him on, causing nationwide panic and sowing the seeds of a dangerous reverence for his ability to manipulate authorities.

The Zodiac Killer inspired a generation of serial killers, fascinated with the mystery surrounding his correspondences and his never being caught. The most dangerous killers are those who capture public imagination. The new Netflix documentary The Ripper points out that while Jack the Ripper wasn’t the first serial killer, he was the first to incite global panic. That is what has made him so notorious. The Zodiac strived towards a similar panic, as have several copycat killers in the years since his silence, most famously Heriberto Seda, who killed three people before being captured.

The Zodiac also had a huge influence on popular culture, giving rise to books, music and famous films such as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, but the most important is Zodiac, a mystery thriller which retold the true story in 2007. It’s directed by the renowned David Fincher, whose films have received 30 nominations at the Academy Awards. His latest film, Mank, is a black and white biographical drama about the writing of Citizen Kane, which was released on Netflix this month.

Zodiac sports an all-star cast. Mark Ruffalo (with more fury than The Hulk) plays Dave Toschi, the cop who headed up the manhunt for the Zodiac – the man who inspired Bullitt and Dirty Harry. The charismatic Robert Downey Jr plays Paul Avery, an alcoholic crime reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle who thinks the sun shines out of his ass (a role which comes quite naturally to him, having been a drug addict in the past and continuing to be a narcissist in the present). Jake Gyllenhaal, rather than playing the disturbed psychopath as is his MO, is Robert Graysmith, the “boy-scout” political cartoonist with a knack for code cracking who came closest to catching the killer, and eventually wrote the bestselling book upon which the film is largely based.

Zodiac is gripping and intense. Viewers should be warned that there are several murder scenes, one of which is highly disturbing. It’s a marathon of a film, powering through two and a half hours of edge-of-your-seat suspense drama, but as with the case itself, there’s no resolution in the end, only the frustration of justice not served despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence of the killer’s identity.

Just like the case, just like the film, this recent deciphering of the cryptogram was anticlimactic. After all the fear and violence and half a century of investigation, it just takes one glance at his inarticulate message to see that he was little more than a deluded psychopath who got lucky.

Many people remember the Zodiac Killer as some kind of criminal mastermind who evaded the police through diabolical guile, but this is mostly a function of his misrepresentation in the media.

The Zodiac made several mistakes during his tirade which should have led to his arrest, but didn’t because of a lack of cooperation between police departments and bureaucratic legal hurdles. Rather than paint law enforcement as negligent, the Zodiac was portrayed as an evil genius.

In this way he got the best press he could possibly have hoped for, and that’s all he really wanted. The Zodiac claimed responsibility for 37 murders in his letters, the vast majority of which he did not commit. He was addicted to the attention, and many have speculated about the incalculable damage that could have been avoided had the tabloids not played ball. DM/ML

Zodiac is available to rent on Netflix.
You can contact This Weekend We’re Watching via [email protected]