My first time trying to review a true crime book, let's see how this goes...
Zodiac is a 1986 book by Robert Graysmith, an artist and cartoonist who was a youngster working with the San Francisco Chronicle back in the 1960s when the whole Zodiac murder thing happened. He wasn't part of the Chronicle's investigative team. He got obsessed with the case, and this is the partial story of his investigation into what we know and what he thinks he knows.
Graysmith wasn't just reading reports, either; he got personally involved with interviewing suspects, victims, and law enforcement. He has a number of his own theories.
The first half of the book is very "police procedural." This is from before Graysmith got personally involved, so it's a collection of names, dates, timelines, and narratives regarding the five authentic victims of the Zodiac, as well as those few who got away.
Graysmith reconstructs the victims' days leading up to their encounter, based on eyewitness reports and interviews of their families and friends (or that's the impression I got, it's possible he's somewhat speculating). Obviously, we can't ask questions about "character development" like we would with a work of fiction, but the reconstructions are reasonable and satisfying, and tense and frantic when appropriate.
The descriptions of the attacks are vivid and visceral but not too bombastic.
Another interesting aspect of the book is Graysmith's examination of some of the investigators on the Zodiac case. Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong are two examples. We get to see a decent amount of them, and Graysmith portrays them as involved and attentive.
We also get pictures of some of the hoaxes and copycats that surrounded the Zodiac. For instance, Graysmith tells the tale of a mysterious caller who insisted a big-name lawyer talk with him on live TV. The calls were eventually traced to an inmate of a mental hospital.
Another great element of the book is that Graysmith reproduces a great deal of physical evidence in the book. We get to see the letters and ciphers he sent, as well as some possible solutions. One element of the case I didn't know about was the fact that the Zodiac made several bomb threats.
Later on, the book becomes much more personal and first-person as Graysmith starts writing about his own experiences. He pushes two of the potential suspects pretty hard, and his attempts to get handwriting samples from one of them would be comical if this was fiction.
Another effort Graysmith makes is to try to connect a bunch of unsolved murders and deaths in the area with the Zodiac's proclaimed numbers. This isn't a bad idea, but sometimes it feels like Graysmith is pulling on a pretty narrow thread.
On the downside, some of Graysmith's descriptions of investigative technology lacks crucial details. His description of "latent prints" fails to make the contrast with visible "patent prints" and is worded in such a way that it confused me. Graysmith's explanation of ninhydrin is missing the crucial point that it's used for fingerprint analysis of paper.
Another issue is that, early on, Graysmith has a tendency to introduce a lot of people so quickly that I had trouble keeping their names straight. There is an index in the book, but it's not all the way at the end of the book where it should be, so I ended up getting a little lost and confused.
Graysmith accepts uncritically a simple Freudian profile for the Zodiac, but I don't think he justified that well enough.
The major issue is that other authors dispute a lot of Graysmith's facts! Another "expert" named Michael Butterfield makes a lot of worrying points about the book, and it's difficult for me to get to the bottom of that conflict. For instance, Butterfield notes that Graysmith's preferred suspect doesn't match, and has never matched, the descriptions given by eyewitnesses. Graysmith's "eureka moment" with figuring out the Zodiac's method was never proven to be true, but he's very positive about it. Graysmith was very positive about a 1978 letter supposedly from the Zodiac until DNA analysis showed it didn't point toward his preferred suspect; from then on Graysmith claimed the letter was a hoax.
The ugly truth is that we may never get 100% certainty about the correctness of the proposed cipher solutions, and all the possible suspects are dead! Evidence that came out after 1986 seems to have ruled out Graysmith's preferred suspect, too.
Long story short, this was an interesting book but quite a few of the facts it presents are quite controversial. It was generally well-written, with some notable failings. However, if Graysmith's detractors are right about him playing fast and loose with the facts, then it might be better to treat it as "based on a true story," rather than a real true crime masterpiece.
Grab a copy here.
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