Robert Graysmith is the true crime writer and author of ZODIAC
QUESTION: Are you still drawing?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: I do. I draw every single day. And it's the most fun in the world. My apartment’s about the size of this room. And one half is for art and the other side’s for writing. And every day I start about seven, work ‘til Letterman comes on.
QUESTION: Were you surprised at how obsessed you became with this case?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: It surprised me, but when you’re in the grip of it, you don’t really know. I was talking to David Fincher and it didn’t seem unusual at all for me to be at two in the morning parked in Vallejo somewhere. And now that I get thinking back, I get a little more lucid about it. You realize that that was sort of extraordinary at the time. Everybody was pretty much obsessed by this because we really hadn’t run into anything like this before. We had Son of Sam, Boston Strangler, and then Jack The Ripper. But this is something entirely new back in 1968 that we really hadn’t dealt with before.
QUESTION: And where television really picked up on it and ran with it.
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: Yeah, well, this guy was smart enough to market himself. I mean, he had a really wonderful, colorful turn of phrase, his own trademark, his ciphers, some of which still haven’t been broken to this day, a chilling costume. I mean, there was never anything like this case. My intention at the time, since I was doing political cartoons, was to sort of make a political cartoon in words. And, so when you do a cartoon, you attack a bill or a law or something. And you want to create a physical reaction to it so they repeal the law or they make a change. In this case, I thought, what if you can put together everything that’s known, and at that point every, every fact was jealously guarded. I could put this in a book and the public might recognize him somewhere, might solve the ciphers and in this way it's like a political cartoon that will bring him to a halt.
QUESTION: With the technology we have now, would this case be solved?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: Oh, absolutely. Instantly. They were very jealous in those days because, as one of the guys put it, ‘Anybody that solves this is going to be the ace of aces, the best detective.’ You had five or six jurisdictions, and you had the killer striking – and I think he was very calculated, although David Fincher doesn’t agree with me – but he was striking on the confused boundary lines between counties. Like, for instance, Lake Herman Road was Venetia. Sheriff’s department, police department, they all showed up, each one wanting to solve it. Each one kept their own facts. And then, when you bring in Napa and you bring in San Francisco and Riverside, these are all people jealously guarding this. So, when I go in, they pretty much have a piece of paper. And if you could guess, like, ‘The darling had done something that day, right?’ ‘Yeah, she might have been at the beauty parlor.’ You know, they’d do this kind of thing. No pencils, no paper, and I’m sitting there and I don’t have a great memory. But they give you, like, vehicle license and identification numbers and phone numbers. And, I’d just sit there and try to remember it. After about three hours I’d run across the street and just try to write it all down.
QUESTION: Why does Fincher disagree with you?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: He’s very strict. He’s following what Detective George Bawart Vallejo PD did. He came late in the case in the ‘90s. And, he and his Captain Roy Conway made real advances. They went to Germany and so on. But, anyway, the way they did this was they said, ‘Let’s disallow any Zodiac case we can’t be certain of. So, goodbye Lake Herman Road. We know that he was at Lake Berryessa, he wrote on the car. We’ll look for the facts in that.’ So, that’s sort of what David Fincher did. Anything he couldn’t be certain of didn’t make it into the film. I got to follow them from the very beginning before there was a film, before they were greenlit, that three year period there. I got to watch them tape every word. They used to call me and as they gradually worked on this, not just doing a script, they found incredible new information in the case.
QUESTION: So, what does this DNA evidence mean?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: Well, this is intriguing because back in 1978 they put all the letters in a cardboard box. Now, first of all, you’ve got to remember when these arrived at the Chronicle it’s a situation like this: Carol Fischer brings them in, ‘Oh, let me see that.’ And the thing that’s sort of intriguing is there are what they call Velloxes, which in those days was hot metal. They would make a plate. So, the letters were handled because they may have gotten to the police, but not before the Chronicle actually photographed them in perfect copies. And then the copy boys would carry them over. And of course the mail department had had their way. So, anyway, eventually they take all these letters in 1968. So, they’re what, ten, 12 years old, whatever. They take them down to Sacramento in a cardboard box. It's like, what, 112 degrees or something there. And they sit around, they bang around for a while. They bring them back to San Francisco. Then the letters that they were talking about are taken. They were in private hands. They bring them back in, and the TV show needs something for their new season. So, they come in and they do the test. But, they take a little bit from the back of one envelope, a little bit from the front of one, and something probably from the flap. He was sort of vague about that. And they mix them together and they got a print that is so partial that they can’t even run it through CODAS. It's just a fragment. But, it could be a great clue. The reaction of the police department at the time was remarkable in that they said, ‘We’re not going to work on the case anymore.’ And they demoted the two officers, the two homicide inspectors, to juvenile. So, it's a very strange thing. You think this would be their best clue. So, I don't know what it means outside of that. I do know that Arthur Leigh Allen, from Atascadero, would send letters that were not sealed, with no stamps, inside a letter that he would seal and stamp. And ask his friends to mail them. In fact, I have a couple. To mail them outside of San Quentin, that his one friend asked, ‘Well, why can’t you do that, you sealed the first one?’ And they were fairly general letters. The one I saw was, like, to the Fish and Game Department in D.C. So, you’re not sure. But I think you’re dealing with an extremely devious guy. And we did have something called A.P., P.G.M.A.P.O., which was a saliva test. It could tell you the blood type, it could tell you his race, it could tell you he’s a male. You could tell a little bit. And I know even then in those days, if I were doing something like that, I would never lick a letter or stamp. It seems very odd that late on that he would start doing this. But that’s the great thing about the Zodiac case. There are so many possibilities that it's something you’ll endlessly discuss.
QUESTION: Robert, there’s a scene in the movie where there’s a humorous situation in the killing at the lake. Did you ever think of actually doing a cartoon rendition?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: No, and that’s the thing: it's funny. Yesterday I was sitting with Ken Narlow, who was the captain at the time. He says, ‘You’re having a senior moment, Robert.’ It's marvelous to have a wonderful film that is so accurate, and a lot of detail and care that went into it. But I was just flashing back on the victims. I think, in the excitement, to get all the facts you can, I think you sometimes forget these were really nice kids. And that’s probably one of the reasons I was so interested in solving it.
QUESTION: Did you talk to the one who survived the first round in the car?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: Oh, Blue Rock? Oh, no, you know who did that? Brad Fischer tracked him down: Mike Mageau. He said, ‘Yeah, everything in the book is right.’ But I was astonished. You talk about victims in this case – there’s a supplement in here where it talks about Brian Hartnell and Mike meeting in court. And Brian, who has survived this, he’s an enormous man. He’s 280, 6’8”, enormous, and wonderful person. He has made a success of his life. But he’s in court and he’s, I think, a defense attorney, and who’s in court? Mike, whose in an orange jumpsuit. And he looks at him and he says, ‘Wow.’ He says, ‘We were both touched by the same killer, and look at you and look at me.’ And this poor kid, he’s got pins in his legs. He crawled out of a hospital bed right after the shooting, dyed his hair red, vanished. He has green eyes. He’s sort of noticeable, vanished into the street scene. I would have people that were nurses and helping, places that help the disadvantaged. And they’d talk about him. So, so they hired a detective to try to find him because Fincher was very strict on wanting to speak to every single person in the case. And they tracked him to Vegas, where he’d been arrested. And Brad interviewed him, one of those little back and forth things, 30 minutes. And by the time the detective got there, he’d already been released, released and vanished again. So, this is guy knows something. Because remember the night of Darlene’s murder, it's the hottest night of the year, he’s got three t-shirts, three sweaters. He’s wearing extra socks, pants. He leaves the front door of his house open, TV going, lights on. They rush out toward Blue Rock Springs, and Mike authenticated this, they were chased out there by someone that Darlene knew. And I just think that he was expecting trouble. They knew something was up. So, he is probably one of the keys to this entire puzzle.
QUESTION: Why was his clothing being layered?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: Well, he’s a very slender guy. He was 6’2” and very, very thin, as were all of Darlene’s boyfriends, but I think he was trying to bulk. That’s all I can figure, in some way that he looked more impressive as a bodyguard or a whatever it was. So, they had been at a place called Mr. Ed’s, which is prominent in that almost all the victims in Vallejo were at Mr. Ed’s the night of their murder. So, you don’t know.
QUESTION: So, how many victims are there of the Zodiac killer?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: Well, he claims 50 and, you know, it's not really so much the number in this case. The intriguing thing about this is that our suspect, who by the way, was at the lake. There were ten people at the lake; he was one of them. He admitted it in letters from prison. He admitted it to his friends that night. He said, ‘I left just before the stabbings, an hour before.’ Brad Fischer found a map that Arthur Leigh Allen had drawn showing the lake, the murder sites, escape routes, and signed. So, this is the kind of stuff that they’ve come up with, things that aren’t in the movie that are just amazing breakthroughs in the case.
QUESTION: How does it feel to see Fincher so meticulously recreate something you lived through?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: Well, I can only give the one that strikes me the most. It's a person, it's a place. The San Francisco Chronicle at the time was like the old ‘30s newspaper; it's bustling. There’s the clatter of typewriters. We had telephone booths against the wall, all the phones are ringing, copy boys lowering baskets to bring up beer from downstairs out the window. There were horserace bets going on, reporters sleeping in their cars. It's gone – it’s an insurance company. I mean, it looks like that. Carpeting, there’s not a sound, there’s no scramble and rush, there’s not real competition. I love newspapers. I’ve got all the old metal plates and original art, and I just love that stuff. But, anyway, what Fincher did is he goes and gets the blueprints, 3D graphics. I’m looking on the screen, it's alive again. And then, for the movie, it's a block-long set. And you open the drawers – Chronicle notebooks, Eagle pencils, the vacuum tubes work, the phone works. The movie shows the lighting system, which is extraordinarily unique. He has recreated it. Nobody in the world would remember. And I just think, ‘My God, that’s incredible that he went to that kind of trouble.’
QUESTION: How does it feel to be portrayed in the film by Jake Gyllenhaal?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: Oh, it's thrilling. It's thrilling. And I don’t think they ever had anybody but Jake in mind. I believe he came right out of Jarhead and was already being auditioned for that.
QUESTION: What were you thinking when you had these encounters with Arthur Leigh Allen?
ROBERT GRAYSMITH: I once pulled alongside Arthur Leigh Allen. I mean, excuse me, he pulled alongside me. I’m surveilling in my bright orange V.W., and he pulls alongside, and he leans in and gives me a look that you wouldn’t believe. And, then, later on I’m talking to this guy at the auto parts store in Sonoma. He says, ‘Yeah, this Allen said, ‘come on, come at me.’’ And he said, ‘This guy is a tough wrestler.’ He said, ‘The next thing I knew, I was clear across the room.’ This guy, he’s not only intelligent and cunning, he’s strong as an ox. So, I mean, this is one dangerous guy and I really didn’t appreciate that until maybe the last couple years. It really was foolish.
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