*spins giant wheel of Zodiac suspects*
And it lands on... some abusive weirdo who belonged to a militia and told florid lies about his military service, published 'zines about Hobbits and was obsessed with LARPing, and wrote hundreds of letters to the editor bitching about the US postal service.
Leave the postal service alone, damn it!
I was going to say "Well, at least it's not another rando who's convinced his daddy done did it", but then I read the article and his daughter is on board, so it kind of is? Although the idea didn't originate with her, and in fact she initially considered suing Jarett Kobek for libel over it.
Real ones know that I am interested in true crime; yes, I've heard all the arguments Kids Today use about how it's horrible and exploitative or whatever. Don't give a shit, move along. Although I don't disagree that some of it is problematic, it's copaganda or it elevates junk science. I mean, try Googling any of the cases from any random episode of Forensic Files, half of them have either been overturned on appeal or are currently being worked on by an innocence project office. But "true crime" is such a huge genre that painting it all with the same broad brush is silly. Radley Balko's book The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Netflix's Exhibit A, and the APM podcast In The Dark are all "true crime".
Zodiac, and specifically Robert Graysmith's book about him, was my entry point into it. Before the internet and podcasts and basic cable, true crime was a much more niche interest. Having been born in the mid-1970s and grown up in the Bay Area, Zodiac felt like our local serial killer. It was still fairly recent when I was a kid, and of course the fact that he was never caught means it continued to generate a steady trickle of interest over the years. One of the Zodiac letters was actually mailed from the town I grew up in, when I was a toddler, although it was one of the later letters and was probably one of the fakes.
A few years after I read Graysmith's book, Richard Ramirez would come to the Bay Area for a brief stop during his reign of terror. But he's always been too nasty to interest me much. And his whole Satanic thing was just very *eyeroll*. I did like the Netflix series from a couple years ago though, especially the woman with the heart-shaped glasses who called his groupies "stupid bitches". Her connection to the case was apparently "saw Ramirez buy a metal band t-shirt at Goodwill, was freaked out by him", which is random enough to be funny on its own, but also she was pretty funny herself so I can see why they put her in the documentary.
Everything else aside, the disgusting teeth and breath (every survivor says his breath smelled like a dumpster full of rotting possum corpses) should have been deal breakers.
Although Graysmith's book is still a good place to start for anyone with an interest in Zodiac, over the years I've realized that his theories have holes big enough to drive through, and I don't agree with his final hypothesis. I actually don't have a favorite pet suspect at all. Whoever it was must be long dead by now, anyway. It could have been this guy Doerr. *shrug*
Leave the postal service alone, damn it!
I was going to say "Well, at least it's not another rando who's convinced his daddy done did it", but then I read the article and his daughter is on board, so it kind of is? Although the idea didn't originate with her, and in fact she initially considered suing Jarett Kobek for libel over it.
Real ones know that I am interested in true crime; yes, I've heard all the arguments Kids Today use about how it's horrible and exploitative or whatever. Don't give a shit, move along. Although I don't disagree that some of it is problematic, it's copaganda or it elevates junk science. I mean, try Googling any of the cases from any random episode of Forensic Files, half of them have either been overturned on appeal or are currently being worked on by an innocence project office. But "true crime" is such a huge genre that painting it all with the same broad brush is silly. Radley Balko's book The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist, Netflix's Exhibit A, and the APM podcast In The Dark are all "true crime".
Zodiac, and specifically Robert Graysmith's book about him, was my entry point into it. Before the internet and podcasts and basic cable, true crime was a much more niche interest. Having been born in the mid-1970s and grown up in the Bay Area, Zodiac felt like our local serial killer. It was still fairly recent when I was a kid, and of course the fact that he was never caught means it continued to generate a steady trickle of interest over the years. One of the Zodiac letters was actually mailed from the town I grew up in, when I was a toddler, although it was one of the later letters and was probably one of the fakes.
A few years after I read Graysmith's book, Richard Ramirez would come to the Bay Area for a brief stop during his reign of terror. But he's always been too nasty to interest me much. And his whole Satanic thing was just very *eyeroll*. I did like the Netflix series from a couple years ago though, especially the woman with the heart-shaped glasses who called his groupies "stupid bitches". Her connection to the case was apparently "saw Ramirez buy a metal band t-shirt at Goodwill, was freaked out by him", which is random enough to be funny on its own, but also she was pretty funny herself so I can see why they put her in the documentary.
Everything else aside, the disgusting teeth and breath (every survivor says his breath smelled like a dumpster full of rotting possum corpses) should have been deal breakers.
Although Graysmith's book is still a good place to start for anyone with an interest in Zodiac, over the years I've realized that his theories have holes big enough to drive through, and I don't agree with his final hypothesis. I actually don't have a favorite pet suspect at all. Whoever it was must be long dead by now, anyway. It could have been this guy Doerr. *shrug*