2008 Woodie Awards
The Zodiac: 60's Killings are Still a Bizarre Whodunit
Dixiw Reid
Issue date: 3/12/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment
- Page 1 of 3 next >
|
Vallejo and Napa County in the late 1960s, was Arthur Leigh Allen, a onetime schoolteacher and convicted pedophile who died in 1992.
Retired cop Ken Narlow doesn't think so, and he has a feeling Zodiac is still alive.
"I think he's out there somewhere," says Narlow.
The five murders Zodiac claimed four young people and a San Francisco cabbie remain
unsolved, and his identity is uncertain.
Graysmith and Narlow were major players in the sensational drama that surrounded the Zodiac killings more than 30 years ago and in the making of the documentary-style thriller "Zodiac" (in theaters Friday). It's
based on Graysmith's true-crime best-sellers "Zodiac" and "Zodiac Unmasked."
Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhall) was a young editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969. He was in the
publisher's offi ce ge?? ing a cartoon approved when the fi rst of Zodiac's taunting letters with crytogram "clues" to his identity, many misspellings, endless threats and Zodiac's trademark cross-inside-a-circle signature arrived in late July.
In similar letters delivered to the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times-Herald, Zodiac bragged about killings in Vallejo a few weeks earlier, on July 5, and
in December 1968.
"The thing that galvanized us all was that he was sending us ciphers, and they were all slightly different, and no one knew which
one came first, in order to break the code," Graysmith says from his home in San Francisco. "The threat that went with it was that he was going to start killing people on a rampage if (the newspapers) didn't print his cipher on the front page. After a lot of soulsearching, all three papers did (on Aug. 1, 1969)."
Narlow (Donal Logue plays him in the movie) was an investigator with the Napa County Sheriff 's Department in late September 1969 when he learned that two college students were stabbed while picnicking at Lake Berryessa, 30 miles north of Napa. He rushed
to the hospital and was waiting when the ambulances arrived. Cecilia Ann Shepard died two days later. Her companion, Bryan Hartnell, survived six stab wounds and now practices law in Southern California.
As for Narlow, he retired from the department 20 years ago but is still working
the case, unofficially. He was a technical adviser on "Zodiac."
Be the first to comment on this story