ROBERT Graysmith never thought he’d meet anyone who could match his obsession with the Zodiac, a serial
killer who terrorized San Francisco’s Bay area from the late 1960s to the mid-’70s.
As the author of two books about the still-unsolved case, Graysmith, a former editorial cartoonist, is the preeminent non-police expert on the Zodiac. Nobody else has delved as far, and as tenaciously, into the gory details and loose ends.
That is, until director David Fincher got involved. Fincher’s new film, “Zodiac,” centers on Graysmith (Jake Gyllehaal), then a young cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and his move to the spotlight when he cracked the killer’s coded letters to the paper.
From then on, his life became consumed by the need to figure out who the Zodiac was, piece by painstaking piece of evidence. Which turned out to be similar to Fincher’s creative process.
“This is a good example of how David Fincher works,” says Graysmith. “We were at Lake Berryessa, one of the murder sites, and [former detective Ken] Narlow says, ‘OK, this is where the couple was murdered.’
“And Fincher gets down on the ground, he’s feeling the ground, and he yells to see how far a voice carries, and he looks up the road. And suddenly, without warning, he gets up and walks over and comes out on this other little inlet, and he comes back and says, ‘No, the murders were over there.’
“And Narlow – this is the guy who found the bodies – goes, ‘Oh yeah. I took you to the wrong spot.'”
Fincher, a notorious perfectionist whose films include “Fight Club” and “Se7en,” vowed he’d only make this movie if he had the resources to make it an informed and accurate account.
Not only were they able to portray the investigation in its true light, but Fincher’s crew even ended up discovering new details and clues that both Graysmith and the police had missed. Two days before this interview, Fincher’s team located a long-missing surviving victim. They also picked up where other handwriting studies left off.
“Fincher’s expert didn’t look at the letters – which were really just block printing. Instead, he looked at the spaces between the letters,” Graysmith says.
“Not many killers go nationwide in newspapers and magazines claiming, ‘I’m the killer, come and catch me,'” says Narlow, the retired detective (Donal Logue) who worked on the Lake Berryessa case.
“It was a challenge to the entire population,” says Narlow. “He threw the gauntlet out there.”
But Graysmith rose to the challenge – at times, going to investigative extremes that even he says were ill advised. “I have to admit I was pretty stupid in some of the things I did,” he says.
In the movie, Fincher depicts Graysmith’s eventual confrontation with his suspect (now deceased). “I went into the Ace Hardware [where he worked] and I locked eyes with him, and I knew,” says Graysmith. “I talk about it as being
like a tuning fork. There was this hum, and the rest of the room went still. For me, it was the answer.”
But what you won’t see in “Zodiac” is Graysmith’s perilous followup, in which he returned and parked outside the store.
“I’m sitting there in my brightred Rabbit,” he says, “and it’s dark, and I look in the window, and he’s gone. And then this car pulls up close next to me. Pins me in. I can’t move. And it’s this guy. And he gives me a look that would kill.
“Now that I know more about him,” he says, “I should have been more terrified.”
During filming, Graysmith was finally able to view a key piece of evidence from the Lake Berryessa case – the door of the victim’s car, on which the killer had written the dates of his murders.
“He liked to taunt people,” says Graysmith. “He wrote on the door to prove he was there. And the coldness of this guy. . . I thought there’d be a light tremble or a smear. There wasn’t a single quiver. Absolute calm.”