Oh Zodiac film you, two hour and forty minute run time up my spine, like a slow moving street sweeper at 3a.m.
The Zodiac is never one that really fascinated me because he was so, vanilla. He's like one of the original serial killers we knew about in the modern era and he benefited greatly from less than spectacular detective work and forensics. He was never particularly morbid or shocking like many of the ones that came after him. Someone like Ted Bendy wanted to kill because it was gratifying to him whereas the Zodiac seemed to be gratified not by the killed as much as by the games he played with the media and police.
He was also short lived compared to someone like the Green River killer who killed for decades before finally being brought to justice. Zodiac's crimes probably only spanned a year or two and then he stopped which is really weird because serial killers can't stop, its a compulsion. This is a piece of evidence that counts against Arthur Leigh Allen. He went to prison for other crimes and got out in 4 years but there were no more murders or letters from the Zodiac while he was in prison from 1974-1977.
If you put a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on him he would look pretty close to the composite sketch as well. The Zodiac claimed he used a disguise while he was killing.
I don't know how much was true in the film concerning the maids discussion with the Zodiac about his birthday being December 18th but Arthur Leigh Allen was indeed born on the 18th of December.
The Zodiac wasn't this depraved psycho though, not like we know now with guys like Dahmer. He wasn't into having sex with the bodies that I know of, not into cannibalism, and didn't save the body parts. In fact, even his method of killing seems very anti-serial killer because he mostly used a gun and the vast majority of serial killers are more hands on than a gun allows. I'm sure some people may have suspected the Son of Sam killer as being the Zodiac when he began shooting people in 1976.
Arthur Leigh Allen died of a heart attack and died in 1992 and he was only linked to the 7 that were attacked in 1968-69. He was suspected of killing as many as 20-28 and he claimed to have killed 37. The movie centered on the prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen although with techniques pioneered later he was cleared due to DNA evidence, the partial print on the taxi, and handwriting analysis. Thing is, you can't trust their collecting methods in 1968-69. The DNA could have been anyone's, the partial print on the taxi also could have been anyone's, a detective, someone that walked up to the cab and looked in before the police arrived, who knows, and hand writing analysis is notoriously unreliable which is why nobody goes to jail based just on handwriting alone. It would have to match perfectly.
One of the most damning bits of evidence against Arthur Leigh Allen is that in 1992, Mike Mageau picked him in a line up and said that is the guy that shot me. Mageau was played by Jimmi Simpson in the film.
The couple that was first killed in the film was Mike Mageau and Darlene Ferrin which was actually the second set of murders in real life.
Darlene was killed but Mike survived and picked out Arthur Leigh Allen as his assailant. Mageau also described a brown Corvair at the Blue Rock Springs scene. Allen's friend, Philip, owned a brown Corvair that Allen was allowed to use. An unidentified man named "Lee" was known to associate with Ferrin, shown above, and Allen frequently went by his middle name Leigh. So there was all this circumstantial evidence against Allen but he gets cleared due to the much later DNA test. The dude even wore a watch that said Zodiac on it.
