A new Netflix documentary series finds even more compelling evidence that Vallejo pedophile Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac Killer, but does it bring us closure?
A police sketch of the Zodiac killer, and suspect Arthur Leigh Allen, who is the focus of the new Netflix series, This is the Zodiac Speaking.
For decades after the first letter from the serial killer who called himself Zodiac arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle in August 1969, Robert Graysmith performed the Sisyphean labor of trying to unravel the identity of the San Francisco Bay Area’s all-too-real bogeyman. Graysmith was the Chronicle’s political cartoonist at the time, and was first drawn to solving the cryptogram-laden ciphers the killer included with the taunting letters. He soon became obsessed with solving the case itself, and that’s when he started pushing that rock up a mountain of circumstantial evidence tying his favorite suspect to the case, only to have it come rolling back down again as new yet still unsatisfying forensic analysis added doubt to his personal theories.
While the case has been just as frustrating for multiple generations of cold case detectives and armies of amateur sleuths as it was for Graysmith, he at least got a best-selling book and a movie deal out of it. His 1986 book Zodiac has been reissued well-over 34 times by now and was adapted by director David Fincher into the now-classic film Zodiac in 2007 with Jake Gyllenhaal starring as a certain cartoonist-turned-sleuth. Graysmith made out okay, but like so many who have gone down these true crime rabbit holes, he’d probably trade all of his literary and financial success in to finally prove who the Zodiac was.
This makes the new three-part Netflix documentary This is the Zodiac Speaking a kind of victory lap for Graysmith, or at least as close to one as he’s likely to get now that he’s 82-years-old. Directed by Ari Mark and Phil Lott, who previously directed the HBO Max documentary series The Invisible Pilot (2022), This is the Zodiac Speaking focuses on the siblings Connie, David, and Don Seawater’s childhood recollections of Arthur Leigh Allen, the convicted child molester that has been on the top of Graysmith’s Zodiac Killer suspect list since at least the 1980s when the author stalked him at the Vallejo Ace Hardware where the hulking pedophile worked at the time.
“When you have a guy that’s a killer, there’s geographical profiling,” Graysmith said when I interviewed him in 2002 for Salon.com story on the Paul Schrader film Auto Focus, which was based on his 1993 book, The Murder of Bob Crane. *
“I did a map of the suspect’s house,” Graysmith continued. “He’s in the center. He’s 20, 30-feet away from some of the victims. He knew all of the victims and was even stalking one them.”
According to Graysmith, serial killers “try to insinuate themselves into the investigation.’
‘One day I turned to this inspector and asked, ‘Has there ever been anybody who offered to help you catch the Zodiac Killer?’ And yeah, there was this one guy.” That “one guy” was Arthur Leigh Allen.
Graysmith profiled Allen under the pseudonym Bob Hall Starr in his 1986 book because Allen was still very much alive and able to file libel suits at the time. With Allen safely dead in 2002, Graysmith published a followup, Zodiac Unmasked: the Identity of America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed, to hammer home the case that Allen was Zodiac. But that gravity of Hades sent that rock tumbling to the base of the mountain once again when DNA tests conducted by Dr. Cydne Holt of San Francisco’s crime lab for ABC News appeared to clear Allen as a suspect shortly after the updated book hit the shelves, causing Graysmith to speculate that Allen “may have had a helper” when I interviewed him.
(The San Francisco crime lab’s DNA profile of Zodiac has since been called into question, putting Allen back into the mix according to Tom Voigt of ZodiacKiller.com in 2018.)
It didn’t help Graysmith’s case that fingerprint and handwriting evidence examined over the years also appeared to clear Allen — something not mentioned in This is the Zodiac Speaking. On top of that, Allen with his round face, bald head, and double chin doesn’t resemble the slim-faced, bespectacled suspect depicted in the famous San Francisco Police sketch from 1969. The sketch added even more suspects to the case and sparked off a cottage industry of books written by people who believe that their abusive dads or weird uncles had to be the Zodiac, mostly because they wore horn-rimmed glasses back in the 1960s.
But Allen has hung around in the suspect pool because no other suspect had amassed any where near the same amount of circumstantial evidence linking them to the crimes. He was a longtime resident of Vallejo, where the confirmed Zodiac murders started. He also lived around the corner from the restaurant where Zodiac victim Darlene Ferrin worked and was said to have stalked her. He often swam in Lake Berryessa in Napa County, where Zodiac showed up on Sept. 29, 1969 and stabbed college student Cecilia Shepard to death, and nearly killed her boyfriend, Bryan Hartnell. Allen even told police investigators that he planned on going to Lake Berryessa on the day of the stabbings but went up the coast instead. He also dismissed the bloody knives that he was seen with at the time as being used to slaughter chickens.
“You’re already a suspect in the case and you manage to be somewhere the serial killer happens to strike, that’s just way off the charts,” Graysmith said.
“He’s wearing the same kind of shoes and the same size shoe. He’s identified by everybody. He’s seen lurking around. There’s no way.”
Allen wore the same wing-walker shoes worn by Zodiac, and a Zodiac-brand watch with the same crosshair symbol on it that the killer often signed his letters with and wore on his chest like a super villain when he committed the Lake Berryessa stabbings. He confessed to a friend that he was going to murder people and call himself Zodiac. And when Vallejo police searched Allen’s home before his death in 1992, they found pipe bombs and bomb diagrams that were similar to the one sent to the Chronicle by the Zodiac in November 1969. And in 1991, Zodiac survivor Mike Mageau picked Allen out of a photo lineup as the man who shot him on the outskirts of Vallejo in 1969.
But despite all of this, police in Vallejo, Benicia, Napa and San Francisco — the locations of the five confirmed Zodiac murders — could never close the case. There were plenty of guns, but none of them were smoking, or at least not smoky enough. And recent Zodiac documentaries on the unsolved murders such as the History Channel’s The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer (2017) and The Most Dangerous Animal of All (2020) confine Allen to a footnote if they even mention him at all.
In This is the Zodiac Speaking, Connie, David and Don Seawater’s reminiscences bring Allen back into the Zodiac conversation on the biggest true crime programming platform possible. “Mr. Allen,” as the Seawater siblings still call him so many decades later, was David’s fourth grade teacher at Santa Rosa Elementary School in Atascadero. “He was just a huge man, and the first male teacher I ever had,” David recalls in episode one. “He was just so nice and so friendly.”
“When I met him, I was in awe,” Connie adds. “He was like the Hoss Cartwright off of Bonanza.”
Allen ingratiated himself with the large family in 1961 after the Seawaters’ father was institutionalized at Atascadero State Hospital, a forensic psychiatric facility, for molesting Connie when she was between seven and eight years old. Their’ mother, Phyllis Seawater, had six children, so she was thankful for the help.
Allen may have treated the Seawaters “like royalty, like his own kids” as David says, but he was still more than a bit odd. He taught cipher codes with cryptograms to his students that bear disturbing similarities to those used by the Zodiac. He also played recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan’s yellowface opera The Mikado in class, which Zodiac quoted in the letter he mailed to the Chronicle on July 26, 1970. Adding color if not corroboration, he liked to play the Kingston Trio’s version of the murder ballad “Tom Dooley” to classrooms full of fourth-graders. “Met her on the mountain/Stabbed her with my knife,” the folk group sings as the scene fades to black.
What the Seawaters add here are their recollections of road trips with Allen that they now realize were the scenes of murders at the times certain unsolved killings took place. He took the children to a state beach near Lompoc on June 4, 1963 when high school seniors Linda Edwards and Robert Domingos were slaughtered there. Connie recalls Allen leaving the kids in the car for nearly an hour while he went down to the beach and came back with blood on his arms.
Allen took Connie and David to the Riverside Raceway right before Halloween in 1966 when Cheri Jo Bates was stabbed to death at Riverside City College on Oct. 30, 1966. Allen even took Connie to the same college to show her around on the same day Bates was killed.
Their recollections placing Allen near the scene of these crimes has to be icing on the cake for Graysmith, who has long theorized that these pre-Zodiac murders were a rehearsal for the Bay Area killings of 1968 to 1969. The killer of Bates sent letters to the Riverside Press-Enterprise, Riverside PD and Bates’ father in a manner similar to the triptych of letters he sent to Bay Area papers in 1969. Something not mentioned in This is the Zodiac Speaking, Bates’ killer and Zodiac both misspelled twitch as “twich” in their correspondence, plus one of the letters is signed with a Z-like character at the bottom. And the murderer of Edwards and Domingos used precut rope similar to what Zodiac used in the Lake Berryessa stabbings, and he used .22 caliber bullets as Zodiac did in Benicia and Vallejo in 1968 and 1969.
It would be tempting to dismiss This is the Zodiac Speaking as yet another entry in the “my father figure is the Zodiac” genre, if not for the extensive level of corroboration between Connie, David and Don, along with further accounts from other family members, and other former students of Allen’s, all backed up by an extensive collection of photos and home movies of Allen with the family, and other materials. And David finds he is dying from cancer during the production, giving his final interviews the weight of deathbed testimony.
But far more disturbing than any connection to possible Zodiac murders are revelations that add to Allen’s established litany of crimes against children. Former Allen student Darin Alvord says that the teacher “paid different attention to the girls than the boys,” and Melody Barger, another student of Allen’s, now realizes that she was being groomed by him through excessive attention and hugs.
Connie was the recipient of Allen’s inappropriate affections too, the extent of which she understands only decades later. Adding to the horror, her mother Phyllis enabled Allen as their relationship was likely more than just platonic. “I saw the two of them go into my mother’s bedroom, closed the door, and they both slept there over night,” Marlene Doge, the younger sister of the Seawaters recalls. (Excuse me, but ewww!) This recalls Netflix’s superior true crime documentary Into the Fire: The Lost Daughter from earlier this year. Both series have mothers that put the sociopathic man in their lives ahead of their daughters as revealed through unsettling prison correspondence.
But the series falls short as a work of journalism by introducing tarnished pieces of evidence without mentioning the doubts about them. A 1978 letter sent to the Chronicle by someone claiming to be Zodiac is shown and recited at face value, even though suspicions (raised by Armistead Maupin of all people) that San Francisco homicide inspector Dave Toschi forged the note were strong enough to get him removed from the Zodiac case after nearly 10 years. The existence of other suspects in the Riverside and the Gaviota State Beach murders aren’t mentioned either, creating a lopsided view.
Production company Ample Entertainment’s background in producing more meat-and-potatoes docuseries such as Cold Case Files and Ancient Empires, does This is the Zodiac Speaking no favors either as each episode is loaded with intrusive whooshes and incessant violin riffs trying to tell us how to feel even though the material itself fills us with more than enough dread all on its own. Each episode also feels a little rushed, making it the rare multipart true crime documentary that could have used an extra episode to let the revelations breathe a little more while bringing in at least one or two evidence-backed contradictory voices. Tom Voigt, who knows this suspect pool better than anybody from his 26 years of managing ZodiacKiller.com, appears briefly in episode three, but only to illustrate the cooperation between Vallejo police and the public with this case.
In the end, This is the Zodiac Speaking adds even more damning evidence to the mountain of it linking Allen to the crimes. The cessation of the Zodiac mail correspondence while Allen was incarcerated at Atascadero State Hospital for child molestation, only to have it commence again when he was freed, is hard to dismiss as just coincidence, especially when combined with all the memories, letters and photos the Seawaters bring with them.
While incredibly compelling, it still doesn’t feel quite conclusive enough to give the still-living friends and relatives of the victims the closure they beckon for during interviews throughout the series. In an attempt to rectify this, the series goes full-on iDiscovery in its final episode as blood from a knife reportedly belonging to Allen is submitted DNA testing, the results of which may give us that fourth installment after all.
If the blood came from Lake Berryessa victims Celia Shepherd or Bryan Hartnell — or at least Cheri Jo Bates — Graysmith, the Seawaters, and so many others, may finally make it to the top of Zodiac evidence mountain. However, if that sample comes from some chickens that Allen slaughtered for dinner back in 1969, Bob Graysmith will have to go pushing that boulder up an even steeper hill all over again.
* Usually, I’d want a fresher interview with somebody but I was lucky enough to talk to Graysmith when I did 22 years ago. “I’ve turned down a lot of interviews, because I don’t want to think about it anymore,” he says in This is the Zodiac Speaking.
If you want to support me and read my other writings on the Zodiac, please buy my San Francisco true crime book, The Murders That Made Us from Alibi Bookshop in Vallejo via bookshop.org, the bookstore right across the street from the post office where Zodiac used to buy his stamps.
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