The case of the Zodiac Killer has been keeping police and true crime fans busy for over 50 years. A new docuseries on Netflix is now taking up the topic again and is getting a lot of attention as a result.
The three-part true crime documentary Hier spricht Zodiac by Phil Lott and Ari Mark is the new number one in the Netflix series charts. It is about one of the men who is thought to be the notorious Zodiac killer who killed at least five people in the late 1960s – and was never caught.
The theory that Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac, who posed a challenge to the police and press with coded messages, was popularized by journalist Robert Graysmith. In the film Zodiac by master director David Fincher, the reporter was played by Jake Gyllenhaal; in the new Netflix documentary, Allen himself has his say.
This is Zodiac on Netflix: the new true crime hype about the notorious serial killer
The latest Zodiac documentary focuses on Zodiac suspect Arthur Leigh Allen. This time from the perspective of David and Connie Seawater, who as children went on trips with their teacher and later realized that the destinations were also crime scenes. They now believe that Arthur, who died in 1992 and was something of a father figure to them at the time, was responsible for the Zodiac killings in San Francisco. In This Is Zodiac, they explain the evidence they have for their suspicions.
Allen is not thought to be the only possible Zodiac, however. Circumstantial evidence also led Gary L. Stewart (The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father and Finding the Zodiac Killer) to believe that his father, Earl Van Best Jr., was the never-caught serial killer, until the 2020 Hulu documentary The Most Dangerous Animal of All convinced him and co-writer Susan Mustafa otherwise (via Vulture).
Furthermore, just last year, the Daily Mail and others reported that Gary Francis Poste, another top suspect, had been convicted by the FBI as the Zodiac Killer.
So the case of the Zodiac Killer has probably long since reached the same category as Jack the Ripper. In the sense that it may no longer be solved, but it still provides good material for true crime programs.
