Zodiac Killer Project (2025) Movie Script
1
[traffic roar]
[birdsong]
If we'd made the film,
there would've been a car here
probably in that
spot on the left
and it would've been a
California Highway Patrol car
but era-appropriate
so like a 1960s...
black cruiser with a white door
and a kind of...
badge on the side.
This would've all been
reenactment, obviously
which is how all these things
tend to start now.
Like, everything's got to have
that rhythm of drama...
even when it's documentary.
So inside the cruiser, we'd
have an actor playing Lyndon,
the cop at the center
of the story,
and he's just sitting there
minding his own business
when in pulls this other car.
And of all the spots in
the parking lot,
this car pulls up
right next to Lyndon's.
And so at first, Lyndon doesn't
necessarily think much of it.
but eventually he
looks over at the guy
and he sees
that the guy is
staring right at him.
And we'd have heard Lyndon's
inner monologue throughout this
which would've been
taken from the book.
I'll just read a
little bit of that now.
[ominous drone]
So he says:
'He did not drop his
eyes or turn away.'
'With his face
quivering in spasms,'
'and an unflinching
stare of hate,'
'I knew I was looking
into the eyes of death.'
So he describes it
in these almost...
biblical terms.
And obviously we'd have had
a close-up of these eyes...
if we could find an actor
with eyes menacing enough
to match that description
and probably cross-cutting
between that
and Lyndon's eyes,
and it's this kind of...
face-off situation
between these two men
in silence in this parking lot.
This feeling of
a growing tension
that has to break in some way.
And finally,
just when you think
that the worst could happen,
that this could...
rupture into violence...
Lyndon leaps into action.
I had it so clear in my mind:
this shot of Lyndon's hand,
lurching for the gearstick,
pulling it into reverse and
then he's out of there
and the hills are whirling
through the windows
as the car reverses out
of the parking lot
and guns it onto the highway.
And the tension breaks
but there's also this
sense of high drama
that has erupted
from this confrontation,
[drone escalates]
even if we don't necessarily
know what any of it
signifies...
yet.
[drone ends]
[distant, irritable car horn]
So we would've followed
Lyndon down the highway,
until he finds a place to
pull over and get his bearings
and then he would have
lowered his... sun visor
and pinned to the back of it
is the famous police sketch
of the Zodiac Killer.
Fuck... it would've been good.
And from there we'd have
gone straight into
the title sequence,
which kind of
would've made itself.
All these things are basically
built to the same model now.
[urgent piano]
It's lots of layered imagery,
so you can never quite tell
what you're looking at...
bodies and landscapes,
all intermingled,
but in a very meaningful way.
What are we,
but products of the landscape?
[laughs]
But with a kind of disjointed,
scratchy aesthetic,
as though it's been made by
the serial killer themselves.
[evil circus music]
The same sorts of images
pop up again and again:
you got like...
you know...
birds taking flight
and a shadowy man...
walking away
and kind of
country-inflected music
but with a dark edge.
And everything's
vague and fluid,
like it's being viewed through
the fog of a dream.
Lots of tiny text...
that's almost
too small for human eyes,
I guess to make
it look cinematic.
And over the top of all this,
audio that starts to
tell the story of the case.
'You can see that this
does not look like grief...'
'... does not read as grief.'
And typically by the end,
it gets weirdly talky,
It is almost like you're
watching a trailer
for the film you're
already watching.
'It was the case that goes
to the heart of our democracy.'
'This is a murder which, unless
solved, won't be forgotten.'
It kind of sets up
everything and nothing.
All the soundbites are just
people saying things like:
'The things that went on...
were beyond the imagination.'
Or whatever.
Like, it doesn't really
tell you anything...
but at the same time,
it gives you the general vibe
in case you've got one
eye on your phone.
[steady rumble of highway]
So then we'd have
gone back to Lyndon
coming back down
the highway after this...
unsettling confrontation.
Maybe still stealing the
odd glance at the sketch.
And obviously, he's realizing
that he may have
just come into contact
with the most
wanted man in America.
But for all the adrenaline
of that moment,
he also managed to take down
the guy's license plate.
So right from the off, we're
getting this sense of Lyndon
as someone who's
calm in a crisis.
I should probably give some
general background on Lyndon.
[heavy truck]
So Lyndon was a California
Highway Patrol cop
for, I think, 30 years,
maybe longer.
And towards the end of his
life, he published this book,
about his lifelong quest
to bring the
Zodiac Killer to justice,
starting that day
up at the rest stop.
It's called...
'The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up'
a.k.a. 'The Silenced Badge'.
And it's got this
very distinctive cover
with this bright red
spider's web
with a little crosshair symbol
at the center
because that was the
Zodiac Killer's trademark.
And I remember
seeing that cover
in thumbnail form on Amazon,
presumably after
the algorithm had
exhausted every other
true crime book on the market,
and just being
very drawn to it.
So I bought the book,
read it kind of
absentmindedly at first,
but I remember
being struck by how
incredibly cinematic
a lot of it was.
It feels like it's been
written in the mold
of a true crime documentary.
And so even though I'd
never really imagined
making a true crime doc,
working in documentary these
days, true crime's got this...
gravitational pull.
Eventually, you just...
give in to it.
[distant highway]
So I started trying to get
the rights to the book,
from Lyndon's family.
And it all seemed
to be going well.
We were deep into
contract negotiations
and starting pre-production.
I even went out to Vallejo
in the Bay Area, where it
all took place, and started...
scouting around for locations,
speaking to people I thought
might make good interviewees.
So I was actually out there,
working on it,
when I got the email to say
that Lyndon's family
had pulled out
and that we weren't
getting the rights to the book.
And I still don't know
entirely why...
whether it was a case of them
wanting more money or more...
control over the
finished product, or just...
someone else swooping in
promising to make it the next
Tiger King, or whatever.
[quiet room]
But it was honestly kind of
devastating, by that point,
because I really had
figured the whole thing out,
right down to the locations
for the re-enactments.
The way I was picturing it
the majority of the
investigation was going to be
based in Lyndon's home
or what we would've been
passing off as Lyndon's home,
where, unable to put this
confrontation at the rest
stop out of his mind,
he starts to mount this kind of
freelance investigation.
And at first, he's just
laying it all out,
and I think we could have had
him literally laying it all out
across the table
and seeing if
the pieces fit together.
But as time goes on
and he becomes
more and more
immersed in this case,
we'd have filled the space
with more and more stuff:
pin boards and photocopies,
library books.
Anyway, he's got the
license plate number
so the first thing he does
is run a check on that
and comes back with the name:
George Russell Tucker.
Classic serial killer name.
Three names.
[laughs]
Apparently that's because
the media always uses
people's middle names after
they become serial killers,
so they don't get confused with
anyone else with the same name,
the same first and second name.
But as a result, the second
you say someone's middle name,
they sound like
a serial killer.
It works both ways.
And then, along with the name,
he gets a photograph
of the guy.
We'd have had, inevitably,
the moment where
the envelope arrives from the
DMV and he pulls out
the photocopy of
the driving license,
slides it alongside
the police sketch,
and needless to say,
the similarities are striking.
And again, we'd be hearing
Lyndon's words from the book,
which capture that sense
that he's kind of
approaching this
with a degree of skepticism
and it's only actually the
sheer weight of the evidence
that means he's duty bound
to look further.
[sinister drone]
So he says:
'The horn-rimmed glasses
were very prominent.'
'The shape of his hair...
'was nearly a perfect match.'
'A mad dog killer
was on the loose'
'and apparently living nearby.'
'Very close indeed.'
[drone eases]
It wouldn't have been me
reading all of this, obviously.
We'd have hired an actor with a
voice more similar to Lyndon's.
But actually, we probably would
have left it kind of ambiguous
as to whether it was an actor,
or Lyndon himself.
If you show a tape player the
first time you hear the voice,
you can kind of just let people
draw their own conclusions.
Apparently in the industry,
they call those shots...
'evocative B-roll'
You know, like those
standalone images
that sort of evoke a scene
without actually
showing much of it.
Like sometimes
they'll have people in them,
but they're always
just at the edge of frame
or kind of falling out of focus
in some improbable way.
'Bactors'.
That's what someone
told me they're called.
Because you can only
ever see their backs.
But I see why they do it:
it is almost like the more...
generic the image...
the more effective it is
as visual shorthand.
Like there was this other bit
of evidence against Tucker,
related to a boot print
that was found at one
of the Zodiac crime scenes,
and if that's the
only relevant detail,
you don't really need
the whole crime scene.
You just need that one shot
of the boot print...
in the mud.
Maybe even like a flashbulb...
like it's a crime scene
photograph being taken.
Did they use flashbulbs...
in the 60s?
We'd have gone with it anyway,
it's very dramatic.
Like, the big flash
of the bulb,
we see the boot print,
and maybe the bulb
falls to the ground
and smashes next
to the boot print.
You can see it, can't you?
[road rumbles steadily]
And then the next scene
would have been Lyndon
bringing his findings
to his superiors
or to the team leading the
Zodiac investigation in Vallejo
and they agree to
call Tucker in for questioning.
This is actually a library,
not a police station.
It's much easier to
film at a library
so we were gonna do
the exteriors
and some of the interiors here.
And the way this works in
the book is a little convoluted
because obviously this wasn't
Lyndon's jurisdiction.
I don't think he was
actually present
when Tucker was brought in
for questioning.
But dramatically,
we would have wanted him there.
So I think we would have at
least implied that he was there
without going so far
as to actually state it.
In fact, I always
imagined Lyndon
behind a two-way mirror
and that he would be
monitoring this interrogation
from the relative security
of the next room.
So they bring Tucker in
and they ask him for a series
of basic personal details:
full name, address...
But for our purposes, this
is just an excuse for Lyndon
to finally get like a real
close up look at the guy,
not in a moment of heightened
tension like at the rest area,
but now in a cool and collected
way, where he can actually
scrutinize the man who's
physically sat in front of him.
And at the same time,
we'd have tried to
fill in some of who
Tucker actually was.
As far as I could tell, there's
no actual footage of him,
unfortunately,
but
there's those 4 or 5 bits
of home movie footage
of American families
in suburbia of that era
that you see in
every documentary
because they can
stand in for...
the whole idea
of American childhood.
So that would have
done the job.
[laughs]
But the point here is that
Lyndon's actually getting
a real sense of the guy
and asking,
could this actually
be the Zodiac Killer?
And of course, the answer
would have been yes
because we would've
staged this entirely to
confirm those suspicions
so all the classic
interrogative signifiers:
cigarette perched
on an ashtray,
reel-to-reel tape recorder,
ticking clock on the wall,
the interrogation lamp.
Do you picture an
interrogation lamp
like a desk lamp
or a hanging lamp?
A hanging lamp.
And they're always swinging.
[laughs]
Why are they swinging?
Is the implication
that it's got tense?
Someone's knocked the lamp.
The bad cop stood to his feet
and knocked the lamp
and it's gone swinging.
[laughs]
See, I'm not saying that having
seen a lot of these things
is all the training I would
have needed to make one,
but I do think it would have
got me pretty far.
[music pulses, like a
faulty air conditioner]
[slow, rhythmic
metallic thuds]
What happened next would
have taken things up a notch,
dramatically speaking.
But actually, it's kind of...
hard to know what I can
and can't talk about here.
Legally.
A lot of what I've
described thus far,
there's multiple sources for.
So like, the scene at the
beginning in the rest area...
Lyndon filed a police report
so some of the details of
that are in there.
He gave interviews
over the course of his life,
where he talked about it.
So there's these
various sources
diluting the extent to which
we're drawing from...
Lyndon's book
which obviously,
we don't have the rights to.
The tricky thing is when
you get to sections like this
where the book really
is the only source.
And so there's kind of a limit
to what I can say.
But without getting
into it too much,
essentially, Lyndon alleges
a kind of conspiracy
in which Tucker was able
to exert influence within the
Solano County Sheriff's Office
and basically get the
investigation shut down.
So this would have been a
kind of montage
where word is making its way
through the corridors of power.
You know, like...
phone call begets
phone call begets phone call
until it reaches
the highest authority,
the sheriff of the county.
And we'd throw in
a few interview moments
where people are like,
'oh, power in Vallejo...'
'it's all about...'
'who you know.'
Finally, Lyndon hears that word
has come down from the sheriff,
and obviously it's
not what he wants to hear.
I'll read the actual quote
from the book...
because it gives
you a sense of the
conspiratorial tone
of the thing.
[pages rustling]
The sheriff's message is:
[dramatic drone]
'Belay all such orders'
'and forget about
George Tucker completely.'
'I don't care who he is.'
'I am telling you to
destroy your notes'
'and burn your files.'
'I never want to hear
the man's name again.'
'Ever.'
[satanic choir roars]
[timpani drum roll]
[satanic choir roars]
[timpani drum roll]
[satanic choir roars]
[timpani drum roll]
[satanic choir roars]
[timpani hit]
[final timpani hit]
[drums and choir melt
away into drone]
[drone dissolves]
So that's good...
dramatic stuff, right?
I presume the 'burn your files'
thing was not literal
but obviously we'd have
had to make it literal.
That's too good to pass up on.
I'm imagining all this stuff
that we've seen earlier,
like the printout of Tucker's
name
or the Zodiac police sketch,
all of this stuff,
all of this key evidence
being swallowed up by flames
as we see the scale of the
perversion of justice at hand.
And through it all,
there's this sense that
you know
not only was Lyndon
on to something,
but he actually got
too close to the truth.
Alright, end of act one.
[traffic rumble, cars passing]
So the next sequence would
have been a kind of...
dust-settling moment.
Lyndon's off the case
and so by default,
he's back to the daily grind:
routine traffic stops,
seeing the normality - the
banality - of life in Vallejo.
Oh, wait, this is amazing.
[motorcycle revving]
[laughs]
But for him it's instilled with
a real sense of of anti-climax.
He's gone from being the cop
who's going to solve
the most high-profile murder
case in the world
to being the cop who
hands out parking tickets.
But the point would have been,
and maybe we'd have had some of
our interviewees spell it out:
that that banality is
really just a veneer,
masking something
more sinister.
And actually, getting people
to say that, doesn't really
take much work.
There's two things
people ever say about
the places where these
sorts of crimes happened.
Like, oh, it was idyllic.
'Waterloo was a great place.'
Kids played out in the street.
You didn't lock your doors.
'Kids rode their bikes.'
'It's just a very
quiet neighborhood.'
'It's a very isolated
little community.'
'It's a beautiful place...'
'but...'
But it had a dark side.
'... there's a dark side.'
And so that shift
would have led us
inexorably towards...
Tucker's house.
[eerie drone]
[airplane, faint birds]
I think we would have had it so
the first time he drives by,
it's almost by accident.
Like he's...
He is driving by on
one of these routine calls
He is driving by on
one of these routine calls
and happens to see Tucker...
maybe like...
emptying his trash or...
parking his car.
[car engine quietens]
[door lock clicks]
[drone fades]
And is reminded,
like, oh...
as long as I do nothing,
this guy is still
out in the world
potentially committing
further crimes.
[distant wind chimes]
But what's more, the way he
describes the house is like
this perfect villain's lair.
[pages rustling]
He says its...
'surrounded by an unusual
grove of whispering pines'
and that...
'no stranger's eye can pierce
its foreboding veil'.
And the sense would've been
that his suspicions were
really starting to
solidify here,
really just based
on seeing this...
fucking creepy house.
It's intuition more
than anything else.
This isn't the actual
house, incidentally.
The actual house isn't
anywhere near spooky enough.
Anyway, I don't know if we
would've needed some moment
that it crossed into...
actually sinister.
Oh, in fact I tell you what
it would have been...
After a few days of staking
the place out,
Lyndon discovered these...
bits of graffiti
around the house.
Let me read
from the book again.
[pages rustling]
[eerie drone resumes]
'One day, I noticed
something very strange.'
'Someone had taken white paint'
'and painted an inverted
cross with arrows'
'on the telephone pole on
the right side of the house.'
'Then lo and behold,'
'on a concrete water cistern
to the left of the house,'
'was painted a large hatchet.'
And because he describes
finding these symbols
as though he's unearthing
some dark, occult mystery,
I always imagined them hidden
behind reeds, or something,
like Lyndon had to
pull back something
to see these ominous symbols
painted around
this creepy house.
[drone evaporates
into sound of the dusk]
Um...
I mean, there is a third one,
that we would have had to lose,
because the
third one depicts...
'two nude males engaged in
explicit homosexual activity'
and the photograph of this
in the book is...
to Lyndon, I think,
very sinister.
To a contemporary viewer,
I think, slightly less ominous
than the hatchet.
[laughs]
We probably would have
taken it out, in the interest
of trying to make
the theory convincing.
[eerie drone returns]
You can still deploy
someone just having a bad vibe
and living in a creepy house
but today's Netflix viewers
don't get as worked up about
someone being gay, potentially.
Or bi, actually.
He doesn't say he was gay.
He says that Tucker was bi.
Although adorably, he actually
says that he was 'AC/DC',
which is a wonderfully 1950s
way of putting it.
[drone evaporates]
[birdsong, distant road]
So next Lyndon
starts to build this...
crack team
assembled from across
Vallejo society
in order to aid his
investigation into Tucker
which is kind of amazing
for our purposes,
because that's already like
something out of a film.
And this group consists
of him, obviously,
and a few of his friends
from law enforcement,
from the California Highway
Patrol and other agencies,
as well as various people
from local government,
and then, weirdly,
Lyndon's minister...
a guy called Ernie,
who was the minister at the
local United Methodist Church.
And in my head, I pictured
them meeting in a diner,
somewhere unremarkable,
somewhere everyday,
where they can slowly
start to build
this case against Tucker.
And a few of them
are still alive,
so I was imagining
getting them down to the diner
and filming them...
getting out of their cars,
their boots coming
down on the tarmac,
[heavy footstep]
sitting them down in a booth
and getting them to
play the role of
the hot-shot detective.
You know what I mean?
I feel like all these
figures of authority,
the second you point
a camera at them,
they just know what to do.
You know, they
know the image of a cop
in a true crime show.
[heavy footstep]
And so without prompting,
they walk in the right way
and they talk about themselves
in the right way.
'What I figured out at an
early age in the Bureau is...'
'you push it, and then...
you keep pushing.'
Even just the nicknames!
They all have these
clearly self-anointed nicknames
and about half of them
seem to be 'the bulldog'.
'What was your nickname?'
'The Bulldog'
'Bulldog'
'The Bulldogs'
It's like there's
no direction required.
[distant cars]
And I was imagining these
interviews as a springboard
for discussing each of the
killings in more detail.
[beep of reversing truck]
You know, someone ominously
references one of the crimes,
and we cut to the microfiche in
the archive, whizzing back to
[mechanism whirrs]
'July 4th, 1969'.
I think that actually is...
the date of one of
the Zodiac crimes.
This is how embedded
it is in my head.
And then they discuss
the facts of the crime
and how Tucker
might be implicated.
And meanwhile,
our 'evocative B-roll'
is going into overdrive.
All the classic staples:
the gun...
rising up towards the camera,
shell casings
clattering to the ground,
crime scene tape...
stretching out into
the distance,
Or...
blood,
pooling on the ground.
Maybe a hand
reaching in to touch it,
as though to check
it's actually blood.
[car suspension rattles]
Plus all the actual police
photographs of the crime scene.
Which now
I feel like, even recently,
you could just show those,
and now everything's so jazzy.
Like, at the very least,
now they have to be placed
in a kind of 3D environment
or be falling in and
out of focus
with a bit of dust
dancing across their surface,
and the thing I increasingly
see now is
they've taken the crime
scene photograph and they've...
created a three-dimensional
image from it.
You know, it'll be like
a layered thing.
It's like you're moving
through the space
so you can be not just
at the place where a horrific,
brutal murder took place,
but actually traveling through
it, like on Google Street View.
It's probably good work
for some graphic
artist somewhere,
someone who knows
After Effects.
You must just...
forget what you're looking at.
[distant cars]
And so between
all of that, we'd...
fill in the general
contours of the case.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: Do you wanna
fill in some of that now?
Uh...
No.
PRODUCER: Okay.
[laughs]
No, not at all.
I feel like that's...
the only saving grace of not
getting to make the film,
is that we don't have to...
re-tell the story
of the Zodiac Killer
for the thousandth time.
Anyway, they're
doing all this work
to link Tucker to
each of the crimes
but obviously, this is
all off the books
because Lyndon's been told
not to pursue the case.
So next, him and his team
have to take their theory
and get it in front of someone
higher up the chain of command.
He puts together a dossier
of his and
his colleagues' findings,
and then together
they go into these
centers of investigative power,
slam down the dossier,
and they think that's
all they need to show,
but instead, these agencies
just don't seem to care.
They have their own suspect,
their own theories of the case,
and they don't want
some outsider
telling them how
to do their job.
[door clicks shut]
So the main challenge
for Lyndon becomes
getting anyone to hear him out.
[car indicator ticks]
But then at the same time,
he kind of doesn't
want too many people
to hear him out,
because if you get too
many people on board,
it kind of ceases to be
your suspect anymore,
ceases to be your theory.
So much of what's making it
possible for me to talk about
Lyndon and his suspect
without the rights to the book,
is the fact that he wasn't
terribly discreet.
Like, he went on the radio
and talked about his suspect.
He gave interviews
to newspapers.
Like, in one sense, he really
would have been better
just keeping it to himself.
Like, it's not just the
quality of the evidence.
It's the...
exclusivity.
Like, did you watch The Jinx
when it went out?
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: No.
The final episode of that
is unbelievable.
So for six episodes or
whatever, they've been pursuing
this guy called Robert Durst,
who is this eccentric heir
to a real estate fortune,
who's suspected
of murdering three people.
And he's interviewed in this
show and always kind of
dodges their questions
and skillfully evades
incriminating himself
right up until
this final episode,
where, at the end
of his final interview,
with the filmmakers
he goes to the bathroom
and unknowingly,
still wearing his microphone,
confesses to himself...
[rustling of clothes]
[groaning]
It's unbelievably chilling.
Just incredible television.
And the timing was just unreal.
I think Durst was arrested
the day before the airing,
and then in the finale,
you see exactly how and
why he was caught,
but it did beg the question:
how did this ever line up?
Because obviously
that interview was conducted
I think years before the
broadcast of the show,
and so whatever
the legality of it,
it would seem quite ethically
dubious if the filmmakers had
left this murderer
to be walking the streets
for two years,
just in the interest of
holding back a big reveal
for their final episode.
And the story that they told
was that they hadn't
actually known
that they had
captured the confession.
That that tape
went unlistened to
for months or years
after it was recorded,
and that they realized
like a week before
the final episode was gonna
air, just in time to edit it in
and the fact that he was
therefore arrested
the day of the airing
or the day before or whatever,
is just a happy accident,
slash...
the greatest thing that's
ever happened to them
in their filmmaking lives.
[distant highway]
[uncertain drone]
But anyway,
in Lyndon's telling,
any secrecy is very
much foisted upon him
by the incompetence of
these various agencies,
and from that, he concludes
that if he's ever going to
bring Tucker to justice,
he's gonna have to
go it alone.
And there's a great...
caustic line about this
in the book.
Let me just find it.
[pages rustling]
He says:
'Do you think
I'm going to trust...'
'a bunch of
badge-toting clowns...'
'with additional information?'
'Not me.'
'Never again.'
I'm trying to keep
all these quotes brief
because I have to justify
each one to our lawyer,
but there's 400 pages of this.
[drone continues]
[like a choir holding
an uneasy note]
Anyway, under cover of night,
they begin pursuing Tucker,
tailing his car
wherever he goes,
arranging a series of shadowy
meetings with witnesses,
informants, people who know him
in one way or another.
They go through
his trash at one point
and try and find incriminating
evidence in there.
And ultimately,
they stage this...
show-stopping sting operation.
[drone fades]
[distant cars,
gentle birdsong]
Basically, they found out
Tucker was in AA,
and I'm not entirely
sure how, actually,
but the way I always imagined
it playing out was
they're tailing Tucker
around Northern California
one evening.
Eventually they see his car
pull up outside a church.
Not this church,
but a church,
and this one would have done.
And so Lyndon's
maybe across the street,
watching Tucker as he
gets out of his car
and makes his way
into this church.
Um...
Eventually, maybe,
he sneaks in and realizes
that it's an AA meeting.
And so this is like
hitting paydirt,
because what do people do
at an AA meeting?
They confess.
And so immediately, Lyndon and
his team start discussing
how to get someone inside,
but also who to get inside,
because obviously
a lot of them are...
too high-profile, in one
way or another,
would be too easily
recognized by Tucker.
And so eventually,
all eyes fall on Ernie...
the minister.
And maybe we'd have set up
earlier in the film that
Ernie is a bit of a redundant
member of the group,
like it's nice to have him,
but he's not the big guns
of this investigative team.
But lo and behold,
now it falls to Ernie
to do what the others cannot.
So Ernie begins driving up
to the church every week,
takes his collar off...
[fabric slide]
I'm imagining the
dramatic scene of him
putting the collar
on the bedside table
to go out and deceive a man
he doesn't even know,
in a church.
And then at the end
of each meeting,
Ernie would record these tapes
reciting back everything
that Tucker had said.
And apparently
the tapes still exist,
so we would have played
them over this sequence.
Here's a quote from it.
This is Ernie on one
of these tapes, saying:
[unsettling drone]
'I felt like he was
trying to say,'
'I am a rotten S.O.B.'
'but I can't tell you
what I have done.'
'I've done things I'm not proud
of, and would never tell you.'
'Terrible things.'
'If only you knew.'
'But you will never know,'
'and I don't care anymore.'
'It's in the past now.'
[drone intensifies,
breathy and insistent]
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: Imagine going
to an AA meeting...
... and then what you say
being published in a book.
[laughs, drone cuts out]
Well, yeah.
Not great.
Um...
You know, invading
the sanctity of an AA meeting
to listen in on
someone's confessions,
hoping they admit to
committing the Zodiac killings.
That's the thing, though.
If he did...
it's fine.
Right? If he did,
it's absolutely fine.
You could go much further.
It's only if he didn't, that
you start to feel a bit...
sweaty about it.
And I feel like that's what
we would have been
trading on with this.
You need people
to be fully convinced
going into this sequence, or it
just seems way beyond the pale.
I always think back
to that scene in...
Paradise Lost.
I think it's the second
Paradise Lost film, where...
It's like...
Have you seen Paradise Lost?
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: No.
It was a trilogy of
documentaries about this...
miscarriage of justice where
these teenage boys were...
sent to prison for
the murders of some children
that they clearly
hadn't committed.
And in the second
of the three films,
they start sniffing
around the possibility
that the dad of
one of the dead kids
could have been responsible
for these deaths.
And in the interests of
exploring this idea,
they film him out in the woods
performing some sort of
commemorative ritual,
um...
which is admittedly...
incredibly weird and creepy
and the takeaway
of the scene is clearly:
oh my God,
this guy is guilty as sin.
And he wasn't.
He had nothing to do with it.
And I think even at the time,
they got a bit of stick for...
having kind of...
exploiting his grief
in this way,
um...
but if it had been him,
no one would have cared
about exploiting the grief.
If you're convinced it's
for the greater good,
there are very few
ethical lines
as far as...
HBO execs are concerned.
[distant cars]
So Tucker is saying all this
creepy stuff in these meetings,
but obviously he's
not about to confess
to being the Zodiac Killer.
And so they realize they
need to go one step further.
They need something undeniable.
And what he
arrives at is...
this palm print.
Basically, after
one of the crimes,
the Zodiac Killer himself
called the police
to report what he had done,
and they managed to get to
the phone booth that he used
quite quickly
and so they found on it,
a palm print
that was considered
to be definitively his.
And so Lyndon seizes upon this
as the ultimate test
of Tucker's guilt.
[insistent electronic music]
And so, from here, we'd have
been straight into our scheme,
and I think we'd have done it
a little bit like a heist film,
showing it step by step
and piece by piece,
before people have a chance to
make sense of what the plan is.
You feel it coming together
like this jigsaw puzzle,
until at the end,
the picture reveals itself.
So the first step is that
a friend of Lyndon's
bandaged Ernie's arm
into a cast,
and he wore this cast
every week at this AA meeting
where he was undercover,
getting Tucker used to the idea
of him in an arm cast.
And then Lyndon...
gives Ernie a gun.
He arms him, with a revolver.
And I could just imagine
the inserts of all of this:
the gun tucked into
the ceremonial robes...
Does a Methodist
minister wear robes?
We would've had him wear robes.
Just, that image of...
the gun going into
the religious garb
and then maybe
the bandaged arm...
swinging back in front
to hide the gun
and then the...
In fact, I have to hand this
one over to Lyndon
because the way he describes it
is so perfectly understated.
Let me find it.
[pages rustling]
He says:
'As March 1st, 1977,
approached,'
'our plan was
right on schedule.'
'I bought the
fishbowl required.'
[glass hit reverberates]
[like a revving engine]
I mean, as a cliffhanger...
just incredible.
If this was a series,
that's where you'd
put the episode break,
and then there's no way
people are stopping watching.
And so Lyndon
gives Ernie this fishbowl,
and he drives up the highway
to this fateful AA meeting.
He's sitting outside,
thinking about whether his
grand plan is going to work.
Eventually, he
sees Tucker arrive,
and so he gets out of the car,
walks to his trunk, pops
it open, and there it is:
[glass hit, resonates]
the fishbowl.
So he says,
could you carry this
into the meeting for me?
Because of my broken arm.
And I guess he explained
that he was gonna
give a presentation
to the group
and use the fishbowl as a prop.
And so this is our
make or break moment.
Is Tucker gonna reach
his hands into the trunk,
plant them on the sides
of this fishbowl,
leaving, presumably...
the platonic ideal
of two handprints
on the side of this glass bowl.
And lo and behold,
that's exactly what happens.
[choir sings]
And I can only
imagine the triumph
of that moment, as this bowl
is carried into the meeting,
and we're caught up
on this wave of energy,
thrust into the building,
albeit obviously, that momentum
immediately interrupted
by a two-hour AA meeting
and whatever Ernie's
presentation was.
[choir is silenced,
driving beat continues]
My assumption is it would've
been some kind of metaphor,
like, take life
one day at a time,
like a goldfish.
Because of the short memory.
Maybe? I don't know.
Uh...
So, at the end of the meeting,
Ernie has Tucker carry the
fishbowl back to the car,
pops the trunk...
I'm imagining this...
this empty trunk of
this car opened up,
the little interior light
just perfectly illuminating
the spot where this
bowl is gonna go,
and presumably from there,
be whisked...
straight to whatever
expert is gonna
painstakingly extract
these palm prints,
which can then
be matched to the...
file print of the Zodiac Killer
and the whole thing is
gonna be wrapped up
in this perfect, neat bow,
as soon as Tucker
places this bowl
back down into
the trunk of the car.
[glass reverberates
in anticipation]
But then...
Actually, let me read
the version in the book,
because Lyndon describes it in
such exquisitely tragic terms.
[music collapses into
thudding pulse]
'But then, for
some strange reason,'
'our suspect did
something totally bizarre.'
'After the bowl
was set securely...'
'in the trunk of Ernie's car,'
'Tucker slapped the bowl
with his palms'
'several times'
[glass hits, like
chiming bells]
'and then rubbed the bowl'
'several times as well.'
'Ernie said,'
'I could not believe
my eyes, Lyndon.'
'It was like he knew.'
[birdsong]
[bike whizzes by]
Pretty good, right?
And I think we would've
tried to play it
right down the middle of either
an intentional act of sabotage,
or just about plausibly,
an innocent action.
That's a fun knife edge.
Either it's like the wily
behavior of a serial killer,
or it's like your dad,
kind of
patting the sides of something
to show you how robust it is.
[glassy reverberations]
And I think by
shooting it slow motion,
we would have really extracted
every agonizing clap of
the hands against the bowl
and then that terrible,
dreadful rubbing of the sides.
Like this...
I could just imagine...
Oh god, I was so excited
about shooting this sequence.
The feeling of agonizing loss
in that moment.
[reverberations fall
away to nothing]
[car softly pulling up]
And so it's
that feeling of loss
that would've set the stage
for the final third
of the film,
which begins with
a real error of judgment
on Lyndon's part,
and that's that he agrees
to meet with another man
who's been on his own parallel
hunt for the Zodiac:
Robert Graysmith.
Will that land, do you think?
Or should I explain who he is?
So, Graysmith is the author
of the most successful book
about the Zodiac Killer,
so successful, in fact,
that in Zodiac circles,
it's often just called
'the Yellow Book,'
like it's Macbeth or something,
because it's got this very
distinctive yellow cover
with 'Zodiac' written
down the center.
But at this point,
he's still chasing
the story down
and so him and Lyndon have been
speaking to the same sources,
following up on the same leads,
but it's only now,
at this low ebb,
that Lyndon agrees to meet,
figuring, I guess,
what do I have to lose?
And pretty soon
he gets his answer.
[distant cars]
I think we could have gone
pretty swiftly from that to...
Well, what I was imagining
was Lyndon wandering innocently
around his local bookstore
and then spying
in the new releases
or the bestsellers section,
this bright yellow...
Actually, I think the first
edition was black, but...
it's got that
crosshair symbol on it
and 'Zodiac'
in massive writing,
and so I was imagining him
feverishly searching
through the pages
to see if it
favors his suspect,
and instead, not only
does it present
an entirely different suspect,
but it also includes
some of the juiciest details
from Lyndon's story
almost as this, kind of,
funny aside.
And one of the main reasons
I was able to describe
the fishbowl story in such
detail a minute ago
is that the story got out
20 years before Lyndon
wrote his book,
which must have been...
annoying.
But then he can't
really make it about that
because that seems
sort of vain,
so the version in Lyndon's book
is all about how this was...
You know,
a threat to
his family's safety,
and how this was putting lives
in jeopardy and all this stuff.
Let me find the thing.
He says:
[disenchanted drone]
'Graysmith, a complete novice,'
'went on to disseminate...'
'sensitive investigative
findings to the entire world,'
'things which could place
my family members...'
'in a great deal of danger.'
So he frames it as an
ethical concern, essentially,
and we would have run
with that in the film, but...
but I think the real
violation was that...
not only was this book
hugely successful,
and made Graysmith
a very wealthy man,
it also made him...
the de facto authority.
[drone fades into distant cars]
It's very hard to be the
second true crime book,
or the second true crime film
about any given subject,
because as soon as
one is a hit,
that kind of sets
the terms by which
the thing is understood.
It assigns the guilt,
I think, more powerfully
really than even the...
law enforcement agencies
directly working on the case.
[distant, tinny melody]
Anyway, my plan
had been to bounce
straight from
the Graysmith stuff
into some of Lyndon's more
out-there detective work,
as he becomes
increasingly desperate
to get his own investigation
moving again.
[tinny tune grows louder]
I imagined it like that
classic cop movie thing
where they go back
to the drawing board,
start re-examining all the old
evidence to see if they can...
shake something loose.
So he'd be re-reading
interview transcripts,
going back and meeting
with witnesses again,
trying to see if there's
something that he missed
first time around.
[jolly melody continues]
There's an ice cream truck
just out of shot here.
But as Lyndon looks
closer and closer,
and obsesses over
every little detail,
we would've been trying
to build this sense of
kind of...
growing paranoia.
Like, maybe the leads start
off fairly reasonable,
like there was this thing about
him buying Tucker's old car,
the one that he'd been driving
that day at the rest stop.
Lyndon buys it, and he
searches through it,
looking for any old discarded
items that might...
have evidentiary value.
But as he starts to look
at each of these things closer,
there's kind of a
mania that sets in,
you know,
and in particular,
there was this whole thing
where he found a button,
in the car
and became convinced
that this button
had some sort of massive
significance to the case.
And so I think we could've
taken little things like that,
and used them to create
this sense that we're...
delving deeper and deeper
into Lyndon's...
psyche.
Like...
[paranoid drone]
We're falling down the
rabbit hole with him,
not knowing how deep it goes.
[ice cream melody
plays on eerily]
[a thudding pulse,
music warps and distorts]
But because Lyndon was such
a lone wolf by this point,
almost by definition,
this is where we have...
the fewest sources
outside of his book.
So people just have to...
take my word for it
that there would've been...
you know...
some great
twists and turns here.
Like, have I even...
I haven't even mentioned...
the building yet, have I?
Basically, there would've been
a key scene here,
where there's an explosion,
uh...
with narrative significance.
[pulse slows]
[pulse continues,
a muffled thud]
But the purpose of all
this would've been
getting Lyndon to a more
reckless state of mind,
where he's ready to make
the kinds of rash decisions
that he wouldn't
have made a few years earlier,
or half an hour earlier,
for our purposes.
And again I can't get
into the intricate...
plot mechanics of this,
but basically in a bizarre
twist of fate,
Lyndon finds himself presented
with the opportunity...
for him and his wife...
to go to dinner with
Tucker and his wife
as friends.
Like, they've fallen into
the same social circle
through this very strange
series of events
and now, the situation is such
that it could make
sense for them to...
essentially double date.
So Lyndon writes in the book
about them preparing
to go to dinner
with Tucker and his wife,
and he writes about it
like they're preparing
for a military operation.
[pages rustling]
So he says:
[buzzing tone, like
a live wire]
'The evening before
this arranged dinner,'
'I retrieved my
.38 five-shot...'
'Centennial Smith and
Wesson hammerless,'
'cleaned and lubricated it,'
'and loaded it
with high-velocity,'
'light-grain hollow points.'
'Next, I checked my small...'
'palm-sized .22
Magnum Derringer,'
'the dynamite stick,
which holds two bullets.'
'I called my wife into
the kitchen and asked her,'
'do you remember how to load
and shoot the Derringer?'
And so, with the guns
tucked into the...
the pocket of Lyndon's
jeans and his wife's purse,
they set out...
for a date with justice.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: I think
'double date with justice'.
A double date with justice.
[laughs]
See, this is why it's a bit...
bittersweet doing this.
Like, this is the fun
of this genre, right?
Getting to that point where
things that would have seemed
impossibly outlandish
at the outset
now start to seem
perfectly reasonable.
Like, you watched
Making a Murderer, right?
[dark-edged country music]
That first season, even
though it was built around this
very dramatic story of this...
possible miscarriage
of justice,
the actual content of the show
was pretty restrained.
Most of what you were
looking at was just...
grainy interrogation footage
and shots of people
standing about in courtrooms.
But then they made
a second season,
and you can just feel
this inevitable slide
into sensationalism,
from the off-- from episode
one of season two,
they are taking a mannequin,
putting a wig on it,
and covering it in red paint
to simulate blood splatter.
'I wanted to re-enact it.'
And you look back
at the previous season
where it was all basically
men in dusty suits
sitting around discussing
legal precedent,
[heavy thud]
and you think,
how did we get here?
Like, the bounds of
rational behavior
are just ever-expanding.
[quiet room]
So if you accepted
Lyndon and his team
searching through
Tucker's trash,
then why wouldn't
you accept them...
eavesdropping on
the AA meeting?
And if you accept them
eavesdropping on the AA meeting
then why wouldn't you
accept the whole...
fishbowl caper?
And yeah, here we are,
at a steakhouse,
with the Zodiac Killer.
[jangled thuds, like a piano
thrown down a staircase]
So this is
the actual steakhouse
that they went to,
up in Winters, California,
and I think from the moment
they would've met,
we would have had this
question of recognition.
Like, does Tucker remember
Lyndon from the rest stop?
Or did he somehow
sense his presence...
at the police interrogation?
To what extent
does this man know
that this meeting
is not a first encounter,
it's the culmination
of years of police work.
[discordant pulse continues]
So in the book, Lyndon writes:
'The next hour...'
'was one of the most
bizarre in my entire life.'
'Staring straight out
at about a 30-degree angle,'
'Tucker appeared to be
in another dimension,'
[knife carving]
'some kind of Twilight Zone.'
[moist scrape]
And in the context
of all of the suspicions
that we would have built up
by this point in the film,
I think Tucker just
seeming kind of detached
would have become a kind of
absorbent surface,
for anything we wanted
to throw at it.
And that's even before the...
the drive home.
[thudding pulse continues]
[cars passing outside]
So they're driving back along
the I-80, down to Vallejo,
and I was imagining this as
already a tense scenario:
the road stretching out
before them,
and we're packed
into this tight space
with our hero
and our villain.
And then that tension
would have ratcheted up
even higher
once Tucker takes
an unexpected turn
off the highway and onto
this little side road called
Cherry Glen Road.
[intermittent
percussive strikes]
And I think if we'd charted
that rising tension effectively
it would have
all felt inevitable.
We would've felt Lyndon's hand
reaching into his pocket
to grab the gun
before he even did it.
We'd have seen the Derringer
coming out of the purse
a split second
before it's on screen.
[pulse darkens]
And the audience is becoming
convinced that this is it.
This is the moment
where all of the latent threat
and violence of the film
is about to
suddenly burst forth.
[a high note emerges
from the dirge]
And we're pushing the tension
as far as it will go,
but we know it can only sustain
for so long before it has to...
break....
somehow.
[high note soars,
pulse thuds like a heartbeat]
[percussive strikes
splinter into feedback]
[disparate sounds merge
into a wall of noise]
But instead...
[music dissolves into
rumble of road]
nothing happens.
They return home.
They're dropped off.
The air clears.
But now there's no mistaking
who has the upper hand.
You know, like
Like so many Zodiac
victims before them,
he's showing them
that they're at his mercy.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER:
By driving home.
[laughs]
Yeah, but on an
unconventional route!
See, if we'd
done it right, though,
you wouldn't be
thinking like that.
You haven't seen enough
of these things,
but when they work,
you just kind of go with it.
The internal logic of the film
just pulls you through.
And I think we'd have got the
audience there by this point
and then we would've been
on the home straight.
We're at an hour and 15 now.
So next, we
would have gone to...
the letter.
[clunking keys]
Basically, as a
sort of last resort,
Lyndon wrote a letter
to the president,
and it's quite somber,
quite serious,
all about duty and honor.
[noble drone]
He says:
'Mr. President,'
'after a devoted and dedicated
32 years of investigation,'
'into the infamous
Zodiac Killer case,'
'I am in fact writing
my last letter of appeal.'
'My request is
not really about me.'
So he does that maneuver you
see in a lot of these things,
which is that he reframes it...
as being...
really about the victims,
and their families.
About seeking closure for them.
[distant cars]
And, you know...
Sure.
But...
as true crime's got bigger and
bigger and people have got...
like maybe...
10% more squeamish about it,
that little disclaimer
has become
even more ubiquitous.
Like, did you watch that
Netflix Dahmer show?
I've never seen anything
with such an outsized
sense of its own
moral righteousness.
It's like ten episodes long,
and the first nine
episodes are just...
Jeffrey Dahmer drilling
into people's skulls,
and then the tenth episode
is this lecture, about how...
we shouldn't really focus on...
Jeffrey Dahmer drilling
into people's skulls...
'Just when you thought folks
couldn't stoop any lower.'
'It's sick.'
Obviously they do
the final grid.
That's when you know these
shows really care, right?
When they end with a
photo grid of all the victims.
Eight and a half cumulative
hours of violent gore,
and now a single passport photo
of each of the victims
to remind us
what really matters.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER:
You watched it though.
Yeah, it was good.
Evan Peters.
[steady rumble of car]
So Lyndon sent his letter,
and then it would have been
a case of waiting
to see if it's going to lead
to anything at all.
And so I figured we'd have him
drive out to the
outskirts of town,
where he finally
has time to reflect
on everything he's
given over to this,
on all the years lost
to the pursuit of Tucker,
that could all be for naught
if nothing comes of it.
[car passes]
[laughs]
It's just so beautiful.
Uh...
We would've shot a less...
distractingly beautiful sunset
for the actual thing, but...
good job,
nonetheless,
camera team.
[distant cars]
And then finally,
the word comes back
from the FBI
that they're not going
to take up the case.
And Lyndon writes quite
strikingly about it
in the book,
as almost like,
the end of hope,
where he says:
'So now I tell the world
there is no justice,'
'there is no integrity,'
'and there are no existing laws
that morality can supersede.'
'There is no agency
and not one individual'
'who will step forward
to intervene'
'in this noble
cause of justice.'
[metal sings in the wind]
[distant cracks...]
[perhaps fireworks...]
I definitely haven't quite...
made my peace...
with this.
With not getting
to make the film.
Like, obviously, I'm happy
with what we've done instead,
but how many people
are ever going to watch this?
Realistically.
[birdsong]
So in this final stretch,
the question would have become,
what is the closure
that the audience now needs?
Once it becomes clear that
Lyndon isn't going
to definitively prove
that Tucker was
the Zodiac Killer.
Not least because
he wasn't, obviously.
But, that's...
parenthetical.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER:
Like, he definitely wasn't?
I mean...
no?
I mean, maybe.
But no, probably not.
But yeah, either way...
we know now that Lyndon isn't
gonna get it over the line,
at least in a legal sense.
And so the stakes
become much more about
the internal drama of the film
and the ending that
the film demands.
And, the book
doesn't necessarily
offer an obvious one, but
I think that the closest one
I found in it, and how I was
planning to end the film...
was with this party
at Tucker's house.
Basically, Tucker threw
a summer barbecue
and invited Lyndon
and his wife.
And so they drive up
there, they go inside,
and he describes Tucker...
at the bar, mixing cocktails,
which is a wonderfully...
innocent action.
I don't know if we'd
try and like...
make that seem more
sinister in some way.
Maybe he's mixing
blood red cocktails.
The book's description of this
encounter is fairly minimal.
He says:
'He looked at my wife
and said, thank you,'
'but never made the slightest
eye contact with me.'
'It was very awkward,'
'but I extended my arm
for a handshake...'
'and felt like
a complete idiot.'
So in Lyndon's own telling,
it's an emasculating moment,
but I think it could've been
made into the moment we needed
of Lyndon finally holding
his own against Tucker.
And in particular, the thing he
says about eye contact...
that he never made
the slightest eye contact,
even when they're
shaking hands,
because eye contact was
how we began down this road...
They were in these adjoining
cars, they locked eyes...
and then Lyndon feels
that he lost face
by letting himself be
stared down by this stranger...
I think this could've
been the moment
where he reverses the dynamic:
[redemptive drone]
Where he goes in for
the handshake with Tucker,
realizes he doesn't want
to meet his eyeline,
but he just holds him there.
Maybe he won't let his hand go,
until Tucker...
raises his eyes to Lyndon's,
in acknowledgment,
and there's a sense
that even if
he knows he's never going
to see Tucker put away,
he's forced Tucker to recognize
that he is a worthy match.
That's actually quite
good, isn't it?
[laughs]
And I think it would have been
a good cue for us to
swerve towards
a larger takeaway.
[soft waves]
You know, what is it in all
of us that makes us want to...
revisit these terrible crimes?
Why can't we let the past
be in the past?
And I think we'd be building
a rhythm up by this point.
It's almost becoming
like a montage
as we revisit these
little moments from the film.
We'd have little snapshots of
each crime scene,
and interviewees coming
back to the fore to...
give their final thought.
We'd re-run our
'evocative B-roll' of...
bullet casings,
dropping to the floor and...
the paperwork consumed by fire.
And the sense you get
is that there's something
tying all of this together,
as though...
everything we've
seen thus far was...
speaking ultimately
to the same idea,
something sort of universal...
something profound
and open-ended.
[soothing tones continue]
And you can kind of...
you know, at that point,
re-wrap...
this lack of a conclusion
as almost a moral virtue.
That actually, it would be
simplistic to have an ending,
to give an easy answer,
because, what is life,
if not accepting
the chaos of reality,
and the mysteries
at the heart
of human existence?
[music reaches closing note]
It's funny, you
build up the rhythm...
and the feel of closure...
and you almost just get it.
[meaningful drone]
[traffic roar]
[birdsong]
If we'd made the film,
there would've been a car here
probably in that
spot on the left
and it would've been a
California Highway Patrol car
but era-appropriate
so like a 1960s...
black cruiser with a white door
and a kind of...
badge on the side.
This would've all been
reenactment, obviously
which is how all these things
tend to start now.
Like, everything's got to have
that rhythm of drama...
even when it's documentary.
So inside the cruiser, we'd
have an actor playing Lyndon,
the cop at the center
of the story,
and he's just sitting there
minding his own business
when in pulls this other car.
And of all the spots in
the parking lot,
this car pulls up
right next to Lyndon's.
And so at first, Lyndon doesn't
necessarily think much of it.
but eventually he
looks over at the guy
and he sees
that the guy is
staring right at him.
And we'd have heard Lyndon's
inner monologue throughout this
which would've been
taken from the book.
I'll just read a
little bit of that now.
[ominous drone]
So he says:
'He did not drop his
eyes or turn away.'
'With his face
quivering in spasms,'
'and an unflinching
stare of hate,'
'I knew I was looking
into the eyes of death.'
So he describes it
in these almost...
biblical terms.
And obviously we'd have had
a close-up of these eyes...
if we could find an actor
with eyes menacing enough
to match that description
and probably cross-cutting
between that
and Lyndon's eyes,
and it's this kind of...
face-off situation
between these two men
in silence in this parking lot.
This feeling of
a growing tension
that has to break in some way.
And finally,
just when you think
that the worst could happen,
that this could...
rupture into violence...
Lyndon leaps into action.
I had it so clear in my mind:
this shot of Lyndon's hand,
lurching for the gearstick,
pulling it into reverse and
then he's out of there
and the hills are whirling
through the windows
as the car reverses out
of the parking lot
and guns it onto the highway.
And the tension breaks
but there's also this
sense of high drama
that has erupted
from this confrontation,
[drone escalates]
even if we don't necessarily
know what any of it
signifies...
yet.
[drone ends]
[distant, irritable car horn]
So we would've followed
Lyndon down the highway,
until he finds a place to
pull over and get his bearings
and then he would have
lowered his... sun visor
and pinned to the back of it
is the famous police sketch
of the Zodiac Killer.
Fuck... it would've been good.
And from there we'd have
gone straight into
the title sequence,
which kind of
would've made itself.
All these things are basically
built to the same model now.
[urgent piano]
It's lots of layered imagery,
so you can never quite tell
what you're looking at...
bodies and landscapes,
all intermingled,
but in a very meaningful way.
What are we,
but products of the landscape?
[laughs]
But with a kind of disjointed,
scratchy aesthetic,
as though it's been made by
the serial killer themselves.
[evil circus music]
The same sorts of images
pop up again and again:
you got like...
you know...
birds taking flight
and a shadowy man...
walking away
and kind of
country-inflected music
but with a dark edge.
And everything's
vague and fluid,
like it's being viewed through
the fog of a dream.
Lots of tiny text...
that's almost
too small for human eyes,
I guess to make
it look cinematic.
And over the top of all this,
audio that starts to
tell the story of the case.
'You can see that this
does not look like grief...'
'... does not read as grief.'
And typically by the end,
it gets weirdly talky,
It is almost like you're
watching a trailer
for the film you're
already watching.
'It was the case that goes
to the heart of our democracy.'
'This is a murder which, unless
solved, won't be forgotten.'
It kind of sets up
everything and nothing.
All the soundbites are just
people saying things like:
'The things that went on...
were beyond the imagination.'
Or whatever.
Like, it doesn't really
tell you anything...
but at the same time,
it gives you the general vibe
in case you've got one
eye on your phone.
[steady rumble of highway]
So then we'd have
gone back to Lyndon
coming back down
the highway after this...
unsettling confrontation.
Maybe still stealing the
odd glance at the sketch.
And obviously, he's realizing
that he may have
just come into contact
with the most
wanted man in America.
But for all the adrenaline
of that moment,
he also managed to take down
the guy's license plate.
So right from the off, we're
getting this sense of Lyndon
as someone who's
calm in a crisis.
I should probably give some
general background on Lyndon.
[heavy truck]
So Lyndon was a California
Highway Patrol cop
for, I think, 30 years,
maybe longer.
And towards the end of his
life, he published this book,
about his lifelong quest
to bring the
Zodiac Killer to justice,
starting that day
up at the rest stop.
It's called...
'The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up'
a.k.a. 'The Silenced Badge'.
And it's got this
very distinctive cover
with this bright red
spider's web
with a little crosshair symbol
at the center
because that was the
Zodiac Killer's trademark.
And I remember
seeing that cover
in thumbnail form on Amazon,
presumably after
the algorithm had
exhausted every other
true crime book on the market,
and just being
very drawn to it.
So I bought the book,
read it kind of
absentmindedly at first,
but I remember
being struck by how
incredibly cinematic
a lot of it was.
It feels like it's been
written in the mold
of a true crime documentary.
And so even though I'd
never really imagined
making a true crime doc,
working in documentary these
days, true crime's got this...
gravitational pull.
Eventually, you just...
give in to it.
[distant highway]
So I started trying to get
the rights to the book,
from Lyndon's family.
And it all seemed
to be going well.
We were deep into
contract negotiations
and starting pre-production.
I even went out to Vallejo
in the Bay Area, where it
all took place, and started...
scouting around for locations,
speaking to people I thought
might make good interviewees.
So I was actually out there,
working on it,
when I got the email to say
that Lyndon's family
had pulled out
and that we weren't
getting the rights to the book.
And I still don't know
entirely why...
whether it was a case of them
wanting more money or more...
control over the
finished product, or just...
someone else swooping in
promising to make it the next
Tiger King, or whatever.
[quiet room]
But it was honestly kind of
devastating, by that point,
because I really had
figured the whole thing out,
right down to the locations
for the re-enactments.
The way I was picturing it
the majority of the
investigation was going to be
based in Lyndon's home
or what we would've been
passing off as Lyndon's home,
where, unable to put this
confrontation at the rest
stop out of his mind,
he starts to mount this kind of
freelance investigation.
And at first, he's just
laying it all out,
and I think we could have had
him literally laying it all out
across the table
and seeing if
the pieces fit together.
But as time goes on
and he becomes
more and more
immersed in this case,
we'd have filled the space
with more and more stuff:
pin boards and photocopies,
library books.
Anyway, he's got the
license plate number
so the first thing he does
is run a check on that
and comes back with the name:
George Russell Tucker.
Classic serial killer name.
Three names.
[laughs]
Apparently that's because
the media always uses
people's middle names after
they become serial killers,
so they don't get confused with
anyone else with the same name,
the same first and second name.
But as a result, the second
you say someone's middle name,
they sound like
a serial killer.
It works both ways.
And then, along with the name,
he gets a photograph
of the guy.
We'd have had, inevitably,
the moment where
the envelope arrives from the
DMV and he pulls out
the photocopy of
the driving license,
slides it alongside
the police sketch,
and needless to say,
the similarities are striking.
And again, we'd be hearing
Lyndon's words from the book,
which capture that sense
that he's kind of
approaching this
with a degree of skepticism
and it's only actually the
sheer weight of the evidence
that means he's duty bound
to look further.
[sinister drone]
So he says:
'The horn-rimmed glasses
were very prominent.'
'The shape of his hair...
'was nearly a perfect match.'
'A mad dog killer
was on the loose'
'and apparently living nearby.'
'Very close indeed.'
[drone eases]
It wouldn't have been me
reading all of this, obviously.
We'd have hired an actor with a
voice more similar to Lyndon's.
But actually, we probably would
have left it kind of ambiguous
as to whether it was an actor,
or Lyndon himself.
If you show a tape player the
first time you hear the voice,
you can kind of just let people
draw their own conclusions.
Apparently in the industry,
they call those shots...
'evocative B-roll'
You know, like those
standalone images
that sort of evoke a scene
without actually
showing much of it.
Like sometimes
they'll have people in them,
but they're always
just at the edge of frame
or kind of falling out of focus
in some improbable way.
'Bactors'.
That's what someone
told me they're called.
Because you can only
ever see their backs.
But I see why they do it:
it is almost like the more...
generic the image...
the more effective it is
as visual shorthand.
Like there was this other bit
of evidence against Tucker,
related to a boot print
that was found at one
of the Zodiac crime scenes,
and if that's the
only relevant detail,
you don't really need
the whole crime scene.
You just need that one shot
of the boot print...
in the mud.
Maybe even like a flashbulb...
like it's a crime scene
photograph being taken.
Did they use flashbulbs...
in the 60s?
We'd have gone with it anyway,
it's very dramatic.
Like, the big flash
of the bulb,
we see the boot print,
and maybe the bulb
falls to the ground
and smashes next
to the boot print.
You can see it, can't you?
[road rumbles steadily]
And then the next scene
would have been Lyndon
bringing his findings
to his superiors
or to the team leading the
Zodiac investigation in Vallejo
and they agree to
call Tucker in for questioning.
This is actually a library,
not a police station.
It's much easier to
film at a library
so we were gonna do
the exteriors
and some of the interiors here.
And the way this works in
the book is a little convoluted
because obviously this wasn't
Lyndon's jurisdiction.
I don't think he was
actually present
when Tucker was brought in
for questioning.
But dramatically,
we would have wanted him there.
So I think we would have at
least implied that he was there
without going so far
as to actually state it.
In fact, I always
imagined Lyndon
behind a two-way mirror
and that he would be
monitoring this interrogation
from the relative security
of the next room.
So they bring Tucker in
and they ask him for a series
of basic personal details:
full name, address...
But for our purposes, this
is just an excuse for Lyndon
to finally get like a real
close up look at the guy,
not in a moment of heightened
tension like at the rest area,
but now in a cool and collected
way, where he can actually
scrutinize the man who's
physically sat in front of him.
And at the same time,
we'd have tried to
fill in some of who
Tucker actually was.
As far as I could tell, there's
no actual footage of him,
unfortunately,
but
there's those 4 or 5 bits
of home movie footage
of American families
in suburbia of that era
that you see in
every documentary
because they can
stand in for...
the whole idea
of American childhood.
So that would have
done the job.
[laughs]
But the point here is that
Lyndon's actually getting
a real sense of the guy
and asking,
could this actually
be the Zodiac Killer?
And of course, the answer
would have been yes
because we would've
staged this entirely to
confirm those suspicions
so all the classic
interrogative signifiers:
cigarette perched
on an ashtray,
reel-to-reel tape recorder,
ticking clock on the wall,
the interrogation lamp.
Do you picture an
interrogation lamp
like a desk lamp
or a hanging lamp?
A hanging lamp.
And they're always swinging.
[laughs]
Why are they swinging?
Is the implication
that it's got tense?
Someone's knocked the lamp.
The bad cop stood to his feet
and knocked the lamp
and it's gone swinging.
[laughs]
See, I'm not saying that having
seen a lot of these things
is all the training I would
have needed to make one,
but I do think it would have
got me pretty far.
[music pulses, like a
faulty air conditioner]
[slow, rhythmic
metallic thuds]
What happened next would
have taken things up a notch,
dramatically speaking.
But actually, it's kind of...
hard to know what I can
and can't talk about here.
Legally.
A lot of what I've
described thus far,
there's multiple sources for.
So like, the scene at the
beginning in the rest area...
Lyndon filed a police report
so some of the details of
that are in there.
He gave interviews
over the course of his life,
where he talked about it.
So there's these
various sources
diluting the extent to which
we're drawing from...
Lyndon's book
which obviously,
we don't have the rights to.
The tricky thing is when
you get to sections like this
where the book really
is the only source.
And so there's kind of a limit
to what I can say.
But without getting
into it too much,
essentially, Lyndon alleges
a kind of conspiracy
in which Tucker was able
to exert influence within the
Solano County Sheriff's Office
and basically get the
investigation shut down.
So this would have been a
kind of montage
where word is making its way
through the corridors of power.
You know, like...
phone call begets
phone call begets phone call
until it reaches
the highest authority,
the sheriff of the county.
And we'd throw in
a few interview moments
where people are like,
'oh, power in Vallejo...'
'it's all about...'
'who you know.'
Finally, Lyndon hears that word
has come down from the sheriff,
and obviously it's
not what he wants to hear.
I'll read the actual quote
from the book...
because it gives
you a sense of the
conspiratorial tone
of the thing.
[pages rustling]
The sheriff's message is:
[dramatic drone]
'Belay all such orders'
'and forget about
George Tucker completely.'
'I don't care who he is.'
'I am telling you to
destroy your notes'
'and burn your files.'
'I never want to hear
the man's name again.'
'Ever.'
[satanic choir roars]
[timpani drum roll]
[satanic choir roars]
[timpani drum roll]
[satanic choir roars]
[timpani drum roll]
[satanic choir roars]
[timpani hit]
[final timpani hit]
[drums and choir melt
away into drone]
[drone dissolves]
So that's good...
dramatic stuff, right?
I presume the 'burn your files'
thing was not literal
but obviously we'd have
had to make it literal.
That's too good to pass up on.
I'm imagining all this stuff
that we've seen earlier,
like the printout of Tucker's
name
or the Zodiac police sketch,
all of this stuff,
all of this key evidence
being swallowed up by flames
as we see the scale of the
perversion of justice at hand.
And through it all,
there's this sense that
you know
not only was Lyndon
on to something,
but he actually got
too close to the truth.
Alright, end of act one.
[traffic rumble, cars passing]
So the next sequence would
have been a kind of...
dust-settling moment.
Lyndon's off the case
and so by default,
he's back to the daily grind:
routine traffic stops,
seeing the normality - the
banality - of life in Vallejo.
Oh, wait, this is amazing.
[motorcycle revving]
[laughs]
But for him it's instilled with
a real sense of of anti-climax.
He's gone from being the cop
who's going to solve
the most high-profile murder
case in the world
to being the cop who
hands out parking tickets.
But the point would have been,
and maybe we'd have had some of
our interviewees spell it out:
that that banality is
really just a veneer,
masking something
more sinister.
And actually, getting people
to say that, doesn't really
take much work.
There's two things
people ever say about
the places where these
sorts of crimes happened.
Like, oh, it was idyllic.
'Waterloo was a great place.'
Kids played out in the street.
You didn't lock your doors.
'Kids rode their bikes.'
'It's just a very
quiet neighborhood.'
'It's a very isolated
little community.'
'It's a beautiful place...'
'but...'
But it had a dark side.
'... there's a dark side.'
And so that shift
would have led us
inexorably towards...
Tucker's house.
[eerie drone]
[airplane, faint birds]
I think we would have had it so
the first time he drives by,
it's almost by accident.
Like he's...
He is driving by on
one of these routine calls
He is driving by on
one of these routine calls
and happens to see Tucker...
maybe like...
emptying his trash or...
parking his car.
[car engine quietens]
[door lock clicks]
[drone fades]
And is reminded,
like, oh...
as long as I do nothing,
this guy is still
out in the world
potentially committing
further crimes.
[distant wind chimes]
But what's more, the way he
describes the house is like
this perfect villain's lair.
[pages rustling]
He says its...
'surrounded by an unusual
grove of whispering pines'
and that...
'no stranger's eye can pierce
its foreboding veil'.
And the sense would've been
that his suspicions were
really starting to
solidify here,
really just based
on seeing this...
fucking creepy house.
It's intuition more
than anything else.
This isn't the actual
house, incidentally.
The actual house isn't
anywhere near spooky enough.
Anyway, I don't know if we
would've needed some moment
that it crossed into...
actually sinister.
Oh, in fact I tell you what
it would have been...
After a few days of staking
the place out,
Lyndon discovered these...
bits of graffiti
around the house.
Let me read
from the book again.
[pages rustling]
[eerie drone resumes]
'One day, I noticed
something very strange.'
'Someone had taken white paint'
'and painted an inverted
cross with arrows'
'on the telephone pole on
the right side of the house.'
'Then lo and behold,'
'on a concrete water cistern
to the left of the house,'
'was painted a large hatchet.'
And because he describes
finding these symbols
as though he's unearthing
some dark, occult mystery,
I always imagined them hidden
behind reeds, or something,
like Lyndon had to
pull back something
to see these ominous symbols
painted around
this creepy house.
[drone evaporates
into sound of the dusk]
Um...
I mean, there is a third one,
that we would have had to lose,
because the
third one depicts...
'two nude males engaged in
explicit homosexual activity'
and the photograph of this
in the book is...
to Lyndon, I think,
very sinister.
To a contemporary viewer,
I think, slightly less ominous
than the hatchet.
[laughs]
We probably would have
taken it out, in the interest
of trying to make
the theory convincing.
[eerie drone returns]
You can still deploy
someone just having a bad vibe
and living in a creepy house
but today's Netflix viewers
don't get as worked up about
someone being gay, potentially.
Or bi, actually.
He doesn't say he was gay.
He says that Tucker was bi.
Although adorably, he actually
says that he was 'AC/DC',
which is a wonderfully 1950s
way of putting it.
[drone evaporates]
[birdsong, distant road]
So next Lyndon
starts to build this...
crack team
assembled from across
Vallejo society
in order to aid his
investigation into Tucker
which is kind of amazing
for our purposes,
because that's already like
something out of a film.
And this group consists
of him, obviously,
and a few of his friends
from law enforcement,
from the California Highway
Patrol and other agencies,
as well as various people
from local government,
and then, weirdly,
Lyndon's minister...
a guy called Ernie,
who was the minister at the
local United Methodist Church.
And in my head, I pictured
them meeting in a diner,
somewhere unremarkable,
somewhere everyday,
where they can slowly
start to build
this case against Tucker.
And a few of them
are still alive,
so I was imagining
getting them down to the diner
and filming them...
getting out of their cars,
their boots coming
down on the tarmac,
[heavy footstep]
sitting them down in a booth
and getting them to
play the role of
the hot-shot detective.
You know what I mean?
I feel like all these
figures of authority,
the second you point
a camera at them,
they just know what to do.
You know, they
know the image of a cop
in a true crime show.
[heavy footstep]
And so without prompting,
they walk in the right way
and they talk about themselves
in the right way.
'What I figured out at an
early age in the Bureau is...'
'you push it, and then...
you keep pushing.'
Even just the nicknames!
They all have these
clearly self-anointed nicknames
and about half of them
seem to be 'the bulldog'.
'What was your nickname?'
'The Bulldog'
'Bulldog'
'The Bulldogs'
It's like there's
no direction required.
[distant cars]
And I was imagining these
interviews as a springboard
for discussing each of the
killings in more detail.
[beep of reversing truck]
You know, someone ominously
references one of the crimes,
and we cut to the microfiche in
the archive, whizzing back to
[mechanism whirrs]
'July 4th, 1969'.
I think that actually is...
the date of one of
the Zodiac crimes.
This is how embedded
it is in my head.
And then they discuss
the facts of the crime
and how Tucker
might be implicated.
And meanwhile,
our 'evocative B-roll'
is going into overdrive.
All the classic staples:
the gun...
rising up towards the camera,
shell casings
clattering to the ground,
crime scene tape...
stretching out into
the distance,
Or...
blood,
pooling on the ground.
Maybe a hand
reaching in to touch it,
as though to check
it's actually blood.
[car suspension rattles]
Plus all the actual police
photographs of the crime scene.
Which now
I feel like, even recently,
you could just show those,
and now everything's so jazzy.
Like, at the very least,
now they have to be placed
in a kind of 3D environment
or be falling in and
out of focus
with a bit of dust
dancing across their surface,
and the thing I increasingly
see now is
they've taken the crime
scene photograph and they've...
created a three-dimensional
image from it.
You know, it'll be like
a layered thing.
It's like you're moving
through the space
so you can be not just
at the place where a horrific,
brutal murder took place,
but actually traveling through
it, like on Google Street View.
It's probably good work
for some graphic
artist somewhere,
someone who knows
After Effects.
You must just...
forget what you're looking at.
[distant cars]
And so between
all of that, we'd...
fill in the general
contours of the case.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: Do you wanna
fill in some of that now?
Uh...
No.
PRODUCER: Okay.
[laughs]
No, not at all.
I feel like that's...
the only saving grace of not
getting to make the film,
is that we don't have to...
re-tell the story
of the Zodiac Killer
for the thousandth time.
Anyway, they're
doing all this work
to link Tucker to
each of the crimes
but obviously, this is
all off the books
because Lyndon's been told
not to pursue the case.
So next, him and his team
have to take their theory
and get it in front of someone
higher up the chain of command.
He puts together a dossier
of his and
his colleagues' findings,
and then together
they go into these
centers of investigative power,
slam down the dossier,
and they think that's
all they need to show,
but instead, these agencies
just don't seem to care.
They have their own suspect,
their own theories of the case,
and they don't want
some outsider
telling them how
to do their job.
[door clicks shut]
So the main challenge
for Lyndon becomes
getting anyone to hear him out.
[car indicator ticks]
But then at the same time,
he kind of doesn't
want too many people
to hear him out,
because if you get too
many people on board,
it kind of ceases to be
your suspect anymore,
ceases to be your theory.
So much of what's making it
possible for me to talk about
Lyndon and his suspect
without the rights to the book,
is the fact that he wasn't
terribly discreet.
Like, he went on the radio
and talked about his suspect.
He gave interviews
to newspapers.
Like, in one sense, he really
would have been better
just keeping it to himself.
Like, it's not just the
quality of the evidence.
It's the...
exclusivity.
Like, did you watch The Jinx
when it went out?
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: No.
The final episode of that
is unbelievable.
So for six episodes or
whatever, they've been pursuing
this guy called Robert Durst,
who is this eccentric heir
to a real estate fortune,
who's suspected
of murdering three people.
And he's interviewed in this
show and always kind of
dodges their questions
and skillfully evades
incriminating himself
right up until
this final episode,
where, at the end
of his final interview,
with the filmmakers
he goes to the bathroom
and unknowingly,
still wearing his microphone,
confesses to himself...
[rustling of clothes]
[groaning]
It's unbelievably chilling.
Just incredible television.
And the timing was just unreal.
I think Durst was arrested
the day before the airing,
and then in the finale,
you see exactly how and
why he was caught,
but it did beg the question:
how did this ever line up?
Because obviously
that interview was conducted
I think years before the
broadcast of the show,
and so whatever
the legality of it,
it would seem quite ethically
dubious if the filmmakers had
left this murderer
to be walking the streets
for two years,
just in the interest of
holding back a big reveal
for their final episode.
And the story that they told
was that they hadn't
actually known
that they had
captured the confession.
That that tape
went unlistened to
for months or years
after it was recorded,
and that they realized
like a week before
the final episode was gonna
air, just in time to edit it in
and the fact that he was
therefore arrested
the day of the airing
or the day before or whatever,
is just a happy accident,
slash...
the greatest thing that's
ever happened to them
in their filmmaking lives.
[distant highway]
[uncertain drone]
But anyway,
in Lyndon's telling,
any secrecy is very
much foisted upon him
by the incompetence of
these various agencies,
and from that, he concludes
that if he's ever going to
bring Tucker to justice,
he's gonna have to
go it alone.
And there's a great...
caustic line about this
in the book.
Let me just find it.
[pages rustling]
He says:
'Do you think
I'm going to trust...'
'a bunch of
badge-toting clowns...'
'with additional information?'
'Not me.'
'Never again.'
I'm trying to keep
all these quotes brief
because I have to justify
each one to our lawyer,
but there's 400 pages of this.
[drone continues]
[like a choir holding
an uneasy note]
Anyway, under cover of night,
they begin pursuing Tucker,
tailing his car
wherever he goes,
arranging a series of shadowy
meetings with witnesses,
informants, people who know him
in one way or another.
They go through
his trash at one point
and try and find incriminating
evidence in there.
And ultimately,
they stage this...
show-stopping sting operation.
[drone fades]
[distant cars,
gentle birdsong]
Basically, they found out
Tucker was in AA,
and I'm not entirely
sure how, actually,
but the way I always imagined
it playing out was
they're tailing Tucker
around Northern California
one evening.
Eventually they see his car
pull up outside a church.
Not this church,
but a church,
and this one would have done.
And so Lyndon's
maybe across the street,
watching Tucker as he
gets out of his car
and makes his way
into this church.
Um...
Eventually, maybe,
he sneaks in and realizes
that it's an AA meeting.
And so this is like
hitting paydirt,
because what do people do
at an AA meeting?
They confess.
And so immediately, Lyndon and
his team start discussing
how to get someone inside,
but also who to get inside,
because obviously
a lot of them are...
too high-profile, in one
way or another,
would be too easily
recognized by Tucker.
And so eventually,
all eyes fall on Ernie...
the minister.
And maybe we'd have set up
earlier in the film that
Ernie is a bit of a redundant
member of the group,
like it's nice to have him,
but he's not the big guns
of this investigative team.
But lo and behold,
now it falls to Ernie
to do what the others cannot.
So Ernie begins driving up
to the church every week,
takes his collar off...
[fabric slide]
I'm imagining the
dramatic scene of him
putting the collar
on the bedside table
to go out and deceive a man
he doesn't even know,
in a church.
And then at the end
of each meeting,
Ernie would record these tapes
reciting back everything
that Tucker had said.
And apparently
the tapes still exist,
so we would have played
them over this sequence.
Here's a quote from it.
This is Ernie on one
of these tapes, saying:
[unsettling drone]
'I felt like he was
trying to say,'
'I am a rotten S.O.B.'
'but I can't tell you
what I have done.'
'I've done things I'm not proud
of, and would never tell you.'
'Terrible things.'
'If only you knew.'
'But you will never know,'
'and I don't care anymore.'
'It's in the past now.'
[drone intensifies,
breathy and insistent]
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: Imagine going
to an AA meeting...
... and then what you say
being published in a book.
[laughs, drone cuts out]
Well, yeah.
Not great.
Um...
You know, invading
the sanctity of an AA meeting
to listen in on
someone's confessions,
hoping they admit to
committing the Zodiac killings.
That's the thing, though.
If he did...
it's fine.
Right? If he did,
it's absolutely fine.
You could go much further.
It's only if he didn't, that
you start to feel a bit...
sweaty about it.
And I feel like that's what
we would have been
trading on with this.
You need people
to be fully convinced
going into this sequence, or it
just seems way beyond the pale.
I always think back
to that scene in...
Paradise Lost.
I think it's the second
Paradise Lost film, where...
It's like...
Have you seen Paradise Lost?
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: No.
It was a trilogy of
documentaries about this...
miscarriage of justice where
these teenage boys were...
sent to prison for
the murders of some children
that they clearly
hadn't committed.
And in the second
of the three films,
they start sniffing
around the possibility
that the dad of
one of the dead kids
could have been responsible
for these deaths.
And in the interests of
exploring this idea,
they film him out in the woods
performing some sort of
commemorative ritual,
um...
which is admittedly...
incredibly weird and creepy
and the takeaway
of the scene is clearly:
oh my God,
this guy is guilty as sin.
And he wasn't.
He had nothing to do with it.
And I think even at the time,
they got a bit of stick for...
having kind of...
exploiting his grief
in this way,
um...
but if it had been him,
no one would have cared
about exploiting the grief.
If you're convinced it's
for the greater good,
there are very few
ethical lines
as far as...
HBO execs are concerned.
[distant cars]
So Tucker is saying all this
creepy stuff in these meetings,
but obviously he's
not about to confess
to being the Zodiac Killer.
And so they realize they
need to go one step further.
They need something undeniable.
And what he
arrives at is...
this palm print.
Basically, after
one of the crimes,
the Zodiac Killer himself
called the police
to report what he had done,
and they managed to get to
the phone booth that he used
quite quickly
and so they found on it,
a palm print
that was considered
to be definitively his.
And so Lyndon seizes upon this
as the ultimate test
of Tucker's guilt.
[insistent electronic music]
And so, from here, we'd have
been straight into our scheme,
and I think we'd have done it
a little bit like a heist film,
showing it step by step
and piece by piece,
before people have a chance to
make sense of what the plan is.
You feel it coming together
like this jigsaw puzzle,
until at the end,
the picture reveals itself.
So the first step is that
a friend of Lyndon's
bandaged Ernie's arm
into a cast,
and he wore this cast
every week at this AA meeting
where he was undercover,
getting Tucker used to the idea
of him in an arm cast.
And then Lyndon...
gives Ernie a gun.
He arms him, with a revolver.
And I could just imagine
the inserts of all of this:
the gun tucked into
the ceremonial robes...
Does a Methodist
minister wear robes?
We would've had him wear robes.
Just, that image of...
the gun going into
the religious garb
and then maybe
the bandaged arm...
swinging back in front
to hide the gun
and then the...
In fact, I have to hand this
one over to Lyndon
because the way he describes it
is so perfectly understated.
Let me find it.
[pages rustling]
He says:
'As March 1st, 1977,
approached,'
'our plan was
right on schedule.'
'I bought the
fishbowl required.'
[glass hit reverberates]
[like a revving engine]
I mean, as a cliffhanger...
just incredible.
If this was a series,
that's where you'd
put the episode break,
and then there's no way
people are stopping watching.
And so Lyndon
gives Ernie this fishbowl,
and he drives up the highway
to this fateful AA meeting.
He's sitting outside,
thinking about whether his
grand plan is going to work.
Eventually, he
sees Tucker arrive,
and so he gets out of the car,
walks to his trunk, pops
it open, and there it is:
[glass hit, resonates]
the fishbowl.
So he says,
could you carry this
into the meeting for me?
Because of my broken arm.
And I guess he explained
that he was gonna
give a presentation
to the group
and use the fishbowl as a prop.
And so this is our
make or break moment.
Is Tucker gonna reach
his hands into the trunk,
plant them on the sides
of this fishbowl,
leaving, presumably...
the platonic ideal
of two handprints
on the side of this glass bowl.
And lo and behold,
that's exactly what happens.
[choir sings]
And I can only
imagine the triumph
of that moment, as this bowl
is carried into the meeting,
and we're caught up
on this wave of energy,
thrust into the building,
albeit obviously, that momentum
immediately interrupted
by a two-hour AA meeting
and whatever Ernie's
presentation was.
[choir is silenced,
driving beat continues]
My assumption is it would've
been some kind of metaphor,
like, take life
one day at a time,
like a goldfish.
Because of the short memory.
Maybe? I don't know.
Uh...
So, at the end of the meeting,
Ernie has Tucker carry the
fishbowl back to the car,
pops the trunk...
I'm imagining this...
this empty trunk of
this car opened up,
the little interior light
just perfectly illuminating
the spot where this
bowl is gonna go,
and presumably from there,
be whisked...
straight to whatever
expert is gonna
painstakingly extract
these palm prints,
which can then
be matched to the...
file print of the Zodiac Killer
and the whole thing is
gonna be wrapped up
in this perfect, neat bow,
as soon as Tucker
places this bowl
back down into
the trunk of the car.
[glass reverberates
in anticipation]
But then...
Actually, let me read
the version in the book,
because Lyndon describes it in
such exquisitely tragic terms.
[music collapses into
thudding pulse]
'But then, for
some strange reason,'
'our suspect did
something totally bizarre.'
'After the bowl
was set securely...'
'in the trunk of Ernie's car,'
'Tucker slapped the bowl
with his palms'
'several times'
[glass hits, like
chiming bells]
'and then rubbed the bowl'
'several times as well.'
'Ernie said,'
'I could not believe
my eyes, Lyndon.'
'It was like he knew.'
[birdsong]
[bike whizzes by]
Pretty good, right?
And I think we would've
tried to play it
right down the middle of either
an intentional act of sabotage,
or just about plausibly,
an innocent action.
That's a fun knife edge.
Either it's like the wily
behavior of a serial killer,
or it's like your dad,
kind of
patting the sides of something
to show you how robust it is.
[glassy reverberations]
And I think by
shooting it slow motion,
we would have really extracted
every agonizing clap of
the hands against the bowl
and then that terrible,
dreadful rubbing of the sides.
Like this...
I could just imagine...
Oh god, I was so excited
about shooting this sequence.
The feeling of agonizing loss
in that moment.
[reverberations fall
away to nothing]
[car softly pulling up]
And so it's
that feeling of loss
that would've set the stage
for the final third
of the film,
which begins with
a real error of judgment
on Lyndon's part,
and that's that he agrees
to meet with another man
who's been on his own parallel
hunt for the Zodiac:
Robert Graysmith.
Will that land, do you think?
Or should I explain who he is?
So, Graysmith is the author
of the most successful book
about the Zodiac Killer,
so successful, in fact,
that in Zodiac circles,
it's often just called
'the Yellow Book,'
like it's Macbeth or something,
because it's got this very
distinctive yellow cover
with 'Zodiac' written
down the center.
But at this point,
he's still chasing
the story down
and so him and Lyndon have been
speaking to the same sources,
following up on the same leads,
but it's only now,
at this low ebb,
that Lyndon agrees to meet,
figuring, I guess,
what do I have to lose?
And pretty soon
he gets his answer.
[distant cars]
I think we could have gone
pretty swiftly from that to...
Well, what I was imagining
was Lyndon wandering innocently
around his local bookstore
and then spying
in the new releases
or the bestsellers section,
this bright yellow...
Actually, I think the first
edition was black, but...
it's got that
crosshair symbol on it
and 'Zodiac'
in massive writing,
and so I was imagining him
feverishly searching
through the pages
to see if it
favors his suspect,
and instead, not only
does it present
an entirely different suspect,
but it also includes
some of the juiciest details
from Lyndon's story
almost as this, kind of,
funny aside.
And one of the main reasons
I was able to describe
the fishbowl story in such
detail a minute ago
is that the story got out
20 years before Lyndon
wrote his book,
which must have been...
annoying.
But then he can't
really make it about that
because that seems
sort of vain,
so the version in Lyndon's book
is all about how this was...
You know,
a threat to
his family's safety,
and how this was putting lives
in jeopardy and all this stuff.
Let me find the thing.
He says:
[disenchanted drone]
'Graysmith, a complete novice,'
'went on to disseminate...'
'sensitive investigative
findings to the entire world,'
'things which could place
my family members...'
'in a great deal of danger.'
So he frames it as an
ethical concern, essentially,
and we would have run
with that in the film, but...
but I think the real
violation was that...
not only was this book
hugely successful,
and made Graysmith
a very wealthy man,
it also made him...
the de facto authority.
[drone fades into distant cars]
It's very hard to be the
second true crime book,
or the second true crime film
about any given subject,
because as soon as
one is a hit,
that kind of sets
the terms by which
the thing is understood.
It assigns the guilt,
I think, more powerfully
really than even the...
law enforcement agencies
directly working on the case.
[distant, tinny melody]
Anyway, my plan
had been to bounce
straight from
the Graysmith stuff
into some of Lyndon's more
out-there detective work,
as he becomes
increasingly desperate
to get his own investigation
moving again.
[tinny tune grows louder]
I imagined it like that
classic cop movie thing
where they go back
to the drawing board,
start re-examining all the old
evidence to see if they can...
shake something loose.
So he'd be re-reading
interview transcripts,
going back and meeting
with witnesses again,
trying to see if there's
something that he missed
first time around.
[jolly melody continues]
There's an ice cream truck
just out of shot here.
But as Lyndon looks
closer and closer,
and obsesses over
every little detail,
we would've been trying
to build this sense of
kind of...
growing paranoia.
Like, maybe the leads start
off fairly reasonable,
like there was this thing about
him buying Tucker's old car,
the one that he'd been driving
that day at the rest stop.
Lyndon buys it, and he
searches through it,
looking for any old discarded
items that might...
have evidentiary value.
But as he starts to look
at each of these things closer,
there's kind of a
mania that sets in,
you know,
and in particular,
there was this whole thing
where he found a button,
in the car
and became convinced
that this button
had some sort of massive
significance to the case.
And so I think we could've
taken little things like that,
and used them to create
this sense that we're...
delving deeper and deeper
into Lyndon's...
psyche.
Like...
[paranoid drone]
We're falling down the
rabbit hole with him,
not knowing how deep it goes.
[ice cream melody
plays on eerily]
[a thudding pulse,
music warps and distorts]
But because Lyndon was such
a lone wolf by this point,
almost by definition,
this is where we have...
the fewest sources
outside of his book.
So people just have to...
take my word for it
that there would've been...
you know...
some great
twists and turns here.
Like, have I even...
I haven't even mentioned...
the building yet, have I?
Basically, there would've been
a key scene here,
where there's an explosion,
uh...
with narrative significance.
[pulse slows]
[pulse continues,
a muffled thud]
But the purpose of all
this would've been
getting Lyndon to a more
reckless state of mind,
where he's ready to make
the kinds of rash decisions
that he wouldn't
have made a few years earlier,
or half an hour earlier,
for our purposes.
And again I can't get
into the intricate...
plot mechanics of this,
but basically in a bizarre
twist of fate,
Lyndon finds himself presented
with the opportunity...
for him and his wife...
to go to dinner with
Tucker and his wife
as friends.
Like, they've fallen into
the same social circle
through this very strange
series of events
and now, the situation is such
that it could make
sense for them to...
essentially double date.
So Lyndon writes in the book
about them preparing
to go to dinner
with Tucker and his wife,
and he writes about it
like they're preparing
for a military operation.
[pages rustling]
So he says:
[buzzing tone, like
a live wire]
'The evening before
this arranged dinner,'
'I retrieved my
.38 five-shot...'
'Centennial Smith and
Wesson hammerless,'
'cleaned and lubricated it,'
'and loaded it
with high-velocity,'
'light-grain hollow points.'
'Next, I checked my small...'
'palm-sized .22
Magnum Derringer,'
'the dynamite stick,
which holds two bullets.'
'I called my wife into
the kitchen and asked her,'
'do you remember how to load
and shoot the Derringer?'
And so, with the guns
tucked into the...
the pocket of Lyndon's
jeans and his wife's purse,
they set out...
for a date with justice.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER: I think
'double date with justice'.
A double date with justice.
[laughs]
See, this is why it's a bit...
bittersweet doing this.
Like, this is the fun
of this genre, right?
Getting to that point where
things that would have seemed
impossibly outlandish
at the outset
now start to seem
perfectly reasonable.
Like, you watched
Making a Murderer, right?
[dark-edged country music]
That first season, even
though it was built around this
very dramatic story of this...
possible miscarriage
of justice,
the actual content of the show
was pretty restrained.
Most of what you were
looking at was just...
grainy interrogation footage
and shots of people
standing about in courtrooms.
But then they made
a second season,
and you can just feel
this inevitable slide
into sensationalism,
from the off-- from episode
one of season two,
they are taking a mannequin,
putting a wig on it,
and covering it in red paint
to simulate blood splatter.
'I wanted to re-enact it.'
And you look back
at the previous season
where it was all basically
men in dusty suits
sitting around discussing
legal precedent,
[heavy thud]
and you think,
how did we get here?
Like, the bounds of
rational behavior
are just ever-expanding.
[quiet room]
So if you accepted
Lyndon and his team
searching through
Tucker's trash,
then why wouldn't
you accept them...
eavesdropping on
the AA meeting?
And if you accept them
eavesdropping on the AA meeting
then why wouldn't you
accept the whole...
fishbowl caper?
And yeah, here we are,
at a steakhouse,
with the Zodiac Killer.
[jangled thuds, like a piano
thrown down a staircase]
So this is
the actual steakhouse
that they went to,
up in Winters, California,
and I think from the moment
they would've met,
we would have had this
question of recognition.
Like, does Tucker remember
Lyndon from the rest stop?
Or did he somehow
sense his presence...
at the police interrogation?
To what extent
does this man know
that this meeting
is not a first encounter,
it's the culmination
of years of police work.
[discordant pulse continues]
So in the book, Lyndon writes:
'The next hour...'
'was one of the most
bizarre in my entire life.'
'Staring straight out
at about a 30-degree angle,'
'Tucker appeared to be
in another dimension,'
[knife carving]
'some kind of Twilight Zone.'
[moist scrape]
And in the context
of all of the suspicions
that we would have built up
by this point in the film,
I think Tucker just
seeming kind of detached
would have become a kind of
absorbent surface,
for anything we wanted
to throw at it.
And that's even before the...
the drive home.
[thudding pulse continues]
[cars passing outside]
So they're driving back along
the I-80, down to Vallejo,
and I was imagining this as
already a tense scenario:
the road stretching out
before them,
and we're packed
into this tight space
with our hero
and our villain.
And then that tension
would have ratcheted up
even higher
once Tucker takes
an unexpected turn
off the highway and onto
this little side road called
Cherry Glen Road.
[intermittent
percussive strikes]
And I think if we'd charted
that rising tension effectively
it would have
all felt inevitable.
We would've felt Lyndon's hand
reaching into his pocket
to grab the gun
before he even did it.
We'd have seen the Derringer
coming out of the purse
a split second
before it's on screen.
[pulse darkens]
And the audience is becoming
convinced that this is it.
This is the moment
where all of the latent threat
and violence of the film
is about to
suddenly burst forth.
[a high note emerges
from the dirge]
And we're pushing the tension
as far as it will go,
but we know it can only sustain
for so long before it has to...
break....
somehow.
[high note soars,
pulse thuds like a heartbeat]
[percussive strikes
splinter into feedback]
[disparate sounds merge
into a wall of noise]
But instead...
[music dissolves into
rumble of road]
nothing happens.
They return home.
They're dropped off.
The air clears.
But now there's no mistaking
who has the upper hand.
You know, like
Like so many Zodiac
victims before them,
he's showing them
that they're at his mercy.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER:
By driving home.
[laughs]
Yeah, but on an
unconventional route!
See, if we'd
done it right, though,
you wouldn't be
thinking like that.
You haven't seen enough
of these things,
but when they work,
you just kind of go with it.
The internal logic of the film
just pulls you through.
And I think we'd have got the
audience there by this point
and then we would've been
on the home straight.
We're at an hour and 15 now.
So next, we
would have gone to...
the letter.
[clunking keys]
Basically, as a
sort of last resort,
Lyndon wrote a letter
to the president,
and it's quite somber,
quite serious,
all about duty and honor.
[noble drone]
He says:
'Mr. President,'
'after a devoted and dedicated
32 years of investigation,'
'into the infamous
Zodiac Killer case,'
'I am in fact writing
my last letter of appeal.'
'My request is
not really about me.'
So he does that maneuver you
see in a lot of these things,
which is that he reframes it...
as being...
really about the victims,
and their families.
About seeking closure for them.
[distant cars]
And, you know...
Sure.
But...
as true crime's got bigger and
bigger and people have got...
like maybe...
10% more squeamish about it,
that little disclaimer
has become
even more ubiquitous.
Like, did you watch that
Netflix Dahmer show?
I've never seen anything
with such an outsized
sense of its own
moral righteousness.
It's like ten episodes long,
and the first nine
episodes are just...
Jeffrey Dahmer drilling
into people's skulls,
and then the tenth episode
is this lecture, about how...
we shouldn't really focus on...
Jeffrey Dahmer drilling
into people's skulls...
'Just when you thought folks
couldn't stoop any lower.'
'It's sick.'
Obviously they do
the final grid.
That's when you know these
shows really care, right?
When they end with a
photo grid of all the victims.
Eight and a half cumulative
hours of violent gore,
and now a single passport photo
of each of the victims
to remind us
what really matters.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER:
You watched it though.
Yeah, it was good.
Evan Peters.
[steady rumble of car]
So Lyndon sent his letter,
and then it would have been
a case of waiting
to see if it's going to lead
to anything at all.
And so I figured we'd have him
drive out to the
outskirts of town,
where he finally
has time to reflect
on everything he's
given over to this,
on all the years lost
to the pursuit of Tucker,
that could all be for naught
if nothing comes of it.
[car passes]
[laughs]
It's just so beautiful.
Uh...
We would've shot a less...
distractingly beautiful sunset
for the actual thing, but...
good job,
nonetheless,
camera team.
[distant cars]
And then finally,
the word comes back
from the FBI
that they're not going
to take up the case.
And Lyndon writes quite
strikingly about it
in the book,
as almost like,
the end of hope,
where he says:
'So now I tell the world
there is no justice,'
'there is no integrity,'
'and there are no existing laws
that morality can supersede.'
'There is no agency
and not one individual'
'who will step forward
to intervene'
'in this noble
cause of justice.'
[metal sings in the wind]
[distant cracks...]
[perhaps fireworks...]
I definitely haven't quite...
made my peace...
with this.
With not getting
to make the film.
Like, obviously, I'm happy
with what we've done instead,
but how many people
are ever going to watch this?
Realistically.
[birdsong]
So in this final stretch,
the question would have become,
what is the closure
that the audience now needs?
Once it becomes clear that
Lyndon isn't going
to definitively prove
that Tucker was
the Zodiac Killer.
Not least because
he wasn't, obviously.
But, that's...
parenthetical.
[intercom blip]
PRODUCER:
Like, he definitely wasn't?
I mean...
no?
I mean, maybe.
But no, probably not.
But yeah, either way...
we know now that Lyndon isn't
gonna get it over the line,
at least in a legal sense.
And so the stakes
become much more about
the internal drama of the film
and the ending that
the film demands.
And, the book
doesn't necessarily
offer an obvious one, but
I think that the closest one
I found in it, and how I was
planning to end the film...
was with this party
at Tucker's house.
Basically, Tucker threw
a summer barbecue
and invited Lyndon
and his wife.
And so they drive up
there, they go inside,
and he describes Tucker...
at the bar, mixing cocktails,
which is a wonderfully...
innocent action.
I don't know if we'd
try and like...
make that seem more
sinister in some way.
Maybe he's mixing
blood red cocktails.
The book's description of this
encounter is fairly minimal.
He says:
'He looked at my wife
and said, thank you,'
'but never made the slightest
eye contact with me.'
'It was very awkward,'
'but I extended my arm
for a handshake...'
'and felt like
a complete idiot.'
So in Lyndon's own telling,
it's an emasculating moment,
but I think it could've been
made into the moment we needed
of Lyndon finally holding
his own against Tucker.
And in particular, the thing he
says about eye contact...
that he never made
the slightest eye contact,
even when they're
shaking hands,
because eye contact was
how we began down this road...
They were in these adjoining
cars, they locked eyes...
and then Lyndon feels
that he lost face
by letting himself be
stared down by this stranger...
I think this could've
been the moment
where he reverses the dynamic:
[redemptive drone]
Where he goes in for
the handshake with Tucker,
realizes he doesn't want
to meet his eyeline,
but he just holds him there.
Maybe he won't let his hand go,
until Tucker...
raises his eyes to Lyndon's,
in acknowledgment,
and there's a sense
that even if
he knows he's never going
to see Tucker put away,
he's forced Tucker to recognize
that he is a worthy match.
That's actually quite
good, isn't it?
[laughs]
And I think it would have been
a good cue for us to
swerve towards
a larger takeaway.
[soft waves]
You know, what is it in all
of us that makes us want to...
revisit these terrible crimes?
Why can't we let the past
be in the past?
And I think we'd be building
a rhythm up by this point.
It's almost becoming
like a montage
as we revisit these
little moments from the film.
We'd have little snapshots of
each crime scene,
and interviewees coming
back to the fore to...
give their final thought.
We'd re-run our
'evocative B-roll' of...
bullet casings,
dropping to the floor and...
the paperwork consumed by fire.
And the sense you get
is that there's something
tying all of this together,
as though...
everything we've
seen thus far was...
speaking ultimately
to the same idea,
something sort of universal...
something profound
and open-ended.
[soothing tones continue]
And you can kind of...
you know, at that point,
re-wrap...
this lack of a conclusion
as almost a moral virtue.
That actually, it would be
simplistic to have an ending,
to give an easy answer,
because, what is life,
if not accepting
the chaos of reality,
and the mysteries
at the heart
of human existence?
[music reaches closing note]
It's funny, you
build up the rhythm...
and the feel of closure...
and you almost just get it.
[meaningful drone]