Greetings,
There are a lot of serial killers on the loose. Far too many, in my view.
But one in particular has truly captured the public imagination and held it for more than half a century. You know the guy. The Zodiac killer, whose Bay Area murder spree left five dead and two severely injured, and somehow inspired a David Fincher movie (beautifully made but totally misleading), weeks’ worth of podcast episodes and enough paperbacks to choke an airport newsstand. Meanwhile, Wikipedia lists 275 murderers more prolific. So why are we still talking about this one?
Well, for one thing, his crimes were grisly (presumably all murders are, to some extent) but not too grisly. Just right. The Goldilocks of grisly.
Perhaps more important, he wrote letters to the editor of local newspapers, taunting authorities for their failure to catch him. As I put it in the cover story for this month’s Los Angeles magazine, he popularized
a tone of smug superiority that attention-hungry outcasts, both fictional and real—from Hannibal Lecter and the Riddler to the aforementioned Ted Kaczynski and a substantial subset of 4Chan dwellers—have sought to emulate ever since.
And finally, he democratized law enforcement, publishing coded ciphers that invited the public at large to play along at home.
His cryptic puzzles brought a seductive element of interactivity to crime-solving (a married couple decoded his first cipher over breakfast in 1969) and prefigured the citizen-sleuth movement along with its twisted progeny, 9/11 trutherism and QAnon.
My story focuses on the novelist Jarett Kobek (I Hate the Internet) and his journey down the Zodiac rabbit hole, which resulted in the identification of a new suspect, Paul Alfred Doerr. A prolific writer of zines and letters to the editor, who lived in Fairfield, California, near where the murders occured, Doerr left behind a trove of writings that allowed Kobek to trace numerous highly persuasive connections to the Zodiac’s known interests and obsessions. He published two brilliant books on the subject that received little public notice, in part because he runs his own publishing company and quietly released them as print-on-demand.
In March, a friend reached out to me and suggested I take a look. Although I’m no crime buff (am I really the only person who thinks Dexter is an abomination?), I thought Kobek himself was a fascinating character and well worth of a profile.
The thing I quickly discovered is that although Kobek is an extraordinary researcher, he had left one stone unturned, and it was a big one. He hadn’t reached out to Paul Doerr’s daughter, Gloria, who lives in Hawaii. Basically, he just isn’t the type to call someone up and tell them their father is a serial killer. But his reluctance gave me an interesting opening. I’m a so-so researcher (I thought I was decent until I met Jarett), but I do really like talking to people, and I have gotten to be comfortable cold-calling folks and getting them to talk, even about difficult subjects.
When I reached Gloria, she told me she was thinking of suing Kobek, that she was waiting on a copy of the book, and that she’d give me an excusive interview after she’d read it. I texted her a week or two later, and this happened.
That was the moment the story went from being an amusing profile of a quirky writer and his weird obsession to something different. Maybe kind of a big deal.
I interviewed Gloria by phone for hours, but eventually I decided we needed to meet in person. I persuaded both Gloria and Jarett to make the trip to Vallejo. We spent about a week together, bunking in a Vrbo rental decked out like a Real World loft circa 1998, smoking too many cigarettes (I promptly quit again the minute I got home) and checking out Gloria’s old stomping grounds.
She mentioned that her father had left some guns behind when he died. One of them, we figured, might well be linked to one of the murders. Gloria thought they might still be sitting where she’d left them 15 years before, in the garage of one of his best friends. The woman, a former coworker who insited on being identified by her Ren Faire name, Mistress Goodheart, was reluctant to say anything that might implicate Paul. Meanwhile, she had become “a bit of a hoarder,” she explained, and was therefore reluctant to let me dig through all her stuff. Paul Doerr’s guns might still be in her house to this day.
Meanwhile, Gloria shared her recollections of growing up. Her father was an interesting character, a charming autodidact, who loved ciphers and cosplay and was an early proponent of organic food, a D&D fan, a gun collector and member of a far-right militia.
He was also a domestic abuser. Here’s a clip of Gloria describing one particularly horrific instance.
I should say that having gotten to know Gloria pretty well over the past six months or so, she’s one of the bravest and wisest individuals I’ve ever met. I’m very grateful to her for sharing her story with me.
Anyway, it would be premature to declare the Zodiac case closed. But there’s more evidence implicating Paul Doerr than there was for any of the hundreds of suspects named in this case so far, from Arthur Leigh Allen (subject of the Fincher film) to Ted Cruz (a meme and U.S. senator).
Fortunately, the Zodiac made one key error. He left behind his fingerprints when he murdered San Francisco cab driver Paul Stine. Doerr’s prints are on record and could be easily obtained by the responsible law enforcement authorities with a single phone call. Hopefully they’ll go ahead and do that in the coming weeks and we can all move on. After all, we’ve got 275 more serial killers to obsess about. And counting.
Here’s the piece. Can’t wait to hear what you think.
Kind regards,
Aaron
P.S. Many thanks to those of who helped persuade Twitter to reinstate my hacked account. Feels good to be back.