Mystery fuels the fire of discovery in ‘Zodiac Killer’ docuseries.
The search for the Zodiac Killer ought to be on the same level of “oh spare me” credibility as “Finding Bigfoot,” but after about 50 years (depending on which murder you believe to have been the killer’s first), it is the crime story that keeps on giving.
The History Channel reopens the case in the five-part docuseries, “The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer,” premiering at 9 p.m. Tuesday. Although the channel only made one episode available for review, it’s enough to give you a sense of why the murders remain one of history’s great unsolved cases.
The Zodiac murders took place over a relatively short span of time, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. There were seven confirmed Zodiac murders, but possibly more — the killer claimed to have murdered 37 people.
The first murders were always thought to have taken place in Benicia. Calif., in 1968 with a young couple as the initial victims — David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen. However, in recent years, earlier deaths are suspected to have been the work of Zodiac, including that of Cheri Jo Bates, stabbed to death in Riverside in 1966.
The History Channel series focuses specifically on what is considered the Holy Grail of the investigation, one of four cryptograms sent by the killer. The cipher in question, called Z340, is a 340-character puzzle sent by Zodiac to the San Francisco Chronicle, which allegedly contains the identity of the killer.
“The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer” takes a two-pronged approach to reviving the case. While Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California’s Information Science Institute heads a team of researchers who use a supercomputer, named Carmel, to try to crack Z340, former Los Angeles homicide detective Sal LaBarbera and former FBI cold case expert Ken Mains retrace the investigative paths of others who have tried to solve the cases. To begin with, they go to Riverside to test their theory that Cheri Jo Bates was a Zodiac victim. Without giving anything away, they discover some intriguing details.
That said, Mains and LaBarbera aren’t the first to link the Bates murder to the Zodiac, although you wouldn’t know that from the way the series plays it.
By the end of the first episode, though, Mains and LaBarbera have a name, although, again, it’s someone who has been suggested as the killer by others, and Knight and his team find something in Z340. But don’t expect a revelation in the first installment, there’s a reason there are five episodes in the limited series. Besides, if solving the Zodiac were that easy, the case would have been closed years ago.
Watching even the most complicated fictional mysteries on television or in movie theaters suggests that cases can be solved with relative ease once you know the killer’s motive and patterns. But we don’t know Zodiac’s motive, other than to create mayhem, and his patterns have remained, well, indecipherable for the most part. Those unknown factors have fueled unending conspiracy theories and crackpot suggestions of the killer’s identity over the years, as well as legitimately serious investigations.
Still, mystery loves company and no matter how skeptical we may be, we’re often hooked by the possibility of identifying the Zodiac killer. At least there’s a greater chance of solving those cases than finding Bigfoot.