Still Searching for the Zodiac Killer

Feb. 20, 2007— -- He was a serial killer like no other, who terrified millions. He sent letters to police, including cipher puzzles and pieces of blood-stained evidence. Once decoded, the ciphers revealed only the arrogance of the killer who called himself Zodiac.

For almost four decades, the zodiac murders remained a morbid fascination to many and an unsolved frustration to police. Next week, a major feature film will re-ignite the story of a killer who plunged the entire San Francisco Bay Area into a state of fear.

For more than a year, beginning at Christmas 1968, Zodiac ambushed three young couples at lovers' lanes near Vallejo and Napa, Calif., and brutally executed a taxi driver in San Francisco. Police have confirmed five murders that can be attributed to the Zodiac killer, but he claimed to have committed dozens more that were never proved.

Terrifying as the murders themselves were Zodiac's letters to the police. In them, he taunted police, provided proof of his crimes, enclosed cipher puzzles and threatened to kill again unless local newspapers published his letters on their front pages.

Robert Graysmith, then a young cartoonist with the San Francisco Chronicle, was so fascinated by the case that he began a decades-long amateur investigation into it.

"It terrified everyone, Graysmith said." Three newspapers gave their front pages to the man. I mean, that's how terrified they were."

In the film, Graysmith is played by actor Jake Gyllenhaal, and Robert Downey Jr. plays a reporter who, like the police, at first dismisses the young Graysmith.

The film details the inability of police detectives to solve the case as Gyllenhaal traces Graysmith's transformation from naive onlooker to amateur sleuth.

"I would work all day and then I'd get in my car and at two in the morning. I'd be in Vallejo, Calf., sitting in front of a house," Graysmith said.

"He was … this bold innocent," said Gyllenhaal. "He'd come up and be like, 'I need this information, I need this information, I need this information,' without even understanding that they had an emotional connection to it. These characters had lost large portions of their life in trying to figure this out. And when he came to them and asked them questions, he would open up things in them that … bothered them more and more, [because] they hadn't solved it themselves."