The Mysterious Matter Of Finding A Murderer

I started reading the book to the left THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL OF ALL: SEARCHING FOR MY FATHER...AND FINDING THE ZODIAC KILLER. Now, the fact that this man, Gary Stewart, thinks his father was the Zodiac Killer, the infamous murderer of anywhere from 5 to 37 people in California in the sixties & seventies, is nothing new. In fact, he's not the only guy to write a book claiming to have irrefutable proof that his father is the Zodiac Killer. Steve Hodel, in his book MOST EVIL: AVENGER, ZODIAC AND THE FURTHER SERIAL MURDERS OF DR. GEORGE HILL HODEL claims that his father is not only the Zodiac Killer, but also the Black Dahlia Avenger, the murderer of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947 as well as the Lipstick Killer, who was responsible for three deaths in 1946 in Chicago,* among others. Jeff Mudgett, a descendant of Herman Webster Mudgett, wrote a biography of Herman Mudgett, better known as H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer, who possibly killed upwards of 200 people in the early 1890's in Chicago, in which he claims that Holmes was also Jack The Ripper, the infamous unidentified murderer of prostitutes in London in 1888**. This phenomenon is nothing new, and whenever a tabloid murder makes news, it brings the crazies out of the woodwork. There's a scene in the David Fincher film of Robert Graysmith's book ZODIAC where the police are inundated with calls where people are willing to confess to any and every unsolved crime in history. A woman named Deborah Perez also claimed that her father was Zodiac but a former claim on her part that she was the illegitimate daughter of JFK made her Zodiac claim null & void. A quick Wikipedia search will show a whole host of individuals who believe that they have the one and only answer to the question of Zodiac's identity. Authorities are always reluctant to set up hotlines for the public to call in and report tips because there are so many bogus and ridiculous claims that get called in when they're really hoping for something useful. Sometimes, those people actually get books published detailing those theories.

Gary Stewart was abandoned by his biological father as a baby and lived his entire life not knowing his biological parents. As an adult, his birth mother got in touch with his adoptive parents and told them she'd like to meet him. His mother caught him up on all the family history and in his quest to learn more about his father, he begins to realize that the man may have been a murderer. He also discusses how the San Francisco Chronicle writer Paul Avery^ seemed to have a vendetta against him, which would explain why Zodiac eventually sent threatening letters & cards to Avery. Stewart describes a man who was handsome and charming, capable of seducing women and adept at hiding his shady past and problems with women that may have caused him to seek out young happy couples to kill as Zodiac. He bears a passing resemblance to a vague description of Zodiac that one of his only survivors was able to relay to the police. A description that would probably fit a thousand men in any given city at any given time.

  

Hodel provided a photo of his father that bears resemblance to yet another Zodiac wanted poster.

Still other descriptions of Zodiac supplied by survivors are of a slightly larger man, a description that fits Arthur Leigh Allen, while still keeping with the theme of a man in dark framed glasses and a crew cut.

I'm still making my way through the book but was compelled to stop and put some thoughts down here. What I'm wondering is if doing this research and bending your findings to fit into a narrative that you want, or need to come out of it is cathartic. I didn't have a troubled childhood and I have no issues with my father or his character so I guess I wouldn't know what it's like to have to piece together my family's potentially nefarious history 40 years after the fact. Steve Hodel was an LAPD detective so tracking down murderers and criminals and piecing together facts, evidence and supposition to solve crimes is in his blood. It's not so far fetched that he would look at his father for crimes that were so close to him, both physically as a California resident and as a detective. I think when someone goes to write a story about something, they find facts to prop-up their theory and conveniently dismiss others so as to not muddy the waters. A quick look at the index of Stewart's book makes no mention of Arthur Leigh Allen, who, in my opinion,^^ is the Zodiac Killer. I believe Graysmith, in his two books, puts forth the most compelling argument for any individual to be Zodiac. Since the crimes were so famous and captured the public's imagination so intensely, coupled with the fact that they were never solved makes them particularly ripe for the picking for people to write about and espouse theories upon. I'm by no means an expert but I am fascinated with the crimes and particularly more-so as a Bay Area resident now. There have been dozens of books and films that have attempted to solve the crime and perhaps link it to other notorious crimes of the era like Hodel has done. It's big business because it's such a recognizable name, even if most of the work is reheated junk. I haven't read them all and I don't need to but I'll probably keep checking up on them every once in a while, even though I believe nobody will ever officially be named the Zodiac Killer. Arthur Leigh Allen died many years ago but has been the most closely linked suspect, thanks to the advancement of crime scene technology, to the crimes^^^. So if Stewart believes his father was Zodiac, it stands to reason that he would not acknowledge Allen as a reasonable suspect, or anyone else for that matter. I think Graysmith, because other than being in the building that some of the Zodiac letters arrived at, he has no connection to the crimes and is therefore in the best position to make a thorough and compelling investigation into the case. He didn't have the public pressure that the police department had and he doesn't have the personal connection that Stewart and Hodel believe they have to the case and can therefore objectively look at all the facts and come up with a reasonable narrative. Graysmith was a cartoonist but made a nice career for himself as a true crime writer and perhaps used some of what he learned from working with Avery and the SFPD detective Dave Toschi in the early days of the killings to become a legitimate writer and detective in his own right.

The crimes themselves hold much more interest for me than belittling these people for whom Zodiac is much closer to than myself. I admire their detective spirit and determination to take a stab (no pun intended) at finding out who Zodiac is. But it doesn't mean they're right, it just means that they were able to get a book deal.

--------------------------------

*William George Heirens was convicted of the Lipstick Killer murders and spent 65 years in prison. While everyone and his brother has their own theories, both the Zodiac killings and the Elizabeth Short murder have yet to be officially solved.
**He wasn't.
^Paul Avery was a troubled writer who was played by Robert Downey, Jr. in the Fincher film.
^^And the opinion of Graysmith and perhaps Fincher and James Vanderbilt, the writers of the 2007 film.
^^^There are many more reasons to believe that Allen is Zodiac, mostly involving the series of letters purportedly written by Zodiac. DNA, handwriting analysis, and study of the content and language in the letters points to Allen more than anyone else. The timeline of the crimes match up very well with Allen's life and behavior, including the fact that he lived very close to one of the victims and the span of time that Zodiac letters ceased to show up coincided exactly with the time Allen spent in prison. Circumstantial, sure, but hard to ignore.

"Can I Bless the Yeast?"

So Lee,

Here's what you've been missing D&D wise.

After you left Jordan came back and has been playing Vogen, the Elf Librarian (Magic-User) and also Libby, the chick that gave you the crud. Vogen is in love with Libby. It's complicated.

So the group has been travelling around the same countryside near where you as Ranger the Ranger got into a fight with your future-son and time travelled mid-wrestle. After checking in on Timmy's grandmother, the crippled bus boy at the Crooked House tavern, and burning down her house after picking up a demonic spell book and magic rapier that hits anything on a 14, but NOT the target on a 16 or 17; fighting off hellhounds while one dragged Arthur's soul into the inferno; losing said demonic to spellbook to a mysterious figure that's definitely Timmy; sneaking into a giant ant hill and stealing an ant egg for a wizard-scholar who most likely is trying to create an ant-monster army; breaking the neck of a Giant Roc that had 36 HD (!) and meeting Arthur's many new characters they decided to get the hell out of Dodge.

This entailed looking for a job in the capital and hitching a ride as... security? aboard House Cannith's new airship that uses a new engine to power it made from the schematics you guys spent so long collecting. Remember all that fighting Warforged terrorists and going into the jungle with Miss Patsy and Zinzelpants and braving the zombies and weirdo skeletons in the Desolation? Yeah that all turned into this giant airship that was being used as a peace ship to make treaties with the newly discovered southern continent and their Empire. Emphasis on the past tense in that sentence.

While you were doing all those dangerous as fuck fetch quests remember your patron, Elayne? Yeah she's here too running around telling people what to do and helping to look for the vampire which is good because she totally did all the work when you guys killed the Lord of Blades. Well, her and Matt's shotgun.

Oh I forgot to mention the maybe genocide that's happening, but whatever that's not important right now.

So the party, newly named Random Task Force, is on board the ship not five minutes when Warforged terrorists, shouting something about the Lord of Blades, attempt to take control! (Imagine in the 5th element when Bruce Willis walks onto the bridge and just one-shots that guy completely winning in one quick motion). After a pretty terrible rescue attempt of the engineers being held hostage in the engine room, the party had won! Except all the engineers died and Libby fell on a smoke bomb after being sent in (naked) as a distraction.

So she's rushed to the infirmary and the rest of the group splits into 2 (!) to search the rest of the decks for any trouble telling the ship's Captain to have everyone on board go to the top deck. LOL. Naturally the emissaries/ambassadors all decide to help cause they think they're tough shit, but they all end up dead. Right at the moment the party gets there to see them murdered by a mysterious black cloud of course. Please keep in mind these guys are all badasses. And they're dead.

The final confrontation happens in the hold of the ship fighting on and around crates.

Them:  "What's in these crates?"
Me: "/shrug"
Them: "How do you not know what's in the crates?"

How I should've responded was having bad guys burst out at that moment and then looked them dead in the eyes and said "Happy?"

Just as the guy I was trying to frame (successfully?) as the vampire is murdered by said mysterious black cloud in front of their eyes the cloud takes humanoid form and slowly dissolves away into...

Everyone: "Is it Elayne? It's Elayne isn't it?"
Me: "...Yeah, totally. It is definitely Elayne. Was gonna be the whole time..." [deletes notes]

Turns out you can't hit a vampire unless using a holy weapon, or silver which the corpses around them have. Damian's golden, holy mace does a shitload of damage to her and Jordan's magic rapier keeps accidentally hitting Amanda. Things aren't looking good. Mostly because vampires feed on people's life force, and in D&D what is the most precious form of life force?

Levels. Yep she was eating their levels! Just by touching them! Bummer!
Also she raised zombies and at one point mind controlled Jordan into attacking everybody while she hid in the rafters and regenerated life.

Yeah turns out vampires are bad news.
This is how we left it last week.

THIS WEEK SHIT GOT REAL.

The Mage Ambassador from Aundair and her cronies came down and cast a battlefield spell that imbued everyone with fighting prowess. It was pretty awesome. Golden light enveloping their muscles and shit, I was proud of myself.

Jordan couldn't come and he let the others play as him (smh), but Arthur rolled two crits as Vogen and did decent damage to the vampire and her zombie minions. Damian did some crazy holy mace damage again and things were looking good. The tide had turned!

So Vamp-Elayne decides to bail. Blasts a hole in the side of the ship and grows wings. Arthur intercepts her with his two characters Vogen and Peaches while Damian casts Yeast on the ship hole and Amanda blesses it.

So now there's a living patch of holy yeast on the escape route. Was it going to do anything? Maybe burn a little? Cause a holy-unholy infection? Who knows, because while standing in front of the hole they kept shooting arrows at Vamp-Elayne who proceeded to pick up Vogen and use him as an Elf shield.

You see where this is going? Yeah she threw Vogen's corpse at the three of them in front of the hole and they all dangled "thousands of miles" in the air.

Except Vogen. Vogen tumbled like a rag doll towards the ground. But he wasn't completely useless yet.

JaNice, Amanda's character was on the bottom of this barrel of monkeys strand and she failed miserably to try and climb up, slipping and falling after Vogen. But this is where things get fucking awesome.

Have you seen that movie with Wesley Snipes and the parachuters? Drop Zone? Fuck it, any movie where someone falls out of a plane and speeds up to catch up to somebody? JaNice does that and grabs onto Vogen's body and uses him to cushion her fall.

AND IT FUCKING WORKS.

It was amazing man, I wish everyone in the world could've seen it.

Meanwhile, Peaches and Ganthet are still fucked, hanging from the ship, but they miraculously manage to climb up just as the Aundair Ambassador launches a fireball and incinerates the Vampire. Promptly, Libby finally shows up with a "life boat" and they get the fuck off the ship just in time to see it ripped to shreds in a massive explosion and crash into Sharn (where this all started) levelling a third of the city.

They find JaNice a few days later in an emergency shelter set up for the victims of the crash and she is surrounded by a group of mid-tier aristocrats who worship her as their new queen. And a puppy.

Epic success! ... ?

With love,
Christopher.

Vigilantes on the Fringe

So Nate and Dave (noisms from one of my favorite blogs, monsters and manuals) started a podcast called "A Gaming Podcast About Nothing" which is pretty good if you like listening to a couple of British dudes speak about games they've played and people they've played it with in the many years they've known each other. Which I do. During the second (first?) episode they were talking about setting Dogs in the Vineyard out in the Oort Cloud which blew my mind because I've wanted to play a space cowboy/bounty hunter game forever and the Oort Cloud is a much more interesting frontier space than the typical Mars. The whole Mars setting was the reason I never got anywhere with it because it reminded me a little too much of Cowboy Bebop and as a superfan of something you have to be aware of when it is over-influencing your creativity.

The second reason this is a revelation to me is that Dogs in the Vineyard is set up to kind of deal with the murder hobo-ness of D&D that all groups sort of devolve into without removing anything that makes that fun. DitV characters are lawkeepers/problem solvers created by the Mormon higher ups to travel from town to town fixing things that need to be fixed. Each town I've seen is set up with multiple things in separate categories that are off and basically fodder for a group to latch onto and set about fucking with in their own special way. Your existence is purposeful and cataclysmic and above all known to everyone. How the NPCs react differs of course, but still I'm kind of #intoit. I don't know anything about the mechanics, but the set up is enough to set my brain on fire!

What I'm Enjoying Right Now: Lightning Round

UNDER THE SKIN - The best way to experience Under The Skin, if you haven't experienced it yet, is to know absolutely nothing about it. Nothing at all. Don't Google the plot, however miniscule it may be, don't watch the trailer, don't read the book, don't let anyone tell you about it. Just watch it while it's still on the big screen, in a big, quiet, dark auditorium because it's a big, quiet, dark film and your experience will be heightened for doing so. Some people in the group I saw it with walked out, another said it made her nauseous and gave her nightmares, another just simply stated he didn't know what he just watched. It's a really interesting film that challenges a lot of preconceived notions about filmmaking and the human condition, just to name a few.

ATMOSPHERE "Southsiders" - I'm not generally a fan of hip-hop and it's been a long time since I've listened to Slug & the gang but I really like this album. It's pretty mellow, it's not quite as angry as some of the earlier stuff, the backing tracks are more chill and free-flowing, layering well behind Slug as he tells stories about life and growing up in the titular southside of Minneapolis. Perhaps being a family man has sanded down the rough edges but he's still got some stuff he needs to get off his chest.

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE - Jim Jarmusch is the epitome of cool, eclipsing even Nick Cave and David Lynch, I think. Leave it up to him to take a tired genre and make it look effortlessly cool while paying homage to its roots in literature and pop culture without any of the worn out tropes that have plagued the vampire story in the last decade. Hiddleston and Swinton are perfect as ancient vampires pondering their existence and struggling to coexist in a world that the main species is destroying. Detroit is a stand-in for the wasteland that humans have made of the world and the lovers pass their days sneaking into hospitals to steal blood and listening to rock music and wondering when humans will taint their surroundings and their bodies to the point when they become toxic.

KCRW's PRESS PLAY - Press Play is a daily news podcast on KCRW hosted by Madeleine Brand and it provides me with a small link to my Southern California roots. Brand and guests discuss events happening in LA and issues that are impacting Angelinos and Californians as a whole, from the drought to the Clippers fiasco to the exodus of auto manufacturers to the week's films. I feel smarter just for listening and it's my way of keeping up on some of the important news of the day because I'm admittedly not really a news junkie and wouldn't know what's going on unless it jumped up and bit me. I've also been listening to The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell (the recent Dan Harmon episode is really good) and The Business on KCRW.

RICHARD STARK'S PARKER by Darwyn Cooke - I've praised the Parker novels before and I absolutely love these adaptations of the Parker series by Darwyn Cooke who captures the brutality and coldness of the '60s criminal underworld that Parker exists in. Start with The Hunter, the first Parker book but check out The Score where Parker leads a team of thieves who are planning to rob an entire town in a single night.

Murder, Death And General Mayhem

I'm a big fan of crime, murder and all around mayhem as long as it's relegated to the pages of my novels and the DVDs on my shelves. Those elements have never really been a part of my life growing up in the quiet small town of Pinon Hills in the Mojave Desert. I think it's that boring small town upbringing that led me to seek out stories of outlaws and gunslingers and urban warriors like Harry Callahan and Paul Kersey. Superheroes in latex underwear and capes never quite appealed to me, flying around in the air between skyscrapers on the trail of a deformed psychopath, they seemed too fantastic, too reliant on gadgets or powers which without, they'd be powerless. If Spider-Man didn't have those webs in his wrist, he'd just be a kid in a weird suit running around. If John McClane loses his gun, he kills a guy with something else and takes his gun, he's good to go. It's the one-man-army that I love. I also liked movies like Blue Velvet that dealt with the creepiness and darkness that lies just beneath the surface and behind the white picket fences. Some of my favorite authors write the kind of rural noir that I have always believed was going on in my own backyard, men and women doing dark deeds under the cloak of rural darkness and the cover of a trailer down a long dirt road. Meth, speed and guns are the major extra-curricular activities of the high desert. But, the type of brutality and mayhem and violence that litters the pages of the crime novels I love and the action movies I worship is something I hope I never have to experience in real life, however bland and boring my life is. I've been lucky to have been raised in an area without violence (for the most part) and now as an adult, I surround myself with people who don't invite that into their lives. I currently live in Berkeley, right next door to Oakland, which is infamous for having some harsh streets and areas where you wouldn't want to make a wrong turn into. For as much gentrification and hipster-izing the city has gone through, I'm still reluctant to go through certain parts. Growing up, I had similar feelings as I would be criss-crossing the dirt roads and motorcycle trails in the desert, where I would frequently come across a trailer or a home that stood out like a sore thumb, porches full of scruffy men in wifebeaters, arms littered with swastika tattoos, shotgun at the ready resting against the wall. You just turn around, don't make eye contact and hope they're too high or too wasted or don't care enough to follow.

Still, however, violence, death & mayhem, or at least the threat of it, still creeps in. My roommates and I had trouble with some youths who sit in our stairwell and smoke weed and our landlord mentioned that people have smelled marijuana and asked if it was us. We politely asked the kids to not smoke there and received no real promise of them not doing it in the future. The last time it happened, my roommate and I asked him to leave and we mentioned that if our landlord thinks we're smoking weed in our apartment, we'll get kicked out. He said if we call the police, we'd better not get caught outside on the street because he'd make a few calls himself and make us pay for doing him like that. Who knows if he was just talking big or if he would really shoot us just for asking him not to smoke weed on our property, but it's an unsettling thought, nonetheless. In another more tragic case of death sneaking up on those around me, a manager at the theater I worked at in my first month up here had a conversation with one of my coworkers (a conversation I found out about after the fact) about the best way to kill oneself. He brought up sleeping pills and she, in the moment, in a conversation with an odd, stoic, sometimes morbid man, replied with the thought that sleeping pills wouldn't be a cool enough way to go out. That was the last conversation she had with Scott because a few days later, he killed himself by ingesting a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of bourbon. He had worked that morning to prepare for that weeks Friday openings and was due in again that evening to work a closing shift but he decided he didn't want to work or do anything else ever again. In another case of the weird ways that the threat of violence can pop up unexpectedly, today at work, in the midst of a transaction with his wife, a man handed me a notepad and told me to look at the note on the first page. The note read, "I'm going to murder someone shhhhhhh." I, like my former coworker, am okay with having a dry, morbidly humorous conversation with someone and I didn't think much of it, but it was seen as a real threat by my current coworkers and they contacted the police about it. I sincerely hope the man was just trying to be funny and expressing his distaste over having to wait in line so long in a darkly comic, hyperbolic manner. I hope nobody shows up dead somewhere in the East Bay tonight at the hands of someone unknown. In addition to all this, there was a drive-by shooting on my block a couple weeks ago that was apparently not a big deal because it happens so often on this block. A Google search of my street + shooting came up with a number of incidents in recent years.

I hope to stick with violence on the page and on the screen, let Frank Bill and Joe Lansdale write fiction that brings those worlds to life between the covers of a book. Let Jason Statham take on an army of gunman onscreen, not outside of my apartment on the street. And as callous as it sounds, I hope the true crime stories I read happen far away from me, never to break my bubble of middle-class existence here in Berkeley.