Hi, I am Elle, and this is Quid Pro Quo, your friendly neighborhood forensics-like podcast, representing a kinder, gentler subsection of weirdos who have a few too many lurid books about zero murder piled up on their bedside table. The Quid Pro Quo podcast deals with crime, psychology, and related themes. Listener discretion is advised. This is Episode 4, the Zodiac Filler.
We are experiencing what may very well be the golden age of true crime. The genre has gained a great deal of legitimacy, with widespread public interest and unprecedented access to information. Truly, it's a sort of renaissance for people like me who are already crime-obsessed weirdos, and I'm deeply excited to be writing this wave. As usual, however, there is a flipside to this.
If we're the current pinnacle, that means that we have to address the fact that what came before us was not the pinnacle. In fact, true crime has kind of a terrible reputation, and I have to admit a lot of that is well deserved. I posted a link to my Twitter a week ago about a Russian man named Anatoly Moskvin, referring to my previous episode about fitness to sin trial. It's a thought-provoking, but fairly upsetting story about an extremely disturbed genius involving schizophrenia, grave robbing, mummification, and an unexpectedly altruistic, but very thoroughly broken thought process.
I tried hard to find a link which did not sensationalize this already heartbreaking situation, but sadly, the closest I could find to a reason discussion of the case was Wikipedia. What does that say about the state of this supposed renaissance? I have a real problem with the idea that a wiki page was the best English language source I could find online, for a nuanced discussion of a recent and massively fascinating true crime story with a psychological bent. I seem to have lost my ability to excuse bad behavior in true crime reporting, and due to this I'm getting pretty darn gun shy about buying and reading true crime books.
Considering the topic of this podcast, it's becoming an issue. My friend Alex asked me if I had seen a movie called Citizen X about the crimes of Ukrainian serial killer Andre Chikitilla, which was based on the book The Killer Department by Robert Cullen. I had not seen the movie or read the book, but I do have a passing familiarity with the case. I was in high school when he was executed and actually remember hearing about it at the time.
I always thought it might be an interesting, if kind of soul-crushing rabbit hole to go down. But you might have noticed that interesting, but soul-crushing is kind of my jam, so I looked into it with the idea to cover the case on a future episode. Reviews for the Cullen book are mixed, and there were enough red flags and negative ones to lead me on a wider search. So far I have not found a single related title which has reviews that offer me any kind of faith that I will find the book informative rather than frustrating.
There's a little voice in the back of my head that thinks that the answer is clearly that I should learn Russian and get on this untapped true crime goldmine. But then again, considering I've barely got a handle on my first language, maybe not. Anyway, I do read extremely fast, but I am always hyper-aware of how much time it takes away from other things. When I was a kid, reading came before most other things, and it especially came before homework.
Somewhere around the end of high school, I realized that I could either read all the things I wanted to read, or I could actually finish my assigned schoolwork and get decent grades. Since then I've been hyper-aware of what a luxury it is to read for pleasure. So when I pick up a book, I want to make it count. I commit to it and I go all in on a full immersion reading extravaganza.
As a result, it completely eats my attention and free time for however many days it takes for me to finish. I don't do casual reading. For me, reading isn't undertaking. When I started this podcast, I realized I now had the perfect excuse to buy a huge chunk of really seminal true crime books which I had somehow never gotten around to reading.
I had a few specific titles in mind, like In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, and Columbine, but for some reason I got the zodiac killer on the radar first, so I went looking for a solid reference. The internet suggested Zodiac by Robert Grace-Miff, so I bought a copy in September and slammed through it in a couple of sittings. It only took until page two before it started to dawn on me that the internet's recommendation was wrong. If you scroll back in my Twitter feed to mid-September, you'll see how initially hesitant I was to leave a properly bad review, but after a couple of months of experiencing an intense fear of true crime novel commitment as a result, I was finally ready to admit that this reading experience had left lasting scars.
Despite what you might glean about my reviewing habits based on this and the WISVOL episode, it actually upsets me a great deal to leave bad reviews of someone's creation. I'm a little too prone to secondhand embarrassment to leave a properly scathing review around where it might make someone sad, even if it's well deserved. I may discuss my feelings in private conversation, but online I try to operate on if you can't say anything nice rules. The true crime literature has a well deserved legitimacy problem and it's books exactly like zodiac which do some of the most damage.
The way I see it now, this experience can only be redeemed by making it a teaching moment. If I can save even one person from wasting their time and money on this love letter to harassment, questionable deductions, and being paid by the word, it is worth pushing by comfort zone as a reviewer. I could rant at length about the writing style of the book, but instead I will point out a single short paragraph which I feel perfectly embodies the most immediately glaring issue. It's right at the beginning so it really sets the tone.
I will not directly reproduce any part of the book for you, instead I will paraphrase a paragraph from page two. The individual words themselves will be changed, but for each sentence the structure, length, and topic will remain exactly the same. The original subject of this paragraph is David Faraday, one of the first acknowledged zodiac victims. The paragraph is the third full paragraph of the second page on the paperback printing.
By 830 Jennifer was dressing for her date. She wore a dark green waist-length blouse, a knee-length black circle skirt, pattern stockings, and gold smooth satin ballet shoes. She put on her Pandora bracelet with silver charms and band on her right wrist and shoved $30 all in fives in the small inside pocket of her purse. She added a black scarf and a small bottle of hand loitian.
On the ring finger of her right hand she fitted her silver claudering with its green stone. Jennifer combed her long red hair back away from her forehead exposing large warm eyes and a smiling mouth and slipped on her navy peacoat. I think it is extremely important to point out at this juncture that this is the second page of the book and the proper subject of the original excerpt is murdered by page six. Not a single solitary one of these descriptive points other than the fact that he's on a date ever comes up again in the book.
Grace Smith could have cut it to that first sentence, but instead wasted fully, 92% of that paragraph, I counted, on the outfit, jewelry, and pocket contents of a person who almost immediately dies and is barely mentioned by name again. In fact, later victim Darlene Farron received such a heavy focus in the book that the first victims David Faraday and Betty Luke Jensen seemed to almost become an afterthought. I can understand the logic behind taking a hyper-focused approach to description if there are relevant clues necessary to understanding the case or if it's done out of a desire to humanize these victims as not data points but fully fleshed out people. I do think that human context is severely lacking in a lot of true crime case discussions, but I don't think giving a text bot level description of someone's pocket contents is going to do it.
And it considerably loses impact when every person, vehicle, building, and vista mentioned in the book is approached with pretty much the same level of unnecessary rambling detail. He continues in this manner for over 300 pages. Then there is a whole added level of confusion due to the number of names in the book which are clearly labeled right off the bat as pseudonyms, but he makes no apparent attempt to make these names particularly distinct. The vast majority of most of these people don't serve any function at all in the story and never come up again, so the overall effect is to add a great deal of name confusion apparently solely in the interest of heading out text.
I had vivid fantasies while I was reading of putting out the good parts version, all of the book version of the Princess Bride by William Goldman, a book which I do wholeheartedly recommend. And I think I may have actually daydreamed so much about editing the middle third of the book while I was reading that I have no functional memory of huge swaths of the narrative. To be frank, it put me to sleep better than some of my grad textbooks. Even when I initially thought it was just the writing style, I was still willing to give grace into the past.
You do have to give some leeway when dealing with a chronological telling of decades worth of separate incidents. It is, after all, the sweeping, informative, and supposedly super well researched bedrock text by someone who is in the thick of the investigation. It seems to have been the go-to source of information for curious readers for decades. There's even a David Fincher movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Grace Smith based directly on this interpretation.
The beginning of the book seems a fairly straightforward factual retelling, but by the end of it all, the only real narrative flow was provided by the continuing saga of how critical Grace Smith was to the investigation. With this book, he actually inserts himself, Mary Sue Style, into the Zodiac Murders. I started getting skeptical about the information when he took a step-by-step through his attempt to crack one of the infamous coded letters from the Zodiac. The logic chain was frankly bizarre and full of disjointed, unrealistic, and national treasure-style logical leaps.
I got sort of stuck on how odd it was that this random newspaper cartoonist would be injected so deeply into the case. And I'm not just talking about really thorough post-factor research. Grace Smith mentions having in-depth conversations with police on an ongoing investigation, access to unpublished or still-sealed information, requests by the same police to case persons of interest for them so it would be off the record, and an apparent willingness to appear in person to scope out a man he very strongly suspected to be a serial murderer, and who is supposedly threatening the lives of the people around those involved in the investigation. It's such a bizarre level of self-injection that I have wondered if I had made it up in my idle daydreams about rewriting the book.
But I assure you that I did not. As it turns out, I was absolutely right to be so skeptical. A lot of discussions I've found since handily debunk most of his major points and point to a distinct possibility that huge swaths of the information which form the structure of his theory are outright fabrications. Relationships which don't exist, geographic references that don't match any known map, witness testimony by people who weren't anywhere near the described events, and some people even accuse him of faking some or all of the zodiac letters.
Okay, so it's terribly written, it's self-aggrandizing, it's quasi-fictional, but aside from me and my no-holds-barred reading style, who cares? Any number of publications out there make bank on exploiting misery by means of false allegations. Wait in line in any major American supermarket and you'll see rows of tabloid journalism operating on the same principles. Heck, just log into the average Facebook account and you'll see more than enough of the same.
But the way I see it, all my friends are doing it is not a very good excuse for bad behavior, especially when you take into account the potential impact true crime stories can have on real people. Despite its advanced age, this is an ongoing case and the book is, for better or worse, the usual first stop for interested readers. If the information in the go-to book is misleading, people who might be able to reveal previously undiscovered information may be thrown off to the point that critical clues may be lost. Multiple witnesses often provide blinchpin information from memories that they did not even know were relevant, and throwing false information into the ring may lose a witness who, at best, does not realize the value of their memory or at worst retrofits their experience to fit the information they have been fed.
Sometimes a memory of a face in a car, a soiled garment on a laundry pile, a suspicious scratch, an uncatalog document, or an unseasonable burn pile can make the difference between solved or unsolved. Whenever Grace Smith publishes a new on-the-case, the police are inundated with cranks, fakes, and false leads. While he did not openly name a suspect in the particular book, choosing instead to use a pseudonym, he clearly had a specific suspect in mind who was named in the follow-up book. The family of that now-dead person of interest is still dealing with the repercussions of that accusation.
As modern investigative methods such as DNA, unequivocally exclude his preferred suspect from certain pieces of evidence, Grace Smith just handily revises his theory to explain away new discrepancies. This is the primary book on a case which people have been stumbling over for thirty years, during a time in fact checking was extremely difficult. That means that there has been more than a generation of credulous readers accepting his view of the case as entirely valid and passing it on in that light. The same exact day I did the final copy editing on this episode before recording.
I saw someone I follow online listed as one of their top three picks for books about serial killers. The Amazon in Goodreads scores for this book are four out of five stars, though I do consider it telling that its follow-up, which I will not read, has only three stars on Amazon from 118 readers. This is where we as consumers and hopefully creators of this golden era of true crime content have the chance to make a difference in the world. These legacy books need to be scrutinized in the cold light of modern research methods and in many cases these stories desperately need responsible retellings.
I don't ask that you review any particular thing in any particular way, but I do ask that you use the newfound legitimacy of your patronage as a consumer of an extremely popular genre to promote or even write responsible and well-crafted true crime stories. I've been looking for a second zodiac book, as much as part of me is a bit disgusted and wants to say screw this I'm done with this whole zodiac thing, I'm still pretty curious what someone with a different approach would do with the case. Please if you've read or written a solid true crime book about zodiac, tiktillo, or anyone really, please pass those titles on. I am desperate for reading that is good and which redeems my faith in the true crime genre.
I am however all set, thank you very much, on reading books which annoy me so much that I feel the need to craft an entire podcast episode to complain about them and what they represent to the field. I will say that if nothing else the Grace Smith book reminded me that I like using felt to pen sometimes, so I got a couple of those. If you want to weigh in on zodiac or if you have other questions about true crime and forensics like, seek me out at quidproquocast on Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, at the dot com and wherever fine, internets are sold. I am currently the most active on Twitter.
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