Murder Inc: how my failed attempt to make a Zodiac Killer film took me to the dark heart of the true crime industry

If you think true crime is inescapable when you’re browsing Netflix or making small talk with your co-workers, try working in the documentary industry. As you traipse from one commissioning meeting to the next, pitching your passion project on the history of mime or the secret life of snails, you can almost hear the words before they’re spoken: “Got any other ideas?” Preferably something with a body count. I had just begun making documentaries in 2015, when the double whammy of HBO’s The Jinx and Netflix’s Making a Murderer brought true crime back to the dead centre of popular culture. Positioned as social justice projects as much as murder mysteries, those shows seemed to herald a new beginning for the genre. Soon enough, though, they gave way to a steady stream of interchangeable offerings, many of them organised into reproducible formats such as Netflix’s Conversations With a Killer franchise, each season of which is built round a long-lost interview with a notorious serial killer, unearthed to order. Nonetheless, I wasn’t entirely hostile to the trend. Having long been a voracious consumer of true-crime films and TV shows, I was drawn to the puzzle-solving aspect of the genre: the way clues slot together over the course of the running time and make a neat resolution feel tantalisingly close at hand, even when we know the case in question remains unsolved. I still remember my first viewing of the French true-crime series The Staircase, broadcast by the BBC in 2005. (Later, with the true-crime boom in full swing, it was acquired and extended by Netflix, then adapted into a dramatic miniseries by HBO.) As revelation after revelation seemed to point towards the innocence of novelist Michael Peterson, accused of killing his wife Kathleen, I became convinced he would be acquitted in the finale – despite having already looked him up online and found him to be imprisoned in North Carolina. Such is the power of the puzzle. Of course, I had misgivings about a puzzle forged from the lives – and horrific deaths – of real people, but I reasoned that making something entertaining might be a good way to put something meaningful in front of a large audience; that true crime’s familiar tropes and rigid formulas could perhaps be put in the service of something more ambitious. The possibilities swirled in my head as I allowed myself to imagine a true-crime documentary of my own. I had stumbled upon a memoir called The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, written by a recently deceased California highway patrol officer named Lyndon Lafferty. In the book, Lafferty details his decades-long quest to bring the infamous Bay Area serial killer to justice, following a serendipitous encounter with his suspect at a highway rest stop. The stock reply to any ethical complaint is a simple one: that all of this is in the service of the victims It wasn’t the first book I’d read about the Zodiac Killer, who murdered at least five people during a killing spree in the late 1960s, and guaranteed his place in the annals of 20th-century crime by sending a series of enigmatic letters and cryptograms. That was cartoonist-turned-investigator Robert Graysmith’s 1986 best-seller Zodiac, which I’d discovered via David Fincher’s acclaimed 2007 film adaptation. But Lafferty’s version was by far the most idiosyncratic, filled with outlandish twists and dramatic cliffhangers alongside the core components of a true-crime yarn: a dogged investigator who refuses to be swayed from his mission; a trail of clues unearthed across decades; and a killer still at large. As I pursued the rights to adapt The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up for the screen, the film began to make itself in my head. I pictured a mysterious cold open, re-enacting Lafferty’s fateful rest stop encounter in a series of tense closeups. From there, the title sequence would thrum into life, offering a patchwork of sepia-toned images foreshadowing the sinister tale to come. I envisioned the faded diner where I’d interview former cops, veteran reporters and anyone else who was still knocking around after 50 years. I was determined to resist the confirmation bias that pervades so many theories of the case, and include evidence that pointed away from Lafferty’s subject as well as towards him. But after half a century of investigation by law enforcement and amateur sleuths alike, there was vastly more evidence than I could ever hope to fit in a feature film, and it soon became hard to tell on what basis I was making my selections. There are half a dozen different accounts of the killer’s height alone, and the one that matched Lafferty’s suspect was as good as any other. This mountain of investigative paperwork renders almost any crime a candidate for the true-crime treatment. Are we all simply captive to an insatiable, voyeuristic appetite for the macabre? As long as there have been criminal codes, people have told stories about their violation, and the relatively brief history of cinema has been littered with morbid tales from the start. Motion picture pioneer Siegmund Lubin dramatised the sensational 1906 murder of architect Stanford White at Madison Square Garden in his film The Unwritten Law, and had the film on screens within a year of the killing. The modern true-crime film, however, has a shorter lineage, taking most of its aesthetic and narrative cues from Errol Morris’s 1988 classic documentary The Thin Blue Line. That film, which re-examined the shooting of a Dallas police officer a decade prior, set the mould for the foggy re-enactments and speculative timelines that have become de rigueur in both the genre’s lowliest daytime TV offerings and its Emmy-winning prestige dramas (and helped collapse the distance between the two). It also boasts the honour to which all true crime aspires, having successfully affected the outcome of the case at its centre. That it did so while upholding consistent ethical standards is perhaps its least imitated quality. Even those few true-crime works that have likewise changed the course of judicial history have done so within a far looser moral framework: The Jinx managed to elicit a confession from suspected serial killer Robert Durst, but rearranged his words in post-production for fear they weren’t damning enough. The stock reply to any ethical complaint about true crime’s methods is a simple one: that all of this is in the service of the victims, and that occasional moral transgressions are a small price to pay to deliver closure to them and their families. The queasy tone of so much modern true crime lies in the jarring contrast between the self-righteousness of that claim and the lurid creative choices it’s used to justify. In the CBS miniseries The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey, criminal behavioural analyst (and self-proclaimed victim advocate) Laura Richards advances the theory that six-year-old JonBenét may have been killed by her preteen brother, who has always denied this claim and was never charged with the killing. To prove the viability of this scenario, she has a child actor slam a flashlight down on a skull wrapped in pig skin and a blond wig. As the resulting fracture is held up for comparison with a photo from Ramsey’s autopsy, Richards assures us that this macabre endeavour is a necessary one: “This is quite hard to do, but we do need to do this, to see what it looks like.” Those for whom all of this is supposedly being done may or may not appreciate it. Netflix’s glossy 2022 miniseries Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story justified its gruesome re-enactment of Dahmer’s crimes on the basis that its sympathies lay ultimately with his victims’ families, but the producers didn’t manage to contact any of them. Several subsequently spoke out against the show, including Eric Perry, a relative of Dahmer victim Errol Lindsey, who told the Los Angeles Times: “We’re all one traumatic event away from the worst day of your life being reduced to your neighbour’s favourite binge show.” Two further Monster series, on the Menendez brothers and Ed Gein, would follow. There is one higher authority to which true crime routinely appeals: history itself. Dark clouds hang over the communities where terrible crimes took place, we’re told, and it’s our duty to confront these latent collective traumas, however painful the task may be. I could already hear my future interviewees darkly intoning about the sinister aura of Vallejo, California – the centre of the Zodiac Killer’s crime spree – as I arrived there in August 2022 to scout locations. I found myself describing shots, lengthy scenes and the entire narrative arc of my unrealised (and now unrealisable) film The reality was more mundane. Not only did daily life in Vallejo seem largely indifferent to events that took place half a century earlier, but most people I encountered weren’t even aware of the city’s morbid claim to fame. In a cab from the airport, my driver was far more interested in telling me about Vallejo’s notable rappers Mac Dre, E-40, Nef the Pharaoh)than its notorious killers. Gazing out of the window, I imagined the moody lens filter I’d need to sell the place as indelibly marked by its gruesome past. I would soon discover it to be a moot point. Two days later, while eating lunch in a diner that I thought might make a suitable filming location, I got an email informing me that negotiations for the rights to Lafferty’s book had fallen through. No specific reason was given, but I immediately wondered if someone with deeper pockets, or a more impressive CV, had discovered the book’s obvious cinematic potential and made a better offer. I wandered out into the street and paused to consider where that left me. Without the Sturm und Drang of Lafferty’s five-decade crusade for justice, the Zodiac Killer case was just a set of facts available to anyone with an internet connection. Without Lafferty’s suspect to loom large over its inhabitants, Vallejo was just a sleepy city with a Six Flags amusement park. I looked around at my surroundings. The sun was high in the sky and there wasn’t a dark cloud in sight. It wasn’t the first time I’d had a project fall through, and I assumed I’d simply lick my wounds for a few weeks before moving on to new ideas. Back in London, however, I was unable to get Lafferty’s story off my mind, and soon found myself describing individual shots, lengthy scenes and the entire narrative arc of the unrealised (and now unrealisable) film to anyone who would listen. If the uncanny familiarity of true crime had made the project easy to conceptualise, it now made it impossible to forget. Eventually, that frustration started to seem like an equally worthy subject. In the film I ultimately made, unimaginatively titled Zodiac Killer Project, I describe the doomed film beat by beat, in real time, over footage of the everyday Vallejo scenes that met me when I first arrived in the Bay Area. Although I allow myself a few fleeting recreations of true crime’s reflexive visual cliches – shell casings clattering to the ground, crime-scene tape stretching out into the distance – the film is shaped largely by what’s not on screen. As I fill in the blanks of each scene, and explain the thinking behind the project, I repeatedly hit up against the unresolved ethical questions and narrative contrivances at the heart of the project, and the genre at large. The film is both an elegy for my unmade true-crime entry and an attempt to grapple with true crime itself, as it continues its seemingly intractable takeover of the documentary industry. If those goals sound contradictory, they reflect the mixed feelings I’ve observed in so many of my peers, who have endeavoured to make meaningful, ethical true-crime films even as they’ve wondered aloud whether true crime might be beyond redemption. Related: Zodiac Killer Project review – true crime critique rescues aborted documentary Perhaps that ambivalence explains why the genre has become so keen to indict its own viewers. Everything from queasy high-budget drama serial Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story to mischievous docuseries Don’t F**k With Cats comes complete with a sequence questioning the appeal of true crime itself. Are viewers indulging their worst fears as a kind of exposure therapy, they ask with sober concern, or wallowing in the misery of others to feel better about themselves? Or are we all simply captive to an insatiable, voyeuristic appetite for the macabre? Whatever the case, the documentary industry itself is off the hook. The countless true-crime films, TV shows, books and podcasts released week after week are merely an attempt to keep up with demand. Or so we keep insisting. But every meeting in which I find myself lured back into the murky waters of true crime, having very publicly laid those ambitions to rest, suggests another possibility: that the legions of true-crime fans are just desperately trying to keep up with our supply. Zodiac Killer Project is released in cinemas on 28 November. Screenings can be found at zodiackillerproject.com