Zodiac: A Lesson in Anarchist Crime Fighting

by Angelo Mike 

Exclusive to STR

March 6, 2007

(Note: There are major spoilers below. If you have not seen “Zodiac”, you should probably wait until after seeing it to read this.)  

I came out of David Fincher’s “Zodiac” electrified. This is the kind of movie that filmmakers and movie goers will want to dissect and analyze like the obsession its protagonists experience. It’s a film about how the mass murderer who called himself Zodiac in 1960s and ‘70s California damaged the lives of people in both the media and police force who worked together to try to capture the man. The word “worked” is used somewhat loosely here, since the movie shows how the police in several counties ran the way states run best, which is as stupid, inefficient rackets which systematically preclude the possibility of a cheap, efficient system of crime fighting.  

In its own right, the movie is kind of a revelation for its creators, both in front of and behind the camera. It draws you primarily into San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith’s growing obsession with finding out who the Zodiac is, beginning with trying to uncover Zodiac’s encrypted letters sent to the Chronicle. It ably ups the ante throughout the film despite the murders having stopped about halfway through to make you complicit with the obsession and need to uncover this horrible puzzle. It’s exhilarating. In it, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. give, in my opinion, the best performances of their careers in a movie filled with great roles.  

It doesn’t preach and leaves open to interpretation the conclusions it wants you to draw from it. Although the real life Graysmith seems to think that the one prime suspect the case ultimately came down to, years after the murders stopped, he died of a heart attack before the police could close in on him. And like any movie that accurately depicts police proceedings, it works to demonstrate the systemic incompetence and corruption of law enforcement socialism.  

Like any socialist enterprise, they are crippled by shortages of capital goods. Early in the movie, police departments from various counties in California need to communicate to each other important evidence from crime scenes in their jurisdiction. There’s a kind of musical intercutting between the detectives miscommunicating to each other and the press because of their lack of coordination. That, and bumbling over the lack of a newly developed machine that can send facsimiles over phone lines in police departments, as well as a shortage of police and detectives to follow up on leads.  

It’s not that on a market for law, we can definitively say there would have been fax machines and better forensic technology in every security firm. It’s for the lack of human omniscience about the future and estimations about the need for capital goods absent economic calculation that makes calculation of necessary resources problematic in socialism. It’s precisely because of the fact that, while humans err, the government monopoly on law enforcement means systematically magnifying and institutionalizing these errors by violently preventing free entry into these fields, where the successful crime fighters would have to pass market profit and loss tests for supremacy.  

The Zodiac, both in real life and the film, sent several letters to the police and press that were encrypted in a secret code. These codes were often solved the way most murders are solved--by soliciting the help of locals. In the film, the first two of the Zodiac’s ciphers are solved by ordinary citizens, those of Graysmith and a couple who see his letter printed in the newspaper. And most murders are solved (and we have to add the cynical caveat that we’re only talking about the ones the state solves) because murder was undertaken in the heat of the moment and not by a sociopathic serial killer who leaves no clear motives or clues. Witnesses, friends, and relatives will usually come forward and identify the suspect for themselves since they know of a motive, heard a confession, or were a witness. It’s not the state that is uniquely the authority on solving crimes. It’s to the extent that they act in harmony with the socially and privately accepted norms of investigation and to the extent that they get cooperation from private citizens.  

Where they don’t get help is often in neighborhoods where people fear the police as much as they fear street gangs, yet these people are physically prevented from providing money to any security firm they do trust.  

So much for the “just in case” belief for the state, in which it is argued that we must have states just in case deranged killers are out there and may kill with impunity. Assumed away in such an argument is the fact that it is no less murder when a state operative steals another’s money and may, with legal immunity, enslave millions of people to murder in war. Somehow, they need this immunity, lest society devolve into chaos and the stronger dominate the weak.  

The police in various departments in the real life and film Zodiac case overlooked and bungled countless leads and clues. And, again, it’s not that private security firms in anarchy wouldn’t make mistakes. They most certainly would as long as humans ran them. But no one could be legally prohibited from trying to investigate for themselves. The best security entrepreneurs would thrive in anarchy, just as the best computer, car, clothing, etc., entrepreneurs do when consumers are allowed to patronize those who serve them best.  

For instance, while operating on what is a different conception of time than the rest of civilization, the police’s case goes cold for the Zodiac in the 1970s while victims’ families are still grieving. The detectives are just sitting on evidence, failing to look up leads which Graysmith does, but since they outlaw the aid of any private effort to find the Zodiac, they constantly obstruct Graysmith’s efforts to find out who Zodiac is.  

At one point, he finds the books on encryption any amateur would need to use the symbols Zodiac does in his letters, something the police never do for some reason. Since it’s been determined that Zodiac must have been in the military at some point because he left boot prints at a scene that were from rare military shoes, he goes to military bases and looks up library records for those books. He finds that copies of them were stolen from one base, years after the case has gone cold.  

He almost never even gets to present this evidence to the case’s leading detective, David Toschi. Toschi illegally lets Graysmith help by providing him a few confidential details of the case of his own and haphazardly sends him on a wild goose chase to various police departments and forensics experts for evidence that they never bothered to piece together. Eventually, Toschi refuses to even deal with Graysmith as it jeopardizes his career, which goes to show that the problem with a socialist police force isn’t that of bad or stupid people, but of a system which works in direct opposition to anyone who wants to innovate and actually cares about solving crimes rather than following bureaucratic mandates.  

For years after the case has gone cold (and a disturbingly high number of real life murder cases do, only to be uncovered by some overlooked key witness or piece of evidence years later if anyone bothers--and yet these people stay in business), Graysmith is the only one who’s working his tail off trying to solve it. Yet he can do so only in complete opposition to police obstruction and incompetence.  

Consider the fact that at a party that was held by an associate of one the prime suspects, Arthur Leigh Allen, Allen is identified by name by the woman throwing it at her house. No one finds out that she identified him by the name of “Leigh” until Graysmith himself finds her in prison and interviews her.  

He investigates this and finds out that Arthur Leigh Allen was Toschi’s prime suspect for over a year after it was deemed conclusive that he couldn’t have been the Zodiac. He goes to Toschi’s house with this information, and Toschi wants to hear none of it after he’s lost his job and is in another police department. Graysmith convinces him to listen by telling him that Allen’s birthday is December 18, the day in which a female housekeeper alleged that the Zodiac had called her home and said that he would kill because it was his birthday.  

The police had a lot of this information before, but just sat on it and never put it together. While discussing this with Graysmith, Toschi objects that there could be lots of creepy looking men named “Lee” who live in the area and could have been at the party of the woman in question. That is true. But Graysmith then gives an embarrassing piece of data that everyone overlooked--that Allen lived next door to the woman throwing the party at the time.  

No one except Graysmith bothered to construct a timeline of Zodiac’s killings and letters along with Allen’s whereabouts. Zodiac stopped sending letters for years, a period in which Allen had gone to jail for other charges. When he got out of jail, Toschi got a letter from him apologizing for not being able to help him when he was questioned previously about Zodiac. So here we have the letters stop showing up when Allen goes to jail, and then one is typed up and sent to Toschi, who suspected him the most, when he gets out.  

No one put the clues together in the police departments. No one paid for such a mistake among countless errors in judgement. The only payment that occurred was when it was too late. Graysmith eventually got divorced from his wife, who couldn’t handle his obsession with finding out who Zodiac was. Several people ended up murdered, their families not compensated, and their deaths unrevenged. Yet the state insists in each case that the price paid for its existence is necessary, lest roving gangs of killers exist outside of the law. And mere linguistic dishonesty keeps us from calling state wars of aggression criminal acts of mass murder by marauding gangs since, in a Mobius strip of logic, states alone define law and are immune from the law, and they allegedly must have this right lest the stronger dominate the weaker and that we live in a lawless world of violent gangs.  

Private law enforcement would have bad or shortsighted people in it as well. These people will exist as long as people exist. My argument is not that these will go away on a market, but that their actions would have to conform to the demands of consumers or they would no longer be in business. They had to demonstrate through their actions that they want a business in law enforcement. All we can ensure with state police is that they will act to demonstrate otherwise.  

Maybe Allen was the killer, and maybe not. There’s a large mound of damning, though circumstantial, evidence pointing the blame at him to this day. Whether the police or a private firm would have secured a conviction for him we can’t say, since we don’t know for sure if he was Zodiac. But the human weakness used to criticize a free market in law enforcement are the very same reasons that central planning and government law enforcement must be rejected, for they are only institutionalized and magnified human weakness many times over--to the point where we must aid and abet this process through taxes and by being outlawed from privately undertaking law enforcement.