Reading the book Zodiac: The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Bizarre Mass Murderer should not be attempted late at night. While author Robert Graysmith successfully provides readers with a chronology of events that occur during the period when the Zodiac killer was at his peak, from beginning to end the book is also quite effective at conveying foreboding, dread and a sense of terror. Perhaps the main reason for its success at being somewhat of a horror story is due to the fact that the Zodiac was never arrested (Graysmith, 1992).
The implication being quite clear: the killer could have easily murdered others by using another alias. But this particular story is also written from the perspective of someone who would devote a good deal of his life to the Zodiac case. Specifically, while a political cartoonist for The San Francisco Chronicle Graysmith took up the mission of decoding various Zodiac communiqués, an activity that eventually impacted his marriage and eventually leading to divorce (Graysmith, 1992). This is particularly interesting because it seems to infer that even those who investigate serial killers are affected, in essence they too become victims.
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"From Zodiac to Dexter".
It may remain rather difficult to truly understand the motivations of serial killers. Mark Seltzer, a Professor of Humanities at the University of California Los Angeles wrote a book on the subject of serial killers and their impact on American culture. He has a unique way of viewing the actions of serial killers, especially as this may relate to the notion of “senseless” murder, “If murder is where bodies and history cross, ‘senseless’ murder is where our most basic senses of the body and society, identity and desire, violence and intimacy, are secured, or brought to crisis.” (Seltzer, 1998, p. 2) He is attempting to understand precisely where serial killers exist in a cultural sense, in other words how they emerge. But, the interest here lies somewhere as an antithesis, because in whatever way they may manifest the macabre existence of serial killers is a stimulant to others. Perhaps co-existing on some different plane; somewhere in the universe where others gravitate to pathological mysteries. For Graysmith, it was as if honey to a bear. The challenges posed through the cryptic messages sent by the Zodiac were too potent for the author; cryptology was the entry to a place fraught with arcane attractants: the implication of future murders; the use of astrological symbolism; attempting to get into the mind of the Zodiac, a feeling of intimacy (Graysmith, 1992).
Seltzer (1998) argues that serial killers have their place in American culture where, “…addictive violence has become a collective spectacle, one of the crucial sites where private desire and public fantasy cross.” (p 253) It would seem that Graysmith would then serve as some type of mediator. A conduit between the Zodiac and the public, perhaps even the fetishists among us as well. When the Zodiac was at his peak it was as if the killer had most in California in a high state of collective anxiety, if not outright terror (Graysmith, 1992). It was as if they were traumatized by the uncertainty of it all, ignorant to his whereabouts, his identity, whether he would be apprehended, or who would be next.
This trauma seems pathological to Seltzer (1998), “The very uncertainties as to the status of the wound of trauma—as physical or psychical, as private of public, as a matter of representation (fantasy) or as a matter of perception (event): these uncertainties are markers, on several levels, of this excruciated crossing.” (p. 254) Graysmith existed somewhere in the headwaters, where the evidence concerning the Zodiac murders existed. When his book was published, he contributed to the public turbulence concerning the Zodiac; the collective trauma caused by the existence of the killer and the mysteries that surrounds him and his murders.
Yet, in spite of the arcane and extremely horrible existence of serial killers such as the Zodiac, it would also appear that America is so resilient that it easily shifts from its collective trauma and fear to actually turn the serial killer into an anti-hero. Turning a debauched serial killer into some form of hero-type could only manifest through the media. Dexter, a popular pay-cable series that was a sensation during its run, surpassed cult-figure status,
He has Facebook and MySpace fan pages, popular magazines have plastered his face on newsstands across the country, and through Showtime’s online ‘shop’ fans can purchase bobble-head dolls, blood-spattered pillows and coaster sets, ‘body parts’ earrings, and posters, mugs, and t-shirts with the slogan ‘power saw to the people.” (Donnelly, 2012, p. 15)
Dexter is more fantasy fulfillment than a profile of a serial killer. His ethic is less pathological in a psychiatric sense then it is from a moral standpoint. In this way Dexter serves to fill a public need as the vigilante who kills for righteous causes. He does the work that most are unwilling or incapable of doing: dispatching truly reprehensible criminals, or at least characters the viewing public wishes to see dismembered (Donnelly, 2012) As a fictional character Dexter dwells where the Zodiac exists: in a place only few occupy but only Dexter may be forgiven, “He threatens those who ‘deserve’ it and poses no threat to those of us who are ‘normal.” He’s a hammer of justice with a heart of gold, and….’he’s great with kids.” (Donnelly, 2012, p. 25)
The universe inhabited by serial killers would be considered by most with a great deal of dread. But, it now seems as if the terror associated with killers such as the Zodiac has been replaced by a type of cynicism that would turn such beasts into heroes. We use to require a conduit, someone like Robert Graysmith to turn our collective fears into the hard-currency of words in order to come to grips with their reality. But, along the way our serial killers became the stuff of culture, or a commodity shaped for purposes of fantasy fulfillment; or as a way by which our consumerist society may satiate its rapacious appetite.
