Zodiac

I finally took the time to see the long (nearly three hours) but fascinating movie, "Zodiac." Ever since I first started seeing the previews for this movie, I knew I wanted to see it. Why? Because in 1969, at the height of the Zodiac killings, I lived in Vallejo, California.

My memories of that era are vague (I was seven years old when the first couple was killed in Vallejo in December of 1968; 10 by the time we left California for Mississippi with the Zodiac still at large) but I've always carried around that underlying layer of fear. Living on a naval base as we did (Mare Island), we should have felt protected. But, perhaps it was the imprint of the wing walker shoe left at Lake Berryessa that raised the level of fear on the base. My strongest memory of that year, because all of the Zodiac's known attacks occurred between December of 1968 and mid-October of 1969, was of trick-or-treating with armed guards.

My older sister, Laurie remembers having nightmares.

The main reason I really wanted to see the movie was to give me all the background that I had missed as a child. And there was so much more than I remembered. Certainly, I wasn't aware of how prolific the killer was when it came to writing the San Francisco newspapers nor how much press he craved.

But the artist's renderings of what he might have looked like are too hauntingly familiar and still send a shiver down my spine. Depsite the continued controversy of who may or may not have been the Zodiac, I still greatly enjoyed the movie and Robert Graysmith's take (thanks to his obsession) on that time.