September 26, 2022

Zodiac · Gabby Petito

We kick off fall break with reviews of two high-profile properties

the true crime that's worth your time

Fall break! Fall break! As announced last week, Sarah and I are taking a breather this week, with special content scheduled every day to keep your true-crime itches scratched. You can see our full schedule for this week below, as well as a special Best Evidence holiday sale. Now, let’s get into it! — EB

The crime

The killer, who is linked to a series of late-1960s attacks in the Bay Area, employed a shifting MO: Often he shot his victims, but on one especially macabre occasion, clad in an executioner’s hood, he tied them up and used a knife. Though he mostly attacked young couples around Vallejo, he also murdered a cab driver in San Francisco. Officially, he is believed to have killed just five and severely injured two, but his modest body count has been far outstripped by his well-tended mystique, bolstered by a sinister handle and a practice of firing off letters to the media and other authorities, often including mysterious ciphers and signed with a crosshairs logo. — Aaron Gell, “Has The Zodiac Killer Mystery Been Solved (Again)?”

The story
Motor Spirit: The Long Hunt for the Zodiac doesn’t come to the conclusion mentioned in Gell’s (spoilery, alas) piece. It…doesn’t come to any conclusion, at least as far as the identity of the killer we variably understand as the Zodiac. The 309th and last page of Motor Spirit advises readers to pick up author Jarett Kobek’s companion volume, How to Find Zodiac, to learn more about a theory Kobek has started cotton-candying around a stick mere pages beforehand.

This is, as we say in the critic trade, fucking annoying. I angrily asked a semi-conscious feline if “this fucker” understood that “I’m on a deadline here” and “don’t have time to read a whole nother book, fuck’s sake!” — but understand three things:

1. I do in fact also own HtFZ;

2. I did in fact want to huck Motor Spirit onto the side table and dig immediately into HtFZ instead of trundling over here to review MS first; and

3. that’s because MS is great, despite being sometimes not very good.

I’ll take the second part of #3 first, and I’ll quote from Gell again because it explains almost every negative margin note I made.

[Kobek] co-founded his publishing company, We Hear You Like Books, in 2015, after I Hate the Internet failed to land a deal. The book went on to earn a rave in the New York Times, sell more than 100,000 copies, and spawn a dozen translations. “I have seized the means of production,” Kobek says now. “I can just fucking do anything I want.”

Kobek evidently doesn’t “want” to employ an experienced copy-editor, at least on this book, and 90 percent of the readership isn’t going to notice the non-standard hyphenation or occasional rogue cut/pastes that disappeared crucial verbs. They will probably notice melodramatic line breaks a cooler head would have advised against; or that, in a lengthy section debunking much of the mythology surrounding lead case detective (until he wasn’t) Dave Toschi, Kobek misspells Bullitt.

Generally, Kobek’s prose has a certain natural and charismatic pace and tone, and at a certain point, I tried to give myself up to the idea that the sloppiness allows the poetry, and vice versa. [I’ve been trying to convince Sarah that the same is true for my writing since 2015, to no avail. — EB] Specific to the true-crime genre, typos like that that biff regarding aspects of the case’s “catechism” are going to undercut Kobek’s authority, and in at least a dozen places, a description or analysis is the text equivalent of a Sour Patch Kid in its concentrated force…but then Kobek goes one clause too far about, like, the Dust Bowl dream of California or the metaphor baked into a victim’s pest-control job, and it’s like, man, that’s a shame.

And it’s a shame because in the main, dude can write. For every time he gilds a figurative lily or tries for a rosy-fingered-dawn thing with a runner about Televisionland, there’s a time he sticks the landing. The same diction that leads to a handful of amateurish misspellings also creates an intimacy with the reader, a secret whose delight is the sharing.

And in the sense that Motor Spirit (the term refers, sort of, to what I would call “meth logic”) is more about the Long Hunt in its subtitle than about finding anything — about the difference between Zodiac the killer and The Zodiac the brand — Kobek needs to strike a balance between a conversational and intuitive contextualizing of the case as we (often mis-)understand it, and a thorough accounting of every fact available, real and created, that won’t wear the reader out. It’s an extraordinarily difficult one to strike; Kobek succeeds, particularly in the sections on the Zodiac’s how-do-you-do-fellow-kids relationship with the counterculture, and on the “tedious” obligation of anyone interested in the Zodiac case to contend with Charles Manson.

Kobek’s “but first, a sidebar on a contemporaneous case” overviews of the Doodler, the Zebra killings, Jeffrey MacDonald, a series of bombings, and many others get tied into the main timeline so smoothly; his facility with walking the reader up to a theory with circumstantial information, dropping a graf break, and moving on to the next thing without overselling the idea is amazing.

“This fucker” also put like two dozen books and cases on my master topics list, and my copy is now useless to anyone but myself, it’s that covered in scrawl1 and beset by dog-ears. That doesn’t always mean I loved a book — it can mean I hated it, but it definitely means it got in my kitchen and banged some pots and pans.

I want to flick Kobek in the eyeball, a little bit; I want to volunteer myself as the VP of proofreading at his publishing company; and I want to go get started on How to Find Zodiac, so I’ll wrap this up with a without-reservations recommendation for Motor Spirit. …Hey, look at me getting all the way through without saying “what a ride!” I will await my parade. — SDB

…And because it’s tagged #hotoffthepress at Exhibit B., it and everything else new from the warehouse is 10% off through 9/30/22. Just drop code EqB at checkout!

It’s a fall break sale! This week only, you can score a year of Best Evidence for only $50. That includes access to our full archives, a monthly poll-based review issue, and the cozy and smug feeling you get when you support two hustling writers.

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Also, true crime makes a great gift!

Lifetime’s The Gabby Petito Story is better than you might expect, but perplexing pacing and a truly vile seven minutes prevent me from recommending Thora Birch’s first outing as director, even as background entertainment.

The TV movie, which drops on October 1, begins with a lot of promise: a tense opening scene drops us in the couple’s van as they’re pulled over by Moab police, a now-famous interaction we now know was dreadfully botched by law enforcement and provided the bodycam footage the entire internet pored over as officials searched for signs of Petito. Then, from the proverbial “how it’s going” we’re sent back to “how it started,” in a scene that’s a neat deconstruction of an awful lot of rom-com tropes.

As we know from Vanity Fair’s “Gabby Petito’s Life With—And Death By—Brian Laundrie” (which, honestly, will serve any urges you have to consume more about this covered-to-a-fault case), Gabby Petito (played here by veteran actor Skyler Samuels, who does the best with what she’s handed) and Brian Laundrie (perhaps too well-portrayed by Evan Hall) had been friends as high schoolers in Long Island, then lost touch when Petito moved several states away. They reconnected when she returned to her hometown, in the tradition of so many silver screen love stories, a truth that the movie plays with by manufacturing a party at which the two re-meet cute, charming and teasing each other in a way that we’ve seen a thousand times in movies with ostensibly happier endings.

Their courtship, which the film claims is based on a comfortable and teasing banter, makes up over half the movie, with few indications that things are about to go dreadfully wrong. That transition into abuse is where the movie starts to falter: Hall plays Laundrie so winningly and sympathetically that his turn to coercive control seems abrupt and hard to fathom, and dialog from the Petito character like “Brian, I think you need to go back on your medication,” seems to come out of nowhere.

But until then, there are some near-genius moments, like a scene where Laundrie meets Petito’s parents (her mom, Nichole Schmidt, is played by Birch, who bears a striking resemblance to the character she plays) that feels like a direct take on Say Anything’s buy/sell/made dinner. I’m hardly the first person who, with the wisdom of hindsight, feels like the Lloyd Dobler character is a stalk-y creep [THANK you — SDB]; this scene in TGPS drives home the lie that pop-culture perpetuates when it presents a guy who says that all he wants to do in life is “spend time with your daughter.” (That’s Dobler speaking, not Laundrie, but the TGPS scene might as well have had that line.)

What TGPS seems to be arguing is that to date out of one’s so-called league requires a lot of self-confidence and a rich life of one’s own to avoid turning toxic, which isn’t the worst thing to remind people. It also does a nice job of illustrating how, when things between people sour, that same fun banter from the beginning of a relationship can turn into biting, undermining abuse.

In the body of the film, we’re spared seeing Petito’s death, which felt like a blessing — given the prominence of the case, we’ve all visualized it already, right? That the show skips that seems like a smart artistic decision (one that’s undermined at the end, more on that in a minute). Less thought out are some other omissions, most significantly the well-documented failure of the police to recognize the threat Laundrie posed to Petito, and the allegedly active steps Laundrie’s family took to shield him from capture and prosecution. That TGPS leaves both of those points out makes this a smaller, more tunnel-visioned tale of coercive control, largely ignoring that there were a slew of systemic and personal failures leading up to Petito’s death, and that it might have been less inevitable than this movie suggests.

And then we get to the final seven minutes, which I can only speculate about — was there a set of studio notes that that someone watching this wouldn’t know how this story ended? Before TGPS goes straight to shit, we get a quite lovely juxtaposition of a service for Petito and Laundrie heading off on his final, solo hike. That’s where it should have ended.

Instead, we’re thrust into an over-explainy spiral, where we return to the Wyoming camping area, where we see everything I was so glad we’d earlier been spared. And then, adding insult to injury, we watch Laundrie’s last moments, fictionalized in a way that seems for a moment to make him, twice over, the victim of a cruel Petito. Things only get worse after that.

I don’t know that we needed this show in the first place, as there wasn’t any real new ground or insight to be gleaned from the case. But, truly, it put up a valiant fight to justify its existence for the first hour and nineteen or so minutes. My advice: if you opt for this when it airs on Lifetime next week, set a timer and turn it off then, or risk a sour taste in your mouth that will be very hard to shake. — EB

This week on Best Evidence: As noted, it’s fall break! So, our programming notes:

• Tue 9/27: project brainstorm // Sarah has a bunch of big ideas for coverage — on-this-date research; true-crime Emmy-winner rundown — and she’d love your input. Any time, really, but especially on the 27th.

• Wed 9/28: “vacation” consumption // When you need a holiday from true crime, what do you read/watch?

• Thu 9/29: archival field trip // A few pieces from behind the paywall that you may not have seen before (or remember from The Before Time).

• Fri 9/30: budget-doc round-up // Our shared story file filled up like 12 hours after I cleaned it out last time, so we’ll send you into that weekend with beaucoup reading material — and the monthly bonus review will drop that day as well. But…it’s only for paid subscribers, so hop on that sale; it’s on until 10/1.

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