If Laurence Sterne made a true-crime documentary it might resemble this exasperating, sometimes negligible but also often amusing and rather insightful personal work from British film-maker Charlie Shackleton. It is a deconstruction of genre and a meta story of failure from which the director salvages a teaspoonful of success. Shackleton recounts his abortive attempt to make a film about the Zodiac serial killer, who murdered at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area without being caught, and whose case is still open. It was also the subject of a movie by David Fincher.
Shackleton intended to adapt a book entitled The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon E Lafferty, a former California highway patrol cop who died in 2016. Lafferty believed he knew the identity of Zodiac. He once witnessed someone at the wheel of a car behaving suspiciously, who at one stage engaged in a weird stare-out contest with Lafferty in a car-park. Serious criminals are often caught through minor traffic violations so, following a hunch which was to turn into a lifelong obsession, Lafferty recovered a photo of the car’s owner using the licence plate and it resembled the police photofit of the Zodiac’s face.
