Netflix’s This Is the Zodiac Speaking Doc Bolsters a Major Suspect Theory (2024)

This article contains “spoilers” from the Netflix docuseries This Is Zodiac Speaking.

How to put this politely? Many streaming documentaries of late have demonstrated … low effort. The public’s endless appetite for fresh true crime content has led to a steady churn of titles that largely range from uninteresting to unnecessary. Netflix’s latest investigative offering, This Is the Zodiac Speaking, is thankfully neither.

This three episode docuseries directed by Ari Mark and Phil Lott examines the infamous 1960s murders committed by a serial killer known as “the Zodiac” from a fresh perspective. Instead of rehashing the well-known details of the cases, This Is the Zodiac hones in on the most likely suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, and a family who knew him well enough to expose some secrets. The end result isn’t definitive proof that Allen was indeed the Zodiac Killer but the testimony does offer a whole lot of corroborating evidence to the popular theory.

Here is a brief explanation of the facts at hand and the Seawater family’s revelations that make This Is the Zodiac Speaking an unusually useful Netflix true crime endeavor.

Who Was The Zodiac Killer?

This Is the Zodiac Speaking is primarily made up of the Seawater siblings recollections of when they were kids and knew their teacher and mother’s friend Arthur Leigh Allen as a father figure. As such, the narrative hops around in time and doesn’t offer up a fully coherent recounting of the Zodiac Killer’s crimes. So let’s recap what we actually know about Zodiac.

The Zodiac is an unidentified serial killer who targeted at least seven people and killed five in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1968 and 1969. Though he would ultimately claim to have killed 37 people, the following four events are the only confirmed Zodiac attacks.

Lake Herman Road Murders – Teenagers David Faraday and Betty Jensen were shot and killed on a road known as a “Lover’s Lane” by an unknown assailant on December 20, 1968.

Blue Rock Spring Murder – Young couple Michael Mageau and Darlene Ferrinwere shot while in their car in a parking lot at Blue Rock Springsaround midnight on July 4, 1969. Mageau survived his wounds, Ferrin did not. Though the assailant shined a bright flashlight into the car, Mageau was able to describe some of his physical features, saying that he was a white man with a large face and a potbelly.

Lake Berryessa Murder – This attack occurred in broad daylight in a park near Lake BerryessainNapa County on September 27, 1969. While enjoying a picnic together, Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepardwere approached by a man holding a gun and wearing a black executioner’s-type hood with clip-on sunglasses over the eyeholes and a crosshair symbol on his chest. The Zodiac had the couple tie each other up with plastic clotheslines before stabbing them multiple times. Hartnell survived the stabbings but Shepard did not.

Presidio Heights Murder – Taxi driver Paul Lee Stinewas shot and killed by Zodiac on October 11, 1969 when taking him on a short drive in San Francisco.

Zodiac is one of the U.S.’s most infamous serial killers due to the brazenness and theatricality of his crimes. Following the Blue Rock Spring murder, he began corresponding with police via coded typewritten letters. The first decrypted Zodiac letter, dubbed the Z408 cipher, was a bizarre screed containing many deliberate misspellings and claiming that the Zodiac’s victims would become his slaves in the afterlife. To this day, only two of the four officially-recognized Zodiac cryptograms have been deciphered. The Zodiac was never officially identified and the crimes remain unsolved.

Why Is Arthur Leigh Allen The Most Likely Suspect?

Naturally, many Zodiac Killer suspects have been identified and investigated over the years. One, however, continues to stand out as the most prominent and likely candidate. Arthur Leigh Allen is the only person ever identified by police as an actual Zodiac suspect and the reason for law enforcement’s suspicions regarding him are numerous.

Allen first came on the police’s radar in October 6, 1969 when he was interviewed by the Vallejo Police Department about being in the vicinity of the Lake Berryessa attack. He popped up once again in 1971 when his friend Don Cheney reported to police in Manhattan Beach that Allen told him of his desire to kill people and had been known to use the pseudonym “Zodiac.”

Further investigation revealed that Allen owned a Zodiac-branded watch that utilized the same logo that the Zodiac Killer included in letters. Allen also roughly matched the Zodiac Killer’s reported physicality and Michael Mageauidentified him as the man who shot him in a 1992 photo lineup.

Many prominent figures involved in the case, including SFPD inspector Dave Toschi, became convinced that Allen was their man. But police never had enough hard evidence to charge him. Allen died of a heart attack in 1992

What Are The Seawater Family’s Claims?

And that’s where This Is the Zodiac Speaking comes in. The Netflix docuseries doesn’t present any smoking gun evidence that Allen is unquestionably the Zodiac Killer, but the Seawater family’s accounts, if true, provide some of the most damning information about Arthur Leigh Allen in years.

The documentary features interviews with several of the now-adult children of Phyllis Seawater, including David, Don, and Connie. “Mr. Allen” was the Seawater kids’ teacher and their eventual father figure after he took up with their mom following their father’s internment at Atascadero State Hospital for molesting one of his daughters. Yes, this poor family went from a child molester for a paterfamilias to literally the probabe Zodiac Killer (who was also a child molester for good measure).

This Is the Zodiac Speaking contains many small details from the Seawaters’ adolescence that point to Allen’s Zodiac culpability. The Seawaters recount how Mr. Allen was an incredible swimmer who owned a black wetsuit similar to the attire described from the Lake Berryessa murder. Connie even recalls working on sewing together a black hood for him. One of the Seawaters’ classmates, Darin Alvord, claims that Mr. Allen delighted in teaching his students all about alphabetic codes and how to break them.

More important that those small details, however, is the timeline that the Seawaters present. By the end of the three-part documentary, the Seawaters will have claimed to have been taken to every single murder site by Mr. Allen before the eventual murders, including Lake Herman, Blue Rock Springs, Berryessa. Additionally, the Seawaters claim to have been taken to Riverside, California by Allen to watch a stock car race one day before the October 30, 1966 murder of Cheri Jo Bates, a murder that is believed by some investigators to be Zodiac’s first. In episode 3 of the docuseries, David Seawater reporters that an old and sickly Allen confessed to him to being Zodiac in a phone call.

Most of the Seawaters’ claims fall under the category of witness testimony, which is among the least reliable forms of evidence – particularly when it’s being recounted so long after the events. Still, the docuseries does also offer up some interesting bits of corroborating evidence to the Seawaters’ accounts. The most notable new piece of evidence comes from one of the Zodiac’s many coded letters.

In 1973, the Albany Times Unionnewspaper in New York received a supposed letter from the Zodiac, postmarked for August 1. To this day, it’s unclear if this is an authentic Zodiac correspondence or a copycat. A new detail does from This Is the Zodiac Speaking does lend some credence to its veracity, however. Connie Seawater’s daughter Tammie Lee Prueter recalls watching the 2017 History Channel special The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer, in which producers had a supercomputer decrypt the coded portion of the Albany letter that was to reveal the Zodiac’s next victim.

The computer purportedly decrypted the victim’s name as “Connie Henly,” to which they could find no significance. Both Connie Seawater and Tammie Lee Prueter report, however, that the Phyllis Seawater’s maiden name was Hensley. Arthur Leigh Allen was one of the few people who would know that. Combine that with Zodiac’s penchant for deliberate misspellings and the fact that Connie Seawater was living in Upstate New York in 1973 and it is admittedly a compelling datapoint.

Finally, the Seawaters also claim to be in possession of one of Allen’s knives. The docuseries reports sending it to law enforcement for forensic testing but has not yet heard back yet. The Seawaters also point to a box of letters and VHS tapes regarding Arthur Leigh Allen left to them by their mother. That trove doesn’t turn up anything significant beyond the fact that both Phyllis and Allen were captivated by the Zodiac case.

Does The Netflix Docuseries Corroborate David Fincher’s Zodiac?

No documentary about the Zodiac Killer can go without mentioning the definitive depiction of the Zodiac story and one of the best true crime films ever: Zodiac. The 2007 film is David Fincher’s magnum opus and laid the ground work for all crime dramas to come, including the Fincher-created Netflix series Mindhunter.

For what it’s worth, This Is the Zodiac Speaking not only supports Zodiac‘s Arthur Leigh Allen theory but also appears to have the film’s implicit blessing in a way. Longtime Zodiac letter decoder Robert Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal in Fincher’s movie) sits down for an interview with This Is the Zodiac Speaking, something that he claims he is reluctant to do for Zodiac projects that don’t have something new to say. The docuseries also extensively mentions the aforementioned detective Dave Toschi (played by Mark Ruffalo) and San Francisco Chronicle journalist Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.).

Most fascinatingly, we likely would have never heard the Seawaters’ stories at all if it weren’t for Zodiac. All of the siblings cite the experience of watching the film as inspiring them to comb through their Arthur Leigh Allen memories and eventually come forward.

All three episodes of This Is Zodiac Speaking are available to stream on Netflix now.

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Tags: DocumentariesNetflixTrue CrimeZodiac

TV Editor at Den of Geek and Television Critics Association member. Based in Cleveland, Ohio. Very upset about various sporting events.