The Zodiac killer is one of the most notorious unsolved serial killer cases of all time. He terrorized people in the Bay Area in the late 1960s, and while police did name one suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, they were never able to cobble together enough evidence to arrest him. Allen died in 1992, and the mystery of the Zodiac killer continues to haunt. Now, people who say they knew Allen as children reveal in a new documentary series that he confessed to being the Zodiac killer to them, drugged them as children, and may have even brought them along to killings.
In This is the Zodiac Speaking, a three-part documentary out on Netflix Oct. 23, David and Connie Seawater say they would go on weekend trips with Allen, a local school teacher who was like a father to them, in the 1960s. They believe Allen was responsible for killings nearby on those trips that occurred prior to the Zodiac killings that terrorized San Francisco in the late 1960s.
The Zodiac killer murdered at least five victims between Dec. 1968 and Oct. 1969. The killer wrote several messages in code, and demanded they be published on the front page of San Francisco newspapers, threatening to kill more people if they were not. At one point, the killer threatened to blow up a school bus filled with children. And yet, police said they never had enough evidence to arrest a person.
This is the Zodiac Speaking includes interviews with the Seawater children, Allen’s former pupils—plus their home videos and letters from him—along with background on the case from Robert Graysmith, the journalist whose book Zodiac inspired the 2007 film by the same title.
This is the Zodiac Speaking co-director Ari Mark says his intention behind the series is to draw viewers into a bygone era of California before terrifying them. “First, I want the audience to get drawn into the nostalgia of the carefree and tech free California,” he says. “And, then I want them to be very scared. Scared for the victims and their families who were stalked and brutalized in the most vicious way. I don’t want the audience to experience this unpredictable, lurking evil as something far away and impossible to understand, but in the most relatable, innocent, and terrifying of ways—as children. As a tight knit group of siblings who loved Allen as a teacher and trusted him as a member of their family. And probably still do.”
Here’s a look at the most revealing statements from the docu-series and how they may shed light on the unsolved case of the Zodiac killer.
Arthur Leigh Allen before he was the suspected Zodiac killer
When David Seawater, Connie Seawater, and their younger brother Don Seawater met Allen in the early 1960s, their father was in a mental institution. He bonded with their mother Phyllis, and became a regular fixture at family dinners. Allen was an avid diver, and he’d take the children on excursions, like clam digging, and to movie theaters.
Allen was a beloved school teacher, known for dancing and singing along to music in class like The Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” and the Gilbert and Sullivan soundtrack to The Mikado.
A former student, Darin Alvord, describes Allen teaching them how to decipher codes and thought his teacher was just trying to teach them different ways of communicating.
Other former students recall the way he called the girls in his class “my beautiful.”
Field trips that were followed by murders
The deaths of Robert Domingos, 18, and Linda Edwards, 17, on June 4, 1963, are not officially linked to the Zodiac killer, but the Seawater children believe they were nearby.
They recall Allen showing up to their house at the end of the 1963 school year to see if they wanted to watch him go diving. When they arrived at Tajiguas Beach, they say that Allen immediately ran off. The kids were left to play on their own, and then Allen came rushing back huffing and puffing with red stuff on his hands, loading the kids into the car, and speeding off with them. The documentary flashes to headlines of Domingos and Edwards death at that same time, as the Seawaters think Allen may have been behind the double-murder.
On Oct. 28, 1966, when David Seawater was a sophomore in high school and Connie was a freshman, Allen showed up at their house to take them to a racetrack in Riverside. On Oct. 30, Connie found her brother David in a deep sleep in the motel and couldn’t be woken up. Then, she remembers going out for a drive with Allen during which he put his hand down her pedal pushers. She recalls getting back to the motel and drinking some juice and then falling into a deep sleep and not being able to remember anything except Allen leading them to the car on Oct. 31. On Oct, 30, 1966, a woman named Cheri Jo Bates was found dead, and the Seawaters believe that Allen was the one behind it, though the case has never been solved.
People who think Allen is the Zodiac killer point to how the Zodiac murders stopped when he was arrested for child molestation in 1974. He spent three years in prison and then served five years of felony probation until 1982.
The suspected Zodiac killer’s confessions
In the docu-series, Connie says she now believes that Allen hinted that he was the Zodiac killer. She remained in touch with Allen, and even introduced him to her son. She recalls sailing with Allen in 1991, and she asked him if he was the Zodiac killer. He said if he told her, then he’d have to kill her. But, “I thought it was a big joke,” Connie says in the series.
David says got a more direct answer from Allen. In 1992, his mother told him to call Allen because his health was rapidly declining. She always stood by Allen, despite the speculation that he was the Zodiac killer. David says Allen was sobbing on the phone, as he confessed that he drugged them as kids and molested his sister Connie. Then when he asked Allen if he was the Zodiac killer, he says that Allen admitted that he was. Allen died on August 26, 1992, at the age of 58.
After seeing the 2007 film Zodiac—starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr. as San Francisco Chronicle staffers on the case and Mark Ruffalo as a detective—they were struck by actor John Carroll Lynch, who played Arthur Leigh Allen in the movie. They thought he looked exactly like the real Allen, and then realized they had been to all of the sites where Zodiac murders took place before the killings. “So much in that movie that was scary familiar,” Connie says in This is the Zodiac Speaking.
The Seawater children say in the series that their mother Phyllis never believed Allen could be the Zodiac killer, or a child molester. After she died on April 23, 2017, her children found a box with countless letters that she had exchanged with Phyllis in which he talked about the Zodiac, and they are excerpted in the series. “Every time someone mentioned police to me I’d jump,” he wrote in one. “Seeing a murder headline would turn my palms sweaty,” he wrote in another. And in the letter the Seawater children find the most revealing, he wrote, “the most dangerous thing is when I almost decided to confess.”
Graysmith says that Allen was probably attracted to the Seawater children and their family because a partner and a family was something he always wanted, but instead he lived in a basement with his mother, noting that the Zodiac killer’s victims were “almost always married people. My theory is: they’re happy and he’s not.”
