Telling the truth of true crime

DIRECTOR CHARLIE SHACKLETON THOUGHT HE COULD have his cake and eat it too.

- BY ESTHER ZUCKERMAN

For years, Shackleton had been considering the idea of making a documentary centered on the Zodiac Killer. The mysterious and legendary serial killer haunted the Bay Area in the late 1960s, killing at least five people and claiming dozens more victims, though those were never confirmed. He has been a fixture of pop-culture fascination ever since, from David Fincher’s 2007 thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal to last year’s Netflix docuseries This Is the Zodiac Speaking.

“I had a sort of love-hate relationship with true crime,” Shackleton said in a video call earlier this year, when the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. “It seemed like the way to make something that would genuinely interest me but could also potentially be quite commercial.”

The director, whose previous features include the essay-like Beyond Clueless, about teen movies, and Fear Itself, about the horror genre, found his angle when he came across the book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge. Published in 2012 by Lyndon Lafferty, a California Highway Patrolman, the book homes in on a suspect he calls George Russell Tucker and chronicles how Lafferty believed his efforts to bring Tucker to justice had been thwarted. Alas, Lafferty’s family did not grant Shackleton the rights to the book.

So instead, Shackleton made