John Carroll Lynch On Whether ‘Zodiac’s’ Arthur Leigh Allen Was Guilty [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

John Carroll Lynch believes the suspected serial killer Arthur Leigh Allen could well have been guilty.

JOHN CARROLL LYNCH ON ZODIAC KILLER

Lynch portrayed Allen in Zodiac in David Fincher‘s 2007 thriller Zodiac. “Arthur Allen was an incredibly disturbing person to learn about. I got to see videotapes, I got to read transcripts, I got to read about him, I got to see where he was all throughout the process of trying to chase down the Zodiac,” Lynch describes. “There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that leads me to believe he might be the Zodiac.”

The director, however, asked Lynch to play the part as if Allen was not guilty of being the Zodiac killer. This greatly impacted Lynch’s beliefs about the murderer. “[He] asked me to play it like he didn’t do it, so I think I kind of fall on that spectrum. I don’t know whether that’s because I committed to that as an actor, or whether I really believe that he didn’t do it.”

Lynch’s doubt stems from the moral issues surrounding the Zodiac murders. The Zodiac Killer, or Zodiac, was a murderer who targeted four men and three women aged 16-29 during the late 1960s and early ’70s. The killer sent letters and cryptograms to the local California press, but law enforcement was only able to definitely solve one of them. Zodiac claimed to have killed 37, but only 7 victims were confirmed, two of whom survived. The killer was never found, and the case has been marked “inactive” as of April 2004.

Allen was suspected and questioned various times over a 20-year span, but was ultimately ruled out. He died in 1992.

“There’s too many things that he’d have to have rubbed through, too many moral problems he had already rubbed through in different directions to come to that,” Lynch said of Allen. “That being said, somebody killed those people and he’s a pretty likely character to have killed people. He was really creepy.”