Director David Fincher (far right) was affected by the Zodiac killer when he was 7 and the killer prowled the Bay Area where he lived. (AP Photo/HO/Courtesy of Warner Bros.)

Trailer: "Zodiac."

The Zodiac murderer who stalked Northern California starting nearly four decades ago was an out-sized character, even by serial killer standards: taunting police, threatening all the region's schoolchildren, releasing unbreakable ciphers to the public.

It follows that the people caught up in the mystery still cloaking the unsolved case -- from the bad-boy techno-geek filmmaker David Fincher to amateur Internet sleuths -- are an odd bunch.

With the Friday release of Fincher's "Zodiac," a nearly three-hour film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., we entered the Zodiac's world -- where, as the movie's tag line puts it, there's more than one way to lose your life to a killer.

We found Fincher there, explaining how he was frightened by Zodiac as a 7-year-old growing up in San Anselmo, outside San Francisco. There's Robert Graysmith, the newspaper cartoonist-turned-amateur detective whose two books are the basis for Fincher's movie.

Tom Voigt, informal leader of the current wave of nonprofessional investigators, is hosting a "Zodiackiller.com task-force meeting" this weekend in San Francisco. And finally there's John Mikulenka, an ad copy proofreader who crafted a documentary about the strange group of people who continue to hunt the Zodiac.

Meet them below:

___

THE AUTEUR TURNED INVESTIGATOR

Fincher, the 44-year-old maker of "Se7en" and "Fight Club," says he remembers being told when he was 7 that patrol cars were following his school bus because the Zodiac had threatened to shoot children. "There was a strange alchemy," he said. "Something weird was happening. And then the fact that it was never really resolved was of real interest to me." Fincher moved away from the Bay Area in 1976 and mostly forgot about Zodiac. Several years ago he received James Vanderbilt's script, which focused on Graysmith's investigation and obsession, and his old boogeyman was reborn into a film project.

While making the movie, he began peering into the evidence. With a $60 million-plus budget, he hired new handwriting experts, interviewed police and surviving victims and painstakingly recreated crime scenes. And of course the movie, shot digitally, grew and grew to its current, somewhat exhausting length. "We owed a certain depth to the people that spoke to us. We owed them the respect of trying to use that stuff," he said.

The dominant critique of the film is its length -- it bogs down in the final hour or so. Fincher explains the slowness thusly: "We wanted it to take a toll. We want the audience to feel like you know, they don't have to sit through 35 years of it, but they have to feel the toll of that -- that it feels like it's taken a bite out of you."

___

THE AUTHOR WHO STARTED IT ALL

Talk about coming around full circle: Robert Graysmith's two books form the basis for the film, but during pre-production he began writing "Shooting Zodiac," about the making of the movie. The new book's "heroes" are Fincher, Vanderbilt and producer Brad Fischer, he said, adding: "It's just a really upbeat, incredible story." In Gyllenhaal's portrayal, Graysmith comes across as earnest but a bit nutty. Graysmith acknowledged that, saying, "I'm not necesarily the most logical person. But I really can stick with things."

Now a full-fledged true crime writer, Graysmith comes across as knowledgeable about minutiae of the case, if a bit flighty. He seems a bit starstruck by his brush with Hollywood, calling Fincher "the smartest man I've ever met." When a reporter simply asked his age, Graysmith's response, in full, was: "Jake is -- what do you think? How old is Jake? Twenty-six? So I'm uh, 64. And I got so skinny while I was working on this I was down to 145 pounds. I was 5-11 and a half. And I had tons of hair. So I wasn't too far off from Jake. You know, but he's playing me 37 years ago. So uh, I'm pretty happy. I enjoy working. I want to get back to drawing and painting and all that, so I hope when I sell these new books that I'll have enough to really just pack it all in and just sell what I've written and go back to drawing and painting and not have to worry so much about finances."

___

THE INVESTIGATING WEBMASTER

Tom Voigt is the 40-year-old webmaster of http://www.zodiackiller.com and its MySpace counterpart http://www.myspace.com/zodiackillerdotcom . He launched his site after seeing a reenactment on TV and reading Graysmith's "Zodiac" in the mid '90s. The Portland, Ore.-based Voigt said his site, where users from Ireland to Japan exchange clues and try to jointly solve Zodiac's still-unbroken ciphers, received 620,000 hits last Saturday.

His rationale for devoting massive amounts of time to chasing down Zodiac: He said law enforcement, specifically the San Francisco Police Department, has forsaken its duty. "The real Zodiac could call SFPD to confess after seeing the Fincher movie and they would put him on hold for so long he would die of old age," Voigt said.

There's a split in the amateur investigator community. Graysmith, by far the most famous sleuth and the man who revived interest in Zodiac, is repeatedly ridiculed on the message boards hosted by Voigt. In online reviews, Voigt calls Graysmith's latest book a "fictional account."

Voigt called Fincher "a lunatic" but planned to see "Zodiac" on opening night. The next day, he's hosting a "task force meeting" in San Francisco featuring -- among others -- a Chicago writer whose MySpace blog at http://tinyurl.com/25zzp4 is devoted to attacking Graysmith.

___

THE BEMUSED DOCUMENTARIAN

Also at that meeting, ad copy proofreader John Mikulenka will screen a documentary he made in his spare time, "Hunting The Zodiac." It revolves around a community of around several hundred people who devote large portions of their lives to the case, Mikulenka said. One is an interior decorator who believes the Zodiac is stalking her still.

Another, 42-year-old pilot Ray Nixon, said he's spent "many, many thousands of dollars" investigating Zodiac and once left his job to work 18 months full-time on the case. "It's really a drug. Sometimes there's highs and lows," Nixon said in the documentary. "There's been times, fortunately when I was alone, that I run up and down the hall screaming 'I got you!' or something like that."

Mikulenka had been researching the case for a TV pitch when he came across the wacky subculture. "I was way more intrigued by the echo, by the way it's followed and pursued by people today," he said. But why? Why is Zodiac so appealing?

"The fact that it's unsolved is just catnip for people who are interested in true crime. The fact that the killer has a body of work, meaning these letters and ciphers, makes it even more fascinating," Mikulenka said. "There's so many ways to tell this story. And everybody's adding their brushstrokes to it."

___

asap staff reporter Ryan Pearson is not a prime suspect.

___

Want to comment? Sound off at soundoffasap@ap.org .

©2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy.