The Zodiac Killer is one of America’s most infamous unsolved criminal cases
Cold case investigators in the US believe they have identified the Zodiac Killer, the man who terrorised the San Francisco community in the late 1960s.
A group of more than 40 volunteers, made up of former law enforcement investigators, journalists, and military intelligence officers, who call themselves the Case Breakers, have named the serial murderer as Gary Francis Poste.
Despite the Case Breakers evidence, federal and police investigators tasked with solving the 52-year-old mystery told the San Francisco Chronicle that the latest theory doesn’t hold up.
Poste was an Air Force veteran from the Sierra foothills and died in 2018 according to the Case Breakers. They also claim that a 1966 murder in Southern California was also the work of the infamous Zodiac.
So far, five murders that occurred in 1968 and 1969 in San Francisco have been confirmed to be the work of the Zodiac Killer.
He became famous for taunting authorities with coded messages in letters sent to newspapers and law enforcement, which he claimed would reveal his identity if they were decoded. Several suspects have been investigated over the last 50 years, but his identity has never been revealed.
In one of the letters, the Zodiac claimed to have murdered 37 victims. The killer has been linked to a number of other cold cases, but only five Bay Area murders and two attempted murders have been officially attributed to him.
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The group’s latest theory is based on Poste looking similar in photos to a 1969 police sketch of the killer. Crucially, there appear to be similar scars on his forehead the group say.
Jen Bucholtz, a former Army counterintelligence agent who is part of the group told Fox News that letters from the Zodiac also reveal Poste to be the killer when the anagrams are cracked.
She said: “So you’ve got to know Gary’s full name in order to decipher these anagrams.
“I just don’t think there’s any other way anybody would have figured it out.”
But in response to their theory, the San Francisco office of the FBI said in a statement to local media, via Sky News: “The Zodiac killer case remains open. We have no new information to share at the moment.”
