He targeted young couples and a lone male cab driver. His known attacks took place in Benicia, Vallejo, unincorporated Napa County, and the city of San Francisco proper. Two of his wounded victims survived. The Zodiac claimed to have murdered 37 victims.
Mike Renault Mageau and Bryan Calvin Hartnell are the only two known survivors of the Zodiac.
In October 2021, a cold case investigation team known as the Case Breakers claimed to have successfully unmasked the serial killer as Gary Francis Poste.
Gary F. Poste has been identified as the infamous Zodiac Killer by The Case Breakers, which investigates cold cases.
The Case Breakers is now saying it has identified the Zodiac Killer as Gary Francis Poste, who passed away in 2018. The team's years of digging uncovered new forensic evidence and photos from Poste's darkroom. One image features scars on the forehead of Poste that match scars on a sketch of the Zodiac, the team said.
Currently, the most accepted suspect for the Zodiac Killer is Arthur Leigh Allen. He was the main suspect in the case and the one the police mainly focused on.
The final confirmed Zodiac killing occurred two weeks later, when lone taxi driver Paul Lee Stine, 29, was shot and killed in the Presidio Heights neighbourhood of San Francisco on Saturday 11 October 1969 in an incident initially thought to be an unrelated robbery until the murderer wrote another letter to the ...
The Zodiac Killer is believed to be a California man who gave himself that nickname to conceal his identity from authorities.
A group of specialists, including retired law enforcement and miilitary officers, says it has identified a "very strong suspect" in the Zodiac killer case. The group says that the Zodiac's cryptic letters identified the killer, who also had a facial scar that matched a scar in the police sketch of the Zodiac.
Given that the earliest officially recognized victims of the Zodiac Killer are David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen (both killed December 20th, 1968), the first letter sent by the Zodiac would actually be the set of three basically identical letters he sent to three different papers in the Northern California area.
The person who escaped was identified as Kathleen Johns, then a 23-year-old woman driving, with her infant daughter, from San Bernardino to Petaluma on the evening of March 22, 1970.
Zodiac Killer - Wikipedia
would now be around 90 years old.
Zodiac wore what has been described as an executioner's costume for at least one of his killings. Hartnell told detectives Zodiac appeared wearing clip-on dark glasses, a black executioner's hood with a white circle and cross on the chest, a foot-long knife with a taped wooden handle and a scabbard with brass rivets.
The letters stopped in 1974. In that final letter, the writer stated that he had recently seen “The Exorcist” and thought it was the “best satirical comedy that (he had) ever seen.” He ended the note with a tally of the murders he claimed he'd committed.
Reviewers praised it for its historically accurate depiction of the hunt, by journalists, law enforcement, and the public, for the serial killer known as the Zodiac, who tormented the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in the late 1960s.
The evidence against Arthur Leigh Allen was considered circumstantial. Specifically, DNA and handwriting samples believed to belong to the Zodiac killer did not match Allen. He was never charged with the murders and passed away in 1992 from a heart attack.
The only possible DNA sample comes from beneath a stamp stuck to one of his infamous letters. The sample, developed in 2002 by San Francisco police, is only a partial profile. Because it's not someone's full DNA profile, it can't be used to point to just one person.
Who was Gary Francis Poste? He reportedly had a wife and at least one son. The man named by the Case Breakers was married to Mary Poste, and had at least one son. He reportedly worked for years as a house painter after serving time in the United States Air Force.
The first murders widely attributed to the Zodiac Killer were the shootings of high school students Betty Lou Jensen and David Arthur Faraday on December 20, 1968 on Lake Herman Road, just inside the city limits of Benicia.
According to code-breaking expert David Oranchak, the cipher's text includes: “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. … I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me,” the newspaper reported.
Cryptographic researchers have finally cracked a 51-year-old code left by the Zodiac, a serial killer who terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Much of the work of cracking the code was done in Mathematica, the statistics package from Wolfram.
The full message, submitted to the F.B.I. on Dec. 5, included a misspelling of the word paradise, no punctuation and some garbled phrases.