MY FATHER-IN-LAW... THE ZODIAC KILLER?
WHEN MICHELLE HEARD HER FATHERIN-LAW WAS SUSPECTED OF MULTIPLE MURDERS, SHE WASN’T SURPRISED
The phone call Michelle Wynn received from her son seven years ago was shocking, but it made a lot of sense. In fact, it helped piece together a puzzle she’d long been wondering about.
In the call, Michelle’s son told her that the FBI had been talking to him about his paternal grandfather, Gary
Francis Poste. They had information about him possibly being the Zodiac, a serial killer who had terrorised California in the late 1960s, murdering at least five people.
“He [my son] said, ‘How could someone who was so good to me do all those things?’” Michelle, 52, tells New Idea exclusively. “But I wasn’t surprised. I knew there was something wrong right from the beginning when I met him [Gary]. Did I think it was to this scale? Obviously not, but it didn’t surprise me.”
The Zodiac killings remain one of America’s most famous unsolved cases. The murderer shot or stabbed seven people, two of whom survived, and he then grabbed notoriety by sending coded messages to the media. In these messages, he made claims of many more victims and threatened to kill more people if his words were not printed. His letters opened with, “This is the Zodiac speaking,” which led to the ‘Zodiac Killer’ moniker.
Michelle married Gary’s son, Mark, in the years after the killings, and on meeting Gary she says she was immediately struck by his “creepiness” and his introverted demeanour.
“He didn’t have a single friend,” she remembers. “He did crosswords, and he was always sitting in the corner with a book. The relationship he had with his wife [Mary] was just horrible. They had separate rooms and he talked to her like she was nothing. She was very meek and whenever I asked her about it, she wouldn’t answer.
“He’d sometimes go and sit outside Mary’s work in his truck for hours. It was like he was taunting her, reminding her to keep her mouth shut about something.”
The real issues started for
Michelle when she and Mark began having relationship problems.
“I can’t remember how many times I had my windshield smashed or my tyres slashed. Someone put sugar in my gas tank and then there was a slingshot through my window, which could have killed me if I’d
‘I JUST WANT CLOSURE FOR THE FAMILIES INVOLVED’
been there. I was very lucky,” she says. “I knew it was Gary. He’d got someone to do it. He was as smart as anything.”
Initially, Michelle was more annoyed than terrified, but as time went on, she started fearing for her life.
“I had to move away. It wasn’t going to stop,” she says.
Over the following years, Michelle had minimal contact with Mark and his family, and then she got the call from her then-adult son about Gary allegedly being the Zodiac.
“I’ve been dealing with that for seven years,” she says. “He bought my son his first gun when he was 3. I was mad at the time and, with hindsight now, I think he was trying to prime him like he primed other boys in town to do his bidding.”
However, Gary was never charged and, in 2018, he passed away. Since then, the Case Breakers – a group of volunteer sleuths with backgrounds in the military, police and law – became involved. In October, they claimed to have cracked the Zodiac mystery, naming Gary as the only possible killer.
Among the most compelling new pieces of evidence, photos were unearthed from Gary’s darkroom. One image features scars from a car crash on his forehead that match scars on a police sketch of the Zodiac.
Adding to that was the work the Case Breakers have done on deciphering some of the coded letters to the media. They worked out that the cipher key to cracking the code is Gary’s full name.
Despite the new evidence, the case remains open – but Michelle hopes that won’t remain the situation for long.
“I know he’s the killer,”
Michelle says. “At first
I wanted him to face it. I was angry he’d died, but now I just want closure for the families involved.”