Unsolved Zodiac Killer case still stirs flap
The Zodiac Killer may still be out there.
A team of former professional investigators including members of law enforcement said Wednesday that they may have cracked the case of the mass murderer believed to be responsible for at least five deaths in Northern California in the 1960s. But the FBI isn’t buying it. “The case remains open and there is no new information to report,” the FBI told news outlets.
Case Breakers, a group of independent investigators comprised of retired FBI agents, said in a statement that they think they know the identity of the “California psychopath who shot, stabbed or choked to death possibly as many as 10 victims between 1962 and 1970.”
That group said their suspect, an Air Force veteran who worked as a house painter, died in 2018. They identified him as Gary F. Poste.
But the group’s claims don’t impress those who’ve studied the case extensively. Tom Voigt, who runs the website ZodiacKiller.com and wrote the book, “Zodiac Killer: Just the Facts,” told Rolling Stone “these so-called experts” are spewing nonsense.
“This is hot garbage,” he told the outlet. “I don’t know why it got any coverage at all.”
Former San Francisco Police Department homicide investigator Frank Falzon, who worked on the case when it was fresh, also discounted Poste was the Zodiac Killer.
But Case Breakers said its “statewide examination” has turned up eyewitnesses and includes “new physical and forensic evidence” as well as “decades of pictures from Poste’s former darkroom.”
All of the murders believed by authorities to have been committed by the Zodiac Killer occurred between December 1968 and October 1969. The case was inactive for three years before San Francisco cops reopened it in 2007 after advances in DNA testing motivated investigators to try and solve the mystery again.
It was because of a 1969 letter to several San Francisco newspapers that the murderer became known as the Zodiac Killer. Either a gun or a knife was used in the slayings.