Zodiac Killer linked to 28 murders as suspect ‘identified’ as Gary Francis Poste after evading cops for 50 YEARS
THE Zodiac Killer linked to 28 murders has been identified by cold case sleuths as Gary Francis Poste.
Case Breakers, a team of specialists who have worked to crack a number of America's most high-profile unsolved cases, made the revelation.
He terrorized the San Francisco area, carrying out five murders in 1968 and 1969 and is known to have targeted at least seven victims.
The Zodiac Killer has been linked to as many as 28 murders.
And in taunting letters sent to newspapers and police, the killer himself claimed to have murdered 37 people.
One image uncovered from the darkroom purportedly featured scars on Poste's forehead which match a sketch of the Zodiac.
- some of which to this day but Case Breakers say they also point to Poste.
Michelle Wynn, 52, a relative of Poste, said she believes Case Breakers have nailed the killer.
Poste “is the Zodiac, without a doubt" she said adding "being around him, knowing his demeanor and his shadiness and twistedness — I have an intuition, I can read people".
The case was deemed inactive in 2004 but the San Francisco Police Department reopened it in March of 2007.
The San Francisco office of the FBI said in a statement was cautious about the new information, a view echoed by the city's police department.
"I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."
The killer earned his nickname by signing his fourth letter to the press with "Zodiac" on August 7, 1969.
In it, he wrote: "Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking."
He also signed his letters with a circle and a cross over it, resembling a target or a coordinate symbol.
CASE SOLVED?
Authorities believe the Zodiac claimed his first two victims on December 20, 1968, when 17-year-old David Arthur Faraday and 16-year-old Betty Lou Jensen were shot and killed in Benicia.
The second two victims - Michael Renault Mageau, 19; and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22 - were found shot in a parking lot in Vallejo on July 4, 1969. Ferrin was killed and Mageau survived.
Nearly three months later, 20-year-old Bryan Calvin Hartnell and 22-year-old Cecelia Ann Shepard were found stabbed at Lake Berryessa in Napa County on September 27, 1969. Shepard was killed and Hartnell survived.
Taxi driver Paul Lee Stine, 29, was shot and killed in his car in San Francisco's Presidio Heights neighborhood on October 11, 1969.
The Case Breakers have asserted that the Zodiac is also responsible for a sixth killing in Riverside, California, on October 31, 1966.
Cheri Jo Bates was 18 years old when she was found dead in an alley on the Riverside City College campus.
In 1967, police received a handwritten letter which later led them to believe Bates' killing may have been committed by the Zodiac.
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That theory was quashed in 2016 when investigators received an anonymous note from someone who claimed they'd written the earlier note as a "sick joke."
However, the Case Breakers have maintained that the Zodiac did kill Bates and claim investigators have blocked them from comparing her DNA to Poste's.
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