A Cold Case Team Says They've Finally Identified the Zodiac Killer

The mystery of the Zodiac Killer, the serial murderer who famously terrorized the Bay Area in the late ’60s, has finally been solved, or so it seems. As TMZ reports, a team of more than 40 detectives, journalists and military intelligence officers who dubbed themselves the Case Breakers claim to have identified one of history’s most elusive villains.

The Case Breakers identified Gary Francis Poste as the killer after poring through new forensic evidence, photos from Poste’s darkroom and coded letters from the Zodiac Killer. Unfortunately, it’s too late to bring him to justice; Poste died in 2018.

The group was able to link Poste to the five murders committed by the Zodiac Killer in 1968 and 1969, as well as an additional murder committed in Riverside, California in 1966. They reportedly found a photo of scars on Poste’s forehead that matched the scars on a police sketch of the Zodiac Killer, and they were able to decipher letters sent by the Zodiac that revealed him to be the killer. In one note in particular, removing the letters of Poste’s name revealed an alternate message.

“So you’ve got to know Gary’s full name in order to decipher these anagrams,” a former Army counterintelligence officer who worked on the team explained. “I just don’t think there’s any other way anybody would have figured it out.”