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Investigators say they've finally identified the Zodiac Killer
- pengaru 5y agoFor anyone disinterested in giving any FOX site clicks, here's an alternative source: https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Investigators-claim-this-man-is-Zodiac-Killer-16513837.php https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Investigators-claim-thi...
- armadsen 5y agoI'm with you on not wanting to send traffic to Fox, but it's worth noting that this is Fox 13/KSTU, which is a local Fox affiliate in Salt Lake City, but is not owned by Fox (it's owned by Scripps Broadcasting). I have no idea how revenue from traffic to their website relates to their relationship with Fox, but it's not a direct relationship. (I fondly refer to them as "Let's Play News", because the quality and professionalism of their local newscasts tends to be hilariously low.)
- khazhoux 5y agoThis is great news. Even if we've heard similar announcements before. Definitely good to have closure. Closure not just for the family. Really, for everyone who has followed this. Unmasked soon, I hope, and finally... Zodiac Killer will be revealed.
- randomcarbloke 5y agobrilliant
- thatsecurityguy 5y agolmao, I am dying at this.
- m3kw9 5y ago“ the Zodiac Killer as Gary Francis Poste, who passed away in 2018.”. He barely got away it seems if true.
- oh_sigh 5y agoWhat are the ethics of potentially identifying deceased people as baddies? Unless there is DNA evidence which remains(which I doubt), or they find incontrovertible evidence in his home or something like that(I also doubt), this is just a guess that will drastically affect his probably otherwise-normal family whether the allegations are true or not.
- lazide 5y agoNear as I can tell, as long as they don’t have an estate to sue you it’s a-ok (based on current media cycles anyway). Only mostly sarcastic.
- nescioquid 5y agoThis was the question on my mind as well. The alleged "perp" died in 2018, but I didn't see any mention of the duration of the group's investigation. Did this group identify him as a person of interest before his death? If so, that raises yet more more questions (e.g. no statutory limitation on murder). > Hans Smits told Fox News he spent 10 years hiding a whistleblower who said he escaped a criminal "posse" headed by Poste. The man, who The Case Breakers only referred to as Wil, told Smits the posse roamed California's High Sierra region and that he was "groomed into a killing machine." > Smits said he gave Wil financial, logistical and emotional support over the years and moved him around for nearly 10 years in an effort to keep him safe. > "I'm the one that took him to the FBI office and put him on a train and sent him out of state," Smits said. The story does not seem to explicitly state Smits is a member of the Case Breakers, but if Smits knows Wil, and Case Breakers only identify the whistleblower as Wil, it seems to imply Smits is a member of Code Breakers. If that is all true, they were working Poste as a person of interest while he was still alive.
- no_butterscotch 5y agoThis was my first thought as well. Other ethics include the press now reaching out to the surviving family of this man? "So and so, who call themselves investigators, say your father is the Zodiac Killer! Thoughts?" Are there rules around this crap?
- jfrunyon 5y agoI don't know enough about the Zodiac Killer to determine whether or not this is true. But I do know that when the only $search_engine results to something are from one media network (a few Fox local & Fox News), and a tabloid... take it with a grain of salt.
- steve76 5y agoDig him up and whip his bones.
- sfblah 5y agoWell that's a relief. Now they can arrest and prosecute him!
- Shared404 5y ago> The Case Breakers say they have identified the Zodiac Killer as Gary Francis Poste, who passed away in 2018. It would appear not.
- romwell 5y agoI believe the parent comment was a sarcastic remark on that very fact.
- Shared404 5y agoYeah, I realized that a little too late :P . Usually I'm pretty decent at picking up sarcasm over the internet, but not today it turns out.
- julianapostate 5y agopeople on HN only use exclamation points in code or sarcasm
- kelseyfrog 5y agoThank you for pointing it out bluntly. For people like me, it does help to read the unwritten rules.
- mhh__ 5y agoSomeone always misses it. I've basically given up on any sarcasm here because it seems that the "don't let this place turn into Reddit" mantra seems to cultivate a crowd requiring quite a lot of hand-holding through subtext. I maintain that the inane screaming about clickbait is correlated to this.
- romwell 5y ago
- cf100clunk 5y agoLoads of prior HN discussions on the solving of his cipher: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=zodiac%20cipher&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- romwell 5y agoI believe the crowdsourced investigation has already yielded a veritable result[1]; I'm not sure why the case needed to continue being active. [1] https://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com/ https://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com/
- Ansil849 5y agoI feel like at least twice a year, there is some story like "Zodiac Killer Finally Identified" or "DB Cooper Finally Found". And behind these stories is usually just one person or group of people who are presenting their pet theory (which highlighted all facts supporting it, and conveniently brushes aside all facts which don't) and have savy media contacts so are able to get media exposure to help promote what's frequently accompanied by a book they are trying to sell copies of. I don't know if that's the case here, but this pattern of events has made me just tune out stories like this. I wish media outlets would be more critical.
- codazoda 5y agoIt seems like even the article contradicts what this group says... > "Our Homicide Cold Case Unit has determined the murder of Cheri Jo Bates in 1966 is not related to the Zodiac killer," the Riverside Police Department's Homicide Cold Case Unit told Fox News.
- bogwog 5y agoIt seems like the group asked the police department to test the DNA found in the Bates case to confirm it once and for all, but the police department has refused. So there's probably some internal politics thing going on here.
- pwinnski 5y agoThe FBI says it is related, the local PD says it is not, and to ask the FBI. The local PD is also refusing to do DNA tests which would resolve the issue.
- Ansil849 5y ago> The local PD is also refusing to do DNA tests which would resolve the issue. Yeah, mean ol' law enforcement, refusing to do DNA tests for any crank mystery squad solving team that demands them.
- 5y ago
- mauz 5y agoLooking at the press release [1], it still feels relatively circumstantial to me. Not sure that we can deem the Zodiac Killer to be fully identified yet. It's definitely not nearly as cut and dry as when they identified the Golden State killer. [1]: https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Zodiac-Killer-Press-release-1-1.pdf https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...
- bena 5y agoDo you know what circumstantial means? It doesn't mean "weak". It means "pertaining to circumstances". Nearly all evidence is circumstantial. DNA is circumstantial evidence. Fingerprints are circumstantial evidence. A smoking gun is circumstantial evidence. Trials are based on circumstantial evidence. Hans Reiser was arrested, tried, and convicted of murdering his wife based on nothing but circumstantial evidence that a murder even occurred. They didn't even have her body. If a lawyer would jump up and shout "Objection, evidence is circumstantial", the judge would look at them and say "Yeah, no shit, what's your actual objection?"
- mjburgess 5y agoConsult a dictionary, eg., > pointing indirectly towards someone's guilt but not conclusively proving it. You are correct that within a technical legal context most evidence is circumstantial. But that isnt the only meaning of the word, and indeed, largely not what is meant.
- bena 5y agoWhat they meant is wrong. I can consult Merriam Webster, which agrees with what I said. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/circumstantial%20evidence https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/circumstantial%20... Or Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/circumstantial-evidence https://www.britannica.com/topic/circumstantial-evidence Or Cornell https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/circumstantial_evidence https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/circumstantial_evidence Or basically any single law firm or courthouse https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/legal-defenses/circumstantial-evidence/ https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/legal-defenses/circumst... https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/circumstantial-evidence-vs-direct-evidence https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/circumst... https://www.nycourts.gov/judges/cji/1-General/CJI2d.Circumstantial_Evidence.pdf https://www.nycourts.gov/judges/cji/1-General/CJI2d.Circumst... Yes, inferences must be made. But as a lot of those links mention, direct evidence (the other kind of evidence) is often worse as it's usually eyewitness accounts. Lazy television writers have done us all a disservice by repeated implication that circumstantial evidence isn't good enough.
- purple_ferret 5y agoA quick google doesn't show this guy on lists of common suspects. Where did he come from and what is supposed to be his motive?
- darepublic 5y agoTime for another zodiac movie, this time including the subsequent murders and the eventual posthumous uncovering of the murderer. No matter how convincing the evidence it's just not satisfactory that the guy can't be tried.
- bickeringyokel 5y agoCan't wait for Hollywood to make the new movie and change all the details of this new evidence for entertainment value.
- gandalfian 5y agoSo no one from the film.
- silksowed 5y agoMr. Cruz ? /s
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- poundtown 5y agobit unsettling hearing about his posse.
- panzagl 5y agoAnd makers of true crime podcasts everywhere rejoiced...
- ljm 5y agoI imagine the Zodiac Killer was actually more than one person. Of course, this was back in the time when creating attractive codewords for dangerous criminals was the norm. Who's to say that the coded messages sent to newspapers weren't actually meant for other people involved in the activity?
- codezero 5y agoIn the fox story, they note that he ran a criminal gang of about 3 people, and recruited young men looking for a father figure, so you might be right. They paint it as him being the primary one doing the bad things with the others as just lookouts/help w/ hiding evidence.
- HPsquared 5y agoI'm reminded of that scene in Hot Fuzz - "No luck catching them killers then?" .. "It's just the one killer actually!"
- speedybird 5y agoThe coded messages were handwritten. To my eye, they have the same handwriting. Occam's Razor is just a rule of thumb, but I think it applies here.
- TedCancruz 5y agoIt was me!
- amatecha 5y ago"For the full story, and more evidence from the Case Breakers, visit"[0] Can we update the link to just go to the full story rather than the summarized version? (sorry, I know it's kinda "offtopic" but that just bugged me starting to read and just being redirected to another site) [0] https://www.foxnews.com/us/cold-case-zodiac-killer-identified-murder https://www.foxnews.com/us/cold-case-zodiac-killer-identifie...
- lqet 5y agoBy far the most interesting takeaway from the full FOX news article is that it seems possible that the Zodiac Killer was actually a group of people: > Hans Smits told Fox News he spent 10 years hiding a whistleblower who said he escaped a criminal "posse" headed by Poste [now identified as the Zodiac]. The man, who The Case Breakers only referred to as Wil, told Smits the posse roamed California's High Sierra region and that he was "groomed into a killing machine." > In addition, Wil said he witnessed Poste burying murder weapons in the woods, Smits said. > "They put out several bear caches out there in case something happened," Smits said. > Smits said he gave Wil financial, logistical and emotional support over the years and moved him around for nearly 10 years in an effort to keep him safe. > Despite being dead for three years, some people are mysteriously still loyal to him, said Michelle, who also declined to provide her last name. > "He targeted young men who didn't have a father figure," she said. "It was a posse of three but the one [Poste] did a lot of damage. He still has some kind of control… and he's gone."
- CancunVacation 5y agoSo that means that Ted Cruz hasn't been ruled out as a suspect?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gaetgu 5y agoOne hundred percent. That is something that, to my knowledge, was not known before. If it is indeed true then it would bring some interesting questions along with it.
- jgrahamc 5y agoOther clues include deciphering letters sent by the Zodiac that revealed him as the killer, said Jen Bucholtz, a former Army counterintelligence agent who works on cold cases. In one note, the letters of Poste's full name were removed to reveal an alternate message, she told Fox News. "So you've got to know Gary's full name in order to decipher these anagrams," Bucholtz said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out." I'd love to see that evidence.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoI wonder if neuroscience will ever come up with a treatment for serial killers that would cure them of their murderous obsessions. I believe some serial killers are constantly thinking about murder, while others might have two sides to their personalities that avoid thinking about the other, like a switch.
- ssklash 5y agoFrom what I've seen/read, it seems like many serial killers have a consistent urge/voices telling them/impulse to kill that they are able to resist for a time, lose control, kill, and then repeat the cycle.
- jimbob45 5y agoI've wondered how many potential serial killers there are out there that will never kill simply because we, as a society, have elevated video games, movies, and adult entertainment to such an extent that killing just isn't as gratifying as blowing time on WoW, Netflix, or PH.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y agoThis has probably also lost us virtuosos in other more positive fields.
- some_furry 5y agoThis is a feature, not a bug.
- mhh__ 5y agoI think the question may not be one of gratification as much as early trauma. The internet has its flaw socially but it has made it hugely easier to be weird and find refuge amongst other like-minded people. Serial killers don't come from nowhere
- aquova 5y agoSo two new pieces of evidence are offered up by this article, firstly that Zodiac was identified by several witnesses as having a forehead scar, including being drawn on the famous sketch of him, which matches a scar Poste had at the time. Secondly, some sort of new solution to the cipher is possible by omitting Poste's full name in some way. As exciting as it would be, I always take these claims about famous cases being solved with a grain of salt. It seems they were also denied DNA evidence from another California case, and bringing up excitement about Zodiac might let them press the issue further. The scar I don't think is definitive proof by any means, but if there is some new explanation to one of the ciphers, I would be very interested in seeing it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- polynomial 5y agoApparently there was also a paint-splattered watch recovered at the Bates killing scene (tied to ZK in 1975 by FBI) and he spent decades as a house painter. There was also a recovered boot print from that scene that apparently was a match to him. I guess we'll all have to wait for all the true crime podcasts to spill the rest of the beans.
- astrange 5y agoAlso, his friend apparently liked to tell people it was him and post selfies on Facebook saying he was Zodiac. https://twitter.com/Q_Review/status/1445837540620218369 https://twitter.com/Q_Review/status/1445837540620218369
- asveikau 5y agoWow. That guy in the glasses looks just like the police sketch.
- koboll 5y agoThe guy REALLY looks like the police sketches too. Almost perfectly the same, except for maybe a slight difference in nose width.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- paxys 5y agoThe "investigators" mentioned are The Case Breakers, described (on their website) as "The elite team that's solving our greatest mysteries". No mention of their actual credentials or accomplishments.
- cyberge99 5y agoThat’s because they’re still solving them. ;)
- etc-hosts 5y agotheir credentials are listed at end of this doc https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Zodiac-Killer-Press-release-1-1.pdf https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...
- gumby 5y agoThis case didn’t only inspire documentaries but also inspired the song “Dire Wolf” by the Grateful Dead.
- watertom 5y agoThe Zodiac didn't inspire the song, the Hound of the Baskerville's inspired the song. "So the Zodiac actually emerged some months after the song was finished" Story behind the song "Dire Wolf" http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2012/10/dire-wolf-1969.html http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2012/10/dire-wolf-1969.html
- gumby 5y agoThe full quotation from the page you linked to is, “So the Zodiac actually emerged some months after the song was finished – but, as we’ll see, Garcia immediately made the connection between the killer and the song in live shows that October, when Zodiac frenzy gripped San Francisco. (He was recording pedal steel in the studio for CS&N on October 24; and on October 26 he mentions the Zodiac and “paranoid fantasies” onstage; so his memory of driving home in fear seems to be quite literal.)” Is a song, especially a Dead song, finished when the pen leaves the paper?
- julienchastang 5y agoHow about using this same forensic team to determine the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto :-)
- real_satoshi 5y agoLook, I don't know why this keeps coming up. I am not the zodiac killer.
- technocratius 5y agoPlease don't try to turn this place into reddit.
- dane-pgp 5y agoPlease try to turn Reddit into this place.
- spoonjim 5y agoI'll need some more evidence to believe it. They're strongly citing the "scars" on his forehead which, to my eye, look a lot like the wrinkles on anyone's forehead.
- philwelch 5y agoIf you look closely, different people don't tend to have matching forehead wrinkles.
- spoonjim 5y agoYes, but these photos are so low resolution that it’s not clear they’re exactly matching here, either. And it’s not clear that a police sketch has accurate forehead wrinkles. I could not describe my wife’s forehead wrinkles to a sketch artist, for example.
- caymanjim 5y agoIs anyone familiar with Robert Graysmith's books on the Zodiac Killer? The Fincher film "Zodiac" is based on Graysmith's research/obsession. I don't think the film mentions anyone named Poste at all. I'm wondering if he ever came across Graysmith's radar.
- irrational 5y agoOh good, Ted "Cancun" Cruz will finally be put into prison. In all seriousness, my daughter in college was in a psychology class where they were talking about serial killers. The Zodiac killer came up and a guy in the class said, in all seriousness, "Isn't Ted Cruz the Zodiac killer?"
- outside1234 5y agoTed Cruz?
- Bayart 5y agoDavid Oranchak's video last on his, Sam Blake's and Jarl Van Eycke's cracking of Cipher Z-340 last year : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o
- newsclues 5y agoYeah looking forward to seeing what he has to say about this!
- johncessna 5y agoWeird, I just finished watching Veritasium's [1] latest video which featured the techniques for finding the Golden State Killer, and saw this one come across the feed. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT18KJouHWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT18KJouHWg
- nick_ 5y agoMr. Zodiac creates spooky mysteries even still...
- DaveSapien 5y agoNice try Ted Cruz...
- ncmncm 5y agoNow that we have maybe identified somebody who killed, what, 37 people?, let's start identifying individuals responsible for millions of more horrendous deaths, often drawn out over months of suffering, and maybe try to stop them. The guys who first put lead in gasoline are long dead already. There were people who fought getting it out of the gasoline, and they are mostly dead, by now, too. Likewise, leaded paint. That was banned in 1978. Thousands of people are still being killed by paint exposure, though, many indirectly by violent tendencies induced by lead paint exposure, which people still experience, by the millions, every day. Lots of people fought tooth and nail to keep people in doubt about tobacco smoke causing lung cancer. They are mostly dead. The top academic in statistics was one of those, and was personally responsible for decades of denial that observational study could determine causation, fetishizing random-controlled trials, RCTs. (RCTs are great, but anybody who insists that only RCTs can demonstrate causation is a fetishist.) He's dead too, but his legacy lives on, still killing people en mass. The people who started hydrogenating vegetable oils, starting with waste cottonseed oil, are long dead. But trans fats, produced by hydrogenation, were only (technically) banned from the US diet in 2017. That was an outcome of Fred Kummerow's entire career: he knew in the '50s that trans fats were poison, and worked for decades to get them banned. He died in 2016. I say "technically" because certain corporations have special dispensation to continue poisoning people. Maybe, catch them? Maybe, catch whoever fought the 2017 ban, who had poisoned people for many decades before, and sought to continue? They are mostly still alive. The biggest public health problem in the US today, killing way more than COVID-19, comes from (being precise!) consumption of fructose without adequate accompanying fiber. The sodas, Coke/Pepsi the biggest, but also juice, apple, orange, cranberry, Red Bull, Monster, are worst. But sugar, which is half fructose, is added to practically everything nowadays, not just breakfast cereal. Almost the whole food industry is devoted to stripping out fiber and selling the rest; when "the rest" has, or gets added, sugar, it becomes slow poison. (Robert Lustig videos on Youtube are a great way to start learning about this. He has books out, too. Lustig is an endocrinologist, the smartest kind of medical doctor.) One of the reasons sugar is added to everything is that we were told for decades that saturated fat was bad for us. (Another is that sugar production is massively subsidized, so is the cheapest ingredient.) All the stuff blamed on sat fat turns out to be caused, instead, by the trans fats and sugar. The saturated fat is not only totally harmless, it is important for brain function, so its loss compounds the problem. Thus, the people taking fiber out of and putting sugar into everything are the biggest current mass killers. Likewise, everybody maintaining sugar production subsidies. Stringing them up may be an over-reaction. Anyway stopping them seems like a good idea. At least, require fructose-content and fructose vs. fiber labeling? Think about them next time the news is full of somebody killing a dozen people. Is a dozen bad, but millions A-OK?
- swayvil 5y ago"Investigators" is one of those utterly ambiguous yet powerfully dominating terms, like "Authorities" and "Scientists". We build our epistemological hierarchies like it's 2000 BC. (Heck, like 2Billion BC, if you think of knowledge as a kind of termite-mound. Memes are the new pheromones). Fancy cellphones make no diff.
- aerovistae 5y agoThis seems super dubious. I just watched the 2007 film Zodiac this week so it's recently on my mind. The prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, has so much incriminating evidence against him that it's just nuts to me that anyone considers this anything but a solved case. Seriously, just read this: https://zodiackiller.fandom.com/wiki/Arthur_Leigh_Allen#Incriminating_Evidence https://zodiackiller.fandom.com/wiki/Arthur_Leigh_Allen#Incr... Most importantly of the list, a guy he shot who lived picked him out of a set of photos and said he was certain that was the man who shot him. Like....how can you go through that list and come to any other conclusion? It seems very clear that it was just procedural error by the police that let him get away with it back then. When investigators contacted him anew in 1992, he suddenly died of heart failure before they could interview him.
- spurgu 5y agoYeah I saw the movie as well a couple of weeks ago and the OP article doesn't shine light on much at all.
- jonny_eh 5y ago> When investigators contacted him anew in 1992, he suddenly died of heart failure before they could interview him. What are you implying? If anything.
- aerovistae 5y agoEither medication-induced suicide or massive stress spike. It's very convenient timing to die.
- jonny_eh 5y agoConvenient for who?
- aerovistae 5y agoAre you.... A stan for Arthur Leigh Allen?
- anigbrowl 5y agoFinally identifying the Zodiac killer is something of an approximately annual ritual by now See also: Voynich manuscript secrets finally revealed, who was DB Cooper, etc. etc. Mainstream journalists love these articles because it's a way to recycle an old story while only adding 1 or 2 details and a quote, knowing devotees will jump on and amplify it.
- ForTheTimeBeing 5y agoThe likeness of the shape & angling of their brows is striking.
- iou 5y agohttps://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Zodiac-Killer-case-solved-Case-Breakers-16514228.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Zodiac-Killer-ca...
- spoonjim 5y agoI cannot even fathom the evil required to kill a real life human being just for a sick moment of "fun" or whatever it is. I'm almost hoping that they've got the wrong guy and that the real one is alive so they can catch him and execute him.
- ramblerman 5y agoDo you sense no irony whatsoever in your statement?
- spoonjim 5y agoNot at all. The idea that punishment = crime would imply that imprisonment is morally equivalent to kidnapping, or that a fine is morally equivalent to robbery. I don’t subscribe
- nsonha 5y agoShould we ban media coverage and making movies, books etc about this kind of thing? I don't think it helps improving public awareness as much as it gives these psychopaths the idea that what they do is cool.
- lbriner 5y ago40 people to solve an old case that people already suspected was carried out by someone who has now died doesn't seem like a judicious use of time and money, unless they did it for free. Los Angeles has an entire warehouse of unsolved cases, wouldn't it be nice for those people to provide bits of insight into those cases instead?
- dmos62 5y agoI read the linked article https://www.foxnews.com/us/cold-case-zodiac-killer-identified-murder https://www.foxnews.com/us/cold-case-zodiac-killer-identifie.... It's just so bad. If they have actual evidence, they haven't presented it on Fox News.