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.
The Zodiac Killer is believed to be a California man who gave himself the nickname to conceal his identity from authorities.
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.
Case Breakers said they discovered Poste's identity after years of digging through new forensic evidence and his darkroom.
“I absolutely feel we solved this case,” Tom Colbert, a member of the Case Breakers, told The San Francisco Chronicle.
One image uncovered from the darkroom purportedly featured scars on Poste's forehead which match a sketch of the Zodiac.
The letters included complex ciphers – some of which haven't been officially solved 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.
“The Zodiac killer case remains open. We have no new information to share at the moment,” said the FBI.
Case Breakers is comprised of more than 40 former law enforcement investigators, journalists and military intelligence officers.
They also claim to have linked Poste – who died in 2018 – to a sixth killing hundreds of miles away that has never before been connected to the Zodiac.
Over the years, many independent sleuths have claimed to have decoded the Zodiac's true identity.
Cops and local media get hundreds of tips every year on potential suspects with many far fetched theories about who the killer could be.
One meme even claimed Texas Senator Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer.
In one note written by the killer, removing the letters of Poste's full name revealed an alternate message, according to former Army counterintelligence agent Jen Bucholtz.
"So you've got to know Gary's full name in order to decipher these anagrams," Bucholtz told Fox News.
"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.
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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