Zodiac Killer suspects


Thousands of men have been named as a possible suspect for the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified serial killer active between December 1968 and October 1969. The Zodiac murdered five known victims in the San Francisco Bay Area, operating in rural, urban, and suburban settings. He targeted three young couples and a lone male cab driver. The case has been described as "arguably the most famous unsolved murder case in American history", and has become both a fixture of popular culture and a focus for efforts by amateur detectives.
In 2012, The Guardian wrote that over 2,500 people have been brought up as a possible Zodiac suspect, and at least a half-dozen names were credible. The San Francisco Police Department had investigated an estimated 2,500 suspects by 2009. Richard Grinell, who runs the website Zodiac Ciphers, said in 2022 that "there are probably 50 or 100 suspects named every year".
While many theories regarding the identity of the Zodiac have been suggested, the only suspect authorities ever publicly named was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who died in 1992.

Background

The Zodiac Killer claimed in messages to newspapers to have committed thirty-seven murders. Investigators agree on seven confirmed assault victims, all in Northern California, of whom five died and two survived:
The Zodiac coined his name in a series of taunting messages that he mailed to regional newspapers, threatening killing sprees and bombings if they were not printed. He also said that he was collecting his victims as slaves for the afterlife. Some letters included cryptograms or ciphers; of the four codes he produced, two remain unsolved while the others were cracked in 1969 and 2020. The last confirmed Zodiac letter was sent in 1974, in which he claimed to have killed thirty-seven victims. He had said earlier that many of them were in Southern California, including Cheri Jo Bates, who was murdered in Riverside in 1966; a connection between the two has not been proven.

Arthur Leigh Allen

was a teacher and convicted child molester. He remains the only publicly named suspect by the police. Several of his friends have claimed that he had called himself The Zodiac, that he liked to shoot young couples in Lover's Lanes, and that he had aspirations to write a book about a serial killer named The Zodiac. Additionally, the timing of his imprisonment and the Zodiac's known correspondence with the police aligns perfectly. By far the lead most pursued by the police, he was the subject of several searches, but was never arrested. In the early 2000s, DNA and fingerprints believed to belong to the Zodiac were compared to Allen, excluding him. True crime author Robert Graysmith wrote two books in 1986 and 2002, in which Allen's culpability was strongly suggested. Zodiac, a 2007 film based on Graysmith's books, portrayed Allen as the likely killer.

Earl Van Best Jr.

In 2014, Gary Stewart and Susan Mustafa published a book, The Most-Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father... And Finding the Zodiac Killer, in which Stewart claimed his search for his biological father, Earl Van Best Jr., led him to conclude Van Best was the Zodiac. Stewart based his hypothesis on circumstantial evidence, including a composite sketch resembling Van Best, partial fingerprint and handwriting matches, encrypted messages in Zodiac letters, and partial DNA connections.
In 2020, the book was adapted for FX Network as a documentary series. To validate Stewart's claims, the producers enlisted private investigator Zach Fechheimer, who uncovered that Stewart had manipulated a police report and traced Van Best to being present in Europe during the Zodiac's known activities. Additionally, experts discredited the DNA analysis and the handwriting and fingerprint matches. The producers chose to withhold their findings until near the end of the documentary's production to minimize their impact on both the series and Stewart. Six months after production, director Kief Davidson stated that he thought Stewart's father was not the Zodiac, while executive producer Ross Dinerstein remained uncertain about Van Best's potential involvement.

Gary Francis Poste

In 2021, the Case Breakers, an independent group made up of around forty "former law enforcement officials, academics, journalists, and former military intelligence workers", claimed they had identified Gary Francis Poste, a man who died in 2018, as both the Zodiac and the murderer of Cheri Jo Bates. The Federal Bureau of Investigation stated that the case remained open and that there were "no new information to report". Local law enforcement expressed skepticism regarding the team's findings. Riverside investigator Ryan Railsback said the Case Breakers' claims largely relied on circumstantial evidence. Rumors about Poste as a suspect had been investigated by the SFPD in 2017. They visited his jail, but declined to say if they interviewed him. In 2023, the Case Breakers claimed an FBI whistleblower told them the bureau had considered Poste a suspect since 2016.
Poste was a veteran of the United States Air Force. He had a history of violence; he pushed his wife into a wall, breaking her pelvis, and a male relative claimed Poste tried to attack him with a hammer. Poste allegedly had a group of young male followers whom he trained to be "killing machines", and who often attacked animals. One piece of evidence used by the Case Breakers involved forehead scars that were supposedly present on both Poste and the Zodiac. Tom Voigt called the claims "bullshit", noting that no witnesses in the case described the Zodiac as having forehead scars. The Case Breakers also said that the Zodiac and Poste had the same shoe size, and claimed that DNA from the Bates murder would match Poste's.
Poste had been investigated as a suspect in the Zodiac case since at least 2014 by television news anchor Dale Julin. Julin filed affidavits in court that stated he interviewed Poste in 2017, and Poste admitted to being the Zodiac. The Union Democrat newspaper found the information in the affidavits to be unverifiable. Julin also claimed he used supposed anagrams found in the Zodiac's letters to find a tree where Poste, as the Zodiac, hanged alleged victim Donna Lass. Julin's solution for the codes contained Poste's name and gave the coordinates of a specific pine tree in a section of a campground in Zephyr Cove, Nevada. The tree in question had been gouged at the base. The Case Breakers partially based their research on Julin's book on the subject, Catching Zodiac, which was released in 2024.

Giuseppe Bevilacqua

In 2017, Italian journalist Francesco Amicone conducted an investigation that implicated Giuseppe "Joe" Bevilacqua, a retired U.S. Army sergeant and former superintendent of the Florence American Cemetery and Memorial, as a suspect in both the Zodiac and Monster of Florence cases. Bevilacqua had previously testified at the trial of suspect Pietro Pacciani in 1994. Starting in May 2017, Bevilacqua and Amicone began having multiple meetings; according to Amicone, Bevilacqua implied his responsibility for both cases in phone correspondence. Bevilacqua agreed with Amicone's request to turn himself in but later changed his mind. Citing professional ethics reasons, Amicone did not record the conversation. Amicone's inquiry was published in multiple Italian newspapers, and has been continued since then on his blog. Italian authorities dismissed their investigation into Bevilacqua in 2021. He died on December 23, 2022. Amicone claimed a DNA profile was sent to U.S. authorities investigating the Zodiac case in November 2023.

Lawrence Kane

Retired police detective Harvey Hines began investigating a man named Lawrence Kane in the 1980s. When shown a photo lineup, Kathleen Johns had identified Kane as the man who abducted her in 1970. Darlene Ferrin's sister Linda identified a photo of Kane as the man she said had once harassed Ferrin in a restaurant. After also seeing a photo of Kane, Officer Don Fouke said that Kane resembled the man he and Zelms had observed near the Stine murder scene more than any other person he had seen. Kane had lived in South Lake Tahoe, California, and worked at the Sahara Tahoe casino when alleged victim Donna Less worked there. Hines also believes that Kane was the abductor and killer of a woman named Dana Lull in Las Vegas, following her companion Roy Tophigh giving a description of a man that closely matched Kane. He had previously been arrested for voyeurism in 1961 and prowling in 1968, and had been diagnosed with impulse-control disorder after suffering brain injuries in a 1962 accident. Kane died in 2010.
In 2021, Fayçal Ziraoui, a French-Moroccan business consultant and engineer, claimed that he had solved the "Z13" and "Z32" ciphers. According to Ziraoui, the Z13 cipher reads "Kayr", in theory a typo of "Kaye", and the Z32 cipher gives a set of coordinates: "LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST." If the coordinate system used is "based on the earth's magnetic field not the more familiar geographic coordinates", it gives the location of a school in South Lake Tahoe, lining up with the cipher's intention of being the location of a bomb in a school. Many Zodiac sleuths disputed Ziraoui's findings, while the FBI and SFPD declined to comment on his hypothesis. Anonymous law enforcement officers investigating the Zodiac told the San Francisco Chronicle they did not believe the solutions were correct.