"Case Breakers" Group Claims It's Identified the Zodiac Killer, and Linked Him to a Sixth Murder

Just in time, huh?

Just kidding. But the man they claim was the Zodiac died in 2018.

It wasn't the guy the David Fincher movie depicted as the killer.

A cold-case task force claims it has identified the notorious Zodiac Killer, who terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s and taunted authorities with cryptic notes.

Investigators with the Case Breakers told Fox News that the group -- led by former FBI agents and retired law enforcement officials -- has identified the infamous killer as Gary Francis Poste, who died in 2018.

They also tied the infamous serial killer to a sixth murder in Southern California.

I gotta tell you, the evidence they present is very weak. One claim is:

In one [of the Zodiac's notes to the media], the letters of Poste's full name were removed to reveal an alternate message, a Case Breakers investigator told Fox News.

I don't know what the specifics are but I have read about amateur codebreakers -- including Graysmith, the cartoonist from the movie -- who would invent "codebreaking rules" to break Zodiac's codes. These rules were nonce rules -- not really "rules" at all, just them making up whatever rule was needed to "solve" the cipher.

"Take out all the H's and add three G's." And this would produce a message, which they would claim was the solution to the cipher.

But they weren't. At all. It was just people making up random steps to make a message out of a jumble of letters. They themselves were writing the message by choosing this random rule and now this new random rule to impose a false order on the ciphers.

I can't say exactly what happened here, but the notion that by removing the letters of this guy's full name you get an "alternate message" sounds like it could be more of this sort of writing-you-own-message messugas.

Here are two other offers of evidence:

A wristwatch with paint splatter thought to have been worn by the killer was recovered at the scene of Bates' murder -- and Poste had painted homes for more than four decades, according to the cold-case squad.

In addition, a heel print from a military-style boot at the murder scene matched his and others found at the Zodiac crime scenes, Fox News reported.

By the way, that watch left at the murder scene? That was found at the scene of the Bates murder, the one they're claiming is the sixth Zodiac killing.

In other words, they're claiming the Zodiac committed a crime no one has confirmed he committed (and which the Zodiac did not claim as his own), and then they use a piece of evidence from that scene to claim this Poste guy was the Zodiac.

The picture of this guy (at the link) does resemble the eyewitness sketches of Zodiac, but... the sketches of Zodiac show what I would call "a normal looking guy." So a lot of people are going to match those sketches.

Related: a serial killer has been identified in France, and it turns out it was a cop.

A former French military cop confessed in his suicide note that he was the sinister serial killer behind several rapes and murders dating back to the 1980s, reports said.

Francois Verove, 59, admitted he was "Le Grele'" or "The Pockmarked Man" as police closed in on him for crimes including the rape and murder of an 11-year-old in 1986, the French-language paper Le Parisien reported.

Verove killed himself Wednesday in the town of Grau-du-Roi with a fatal dose of medication after he had ducked a DNA test that could've linked him to the long-unsolved crimes, Le Parisien said.

...

"The Pockmarked Man" is believed to be behind the 1986 rape and murder of 11-year-old Cecile Bloch in Fountainebleau, according to the BBC. The girl's body was found stabbed to death in the basement of the apartment building where her family lived, the report said.

...

DNA linked "The Pockmarked Man" to other crimes, such as a 1987 double murder, the 1994 murder of 19-year old Karine Leroy and six rapes with victims as young as 11 years old, reports said.

Horrible.

On September 30, a British cop was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Sarah Everard.

He falsely claimed she was breaking covid curfew and arrested her. Then he drove her to a remote location, raped her, murdered her, and burned her body.

Feminists in Britain are claiming that this is somehow the fault of "The Patriarchy," as if men were protecting this guy.

It is true that women who worked with this guy gave him the nickname "The Rapist" because he gave off an evil, weird vibe and made them uncomfortable. And yes, that vibe was correct in this case.

And I'd say, as a general matter, that I do trust the feelings of people as regards this kind of thing.

But this sort of "vibe," while it should be trusted on a personal level, cannot be given the status of legal proof by a government. Are feminists really claiming that if a weird-seeming guy gives women the creeps, he should be fired? Or thrown in jail?

As "pre-crime," as Sargon calls it?

Again, I do believe that people's unconscious minds really do pick up on signals and vibes. But... you can't throw a guy who never committed a crime in jail because of that. Or are they really arguing that Feminine Intuition is now legal evidence?

This also seems to be avoiding a much more salient issue: When the government has the power to surveil you and interfere with your personal actions and movements at such an intimate scale, and sends out its law enforcement (and in Australia, its military) to harass and arrest citizens for merely moving around their neighborhoods -- you are creating the perfect hunting ground for psychopaths who have embedded themselves into the police.

But no, let's just talk about Muh Patriarchy.

posted by Ace at 02:52 PM

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