Infamous Zodiac Killer Unmasked After 50 Years In Breakthrough Cold Case Investigation

A team of more than 40 specialists investigating decades-old cold cases have successfully identified the notorious "Zodiac Killer," who was accused of at least 37 murders and known for leaving then-unsolvable riddles to the media and police in the late 1960s.

The Case Breakers, a team of former law enforcement investigators, journalists, and military intelligence officers, have unmasked the "Zodiac Killer," one of America's most prolific serial murderers, as a man named Gary Francis Poste, who died in 2018, Fox News reported.

Previous investigations have linked the "Zodiac Killer" to at least five murders in 1968 and 1969 in the San Francisco area but the serial killer claimed to have murdered 37 victims via complex ciphers in letters mailed to regional newspapers and law enforcement, which he also used to give birth to his alias.

Some of the sent letters included cryptograms with two remaining unsolved to this day. Authorities successfully cracked the code in 1969 and another in 2020, which was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle by the Zodiac years earlier.

"I hope you are having lots of fun trying to catch me. I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me," the decrypted message read.

"So you've got to know Gary's full name to decipher these anagrams," Jen Bucholtz, a former Army counterintelligence agent who works on cold cases, said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."

Following years of digging, the Case Breakers uncovered new forensic evidence and photos from Poste's darkroom, with one image featuring the notable scars on his forehead that match those on a sketch of the Zodiac, Fox13 noted.

Police marked the first of the confirmed Zodiac killings in December 1968 after a man and woman were shot dead in a car in Benicia, California, which followed another fatal shooting on July 4, 1969, in Vallejo that left a woman dead and a man with serious injuries.

Then later that year, another couple was knifed near a lake, leaving the surviving male victim with multiple stab wounds.

According to TMZ, Poste died at the age of 80 from sepsis, septic shock, dysphagia, and vascular dementia in 2018, as indicated in his death certificate. The document also noted that the man also suffered hypertension, osteoporosis, hypothyroidism, and atrial fibrillation before his Aug. 23, 2018, passing.