Investigators say they've finally identified the Zodiac Killer | Hacker News Reader

Investigators say they've finally identified the Zodiac Killer

fox13now.com

326 pointsafrcnc200 comments

So 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.

Apparently 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.

Also, 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

Wow. That guy in the glasses looks just like the police sketch.

The guy REALLY looks like the police sketches too. Almost perfectly the same, except for maybe a slight difference in nose width.

Does anyone else have issues with identifying and describing facial features. I have no problems recognizing people, but there’s no way I can verbalize them on a specific features basis. What kind of disorder do I have?

Perhaps the artists are trained to ask questions of witnesses that reveal details you wouldn't be able to give up unprompted?

I’ve had this exercise with my wife and I couldn’t even describe her nose, mouth, forehead or ears even though I see her everyday.

That’s fascinating to me. How would you describe your dreams (as in rem sleep dreams)?

I remember a podcast (I think it was Every Little Thing) where someone described being a police sketch artist and it very much involved a lot of question asking, a lot of experience with identifying specific traits that stand out, and refining it over time.

Draw a nose, was the bridge wider or thiner? With a lot of experience they seem to be able to get the "right" details close-enough that it can identify say, a large handful of people for whom those that might report them can feel more confident in say, calling the FBI before reporting their uncle.

This casts a wider net than say, directly identifying them, but it helps isolate the possible suspects well enough to be worth doing when you've got nothing else.

I think that's fairly typical for people who aren't used breaking down images into their constituent parts. In the language of computer vision, it would be like saying that our visual cortexes don't need to know how to segment a face into detailed descriptions of eyes, a nose, a mouth, etc., in the same way as it is necessary to be able to segment a wolf from a forest scene.

But it can also be trained. See, e.g., Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.

Thank you for the book recommendation. My internal visual system is impaired unless I’m on certain drugs. I’m super excited to hear it can be trained.

Have a search for "aphantasia" and see if your experience matches.

I’d say it sounds more like prosopagnosia.

I doubt it’s either of those. I can recognize a person at a distance but ask me to describe if their nose bridge is wider or narrower and I literally wouldn’t be able to tell you unless it’s significantly exaggerated.

The question should be, if shown an example nose drawing could you say whether the bridge should be wider or narrower?

Or if shown two noses with different width bridges, can you point to the one that is closer to being right?

Police sketch artist scenes in movies and TV shows are incredibly abbreviated compared to reality, which often features a lot more iteration and discarded sketches precisely because a lot of people are in the "I'll know it when I see it" group.

That explains it. Yeah, I'd be able to point to something that's closer to what I saw.

i have partial aphantasia (I think) and I am quite good at recognizing faces, but I couldn't necessarily visualize one to describe it if not looking at the face

Unfortunately, "aphantasia" is now labeled as "the inability to voluntarily create a mental picture in your head". That's from Google.

The primary problem with this label is that this could include some people who see involuntary imagery (like people), but don't do what is essentially creative visualization. For those people, they "know" the experience of seeing things in mind.

Then there are the rest of us "aphants" that don't ever see images internally, at all. For the people I've found with this ability I would say none of them could hear things internally either. Not everyone has the ability to "rehear" things.

I spent a lot of years asking people about how they saw things internally and it just got weirder the more I asked. Eventually, I just decided that everyone thinks differently, with various "side models" that allow them to see, hear, think and even smell things that aren't real.

> Then there are the rest of us "aphants" that don't ever see images internally, at all.

What about remembering things that you have already seen? Let's say I ask you to watch, for example, the Star Trek TNG opening sequence. Can you "rewatch" it?

I can. I can also sort of picture 'creative' images, to an extent.

However, conjuring up faces of people I've met is pretty difficult. Even my dog, which I find easier than people, can still take different shapes that are not real and I can't 'fix' it until I look at her again. If it is a person that I've only seldom met, I won't be able to recall the face at all, even if I can still recognize the person. It doesn't matter that I met the person a minute ago - if I don't make a very conscious effort to remember, I probably won't recognize them at all (and will definitely not recall the image). If I am under stress, that's even worse.

I've always chalked that up to 'being bad with faces', but there maybe something more at play, it seems.

I've some sort of stock graphics library in my mind.

For example, I cannot visualize the apple I have in my hand, even if I consciously study it for a few minutes and note out the shape and colouration before closing my eyes. However, I can visualize "an apple", I even get a choice between clipart version or realistic stock photo version of a red delicious or an granny smith. I cannot conjure up the faces of people I know, or even my own face, but I can bring up "young adult asian male" "elderly white female" etc.

When I looked up aphantasia, one of the test was "can you visualize waves hitting the beach" and I was wondering if the Toei logo because I can rewatch that anytime I want, but I can't visualize a generic beach with waves.

I've found it challenging to pin down someone about whether they see stuff internally or not. It's as if people who do aren't quite aware of what they are doing is happening, but if they think about it (like breathing) then they are like "oh yeah, I see it!"

Anything "built up" from a mental concept, and seen as an image, would be exactly what I don't do.

For me, the visualization is a mix of still frames, caricatures and abstractions.

Yeah, the answer is always "no I don't see it". That is because I don't build side models in my mind, from thinking mind. While awake, I build ONE model in mind, from what my sensors feed it. When the sensors go dark, I see darkness and hear nothing.

While falling asleep I'm able to have hypnagogic visualizations. I do dream (but can't re-see the dreams) and psychedelics haven't produced anything much in the way of imagery. Maybe sounds and some slight alteration of the model, like movement or some slight color enhancement.

I don't know whether your experience is similar to mine, but I can't visualize faces at all, even of someone I have just been looking at. I have no issues recognizing people or visualizing things other than faces, so neither aphantasia nor prosopagnosia match.

This comment describes me perfectly.

Aphantasia is a spectrum.

I can’t visualize anything really. It’s like I just think about its shape in an abstract since but I don’t actually visualize anything it’s all words and thoughts in my head, no images.

Can you close your eyes and visualize a red, three dimensional star rotating?

Yes until I also visualized a derpy dog orbiting it whose tongue was hanging out.

What is a 3 dimensional star? A star is a 2D shape, so this statement is ambiguous

Nope I just think about a star and it rotating but there is no visualization or images involved

There was an article about this here on hn some time ago. People who don’t have a mind’s eye.

I heard this very often and am always quite curious about it, as I cant relate. Whenever I imagine something it's a mix of abstract, foggy stuff and vivid clear images. I don't "see" them, I think/dream them like replaying a visual input without involving the eyes.

Sounds like you have asphantasia. (I also have it)

I took think id be terrible at this. I doubt I'd describe my own face to a sketch artist well, let alone a fleeting meeting with a stranger..

Part of the sketch artist's job is to work with people who aren't familiar describing images.

Not a disorder. Totally normal. This is why cognitive models distinguish between visual and verbal processing.

I've always had a similar experience to this and also don't believe it is the same thing as either aphantasia or prosopagnosia.

I can consciously imagine things (and people and places) that I'm not seeing right now. I'm not super-great at it, but I can certainly do it. I can also easily and reliably recognize individual people.

But the idea of describing any individual detail of people's appearance even while looking at them (let alone from memory) seems extraordinarily difficult for me, and has since childhood. My stepmother was an artist and would sometimes try to question me about this, suggesting that I could learn to do it but hadn't.

I think I agree with other comments in this thread that conscious awareness of visual details in a scene is a separate skill from any form of recognition or recall -- especially, or most dramatically, for faces, but really for any visual percept as well. Maybe for any sensory perception: for example, I could imagine someone who can recognize individual voices, or musical instruments in a performance in which several different instruments are present, but who can't describe what makes one different from another (perhaps not even at the level of which instrument or voice has a higher-pitched fundamental tone than another's?).

I think I rely a ton on my visual system's chunking and abstraction and usually have little to no conscious awareness of any individual visual detail (especially for faces, but really for anything), unless I make some active effort to bring visual details to consciousness. I remember telling a friend in high school that I usually experienced visual scenes in a kind of wireframe summary by default (although this is just a metaphor, since I don't mean to deny that I noticed colors or textures), which she also found surprising and unfamiliar.

Edit: Like another commenter in this thread, my stepmother often recommended Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to me, so maybe I should work through it and try to develop my ability to notice visual features without interpreting them. :-)

I couldn’t describe this any better. Especially the visual chunking and abstraction.

I very much feel this way as well. I've never quite articulated it as well as you have and it has given me some insight into my own behaviors.

I think this is why I'm what is described as a "power gamer". When I play video games I'm always looking for optimal strategies, the most powerful combinations of items and skills, etc. While I definitely can at times enjoy the scenery and graphical beauty of video games, I often feel as if I'm "staring through" the game as presented right into the game as actuality when playing, hardly processing the graphics at all past being some kind of representation of the game itself.

I can really relate to this. Thnx.

I have literally had this thought yesterday for the first time. If I had to describe someone's face to police... I couldn't.

I mean, they've got 2 eyes, a nose, lips, that's the best I could do :D

I feel the same way. I know there are purported to be disorders that affect the ability to recognize different faces, but I have to ask myself whether or not I’m much worse than the average, or if everyone is bad at it and I’m just more aware of that. Study after study since the 1960s has all but proven that humans just aren’t good at this and eyewitness testimony is very often wrong, yet we still insist that we “know what we saw.”

This isn't an activity many people have to do often (verbally classifying facial features), so it isn't that surprising to me that untrained people have difficulty with it. Obviously I don't know your specific experience, but I'd think your experience is the norm rather than the exception.

In my mind, it's similar to musicians training solfege or chemists training in verbally classifying a smell: it aids both their understanding and their skill. It absolutely blew my mind to have a perfumist friend of mine describe smells to me as we were walking through the city. I'd never have guessed the depth and complexity of olfactory sensations that us humans are capable of with the right training.

The police sketch is from a 2 children that watched from across the street at night. I have never believed the sketch is accurate. The sketch also shows a skinnier person but everyone described him as a bit overweight.

No one ever said he had forehead scars though, if he did...he'd be much easier to identify.

Looking 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.myftpuplo...

This is exactly why I want to see more info about the cipher they solved (that and my innate interest in ciphers.) The claim is that when you remove all the letters of his full name, there is a 2nd message hidden there.

This is exactly the sort of thing I would immensely like to get ahold of and apply some stochastic models to, in addition to just knowing more of the specifics.

In any case, if they have truly deciphered a message that implicates him, it would be significantly more than circumstantial.

What really pains me is the paucity of substantial information backing up the claim, that and the story seems to have been broken by TMZ, ugh.

Other 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.

I 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.

Don't forget Jack The Ripper!

>Don't forget Jack The Ripper!

That's a mystery long solved, friend[0].

[0] https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Sebastian#History

Emmy award nominated Babylon 5 episode! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comes_the_Inquisitor

One of the best, among many, of the series.

At least the Zodiac killer is recent enough for uncovering their identity to feel sort of feasible. That said, I personally find the idea of it being Ted Cruz so amusing that I see little reason to amend my head-canon, regardless of evidence presented.

I believe that would require time travel.

"Asked how a teenage boy could've committed a crime more than two decades ago, a police spokesman explained 'He's very clever.'"

I’m honestly so tired of hearing this lame conspiracy theory/in-joke. It’s so dumb and trollish and barely funny, all it does is give ammo to repubs who think dems are wackadoos. Fellow dems, this ain’t it.

That's cool and all, but I personally enjoy it because of Ted's personality specifically, not his specific political affiliation. And also who cares? It's clearly a joke, one that happens to appeal to my particular sense of humor.

There are oodles of topics that provide plenty of political ammunition, but anybody who takes this one seriously is an idiot.

Sorry, but I just recently watched a crowd of angry trolls sell memes and Internet in-jokes as facts to droves of angry Facebook users, and then they combined forces to elect a fascist. I no longer believe this kind of crap is inconsequential.

I don't think you're helping your case with this comment.

It really is all in good fun. Even Ted Cruz takes part.

https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1337480518074503170?s=20

https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1408133090397114375?s=20

> my head cannon

The phrase you're thinking of is "headcanon" (cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon), although "head cannon" evokes a much funnier mental image.

Despite knowing it was the same base as canonical, it somehow never occurred to me to spell it that way. Thanks for the heads up, but since google hasn't decided it approves of "headcanon" I was forced to compromise in my correction.

https://xkcd.com/1401/

I find this quite convincing:

> In one note, the letters of Poste's full name were removed to reveal an alternate message, [Jen Bucholtz, a former Army counterintelligence agent] 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 want to see the details because there have been some dubious decipherments before that were a real stretch, so I want to see how plausible the ananagram is.

I don't understand, so they have a deciphered letter from zodiac, they removed the individual letters of Gary's name from the message and got a 2nd message? Is that right?

I think that one message could not be fully decoded, there seemed to be some cruft in it. My guess is this cruft was no longer in the decoded message once the letters of his name are removed.

This would indeed be convincing, but I can't seem to find any further information on it.

Here is the Case Breaker's blog announcement[1]. And here is a press release from them with some details of their work[2].

I'd really like to see this in action, but it seems like they haven't published it yet. Am I missing it?

[1] https://thecasebreakers.org/2021/09/the-last-zodiac-victim/

[2] https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...

I'm missing something here. I could create a coded message that required apeace to decipher. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm you.

But there's no reasonable motive for the Zodiac Killer to do so. If he wanted to frame Gary Poaste, he would plant evidence that was more obvious. If he wanted to toy with the detectives who were trying to discover his identity though--which is well within the pattern of behavior observed from the Zodiac Killer--this is exactly the sort of thing he would do.

Such an important angle to consider this from. Until there’s a DNA match how do we know the zodiac killer just didn’t use the name of some guy he knew? Especially a seemingly uncommon name (maybe it was common at the time)

If he knew one of their suspects names and decided to fuck with them and throw them off the trail, yes, he would use someone else's name. Your leap to judgement of "it must be Gary" is just as much of a leap as "it might not be" - both rely on "knowing" the Zodiac's motives, which no one does, because he's not been identified.

No but it requires you to know apeace. Could be random letters with usernames - ok. But it's a different story with full names in the 1960s. Could have still just browsed the telephone book, but together with other hints it adds weight to the argument.

> I find this quite convincing

I would find evidence of it actually convincing, which you would think would be foregrounded somewhere. And yet, mysteriously, it is not. This suggests that the claim is bullshit.

Stats or it didn't happen. That kind of seemingly incredible coincidence can sometimes just be the mind playing tricks on people who are unaware of how many ways a similar result could have occurred by chance.

> anagrams

That strikes me as a major red flag. With anagrams you can place letters in any order you choose. A lot more cheatable than a consistent cipher solution.

Are anagrams typical of zodiac findings?

From the article

> 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."

To me it's pretty coincidental if the letters for this person's full name just happen to be this person who also has other characteristics matching the description including facial scars from one of the police sketches.

#1 This is a pretty big claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And yet there is no evidence.

-or-

#2 It also sounds like they're saying if you remove various letters of the alphabet from a cipher, you can get a readable message. This is not notable.

#2 seems very notable

The facial scars in the sketch vs the photo seem like a huge stretch to me personally. It looks like they were just sketching normal forehead lines. And sketches are not exactly reliable in the first place. It really seems like someone desperately looking for a pattern where there isn't one.

It 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.

It 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.

The 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.

> 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.

If the group wants to incurr the costs what does it matter?

Because if they start doing it, they'll get more requests to do it in the future. And then they'd have to make more process around it and pay people to execute that process, and then they're in the business of selling small bits of criminal evidence to random cranks.

There is probably not an infinite supply of dna evidence, and testing it is destructive. So I can imagine they don’t want to testany plausible theory but save it for when they are really convinced.

It sounds like there's a little bit of presumed Zodiac-Killer DNA on his letters, and there's been some preliminary analysis of it. Hopefully this evidence is suggestive enough to justify a full comparison.

https://medium.com/@charlierusso23/why-has-dna-evidence-not-...

It's actually the same guy! The fox news video started auto-playing and they introduced their first guest as "Casebreakers head Tom Colbert, who IDed hijacker DB Cooper". So, yeah, I think based on that alone this is likely fake news.

> It's actually the same guy!

Holy shit! That made my day. I'm assuming he's saving the big reveal that he's bagged Bigfoot for Christmas.

He was as tenacious as a bull-dog when he once understood what he had to do, and indeed it was just this tenacity which has brought him to the top.

check out the press release from "The Case Busters"

https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...

I honestly found it borderline impossible to read or follow. It's a bunch of disjointed speculation and 'did you know you can get any barcode to equal 666'-levels of rambling.

I agree.

They haven't actually solved anything.

The "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.

That’s because they’re still solving them.

;)

their credentials are listed at end of this doc

https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...

Oh 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?"

I, personally, know of no hard evidence that could conclusively prove that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck_v._Eiland-Hall

I 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.

This 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.

brilliant

lmao, I am dying at this.

For anyone disinterested in giving any FOX site clicks, here's an alternative source:

https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Investigators-claim-thi...

I'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.)

Weird, 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

Mr. Zodiac creates spooky mysteries even still...

A 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?

Loads of prior HN discussions on the solving of his cipher:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

What 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.

Near 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.

This 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.

This 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?

"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.

Is 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.

David 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

Yeah looking forward to seeing what he has to say about this!

I'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.

If you look closely, different people don't tend to have matching forehead wrinkles.

Yes, 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.

And makers of true crime podcasts everywhere rejoiced...

I read the linked article 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.

Finally 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.

Now 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?

> Robert Lustig videos on Youtube are a great way to start learning about this.

Or off YT:

https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/w/feioCyaQEZ1ogHK1oNJM4K

> Thus, the people taking fiber out of and putting sugar into everything are the biggest current mass killers. Stringing them up may be an over-reaction. Maybe convicting them would be, too? Anyway stopping them seems like a good idea. Think about them next time the news is full of somebody killing a dozen people. Is a dozen bad, but a million A-OK?

IMO simply not compelling millions of people to pay them for it would be a good start. Defund all the agencies that promote poison, whether by subsidizing corn syrup, villianizing natural saturated fats to sell trans fats and sugar, or conspiring with drug companies and corrupt researchers to sell addictive substances (as discussed this week: https://dynomight.net/alcohol-trial/).

I like to play the videos at 1.5x-2x speed, with subtitles. That makes a 90-minute lecture take a more easily found 60 or 45 minutes.

Tobacco advertising is banned in the US, and tobacco use is in decline there. (The US State Department works to outlaw bans in other countries. True!) A ban on advertising sugar-laced products -- high sugar-to-fiber ratio products, specifically -- ought to help.

I like 3× speed with subs and librubberband (automagically speeding faster through silence and slowing down on fast speech, automatically activated by mpv's librubberband-helper plugin).

After reading the lies and cover-ups the NIAAA, NIH, etc. were involved in relating to the alcohol study, adding more bureaucrats to enforce new bans is about the last thing I'd try to help.

TIL librubberband! So, like

  $ mpv --af=rubberband --speed=2 --demuxer-readahead-secs=60 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpNU72dny2s'

Food labeling requirements have to be counted as a success, as far as they go. And, I find it hard to criticize the execution of the tobacco advertising ban. Stringing people up has been seen to work, but most often the wrong ones get strung up.

> The saturated fat is not only totally harmless,

I was under the impression that you should still keep a balance between unsaturated and saturated fats to keep cholesterol in check?

I have not heard of any such thing. Inuit who have never had access to unsaturated fat do not start getting heart disease until they adopt a supermarket-driven diet.

Cholesterol as a measure of health is driven to some degree by Big Pharma, who would like to have everyone taking statins for the whole rest of their lives. Certainly, dietary cholesterol is absolutely harmless, always has been.

According to an article on PubMed, that's largely a myth, based on early, faulty studies [1].

[1] "Low incidence of cardiovascular disease among the Inuit--what is the evidence?"

Should 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.

40 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?

I 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.

From 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.

I'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.

This is a feature, not a bug.

This has probably also lost us virtuosos in other more positive fields.

I 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

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Zodiac-Killer-ca...

This 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#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.

Yeah I saw the movie as well a couple of weeks ago and the OP article doesn't shine light on much at all.

> When investigators contacted him anew in 1992, he suddenly died of heart failure before they could interview him.

What are you implying? If anything.

Either medication-induced suicide or massive stress spike. It's very convenient timing to die.

Convenient for who?

Are you.... A stan for Arthur Leigh Allen?

No, I'm just honestly wondering what you're suggesting. Did he commit suicide in a sneaky way?

Maybe because I haven't followed the case at all but: that wiki says: "Allen was cleared through a comparison of DNA, fingerprints, palm prints, and handwriting."

Most of the evidence seems to be a friend of his claiming he said all kinds of things about wanting to kill people. His friend might have just been nuts.

There's a ton even ignoring his maybe crazy friend...

>Allen was allegedly in Riverside on the weekend when Cheri Jo Bates was murdered. He later claimed to be in Pomona when he heard of Bates' murder.

>Allen took his only sick day of the year on Nov.1, 1966 (Bates was murdered on Oct. 30, 1966).

>Told police he was going up to Berryessa on the day of the Hartnell/Shepard attack, but decided to go up the coast instead.

>Allen admitted to possessing bloody knives on the day of the Berryessa attack, claiming that he used them to kill chickens.

(other friend...) >Allen communicated to his friend Philip that he was fascinated with the idea of killing people. He believed that people were more challenging to kill than animals since they were more intelligent. Similar sentiments were communicated during the three-part cipher mailed to newspapers. Allen also mentioned to the police that his favourite book was The Most Dangerous Game, a book about killing humans and possibly alluded to in a Zodiac correspondence.

>In 1991, the search warrant for Allen's house found bomb diagrams and the same ingredients for bombs that were mentioned in a previous Zodiac letter.

>Karen Allen, his sister-in-law, stated that Allen would use the shortened "trigger mech" in place of "trigger mechanism," as well as spelling Christmas with two S's. Both idiosyncrasies appear in the Zodiac letter to Melvin Belli.

This person is either the most unlucky person in the world with all these random associations with the zodiac killer, or was the actual zodiac killer.

So no one from the film.

“ the Zodiac Killer as Gary Francis Poste, who passed away in 2018.”. He barely got away it seems if true.

bit unsettling hearing about his posse.

I 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.

Do you sense no irony whatsoever in your statement?

Not 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

The likeness of the shape & angling of their brows is striking.

How about using this same forensic team to determine the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto :-)

Well that's a relief. Now they can arrest and prosecute him!

> The Case Breakers say they have identified the Zodiac Killer as Gary Francis Poste, who passed away in 2018.

It would appear not.

I believe the parent comment was a sarcastic remark on that very fact.

Yeah, 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.

people on HN only use exclamation points in code or sarcasm

Thank you for pointing it out bluntly. For people like me, it does help to read the unwritten rules.

Someone 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.

/s (for those only reading the comment section)

Not sure if missing a /s but FTA:

   The Case Breakers say they have identified the Zodiac Killer as Gary Francis Poste, who passed away in 2018.

"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-identifie...

By 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."

One 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.

This part of the article actually made me more skeptical about the rest of the claims. The rest sounds like fairly convincing forensics, but then it veers off into rather outlandish conspiracy territory. And if you look at the earlier article on the "Case Breakers" site, the whole thing appears to have started in conspiracy territory: https://thecasebreakers.org/2021/09/the-last-zodiac-victim/

That's not to say that no such weapons cache exists. I imagine there must be plenty of outlaw-ish people in rural regions with sizable above- and underground collections of firearms. But often their boasts of paramilitary acumen tend to be rather overstated, so claims of a serial killer grooming posthumously loyal killing machines would require rather extraordinary proof.

Articles on the Case Breakers' site:

https://thecasebreakers.org/2021/10/cold-case-team-says-zodi...

https://thecasebreakers.org/2021/09/the-last-zodiac-victim/

Press release #1: https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...

This case didn’t only inspire documentaries but also inspired the song “Dire Wolf” by the Grateful Dead.

The 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

The 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?

Time 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.

Can't wait for Hollywood to make the new movie and change all the details of this new evidence for entertainment value.

I 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?

In 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.

I'm reminded of that scene in Hot Fuzz - "No luck catching them killers then?" .. "It's just the one killer actually!"

The 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com