The FBI says that the Zodiac Killer case is still open despite claims from a group of specialists that they believe they have identified the killer.
“The Zodiac Killer case remains open. We have no new information to share,” the FBI’s San Francisco office told The Hill in a statement on Thursday.
“At this time we are not identifying potential suspects for this open investigation,” Adam Lobsinger, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department, told The Hill in a statement.
Dubbed the Case Breakers, the group of specialists said in a statement on Wednesday that they believe the identity of the Zodiac Killer is Gary Poste, a man who died three years ago. The group claims that scars on the Zodiac Killer’s forehead look similar to scars on Poste’s forehead when comparing images from Poste’s dark room and other forensic evidence.
The group has also claimed that Poste was likely the Zodiac Killer because Zodiac letters were also decoded, allegedly showing that Poste was the person behind the infamous five murders that took place in the late 1960s in the San Francisco Bay area and have riddled law enforcement officials and media ever since.
The group also pushed a now-debunked theory that the Zodiac Killer was responsible for the death of Cheri Jo Bates, a teenager who was found dead two years after the Zodiac killings.
“Is there a chance that [the Case Breakers suspect] killed Cheri Jo Bates? No,” Riverside Police Officer Ryan Railsback told the San Francisco Chronicle. “If you read what they [the Case Breakers] put out, it’s all circumstantial evidence. It’s not a whole lot.”
Railsback told the Chronicle that, along with the FBI, the department had worked on debunking theories that claimed that Bates had been killed by the Zodiac killer and said that since August authorities were offering a cash reward to anyone who had information on Bates’s killer.
The Chronicle also spoke with an expert who worked with FBI officials to crack a cipher about the Zodiac in December and said that it was unlikely that the anagram that was decoded by the group of specialists referred to Poste because anagrams are convoluted and could include a variety of names.