As of today, I did not have any response from authorities on my proposed solutions. Ziraoui politely emailed back: “Long-time Zodiac sleuth (sic) are more skeptical, but one can wonder about their lack of bias (sic) or scientific credentials. I asked Ziraoui by email last week what kind of response he’d gotten, considering the hostility his theory drew from online forums (“It’s a waste of time,” Mike Morford, who runs the popular, told me). Kaye, who also used the name Kane, died in 2010. He said, “the Zodiac identity could have been solved” and named Lawrence Kaye, whom amateur sleuths have scrutinized before, as the killer. Ziraoui emailed me in February from his suburban Paris home with his theory, a few days after Le Point magazine in France wrote about it. My sources at the heart of the investigation - all under orders not to discuss the Zodiac because it’s an open homicide case - say they believe there’s nothing to the theory by French engineer Fayçal Ziraoui. Then, like with virtually all the other tips that roll in, the fever faded. The New York Times ran a story on it last month, and the perpetually astonished world of crime buffs got all excited for a few days.

The latest of these tips made a splash when a French engineer said he’d solved the last two uncracked ciphers, known as Z32 and Z13, after just two weeks of trying. And the spooky ciphers the Zodiac mailed to The Chronicle as he was stabbing and shooting five people to death in the Bay Area in 1968-69? Those have been decoded in hundreds of ways, naming hundreds of suspects far beyond the only one the cops ever took seriously enough to name - Arthur Leigh Allen, a convicted child molester in Vallejo who died in 1992 without being charged. Or one of the cops who investigated the case. Others say it’s their father - that’s a particularly popular theory. I’ve got piles of letters saying the Zodiac is the creepy neighbor upstairs or down the street. And just like the tide, each wave is urgent and utterly different. Zodiac Killer tips roll in like the tide, month after month, in emails, phone calls, texts, books, Twitter messages, snail mail. ASSOCIATED PRESS Show More Show Less 2 of2Ī letter published by The Chronicle on April 22, 1970, includes a cypher that the Zodiac hints will give away his identity. A card mailed to The Chronicle by the Zodiac in 1969 included a letter and a cryptogram.

Zodiac killer cipher