On November 30, 1966, the FBI received a strange report from a lower police department.
The report shows that someone anonymously declared to them that he was the perpetrator of a murder a month ago and that he would continue to commit the crime. Although the FBI was very angry with this provocation of the red fruit, they remembered the case a month ago and were full of worry.
The victim of that case, a female college student named Cheri, was killed the night before Halloween, when the FBI found 11 knives in her body, 7 of which were in the neck, so the police speculated that the killer wanted to cut her neck.
Although Cherie's nails contained the substance of suspected suspected dander, the FBI at that time could not find a good clue to solve the case based on this clue, as well as other traces at the scene, so the FBI police officers have been having headaches, but they did not expect that they had not yet found the clue to solve the case, and the murderer had begun to openly provoke.
But with the exception of another letter from the killer six months later (there were three letters from Cheri's father, the local newspaper, and the police station, which were short and arrogant: she must die, and more people will be killed), the murderer does not seem to have any actual action.
But just as everyone was about to forget about it, the murderer began to act again.
At the end of 1968, a young couple drove to a Christmas concert at a local high school, and after the concert, they did not go straight home, but took advantage of the night to play poker in the car, and as a result, someone attacked them with a gun, and they were killed on the spot.
One night in mid-1969, a single mother and her new boyfriend Jack were playing poker in a car when they encountered an attack by a killer who was in a hurry to leave after shooting, so they didn't realize that the two people in the car weren't dead.
However, when rescued, only Jack survived, and he later reported to the police that the person who attacked them was a white male with a relatively large body, and nothing else was known. Although the scene of the incident was very close to the place where the high school students occurred, the police at the time did not realize that the murderers of the two cases might be the same person.
However, half an hour after the crime, a phone call told them that the murderer was the same person, and the reason why the person who called the police was determined was because he was the murderer.
In August of that year, the murderer wrote to the newspaper, detailing his crimes and mentioning his name, the Zodiac Killer. And the killer also left a password letter and declared that if the police could not crack it in time, then he would continue to kill people until 12 were killed.
In October of that year, the murderer shot again, this time the victim was a driver, originally the murderer was more prepared, but he did not expect that his behavior was inadvertently seen by several children, and they also directly reported to the police, but he was lucky this time, because when the alarm center arranged the investigation, he mistakenly said that the "white man" was "black", so that he was not caught in the encirclement.
The FBI at the time would not have imagined that it would be the closest they would be to catching the killer. Because the killer then wrote them a letter to the indirect (direct newspaper), in which he not only provocatively told the police that he had been interrogated by two agents that day, but that he was not really suspected because he was white, and he also threatened that his next target would be the school bus.
The murderer's letter at that time not only caused a huge shock within the FBI, but also caused an uproar in society, after all, the most cared for in the world is the child, so the US police at that time even sent a helicopter to follow the school bus cruise, and the "Zodiac Killer" also became famous, at that time he was no longer a serial killer, but became a terrorist!
However, just when the whole of San Francisco was in full swing (at that time, no one outside San Francisco dared to come, and the inside was like a military management), a phone call pushed the "Zodiac Killer" killer to the cusp of the storm. The caller, who claimed that he was the killer the police were looking for, asked the media to hold a press conference for him and asked the top lawyers in the United States at the time to attend.
The live broadcast was broadcast as scheduled, but when the eyes of the whole United States were on the live broadcast, the police found that it was just a "harassing phone call" from a mental hospital. After the farce, the police received a letter from the killer, as well as another letter with a code saying that he was going to carry out an explosion at a public facility, along with a map.
However, just after the police have been busy with this for a while, the murderer reappeared three months later, this time targeting Catherine who was driving with the child, the murderer had already deceived the trust of the murderer, but Catherine found an opportunity to jump out of the car because she found an abnormality.
Later, Catherine identified that the murderer who wanted to kill her should be the same person as the "Zodiac Killer" who was wanted by the police. Still just as the police were ready to encircle and suppress, the murderer once again stopped continuing to operate.
Since then, the killers have written about 21 letters to the newspaper on an intermittent basis, claiming that they killed a total of 37 people, but only 7 people have been publicly admitted by the police, and two of these 7 people have survived. The murderer's last letter was sent in 1978, and since then the mysterious "Zodiac Killer" has been in the police's sight, but none of them have really been confirmed.
One of the most exciting times for the police was when a man named Dennis reported to the police that he had found a lot of suspicious things in his stepfather's belongings, so he thought that his stepfather was the mysterious killer of the year, and said that his mother may have also died at the hands of his stepfather, but after careful police investigation, there was still no definite conclusion.
On October 7, 2021, when rumors were that the case had been solved, the FBI said in a low-key manner that they had only identified the killer, but the case was still not closed.
After reading some of the information on this case, I have a question, the police at that time already had a portrait of the suspect, and there was some evidence involving DNA, why has it been unable to finally determine the identity of the murderer?