Police Refute Claims That Riverside Slaying Was Zodiac Killer

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A team of more than 40 former law enforcement investigators, military intelligence officers and journalists said it has identified the "Zodiac Killer," a serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s.

The team, which calls itself the Case Breakers, named the suspect in a post on the group's website — the man died in 2018.

Current law enforcement officials, however, are not closing the Zodiac case based on the armchair sleuths' conclusion. The San Francisco office of the FBI said in a statement to USA Today on Thursday that "The FBI's investigation into the Zodiac Killer remains open and unsolved."

Furthermore, Riverside police are not buying the team's assertion that an "FBI memo" links a 1966 Riverside City College homicide to the Zodiac Killer.

“Is there a chance that (the Case Breakers suspect) killed Cheri Jo Bates? No,” Riverside Police Officer Ryan Railsback is quoted as saying in 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.”

Tom Voigt, operator of ZodiacKiller.com and author of "Zodiac Killer: Just the Facts," was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine about the Case Breakers revelation.

"It’s all bullshit, by the way, just to get that out of the way. This is hot garbage," Voigt was quoted as saying.

But the Case Breakers believe they have cracked the Zodiac mystery.

"My FBI guys say it's irrefutable. It's a match," Case Breakers member Tom Colbert told Fox. "We have six people that he has confessed to that he was the Zodiac. Three of them on our court affidavits."

The Case Breakers uncovered new forensic evidence and photos from the suspect's darkroom, including an image showing scars on his forehead that matched scars on a San Francisco Police Department sketch of the Zodiac, the group said.

Jen Bucholtz, a member of the team and a former Army counterintelligence agent, pointed to letters sent by Zodiac that revealed him as the true killer.

In a series of cryptic messages mailed by the killer, who labeled himself Zodiac, the murderer taunted law enforcement officers and created a persona that has endured for more than a half-century.

If you removed the letters of the suspect's full name from a note sent by Zodiac, an alternate message is revealed, Bucholtz told Fox.

"So you've got to know [his] full name in order to decipher these anagrams," she said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."

Just last year, one of the Zodiac Killer's coded messages was solved.

Zodiac claimed to have commited five killings in the Bay Area in 1968 and 1969. The FBI has published hundreds of pages of investigative notes about the case.

The first killing happened in December 1968, when two teenagers were shot to death in a car in Benicia. The victims were David Arthur Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16.

A man and woman were shot in Vallejo in July 1969. Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22, died. Michael Renault Mageau, 19, survived.

Two college students were stabbed while picnicking at Lake Berryessa in September 1969. Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22, died, but Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, survived more than a half-dozen stab wounds.

The final killing attributed to Zodiac happened in October 1969, when cab driver Paul Lee Stine, 29, was shot to death near the Presidio in San Francisco.

But Zodiac once claimed to have murdered 37 people.

The Case Breakers team said it linked the killer to the death of Cheri Jo Bates, 18, in Riverside in 1966. Her body was found at the Riverside City College campus after her father reported her missing. The Case Breakers allegedly found a 1975 FBI memo that attributed the Bates killing to Zodiac based on a letter he mailed from Pleasanton in 1971.

A year after the Bates slaying, police received a handwritten letter that led investigators to believe her homicide was linked to the Zodiac Killer.

"This letter, along with sensitive information leaked to the media at the time, fueled many theories and speculation regarding this case," Railsback said last month when it was announced that a $50,000 reward was being offered for information that leads to the positive identity of Bates' killer.

In 2016, investigators received an anonymous letter from a person admitting the handwritten letter sent to the police in 1967 about the Bates slaying was written as a "sick joke" and not by the Zodiac Killer, according to Railsback.

Last year, Riverside police, with the help of the FBI Los Angeles Investigative Genealogy Team, were able to confirm that the origin of the letter was a "troubled youth who was seeking out attention in his teenage years," Railsback said. The case was officially ruled out as being related to the Zodiac Killer but remains unsolved.

The Zodiac Killer case has been the subject of numerous articles, books, movies and documentaries since the 1960s.

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—City News Service contributed to this report.