Author: Zodiac Killer's Identity Has Been Known Since Early 1970s
May 18, 2012 in Zodiac
A retired California Highway Patrol officer says in a new book that a small group of law enforcement authorities who investigated the Zodiac murder cases knew the identity of the killer decades ago.
In “The Zodiac Killer Cover-up/AKA The Silenced Badge,” Lyndon Lafferty claims that a group he calls the “Mandamus Seven” has known the Zodiac’s true identity since March 15, 1971. The “seven” include former law enforcement officers, a district attorney, federal agents, and Lafferty himself.
“This true story is now being told for the very first time,” Lafferty writes in the book’s synopsis. “Official corruption and political intervention forced the investigation into a top-secret, covert status.”
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Lafferty believes the Zodiac killer is now a 91-year-old alcoholic man who lives in northern California, where the five Zodiac murders took place in 1968 and 1969.
Lafferty uses a fictitious name for the man in his book “due to privacy and safety concerns,” the Chronicle reports. He also alleges that the case was covered up in the early 1970s by a few politically powerful local figures, including a judge who was romantically involved with the suspect’s wife.
Lafferty concludes that the wife’s extramarital relationship triggered much of the Zodiac killer’s violence, writing that “through his tauntings of the police, his codes, ciphers, and letters, he was on a mission to redeem his shattered ego, to prove that he is better, smarter, and more clever than all the judges and police put together.”
Someone identifying himself as “the Zodiac” took responsibility for the five murders in cryptic letters sent to several Bay Area newspapers, including the Chronicle, until 1974.
The Zodiac “continued his killing spree until he claimed a total of 37 victims,” Lafferty writes in his synopsis, without providing any further details.
In addition to the five confirmed murders, the Zodiac severely wounded two men who survived his attacks. Each man was with a different female victim of the killer at the time.
No one was ever formally charged for any of the Zodiac crimes.
The San Francisco Police Department, which investigated the last known Zodiac murder in 1969, says “the case is still officially open.”
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/author-zodiac-killers-identity-known-since-early-1970s-163100285.html
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