Gary Francis Poste is a retired American intelligence officer who has been credited with helping to bring down the Soviet Union. He is also a suspect in the Zodiac killings, a series of unsolved murders that took place in the 1960s and 1970s.

Poste has never been charged with any crime, and he has consistently denied any involvement in the zodiac killings. However, some investigators believe that he may have been responsible for the murders, and his name continues to be associated with the case. 

As the zodiac killings remain unsolved, it is unlikely that the truth about Gary Francis Poste will ever be definitively known.

He served his duty in the Air Force and was known as a former US air force serviceman, afterward worked as a house painter. He died at 80 years old in August 2018. Local media reports suggest Poste was a zodiac serial killer.

Police and murder investigators have been trying desperately to solve the zodiac killer case for over 50 years.

Approximately 50 years after the zodiac killer stalked the city of San Francisco, between 1968 to 1969, he killed at least five people while teasing police with cryptic letters.

The zodiac killer’s mystery was finally solved in 2021, according to Thomas J. Colbert and his Case Breakers team, he was a retired law enforcement agent, military intelligence personnel, and journalist.

They suspected that the notorious murderer was Gary Francis Poste, who passed away in 2018.

Evidence against the zodiac killer 

In October 2021, a cold case investigation team known as the Case Breakers, according to Fox News, discovered several crucial hints that they claim to connect Gary Francis Poste to the zodiac killer. 

They found that he fit disturbingly well into one of the murderer’s coded letters and that the scars on his forehead matched a sketch of the Zodiac killer.

Additionally, witnesses asserted that Poste was a violent individual who even oversaw a “criminal posse” in the 1970s in California.

However, some experts are skeptical of these claims, citing the fact that many people fit the basic profile of the zodiac killer and pointing out that there is no concrete evidence linking Poste to the murders. The case remains open, and it is unclear if the truth will ever be revealed.

After, A group of 40 private detectives asserted that they had identified Poste as the zodiac killer, a terrifying serial killer who terrified the Bay Area in the late 1960s by brutal killings of multiple victims, using anagram code-breaking and pictures.

The team said it had built its case on pure evidence, images discovered in Poste’s darkroom, and some coded notes left by the serial killer.

The organization argued that the forensic evidence demonstrated Poste’s murder of Cheri Jo Bates. In 1966, a killer went unpunished as they killed Bates.

The Case Breakers said in their statement, as a retired FBI agent described, “There is photographic proof of ‘irrefutable’ scars on our Zodiac’s forehead — observed by three witnesses and an observing cop, then later passed on to the 1969 SFPD sketch artist.”

Victims of zodiac killer Poste 

In the late 1960s, the zodiac killer murdered five people before sending cryptic letters of taunt to neighborhood newspapers. They were either shot or stabbed. There names are:

Mr. David Faraday

Betty Linda Jensen

Daryl Ferrin

Shepard, Cecelia

All the victims were young couples in their teens or early twenties.

In one letter, the murderer claimed to have killed 37 people and was connected to several other unsolved crimes.

This assertion, however, has not been supported. The serial killer delivered a letter and a cryptogram to the neighborhood newspapers after every death. 

A male relative of Poste reportedly got in touch with the San Francisco Chronicle six years ago and said he lived in Groveland, a town roughly 150 miles away from San Francisco. This relative said Poste tried to hammer him to death and was the zodiac killer.

All evidence and clues proved that he was a natural zodiac killer. He died in 2018 before receiving any kind of punishment for his killings.