It’s one of cinema’s greatest mysteries: Who is the Zodiac Killer?

What line does Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost in Translation? What exactly is the mysterious “rabbit’s foot” in Mission Impossible 3? What does Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase contain in Pulp Fiction?

Many films leave the audience with a question they leave unanswered.

Screenwriting biases or artistic choices often occur through no fault of the mystery director in question. This is especially true in the case of David Fincher’s Zodiac, whose action is directly inspired by a famous police investigation: the one aimed at discovering the identity of the infamous “Zodiac Killer”, which has been rampant in the San Francisco area of ​​late. 1960s.

Who is the “Zodiac Killer”?

Indeed, to this day it is excellent serial killer He claimed responsibility for 37 murders (5 of which were officially confirmed) and left strange mysterious messages in his wake, still unsolved, even if some interesting reasons have recently been added to the investigation (see below).

Based on jobs Zodiac (1986) and Mask of the Zodiac: America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed (2002), Fincher’s feature film followed the lengthy work of press cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), his San Francisco Chronicle colleague Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and Inspector David Tosh (Mark Ruffalo). On the trail of an elusive killer for more than a decade.

At the end of the film, just like in reality, the final bullets approved by the investigators failed to come to fruition, and the final card explained that the case remained open today.

New ways after 50 years

However, many years after the feature film’s release, there have been new twists to the investigation (discover our full article on these latest elements here).

Thus, in December 2020, more than 50 years after the terrible events, three amateur detectives announced that they finally managed to decipher one of the killer’s letters. In February 2021, a French polytechnic claimed to have unmasked the latter by deciphering his messages and attributed the identity to a certain Lawrence Keir, suspected by the FBI and who died in 2010.

In October 2021, a team of about forty former investigators, journalists and intelligence officers finally announced that the “Zodiac Killer” was a man named Gary Francis Post, who died in 2018 at the age of 80.

However, the latter hypothesis has not yet been confirmed, and the mystery surrounding this historical investigation therefore remains officially unsolved.

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