The Zodiac killings began in December 1968 when high school students Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday were shot as they enjoyed a first date.
Three other murders were conclusively linked by the police, but in letters to local newspapers and police forces the killer claims to have murdered at least 37 people.
He began taunting detectives’ inability to catch him by sending them coded letters, some of which have never been cracked. One which was claimed that he was killing people to keep as slaves in the afterlife.
The mystery inspired several films and television shows. Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood is loosely based on the Zodiac case. In 2007, the film Zodiac, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr, focused on police attempts to catch him.
Despite working through 2,500 suspects, the San Francisco Police Department have never caught the killer or even arrested anyone.
The only named suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen, a local man who was linked through circumstantial evidence including the fact that he owned a typewriter of the same make as that used to write the letters and wore a Zodiac brand wristwatch.
Mr Allen died in 1992. DNA evidence appeared to rule him out as a suspect in 2002.
Mr Lafferty, a former California highway patrol officer, claims that the killer was motivated by jealousy because his wife as having an affair with a senior judge.
He writes: “Through his tauntings of the police, his code, 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.”
Mr Lafferty is not the only person to claim to have cracked the case. Many amateur sleuths have laid claim to having solved the mystery including one woman who claimed her father was the murderer.
Deborah Perez’s 2009 claim, however, carried little weight as she had previously claimed her father was John F. Kennedy.
Mr Lafferty hopes his theory will be taken more seriously.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle he said: “Look, I know what most people think of Zodiac theories, and there have been so many over the years that if a person walked into the Vallejo Police Department right now and said he was the Zodiac, they’d tell him to get out,” Lafferty said. “But I do feel that we have a very credible case.”
The San Francisco Police Department say the case remains open and unsolved.
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