Case Breakers, which includes former FBI agents, law enforcement officials and journalists, issued a statement Wednesday claiming now-deceased U.S. Air Force veteran Gary F. Poste, a 1956 graduate of Port Leyden Central School, was the person responsible for serial murders in the San Francisco area in the late 1960s.
The killer made national news by taunting investigators with cryptic letters sent to newspapers, threatening to continue killing if his letters were not published. In all, the Zodiac Killer claimed to have committed 37 murders, but has never been identified and is officially tied to six murders.
Case Breakers has previously named Poste as the killer, but claimed Wednesday that the group’s founder, Thomas J. Colbert, “found DNA on a 30-year hiking mat once owned” by Poste and that his organization “found the ancestral town of the now-dead Poste, where DNA from a blood relative was offered by a confidential informant.”
The statement claims that days later, “good profiles” from Poste’s relative and DNA from the mat were compared by forensic experts from five colleges and that “strong similarities” were found. While that would likely only demonstrate that the mat indeed belonged to Poste and that he is related to the second contributor of DNA, Case Breakers suggest federal investigators have not properly employed a national DNA databank that the group believes could connect Poste to the Zodiac killings.
Poste, who died in 2018, was raised in Lyons Falls, Lewis County. His mother, Elva, who died in 2009, was born in Pierrepont, St. Lawrence County, while his father, who died in 1992, was born in Parishville. The couple moved to Lyons Falls in 1945 when Poste was a youth.
WATERTOWN — The man a volunteer group of cold case investigators claims is the notorious Zodiac Killer has roots in the North Country. Case Breakers, whic
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