Case Breakers, a nonprofit run by investigative journalist Thomas Colbert, claims to have connected Air Force veteran Gary Francis Poste to the killings and said an FBI agent confirmed to them that he had been a suspect since 2016.
“The offender has been secretly listed as Zodiac’s ‘suspect’ in records since 2016, with his ‘partial DNA’ secured at the federal laboratory in Quantico, Virginia,” Case Breakers said in a press release Thursday.
The team said the FBI has a partial DNA sample from Poste in its database, but has not used the sample in its investigation of the serial killer responsible for five confirmed deaths in Northern California in the late 1960s.
The FBI, for its part, has repeatedly said that Has not solved the case of the Zodiac Killer and that his investigation is still open.
Case Breakers also said it collected its own sample from Poste, who died in 2018, and wants the agency to compare it with DNA evidence collected in the murder of Cheri Jo Bates in 1966 because they believe that he is also guilty of that case.
However, the federal bureau has disputed that Bates was part of the killing pattern.
“We 100% believe that our Cheri Jo Bates case is unrelated to the Zodiaco case,” Riverside Police Officer Ryan Railsback told Fox News Digital in October 2021. “Nothing has changed on that.”
The organization has called for “a serious review” from the FBI, the Riverside Police Department and the San Francisco Police Department.