Ted Cruz isn’t the Zodiac Killer after all – but he’s still playing along

After more than 40 years, one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases in US history has reportedly been solved after an independent team of investigators identified who they believe was the Zodiac Killer – and it’s not Ted Cruz.

On Wednesday, Fox News reported that a cold case team made up of 40 former law enforcement investigators, journalists and military intelligence officers known as ‘The Case Breakers’ named Gary F. Poste as the serial killer who terrorised the San Francisco Bay area during the late 1960s and killed five people. Poste has also been linked to another murder from 1966, years before the first Zodiac killing was recorded.

The team apparently managed to link Poste forensically to the killings and also uncovered photos from his darkroom which show that he had a similar facial scar that matched a sketch of the Zodiac killer. Some of the photos that were found dated back to 1963.

Other clues that are said to show that Poste was the elusive killer came from deciphering a cryptic letter and ciphers that were sent by the Zodiac to the San Francisco Chronicle (a trait of the killer) which revealed an alternative message.

Speaking to Fox, Jen Bucholtz, former Army counterintelligence agent, said: “So you’ve got to know Gary’s full name in order to decipher these anagrams, I just don’t think there’s any other way anybody would have figured it out.”

Poste died in 2018 meaning that, even if he was the Zodiac killer, the case can never be brought to trial and therefore the killer has never been actually caught by the authorities.

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However, they could always turn their attention to Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, who has been playing along with a meme for years now that has joked that he is the Zodiac. After the news broke on Wednesday, Cruz quote retweeted The Hill’s version of the story with a GIF of Dr Evil from Austin Powers, looking all coy and sheepish.

This meme has been going on since 2013 when a Twitter user joked that Cruz would use an upcoming political speech to confirm his identity as the killer. This slowly gained more momentum when Cruz ran for the Republican presidential candidate during the 2016 US election due to his overwhelming unpopularity.

Cruz has even joined in on the joke on several occasions, even sharing one of the Zodiac’s ciphers.

Of course, it is impossible for Cruz to be the Zodiac as 50-year-old wasn’t born until December 1970 whereas the final zodiac killing was recorded in October 1969.

Still, the Cruz memes have been reignited following the news that the identity of the mysterious murderer might have finally been solved.

Despite the news sending social media’s true crime obsessives into a frenzy, the FBI has responded and said the case remains open.

The FBI told The Hill on Thursday: “The Zodiac Killer case remains open. At this time, we are not identifying potential suspects for this open investigation.”

The Zodiac murders were one of the biggest unsolved crimes in US history and inspired numerous documentaries, TV shows, books and films.