By Davina Willett
Court TV

The Zodiac Killer

A little over 15 years later and 380 miles north along Highway 101, a serial murderer not only dominated the headlines in the San Francisco Bay area for 10 years, he extorted no fewer than 21 bylines.

The Zodiac Killer taunted police and reporters and the public with his killings, as well as sending cryptic ciphers and letters to the press, demanding their publication.

A wanted poster for the Zodiac Killer

He was a serial killer who appeared to have no modus operandi, no pattern in the victims he chose, and left few traces at murder scenes.

He was known to have killed six people between 1966 and 1970, and continued over the next few years to taunt the press and the public with his letters. He is accountable for no known deaths after 1970, although in one of his letters he claimed to be responsible for close to 40 homicides.

Theories abound as to who is the Zodiac. Only Robert Graysmith, a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle when the Zodiac began his crime spree and who subsequently became friends with investigators and obsessed with the case, wrote a book publicly identifying the killer.

In his 1986 book, Zodiac, Graysmith gave the killer a pseudonym, Richard Starr, however, this "suspect" died in 1992 and so Graysmith later identified the man by his real name in his follow up book, Zodiac Unmasked. The author believed the Zodiac was a man named Arthur Leigh Allen, a reported sociopath and convicted pedophile. He claimed that police had long suspected Allen as the Zodiac killer.

At this time, the case still remains open. Even although it's been more than 30 years since the Zodiac's last known killing, it seems as firmly implanted in people's memories as it was then and was one of the first cases that the public and the media murmured when the recent Washington D.C. area sniper left a tarot card.

Coincidently, the Zodiac threatened in one of his letter's that "school children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning — pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out," which echoes the D.C. sniper's shooting of a 13-year-old after he was dropped off at his Maryland school, and the sniper's follow-up threat that "your children are not safe."