FBI May Be On The Verge Of Identifying The Real Zodiac Killer

WARNING: This post (and potentially its title) contain MAJOR spoilers for David Fincher's film, "Zodiac."

Hot off the heels of Peter's experience with a David Fincher tribute and his disappointing viewing of 20 minutes from Benjamin Button comes word that the storyline from Fincher's last opus, Zodiac, may finally be reaching a resolution. According to CBS13 in Sacramento, the FBI is now running lab tests on the belongings of a man named Jack Tarrance, who died in 2006. Tarrance's stepson, Dennis Kaufman, has spent eight years trying to prove that Tarrance was the Zodiac killer.

For those that don't remember the film Zodiac, it chronicled the attempts of San Francisco Chronicle employees Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) and Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), in addition to detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), to find the identity of a serial killer who brutally murdered several people in Northern California during the late 1960s. The killer sent letters to the Chronicle in the form of strange ciphers and codes, hence the Zodiac moniker. One of the main suspects of the film, Arthur Leigh Allen (who died in 1992) was positively identified in a mugshot by a Zodiac murder victim during the film's closing scene. However, other elements implicating Allen never added up and the case has remained one of the country's most infamous unsolved murders.

Perhaps no more. While going through his late stepfather's belongings, Kaufman discovered a number of incriminating items, including a knife covered with what could be blood, a black hood with a zodiac on it (which conceivably could have been used in the 1968 Lake Berryessa murder) as well as rolls of film, at least one of which contained gruesome images that "[a]ppeared to be people who were murdered," according to Kaufman.

Kaufman also believes that Tarrance's handwriting and photo match the handwriting and composite sketch of the Zodiac killer. I've embedded the handwriting comparison and the headshot comparison in this post, but for the full write-up and some more photos, head on over to CBS13. According to the FBI, they could get the results of their tests any day. We'll report more updates as they become available.