This seems super dubious. I just watched the 2007 film Zodiac this week so it's recently on my mind. The prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, has so much incriminating evidence against him that it's just nuts to me that anyone considers this anything but a solved case.
Most importantly of the list, a guy he shot who lived picked him out of a set of photos and said he was certain that was the man who shot him.
Like....how can you go through that list and come to any other conclusion? It seems very clear that it was just procedural error by the police that let him get away with it back then. When investigators contacted him anew in 1992, he suddenly died of heart failure before they could interview him.
Maybe because I haven't followed the case at all but: that wiki says: "Allen was cleared through a comparison of DNA, fingerprints, palm prints, and handwriting."
Most of the evidence seems to be a friend of his claiming he said all kinds of things about wanting to kill people. His friend might have just been nuts.
There's a ton even ignoring his maybe crazy friend...
>Allen was allegedly in Riverside on the weekend when Cheri Jo Bates was murdered. He later claimed to be in Pomona when he heard of Bates' murder.
>Allen took his only sick day of the year on Nov.1, 1966 (Bates was murdered on Oct. 30, 1966).
>Told police he was going up to Berryessa on the day of the Hartnell/Shepard attack, but decided to go up the coast instead.
>Allen admitted to possessing bloody knives on the day of the Berryessa attack, claiming that he used them to kill chickens.
(other friend...)
>Allen communicated to his friend Philip that he was fascinated with the idea of killing people. He believed that people were more challenging to kill than animals since they were more intelligent. Similar sentiments were communicated during the three-part cipher mailed to newspapers. Allen also mentioned to the police that his favourite book was The Most Dangerous Game, a book about killing humans and possibly alluded to in a Zodiac correspondence.
>In 1991, the search warrant for Allen's house found bomb diagrams and the same ingredients for bombs that were mentioned in a previous Zodiac letter.
>Karen Allen, his sister-in-law, stated that Allen would use the shortened "trigger mech" in place of "trigger mechanism," as well as spelling Christmas with two S's. Both idiosyncrasies appear in the Zodiac letter to Melvin Belli.
This person is either the most unlucky person in the world with all these random associations with the zodiac killer, or was the actual zodiac killer.
Seriously, just read this:
https://zodiackiller.fandom.com/wiki/Arthur_Leigh_Allen#Incr...
Most importantly of the list, a guy he shot who lived picked him out of a set of photos and said he was certain that was the man who shot him.
Like....how can you go through that list and come to any other conclusion? It seems very clear that it was just procedural error by the police that let him get away with it back then. When investigators contacted him anew in 1992, he suddenly died of heart failure before they could interview him.