NarrativeFor these thousands of anonymous people, there is only one Grail: to find the identity of the Zodiac, this serial killer who sowed terror in the San Francisco area at the turn of the 1970s. This month, a Français releases a book-investigation whose hypothesis agitates this strange community.
Fayçal Ziraoui is a fulfilled man. His pleasure in life: broadening the scope of his knowledge. When this 39-year-old engineer and consultant, polytechnician and graduate of HEC considers that he has dug enough into one subject, he moves on to another. Guided by his curiosity, he once learned to create virtual reality software or repair old watches. After devoting himself to baking, he also worked on an application project for VTC drivers which requires artificial intelligence.
Not long ago, he was thinking about the relationship between physical activity and dietetics. The intensive practice of a competitive sport appeared to him as the solution to lose weight, after climbing up to 100 kilos. The idea was to raise his body to the height of his intellect. A mission accomplished after his participation in several triathlon competitions where he completed 2 kilometers of swimming, 9 kilometers of cycling and then 20 kilometers of running.
In December 2020, Fayçal Ziraoui made a discovery. It holds in one name: Lawrence Kane. To many, this surname means nothing. But it certainly speaks to the 50,000 amateur or professional researchers, detectives, police officers, mathematicians, journalists, computer scientists, engineers established in the United States, but also in Asia and South America, who spend most of their time try to flush out the identity of the one who called himself the “Zodiac killer”, and to whom the filmmaker David Fincher devoted a film in 2007.
Lawrence Kane, who died in 2010, is part of the long list of more than 2,000 suspects joined for more than half a century to the anonymous face of this serial killer. To utter his name is to add salt to an ever-fresh wound and to raise endless controversy within a community in which everyone stubbornly and ferociously defends their designated culprit. Because you don’t enter the world of the “Zodiac” like in a fast food restaurant: very often, you dedicate your life to it, and it’s the time spent on this investigation that will make you a more or less credible member of this informal club.
Two cryptograms finally deciphered?
The “Zodiac” raged eleven months in Northern California between December 1968 and November 1969. The killer claimed responsibility for his crimes in letters written in encrypted writing, combining symbols and letters of the alphabet. Indecipherable messages that he sent until 1974 to the police and the local press, and in particular to the San Francisco Chronicle. Each letter began with the same sentence: “The ‘Zodiac’ speaks to you” and ended with his signature: the sight of a sniper rifle, a symbol that he had also engraved with the tip of a knife on the car door of one of his victims.
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