The Zodiac Killer case: why an unsolved mystery still captivates

The Zodiac killer case is one of the most famous unsolved criminal cases in American history. A person who called himself Zodiac sent letters and coded messages to newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks. No one has ever been charged, and the case remains open. That open status is the core fact, and it shapes everything else. Because there has never been an arrest, let alone a conviction, every name put forward is a suspect and nothing more. The presumption of innocence applies to every person ever named in connection with the case, and careful reporting keeps that distinction in view at every step. The name itself carries a strange weight, and its origins are older than the case. As Wikipedia's entry on the zodiac explains, the word derives from the Ancient Greek for "of or relating to little animals", and the twelve-sign system traces back to Babylonian astronomy in the first millennium BC.

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