Zodiac Killer’s Arrest Came Out Of Routine Case
A detective assigned to a seemingly ordinary shooting in Brooklyn didn’t immediately make the connection. Then, while looking over the suspect’s written statement, he noticed strange scrawls - including an inverted cross crowned by three 7’s.
“It just jumped out of the page,” Detective Sgt. Joseph Herbert said. “I nearly fell off my chair.”
Herbert, who years ago worked on a task force hunting New York’s infamous Zodiac killer, instantly flashed on the taunting letters the gunman had written.
That coincidence, followed by a fingerprint match, helped crack the case of the killer who terrorized New York in the early 1990s, police said Wednesday.
At a news conference, Police Commissioner Howard Safir confirmed that the suspect, Heriberto Seda, 28, had been linked to the shootings. Police sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the suspect confessed to being the Zodiac killer.
The Zodiac killer shot three men in 1990 along the Queens-Brooklyn border - one fatally - and wounded a man in Central Park. The shootings all occurred on a Thursday, 21 days or a multiple of 21 days apart. The gunman wrote several notes taunting a 50-detective task force for not catching him, and vowed to kill one person born under each of the 12 astrological signs.
He shot four: A Scorpio, a Gemini, a Taurus and a Cancer. New Yorkers were warned not to divulge their birthdates to strangers, and police went on alert every three weeks. But after striking on June 21, 1990, the gunman disappeared.
In August 1994, someone calling himself the Zodiac sent another letter to the New York Post describing five additional attacks - four of which were confirmed - that occurred in 1992. Police said at the time it was not clear whether the author was the same Zodiac, a copycat shooter or a hoaxer.
But Seda confessed to all nine attacks, telling police he had been overcome by “urges” to strike randomly, said one investigator. The suspect claimed it was only by chance that he appeared to know his victim’s astrological signs.