Bloke reckons he's solved the Zodiac Killer case - and the suspect is very close to home

As new Netflix documentary This is the Zodiac Speaking is released, one California TikTokker is convinced that his grandfather was the elusive killer who terrorised the state in the late 1960s

As the Swinging Sixties drew to a close, people in California’s Sand Francisco Bay Area lived in fear of a mysterious serial killer who taunted police with a series of cryptic clues. The mystery of the so-called “Zodiac Killer” persists to this day – it’s regarded as the most famous unsolved murder case in American history, and has inspired dozens of documentaries and fictional accounts ranging from Dirty Harry to The Batman.

But a Californian TikTokker named J Foy claims not only to have unmasked the feared killer - he claims to be the murderer's grandson. Foy explained: “This is not just based off physical appearance. I typed in my grandpa's name on Google the other day and, to my surprise ,internet sleuths have been throwing my grandpa's name around for years connecting him as the Zodiac motherf*****g killer.

He produced a number of photos of his grandpa, Richard Hoffman, dating back to the time of the Zodiac’s reign of terror, and, he says, they look “exactly like him. Foy adds that his grandpa was a police officer in Vallejo, northern California, which would go some way to explaining now the notorious serial killer managed to evade capture if true.

While officially the Zodiac is known to have had five victims, in taunting letters the killer sent to police he claimed to have murdered 37. Two of the officially-recorded victims – Michael Renault Mageau and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, were “were driving around Vallejo one night the night that my grandfather happened to be on duty driving an unmarked police car and wearing plain clothes,” he says.

True crime podcaster Kris Collins takes up the story: “When (Mageau and Ferrin) were driving around, a car was supposedly following them the whole time …like a police car might do… and this was the same night that his grandfather was supposedly on duty, doing his own patrol in an unmarked car and wearing civilian clothes.

“After being followed around they pulled over into the Blue Rock Springs parking lot, where the killer's car would pull alongside them and the killer would get out and Darlene would supposedly say ‘Oh my God that's Richard, he's going to kill us both.’ – and this was all because she was dating a police officer behind her husband's back.”

Mageau later said that Ferrin “knew” the Zodiac killer, and called him “Richard” just before her death.

Foy says in his TikTok that although Ferrin was married, she was known to have been dating a number of men at the same time – and she was “terrified” of one of them: “It was well known by her friend group that she was dating a Vallejo cop, although she never told them the name.”

It’s claimed that Hoffman “showed up uninvited” to a party at Ferrin’s house, and she told friends that she was “scared to death of him.”

Foy angrily points out: “My grandpa denies these claims – he says he never laid eyes on her. But he then later goes on to say ‘I know that she worked at a restaurant locally here in Vallejo.’ How the f*** have you never laid eyes on her Grandpa? You tell me about that!”

Adding to this circumstantial evidence, Foy points out that his grandfather would habitually misspell the word “until” with two letter Ls, something the Zodiac did in his many teasing notes to law enforcement.

Another clue, Foy adds, is that the woman believed to have been Zodiac’s first victim, Cheri Bates had – like his grandpa – moved to the Bay Area from Nebraska. Bates had been studying at the Riverside college library on the night of her death, and her killer had apparently disabled her blue Volkswagen Beetle in the library’s parking lot in order to make her easier to capture.

Eerily, says Kris Collins, a graphic poem about murder was found beneath the desk where Bates had been working: "Forensic analysis states that the poem, due to the spelling style, is confirmed to be from the Zodiac Killer …and to add another weirder layer to everything, the initials alongside the poem are RH – the initials of his grandfather.”

While it’s not certain that the man who killed Bates was the Zodiac, it does seem likely that she knew her iller. A close-typed “confession,” presumed to be from the serial killer, was sent to a local newspaper. Gilled with detail that showed it was definitely from Bates’s killer, it said that his motive was “making her pay for the brush-offs that she had given me during the years.”

In 1971, the Zodiac Killer wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times, explicitly claiming to have been responsible for Bates’s murder, adding that there were “a hell of a lot more” victims that police hadn’t even found.

Foy adds that’s grandfather had a questionable character: “He is known in my family to be controlling, manipulative, and also unfaithful to my grandmother.”

However, Foy’s claims are unlikely ever to be proven either way because his grandfather is no longer alive to face questioning.

The first episode of This is the Zodiac Speaking dropped on Netflix today (Wednesday, October 23).