Richard Gaikowski: The Bespectacled Newspaper Editor Who Went “Berserk”
TwitterVariations of Richard Gaikowski’s name seem to appear in the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers.
According to Tom Voigt, one of the most compelling Zodiac Killer suspects is Richard Gaikowski, a bespectacled San Francisco newspaper editor who bears a striking resemblance to police sketches of the murderer.
“Richard Gaikowski is my best bet,” Voigt explained to Rolling Stone. “If I was an employer looking to hire the Zodiac, he’d probably have the most impressive résumé in my eyes.”
As Voigt says on his Zodiac Killer website, Gaikowski was the editor of a counterculture newspaper called Good Times from 1969 to 1971, the same time period that the Zodiac operated in Northern California. The paper’s production schedule kept Gaikowski busy on Wednesdays, which happens to be the only day of the week that the Zodiac never mailed a letter.
San Francisco Police DepartmentThe Zodiac Killer’s letters abruptly stopped at the same time that Gaikowski was hospitalized for going “berserk.”
History also writes that one of Gaikowski’s former colleagues claimed that Gaikowski was the killer and that the editor had invited him to commit violent crimes together. Voigt additionally points out that a Zodiac Killer cipher appears to contain a variation of Gaikowski’s name, and that the Zodiac Killer’s letters abruptly stopped around the same time that Gaikowski was involuntarily committed to the Napa State Hospital after going “berserk.” The murderer didn’t send another letter for about three years.
So was Gaikowski the Zodiac Killer? Not everyone thinks he’s a strong suspect. A San Francisco police inspector described Gaikowski’s former colleague as “one of the three top Zodiac kooks.” And Gaikowski claimed that he was out of the country at the time of one of the Zodiac attacks (though, according to Voigt, his passport says otherwise).
Indeed, though some have taken the alleged inclusion of Gaikowski’s name in the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers as a strong indication of his guilt, Gaikowski isn’t the only Zodiac Killer suspect to supposedly appear in the ciphers.
Who Is The Zodiac Killer? The Tantalizing Theory About Lawrence Kane
IMDBLawrence Kane strongly resembled the Zodiac Killer and may have learned to write encoded messages in the Navy.
To some, Lawrence Kane (who also went by the name Kaye) seems like the best Zodiac Killer suspect of all. Several eyewitnesses spotted a resemblance between Kane and the Zodiac Killer.
The sister of a victim claimed that a man resembling Kane had previously bothered her sibling at a restaurant, a police officer who caught a glimpse of the killer after one of his attacks agreed that Kane bore a resemblance to the murderer, and a woman who may have escaped from the Zodiac Killer also picked out Kane’s image as her would-be abductor.
What’s more, a French engineer named Fayçal Ziraoui claimed in 2021 that he’d cracked two of the previously unsolved ciphers that the Zodiac Killer had sent to the San Francisco Chronicle. And according to Ziraoui, one appeared to spell Kane’s name, hinting at the Zodiac Killer’s identity.
Ziraoui believes that cipher Z13, which begins in English with the phrase “My name is —” can be decoded to read: K-A-Y-R. To many online sleuths, this seems tantalizingly close to “Kane” or “Kaye.”
Wikimedia CommonsCipher Z13 begins with the phrase “My name is” before trailing off into the Zodiac Killer’s coded language.
Kane served in the Naval reserves, where he could have learned to write coded messages. And Voigt writes on his Zodiac Killer website that Kane suffered from brain damage following a 1962 car accident, which reportedly left him unable “to control self-gratification.”
However, many criticized Ziraoui’s findings after he released them online in 2021. Since investigators have failed for decades to solve the Zodiac Killer’s remaining ciphers, many expressed doubt that Ziraoui could crack the code so quickly and easily. “When he says that it took two weeks to crack the Z32 and an hour for the Z13, I think that sums it up pretty well,” one online commenter wrote, according to The New York Times.
Kane, who died in 2010, took any secrets he might have had about the infamous murderer to his grave. But when it comes to the question of the Zodiac Killer’s identity, there are still several other intriguing possibilities.
