Police skeptical of new Zodiac rumor -- Newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area are highly competitive. So when the San Francisco Chronicle launched a series claiming they had "uncovered the Zodiac's identity," I had to respond. After all, I worked in Vallejo, California, where the serial killer claimed several of his victims three decades earlier. I also knew the Chronicle story wasn't totally accurate.

         Just like smaller newspapers, big publications can make mistakes while grasping for big rings. The Chronicle had jumped the gun on DNA results taken from the prime suspect, a former Vallejo resident. Several months later the released results were inconclusive (see next story). In the meantime, I enjoyed taking the famed Chronicle reporter who wrote the story down several notches in MY story -- without even mentioning the word "Chronicle."

        At an unrelated press conference some weeks later, he didn't speak to me. Good fun!

Still a suspect -- I knew that the famed Zodiac serial killer had first struck in Vallejo, California, where I found myself toiling at a daily publication. But I got excited when nearly 30-years after the last killing attributed to the Zodiac, investigators from several jurisdictions decided to compile old evidence for a second look at the high-visibility case.

         Even more cool was I found the cryptic letters originally mailed to my newspaper buried in our archive. I was hypnotized by bizarre markings that supposedly revealed the killer's identity -- which NASA failed to decipher years earlier. The space agency did confirm a mathematical sequence existed.

          For my story, the previously unpublished ciphers provided a very, very neat graphic.