SACRAMENTO (UPI) —State crime sleuths today folded up their comic pages and gave up hope of finding clues to the riddle of San Francisco’s Zodiac killer in the Dick Tracy cartoon series.
Agents of the State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation began checking two months worth of Tracy comics on the theory they might find some parallels between the San Francisco killer of five persons and the “Scorpio” leader of the “Zodiac Gang ” being hunted down by Tracy.
“We gave the whole thing up,” Earl Bauer, senior analyst in the crime laboratory, said today. “We didn’t find any-thing that tied it up at all. We gave it up.”
“They’re just in two different worlds,” Bauer said of the real and fictitious Zodiacs.
He said the killer began using the Zodiac symbol before it appeared in the comic strip. Aug 17.
Zodiac, who has bragged of his crimes in cryptic notes to police and newspapers, shot a young couple to death in a lovers lane near Vallejo last Dec. 20, killed another girl and wounded her companion near Vallejo July 5, stabbed Hartnell and killed his coed companion Sept. 27, and shot a San Francisco cab driver to death Oct. 11.