Tag: serial killers

Genius! These codebreakers just cracked the Zodiac Killer’s infamous 340 cipher, 51 YEARS after it was first published.

On December 5th, 2020 Sam Blake, Jarl Van Eycke, David Oranchak finally cracked the Zodiac Killer’s unsolved 340-character cipher.

The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who was active in Northern California in the 1960s and ’70s. His name came from the taunting letters he would send to the San Francisco Bay Area press which included a total of four ciphers. It was confirmed that he killed at least five people, though he claimed to have murdered 37.

Police still don’t know the identity of the Zodiac Killer, though they’ve long hoped that solving his ciphers would reveal more details about him.

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Biden Labor Candidate Oversaw Fraudulent Payments to California Prison Inmates

A frontrunner to be president-elect Joe Biden’s labor secretary oversaw the payment of nearly $1 billion in fraudulent benefits to California prison inmates.

Julie Su is the secretary of California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency, which operates the state’s pandemic unemployment system. The system paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment payments to prison inmates and convicts, prosecutors announced on Tuesday.

The fraud involved over 35,000 unemployment claims filed between March and August under the names of California state prison inmates. The inmates included two serial killers responsible for the deaths of at least eight people, as well as the well-known murderer Scott Peterson, who was convicted in 2004 for killing his pregnant wife. The Sacramento County district attorney called the scandal “one of the biggest fraud of taxpayer dollars in California history.”

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Fired VA staffer admits to murdering 7 patients with insulin

A former staffer at a veterans hospital in West Virginia pleaded guilty Tuesday to intentionally killing seven patients with fatal doses of insulin, capping a sweeping federal investigation into a series of mysterious deaths at the medical center.

Reta Mays, a former nursing assistant at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg was charged with seven counts of second-degree murder and one count of assault with the intent to commit murder of an eighth person. She faces life sentences for each murder.

At a plea hearing, Mays, 46, admitted to purposely killing the veterans, injecting them with unprescribed insulin while she worked overnight shifts at the hospital in northern West Virginia between 2017 and 2018. Her voice cracked throughout the hearing as she answered a judge’s questions. She shook and appeared to weep as details of the charges were read aloud.

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