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Cheri Jo Bates Zodiac Letters Proven a Hoax
The identity of her killer remains a mystery
In 1967, the Riverside Police and The Press-Enterprise editorial offices received anonymous letters regarding the October 31, 1966, murder of Cheri Jo Bates. The letters initially led them to believe the murder might be tied to the “Zodiac Killer.”
The letters also generated increased public interest in the case, fueling a lot of speculation over the years since the murder as to the identity of the person who had written them — namely whether they were from the Zodiac Killer and if this was one of his early murders. Additionally, it led to sensitive information the police had kept close to the fold being released to the public at large.
In early August 2021, Detectives in the cold case of Cheri Jo Bates revealed new information about these letters that had been previously unreleased to the public.
In April 2016, the Riverside Police received a new letter postmarked from San Bernadino, California. The letter was printed from a computer. The author claimed to be the person who had sent the original handwritten letters. In this new letter, the sender claimed that the 1967 letter had just been a sick joke and said they were neither the killer of Cheri Jo Bates nor the Zodiac Killer.
In 2020, the Homicide Cold Case Unit and the FBI Los Angeles Investigative Genealogy Team submitted a stamp from the letter for further DNA analysis which led to the identification of the sender. A subsequent interview with the sender revealed that he had been a troubled teen at the time and had sent the letter as an attention-seeking measure. His remorse for what he had done had led him to send the second letter in 2016.
Police investigated further and confirmed that this person was definitely neither the Zodiac Killer nor the murderer of Cheri Jo Bates.
Police have further revealed that a separate set of letters from another individual have also been debunked. These letters were sent to police officials in northern California. The author of this correspondence has also been located and admitted to sending the letters just to keep the investigation going.
