On the night of March 8, 1990, a man shot Mario Orozco in the back on a street in Brooklyn and left a letter behind that borrowed the look of the unidentified Zodiac killer of northern California: a crossed circle, astrological symbols and a claim that the victims were being chosen by their star signs. Over the next three and a half years the same gunman shot eight people in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan and killed three of them. The police were not sure for a time whether the original Zodiac had moved east. A handwriting analyst and California investigators ruled that out, and the New York Zodiac turned out to be a young man who lived with his mother and his half-sister in East New York.
Joseph Proce, seventy-eight, a World War II veteran, was shot in the lower back while walking in Queens late on May 31, 1990, and died in the hospital on June 24. On June 19 the gunman shot Larry Parham, a homeless man asleep on a bench in Central Park, in the chest; Parham survived and told police that a man had asked him his star sign a few days earlier, and the note left at that scene would later carry the fingerprints that helped convict Seda. Parham, a devout Christian, later said that he had forgiven him. Two others shot that spring, Orozco and a man named in reports as German Montenegro or Jermaine Montenesdro, also lived.
After more than two years of silence the attacks resumed. On August 10, 1992, Patricia Fonti, thirty-nine, was shot twice near the Highland Park reservoir in Brooklyn and then stabbed more than a hundred times. James Weber was shot in the buttocks on June 4, 1993, and survived. On July 20, 1993, Joseph Diacone, forty, whose first name some reports give as John, was shot in the head at close range and killed. The last of the known street shootings came on October 2, 1993, when Diane Ballard was shot in the neck; the bullet lodged against her spine and left her partly paralyzed.
The letters went to the police and to the New York Post, and they grew more elaborate. Some carried codes built on international maritime signal flags, which the Post reporter Kieran Crowley decoded with the help of his father-in-law, who had worked in cryptography during World War II. The writer said he would act only when certain stars were visible, and the police consulted an astronomer whose predictions of the next attack proved partly accurate. He also boasted that his homemade guns left no rifling marks and could never be traced. A letter to the Post in August 1994 listed nine victims and claimed responsibility for attacks the police had not connected.
His name was Heriberto Seda, called Eddie, born in New York City on July 31, 1967. He had been a good high school student until he was expelled for bringing a starting pistol to school, and he dropped out rather than attend the counseling sessions required to return. At twenty-six he was unemployed, supported by his mother, and took coins from pay phones and vending machines. Police later described him as a recluse obsessed with astrology and death. In March 1994 officers stopped him over a bulge in his jacket that turned out to be one of his zip guns; because the weapon did not work, his public defender had the charges dropped and the arrest record sealed, and Seda took the outcome as a sign that he could not be caught.
He was caught through his family. Seda abused his teenage half-sister, Gladys Reyes, mentally and physically, and on June 18, 1996, during a confrontation with her and her boyfriend, he shot her in the buttocks as she ran for the front door. She reached a neighbor's apartment and called the police, and after a standoff lasting hours he gave up his guns and was arrested. Nobody at first connected the domestic shooting with the Zodiac. Then detectives noticed that he had ended his handwritten statement about the incident with a symbol like the one on the letters.
The evidence came together quickly after that. Tool marks linked his zip guns to the shootings despite his confidence about rifling, his fingerprints matched those on the Parham note, handwriting analysis tied his statement to the letters, and his DNA was found on a stamp used to mail one of them. Police said he admitted the attacks, and he was formally charged on June 21, 1996.
His Queens trial, before Justice Robert J. Hanophy of the State Supreme Court, lasted six weeks. The prosecutors, Robert J. Masters and Raymond E. Scheer, called forty-five witnesses and introduced about a hundred and fifty exhibits, and Seda repeatedly disrupted the proceedings, shouting obscenities at the judge. On June 24, 1998, the jury convicted him of three counts of second-degree murder and an attempted murder, and he was sentenced to eighty-three and a half years to life. At a separate trial in Brooklyn he was convicted of further attempted murders, including the shooting of his sister and shots fired at officers during the 1996 standoff, and received another hundred and fifty-two and a half years, for a total of two hundred and thirty-two.
He was sent to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora. There he began a relationship with Synthia-China Blast, a transgender woman serving a sentence for a gang-related murder, which New York magazine reported in 2004.