Heriberto Seda was born in Brooklyn in 1967 and lived with his mother and half-sister in a flat in East New York. He was a devout, isolated young man who did not drink or take drugs, built his own zip guns, and read obsessively about the unidentified Zodiac Killer of northern California.
Between March 1990 and June 1994 he shot eight people in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. Three died: Joseph Proce, seventy-eight, Patricia Fonti, forty, and Larry Parham. Mario Orozco, German Montenegro, Jim Weber, Joseph Diacone and Diane Ballard were among those hit and survived. He chose people at random, at night, on the street, and he selected them by their star signs, working through the zodiac in order.
He wrote to the New York Post and to the police in the same register as the Californian letters, with cryptograms, astrological glyphs and a cross-in-circle signature, and the New York press called him the Zodiac. The city had a genuine panic about it in 1990, and again when he resumed in 1992 after a long gap.
He was interviewed by police in 1994 over an unrelated weapons matter, gave a handwriting sample and was released; it was not compared against the letters. He was caught on June 18, 1996, after he shot his sister during an argument and barricaded himself in the flat. He surrendered after a standoff and handed an officer a note signed with the crossed circle.
He was convicted in June 1998 of three murders and a series of attempted murders and sentenced to eighty-three years to life. He is one of very few killers to have deliberately modelled himself on another, and the imitation is why he is often confused with a case he had nothing to do with.