The FBI just responded after investigators claimed to have cracked the zodiac killer case

A team of 40 independent specialists this week said they had cracked one of America’s most notorious unsolved murder cases, the zodiac killer.

But despite the news sending social media’s true crime obsessives into a frenzy, the FBI has responded and said the case remains open.

The killer, who murdered five people in the late 1960s in the San Francisco area, has been on the run for more than 50 years. They terrorised the authorities through letters to the media.

The FBI told The Hill on Thursday: “The Zodiac Killer case remains open. At this time, we are not identifying potential suspects for this open investigation.”

Called the ‘Case Breakers’, the group of 40 former law enforcement investigators, journalists and military intelligence officers believe the identity of the zodiac killer to be a man named Gary Poste - who died three years ago.

The team managed to link Poste to the killings forensically and suggested that he had a similar scar to sketches of the zodiac killer. The ‘Case Breakers’ also claimed that the zodiac letters to the San Francisco Chronicle were decoded, which allegedly showed that Poste was the man behind the murders.

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Speaking to Fox, Jen Bucholtz, former Army counterintelligence agent, said: “So you’ve got to know Gary’s full name in order to decipher these anagrams, I just don’t think there’s any other way anybody would have figured it out.”

The group also pushed a now-debunked theory that the killer was responsible for a teenager found two years after the zodiac killings.

“Is there a chance that [the Case Breakers suspect] killed Cheri Jo Bates? No,” Riverside Police Officer Ryan Railsback told the San Francisco Chronicle. “If you read what they [the Case Breakers] put out, it’s all circumstantial evidence. It’s not a whole lot.”