The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s. The Zodiac killer's identity remains unknown. The Zodiac killer coined the name "Zodiac" in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers), three of which have yet to be solved. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa, and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women between the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted. Numerous suspects have been named by law enforcement and amateur investigators but no conclusive evidence has surfaced.

In April 2004, the San Francisco Police Department marked the case "inactive", yet re-opened the case at some point prior to March 2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo as well as in Napa County and Solano County. The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.

Confirmed victims
Although the Zodiac claimed 37 murders in letters to newspapers, investigators agree on only seven confirmed victims, two of whom survived. They are:

David Arthur Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16: shot and killed on December 20, 1968, on Lake Herman Road, within the city limits of Benicia.

Michael Renault Mageau, 19, and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22: shot on July 4, 1969, in the parking lot of Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo. While Mageau survived the attack, Ferrin was pronounced dead-on-arrival at Kaiser Foundation Hospital.

Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22: stabbed on September 27, 1969 at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. Hartnell survived six stab wounds to the back, but Shepard died as a result of her injuries on September 29, 1969.

Paul Lee Stine, 29: shot and killed on October 11, 1969, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood in San Francisco.

Suspected victims
The following murder victims are suspected to be victims of Zodiac, though none have been confirmed:

Robert Domingos, 18, and Linda Edwards, 17: shot and killed on June 4, 1963, on a beach near Lompoc. Edwards and Domingos were identified as possible Zodiac victims because of specific similarities between their attack and the Zodiac's attack at Lake Berryessa six years later.

Cheri Jo Bates, 18: stabbed to death and nearly decapitated on October 30, 1966, at Riverside City College in Riverside. Bates' possible connection to the Zodiac only appeared four years after her murder when San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery received a tip regarding similarities between the Zodiac killings and the circumstances surrounding Bates' death.

Donna Lass, 25: last seen September 6, 1970, in Stateline, Nevada. A postcard with an advertisement from Forest Pines condominiums (near Incline Village at Lake Tahoe) pasted on the back was received at the Chronicle on 22 March 1971, and has been interpreted as the Zodiac claiming Lass' disappearance as a victim. No evidence has been uncovered to definitively connect Donna Lass' disappearance with the Zodiac Killer.

There is also a suspected third escapee from the Zodiac Killer:

Kathleen Johns, 22: allegedly abducted on March 22, 1970, on Highway 132 near I-580, in an area west of Modesto. Johns escaped from the car of a man who drove her, and her infant daughter, around in the area between Stockton and Patterson for approximately three hours.

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the context of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Babushka Lady is a nickname for an unknown woman who might have photographed the events that occurred in Dallas' Dealey Plaza at the time Kennedy was shot. Her nickname arose from the headscarf she wore similar to scarves worn by elderly Russian women or grandmothers (бабушка – babushka – means "grandmother" or "old woman" in Russian).
Babushka Lady was seen to be holding a camera by eyewitnesses and was also seen in film accounts of the assassination (such as this Muchmore frame and Zapruder Frame 285). She was observed standing on the grass between Elm and Main streets and she can be seen in the Zapruder film as well as in the films of Orville Nix, Marie Muchmore, and Mark Bell (44 seconds and 49 seconds into the Bell film: even though the shooting had already taken place and most of her surrounding witnesses took cover, she can be seen still standing with the camera at her face). After the shootings, she crossed Elm Street and joined the crowd that went up the grassy knoll in search of a gunman. She is last seen in photographs walking east on Elm Street and neither she nor the film she may have taken have been positively identified.

 Identity
The Babushka Lady never came forward. The police and the FBI did not find her, and the film shot from her position never turned up, despite a request by the FBI to local photo processors that they would be interested in any pictures or films of the assassination. Jack Harrison, a Kodak technician in Dallas, claimed to have developed on November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination, an out-of-focus color slide for a brunette in her late 30s that showed a view similar to the Babushka Lady's position.

Beverly Oliver
In 1970, a woman named Beverly Oliver came forward and claimed to be the Babushka Lady. She had worked in 1963 as a singer and dancer at a strip club that competed with Jack Ruby's Carousel Club. In 1994, she released a memoir chronicling the events of the day of Kennedy's assassination, but she has not been able to provide convincing proof she was there. Oliver says her film was taken by Federal agent Regis Kennedy and never returned.

Critics have noted a number of inconsistencies with her story, such as her alleged use of a model of camera that did not exist in 1963, and her claim to have positioned herself just behind Charles Brehm and his son, despite Brehm's statement that he and his son had hurried to that position at the last moment.  Also, the fact that the Babushka lady appears to be a stout, middle-aged woman, whereas Oliver was 17 at the time of the assassination, tends to cast doubts on Oliver's claims.

Oliver was played by Lolita Davidovich in the 1991 film JFK, but is not portrayed as claiming to be the Babushka Lady. In the director's cut she is depicted as wearing a head scarf at Dealey Plaza and speaking of having given the film she shot to two men claiming to be FBI agents.

In the 1992 film Ruby, the character of Candy Cane, portrayed by Sherilyn Fenn, is shown in Dealey Plaza filming the motorcade and wearing a babushka. Though the character is a singer and nightclub performer, there is no evidence that she is based in any meaningful way on Beverly Oliver.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babushka_Lady

The two ought to know: Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who tried to sound the alarm a month before 9/11, and Bogdan Dzakovic, a special agent for the FAA’s security division, who was a leader of the agency’s “Red Team” that was warning officials about vulnerabilities in airport security just before 9/11.

“Things might have been different if there had been a quick, confidential way to get information out,” the two write—and WikiLeaks could have provided exactly that, according to their op-ed in the LA Times on Friday.

The information they wanted to get out was about Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Moroccan attending flight school in Minnesota who was interested in learning how to fly a commercial jet, but was not interested in learning how to land one. Rowley was one of those trying to sound the alarm about him. And a foreign intelligence service had reported that Moussaoui had connections with a foreign terrorist group.

Less than a month before 9/11, an FBI supervisor sent a warning to officials in Washington.  He pleaded that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” 

It doesn’t get much more specific than that. But FBI officials in Washington refused to act, or make any public statement about Moussaoui.

“WikiLeaks might have provided a pressure valve for those agents who were terribly worried about what might happen and frustrated by their superiors’ seeming indifference,” Rowley and Dzakovic argue. “Their bosses issued continual warnings against ‘talking to the media’ and frowned on whistle-blowing, yet the agents felt a strong need to protect the public.”

The 9/11 Commission concluded that the 9/11 hijackers probably would have postponed their action if information about Moussaoui’s secret arrest had become public. And if WikiLeaks had existed, it could have made the information public.

“Official channels for whistle-blower protections have long proved illusory,” Rowley and Dzakovic write. Worried and frustrated FBI agents could go to the media, “but that can’t be done fully anonymously, and it also puts reporters at risk of being sent to jail for refusing to reveal their sources.” 

Therefore, they conclude, “WikiLeaks provides a crucial safety valve”—one that could have prevented 9/11.

Jon Wiener

Source: http://www.thenation.com/blog/155425/could-wikileaks-have-prevented-911-former-fbi-agent-says-yes