Karl Etters

Democrat staff writer

The thought that the elusive Zodiac killer had returned more than 40 years since he was last heard from put people in Tallahassee on edge.

When a message similar to his cryptic messages turned up Friday on the sidewalk outside a student apartment complex – complete with a cipher the likes of which made him infamous in the 1960s – police took it seriously.

“You were wrong. I am not dead or in the hospital. I’m alive and well and I’m going to start killing again,” read the scrawlings in yellow chalk outside The Luxe on West Call apartments.

The message, concealing the name and location of the next victim, was eerily familiar.

It was a direct copy of a letter the Zodiac reportedly sent to an Albany, New York newspaper in 1973.

Campus police and the Tallahassee Police Department increased their patrols around the complex and campus. The story led a local TV station's late news broadcast Monday night and evoked concern from people who live in the area.

It turned out to be part of a class project on serial killers and drug cartels in Florida State University professor Iheoma Nwachukwu’s English class.

The assignment was to write a message in a public forum, take a picture and send it to Nwachukwu.

“It’s all a class project gone wrong,” said TPD spokesman Officer David Northway. We “are happy to report it was all a misunderstanding.”

On Friday, someone reported seeing the message and called police.

Meanwhile, the student who wrote the message had left for a weekend trip. She returned and on Tuesday called police after seeing flyers alerting Luxe residents to it and seeing it reported on the news.

She told police she and her roommate wrote the message but left in the pouring rain thinking the chalk would wash away.

The Zodiac, over the course of six years from 1968 to 1974, was linked to at least five homicides in Northern California. The killer taunted police, communicating through Bay Area newspapers.

Intense investigations by several law enforcement agencies yielded no arrests, despite several suspects.

Unlike the sidewalk message mystery, a case which TPD detectives have closed, the Zodiac murders are still unsolved.

Contact Karl Etters at ketters@tallahassee.com