CARMEL, Ind. — Heidi Cruz knows that her husband, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is not the Zodiac Killer, no matter what people online say.

Heidi spent Monday morning traveling across Indiana in support of her husband’s presidential campaign. At a cafe in Carmel, Yahoo News asked for her reaction to a series of jokes that Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore made at the White House Correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night, where he repeatedly called her husband “the Zodiac Killer.”

“Well, I’ve been married to him for 15 years, and I know pretty well who he is, so it doesn’t bother me at all. There’s a lot of garbage out there,” Heidi said.

There is a popular Internet meme where people have asked whether Ted Cruz is the infamous Zodiac Killer, who was responsible for a string of unsolved murders and taunting letters to law enforcement in California during the late 1960s and early ’70s. This meme has spread widely, even though Cruz was born in 1970, two years after the first killings took place and is most definitely not the Zodiac Killer. Wilmore made a string of references to the meme during his appearance at the dinner in front of an audience that included President Obama and the White House press corps.

“There is a joke going around the Internet that Ted Cruz is actually the Zodiac Killer,” Wilmore said, later adding, “Recently, Ted Cruz got a string of wins and endorsements. Then everybody remembered who Ted Cruz is — the Zodiac Killer.”

Ted Cruz hugs his wife, Heidi, during a campaign event in Milwaukee on Tuesday, April 5, 2016. (AP/Paul Sancya)



Wilmore made several other comments about the meme at the event. Yahoo News asked Heidi about his remarks after a pair of supporters she met with marveled at her ability to “deal with” the “smearing and the scorched-earth stuff going on” during this heated GOP primary.

“Well, it’s amazing how a lot of people are swayed by it,” Heidi said. “Part of it is, the news media is 24/7, and they don’t let up.”

Indiana has become a crucial battleground in the Republican primary as frontrunner Donald Trump is approaching the number of delegates he needs to secure the nomination on the first ballot at the party’s convention. Polls currently show Trump ahead in Indiana. However, Cruz is hoping to come from behind and begin a series of victories that will keep Trump under the delegate threshold and lead to a contested convention.