Joseph Herbert, a New York City police detective whose investigative skills helped crack the copycat Zodiac serial killer case in 1996 and led to his assignment, after the Sept. 11 attacks, to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, where he rose to be a commanding officer, died on Sept. 30 at his home in Rockaway Beach, Queens. He was 68.
His daughter, Kristin Herbert Piccirilli, said the cause was likely a heart attack.
Mr. Herbert was known for his creative, methodical work as a detective and squad commander. In an interview, former New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly called him “a star, a keen investigator who was willing to burrow through mounds of paper, which a lot of cases require.”
Mr. Herbert was working in Brooklyn when an assailant who would later be identified as Heriberto Seda killed three people and wounded five others with a zip gun in two homicidal sprees between 1990 and 1993.
For many New Yorkers, Mr. Seda’s violence evoked memories of the serial murderer David Berkowitz, the so-called Son of Sam, who killed six people and wounded seven others in New York between 1976 and 1977.
But Mr. Seda adopted the name of the Zodiac killer who terrified Northern California in the late 1960s (and was never identified). And like the Zodiac killer, he sent taunting letters as he remained at large — in Mr. Seda’s case, to the police, The New York Post and the CBS news program “60 Minutes.” In at least two of the letters, and a note left at the scene of one of his attacks, he drew a pie-shaped picture with the astrological signs of his first three victims.
In another note he wrote, “Zodiac — time to die.”
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