12 Facts About Gareth Penn

Gareth Sewell Penn was born on January 1,1941 and is an American true crime author and amateur detective known for being among the first non-journalists to write about the Zodiac Killer case.

Gareth Penn published a theory about the killer's motives, publicly accused a noted UC Berkeley public policy professor of the crimes, and labeled himself a one-time suspect.

In 1965, Gareth Penn entered the United States Army in Berlin, Germany and received basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

Gareth Penn received artillery survey training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he became an Artillery Surveyor Instructor.

Gareth Penn received the National Defense Service Medal and the designation of Expert Rifle Marksman.

In 1967, Gareth Penn moved back to Berkeley, California, where he was transferred to the Army reserves.

Gareth Penn's writing, mostly focused on the Zodiac case, was largely published in The Ecphorizer, the newsletter of the San Francisco chapter of Mensa International, which had a peak readership of 700 and was published between 1981 and 1995 A 1972 piece he wrote while attending UC Berkeley, Gottfried von Strassburg and the Invisible Art was published in the peer-reviewed journal of Germanic studies Colloquia Germanica.

Gareth Penn says his father, Hugh Scott Gareth Penn, who had been a US Army cryptographer during World War II, introduced him to the Zodiac case while he was working for the California Department of Justice.

Gareth Penn started writing about the Zodiac case in a 1981 article for California Magazine entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Mass Murderer.

Gareth Penn then spent the better part of two decades publicly accusing University of California, Berkeley public policy professor Michael O'Hare of the Zodiac murders.

Gareth Penn argued that a "geometric design" yielded similarities between the Webster murder and the Zodiac killings in California.

Gareth Penn continues writing about the case, maintaining a narrative blog entitled D550.