Ted Cruz, Who Is Not the Zodiac Killer, Acknowledges a Long-Running Joke

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/us/politics/ted-cruz-zodiac-killer-tweet.html

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Let’s get this out of the way first: Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac killer.

We’re pretty sure. The infamous serial killer’s last confirmed murder was in 1969, while the senator from Texas was born in 1970. We feel the need to be very clear about this: Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, is almost surely not the Zodiac killer. It’s just about impossible.

But that’s long been a joke on the internet. And on Wednesday, Mr. Cruz, who evidence suggests is unlikely to be the Zodiac killer, posted the following on Twitter:

You might recognize the image as a coded letter the Zodiac killer once sent. This does not, any reasonable person would conclude, offer definitive proof that Mr. Cruz is the Zodiac killer, who was blamed for at least five murders in the San Francisco Bay Area and has never been identified.

But it did make for a suitable distraction on Wednesday, as people on Twitter erupted at what appeared to be Mr. Cruz’s first acknowledgment of the long-running joke.

Did the one-time presidential candidate score a few points for being in on the joke? Did he ruin what was once a fun joke?

Others — surely including those hearing about it for the first time through this article — were all sorts of baffled. Why did he tweet the Zodiac note? Why do people say he’s the Zodiac killer? Does anything make sense anymore?

No, it most certainly does not. But to make sense of Wednesday’s events — which do not matter in any significant way, as none of this matters in a cosmic sense — we begin at the origin of the meme.

Like many other memes and jokes, there’s no real reason for it. According to the meme-tracking website Know Your Meme, joking references to Mr. Cruz being the Zodiac killer date to at least 2013.

That’s it. There’s no more story than that. People thought it was a funny joke, more people picked up on it, and it became much more widespread as Mr. Cruz became a steady news figure during the Republican presidential primaries. The comedian Larry Wilmore focused on the gag when he hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2016.

Public Policy Polling, which often inserted whimsical questions into its polls during the campaign season, found that 10 percent of Florida Republicans said they thought that Mr. Cruz was the Zodiac killer, while 28 percent were not sure.

Until now, Mr. Cruz had publicly ignored the joke. His wife, Heidi Cruz, once responded to it, telling Yahoo News: “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.”

That brings us to Wednesday. Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, spilled a soda (it was Dr Pepper) on Mr. Cruz during a Senate hearing. That prompted a playful back-and-forth from the two senators’ Twitter accounts.

Mr. Sasse said that he “was wearing my ‘Lee Harvey Oswald Was Framed’ T-shirt,” a reference to the time President Trump accused Mr. Cruz’s father of associating with the man who assassinated John F. Kennedy.

Then Mr. Cruz — or someone on his staff who runs the Twitter account — responded to the tweet with the Zodiac killer’s note.

That left Twitter users to sort out whether the Texas senator should be applauded for his sense of humor, or whether the time had finally come to put this joke to rest.

The Zodiac killer, who is not Ted Cruz, remains unidentified.