The Zodiac Killer in American Horror Story: the real one was never caught, so who plays him on the show?

The Zodiac Killer terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s, mailed taunting letters and ciphers to newspapers and was never identified. That makes him an awkward fit for a show that loves to cast famous murderers with famous actors. Ryan Murphy's anthology found two very different workarounds, one in American Horror Story: Hotel and one in American Horror Story: Cult.

Hotel: the Zodiac comes to dinner

Hotel's fourth episode, "Devil's Night," aired on FX on October 28, 2015. Every year on the night before Halloween, the hotel's ghostly founder James Patrick March (Evan Peters) throws a dinner party for the dead serial killers of America, and the guest list is a who's who:

• John Wayne Gacy: John Carroll Lynch
• Jeffrey Dahmer: Seth Gabel
• Aileen Wuornos: Lily Rabe
• Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker: Anthony Ruivivar
• The Zodiac Killer: an actor credited only as "Unidentified Extra"

The Zodiac arrives last, and March greets him with "You're late!" He wears the black hood with the crosshair symbol that a survivor described after the 1969 attack at Lake Berryessa, he never says a word, and his biggest moment is pointing a gun at Detective John Lowe (Wes Bentley). Ramirez mocks him for giving himself a nickname, CinemaBlend's Jason Wiese notes.

So the answer to the headline, at least for Hotel: nobody you'd recognize. The show gave every other killer at the table a named actor and left the Zodiac as anonymous as the real one.

The real Zodiac was never identified. On American Horror Story, neither was the actor.

The casting does have one inside joke. John Carroll Lynch, playing Gacy across the table, had already spent time in the Zodiac case: in David Fincher's Zodiac (2007), he played Arthur Leigh Allen, the man investigators considered their prime suspect. In "Devil's Night," he finally gets to sit down to dinner with the man in the hood.

Cult: the Zodiac was a team

Two years later, American Horror Story: Cult offered a different answer. In "Valerie Solanas Died for Your Sins: Scumbag," which aired October 17, 2017, Bebe Babbitt (Frances Conroy) tells Kai Anderson (Evan Peters again) that the Zodiac murders weren't one man's work.

Here's the version the episode gives:

• The killers: After Valerie Solanas (Lena Dunham) shoots Andy Warhol, her radical feminist group SCUM starts attacking couples, and police and the press pin the attacks on the Zodiac.
• The letters: Valerie discovers that Bruce, a gay male SCUM member, has been writing the Zodiac letters to the newspapers himself. SCUM kills him for it.
• The confession: Valerie goes to the police to claim the murders. The officer laughs at her.

Even the show's own critics noticed the problem. Reviewing the episode for /Film, Aaron Pruner pointed out that "Devil's Night" had already shown the Zodiac as a lone killer, and wondered whether the series had written itself into a corner or whether the SCUM story was one of Kai's manipulations.

"Female rage then and in the country now."

— Ryan Murphy, on what the episode set out to explore, via The Hollywood Reporter

So who is the Zodiac on AHS?

American Horror Story never commits. In 2015, he's a silent ghost played by an uncredited extra. In 2017, he's a cover story for a group of women, written up in letters by a man they murdered. Neither version gives the Zodiac one face of his own, which is the one detail the show could be sure it got right.

Don't miss: American Horror Story: 13 easter eggs from Coven, Hotel and Murder House that are easy to miss on first watch

The real case is still open. Fifty-plus years of suspects, books, documentaries and a Fincher film haven't produced a name, and American Horror Story went with the only casting choice nobody can dispute.

Previously we wrote: Who is Sally in Nocturne, and is she dead? A caller says she's gone — Lars Kepler's books suggest who he is