Joseph Herbert, Who Helped Catch Copycat Zodiac Killer, Dies at 68

Joseph Herbert, a former New York City police detective who helped crack the copycat Zodiac serial killer case in 1996, died on Sept. 30 at his home in Rockaway Beach, Queens. He was 68.

His daughter, Kristin Herbert Piccirilli, said the cause was most likely a heart attack, pending an autopsy.

Mr. Herbert was known for his creative, methodical work as a detective. He was later a commanding officer of the Joint Terrorism Task Force after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In an interview, the 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 had terrified Northern California in the late 1960s and who was never identified. And like the Zodiac killer, he sent taunting letters as he remained at large to the police, The New York Post and the CBS news program “60 Minutes,” saying he would kill one person for each of the 12 signs of the Zodiac. 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.”

Mr. Herbert pursued leads in the case under the auspices of the first task force set up to find the killer, and became a member of a second task force, created in 1994. He led a monthslong effort to compile a list of people who had been arrested within a four-square-mile area where some of the shootings had occurred. But experts could not match the fingerprints of anyone on the list to the single one that had been left on a note at a Zodiac crime scene in Central Park.

The task force was disbanded in 1995. But in a twist that proved fortuitous, Mr. Herbert had taken a hostage negotiating course, which he put to use when he responded to a shooting involving Mr. Seda at an apartment building in Brooklyn in June 1996. By the time Mr. Herbert arrived, Mr. Seda had exchanged gunfire with police officers, had shot his half sister in the buttocks and was holding her boyfriend hostage.

Mr. Herbert entered through a window and climbed to Mr. Seda’s third-floor apartment. After two hours of negotiating with Mr. Seda through the apartment door, Mr. Herbert persuaded him to surrender, release his hostage and surrender his cache of zip guns. Mr. Seda was interrogated and wrote a confession, admitting to having shot his half sister.

Mr. Herbert read the confession with fascination. Mr. Seda had drawn a symbol — involving an upside-down cross, a circle and three 7s — that was similar to one in the Zodiac letters. The shapes of certain letters were also similar in both the confession and the letters, as was a distinctive habit of underlining words.

“I had a physical reaction,” Mr. Herbert wrote in his unpublished autobiography, “NYPD Proud” (with Michael McKinley). “My blood pressure went down 50 points. I recognized the handwriting immediately as being that from the letters I had been studying for the last few years of the Zodiac case.”

Fingerprint and DNA analysis confirmed that Mr. Seda was the culprit. In two trials, in 1998 and 1999, he was convicted of multiple counts of murder and attempted murder, and sentenced to nearly 236 years in prison.

Joseph Michael Herbert was born on July 13, 1957, one of eight children of John and Veronica (Rath) Herbert. His father was a New York City firefighter, and his mother managed the home.

After dropping out of Brooklyn Technical High School, he worked for three years as a production supervisor at a sugar refinery in Brooklyn. He would later receive his high school equivalency diploma and, in 2001, a bachelor’s degree in community and human services from Empire State University.

Mr. Herbert joined the police department in 1981 — attracted by the stories his brother John, a homicide detective, told — and retired in 2017.

Working in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn in the early 1980s, he made an arrest that led to the apprehension of the killers of Angelo Brown, an off-duty officer; arrested a crack buyer who turned out to be a rapist who had attacked women a dozen times in the Flatbush neighborhood; and earned the department’s Medal of Valor for shooting and killing a man who had stabbed his partner, Dennis Schwab, in the face.

Mr. Herbert was promoted to detective in 1986.

James Waters, a former police department counterterrorism chief and commanding officer of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which partners with the F.B.I., recalled Mr. Herbert’s comprehensive memory in data-driven CompStat meetings.

“He’d remember every victim’s name,” Mr. Waters said. “The circumstances of the crime, the ballistics information and the connectivity to other crimes. He just had that kind of mind.”

Mr. Herbert rose to be detective squad commander of the 75th Precinct in Brooklyn, where he took the novel step of working with prosecutors to reduce crime by employing federal racketeering law.

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, he joined the Joint Terrorism Task Force, overseeing cases involving threats to New York and the United States, and was dispatched to Washington to analyze classified data at the National Counterterrorism Center. He was named to a top position in the police department’s intelligence division in 2009 after a breach in the investigation of a potential Al Qaeda bomb plot.

In 2011, Mr. Herbert began a two-year stint as an adviser to the House Committee on Homeland Security.

“I had former C.I.A. and F.B.I. guys on the committee, but in his quiet way, Joe took it over,” Peter T. King, a former Republican congressman from Long Island who led the committee, said in an interview. “He had an instinctive way to cut though B.S. and piece things together.”

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Herbert is survived by a granddaughter; two sisters, Veronica Dineen and Marian Herbert; and two brothers, Jeffrey and Joel. His wife, Barbara (Smith) Herbert, a nurse, died in July.

In 2014, after returning to the terrorism task force, Mr. Herbert was named commanding officer on the police department’s side. Later that year, he was promoted to deputy chief of the department, a rank he had never imagined he would achieve.

“I just wanted to be a detective, like my brother,” he wrote in his autobiography.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.