It’s long been assumed that the identity of the “Zodiac killer,” who terrorized Northern California from the late ‘60s through the early ‘70s, is one of those mysteries that will never be solved. David Fincher’s film Zodiac is about that very idea. (Then again, some people think maybe it was Ted Cruz.) And yet we now have one piece of information we’ve never had before: As per The New York Times, codebreakers recently cracked a cipher attributed to the puzzle-loving murderer, one that had baffled cryptographers for over 50 years.
The cipher had been mailed to The San Francisco Chronicle in November of 1969. On December 5, just over 51 years later, a solution was sent to the FBI, cracked by three citizens: David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia; Sam Blake, an applied mathematician from Melbourne, Australia; and Jarl Van Eycke, a warehouse operator and computer programmer from Belgium.
As in other cracked Zodiac killer ciphers, it contained no punctuation and included deliberate misspellings. The message found several dark boasts, and it can be read below in its entirety:
“I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me that wasn’t me on the TV show which brings up a point about me I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradice so they are afraid of death I am not afraid because I know that my new life is life will be an easy one in paradice death.”
Mind you, this brings us no closer to identifying the killer, whose trail evaporated in the early 1970s. Oranhak, who runs both a website and a YouTube series about the ciphers, said as much, expressing his concern that it may give families of the killer’s victims false hope.
“The message in that cipher — I don’t see it as being helpful to them,” Oranchak said. “It’s more of the same junk that the killer liked to write about. It’s just intended to hurt people and make them afraid.”
Previously only one Zodiac cipher had been solved, also by citizens, namely a California couple, back when the killings had just started. This one, however, was considered even more complex.
The Zodiac killer claimed to have taken 37 lives, but only five have been verified. The San Francisco wing of the FBI says the Zodiac case remains an “open investigation.
(Via NYT)