Killer’s code cracked after 51 years
For 51 years, one of the Zodiac Killer’s puzzling codes he sent in letters to newspapers in the late 1960s and early 1970s had confounded the cryptography community, law enforcement and curious citizens.
But the Bay Area killer’s 340-character cipher mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle has been cracked by an international team of codebreakers. The breakthrough was verified by the FBI.
‘‘I felt vindicated,’’ said American codebreaker David Oranchak, who added that he first saw the cipher 14 years ago and thought he could decipher it quickly.
Along with Australian mathematician Sam Blake and Belgian programmer Jarl Van Eycke, the trio figures that the grid of 63 unique, mysterious symbols, written by the killer and mailed to the Chronicle with a victim’s bloodstained shirt, roughly translates as:
‘‘I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. That wasnt 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 (sic) 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.’’
Two weeks before the letter was sent, someone claiming to be the Zodiac Killer had called a morning TV news
show, saying, ‘‘I don’t want to go to the gas chamber’’.
The code does not uncover the longsought identity of the man behind a string of murders in northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Sent in 1969 after a schoolteacher and his wife cracked the Zodiac Killer’s first cipher, the new cipher was more complex and remained unsolved, even by a supercomputer designed to think like the killer.
Experts were mystified by the
arrangement of strange markings.
The trio of amateur sleuths worked on the puzzle for a year, using a codebreaking computer program created by Van Eycke and more than 650,000 variations written by Blake.
Oranchak said the breakthrough resulted from a hobby. ‘‘To actually come upon the answer, and feel like it’s right based on our knowledge of cryptography, and then submit it to the FBI and have them verify it, it was a very good feeling.’’