Amateurs unlock code, reveal Zodiac Killer’s 1969 message
It took 51 years to crack, but one of the taunting messages written in code and attributed to the Zodiac Killer has been solved, according to the FBI.
The mysterious 340-character cipher, which was mailed to The San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969, does not reveal the killer’s identity. But it does build on his image as an attention-seeking killer who reveled in terrorizing the Bay Area in the late 1960s.
“I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me” and “I am not afraid of the gas chamber” are two of the dark boasts in the message, according to David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia who said he had decrypted the cipher with the help of Sam Blake, an applied mathematician in Melbourne, Australia, and Jarl Van Eycke, a warehouse operator and computer programmer in Belgium.
Oranchak, who runs a website and YouTube series about the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers, said he was excited to have solved the code after 14 years of trying. But he said he was also worried about the effect it might have on victims’ families.
“The message in that cipher — I don’t see it as being helpful to them,” he 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.”
The FBI, which employs a team of code-crackers in its Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, said it had verified Oranchak’s claim of having broken the code, known as the 340 cipher. The agency said the cipher was one of four attributed to the killer, and was first submitted to an FBI lab on Nov. 13, 1969.
The FBI’s San Francisco field office also released a statement on the breakthrough, which was reported by The San Francisco Chronicle on Friday.
“The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners,” the office said. “The Zodiac Killer terrorized multiple communities across Northern California and even though decades have gone by, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes.”
The code had long baffled cryptographers, law enforcement agents and armchair sleuths obsessed with the shadowy killer, who was blamed for five slayings in the late 1960s. Only one previous cipher attributed to the Zodiac had been solved — by a California couple not long after it was sent in the 1960s.
This one was considered much more complex, suggesting the killer was frustrated that the first one had been deciphered so easily, Oranchak said.
The team that cracked it came together this year, Blake said, after he reached out to Oranchak with some ideas on how to unravel the patchwork of symbols and characters.
“It’s considered one of the holy grails of cryptography,” Blake said. “At the time, the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution was truly a moonshot.”
For months, Blake said, he and Oranchak tested, by trial and error, around 650,000 possible solutions, running them through a code-breaking program written by Van Eycke.
But the program turned up nothing until it suddenly yielded a surprising combination of words on Dec. 3, including “gas chamber” and “trying to catch me.”
“That’s what caught our attention,” said Oranchak. “That was the key.”
The full message, submitted to the FBI on Dec. 5, included a misspelling of the word paradise, no punctuation and some garbled phrases:
It read: “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.”