51 years later, coded message deciphered

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 340character 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 to break it. 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 submitted to an FBI lab on Nov. 13, 1969.

“The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners,” the field 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 murders in the late 1960s. Only one previous cipher attributed to the Zodiac had been solved.