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A team of amateur detectives appears to have cracked one of the notorious Zodiac Killer’s coded messages, more than 50 years after it was sent.
The killer is confirmed to have fatally stabbed or shot five people in Northern California in the 1960s, although it is believed that he may have killed more.
He was dubbed the Zodiac Killer after sending mocking letters and mysterious ciphers to local police and newspapers.
An artist’s sketch based on a victim’s testimony about the Zodiac Killer.
Until now, one of the ciphers, posted to The San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969, had never been decrypted.
But three members of the public, Australian software engineer Sam Blake, American cryptographer David Oranchak and Belgian software engineer Jarl Van, say they have managed to make sense of the encoded symbols, letters and numbers.
According to the fan team, the 340-character cipher reads: “I HOPE YOU’RE HAVING A LOT OF FUN TRYING TO CAPTURE THAT IT WASN’T ME ON THE TELEVISION SHOW, WHAT RISES A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CAMERA BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE “.
It continues: “EVERYTHING BEFORE BECAUSE NOW I HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE OTHERS HAVE NOTHING WHEN THEY ARRIVE IN PARADISE, SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH, I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE WILL BE LIFE IN LIFE THE DEATH OF THE PARADICE “.
Investigators expected the encryption to reveal the killer’s name, but the message makes no mention of this.
The FBI arm in San Francisco said in a statement that its own Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU) had recognized and confirmed the work.
One of the ciphers sent to The San Francisco Chronicle
A police captain inspects the door of a car belonging to a 1969 Zodiac Killer victim
“Over the past 51 years, CRRU has reviewed numerous solutions proposed by the public, none of which had merit,” he said.
“The encryption was recently solved by a team of three private citizens.”
Oranchak, who lives in Virginia, told The Chronicle that the find was “exciting.”
“We have been sitting on the solution since last Saturday,” he said. “When I started looking at the Zodiac ciphers all those years ago, I thought, ‘Oh, I can write a computer program and figure it out,’ but it’s been kicking my ass all this time. Until now.”
This is the second time a Zodiac Killer cipher has been cracked.
School teacher Donald Harden broke another one of the zodiac codes
The first, also posted to The Chronicle, was solved by a schoolteacher and his wife, but said little more than, “I like to kill because it’s so much fun.”
The killer has never been caught, despite gaining notoriety, and the case is still active.
