message decrypted 51 years after the death toll in the US

The FBI confirmed that a group of hobbyists managed to decipher a 340-character encrypted message, 51 years after it was allegedly posted to the San Francisco Chronicle by a man who became known as the “Zodiac Killer.”

The killer, who was never arrested, shot and killed five people in a series of murders that terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s.

The name Zodiac was used by the murderer himself, who rose to fame for the brutality of the deaths and for the encrypted communications with which he provoked journalists and researchers.

The message was one of several sent to newspapers during the period the killer was active in the region.

It was decoded by three people from the United States, Belgium and Australia.

“I hope you are having a great time while trying to catch me. I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to heaven sooner because I already have enough slaves to work for me,” says the decrypted message, without shining any light on the identity of the murderer.

In a video posted on YouTube, Virginia web designer David Oranchak says he cracked the code together with Australian applied mathematics specialist Sam Blake and Belgian Jarl Van Eycke, warehouse manager and code-breaking software engineer.

The message, which Oranchak described as “more of the same garbage seeking the attention of the Zodiac,” consists of rows of capital letters and symbols. The decryption team, which combined ingenuity and software to decipher the message, dedicated their efforts to the killer’s victims and their families.

Confirming the achievement of the code violation, the FBI said it continues to seek justice for those killed by the killer.

In the tweet below, the agency says the following:

“The IMF learned that citizens cracked a code assigned to the Zodiac Killer. The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI’s San Francisco division and our local partners. The Zodiac Killer has terrorized multiple communities throughout Northern California, and even after decades, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes. Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, and out of respect for the victims and their families, we will not comment further on this moment “.

#Break – Our statement on the #Zodiac code: pic.twitter.com/cJCtlDEbMw

– FBI SanFrancisco (@FBISanFrancisco)
December 11, 2020

Murders

This is not the first coded message attributed to the killer, according to the Chronicle of San Francisco. Two more have yet to be decoded, one of which may contain the killer’s name.

The series of murders began in December 1968 with a man and a woman shot to death in their car.

In July 1969, another man and a woman were shot, but he survived.

Later that year, a man and a woman, a couple, were stabbed near a lake. Only the man survived.

In October 1969, a taxi driver was shot and killed in San Francisco.

The killer, who was never charged or identified, said he murdered 37 people in letters to newspapers, but investigators worked on the basis of seven victims in all, five of them homicides.

The murders inspired two films: Zodiac, 2007, with Robert Downey Jr and Jake Gyllenhaal, and Relentless Stalker, in 1971, starring Clint Eastwood as a tough San Francisco detective.