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A team of crypto enthusiasts announced Friday that they successfully deciphered one of the coded messages sent more than 50 years ago by the “Zodiac Killer,” a serial killer who terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s and remains unidentified.
The message was sent in November 1969 to the San Francisco Chronicle by the alleged murderer: his code consisted of a series of encrypted letters and symbols.
Detectives expected the coded message to contain the identity of the criminal, who committed at least five murders in 1968 and 1969 but claimed 37 in total and inspired other serial killers.
According to the trio of cryptographers, in the decoded message the author boasts and defies the authorities, but does not provide real clues about the motive or the identity of the author of the crimes.
“I hope you are having a lot of fun trying to catch me … I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to the paradice (sic) long before because now I have enough slaves working for me, “he says.
David Oranchak, a 46-year-old American web designer, took several computer programs and years of work to crack the complex code he started working on in 2006.
He was assisted by Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, and Jarl Van Eykcke, a Belgian logistics specialist, he told the San Francisco Chronicle, who confirmed the discovery with the FBI, the federal agency in charge of the investigation.
A first message sent to California newspapers was decoded by a school teacher and his wife in 1969.
“I like to kill because it’s so much fun”, said that text, referring again to “slaves” that he claimed to gather to serve him in the afterlife.
But the code used in the first message was much simpler than the “340 cipher”, so called because it contains 340 characters spread over 17 columns.
The cipher 340 is read diagonally, starting from the upper left corner and shifting down one frame and two frames to the right.
When the bottom is reached, the reader should go back to the opposite corner, the expert said in a video posted on his YouTube channel.
As he noted, the encryption system appears in a crypto manual intended for the US Army dating from the 1950s.
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