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It took 51 years to decipher, but one of the mocking 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 identity of the killer. But it’s based on his image as an attention-seeking killer who reveled in terrorizing the Bay Area in the late 1960s.
“I hope you are having a lot of fun trying to catch me,” reads the message, sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in a series of symbols. “I’m not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise sooner because now I have enough slaves to work for me,” according to David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia who said he cracked the encryption with it 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 on the Zodiac Killer ciphers, said he was excited to have solved the code after 14 years of trying to crack it. But he said he was also concerned about the effect it could have on the families of the victims.
“The message in that code, I don’t see it as useful to them,” he said. “It’s more of the same crap the killer liked to write about. It is only meant to hurt people and make them afraid. “The FBI, which employs a team of code breakers in its Racketeering and Cryptanalysis Records Unit, said it had verified Oranchak’s claim to have cracked the code. , known as the 340 cipher. The agency said the cipher was one of four attributed to the killer and that it was first sent to an FBI lab on November 13, 1969.
“The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the San Francisco division of the FBI and our local law enforcement partners,” the field office said. “The Zodiac Killer terrorized multiple communities in Northern California, and although decades have passed, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes.”
The code had long puzzled cryptographers, law enforcement officers, and armchair detectives obsessed with the shadow killer, who was blamed for five murders in the late 1960s. Only one earlier cipher attributed to him had been solved. Zodiac. New York Times and Guardian
