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An encrypted message sent by a brutal serial killer who has never been caught has been decrypted more than 51 years after it was sent.
The suspected man, known as the Zodiac Killer, killed at least five people and attempted to kill at least two more in Northern California in 1968 and 1969. In the first three attacks, he targeted couples. The first two murder victims were high school students who were parked in a car on their first date. In the attacks on the other two couples, he managed to kill the women, but the men survived. A San Francisco taxi driver was the last known victim.
During the killing spree, the Zodiac Killer sent a series of letters to the media claiming credit for the killings. To prove the authenticity of the claims, the letters included unpublished details and evidence from crime scenes.
In August 1969, following the murders of three of the five known victims, the Zodiac Killer sent three nearly identical letters to three Bay Area newspapers. Each letter also included one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram that the suspect said would reveal his identity. The killer demanded that the newspapers publish the letters in their entirety or he would kill again.
A week after the letters were sent, a couple in Salinas, California, cracked the encryption. The Zodiac Killer, revealed the plain text, said that he was collecting slaves for the afterlife and that he would not reveal his identity because doing so would interfere with those plans.
In November 1969, after killing the two remaining known victims, the Zodiac Killer sent a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle that included a new puzzle. The cryptogram was known as Z-340, or simply 340, because it contained 340 characters. The full picture of the crypto is below:
Since then, both amateur and professional cryptographers, including those working for the FBI, have worked to crack the encryption. It wasn’t until this week that an international team solved it.
“The encryption had been unsolved for so long, it had a huge goal on the back, and I felt like it was a challenge that had a chance of being solved,” Dave Oranchak, one of three men who cracked the encrypted message, said by mail electronic. “It was an exciting project to work on, and it was on a lot of people’s ‘top unsolved ciphers of all time’ lists.”
The full text of the broken cipher reads:
I HOPE YOU’RE HAVING A LOT OF FUN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT IT WAS NOT ME ON THE TELEVISION SHOW THAT BRINGS A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CAMERA BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE EVERYTHING SOONER BECAUSE NOW I HAVE ENOUGH WORK FOR ME SLAVES WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY ARRIVE TO PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW MY NEW LIFE WILL BE EASY IN PARADICE DEATH
The decoded message squares with much of what is already known about the case. The mention of the TV show and the gas chambers refers to a call made to a talk show on KGO-TV a month earlier, in which someone claiming to be the Zodiac Killer said, “I need help. I’m sick. I don’t want to go to the gas chamber. “In other communications, the killer used the same misspelling for the word” paradise. “And of course, there were earlier references to collecting slaves for the afterlife.
Since then, the FBI in San Francisco has confirmed that the team has correctly solved the cryptogram. In a statement issued Friday, the agency wrote:
The FBI knows that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens. The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the San Francisco division of the FBI and our local law enforcement partners. 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. Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation and out of respect for the victims and their families, we will not provide further comment at this time.
Oranchak, a 46-year-old software developer in Virginia, said 340 is what is known as a transpose cipher. Most of the ciphers used by computers today rely on mathematics to encode messages. Transpose ciphers, by contrast, are largely relics of the past that use rules to rearrange the characters or groups of characters in the message.
Transpose ciphers reorganize messages in a wide variety of ways. One common way is to rearrange the columns of a message. The message in 340 was probably rearranged by manipulating triangular sections cut out of messages written in rectangles. Oranchak and his colleagues developed an app that helped him and his colleagues solve the puzzle.
In the video below, Oranchak provides a much more detailed explanation of the encryption and how he and his colleagues cracked it.
Let’s Crack Zodiac – Episode 5 – 340 is solved!
Oranchak said he has been working intermittently to solve 340 since 2006. The other two men on the team are Sam Blake, an applied mathematician living in Australia, and Jarl Van Eycke, a warehouse operator in Belgium. Van Eycke is also the software developer behind AZdecrypt, a code-breaking app that was inspired by his push to crack the 340.
