Fifty years after California’s ‘Zodiac Killer’ sent an encrypted message to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, crypto enthusiasts claim they had successfully cracked it.
The ‘Zodiac Killer’, which terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s and remains unidentified, sent a message to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper in November 1969, consisting of a series of cryptic letters and symbols.
According to an AFP report, experts expected the coded message to contain the identity of the killer, who committed at least five murders in 1968 and 1969, but claimed 37 in total and inspired other serial killers.
According to the trio who are said to have cracked the code, the message includes bragging and defiance of authorities with no real clue as to motive or identity.
It includes a message: “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) much sooner because now I have enough slaves to work for me.”
According to the report, David Oranchak, a 46-year-old American web designer, took several computer programs and years of work to crack the complex code he began working on in 2006. He also made the reveal on his YouTube channel. .
Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, and Jarl Van Eykcke, a Belgian logistician also helped Oranchak. He shared the discovery with the San Francisco Chronicle, which later confirmed it 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, according to the report.
“I like to kill because it is a lot of fun,” he would say, referring again to the “slaves” he claimed to collect to serve him in the afterlife.
But the code used in the first message was much simpler than that of “340 encryption,” which has been so named because it contains 340 characters spread over 17 columns, according to the report.
“All of us in the crypto community at Zodiac thought that encryption had another step beyond simply figuring out which letters belonged to the symbols, and that’s what we found here,” Oranchak said in the report.
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.
