A team of volunteer code breakers has cracked a mysterious cipher sent to a newspaper more than 50 years ago by the San Francisco serial killer who called himself the Zodiac, the FBI said Friday.
The zodiac killer, who was never caught, shot or stabbed seven people in the San Francisco Bay area over the course of about a year in 1968 and 1969, killing all but two. During his killing spree, he sent a series of terrifying letters to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.
Some of the notes were in code, including a particularly complex missive with 340 characters that became known as the 340 cipher.
“I hope you’re having a lot of fun trying to catch me,” said the cipher, cracked last week by codebreakers David Oranchak, Sam Blake and Jarl Van Eycke, according to a video posted on YouTube by Oranchak. “I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise (sic) long before because now I have enough slaves to work for me.”
Like the murders themselves, solving the Zodiac ciphers has become an international obsession for followers of real crime.
Oranchak, who the San Francisco Chronicle identified as a 46-year-old web designer living in Virginia, said in the video that he hoped the encryption would shed information on the identity of the killer.
“The message doesn’t really say much,” he said. “It’s more of the same garbage that seeks the attention of the Zodiac.”
The FBI’s San Francisco office confirmed Friday that the group had cracked the coded message and said the investigation into the half-century-old case was ongoing.
“The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens,” the FBI said in a statement posted on Twitter. “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.”
No one was ever charged in the Zodiac case, and theories about the killer’s true identity abound. The case has inspired numerous books and movies, including 1971’s “Dirty Harry” with Clint Eastwood and 2007’s “Zodiac” with Robert Downey Jr.
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