December 12, 2020 12:25:26 pm
It took the team several years to finally crack the code. (Photo: Screenshot of YouTube video uploaded by David Oranchak)
More than 50 years after the anonymous mass murderer, who called himself the ‘Zodiac Killer’, terrorized the streets of Northern California, a team of crypto experts was finally able to decipher one of the murderer’s mysterious coded messages sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969.
The message, dubbed ‘340 encrypted’ because it contains 340 characters, was decoded by David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, CNN reported.
It took the team several years to finally crack the code. Web designer David Oranchak, 46, first tried using computer programs to crack the complex code in 2006.
While detectives hoped the message would reveal the identity of the killer, the team found that the Zodiac Killer simply bragged about evading law enforcement authorities in the code, without providing any real clues as to motive or identity, AFP reported.
“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 paradise (sic) much sooner because now I have enough slaves to work for me,” the message, written in capital letters and no punctuation marks, read.
This was not the first message the Zodiac Killer sent to California newspapers during his reign of terror. In 1969, a school teacher and his wife were able to convey another similar message.
“I like to kill because it is so much fun,” he would say, once again referring to the “slaves” that, according to him, he was collecting to serve him in the “afterlife.”
But Oranchak and his team said that this code was much more difficult to crack. “All of us in the crypto community at Zodiac thought that encryption had another step beyond just figuring out which letters belonged to the symbols, and that’s what we found here,” Oranchak told AFO.
Cipher 340 is decoded by reading it diagonally, starting from the upper left corner and shifting one frame down and two frames to the right. Once the reader reaches the end, they have to go back to the opposite corner, Oranchak explained in a YouTube video.
This particular encryption system appears in a crypto manual for the US military dating back to the 1950s, according to the web designer.
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