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Fifty-one years later, the second of four encrypted messages from the serial killer Zodiac was decrypted. The summer of 69 in California was the summer of love and blood. And it wasn’t just the murders of Charles Manson’s ‘family’ that abruptly woke America from the hippie dream of a world of peace and music. In the Bay Area, children who discovered free sex in the backseat of their cars, like their Florentine peers across the Atlantic, lived with the nightmare of a serial killer who, since the first double murder on 20 December 1968, it seemed to be aimed at young couples.
‘Zodiac’ was certainly not the deadliest of the serial killers that have bloodied the United States. Five victims in ten months (at least those officially attributed to him) seem few compared to the 35 of Ted Bundy or the 33 of John Wayne Gacy, both active in the 1970s. The mystery of his identity, however, made the case one of the most exciting in modern crime history, a black legend comparable to that of Jack the Ripper in its impact on the collective imagination, as evidenced by the many successful books and films dedicated to him. from the first chapter of the Inspector Callaghan saga to the film shot by David Fincher in 2007.
Like its 19th century English colleague, ‘Zodiac’ had coined its nickname in letters it sent to the press, threatening massacres if they were not published. Letters that had kept coming even in the months after his last crime, the murder of a taxi driver in San Francisco on October 11, 1969, and that contained a mystery within the mystery. These are the four famous encrypted messages, one of which would contain the name of the murderer. To date, only one has been deciphered. Today, 51 years after its expedition to the ‘San Francisco Chronicle’, the content of a second, the so-called ‘Cipher 340’, has been revealed thanks to the eight-month work of an international team formed by the American programmer David Oranchak. , an Australian, the mathematician Sam Blake, and a Belgian, the warehouse worker Jarl Van Eykcke. Not even this time have elements emerged capable of shedding light on who the ‘Zodiac’ was (the only suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, died in 1992 before an investigation was opened against him). But it remains a historic day for the countless followers of the case.
News of the decryption, which had been circulating on forums for days, was confirmed only today by the FBI. “I hope you are having fun trying to catch me”, is the content of the message, “it was not me in the television show about me, I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will take me to heaven as soon as possible, where now I have enough slaves who work for me. The others in heaven have nothing, that is why they are afraid of death, while I am not afraid because I know that my life will be easy once in heaven. “
The first message, the ‘Cipher 408’, of the number of characters included, was translated almost immediately because it was enough to understand which letters the symbols correspond to. In the ‘Cipher 340’, however, the symbols were not arranged in horizontal lines as in normal text, but in diagonal lines, with some words in columns, a system present in at least one American military cipher from the 1950s To put the team on the right track, Oranchak explained to the San Francisco Chronicle, was the identification of some words – “gas chamber” and “the television program” – thanks to software capable of providing 650,000 alternative interpretations of the code. . “We knew we had something on our hands about Dunbar’s show,” continued Oranchak, who has been working on encrypted Zodiac messages since 2006. On October 22, 1969, that television show received a phone call from a person who identified himself. like the Zodiac and claimed that he was afraid of the gas chamber. With the ‘Cipher 340’, the real Zodiac wanted to deny: he was not afraid to go to the other world, where the shadows of his victims would serve him for eternity.
“We are aware of the code solution and we are continuing to work on the case,” is the laconic comment from Sgt Michael Andraychak of the San Francisco Police, “is all we have to say at this point. To expose himself a little more is Gianrico Pierucci, the retired inspector who devoted much of his career to investigations. “He is making fun, from a psychological point of view, in what is good, but there is not much more”, declared Pierucci to the ‘Chronicle’, “what What you really want is a place, an address, a kind of puzzle that can be solved. A certain person, a job, something that gives a clue of who he is ”.
“The codebreakers now have to work on the other two messages,” Pierucci added, “we need your name.” But for Oranchak deciphering the last two messages is an “almost desperate mission” to decipher the other two messages, too short for the thousands of possible combinations to provide the correct trace. The solution to America’s greatest mystery remains a secret in the assassin’s head, who has probably already taken him to his grave.
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