After 51 Years, Experts Crack Cryptic Message Of California's 'Zodiac Killer' Who Murdered 37

Fifty one years after California's 'Zodiac Killer' sent a coded message to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, cryptography enthusiasts claim that they had successfully cracked it.

Zodiac Killer, who terrorised northern California in the late 1960s and remains unidentified, had sent a message to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper in November 1969. The message consisted of a series of cryptic letters and symbols. It took 51 years and a team of experts from three countries to crack the code to a cipher left by the killer.

AP

He claims to have killed 37 people

According to a report in NDTV that quotes AFP, experts hoped the coded message contained 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 said to have broken the code, the message includes boasts and defiance of authorities without any real clues on motive or identity.

He also sent a message to the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969 in a series of symbols, reads: ¡°I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me," it read.

The FBI confirmed that the news of the cracked code is the real deal, but said it does little to help investigators in the decades-long search for the serial killer.

Guardian

A first message sent to Californian newspapers was decoded by a schoolteacher and his wife in 1969, said the report.

What the code said

"I like killing because it is so much fun," it said, again referring to "slaves" that he claimed to collect to serve him in the afterlife.

But the code used in the first message was much simpler than the one for "340 cipher," , which has been named so because it contains 340 characters spread throughout 17 columns, said the report.

"All of us in the crypto community on the Zodiac figured the cipher had another step beyond just figuring out what letters belonged to the symbols, and that's just what we found here," the report quoted Oranchak as saying.

The 340 cipher is read diagonally, starting from the upper-left corner and shifting one box down and two boxes to the right.

ABC

How they cracked the code

As per the report, it took several computer programs and years of work for David Oranchak, a 46-year-old American web designer, to decipher the complex code he started working on in 2006. He has also made the revelation on his YouTube channel.

Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, and Jarl Van Eykcke, a Belgian logistician also helped Oranchak. He told about the discovery to the San Francisco Chronicle, which further confirmed about it with the FBI, the federal agency in charge of the investigation.

When the bottom is reached, the reader must go back to the opposite corner, said the expert in a video posted on his YouTube channel.