After more than 50 yrs, experts crack cryptic message of California’s ‘Zodiac Killer’

New Delhi: It’s been more than 50 years that an anonymous mass murderer who went by the name ‘Zodiac Killer’ sent a mysterious cipher to a newspaper talking about himself and the murders. A team of cryptography experts finally did it, they cracked a mysterious cipher sent by the killer.

This message was sent in November 1969 to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper by the alleged serial killer. The dubbed message ‘340 cipher’ as it contains 340 characters is decoded by David Oranchak who is a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, CNN reported.

In 1968-69, the Zodiac Killer attacked 7 people in 4 different California locations. Zodiac’ss first three targets were couples in secluded areas; two of these people survived. His last known victim was a taxi driver killed on October 11, 1969, in San Francisco.

During and even after his killing spree, the Zodiac killer received a huge amount of attention and spread fear as he shared letters, information, ciphers and threats with authorities. No murder has been officially linked to the Zodiac Killer since October 1969, but the unsolved case continues to fascinate.

The message was sent in all capital letters without punctuation and included the misspelling of paradise.

Decoding the cipher revealed the following message:

“I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me

That wasn’t me on the TV show which brings up a point about me

I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice all the sooner

Because I now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradice so they are afraid of death

I am not afraid because I know that my new life will be an easy one in paradice death.”

The TV show the message refers to is “The Jim Dunbar Show,” a Bay Area television talk show. The cipher was sent two weeks after a person claiming to be the Zodiac Killer called into the show.

#Breaking – Our statement regarding the #Zodiac cipher: pic.twitter.com/cJCtlDEbMw

— FBI SanFrancisco (@FBISanFrancisco) December 11, 2020

Oranchak and his team said that this code was much harder to decipher. “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