Zodiac Killer.Photo: Getty
A team of armchair sleuths say they have solved a coded message attributed to the infamousZodiac Killer— who killed at least five people in California in the 1960s and claimed to have killed more than 30 — more than half a century after the note was sent toThe San Francisco Chronicle.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s San Francisco Division, which lists the Zodiac killings as an open case,confirmed the discovery in a statementon Friday.
The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation, the agency said.
According to coding expert David Oranchak, whoposted his findings on YouTube, the encrypted message — dubbed the “340 cipher” due to its number of characters — reads in part: “I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME.”
“I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH,” it reads.
Oranchak, a 46-year-old web designer who lives in Virginia,told theChroniclethat he has been working on the Zodiac Killer’s codes since 2006.
He was able to crack the 340 cipher with help from two other amateur codebreakers: Sam Blake, a mathematician in Australia, and Jarl Van Eykcke, a warehouse operator in Belgium, according to the outlet.
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“I could not have done this without them,” Oranchak said of his partners. “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.”
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In 1969, a schoolteacher from Salinas, California, and his wife were able to decipher a message — now named the “408 cipher” — sent in pieces to three different newspapers. The message read: “I like killing because it is so much fun.”
source: people.com
