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A TEAM OF cryptography enthusiasts said yesterday they had successfully cracked one of the coded messages sent over 50 years ago by the so-called Zodiac Killer, who terrorised northern California in the late 1960s and remains unidentified.
The message was sent in November 1969 to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper by the alleged serial killer. Its code consists of a series of cryptic letters and symbols.
Sleuths 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.
It includes to message: “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 paradice [sic] all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me.”
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 was helped by Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, and Jarl Van Eykcke, a Belgian logistician, he told the San Francisco Chronicle, which confirmed the discovery with the FBI, the federal agency in charge of the investigation.
A first message sent to Californian newspapers was decoded by a schoolteacher and his wife in 1969.
“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 the 340 cipher, so called because it contains 340 characters spread throughout 17 columns.
“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,” said Oranchak.
The 340 cipher is read diagonally, starting from the upper-left corner and shifting one box down and two boxes to the right.
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.
According to him, the coding system appears in particular in a cryptography manual for the US army dating from the 1950s.
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Good it was cracked but if I remember rightly from the movie, the hardware shop assistant they eventually said was the Zodiac killer died shortly afterwards and therefore they would never know if they were right or not.
Disclaimer – Apologies if you never saw the movie and were planning too but now I’ve ruined the ending…..
@Paolo: A simple spoiler warning would suffice.
@Conrad Shields: it came out 13 years ago. I don’t think you need spoilers.
Also, Darth Vader is Luke’s dad
@Cian Martin: haha….and Bruce Willis was a ghost in Sixth Sense!! Wasn’t expecting the twist at the end of Titanic though!
@Joe Kennedy: the one where the old bint decides to die alongside some pauper she had a dirty weekend with 80 years previous and not with the family she raised thereafter?
@Paolo: Cracked one of the messages not all, they didnt seem to say if same will do for others, many have claimed to have cracked some, some with different meanings for same message etc
@Peter Lewis Jnr: haha…no…. that it ended up sinking!
@Conrad Shields: Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) is Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects
@Paolo: Not a great movie.
@Michael Carolan: also Brad pit is only a figment of Edward Nortons imagination in fight club.
@Paolo: Well you didnt really, we all know he was never caught.
@Michael Carolan: The Wizard in the Wizard of Oz isn’t really a wizard and Dorothy never really left Kansas
@Cian Martin: Noooooooooooooo!
@Paolo: I hate show offs who ruin movies for others
Thanks
@Paolo: it was a terrible ending anyway.
Regardless of time, skill, etc the clock is ticking down on a lot of unsolved murders, rape and crimes where dna is left behind, the friendly ancestry dna test etc are leaving bio markers like confetti.. The future awaits..
@David Dineen: Yes but DNA degrades and I believe it has to be in a certain ‘state’ for want of a better word even if not degraded to be able to be tested, so in some cases passing of time does not help
Where did the ‘Tom Ripley’ comment go, it was the very first comment on this article there was nothing offensive etc in the comment, maybe he, if it even is a he, didnt like letting people know that he had never heard of this famous serial killer etc, but hardly a reason for the Journal to delete it
He said something like basically ‘He hadnt done much research into this killer and due to his Cryptology skills should have been easy enough to catch with such a small pool of people with those skils..” I cant remember the exact wording.
How is that these pro FG journal a/c’s like Tom Ripley seem to have the ability to delete their own comments ? Very suspicious
@Da Dell: can you not delete your own comments. I can. Well after I sent them a photocopy of a donation to FG. Seriously you want to get out more not everything is a conspiracy.
@Rmc: How can you delete your comment ? I cannnot
@Da Dell: make another comment..then try pressing down arrow to right of your name on comment and hide comment..could be how it was removed..I could be wrong
@SquintEastwood: Thanks, but I thought that should juts hide comment from your own view so to speak, like muting a user, if thats it then i stand corrected .. Ive seen in comments in replys before people replying to somethiing but noting was before that etc etc
@Da Dell: I will hide my comment to see if it goes for you
@Da Dell: has it gone
@SquintEastwood: nope.
@David Stapleton: nope too?
What is there
@SquintEastwood: Nope .. at first I thought it had worked as I am on my personal laptop .. then i checked on work laptop and it was there.
I cleared cookies and cache from personal and logged in again and I can see the comments again now …
So how can Mr Ripley and Mr RMC delete theirs then and so much for those that are liking his comment , they must also be able to delete theirs with their journal admin access too :-)
@SquintEastwood: Also mr RMC never let us know how he deletes his ..
I have now saved this page as local HTML, I often do on ‘controversial’ articles as stuff often mysteriously just dissappears :-)
@Da Dell: damn it. Someone’s onto me. How did you know Leo and me were in cahoots with the journal and the Illuminati? The kabal has been exposed
@Rmc: yup. In response to someone not brainwashed and apolitical like myself… The journal delete comments for sport. There is no logic to it. Never was. You don’t violate terms and conditions but they censor you. no need to go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy. Just a bad incompetent moderator that’s all
@Tom Ripley: Wouldnt that suffice as an answer ? Trying to be funny is fine, but you also have a false account, and always defending Leo, so a lot o strange coincidence there. I know the there is people from the journal posting under a/c’s ‘pretending’ to be ordinary users, I have made 2 complaints to the Press Council.
That must be the worst moderator in the world, yours was the very first comment and there wasnt nothing at all that should fall even under the Journals version of censorhip, I have a screenhot of it, plus i have the local HTML version saved ..
RMC said he CAN delete his, so what the story Tom are ye both in cahoots here ? :-)
@Da Dell: false account? If you mean if my name actually Tom Ripley? No, no it’s not. As I’m sure you’re a isn’t Da Dell. Which is odd that you’re pointing that out… Pot says hello kettle. It’s safety reasons. The journal attracts so really nutty conspiracy theorists and I don’t want mentally unstable people stalking me that’s all.
As for my political views I have voted for all parties bar PBF and SF. I’m not pro FG or pro FF. If anything judging by poll results from last election I fall well on on the normal majority Irish voter. So don’t know why you question that on an article about zodiac… Strange…
Anyway Occam’s razor applies to the comments deletion lads. Most simple explanation is incompetent moderator. That is all
@Tom Ripley: Dell is my nickname that all call me by for nearly 40 yrs, and it is my facebook account which is as real as you can get as my mother is even a ‘friend’ ffs :-) .. But I agree in part in not using ones name for anything on the internet, have worked in IT for nearly 30 yrs now and the basics since back then were never to use your real name online for many many reasons, but the main one was to prevent Identify Theft. The journal has banned a few of a/c i had on twitter for no reason, so last time i just used my FB a/c, but I do try to be very selective of what I comment on as I know what happens when you dont follow the required narrative.
I voted FF most of my life, then once for FG for my troubles, I wasnt in Ireland for the next one as had to emigrate due to FG policies, this year I voted for SF for the first time. Due to issues i have with the journal, I have to copy all I do and say for a book of evidence, I also copy the HTML page, and from that I have seen many of your comments and I have seen some of the people you retweet and some are not very nice people and thats putting it mildly. you say you are not pro FF or FG or whatever .. ok fair enough if you wnat us to believe that .. but you are certianly very, very anti some parties.
@Tom Ripley: Also you never mentioned anything about RMC and how he can deleted posts ? Again I say that journal moderator must be the worst one in the world for deleting your comment ..
@Da Dell: I’ve no idea on deleting posts, never even tried. I’ve had plenty of them struck off over the months for no reason and I’ve seen libellous “with people saying reported” comments not being deleted.
Crazy the way they run the site if you ask me.
I’ve never voted SF I’ve no plans too. I see past the gloss. One day maybe when they ideologically change. Then very possible.
@Tom Ripley: Fair enough so and we can agree to dissagree on politics..
I have also seen past the gloss of FG, they are all PR & Spin, as I said I voted for them once, they then proceeded to renege on every reason I voted for them, they basically lied to my face at my front door to get my vote. Their election promises are as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. I have no issue with SF, some of whom have put their lives on the line for their beliefs, whether you agrree with those beliefs or not its still very admirable. Imagine any other party in Ireland honouring a 100 year old election manifesto .. From FG we get great announcemets of these great plans, from the 5 point plan, the New Era Plan, election promises of Political Accountablity and Responciblity and the only results on those are more announcements of more plans while the previous plans are dumped, cronyism, huges wastes of tax payers money on the likes of the NCH. Then we have Leo who the people of his constituency last GE voted on him for the frist time when he was Taoiseach, he came in third after muliptle recounts, the first time in the history of the state that a sitting Taoiseach didnt top the result.
We can all only theorise what SF would do if every in power in ROI, but we have a decade of evidence of what FG are like.
I see true story movie call Zodiac (2007) actors robert Downey jr, mark Ruffalo and jake gyllnhaal
@Brian Flavin: Its a decent Film
@Da Dell: Yip, good movie.
Interesting that it was related to an army code . Was he previously in Vietnam or Korea with the army . A cross net code is one if the hardest to break but well done to theses guys .
Zodiac is an excellent movie, well worth a watch. Also there’s a great 12 episode podcast by True Crime All the Time who summarise the Zodiac Case. Also (spoilers) while the movie names the most likely suspect at the end, it’s still not definitive who the zodiac was and the case is still unsolved
“I am Ted Cruz”
Kaiser Sozer did it!
Squilgly I just hid my earlier comment so no idea if that worked for all :-)
@Da Dell: If that works what a way to have some fun. do a George Hook/Ivan Yates special and say something provocative for the sake of it , create a storm with usual suspects going nuts and then hide original comment :-)
@Da Dell: Scratch that, it dosent work for us mere mortals ..
Nice job :)
I have always thought it was Rick Marshall. Too many things which linked him with the cards, including the fact he had the same typewriter and cards. He did an interview with CBS I think, YouTube it. He was the right age too, but if Cherrie Jo Bates was a Zodiac Victim then Ross Sullivan is the only one which links them all in a round about way.
Testing!
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