Zodiac Decoded
Listen to ““ZODIAC DECODED” #WeirdDarkness BITE-SIZE!” on Spreaker.
The Z340 cipher of the Zodiac Killer had remained a mystery for 51 years. In April 2024, an international team released their whitepaper on decrypting it completely and meticulously. It included a lot of labor, crowdsourcing, and computational programming. Even though the process was first spelled out in at least one video from 2020, this new whitepaper provides the complete prescription for how it can be done.
The solution to the Zodiac cipher is principally due to three men — David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke — although their paper stresses that many others have helped with insight or code over time.
So let us get into how a killer cipher was solved, and what is inside it:
The Zodiac Killer was an unidentified serial killer who conducted murders in Northern California throughout the late 60s and possibly early 70s. The Zodiac is notorious for the series of brutal murders and for taunting the police and the general public through playing riddles, solving ciphers, and making phone calls.
Many have come to see the infamous Zodiac Killer as responsible for five deaths in 1968 and 1969 – including various young couples as well as one lone male cab driver. The known victims of the Zodiac Killer are David Faraday, Betty Lou Jensen, Darlene Ferrin (survived by her boyfriend Michael Mageau who was wounded), Bryan Hartnell (who also survived along with his girlfriend Cecelia Shepard), and then Paul Stine.
The Zodiac Killer sent letters to local newspapers and wrote a detailed description of each crime he committed while demanding that they write about his crimes. Many of those letters had intricate cryptograms, most of which went unsolved for over 50 years, even though some Zodiac ciphers have come out to be solved in present day.
Despite a flurry of sensational headlines and several mass homicide investigations, the Zodiac Killer was never apprehended. Many armchair detectives claim to have solved the Zodiac case, with Gary Francis Poste and Arthur Leigh Allen being two notable examples of popular suspects. Neither were proven conclusively to be the Zodiac decades later.
It has been one of the most intriguing unsolved cases in modern American history, attracting worldwide attention and inspiring books, films, as well as more than 40 theories about who was behind it.
The Zodiac Killer later sent a second cipher to The San Francisco Chronicle on Nov. 8, 1969. This became known as the Z340 letter, and it was extremely difficult for cryptologists of that time to decode, even more so than his first twisted crossword puzzle-style cipher. It then took 51 years to break the code.
The fateful day took place on December 5, 2020, and the trio of U.S.-based software developer David Oranchak, Australian mathematician Sam Blake, and Belgian cipher expert Jarl Van Eycke cracked the Zodiac Killer’s code mystery, which was confirmed by the FBI. Although millions had tried to decode it, including cold case detectives who made over a dozen apparent attempts at deciphering this specific infamous note, it was an unruly obsession itself. The three men released a whitepaper of their laborious process earlier this year, demonstrating that it took many steps to crack the code in the letter.
They determined that Z340 was written in an alphabet of 63 different characters, a system made even more complex by the fact that several symbols could represent any single letter from our standard alphabet. In addition, the letter was filled with striking errors and transpositions of words, making cracking the code incredibly difficult.
But a piece of software made by Van Eycke called AZdecrypt ultimately cracked the answer, which the authors write would not have been possible “without 100s if not thousands” of attempts.
After Zodiac sent Z340, it was decoded by several people soon thereafter, some of whom proclaimed that their decryptions were valid. “Yet none was conclusively endorsed by law enforcement so the efforts persisted for decades.”
It also detailed the various efforts to break into – for lack of a better term – the code over several years. Not the FBI, nor NSA or Navy. Over the years, many attempts were made by members of the American Cryptogram Association, but without sufficient closure regarding solving it.
Amateur codebreakers flocked en masse — “The high-profile nature of the case and uniqueness of Z340 were a lure for many amateur cryptanalysts” (Susi & Hargrove, Granskning) — to try their hand at cracking the cipher. “A lot of ‘viral’ solutions were developed that got lots of media attention.”
However, it was a new version of Van Eycke’s AZdecrypt update that eventually unlocked the protective algorithm.
It is generally assumed that Z408 and another Westbrook, CA cipher (Z340) do not have spaces since they were unable to be found by any software attempting a solution before. It was easy for the transcription to be taken wrong — words blurred together; moreover, because of the low-frequency monophonic style and dense shading of the cipher itself, one could not even take it as read that the letters were correct.
With all its statistics, AZdecrypt could guess intelligently where it should introduce spaces between words for an automated version.
“Which made explanations of partial solutions much more understandable,” the authors said.
More than half a century after the Z340 was sent by the Zodiac Killer, we are finally learning what it says.
The Z340 cipher reads: “I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME. THAT WASN’T ME ON THE TV SHOW” — on a recent live call-in as the Zodiac, to A.M. San Francisco. The cipher continues:
“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 IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH.”
Now, while this new code does not solve all the mysteries of the Zodiac Killer, it is still an amazing discovery. While Oranchak, Blake, and Van Eycke undoubtedly have the credit for airing what is contained in the letter out to the world, they emphasized that their work would not be possible without generations of skilled predecessors.
Which they explained, is that this cipher was, for all intents and purposes, designed to be uncrackable and “the solution of the challenge which had been a large multi-decade group effort from many others’ excellent cryptanalytic contributions.”
And perhaps future sleuths will then take the work of SFPD detectives and others to shed even more light on the Zodiac Killer story.
(Source: Austin Harvey, AllThatsInteresting.com | Cover Photo: Britannica)
Views: 12