[imagesource: Eric Risberg / AP file]

The Zodiac Killer, sometimes referred to as just Zodiac or The Zodiac, is the name preferred by a serial killer who terrorised Northern California, murdering five known victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Napa County, and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969.

Some suspect that he may have started killing before then.

He was never caught, and his identity remains unknown, putting him on the same list as ‘Jack the Ripper’, as a source of public and academic fascination.

Another similarity that he shares with London’s most notorious serial killer is that he sent letters, although Zodiac’s letters were considerably more sophisticated.

The series of taunting letters and cards were delivered to the San Francisco Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers), which until recently, had not been decoded.

According to CNN, the cipher which was sent in 1969 has now been decoded by three codebreakers – David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician.

They 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.”

Yes, the spelling of ‘paradice’ was intentional.

The TV show referenced is The Jim Dunbar Show, a Bay Area television talk show, during which, two weeks earlier, someone had called in claiming to be Zodiac.

“It was incredible. It was a big shock, I never really thought we’d find anything because I had grown so used to failure,” Oranchak, who’s been working on solving the killer’s messages since 2006, told CNN.

“When I first started, I used to get excited when I would see some words come through — they were like false positives, phantoms. I had grown used to that. It was a long shot — we didn’t even really know if there was a message,” he said.

The codebreakers took their findings to the FBI, where a case is still open to catch Zodiac.

The FBI released a statement via Twitter:

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

— FBI SanFrancisco (@FBISanFrancisco) December 11, 2020

Oranchak went over the method used to crack the cipher in a video:

The only disappointing part, says Oranchak, is that the cipher contained no identifying information.

He also isn’t hopeful that they’ll crack the other two ciphers, as both are very short, with thousands of possible names and phrases that could fit.

That’s what they said about the first one, so we’ll have to see.

[source:cnn]