An international team of crackers unraveled the code of the serial killer known as the Zodiac, 51 years after he sent a note with the characters to the San Francisco Chronicle. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about it.
The mystery was named “Code 340” – by the number of characters – experts from the United States, Belgium and Australia worked together to crack it. Investigators hoped that the killer would reveal his name in one of the encrypted notes, but this did not happen.
“I hope you have a lot of fun trying to catch me. (…) I am not afraid of the gas chamber, because it will send me to heaven even earlier, because now I have enough slaves to work for me, ”reads the deciphered text.
One of the crackers, 46-year-old web designer David Oranchak, admitted that he has been working on the cipher since 2006. All this time, he thought that he would create a program, and it would easily recognize the cipher, but this did not help.
This is the second unraveled zodiac cipher. The first was solved in 1969 by a school teacher and his wife. In the note, the criminal said that he “likes to kill because it is fun.”
Zodiac is a serial killer operating in California in the 60s of the last century. He received the nickname because of the astrological symbols used in the notes, as well as the attention to the horoscope of the victims. His identity has not yet been identified. A distinctive feature of the criminal was that he sent encrypted information about himself to the editorial offices of local newspapers. In the notes, the killer claimed to have killed 37 people, but the police found his handwriting in only seven murders.
