The first, sent on July 31, 1969, was cracked just a week later. “I like killing people because it is so much fun,” the cipher, called Z408, read. “It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all.”
David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke used software to help them break the cipher, first by finding the many possible reading directions that could be used if the cipher was transpositional.
The deciphered message reads as: "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 (paradise misspelled) all the sooner.”
Still Unsolved
The Zodiac sent four coded messages in total to the paper in 1969 and 1970. The first had 408 characters and was cracked in a week. The recently solved 340-character cipher was the second. After those, the killer sent two very short ciphers, one with 13 characters and the other with only 32.
Who was Arthur Leigh Allen? Arthur Leigh Allen, a schoolteacher in Vallejo, California is the only suspect to be publicly named by authorities in the case of the Zodiac killer. Allen was institutionalized for sexually abusing children in 1975. He was never officially identified as the Zodiac killer.
The last known victim, a taxi driver, was shot in October 1969. The murders were the subject of intense investigation and media coverage, particularly because of the killer's taunting letters to newspapers and phone calls to police.
Which zodiac sign is Jeff The Killer? Jeff The Killer is an unhealthy Gemini zodiac sign. Gemini belongs to the Air element of astrology, along with Aquarius and Libra. The symbol of Gemini is the twins, which represents a dual-natured personality.
Mageau described his attacker as a 26-to-30-year-old, 195-to-200-pound (88 to 91 kg) or possibly even more, 5-foot-8-inch (1.73 m) white male with short, light brown curly hair.
According to Oranchak, the cipher attributed to the killer says, "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 paradise all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me."
Cryptographic researchers have finally cracked a 51-year-old code left by the Zodiac, a serial killer who terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Much of the work of cracking the code was done in Mathematica, the statistics package from Wolfram.
The letters were also accompanied by the now-infamous “signature” of the Zodiac Killer: a circle with a cross running through it. While the investigators agree on 7 confirmed victims (two of whom survived), the Zodiac has taken responsibility for no less than 37 murders.
He called himself "Zodiac" in his fourth letter to the press on August 7, 1969. In it, he wrote: "Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking." From then on the press called him the 'Zodiac Killer' - but it is not known why the killer gave himself that name.
Zodiac knew when to stop
He was seen by three people and was mere moments from being caught by the police. The near-miss might have frightened him. In any case, he'd already gotten what he wanted: infamy. Unlike killers like Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy, Zodiac didn't appear to be obsessed with killing.
The Zodiac Killer terrorized the San Francisco area in the late 1960s and has never been caught.
The cryptogram was known as the Z-340, or simply the 340, because it contained 340 characters in it. Ever since then, both amateur and professional cryptographers, including those working for the FBI, have worked to crack the cipher. It wasn't until this week that an international team solved it.
The Vigenère cipher is a method of encrypting messages by using a series of different Caesar ciphers based on the letters of a particular keyword. The Vigenère cipher is more powerful than a single Caesar cipher and is much harder to crack.
Cipher comes from the Arabic sifr, which means "nothing" or "zero." The word came to Europe along with the Arabic numeral system. As early codes substituted numerals for letters to hide the word's meaning, codes became known as ciphers. If you crack a cipher, you break the code and can understand the message.
There is only one provably unbreakable code called the Vernam cypher created during World War II to defeat the Germans. It uses genuinely random information to create an initial key.
The "Zodiac Killer," a self-given pseudonym of an unidentified serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s, and whose crimes are widely considered the most famous unsolved murder case in American history.
Serial killers with the highest known victim count. The most prolific modern serial killer is arguably doctor Harold Shipman, with 218 probable murders and possibly as many as 250 (see "Medical professionals", below). However, he was actually convicted of a sample of 15 murders.
Lake Herman Road murders: The Zodiac killer's first victims were a high school couple, Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday on December 20, 1968. The two were on their first date and had driven out to Lake Herman Road, just within Benicia City limits, where they had parked their car.
Gary Francis Poste, the Air Force veteran-turned-house painter who may or may not have been the notorious Zodiac Killer, has been revealed as the ringleader of a group of men he trained as “killing machines.”
FBI has IDENTIFIED Zodiac Killer as Air Force veteran Gary Francis Poste - who died in 2018 - and has partial DNA sample that could link him to five serial murders, cold case investigator claims.
Leo Sylvester Hannan (23 October 1900 – 9 October 1962) was a New Zealand murderer who was convicted of the 1950 murder of watchman Frederick Stade in Wellington, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment.