THE FBI has said one of the taunting messages written in code and attributed to the Zodiac Killer has been cracked, albeit 51 years later.
In November 1969 the mysterious 340-character cipher was mailed to The San Francisco Chronicle. It did not reveal the killer’s identity. However, it built on his image as an attention-seeking murderer who took pleasure in terrorizing the Bay Area in the late 1960s.
David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, decrypted the cipher along with Sam Blake, an applied mathematician in Australia and Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgium-based computer programmer.
“I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me” and “I am not afraid of the gas chamber” are two of the dark boasts in the message, Oranchak said.
He runs a website and YouTube series about the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers.
Although he was elated at solving the code he said he was worried about the effect it might have on victims’ families.
“The message in that cipher — I don’t see it as being helpful to them,” he said. “It’s just intended to hurt people and make them afraid.”
The FBI, the New York Times said had verified Oranchak’s claim of having broken the code, known as the 340 cipher. The cipher was one of four attributed to the killer, and was first submitted to an FBI lab on Nov. 13, 1969.
The bureau said it had received the solution on Dec. 5 from a cryptologic researcher.
In a statement, the FBI said the cipher was recently solved by a team of three private citizens.
The Zodiac Killer was blamed for five murders in the late 1960s. Only one previous cipher attributed to the Zodiac had been solved, and it was decoded by a California couple not long after it was sent in the 1960s.
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