After more than 50 years, the coded message sent by the 'Zodiac' serial killer solved by amateur sleuths.
After more than 50 years, the coded message sent by the 'Zodiac' serial killer solved by amateur sleuths.
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A team of volunteer codebreakers cracked a mysterious cypher sent to the San Francisco serial killer newspaper more than 50 years ago, who called himself the Zodiac, the FBI said on Friday.

The Zodiac Killer, who was never caught, shot or stabbed seven people in the San Francisco Bay Area for about a year in 1968 and 1969, killing all but two of them. During his murderous spree, he sent a series of frightening letters to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.

Some of the notes were in code, including a particularly complex 340 character missive known as the 340 cypher.

“I hope you’re having a lot of fun trying to catch me,” said the cypher, cracked last week by codebreakers David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke, according to a YouTube video by Oranchak. “I’m not afraid of the gas chamber because it’s going to send me to paradise (sic) the sooner because I have enough slaves to work for me now.”

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Like the murders themselves, the solution of the Zodiac cyphers has become an international fixture for true-crime followers.

Oranchak, whom the San Francisco Chronicle identified as a 46-year-old Web designer living in Virginia, said in a video that he hoped the cypher would provide information about the identity of the killer.

He said The message doesn’t really say a whole lot.” “It’s more of that same attention-seeking Zodiac junk.”

On Friday, the San Francisco office of the FBI confirmed that the coded message had been cracked by the group and said the investigation into the half-century-old case was ongoing.

“The FBI is aware that private citizens have recently solved a cypher attributed to the Zodiac Killer,” the FBI said in a statement posted on Twitter. “Multiple communities across Northern California were terrorised by the Zodiac Killer, and even though decades have passed, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes.”

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In the Zodiac case, no one has ever been charged, and theories abound as to the actual identity of the killer. Several books and movies have been inspired by the case, including 1971’s Dirty Harry starring Clint Eastwood and 2007’s Zodiac with Robert Downey Jr.