Code of Zodiac Killer Deciphered
The mathematician Samuel Blake from Melbourne and two fellow cryptologists have been officially recognized by the FBI for solving a over 50-year-old encoded message written by Zodiac, the serial killer whose identity remains unknown.
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Dr. Blake collaborated with two other cryptologists and a supercomputer from the University of Melbourne, named Spartan, to decipher the encoded message known as the "340 cipher." The message features a distinctive circle with a cross through the middle and was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle on November 8, 1969, by a man who identified himself as "Zodiac." The serial killer sent letters to newspapers until 1974, including evidence claiming responsibility for the deaths of at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The official decoding of the 340-character message provides insight into the thoughts and actions of the killer but does not reveal a name, as promised by the serial killer in separate letters sent to various newspapers. Dr. Blake mentioned that he contacted Zodiac cryptologist David Oranchak in early 2020 and has since been working on deciphering the 340 cipher, considered one of the holy grails of cryptography. Mr. Oranchak manages a website dedicated to cracking Zodiac codes and has created several YouTube videos about his findings over the past 15 years while attempting to decipher the message. In a statement on social media, Dr. Blake paid tribute to Mr. Oranchak based in the US and software programmer Jarl van Eycke from Brussels.
"During the year we tested, by trial and error, around 650,000 different reading directions through the cipher. This search turned up — more or less — nothing,"
"However, one of these searches uncovered a surprising combination of words: GAS CHAMBER. That such a macabre phase should pop up in a sea of noise warranted further attention."
"From this fragment, David, Jarl van Eycke and I reworked the key and corrected an error Zodiac made in his diagonal enumeration of the second vertical segment of the cipher.”
"Jarl's fantastic program, azdecrypt, was essential in this process."
A deciphered portion of the codeDr. Blake is a guest visitor at the University of Melbourne and described how the university's supercomputer, Spartan, deciphered the encoded message after processing 650,000 other possible solutions. Ultimately, a solution was revealed, yielding a message with the phrase "GAS CHAMBER." Mr. Oranchak submitted the proposed deciphering to the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, and within a day, they officially approved the solution. In a statement released on Friday, the FBI confirmed that the encoded message attributed to the Zodiac Killer had recently been solved by "private citizens."
"After 50 years of active research, this cipher has finally been solved. We now understand why it resisted attacks for so long," Dr. Blake wrote on social media."
"The reading direction through the cipher was so obscure, that the only way it could be found was with a massive search through many candidates using sophisticated software which can efficiently solve homophonic substitution ciphers."
"Not only were we lucky enough to find the needle in the haystack, but we were lucky enough to pick the right haystack in order to start searching for the needle."
Dr. Blake and his colleagues have dedicated their work to the murder victims and their families. The Melbourne mathematician now hopes that the solution they have revealed will aid in cracking the two remaining unsolved short encoded messages: one with 13 symbols and the other with 32. In his correspondence, the killer hinted that these figures contain his name.
"I find the Zodiac case intriguing, but I'm far from a Zodiac killer expert,"
"Perhaps my lack of knowledge of the case helped as it wasn't a distraction."
"It would be fantastic if this helps the investigation in some way, now it's over to the experts in interpreting the meaning of his message."
Read more about the Zodiac Killer
Watching recommendation: Zodiac on Netflix.