ZODIAC KILLER’S CIPHER CRACKED AFTER HALF A CENTURY

It took more than half a century for three people from different countries to jointly solve the code of the note that the Californian maniac, who operated in the United States more than fifty years ago, sent to the San Francisco Chronicle. The text of the note itself received then the conditional name "Code 340" due to the number of characters used in it.

The serial killer himself was named "Zodiac", since the astrological signs and horoscopes of the victims played an important role in his crimes.

The American David Oranchak, who develops software and creates websites, managed to reveal the semantic content of the text of the note. According to the programmer, he had attempted to solve the killer's puzzle for more than 15 years in a row, hoping to reveal his name. On the special website ZodiacKillerCiphers.com, he covered in detail all his attempts to decipher the mysterious message, sharing information about the cipher with all interested people.

Specialists from Belgium and Australia came to help Oranchak. At the same time, the programmer Jarl Van Eyck even managed to set a kind of record by creating a special application AZdecrypt, which allows decrypting an unknown code through the substitution of bigrams (groups of two characters).

Finally, all the pieces of puzzle came together when the Australian mathematician Sam Blake joined the work.

After he had identified information about changes in the text, and the team put the cipher to the AZdecrypt application, it became obvious that only 650 thousand variants had to be enumerated to decrypt. The ones that were the most likely were considered first.

Unfortunately, the cryptographers did not manage to reveal the name of the killer. Despite the fact that the maniac makes mistakes in the words "slaves" and "paradise" (instead of "paradise" it says "paradice") in his notes, and the method of cryptography is similar to the encryption methods used in the American army in the mid-1950s, it is unlikely to detect serial a killer by them.

Since the crimes of the "Zodiac" have no statute of limitations, his case has not yet been closed. The FBI representatives once again recalled the ongoing investigation. The San Francisco Police Department released similar information.

There is a version that the killer continued to commit crimes in the early 1970s, but none of the experts can call the exact number of victims he killed. Officially, the police assume that the attacks on seven citizens have been proven, two of whom survived and the rest died. The maniac himself, in one of the letters that he actively sent then to various local media, pointed to 37 victims who died from his actions.