A team of cryptography experts was finally able to crack the 'coded message' of the unidentifed Zodiac killer, who claimed five innocent lives in Northern California back in 1969. The killer targeted young couples, of whom two men survived. He also killed a cab driver and once claimed to have murdered 37 victims.
The mysterious killer had sent the cryptic message to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper in 1969.
According to CNN, the FBI dubbed the cryptic cipher "340 cipher" as it used 340 characters. A trio of expert codebreakers--David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia; Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer; and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician -- used different techniques to decode the message.
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When the decoded message was unveiled, it was noticed that it had no punctuation marks and was written in all Caps. Here is the decoded message:
"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 (sic) all the sooner Because I now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradice so they are afraid of death I am not afraid because I know that my new life will be an easy one in paradice death."
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"It was incredible. It was a big shock, I never really thought we'd find anything because I had grown so used to failure," The CNN report quoted software developer Oranchak as saying. "When I first started, I used to get excited when I would see some words come through -- they were like false positives, phantoms. I had grown used to that. It was a long shot -- we didn't even really know if there was a message," he added.
Oranchak has been working to decode the killer's messages since 2006. He also posted a video on Youtube where he explained how it was deciphered and the message used to encrypt the message. It was decoded by reading it from upper left corner diagonally, then shifting one box down and two box down to the right.
Watch the video here:
Though, the deciphered code did not give any clues to identify the killer but it revealed the method he used to create the cipher. His code also gave blurred insights to his motive for the killings. According to the message, he was talking about a fruitful afterlife as he had enough slaves to look after him.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recently confirmed that the code was decoded by codebreakers but it refrained from commenting further as the case is undergoing investigation.
