What’s Left To Be Discovered About The Zodiac Killer?
In the decades since his murder spree in Northern California, slow progress has been made in revealing the answers we seek about the Zodiac Killer case. Although the Zodiac himself went quiet after his known activity during the early 1960s and late 1970s, there are still those who hope to uncover the final answers about the Zodiac Killer case – including the answers to his final two ciphers and his identity.
Only Two Unsolved Ciphers Left
After 51 years, the second solution to a Zodiac cipher was finally revealed. In 2020, a team of amateur sleuths finally cracked the Z 340 cipher. Who were these individuals and how did they solve this cipher?
The Solving Of The Z 340 Cipher
The team of codebreakers who solved the Z 340 cipher included just 3 members:
David Oranchak is a software developer who lives in Virginia. Sam Blake lives in Melbourne, Australia and is an applied mathematician. Jarl Van Eycke is from Belgium and works as both a warehouse operator and computer programmer. This team used their collective experience to crack the Zodiac’s cipher with the aid of software. First, they checked for possible different reading directions that might be used if the cipher were a transpositional cipher.
One solution for how the cipher could be transposed led Oranchak to discover fragments of messages within the cipher. This then led to the further discovery that the message was transcribed in smaller blocks, not the one big block that it is presented as. The key which could be translated into words was found by starting at the top left corner of a section, then moving down one line and over two characters.
Oranchak first suspected their solution was correct when he noted that in the cipher the Zodiac clarifies he didn’t appear on a TV show. The letter had been sent about 2 weeks after a caller on a Jim Dunbar talk show claimed to be the Zodiac and said “I need help, I’m sick, I don’t want to go to the gas chamber.” In the solution to the Z 340 cipher, the Zodiac refutes this by saying: “THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW / … I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER.”
Information Gathered From the #1 Zodiac Killer Website
Tom Voigt is responsible for the creation, curation, and editing of the #1 Zodiac Killer website, Zodiackiller.com. Launched in 1998, Zodiackiller.com remains the ONLY Zodiac Killer website recognized by law enforcement. To learn more about the release of Zodiac Killer: Just the Facts, as well as other information about the Zodiac Killer case, visit Zodiackiller.com today.
