![]() ![]() ![]() Not by its crack Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, but instead by three computer wonks who’d found one another on an obscure online true-crime discussion board and started collaborating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Getty Imagesīut then, in December 2020, the FBI announced a breakthrough: The 340 cipher had been solved. Solving this one would require the eventual codebreakers to employ homophonic substitutions, period-19 transposition, the knight’s tour, and other complex cryptology schemes. The killer’s first cipher had been cracked in a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team. The 340 cipher, above, reached the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969. Some speculated that the cipher would never be solved-that it was too sophisticated, too challenging for even contemporary cryptographers. For more than fifty years, the cipher remained an unsolvable enigma, one that grew to almost mythic proportions among codebreakers and cryptography sleuths. Neither could the Naval Intelligence Office or the FBI. They published the 340 the next day, hoping it might bring them one step closer to the serial killer’s identity, or lead them to his next victims.īut the 340 stumped both amateur and professional cryptographers alike-not just in the weeks following its publication, but for decades. The paper’s editors, along with local law enforcement officials, had no reason to doubt the Zodiac’s most recent threat. PS could you print this new cipher in your frunt page? I get aufully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing !!!!!! It came with a letter for the Chronicle, reading in part: The second, now known as “the 340” due to the number of characters in it, would prove a much more difficult challenge. The Zodiac’s first cipher, included in the July 31 letter, had been solved within a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team-but it had only revealed more of the killer’s raving. But in addition to these overt threats, he included baffling ciphers for investigators to crack, troubling grids of symbols and letters that presumably masked a secret about his identity, intentions, or victims (to this day, the killer has never been found). He promised to blow up buses of schoolchildren and unleash a “death machine” on San Francisco. He shared haunting details of his attacks. He signed his “name” with a crosshairs symbol. The Zodiac’s letters were replete with grisly imagery. The Zodiac had mailed the Chronicle a piece of the victim’s bloodied shirt as evidence of the crime. His most recent murder-of a San Francisco cab driver, by gunshot-had occurred just four weeks before this new envelope arrived. By the time of the November letter, the Zodiac had already attacked seven people, murdering five. Th e envelope arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969 without a return address, its directive to the recipient, in handwriting distinctively slanted and words unevenly spaced, to “please rush to editor.” The Chronicle newsroom had seen the scrawl before, on previous letters sent from the Zodiac, a self-monikered serial killer who threatened to go on a “kill rampage” if the paper didn’t publish his writing on its front page. ![]()
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