Oranchak and Blake began corresponding and eventually generated hundreds of thousands of possible ways to read the code. He responded to Oranchak’s talk with mathematical ideas about how to approach a code that includes both homophonic substitution - in which one letter might be swapped for more than one symbol - and transposition - in which letters are reordered in a systematic way. He posted the talk on YouTube where, predictably, it elicited hundreds of comments, many of which came from people who (erroneously) claimed they’d already solved it.īut one person stood out: Blake. “This cipher has always had such a target on its back,” says Sam Blake, an applied mathematician at the University of Melbourne who worked with Oranchak.Īlthough the codebreakers involved had each been working on the cipher for years, the successful joint effort began in 2018 when Oranchak delivered a talk about the cipher at the annual meeting of the American Cryptogram Association in Asheville, North Carolina. “So many people conjure coincidences out of thin air, and the more coincidences they generate, the stronger their evidence.” He’s spent years fielding theories from misguided, would-be sleuths about the meaning of the 340-character code and the identity of its author. “It took a lot of computational effort, and it’s been a real source of frustration for a lot of people,” says computer programmer David Oranchak in Roanoke, Virginia, who has a background in cryptography and coordinated the effort. The encrypted message didn’t reveal the identity of the Zodiac, but it did bring decades of speculation, conspiracy theories and guesswork to a dramatic close. Further bolstering the claim, experts at the FBI verified the solution (and even tweeted about it). The Zodiac Killer, who was never caught, gained notoriety by writing letters to police and local media boasting of the killings up until 1974.Ĭlaiming to have killed as many as 37 people, he also wrote some letters in code and included bloody bits of clothing to use as proof of the acts.After months of crunching code during the pandemic, three researchers on three different continents announced that they’d finally decoded the message. The only link the Bates murder had in common with the Zodiac Killer was a handwritten letter received in mail claiming responsibility, Railsback said. ![]() While the Riverside Police Department could not comment on the man identified by the Case Breakers, RPD public information officer Ryan Railsback said the Zodiac Killer is definitely not the person responsible for the death of Bates. ![]() The Case Breakers also said in the release that the man is responsible for the 1966 killing of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside County, California. We have no new information to share at the moment,” the FBI said in a statement to CNN. The FBI, which has been supporting local law enforcement in the investigation, also did not acknowledge the claims. “We are unable to speak to potential suspects as this is still an open investigation,” the SFPD said in a statement. In response to the new claims, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) confirmed to CNN that it is still an open investigation. ![]() After 51 years, the Zodiac Killer's cipher has been solved by amateur codebreakers
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