Amateurs Decode ZODIAC KILLER's Message

One of America’s most recognizable serial murderers, The Zodiac, committed his murders between 1968-1969 in Northern California, and while he claimed to have killed up to 37 people, he was ultimately linked to 5 confirmed murders and 2 attempted murders. Their identity has become one of the most enduring true-crime mysteries in American history, alongside their series of taunting letters and cards sent to the San Francisco press which were written in a complex code.

It’s been over 50 years since the last known ZODIAC murder and many of those coded letters have yet to be understood or cracked, until now. A trio of code-breakers (David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician), were able to crack that has been dubbed "340 cipher," and revealed the following message (note: the cipher was sent in all capital letters, without punctuation and included the misspelling of the word “paradise”):

“I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME
THAT WASNT 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 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”

— SF Chronicle

The show that THE ZODIAC refers to is the "The Jim Dunbar Show," which was a Bay Area TV talkshow that THE ZODIAC (or at least who is believed to be THE ZODIAC) called into various times to taunt the host and police.

Oranchak, who's been working on solving the coded messages since 2006, explains “It was incredible. It was a big shock, I never really thought we'd find anything because I had grown so used to failure. 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.”

Once the trio realized they potentially decoded a ZODIAC message, they immediately contacted the FBI with their findings. The team decided to not reveal that they had cracked the cipher (which happened about a week ago) until the FBI confirmed its validity and officially cleared it by SF authorities.

Oranchak detailed the process for cracking the cipher on his website and in a YouTube video.

"We got really lucky and found one that had part of the answer, but it wasn't obvious," Oranchak said. The only disappointing part, Oranchak said, is that the missive contained no personally-identifying information.

The case of THE ZODIAC killer remains an open and unsolved case.