“The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the F.B.I. San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners,” the office said. “The Zodiac Killer terrorized multiple communities across Northern California and even though decades have gone by, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes.”
The San Francisco office said it would not comment further because of “the ongoing nature of the investigation, and out of respect for the victims and their families.”
The code had long baffled cryptographers, law enforcement agents and armchair sleuths obsessed with the shadowy killer, who was blamed for five murders in the late 1960s. Only one previous cipher attributed to the Zodiac had been solved, and it was decoded by a California couple not long after it was sent in the 1960s.
This one was considered much more complex, suggesting the killer was frustrated that the first one had been deciphered so easily, Mr. Oranchak said.
The team that cracked it came together earlier this year, Mr. Blake said, after he reached out to Mr. Oranchak with some ideas on how to unravel the patchwork of symbols and characters.
“It’s considered one of the holy grails of cryptography,” Mr. Blake said. “At the time, the cipher had resisted attacks for 50 years, so any attempts to find a solution was truly a moonshot.”
For months, Mr. Blake said, he and Mr. Oranchak tested, by trial and error, around 650,000 possible solutions, running them through a code-breaking program written by Mr. Van Eycke.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/us/zodiac-killer-code-broken.html
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