A coded message sent more than half a century ago by the notorious Zodiac Killer has been cracked, the FBI has announced.
The Zodiac Killer, who was never identified, shot or stabbed seven people in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1968 and 1969, killing all but two of them. During his murderous rampage, he sent a series of frightening letters to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.
Some of the letters submitted have been written in standard English, others have been written in code. An especially complex missive containing 340 characters, obtained in November 1969 and known as the 340 ciphers, had never been cracked.
But now the video posted to YouTube seems to have solved the mystery.
"I hope you're having a lot of fun trying to catch me," said the cipher, broken last week by amateur codebreakers David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke.
"I don't fear the gas chamber because the sooner it will send me to paradise(sic) because I have enough slaves now to work for me."
The misspelling of the word "paradise" in the piece enabled the decoders and the FBI to realize that the letters were actually sent by the Zodiac Killer, as the other letters also contained this mistake.
Solving the Zodiac ciphers has become like the murders themselves, an international obsession for true followers of crime.
In the video, Mr. Oranchak, a 46-year-old web designer living in Virginia, said he hoped the cipher would yield details about the identity of the murderer.
He said, "The message doesn't really say a whole lot." "It's more of that same attention-seeking Zodiac junk."
On Friday, the San Francisco office of the FBI announced that the coded message had been broken by the community and said the investigation into the half-century-old case was continuing.
"The FBI is aware that private citizens have recently solved a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer," the FBI said in a statement posted on Twitter.
"Multiple communities across Northern California were terrorized by the Zodiac Killer, and although decades have passed, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes."
In the Zodiac case, no one has ever been convicted, and theories abound as to the true identity of the murderer. Numerous books and films have been inspired by the case, including Dirty Harry starring Clint Eastwood in 1971 and Zodiac with Robert Downey Jr. in 2007.
