Zodiac killer’s cipher solved by amateur codebreakers: FBI

Washington, Dec 12 : The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has announced that 51 years after the self-proclaimed ‘Zodiac Killer’ randomly killed five people in Northern California’s Bay Area, a team of amateur codebreakers have solved a cryptic cipher sent to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper in 1969, according to media reports.
According to an archived FBI statement, the ‘Zodiac Killer’ sent local newspapers a three-part coded message explaining his motive for the killings in 1969 and in a separate letter to the editor suggested his identity was buried within an elaborate cipher message.
The decoded message revealed the killer’s twisted motive, but his identity remains a mystery.
In its announcement on Friday, the FBI said that the “340 cipher” was solved by three codebreakers — David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia; Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer; and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, CNN reported.
After the decoding, it was revealed that the the cipher was sent in all capital letters with no punctuation marks.
The deciphered message reads as: “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. That wasn’t 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 (paradise misspelled) all the sooner.