It was sent to the SF Chronicle 51 years after the code experts broke the zodiac ‘340 cipher’

One of the most troubling mysteries of the zodiac killer’s saga, known as the 340 cipher, has been discovered by a code-breaking team from the United States, Australia, Australia and Belgium.

The cipher, sent in a letter to The Chronicle in November 1969, has been astonishing authorities and amateur celebrities since its arrival 51 years ago. Investigators have hope The zodiac that kills five people In two areas in 1968 and 1969, many of their ciphers will announce his name, but 340 has no such name.

According to code-breaking expert David Ran Ranchak, Cipher’s text reads: “I hope you enjoy trying to catch me. … I’m not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to Paradise (sic) sooner because there are enough slaves for me now. “

Cha Ranchak, a 46-year-old web designer living in Virginia, has been working on zodiac codes since 2006.

“This is exciting,” Ran Ranchak said in an interview on Friday. “We have been sitting on compromise since last Saturday. When I started looking at zodiac ciphers those years ago, I thought, ‘Oh, I can just write a computer program and solve it,’ but it has been kicking me all this time. till now.”

Cameron Paula, a spokesman for the FBI’s San Francisco office, confirmed O’Rourke’s claim on Friday. In a statement emailed to The Chronicle, she said:

“The FBI knows that a cipher attributed to the zodiac killer was recently solved by private citizens. The FBI is investigating the Zodiac Killer case for the San Francisco Department and our local law enforcement partners.

He said, “Zodiac Fortress terrorized many communities in Northern California, and we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes, even as decades have passed. “Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation and respect for the victims and their families, we will not comment further at this time.”

This is the second time the cipher of the zodiac has been cracked. First, a long cipher was sent to pieces in 1966 by The Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Vallejo Times-Herald, which was solved by a Salinas school teacher and his wife.

Known as the 408 cipher, he went a little further: “I like to kill because it’s so much fun.”

To break the 404040 cipher – hence the name because it contains 404040 characters – Oranchak teamed up with two fellow, amateur code crackers and ran a beavering set of symbols through special software programs. His teammates were Australian mathematician Sam Blake and Belgian warehouse operator operator Jarl van Ike.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do this without them,” Oranchak said. “In all our crypto community of the zodiac, Cipher took another step other than finding out what pictures are, and that’s where it’s found.”

Ran Ranchak’s findings began to emerge on some zodiac amateur Suthuth forums, such as zodiackillersite.comIn the last few days, there has been a lot of excitement in that wider world of true-criminals.

In most ciphers, as in 408, the solution consists primarily of diagrams by which symbols represent certain characters. In a 40 c0 cipher, it runs the word arrangement diagonally down the page, and they occasionally move to a column column.

“It’s a bit of a bit of code-making, but the basic plan for it can be found in at least one U.S. Army code manual from the 1950s,” Oranchak said.

As the team began to break down the methods in the cipher, they coined a few phrases from each other to let them know they were on the right track. There were references to “Gas Chamber” and “TV Show”, which seems to refer to Jim Dumbar’s “AM San Francisco” show on KGO-TV, which aired in October 1969. On that show, Dunbar and attorney Melvin Bailey called from a guy claiming to be a zodiac, and he said, “I don’t want to go to the gas chamber.”

In the resolved cipher, Rashi writes: “It wasn’t mine (so) in the TV show.”

“We knew we had something to do with the Dunbar show,” said Ranch. It would not have been in this form before October 22 when it happened. When the Chronicle received 340 letters. “The Chronicle published a story on the letter and cipher on November 12.