51 Years Later, 3 Private Citizens/Nerds Finally Break The Zodiac Killer's "340 Cipher" Because They Were "Playing Around With It Bored During Lockdown"

Bettmann. Getty Images.

Bettmann. Getty Images.

Some pretty big news coming out of the serial killer world, and this may be the first time a sentence has started that way and ended up as nothing but your classic feel-good cryptologist story: three private citizens — an Aussie, an American, and a... Brussels-an — cracked the cipher sent to media outlets by the Zodiac Killer 51 years ago. Something that every single government agency with all of their vast resources couldn't do. 

As the resident authority on serial killers and serial killer culture, I have to pay all due respect to ZK as one of the greats, despite the fact he's not one of my personal favorites. I like my serial killers caught and punished with death after full confessions. But there's no doubt he was one of the GOATS, especially when it comes to things like building popularity and brand awareness in the age before social media was an option.  Few serial killers possess the intelligence and tradecraft while simultaneously commanding and controlling so much media attention. I mean, say what you want about his lackadaisical kills and total disregard for the tradition of having an established M.O. that starts raw and is honed over time: he was never caught. That's like, pretty big. To not even know his name (Arthur Leigh Allen) for sure.  They couldn't even solve his little word puzzler Sudokus he sent to the newspapers.  Not until this past weekend, 51 years later,  by 3 nerds and their best friend Spartan a supercomputer:

MYSTERY WIRE — The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has officially recognized Melbourne mathematician Samuel Blake and two other cryptologists, American David Oranchak and Brussels based software programmer Jarl van Eycke, for solving a 50-year-old encrypted message written by the unnamed serial killer known as “the Zodiac”.

Dr Samuel Blake worked on decrypting the message known as the “340 cipher” with the help of a University of Melbourne supercomputer called Spartan.

Obviously this is very big and very cool news especially for aficionados who have seen the mediocre movie like 7 times because they hoped it was actually better than they remember but it never is. But I can't help feeling a little underwhelmed. Multiple aspects of the reveal are a bit of let down, not the least of which is terrible grammar and a devastating typo in 'paradise'.  But also -- using a supercomputer?  That seems like cheating. Jake Gyllenhaal had a legal pad and a pencil. Cryptologist Carl and his buddies whatever their names are, they just dumped data into a machine and had it spit everything out, like the James Harden technique of codebreaking. Pure volume cryptologizing.  

And it still took 15 years, and getting some others to help. 

The cracked cipher does not reveal a name as promised in separate letters by the Zodiac.

“It was such a long shot,” Dr. Samuel Blake said. “We tried several hundred thousand incorrect ways of solving the cipher and just by chance we happened to sort of stumble upon a fragment of how it could be solved and using that fragment we reverse engineered the entire solution and got the entire message out from the Zodiac.”

Blake also said he had been working on finding a solution to the cipher since contacting David Oranchak earlier this year.

“David Oranchak is from the United States and he’s been working on trying to solve this cipher in his spare time for 15 years which is a Herculean effort,” according to Blake. “I saw some of the videos that he’d put online promoting analyses that he’d done of this cipher and I thought they were excellent so I reached out to him I think about March of this year and it was sort of a way of getting through the Melbourne Covid lockdown was to play around with this in my spare time.”

Oh here's what that loser had to say:

According to code-breaking expert David Oranchak, the cipher’s text includes: “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. … I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice (sic) all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me.”

Best part: he made a mistake in the middle. Like he didn't run the code correctly all the way through, something I have since confirmed IS problematic for the breaking of codes. 

Regardless it's yet another W for ZK — his run maybe just came to an end, but he had a good 51 year stretch of people thinking he was a brainiac criminal mastermind instead of just a fat clumsy loser with fat typo fingers. 

Now it's back to protecting and securing our democracy.