After 51 years, one of the Zodiac Killer's most complicated cryptograms has finally been solved by a private team of codebreakers, the FBI has confirmed.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, an international codebreaking team composed of individuals from the United States, Australia and Belgium have decoded the "340 Cipher," which had remained unsolved for over five decades after first being sent to the Chronicle's office in November of 1969. According to Virginia-based codebreaker David Oranchak, the 340 Cipher reads. "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 paradise all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me." This language is consistent with other letters sent by the Zodiac, though the newly-solved cipher provides no clues regarding the killer's true identity.
“The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens," said Cameron Polan, a spokeswoman for the FBI's San Francisco office. "The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners."
The Zodiac Killer was an unidentified serial killer believed to have killed at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late '60s, and was known for sending cryptic messages to law enforcement and journalists. In the following decades, the unsolved case has made its mark on pop culture, such as when he killer when the killer depicted in American Horror Story. However, the most notable example is director David Fincher's 2007 film Zodiac.
The film follows San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) and inspector Dave Toschi (played by Mark Ruffalo) in their attempts to track down the Zodiac after the newspaper is sent encrypted letters by the killer. After discovering a quote from The Most Dangerous Game in the first letter, Graysmith's obsession with cracking each of the codes takes over his life.
Zodiac was based on the book of the same name written by the real-life Graysmith, which surmises that key suspect Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac. However, while a large amount of circumstantial evidence seemingly suggested Allen was the Zodiac, there were other major pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggested he wasn't -- such as his handwriting and not matching the killer's and a DNA test conducted years after the crimes finding no match between Allen's DNA and the DNA found on the Zodiac's letters. Multiple search warrants of Allen's home were served, but he died in 1992 before the police could build any sort of strong case against him.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle, via The Daily Beast