One of the longest-running mysteries in the ‘Zodiac Killer’ saga has finally been solved after an international code-breaking team cracked the notorious ‘340 Cipher’ sent to the San Francisco Chronicle 51 years ago

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One of the longest-running mysteries in the ‘Zodiac Killer’ – https://www.ft.com/search?q=%27Zodiac%20Killer%27 saga has finally been solved after an international code-breaking team cracked the notorious ‘340 Cipher’ sent to the San Francisco Chronicle 51 years ago. The letter has been puzzling authorities and amateur sleuths since it arrived at the newspaper’s officer in November 1969, four years after the killer started terrorizing the Bay Area, killing at least five people. Half a century later three private citizen code-breakers from the United States, Australia and Belgium finally decoded a taunting message which 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’,  Investigators had hoped that the murderer, who has never been definitively identified, would reveal his name in the cipher, but were pleased nonetheless with the break-through.  An international code-breaking team cracked the notorious ‘340 Cipher’ (pictured) sent to the San Francisco Chronicle 51 years ago US code-breaker David Oranchak (pictured), and code-breakers from Australia and Belgium, cb.run – https://cb.run/9YeN cracked the 340 cipher sent by the Zodiac Killer to The San Francisco Chronicle in 1969, using specialist software Australian applied mathematician Sam Blake (left) worked with Oranchak to go through 650,000 different solutions to the cipher 340. Belgian programmer Jarl Van Eycke (right) designed the code-breaking software used to help solve Cipher 340 The infamous Bay Area Zodiac Killer, who killed at least five people and potentially as many as 37 in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has never been definitively identified