December 5th 2020 will go down as a momentous event in the Zodiac Killer story, as the day Dave Oranchak (USA), Sam Blake (Australia) and Jarl Van Eycke (Belgium) finally cracked the 340 cipher after 51 years and one month. It would be another six days, on December 11th 2020, before the breakthrough became public. Here is the message:
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 ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE - SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH - I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH.
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 ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE - SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH - I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH.
David Oranchak David Oranchak released an excellent YouTube video explaining how they deciphered the Z340 despite the mistakes made by the Zodiac Killer when he disguised his message in a wall of ciphertext. David describes in detail how the cipher was cracked using a diagonal period 19 shift (knight's move of one down and two across) on the first 18 rows (split into two sections of 9 rows). One would have thought that the Zodiac Killer created his message in grid form and applied his cipher key to it, resulting in what we see below. However, this is not the cipher he mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle on November 8th 1969, which began with the ciphertext "HER". So what is the simplest method to convert the ciphertext below to the one mailed to the Chronicle?
The first thing you will notice about the first 9 rows of ciphertext below, is that the "H" begins both this cipher and the mailed one. You will also notice that column 1 has 8 characters of ciphertext descending underneath the "H" (marked in the blue rectangle). These are the exact reverse of the 8 characters in the mailed version. Is it possible that the Zodiac Killer employed a simple 9 shift from the first ciphertext character "H" to encode his message further? Following the red squares below, we arrive at the E, R, and so on, until we reach the last (9th row). After the Zodiac takes his 17th character on the last row he has finished his first row in the mailed 340 cipher. He then takes the N from the same row in the left margin (in the blue rectangle) to begin his second row in the mailed version and repeats the process again, traveling across 9 to the reversed ciphertext character "P" or number nine (highlighted in green). He then continues cycling through the cipher in shifts of 9 (shown by the green squares) until he reaches the second to last row. This completes row 2 of the mailed cipher. He then takes the ciphertext character "B" from the blue rectangle to begin his third cycle (shown in yellow) and continues this process until all the ciphertext characters have been converted to the new format. You can follow this below, from red to green to yellow to black to pink. All nine rows adhere to this technique. The Zodiac Killer made errors in the second section of 9 rows.
Below is the beginning of the second section of 9 rows, showing how I created the tenth and eleventh rows of the mailed 340 cipher correctly using a shift of nine. But the message in the second section was filled with errors as David pointed out, so why would the Zodiac Killer rearrange this incoherent message (shown on the right) using the technique below and send it to the San Francisco Chronicle? Which obviously wouldn't make sense.
You will notice the message on the tenth row (highligted in green) is incorrect, yet I managed to encode its ciphertext correctly using the nine shift technique (as I have done with the eleventh row below). If the Zodiac Killer had encoded his legible message correctly, it would not have produced the ciphertext characters seen below. And therefore could not have produced the ciphertext characters mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle on November 8th 1969.
This analysis has been done from the perspective of the Zodiac Killer, who could have created a legible message in grid form, applied his cipher key, and then used a nine shift technique to encode the message further. But this process does not produce the ciphertext seen in the letter mailed to the Chronicle. He would have needed to begin with an illegible message to produce the rows of ciphertext below. It seems like he placed his legible message directly into the first nine rows using a period 19 shift (fairly successfully), but this comes under question during the encoding of the second nine rows because of the marked increase in errors. The first word he has to place in the second nine rows is "SOONER" but he immediately makes a mistake and inserts "SOOHEN". This makes little sense. If the Zodiac Killer had encoded his message described at the beginning of this article, it is extremely difficult to make any missteps due to its simplicity. This follow up article may explain everything.
Some images have been taken from David Oranchak's videos. Here is his latest video entitled Zodiac's 340 Cipher Solved: Five Years Later, explaining the solving of the 340 cipher and the thinking behind the Zodiac Killer errors.
You will notice the message on the tenth row (highligted in green) is incorrect, yet I managed to encode its ciphertext correctly using the nine shift technique (as I have done with the eleventh row below). If the Zodiac Killer had encoded his legible message correctly, it would not have produced the ciphertext characters seen below. And therefore could not have produced the ciphertext characters mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle on November 8th 1969.
This analysis has been done from the perspective of the Zodiac Killer, who could have created a legible message in grid form, applied his cipher key, and then used a nine shift technique to encode the message further. But this process does not produce the ciphertext seen in the letter mailed to the Chronicle. He would have needed to begin with an illegible message to produce the rows of ciphertext below. It seems like he placed his legible message directly into the first nine rows using a period 19 shift (fairly successfully), but this comes under question during the encoding of the second nine rows because of the marked increase in errors. The first word he has to place in the second nine rows is "SOONER" but he immediately makes a mistake and inserts "SOOHEN". This makes little sense. If the Zodiac Killer had encoded his message described at the beginning of this article, it is extremely difficult to make any missteps due to its simplicity. This follow up article may explain everything.
Some images have been taken from David Oranchak's videos. Here is his latest video entitled Zodiac's 340 Cipher Solved: Five Years Later, explaining the solving of the 340 cipher and the thinking behind the Zodiac Killer errors.
Below I have continued the process and completed five rows of the 340 cipher using a nine shift. The red rectangles are row 10. The green rectangles are row 11. The yellow rectangles are row 12. The black rectangles are row 13. The pink rectangles are row 14. A shift of 9 works perfectly with a grid of 17 by 9 = 153.
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