Cipher 340 Cracked December 2020

[Howard Brown]

Let's Crack Zodiac - Episode 5 - The 340 Is Solved!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o&ab_channel=DavidOranchak

On December 3rd, 2020, an international three-person team of codebreakers made a breakthrough with the Zodiac Killer's unsolved 340-character cipher.
By December 5th, the team finished cracking the cipher and sent the solution to the FBI.

This is the full message from the Zodiac Killer that was hidden in the 340-character cipher for 51 years:

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME
THAT WASNT 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

The members of the team that cracked the code are:

* Sam Blake (Australia)
* Jarl Van Eycke (Belgium)
* David Oranchak (USA)

[Anna Morris]

I have been messing around with this thing as a crossword/word search exercise. Cipher experts have warned me it is a cipher and what I have found doesn't count.

I will defer to them but call attention to the many visible words in the plain text. I am not claiming they mean anything profound but think it is another layer of Zodiac messing with minds. The plain text can be scrambled over and over and so many usable words do not appear.

My system provided a glimpse of how it worked. I thought there were patterns that worked diagonally as well as for dropping down a line and shifting characters. I also found "I hope you" in the top left corner but doing that with my system yielded nothing else meaningful. I do not claim I found anything but am surprised that I think I had a basic idea of how it could work.

I am curious how the cipher could have been arranged to have perhaps double meaning or at least some visible words. I think that is as interesting as getting a message.

The message is as much drivel as I expected.

David Oranchak is a fantastic researcher who provided the world with a great web toy that has provided me with lots of fun.

[Kattrup]

Amazing, beautiful work.

Just awesome how this is possible through volunteer dedication across the world. Really exemplified by the Belgian guy: warehouse administrator by day - international code cracker by night!

I’m a bit embarrassed to make a wild-ass guess for the flow of the last line, but maybe the “Life is” was meant to go with “Death” to form a separate “conclusion”.

Removing those three words makes the final line perfectly clear and as they demonstrate “life is” was kept separate from the rest of the text.

Just a thought from a complete amateur

[Joe Chetcuti]

This story was in the front page of today's San Francisco Chronicle. Here is an interesting sentence from that article:

"It's a complicated bit of code creation, Oranchak said, but a basic scheme for it can be found in at least one U.S. Army code manual from the 1950s."

I remember years ago that there was talk about the Zodiac killer as having been a former member of an engineering corps in the military. He had apparently used a word that was only known specifically to a military engineering corps.

The SF Chronicle article gives us a hint that this code creation had a military background to it, too.

[R. J. Palmer]

"That wasn't me on the t.v. show."

He's denying that he was the guy who called in and talked to Melvin Belli in 1969

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlFZwaVL9lM

Shades of Wearside Jack, unless the coded messages are also a hoax, in which case it's a hoax referencing another hoax

[Howard Brown]

R.J.

Hasn't the newly cracked code been shown to be legit ?

[Joe Chetcuti]

"That wasn't me on the tv show."

Yeah, there once was a Ripper letter where the writer claimed he had nothing to do with the torso of a woman that was found in the basement(?) of a government building in early Oct 1888. I've forgotten the specific details of that torso murder. I'm getting old.

The decoded Zodiac message seems to have its writer also in denial of a story that the public might have connected with an infamous killer. This time the writer denied he phoned a tv show claiming he was the Zodiac.

[Howard Brown]

Joe:

The letter you're referring to might be in here:

https://www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=19496&page=8

[Anna Morris]

I believe this solution is legitimate. The FBI is reviewing it now. It was amazing work that cracked the 340 and I am so happy David Oranchak was part of it.

I am curious about a lot more oddities in the 340 and I left several questions on David's channel. I have previously expressed my thoughts, but basically, before there is any deciphering or other work, it looks like there are instructions to break the cipher. I am not surprised the answer involved moving a number of spaces and dropping down. The 340 is a fascinating creation and I wonder if there are other, smaller messages left, perhaps in plain sight?

[Joe Chetcuti]

I finally did find that Ripper Letter that I talked about in my previous post. It was on page 35 of Stewart and Keith's Letters From Hell book.

Thomas J. Bulling of the Central News Agency wrote to Chief Constable Williamson on Oct 5, 1888 to tell him about a letter that was received on that day.

The Ripper Letter began this way:

Dear Friend,

In the name of God hear me I swear I did not kill the female whose body was found at Whitehall. If she was an honest woman I will hunt down and destroy her murderer. If she was a whore God will bless the hand that slew her...

The letter was signed Yours truly, Jack the Ripper.

[Howard Brown]

Joe:

That's known as the 'Moab & Midian' letter.

[R. J. Palmer]

R.J.

Hasn't the newly cracked code been shown to be legit ?

Sorry for never responding, Howard.

The solution to the code was indeed "legit."

I wasn't suggesting otherwise; however, one popular theory is that the person who sent the coded letters was not the actual killer, but merely someone pretending to be.

You might have noticed that the 'Zodiac' is back in the news.

A group is claiming that an FBI whistleblower has confirmed that the FBI has a partial DNA match linking Gary Francis Poste with the murders.

Investigators claim FBI ‘secretly listed’ Zodiac Killer suspect since 2016 | The Independent

[Howard Brown]

Rajah;

That 'Case Breakers' cadre is led by Thomas Colbert.
Colbert is obsessed with the idea that D. B. Cooper was a man named Robert Rackstraw.
Colbert sounds like a few researchers in this field who have a habit of twisting facts as if they were Gumby to make their ideas acceptable.
I'd hedge my bets on the story being true but thanks for letting me know.

[R. J. Palmer]

Rajah;

That 'Case Breakers' cadre is led by Thomas Colbert.
Colbert is obsessed with the idea that D. B. Cooper was a man named Robert Rackstraw.
Colbert sounds like a few researchers in this field who have a habit of twisting facts as if they were Gumby to make their ideas acceptable.
I'd hedge my bets on the story being true but thanks for letting me know.

Thanks, How.

From what I've read so far, Colbert's theory doesn't inspire immediate confidence. The main evidence against Poste seems to be that he was a sadistic hunter who had been in the Air Force, and that he (supposedly) has a passing resemblance to the famous police sketch. I either never noticed or had forgotten that the Zodiac supposedly had a scar on his forehead, but evidently Poste suffered a head injury during a drunk driving accident while in the Air Force and has a scar. The theory was kicked around the block about a year or two ago but didn't gain much traction.

[Howard Brown]

Rajah...
From Wikipedia....check out what Tom Voigt says about the issue :
Gary Francis Poste


In October 2021, the Case Breakers, claiming to be a team of over 40 cold case investigators composed of former law enforcement investigators, military intelligence officers, and journalists, claimed to have identified the Zodiac Killer as Gary Francis Poste, who died in 2018 at the age of 80. The team claimed to have uncovered forensic evidence and photos from Poste's darkroom, and noted that scars on Poste's forehead matched those they said were described on the killer. They also claimed that removing the letters of Poste's name from one of Zodiac's cryptograms revealed an alternate message.

The FBI subsequently stated that the case remained open and that there is "no new information to report," while local law enforcement expressed skepticism to the Chronicle regarding the team's findings. Riverside police officer Ryan Railsback said the Case Breakers' claims largely relied on circumstantial evidence and author Tom Voigt, a Zodiac Killer investigator, called the claims "bullshit". Voigt noted that no witnesses in the case described Zodiac as having scars on his forehead

Voigt in Rolling Stone :

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/zodiac-killer-expert-debunks-identity-theory-1238068/