Three men were credited in December 2020 with cracking the Zodiac Killer's 340-character cipher (Z340) – but they want to share the credit with the group of scouts who helped with the 51-year code-breaking effort.
Zodiac Killer's message decoded by amateur researchers
"The solution of this cipher was the result of a large group effort spanning several decades, and we ultimately stood on the shoulders of the excellent cryptanalytic contributions of many others," wrote David Oranchak, a US-based software developer, and cryptologist Sam Blake, a mathematician based in Australia , and Jarl Van Eycke, a cipher expert based in Belgium, in a paper released last week documenting the history of the Z340 solution.
The Zodiac Killer is known to have murdered at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969 – although the perpetrator claimed to have killed 37. A suspect has still not been officially identified.
After attacking two couples separately in December 1968 and July 1969, resulting in the deaths of three of the four victims, the serial killer sent his first cipher, Z408—named after the number of characters in the ciphertext—in three parts to three local newspapers: Vallejo Times- Herald, San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle.
