The Zodiac Killer's Second Cipher Solved

A clerk at the San Francisco Chronicle slits open an envelope, and out slides a single sheet covered in three hundred and forty handwritten symbols. Circles. Triangles. Little stick figures. Greek letters wearing hats. It's November, nineteen sixty-nine, and nobody in that newsroom knows they're holding the most famous unsolved puzzle in American crime. It will keep its mouth shut for fifty-one years. So hold onto this question, because everything tonight bends toward it. When that page finally spoke... out loud... in English... what did a killer choose to say? Rewind eleven months. Lake Herman Road, outside Benicia, two days before Christmas break ends. David Faraday, seventeen. Betty Lou Jensen, sixteen. Both shot dead beside a parked car. The following Fourth of July, a Vallejo parking lot: Darlene Ferrin, twenty-two, killed. Michael Mageau, nineteen, survives. Then Lake Berryessa in September. Then a cab driver, Paul Stine, twenty-nine, shot in Presidio Heights in October. Five confirmed dead. Two survivors. And a man who would eventually claim thirty-seven. Now here's where it gets strange. On the last day of July, nineteen sixty-nine, three newspapers each open an envelope. The Vallejo Times-Herald. The Chronicle. The Examiner. Inside each one, exactly one third of a cipher. Four hundred and eight characters, torn into thirds like a ransom note for the whole Bay Area. Print it, he writes, or I go on a kill rampage. So they print it. Police hand it to Navy cryptographers, the professionals, the people with clearances. Nothing. And then a schoolteacher's wife in Salinas picks up the paper. Her name is Bettye Harden. Her husband Donald teaches school in North Salinas. And Bettye doesn't come at it with mathematics. She comes at it with psychology. A man this hungry for attention, she figures, will start his message with the word I. And somewhere in there... he'll use the word KILL. She's right. Inside about a week, the Hardens have it. The message begins, quote, I like killing because it is so much fun. It says man is the most dangerous animal of all. And near the end, a shrug of a taunt. I will not give you my name. So when that second page lands at the Chronicle four months later, everyone assumes it's days from falling. It isn't. Three hundred and forty characters. Sixty-three different symbols. Every technique that opened the first one just... slides off. The FBI's code breakers try. Hobbyists try. Professors, cranks, men with shoeboxes full of graph paper. Solutions get announced across the decades, and every single one collapses. Around nineteen seventy-four, the letters stop. The case goes cold. The page says nothing. Jump ahead. A software developer in Virginia named David Oranchak has been picking at this thing, on and off, for years. By twenty twenty he's working with two men he mostly knows through the internet. Sam Blake, a mathematician in Australia. Jarl Van Eycke, a programmer in Belgium, who built code-breaking software called AZdecrypt. Three men, three continents, one page of symbols. And one suspicion: the Zodiac hadn't only swapped the letters this time. He'd scrambled the ORDER too. So they decide to brute-force the scrambling. Van Eycke suggests slicing the grid into three chunks, nine lines, nine lines, and a final two. Blake's math spits out roughly six hundred and fifty thousand ways of rearranging those pieces, and they feed every one of them into the software. Buried in that avalanche, a single variation coughs up three real English words. The gas chamber. And that matters. Because around the time this cipher was mailed, a man phoned a live Bay Area TV show, claimed to be the Zodiac... and said he was afraid of the gas chamber. They pull the thread. The page opens. Oranchak has said that when the phrase that wasn't me on the TV show appeared on his screen, he jumped out of his chair. Read it straight through, and it's a man denying an impostor. Then explaining that no, he isn't afraid of execution at all, because the gas chamber only sends him to paradise sooner... where the people he killed will be waiting there as his slaves. The pattern was diagonal. Down one, over two. On the fifth of December, twenty twenty, they emailed it to the FBI. A week later, the Bureau confirmed it. So that's your answer. Fifty-one years, three continents, six hundred and fifty thousand attempts... and inside is no name, no map, no confession with an address. Just a man bragging about the afterlife. Two of the four Zodiac ciphers are still unread, one of them only thirteen characters long, and the case stays open in San Francisco, in Vallejo, in Napa and Solano counties. Here's what I can't shake. We assume a secret kept that long must be hiding something enormous. Something worth the fifty-one years. Sometimes you break the lock... and the room is empty.