Diana Dors’ second cipher mystery

Von Klaus Schmeh / 7. Dezember 2020 / 12 Kommentare

English actress Diana Dors left behind an encrypted message, which was deciphered years ago. Here’s another one, the solution of which is unknown.

Deutsche Version des Artikels (Beta)

English actress Diana Dors (1931-1984) was once considered the British counterpart of Marilyn Monroe. In dozens of films, she played a seductive blonde, while her private life was worthy of that of a film diva. Diana Dors died of cancer at age 52. The following picture shows her with Dutch entertainer Rudi Carrell:

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Diana Dors’ first encrypted message

In 2015, at a symposium on the history of the Enigma in Poland, I met British cryptologist Andrew Clark. The following photo shows the two of us with Dermot Turing (the nephew of Alan Turing):

Source: Schmeh

Andrew told me an interesting story about Diana Dors. About a year and a half before her death, Dors gave her son, Mark Dawson, an encrypted messsage. This ciphertext allegedly described the whereabouts of two million pounds she had hidden. Dors was already suffering from cancer at that time and probably expected that she would not live much longer.

The said story is covered in a British TV documentary, which seems to be not available online any more. At least, there is a website about it. The following image of the encrypted message is taken from the documentary:

Source: Channel 4

Dors’ third and last husband, Alan Lake, allegedly knew the encryption key of this message. However, he died only six months after his wife.

When Mark Dawson tried to decipher the cryptogram, both his mother and her husband had already deceased. He therefore attempted to decrypt the message with codebreaking means. He figured out that the first part of the cryptogram was encrypted in a Pigpen cipher:

Dawson managed to solve the encryption. Here’s how the cipher works:

Source: Schmeh

The plaintext is the following (with spaces added): LOCATIONS AND NAMES

Here’s a transcription of the second part of the cryptogram:

EAWVL XEIMO RZTIC SELKM KMRUQ
QPYFC ZAOUA TNEYS QOHVQ YPLYS
OEOEW TCEFY ZZEPI NYAUD RZUGM
SSONV JDAER SZNVS QSHRK XPVCC
WUAEJ JTWGC WQRCC NRBKZ VIITF
RZLTS VOAIB NQZOK VANJJ TFAJO
GYUEB XZHRY UFSDM ZEBRK GIECJ
QZHFY QBYVU FNEGD EDIXF YZHOM
PMNLQ XFHFO UXAEB HZSNO EAUIL
JXIWD KTUDN MCCGC EURDG SRBCW
GMNKC RLHER HETVP GWOGC WANVJ
NGYTZ RALTM TAYTL UUSKM QIRZH

When Dawson couldn’t break this one, he consulted a team of British cryptologists. One of them was Andrew Clark, who later told me about this story.

A plaintext that is not really clear

Clark and his colleagues performed a few statistical analyses of the cryptogram. They soon saw that they were dealing with a Vigenère cipher, and they had no trouble breaking it. The keyword turned out to be DMARYFLUCK, derived from Dors’ civil name Diana Mary Fluck. Here is how the first line is decrypted:

Ciphertext: EAWVL XEIMO RZTIC SELKM KMRUQ
Key:        DMARY FLUCK DMARY FLUCK DMARY
Cleartext:  BOWEN STOKE ONTRE NTRIC HARDS

The cryptogram decrypted to a list of surnames, each one followed by a city in England or Wales:

Bowen, Stoke On Trent
Richards, Leeds
Woodcock, Winchester
Wilson, York
Downey, Kingston Upon Hull
Grant, Nottingham
Sebastian, Leicester
Leigh, Ipswich
Morris, Cardiff
Mason, Slough
Edmundson, Portsmouth
Padwell, London
Pyewacket, Brighton
McManus, Sunderland
Coyle, Bournemouth
Humphries, Birmingham
Dante, Manchester
Bluestone, Liverpool
Cooper, Bristol

To my knowledge, it is still unknown what this list means. Do the names refer to real people? If so, did these individuals receive a part of Dors’ millions? The TV documentary does not provide any answers on these questions.

Apparently, Mark Dawson never found the fortune his mother had allegedly left behind. It is even unclear whether Dors still owned so much money when she died. Although she had earned well during her career, she later had to declare bankruptcy.

A second cryptogram

Last week, I received an email from Sean Flynn, who has recently purchased a bunch of photos and paperwork Diana Dors left behind. These items are featured in the TV documentary.

One of the sheets in Sean’s collection shows seven strange-looking words:

Source: Sean Flynn

Here’s a transcript of this cryptogram:

ZAK
WE h
LAKAMAR
AMAMAM
KAB
HAMOKNIO
MALPAOPEQM

All seven words are pronounceable (except for the last syllable of MALPAOPEQM), which makes it unlikely that they were created with a letter-based substitution.

On the other hand, these pronounceable words apparently don’t have a meaning. A Google search doesn’t produce any useful results.

An obvious explanation would be that each word represents an anagram. However, I don’t think that LAKAMAR or AMAMAM can be anagrammed to meaningful words.

Codewords from a codebook would be another possibility. But I see no reason why Diana Dors would use a codebook for her private notes.

All in all, I can’t come up with a good explanation for these seven words. Do they just represent gibberish? If a reader can find out more, please let Sean and me know.
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Further reading: Tony Gaffney’s starlight steganogram

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Kommentare (12)

#1 David Oranchak
http://zodiackillerciphers.com
7. Dezember 2020

Is this the same documentary?
#2 Klaus Schmeh
7. Dezember 2020

@David: Yes, thanks for sharing.
#3 Mike Schroeder
8. Dezember 2020

For what it is worth, I compared the ‘Dors cipher’ to a recent ACA Key Phrase cipher (nd20e26). The stats for the Dor cipher are IC =0.1201, DIC = 0.029, and No. of unique letters = 14. The ACA example had an IC= 0.1288, DIC = 0.0536 and unoque letters = 12. The one other ACA cipher with word divisions (other than a simple Aristocrat), the Ragbaby, has an average IC = 0.041 and DIC = 0.0.018.

Perhaps this is polyphonic cipher similar to a key phrase cipher?
#4 Richard SantaColoma
http://proto57.wordpress.com/
8. Dezember 2020

My guess is that these are mnemonic, or memory aids. They look like this to me, but in addition there seems to be a poem of some sort below.

Perhaps these are rows of the first letters of lines of a speech, a play or screenplay, a song or poem?

I have suggested this before, for other found messages… such as the Somerton Man cipher, Ricky McCormick, and so on. But I think it is a common thing to do… I’ve done it, myself, to help memorize a poem without writing out the words. So maybe it is a case of me “Having only a hammer, and seeing all problems as nails”, but I do think it possible here.

As for Ms. Dor’s first, and solved cipher… not to impugn the woman without knowing her or her history, but a part of me wonders if that was a blackmail list of men’s names? That would be something to keep secret, and also, possibly, worth a couple of million… “hidden” in the list? Perhaps she told her son the list was “worth millions”, and he took it the wrong way… that there was treasure instead of what it really was.
#5 Richard SantaColoma
http://proto57.wordpress.com/
8. Dezember 2020

Well, well, well… after my guess about the nature of the list… that is, possibly being a blackmail list… I looked up Diana Dors, and came across this article:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592006/So-did-Max-Clifford-witness-Diana-Dors-libidinous-parties.html

It turns out that the Dors’ actually had wild parties, and would film/videotape the “antics” of guests, without their knowledge, through two way mirrors. According to the article,

“Though she never publicly revealed their names, Dors would often claim in interviews that a generation of film stars, socialites, sportsmen and TV personalities had caroused at her mock-Tudor home.

“Indeed, she often joked that, were she to name all of the well-known people who’d had sex under its roof, she’d have been able to publish ‘my own version of Who’s Who’.”

And, ‘Mum was a terrible gossip and she lived off telling stories of what went on. That was why we had them. If you watched a film with her, as the credits rolled, she would start telling you that so and so had slept with this person on the film, who had been married to whoever.’

And it seems the couple would hire prostitutes for these parties, and invite many celebrities. This all touches awfully close to home with my guess as to the nature of that list, I think. That might be her “Who’s Who”, and also, “Who Did and Where They Lived” list.
#6 AndreasO
8. Dezember 2020

Richard wrote: “Perhaps these are rows of the first letters of lines of a speech, a play or screenplay, a song or poem?”
All seven words are pronounceable. I wouldn’t expect this when each letter is the first one in a speech or poem.
#7 Sean
8. Dezember 2020

Good evening. Many thanks for your replies. In regards to it being a blackmail list, I disregard this completely. I’m assuming the Dante in the list of names, relates to Troy Dante, who remained a good friend to Diana. I have detail relating to Bowen as being a man who worked with Alan Lake. I would also ask people to ignore the Daily Mail article, as it was sold for money, and it was a decision that Diana’s son deeply regretted. Can we please not allow tabloid press to cloud this article. Many thanks
#8 Erica
CO
9. Dezember 2020

The first 3 letters are repeated: left to right and top to bottom: LAK AMA KAB

COLUMN 1 AND ROW 1
LAK
COLUMN 2 AND ROW 2
AMA
COLUMN 3 AND ROW 3
KAB

LAK
AMA
KAB
#9 AndreasO
9. Dezember 2020

If the third word was KABAMA instead of KAB, the same would be true for rows 4-6:
AMA
MAM
AMA
#10 Gerry
9. Dezember 2020

In the “names list” there is this “Pyewacket, Brighton”. Here are clues to it from 2003: https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/5103843.diana-dors-mystery-deepens/
#11 Thomas
9. Dezember 2020

Probably the people in the list received payments by her. At least a documentary showx a bank account statement transferring a sum to a Mr Bowen: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2018/04/09/revisited-diana-dors-encrypted-message-and-her-lost-millions/
#12 Sean Flynn
10. Dezember 2020

I have the Bowen statement in my collection. I was wondering today, if the LAKAMAR has anything to do with Alan Lake, her husband, and Marbella, as in the years prior to her death, Diana spent alot of time there. Just a wild guess.