New information about recently solved Zodiac killer message published

Dave Oranchak, one of the three codebreakers who solved the second Zodiak Killer message, has published another video. In it there is new information about this century achievement.

German version

It’s been seven weeks since Dave Oranchak, Jarl Van Eycke and Sam Blake announced the decryption of the Zodiac killer message Z-340. I still can’t believe that this mystery, on which even the best experts cut their teeth for 51 years, has now been solved. In my opinion, this is the greatest non-military deciphering success in history. For those not yet familiar with the case of the Zodiac Killer, here is an introduction.

Quelle/Source: Wikimedia Commons

The solution

The trio presented the Zodiac solution not in writing, but in the form of a video produced by Dave Oranchak. This has now been viewed 1.8 million times on YouTube. It is clearly understandable, and you don’t have to be an expert to understand how the decryption described in it works.

Quelle/Source: Schmeh

For those who don’t know, Z-340 was encrypted in two steps. It doesn’t matter in which order you perform these two steps. First, the killer made a homophonic letter substitution (“homophonic” means that for each plaintext letter there are several ciphertext symbols to choose from). The following table shows how this substitution looks like, considering only the first 20 letters of the plaintext of Z-340:

Quelle/Source: Schmeh

Secondly, the order of the letters has been reversed, in such a way that knight moves (two spaces forward, one across) must be used to read the message correctly. The following diagram shows this for the first 20 letters:

Quelle/Source: Schmeh

With the two figures you can understand that the first 20 letters of the message in plain text are as follows: I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOT …

The full plain text is (a few details are still unclear):

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 WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE LIFE IS DEATH

I can only emphasize once again that it was a sensational achievement of the three code breakers to find the right ones out of the countless substitutions and transpositions that are theoretically possible.

Dave Oranchak’s new video

Now Dave has published another video. Titled “How was the 340 made?” it presents some interesting things about the solution and the reactions to it.

To start, Dave explains that he, too, hasn’t quite grasped what actually happened in December. It’s all surreal, he says, and sometimes he thinks he just dreamed the whole story.

Then the video presents numerous clips from newscasts around the world reporting on the Zodiac solution. At 3:00, a German contribution is also shown. Unfortunately, I don’t know which presenter in which program says “now it’s really getting wild” at this point. Maybe a reader can help.

Also some websites announcing the deciphering success are mentioned – at 5:58 for example Nils Kopal’s Youtube video confirming the correctness of the solution.

I’m especially pleased that Dave also mentions my blog at 7:15. He even thanks me for awarding him the Golden Alice. “You’re welcome” is all I can say.

Open questions

Things get particularly exciting from 10:20 onwards, when the question arises as to how the Zodiac killer proceeded with the encryption. At first it is unclear how he changed the order of the letters. Did he deliberately use knight moves or did they occur by chance? Dave has discovered a simple method that leads to the corresponding result. It is not based on consciously used knight moves, but on a shift with the help of two triangles.

Quelle/Source: How was the 340 made?

Is that actually the method the killer used? One does not know.

There are other unanswered questions about the Zodiac cryptograms. For example, one does not know how this one created the homophonic substitution table. Did he simply specify a few symbols for each letter of the alphabet? Or is there a system behind it?

As mentioned above, some details of the decoding are not yet clear. In particular, we don’t know where the words LIFE IS DEATH belong in plain text. Possibly the Zodiac killer used this phrase as filler, and it has nothing to do with the rest of the message.

It is also unclear what an unnamed author who claims to have solved Z-340 years ago is doing now (18:20). This author has described his decipherment in a book, in which he also offers a prize of 10,000 dollars for the one who can prove that his solution is wrong. Dave, who has now provided this proof, suggests that said author donate the money to charity. I didn’t know this story before, so I don’t know what book this is.

And finally, two of the four total Zodiac messages are still unsolved (the video goes into this at 26:50). However, one of them consists of only 13 symbols:

Quelle/Source: Wikimedia Commons

The other one is not much more productive with 33 symbols:

Quelle/Source: Wikimedia Commons

It should be difficult to impossible to resolve these two short messages. However, I thought the same thing with Z-340.

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Further reading: Can you break this Zodiac Killer copycat message?

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