Mind you, this doesn’t get us much closer to learning the identity of the serial killer, who terrorized California half a century ago.
It’s long been assumed that the identity of the “Zodiac killer,” who terrorized Northern California from the late ‘60s through the early ‘70s, is one of those mysteries that will never be solved. David Fincher’s film Zodiac is about that very idea. (Then again, some people think maybe it was Ted Cruz.) And yet we now have one piece of information we’ve never had before: As per The New York Times, codebreakers recently cracked a cipher attributed to the puzzle-loving murderer, one that had baffled cryptographers for over 50 years. The cipher had been mailed to The San Francisco Chronicle in November of 1969. On December 5, just over 51 years later, a solution was sent to the FBI, cracked by three citizens: David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia; Sam Blake, an applied mathematician from Melbourne, Australia; and Jarl Van Eycke, a warehouse operator and computer programmer from Belgium.
