This is the Zodiac speaking

Zodiac is a serial killer who committed his crimes in the United States from 1968 to 1969.
The Zodiac itself ascribed 37 kills to itself, but this was not confirmed by any facts and it is now proven that he committed only 5 murders and two more survived his attack.
The zodiac is often called the Jack the Ripper of the 20th century due to the fact that he, like his British "colleague", was not caught.
It is believed that the zodiac had a mental disorder - he wanted to interest him. And to satisfy this desire, he used letters that he sent to various publications. Only some of them were not quite ordinary - they were cipher programs.

Zodiac has been four attacks.
On December 20, 1968, he shot two young men (Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday).
In 1969, on Independence Day (July 4), he shot another pair. Only this time the girl (Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin) was killed, and the guy (Michael Renault Magow) survived, even despite three gunshot wounds.
September 27, 1969, he tried to slaughter another couple. Again, the girl (Cecilia Ann Shepard) passed away, and her young man (Brian Calvin Hartnell) survived.
The last proven victim of the Zodiac on October 11, 1969 was a taxi driver (Paul Lee Stai), whom he shot in the back of the head.

The zodiac sent about 20 letters in the period from 1969 to 1974 (the authorship of the 1978 letter has not been proven). He mostly wrote to newspapers. Of interest to us are just a few of them.

After two attacks in the editorial office of three San Francisco newspapers - Vallejo Times-Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner - the same letters came out (with slight differences). In addition to the letters, there were also three different encryption codes - for each edition its own.
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The letters began very “nice”: “Dear Editor. I am the killer of two teenagers for the past Christmas ... ". Then he talked about the things that only the police could know to prove that he is really who he claims to be. Then it was said that a part of the cipher was attached to the letter, the remaining two were sent to other editions. Then the Zodiac demanded to publish these parts of the cipher on the front pages of newspapers, otherwise he would drive around the district and kill passers-by.

Requirements fulfilled. The encrypts were sent to the National Security Agency for decryption.

But the message was decoded before - school teacher Donald Harden and his wife coped with the task in just a few minutes.

Many people like to say that the NSA experienced significant difficulties in deciphering the message and therefore Harden was able to provide the opened message earlier. This is not true. It’s just that the Zodiac didn’t consider the NSA case to be important, and the ciphers got into the usual queue.

Here, actually, and these same ciphers:

Vallejo Times-Herald



San francisco chronicle



San francisco examiner



These ciphers are not independent messages, but only parts of one large one.
The decrypted message reads:

It is a funky way to make it. I’m making it a little bit different. ebeorietemethhpiti

I love killing people because it's fun. it is even more fun than killing on a hunt in the forest, because man is the most dangerous animal. killing all of them gave me the most exciting experience. it's better than fucking a girl. the best part of it is that when I die, I will be reborn in paradise, and all the people I killed will be my slaves. I will not give you my name, because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting slaves for my afterlife. ebeorietemethhpiti

On some sites, two more ciphers are decrypted, but I could not find evidence, except on these sites, that the letters really existed.

There are three more letters with ciphers.

The last chronologically and least interesting, in my opinion, letter was received on June 26, 1970 by the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle. In this letter, the zodiac says that it will punish the inhabitants. With the help of a bomb, he intends to blow up a school bus. He buried the bomb and in order to find it, he attached a card and a cipher.

The bomb was not found, and the bus was not blown up. This cipher has not been disclosed.



On November 8, 1969, the editorial office of the San Francisco Chronicle's “beloved” Zodiac newspaper receives a letter containing a postcard in which he complains of loneliness and asks that a new message be published on an editorial. The wish was fulfilled.



A cipher was attached to the card



And this cipher was not disclosed.

This was followed by a letter in which the zodiac is interested in whether the cipher sent earlier had been cracked.
And then suddenly called his name. Although it is too loudly said - he hides it behind the next cipher.



Name could not find out.

Then more letters followed, but nothing good could be learned from them.

The zodiac remained free. At the moment he most likely has already died, but he left his riddles. It is possible that they have no solution and are written in order to constantly stir up interest towards themselves, but most likely “we will never know”.

PS If someone is interested in the whole story of the Zodiac, then there are many sites on the network devoted to him, books are also written and films shot (the last of them in 2007 with Robert Downey Jr., Jake Gyllenhall and Mark Ruffalo) which tells how twice zodiac managed to leave the police.