After more than 51 years, a team of young people in the United States, Australia and Belgium managed to solve one of the most complex puzzles in American history, which are the letters of the serial killer "Zodiac", known as the "340 code, as it consists of 340 letters," According to what the US Bureau of Investigation "FBI" announced.
Mystery and brutality
On July 5, 1969, the police revealed the heinous murder of a girl in her car, who was accompanied by her boyfriend in Vallejo (north of San Francisco), and the young man survived the accident to be the only victim, who saw the killer's face.
Hours after the crime was revealed, the Vallejo police station received a call from the killer, to confess his crime, and to attribute to himself another murder that occurred 7 months ago, in which a young man and a girl were killed in their car as well.
Two months later, the killer surprised them with another crime not less ugly than his first crimes, on September 27, 1969, when he attacked a couple in Lake Perissa in Napa County, California, and after threatening them with a weapon, he tied them and stabbed them with a knife.
But the husband managed to survive.
The mysterious criminal concluded his crimes by killing a taxi driver on October 11, 1969, in San Francisco, who died after the killer shot him directly in the head.
However, the police were unable to reach evidence or a thread that connects them to those behind these crimes, and his crimes caused panic among the people, especially after he threatened to target school buses and kill children.
Encrypted messages
The killer was not satisfied with his calls to the police stations after each crime to inform them that he was the killer, and decided to send encrypted messages to the San Francisco Chronicle, the first of which was in November 1969, and contain complex and strange codes.
A school teacher and his wife were able to decode his first letters, which began by saying, "I hope you enjoy your attempts to catch up with me";
But no one could reach it, or even explain the rest of the messages.
With each of his encrypted messages, he sends a handwritten letter describing how he committed his crime, and why he loves killing, and vows to kill some of the journalists and investigators who seek to uncover him, and in one of his letters he called himself "Zodiac".
Diagram of the suspected "Zodiac" (networking sites)
Revive the case
After years of investigation and access to a number of suspects, the most famous of them was Arthur Lee Allen.
But none of them was proven guilty, and the case began to wane over the years, until a cartoonist named Robert Graysmith brought it back for investigation.
Graysmith was working for the "San Francisco Chronicle" since the beginning of the case, and he was fond of reading, and was able to read a number of books about decoding codes and riddles, and he was joined by one of the investigators who were in the Zodiac case, and together they were able to collect more evidence that condemns Arthur Lee Allen;
But it has not been definitively proven yet to be the killer.
Years later, Graysmith published his book entitled "Zodiac", in which he told the whole story and everything he found. Meanwhile, one of the investigators managed to reach one of the surviving victims in 1991, and was able to identify Allen's face, and he said he was the one who shot him before 22 years.
A commission has been set up to investigate Allen;
But he died of a heart attack before he was interrogated, and the police could not prove the crimes against him.
Half a century later
And after 51 years, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in San Francisco, through its Twitter account, published a statement saying that "the FBI was recently informed that the code attributed to the Zodiac Killer had been resolved by private citizens."
A copy of the serial killer "Zodiac" messages encoded in 1969 (social networking sites)
The statement indicated that the investigation in the case is still continuing until justice is achieved for the Zodiac victims and their families, adding, "Due to the continuing investigation, and respect for the victims and their families, we will not provide further comments at the present time."
#Breaking - Our statement regarding the #Zodiac cipher: pic.twitter.com/cJCtlDEbMw
- FBI SanFrancisco (@FBISanFrancisco) December 11, 2020
The team that decoded the code consists of the American David Oranchak, who told the Washington Post that he saw the code for the first time in 14 years and thought he could decipher it, and shared with Australian mathematician Sam Blake and Belgian programmer Jarl Van Eyck.
Thus, the trio was able to decipher the code consisting of 63 unique and mysterious symbols, which the killer wrote in his letters that he affixed to a piece of blood-stained shirt for one of his victims, and no one was able to solve it throughout these years, even after the invention of a supercomputer dedicated to deciphering the Zodiac code.
Many books and artworks were built on the case, the most famous of which is the American movie "Zodiac", which was released in 2007, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo.