ILLUSTRATIONS: Aluísio Cervelle Santos
The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who terrorized California in the late 60’s and early 70’s. He killed 5 people (and left two others seriously injured) and his identity was never revealed. One of his most striking traits were the letters he sent to the press. They contained an encrypted code and, of the four, only one has been solved to date (see below).
Read the other three letters and learn more about them.
HOW WERE THE CRIMES
1. The psychopath’s first victims were two couples, one in 1968 and another in 1969. On August 1 of that year, he sent his first encrypted letter, in three parts, one to each newspaper in the region known as the Bay Area, in the state of California . In total, the code had 408 symbols – that is, very difficult to break.
two. Zodiac demanded that all three pieces be published, and all eventually were. A couple of teachers managed to decipher that first message. They just couldn’t understand the last 18 characters, which remain unsolved to this day.
3. More letters were sent by the maniac until 1974 (estimates vary, but there were at least 18 in total, counting the first three). Of these new letters, three contained new codes, but none were broken. In one of them, he indicated the location of a bomb on a school bus, but which never exploded. In another, it announced “my name is”, followed by 13 characters
4. The psychopath was never arrested. The biggest suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former teacher. He had a Zodiac watch, he had read the short story The Most Dangerous Game, which one of the letters allegedly referred to, and was recognized from photographs in 1991 by one of the survivors of a serial killer attack. But this evidence was not considered conclusive and Allen died in 1992.
THE DECIPHERED LETTER
Code was cracked with frequency analysis method
1. The couple who broke the code assumed that the killer would use the verb “kill”. It contains the most common double consonant in the English language, the LL. They also assumed that the author would use the words “eu” (“I”) and “diversão” (“fun”). With that alone, they already had 5 different letters to start with.
two. From then on, the couple used frequency analysis. In this method, the symbols that appear most often in the encrypted message are counted. Then, using a table of the most used letters in the language (in this case, English), a trial and error process is done replacing the most used symbols with the most used letters. For example, in English, the most common letter is E. In Portuguese, it is A.
3. The couple gradually replaced the letters. When they found a substitution that made sense, that is, it seemed to form a word, this served to find other letters. Even so, the process was laborious: the code was homophone, that is, with more than one symbol for the same letter. Apart from the lack of punctuation and spelling errors…
READ MORE
– Charles Sobhraj, the bikini killer
– Jack the Ripper, father of serial killers
– Gilberto Valle, the virtual cannibal
THE MESSAGE
I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUE ANAMAL OF ALL TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAE WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND ALL THEI HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOI DOWN OR ATOP MY COLLECTIOG OF SLAVES FOR MY AFTERLIFE. EBEORIETEMETHHPITI
In Portuguese: “I like killing people because it’s so much fun. It’s more fun than killing wild animals in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all. Killing things gives me the most pleasurable experience, it’s even better than hooking up with a girl. The best part is that when I die I will be reborn in heaven and all those I killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow me down or stop me from collecting slaves for my afterlife.”