The cover story of this month’s edition of MUNDO ESTRANHO reserves a space to talk about Zodíaco, the serial killer who terrorized California in the 60s and 70s with his encrypted letters. Only the first, sent in three pieces to different newspapers in the area, was resolved.
Discover now some of your other messages with codes that remain unresolved to this day. In one of them he even promises to reveal his real name!
Letter 1
Sent with a postcard to the San Francisco Chronicle on November 8, 1969, this figure closely resembles that of the maniac’s first message, which was actually deciphered. But the key used to solve that letter doesn’t work with this one, whose contents remain a mystery.
Letter 2
Also sent to the San Francisco Chronicle on November 9, 1969, the letter described a plan to bomb an area school. The attack was never carried out. The letter contains a single coded snippet, which is supposed to reveal the killer’s name.
The translation: “The Zodiac is speaking here. By the way, did you solve the last cipher I sent you yet? My name is… [CÓDIGO]. I’m mildly curious how much bounty money you’re paying on my head. I hope you don’t think I was the one who put out a policeman with a bomb in the police station. Though I have spoken of killing children with one. It wouldn’t be right to invade someone else’s territory. But there is more glory in killing a policeman than there is in killing a child, because a policeman can shoot back. I’ve killed ten people to date. It would have been a lot more, but my pump failed. I got flooded from the rain we had some time ago.”
Letter 3
This was the last cipher sent by the Zodiac. It arrived at the Chronicle address on June 26, 1970. The central symbol, accompanied by the number “12” , was a common constant in messages. It indicated the killer’s “score”: he had already killed 12 people, and the San Francisco Police (SPFD) remained at “zero” because they had not yet arrested him.
The translation: “The Zodiac is speaking here. I was quite irritated with the people of the San Francisco Bay Area. They didn’t heed my wishes that they wear a button with my symbol on it. I promised to punish them if they didn’t comply by annihilating a school bus. But now the schools are on vacation for the summer, so I punished them in another way. I shot a man sitting in a parked car with a .38. The map that accompanies this code tells you where the bomb is. You have until the fall to dig it up.”