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Cracking the 340: How Three Amateurs Solved a 51-Year-Old Cipher
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For 51 years the Zodiac's 340-symbol cipher defeated the FBI, cryptographers, and thousands of amateurs — until three strangers cracked it over a weekend in December 2020. This chapter breaks down exactly how they did it, and why solving the cipher still didn't solve the case.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before December fifth, twenty twenty, the three-four-zero cipher was proof of something unsettling. It was proof that a killer could be smarter than every institution chasing him.
Let's go back to the beginning of the cryptography side of this story. The first major cipher the Zodiac sent was a four-hundred-and-eight-symbol message, split into three parts and mailed simultaneously in August of nineteen sixty-nine to three Bay Area newspapers.
Three months later, in November of nineteen sixty-nine, the Zodiac sent what became the most analyzed cipher in American criminal history. Three hundred and forty symbols.
David Oranchak had been working on the three-forty for years. He's a web developer based in Virginia with a long-standing interest in the Zodiac case.
The key point here is that the ciphers weren't evidence the Zodiac accidentally left behind. They were instruments.
The unsolved ciphers feed directly into the unsolved identity. And here the case gets complicated in a specific way.
Two of the four ciphers the Zodiac sent have never been cracked. And the killer claimed his name was hidden in one of the four.
The Zodiac killed at least five people. David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen at Lake Herman Road in December of nineteen sixty-eight.
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