Much as I love “Sarah The Horse” and “Clara Cataract” as elegant literary plaintexts for this, it’s important to note that these are homophonic solutions for something whose many repeats point to its actually being a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. In fact, if you colour all the Z13’s repeated cipher shapes (once again, using Dave Oranchak’s neat-o-rama Cipher Explorer), this is what you see: Hence it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that the Z340 indeed contains a specific name for us to decrypt – though, as always, it seems highly unlikely that this will contain the Zodiac Killer’s actual name.Ĭryptanalytically, though, the Z13 couldn’t be further removed from the homophonic world of the (cracked) Z408 (and presumably the Z340), in that it has shape repeats and internal structure aplenty. However, if you put all these pieces together, it seems highly likely to me that it was instead the Z340 cipher that had been constructed as a response to President Marsh’s taunt (it appeared a mere seventeen days later).
In the Examiner piece, entitled “ Cipher Expert Dares Zodiac To ‘Tell’ Name“, the President of the American Cryptogram Association issued a direct challenge to the Zodiac Killer to reveal his name in a cipher. The text just above the Zodiac Killer’s Z13 cipher (20th April 1970) clearly and unambiguously refers back to a ‘name’ supposedly in the Z340 cipher (8th November 1969), though as far as I can see the “Dripping Pen” note that arrived with the Z340 didn’t mention a name at all:Īn oft-repeated account for this is that the Z13 had been constructed in response to a kind of cryptographic ‘taunt’ that appeared six months previously in the Examiner newspaper on 22nd October 1969, as detailed here. But first I’m going to talk about the Z13 cipher, because I think it tells us a lot about what is hidden inside the Z340 and indeed why the Z340 was written at all… The Z13 Cipher In particular, I want to suggest an approach we might follow to try to solve the Z340 that (hopefully) won’t need a brain the size of a planet to run it.
#340 cipher cracked
The first one - a long message broken into pieces sent to The Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and Vallejo Times-Herald in 1969 - was previously cracked by a high school history teacher from Salinas, Calif., and his wife.After The History Channel’s recent season of “The Hunt For The Zodiac Killer” programmes (episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5), I thought it was time to get back to some non-fake-news codebreaking research. The 340 Cipher is the second Zodiac cipher to be solved. “Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, and out of respect for the victims and their families, we will not be providing further comment at this time,” Polan said. “The Zodiac Killer terrorized multiple communities across Northern California and even though decades have gone by, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes,” she said. The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners,” the spokeswoman, Cameron Polan, said. “The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens. No joke! This is the real deal.”Ī spokeswoman for the FBI’s San Francisco office said Oranchak’s claim was accurate. “Last weekend, a team I’m on solved the 340 and submitted it to the FBI,” code-breaking expert David Oranchak said in an email to The Chronicle Friday. Many hoped the long-standing stumper would reveal the killer’s name, but it does not.
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