The Zodiac Killer's most uncrackable cipher has, at last, been solved | Hacker News Reader

The Zodiac Killer's most uncrackable cipher has, at last, been solved

sfgate.com

340 pointstestfoobar161 comments

The "340":

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH

The spelling errors a bit interesting. The video is also very interesting.

did the misspellings make it harder to crack the code? or was this known from previous cracked ciphers?

PARADICE was spelled the same across all of his previous messages, so it's a really good indication that this cipher was correct. This YouTube gets into the details of how they cracked it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o

It's also interesting that PARADICE appears in this message twice. One time is spelled backwards (ECIDARAP). Probably he did this because how his first cipher was cracked withing hours/days.

It was cracked by the wife of this high-school teacher. She thought the cipher would start with the word "I" and it would also contain words like "KILL". She found these words within the message so with the help of his husband, they guessed the key and the whole message.

I think Zodiac learned from his mistakes and decide to make it more complicated spelling it backwards, so the same symbols won't appear twice. He probably thought code-breakers would also be looking for important words he included on his earlier messages, such as "paradice" or "slave/s". Having a long sequence of symbols that appears twice and transposing them to his most known words could have led to break the code really fast.

The 'IS LIFE' was probably meant to go at the end.

"BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH IS LIFE"

Bingo. Yes, the placement of "IS LIFE" was their guess and yours is so much better.

They mention it at: https://youtu.be/-1oQLPRE21o?t=520

Which grammar do you consider more likely?

"I am not afraid because I know that my new life will be an easy one. In paradise, death is life."

"I am not afraid because I know that my new life will be an easy one in paradise. Death is life."

Former makes more grammatical sense, but he did seem to have an odd style.

To me, the second one makes far more sense. I see it as him first claiming that the afterlife will be a paradise for him, due to his aforementioned slaves. The final "Death is life" is a statement that life truly beings at death: the afterlife.

Yeah, I think you're probably right.

"Zodiac regularly and almost certainly intentionally misspelled 'paradise'...he correctly spelled more complex words and paraphrased operas like 'The Mikado' with ease. The trope of 'slaves in paradise' is also a common one for Zodiac."

This instantly stood out to me as well. He intentionally misspelled “paradise” because he wanted to call special attention to that word. I think there is further decoding to be done here.

I'd say paradice is Las Vegas. And he wanted to move there ? Also maybe the sentences order is a lot more garbled than the "death is life" part.

The "Las Vegas Strip" is in Paradise, NV

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_Nevada

He does consistently misspell it as "paradice" across multiple letters, but why is it necessarily intentional? Two potential explanations for the consistency are that he intended to call attention to it, or that he simply thought or assumed the word was spelled that way. It's a reasonable phonetic spelling, using an existing English word ("dice").

He has a lot of other phonetic misspellings like "victoms", "darck", "epasode", "pencel", "paterned", "cruse", "coupples", "untill", "allready", "dissapeared", "rubed", "positivily", "ventalate", "silowets", "choaked", "extreamly", "posibly", "twich", "comitt", "descise", "saterical", "comidy", "butons", "considerbly", "promiced", "shure", "inthusiastic", "phraises", "nucenses", "truley", and mistakes like "to many" and "loose" for "lose".

It's possible there's a meaning to it, but I suspect the most boring explanation is the most likely one, there. He may have spent a lot more time speaking than reading/writing and perhaps might not have finished high school, or maybe just happens to not have been very good at memorizing spellings.

His misspellings sound a lot like phonetic misspellings I still regularly see online today, and like how people tended to write English more phonetically and less consistently a few centuries ago. We take it for granted, but English really is not at all an intuitive language when determining spelling from pronunciation or vice versa, compared to more consistent languages like German.

He does seem to have an interesting affinity for using the letter "c" almost any time a soft "c" or hard "c" could be called for, and sometimes eliding other letters. Like "twich", "darck", "promiced", and "paradice". I wonder if an automated analysis of basically every piece of writing you can find from around that time and area, taking some of those patterns into account, could uncover something. Like every single physical letter written to every newspaper about anything. It'd probably require way too much manual digitization labor to be feasible, though.

Whenever I've read material from the '60s or '70s, I've often noticed that phonetic misspellings were much more common in print in that time period than they are today. I always thought this was because it was much more tedious to check spelling before word processing software became common.

Typos on internet forums notwithstanding, I might even guess the age of auto-correct, spell check, and, even things like how some OSs put squiggles over misspelled words in every text field (I think Mac was the first place I noticed this -- though I'm running firefox on FreeBSD and it's doing that in this edit field right now ...), has made the average literate person a better speller than that era. We get so much realtime feedback on spelling when writing on our devices, these opportunities to learn to spell, notice and correct our mistakes would not have at all been so accessible in 1969.

Definitely. There's also probably a bit of selection bias when seeing what HN users think of it; a high percentage of users likely have (at least) decent writing skills and probably read things fairly often (even if it's just blog posts/emails/chats).

If you read/write very rarely and speak very often, these kinds of misspellings may seem pretty natural. But if you write a lot - perhaps even a lot more than you speak - they may stick out like a sore thumb and your brain might flag them as highly unnatural and a potential sign of hidden meaning. (I'm probably like 99.5% writing 0.5% speaking, myself, and I bet many people reading this are, too.)

Then combine it with one of the most mysterious and analyzed crime stories in US history, with a cryptic, megalomaniacal serial killer who loved to use ciphers and symbology to toy with the press, public, and police. I can definitely see why people might suspect something deeper to the spelling, but the null hypothesis always needs to be carefully considered, first.

And a side note: does anyone know what the trends over the decades are like for less "hodgepodge-y" languages, like Spanish and German? They seem to have rules for pronouncing based on spelling and spelling based on pronunciation that are a lot more predictable and consistent than English's. I would guess that the popularization of spellcheck/autocorrect might be less significant for such languages, though I'd also love to be proven wrong.

> And a side note: does anyone know what the trends over the decades are like for less "hodgepodge-y" languages, like Spanish and German?

I'm an amateur observer of this, but speaking in centuries rather than decades I can tell you that Old Spanish up until a little bit after the time of Columbus had different phonetics for several consonants, and thus different spelling. eg. There was a /ʃ/ sound spelled with X, as well as a /ʒ/ which was spelled with J or GI, GE -- this all merged and is today spelt with J or GI, GE, pronounced [x]. Also what is today /θ/ in Spain was once distinct /ts/ and /dz/, written as ç and z respectively (today c and z). /b/ and /v/ had not yet merged and their spellings have since been sort of "re-based" to look like their Latin roots. <h> for a time was not silent, and many words that start with <h> used to have an /f/.

So, the interesting thing about this relative to English: when pronunciation changed around 1500, they also updated the spelling.

> <h> for a time was not silent, and many words that start with <h> used to have an /f/.

Probably related, most words with an H in Spanish use an F in Portuguese. Like 'HONGO' - > 'FUNGO'.

In the 17th century there was a concerned effort to make the written language consistent in writing.

Yes, and go further back and those words in Latin all have f.

Eg. hongo from fungus. hacer from facere. hijo, hoja from filius, folia (/lj/ to /x/ being another change relative to Latin). Too many other examples to list.

How late was it that there was still wide disagreement or variance in spelling?

Even when the printing press arrived and dictionaries were published most people who knew how to read/write outside high society, monks, scholars, etc would have used phonetic spellings or whatever spelling was used in their area for a very long time.

Spellcheck has done more to freeze spelling than anything since the Dictionary. I don't know if that matters but I do find it interesting. In the past if a prominent newspaper or popular writer decided to spell a word differently it could catch on. Now the spell checker pushes back against such changes.

There are still a few where variations are excepted. I always think of "cancelled" or "labelled" which some people spell with one L near the end.

Sometimes that's a question of which country, US usage, UK usage, whatever, but sometimes multiple spellings are found in either place.

I always assumed it was to make deciphering just a little more difficult by having correct solutions include nonsense words and mess with the distribution of different letters.

Most of the time, he appears to have also misspelled various things in his many plaintext letters, and generally the same things consistently, shared between encrypted and plaintext writing. They had the opposite effect of hardening the cipher and actually served as perfect "cribs" to aid decryption [1].

There are some occasions where a word is spelled correctly in one place and incorrectly in another, but this isn't necessarily anomalous for people who don't write or read very often or don't have a lot of spelling memorized. In some cases they might even be using some words they've only heard and spoken and never seen before (or only decades prior), and then might see the correct spelling later, or look it up.

There's also the possibility he did it consistently because he wanted to mislead police about his knowledge/education/region. Haven't dug into it or anything, but I could definitely see either one being true (genuine mistake vs. subterfuge).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crib_(cryptanalysis)

Another explanation that makes more sense to me is it was done intentionally to make it harder to decipher. When I was young our newspaper used to have cryptogram puzzles in them based on a simple substitute cipher. The first thing you look for is repeating letter patterns like double letters and common word patterns like words ending in 'ing' or 'tion' for example. In his cipher he tends to drop a letter in words like 'button' and adds double letters to words that don't have them. Plus in his plain text letters to the press and police he tends to spell everything correctly.

> He does consistently misspell it as "paradice" across multiple letters

Yes but I wouldn't read into it that much. Remember, reading the deciphered ramblings of a deranged psychopath is obviously going to have misspellings and weird idiosyncratic oddities in them.

My take is (if the killer was in any way rational) is that he knew the plaintext would be unraveled at some stage. If not by quantum computers, then a team of dedicated sleuths who know how to program. So yes: the misspelling could be deliberate.

Someone on an earlier Reddit forum pointed out there's a paratrooper division known as the Paradice at one time (https://old.506infantry.org/hiswwiiarticle02.html). Others pointed out the term has been adopted by any other number of groups, and one person suggested a cipher supposedly with the killer's last name is Paradice backwards. My guess is the misspelling is meaningful too but it's hard to say how.

The theory is that when passed through morse code and reversed...

. -.-. .. -.. .- .-. .- .--. = ECIDARAP

can be rearranged to

.- .-.. .-.. . -. -.. -.-- . = ALLEN (DYE)

Since the primary suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen, some thought that the mis-spelling of "paradice" might have been his "signature."

I have no idea of this could be true or is a stretch.

That is extremely interesting. If the FBI is correct that Allen is not the correct suspect, then it's a very strange (though not computationally rare) coincidence.

>and paraphrased operas like 'The Mikado' with ease.

He seems to have misspelled a lot of things in his charming "parody" version of it: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Zodiac_Killer_letter,_July_26...

He also easily could've had a recording or lyrics transcript at hand while writing it, perhaps from a library. Or even if he recounted the structure from memory, he could've just seen the play a lot, or at most he might just have pretty good musical memory. It doesn't necessarily indicate he's especially intelligent or that his rampant misspellings and incorrect grammar are deliberately planted and contain hidden meaning.

Could this hint to the fact the Zodiac committed suicide in the end?

I think his letters should always be taken with a grain of salt. He was probably just building his own myth, the article discusses that:

> As with most Zodiac writings, it sounds more like myth-building than sincerely held beliefs. Zodiac plagiarized often from pop culture, stealing ideas and lines from movies, operas and short stories. His letters, even more than his actual murders, were carefully constructed to present himself as the ultimate supervillain.

It seems kind of pointless if it doesn't reveal the identity of the killer. It seems like the Zodiac was more interested in creating intrigue than taking the risk of being caught.

Knowledge really is power. I remember the first time I saw the 340 it gave me an uncomfortable feeling nearing dread. What horrible secrets did those symbols hide? Turns out it's just some mad ramblings that are pretty underwhelming, and knowledge makes yet another boogeyman seem a bit smaller.

You're right, and it's ironic because I think the primary intention was to unnerve and horrify the public and to make people think some sort of unholy being was stealing souls to torment in the afterlife, like a demon, or the Anti-Christ.

He was very narcissistic, like many serial killers, and in every letter he was trying to build a legend around himself. And unfortunately, the attempt was somewhat successful. It's maybe the most effective way to get very famous very quickly, especially if you elude capture for a long time.

Something tells me there's a decent chance he may get identified one day. But if it ever happens, I suspect it'll be like this cipher solution: it'll take more decades, more toil, and more excruciating retreading of old ground until the right combination of advances in technology, dedication, and creativity finally uncovers a thread that quickly unravels.

My absolute deepest respect and admiration go to the cipher crackers and to everyone else working on this and any other murder cold case; amateur, professional, civilian, or authority. Each individual knows they probably won't succeed, that probably no one will ever know who they are or what they did, that there's probably a major opportunity cost to what they're doing. With very few exceptions, they're doing it solely because it's the right thing. Keep doing what you do. You're our unsung heroes.

So ... knowledge wasn’t power after all?

It's also disappointing though that it brings us no closer to uncovering his identity.

David Oranchak who worked on cracking explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o

> Zodiac made a mistake while constructing his complex cipher

Think I made the same mistake in a Cryptography course cipher exchange. Felt bad for my counterpart who was supposed to decrypt it. No one died, though, as far as I know.

Seems like LIFE IS and DEATH should just be pulled out so the last section reads like:

I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE

LIFE IS DEATH

Another potential intended reading:

"I am not afraid because I know that my new life will be an easy one. In paradise, death is life."

that's roughly what i cam here to post

Is it just me or are there fewer serial killers these days?

It could just be better policing. If you catch someone after they kill once or twice, they don’t get the chance to become a serial killer. But I haven’t looked up any stats on this.

Or they know how to hide better. We've always only caught the stupid ones anyway.

> It could just be better policing.

If it was “better policing”, you expect the clearance rate for actual homicides to have gone up as well as the identified serial killers to have gone down. Instead, the clearance rate has gone down, as well. “Worse policing” of murder would better explain both reduced clearance of homicides and reduced numbers of identified serial killers.

There can be multiple factors at play. For example, future serial killers may be caught after one killing, but drug gang murders may go unsolved.

There's also the mobile phone effect. The dopamine treadmill has stopped people from going out and murdering.

Worse policing also leads to more incorrect clearings.

Who knows how many murders were incorrectly pinned on husbands or wives, or known petty criminals, or tramps? The same technology we use to find murderers can also exonerate people.

We also tossed out a lot of bogus methods based on pseudo-science and learned a lot about the reliability of witnesses; and all the modern technology exposed many expert witnesses as charlatans.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-explains-...

I was watching point break last week, and temporarily felt bad that bank robberies can't really happen anymore. If for no other reason, because they make a good story line.

Over three thousand banks were robbed in 2018 in the US alone.

https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/bank-crime-statistics-20...

I was in the Quad Cities (Iowa/Illinois interface) in the spring and there was a bank robbery pretty much every other week. Turned out to be the same guy each time, but as an East-coaster who's not too familiar with the Midwest there was a couple of months I was convinced that bank-robbing simply never died out in the heartland.

Bank robberies rarely ever happened like Point Break to begin with. The average bank robbery is a quiet affair conducted with a slipped note and the implication of a gun.

I interviewed a family friend who had then recently retired from chasing bank robbers in the FBI for a school project a decade and change ago. The biggest take-a-way was his assertion that, at least at that time, anyone could get away with robbing a bank once. It's not getting away with the crime itself that's hard: it's not leaving a pattern on the next one.

Have also heard this from someone in law enforcement. He said it's the easiest crime to get away with, as long as you only do it once and don't particularly care about the money. The dye packs make it hard to spend.

I've heard it claimed that bank tellers won't risk giving a bank robber dye packs if the robber specifically demands no dye packs. But I'm pretty skeptical of this..

If your interested in a semi modern bank robbery. Evil Genius on netflix is a strange and winding story that begins with one.

They still happen, including a ‘Heat’-esque one in Brazil the other day [0].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-55155377

Lead crime hypothesis probably explains some of it [1]

We do have far more mass shootings though :(

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...

Shootings in general are way down, though, even with mass shootings included.

Many people don't realize that the US is at some of the lowest gun violence levels seen in decades right now. The 90s were way, way worse.

It is actually kind of frightening hilarious to see movies like Predator 2's depiction of the future. Robocop, as well. It is stark how violent things were back then, it seems.

Does the U.S. even have massive organized crime operations like those in those pop cultural depictions, anymore? Seems fewer than we used to.

Not that I know of. Mayhap I'm just ignorant of them?

Organized crime is more powerful and better organized right now than it has ever been in American history.

The reason people are unaware of this is that organized crime is really only visible when they are having problems. Gang wars lead to news coverage, one gang monopolizing an area and effectively extracting revenue from it does not.

Escape From New York is my favorite.

Robocop is intended to be funny.

Source?

Not sure about the original Robocop, but Robocop 2 definitely had comic moments - the bit I particularly remember was the Sunblock 5000 advert (https://robocop.fandom.com/wiki/Sunblock_5000).

I think it was intentionally "raised to eleven." Supposed to be a somewhat satirical take on where things were headed. That said, I couldn't cite why I think that.

"I'd buy THAT for a dollar".

The 90's were an insanely violent time, besides gun violence being at all time highs etc, I remember in high school in the mid-late 90's fights every day happening at school. Some people say lead caused the violence, all I know pollution was horrible in silicon valley (south bay) in the 90's. Every day in the summer you couldn't see the mountains and there was a thick brown haze in the air.

Fights were more common, bullying was rampant but people seemed lighter and happier like nothing was pent up. Probably just rose colored glasses though.

I’d like to reply to badconvincer, but my vouching for his dead comment isn’t reviving it. Anyway, what I want to say is this:

Growing up in the 90s, witnessing 9/11 and the ensuing cultural “snap back,” I think both of you are right. I think what we really had going on before 9/11 was that the country had a very cavalier, devil may care attitude. For some sections of society, that enabled a more carefree lifestyle; for others, we literally didn’t care if they destroyed each other. I think that devil may care attitude disappeared after 9/11 and especially during the ensuing wars.

Where we’re at culturally now would probably require an entire essay to explain. I do think an argument could be made that something similar happened in the late 2000s and early 2010s, where one segment of society let its hair down and was able to exhale, while a totally different class of people were marginalized.

We’re at or near another cultural “snap back” now, I think. What that’ll look like, I have no idea.

> Is it just me or are there fewer serial killers these days?

Maybe. OTOH, the decline in identified serial killers tracks with the decline in identifying the perpetrators of killings period, as the clearance rate for homicides has dropped. Plenty of room for serial killers to hide in that:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/are-ser...

What is the “clearance rate” of a homicide? I see you’ve used that phrase a few times here and it’s keeping me from understanding your contributions.

The number of murders 'cleared' divided by the number of murders recorded. What makes a crime cleared or not depends on who is doing to measuring but consider it to relate to whether the government thinks that they have enough evidence to charge someone with the crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearance_rate

New article this week documents it

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-explains-...

Only 60% of homicides are solved? I would have guessed like 99%. This is sort of crazy to me.

I read that in Mexico that number is less then 10%. https://www.animalpolitico.com/kill-murder-mexico/homicides-...

Same in South Africa

Try watching a show called “the First 48” on A&E sometime. Their murder cases are only solved because a suspect confesses. If the suspect doesn’t confess, or lawyers up, then forget about solving it.

I watched a few episodes, but this show is depressing. I noticed that most of the time they get their suspect because someone "snitches".

My own personal speculation is that TV shows have a lot to do with it. People watching TV get used to the idea of an elite crew of colorful personalities inevitably hunting down their man, and they think murder is a guaranteed jail sentence, so they murder less often. In reality, probably pretty easy to get away with murder.

Also: video games. Young men, who commit most of the murders, spend more time playing video games and therefore less time murdering.

The main reason is that most homicides are not the fancy middle class pre meditated murder type of crime as seen on TV but are often related to other criminal activities and with low evidence. This means that any witnesses are likely going to be within that world of not speaking to the police and any evidence in a gang killing for example, will be of low quality.

But it also matters what we mean by "solved" too.

And there are less resources devoted to poor people getting murdered

Yup, and this doesn't even include all the disappearances that never get called homicides. You're disincentivized against calling a case a homicide if you can't bring a case—your clearance rate will drop. It also doesn't cover all the clearances which involved an innocent person pleading guilty to avoid heinous sentencing.

Now they just shoot people

And here I was thinking that in today's surveillance ridden landscape it's far harder to get away with crime

No you just catch the ones that didn't do their homework.

Most of the (solved) crime news I read about, I'm always confounded how unaware criminals are about "tradecraft".

For an example of stupid criminals, I remember reading in the local newspaper about a group of guys that had robbed a store of phone cards (the story is a bit old) and tried to sell them back to said store.

Instead of using a public phone with one of those cards, they just used their own mobile phone to contact the store. Since in France you're required to give ID to get a SIM card, I'll let you guess how long it took the police to find the robbers :)

It's survival bias in that we don't know about the criminals that get away with stuff, only the ones we catch.

Most burglaries and robberies are performed close to where the criminal lives. They are mostly opportunistic crimes done criminals with no thought at the time of what they are doing and no fear of the consequences.

The stereotypical version of that is the drug addict doing anything to get money for their fix, but generally it's associated with not very smart people who do stuff and do not fear the consequences.

In Belgium a group of robbers was told by a shop owner to not steal him now but to come back in the evening to steal more money from the cash register. He also managed to convince the police to be there in case they would come back, and they did.

https://www.20minutes.fr/insolite/2359379-20181023-belgique-...

But really, what made these serial killers famous is that they often tried to communicate and bask in their fame, no? I'm curious if they no longer advertise themselves, or that their letters are no longer advertised widely?

I do remember seeing the luka magnotta documentary on netflix (don't fuck with cats), which while not quite a serial killers, comes close to someone who liked the attention.

Maybe they all watch CSI, Dateline, etc. and know how to avoid detection better.

I guess that influences the perception of "fewer serial killers" at the same time beyond the drop of detection. The way that "big name" serial killers like Zodiac or the Golden State Killer became widely known is by actively taunting the police/public, which nowadays is probably far too risky to do. So we not only have serial killers that know how to hide better, but also ones that know not to seek out media attention.

Modern DNA analysis and forensics might have something to do with it. It's a lot harder these days than 50 years ago to not leave any evidence.

Not to mention cameras.

Funny you ask! I was just pondering that the Zodiac, who only was confirmed to have killed like 5 people, is a legendary serial killer who most Americans are familiar with, because of the mystique around his moniker and his cyphers and who his victims were.

Yet the Chicago Strangler [1], who is still active, still operating to this day, 50+ victims, few have heard of....because he attacks marginalized groups like black runaways rather than white people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Strangler

The article said there are something like 40 murders possibly associated with the Zodiac killer even though only 5 are confirmed.

Do you honestly believe everyone would suddenly know about the Chicago Strangler if they were murdering only white meth addicts? This racial rhetoric is so tired.

Exactly. Just look at the Green River Killer. He’s not well known, but he killed 50 young women, mostly white, but also mostly runaways and sex workers.

I feel like the Green River Killer is quite well know...

But even if he's not as well known as Zodiac, again, look at the victim profile: runaways and sex workers. It's not just about skin color, although for some reason both of you zeroed in on that. I specified "marginalized groups" such as [mostly black] runaways. It's about being poor, unknown, and not white.

"Yet the Chicago Strangler [1], who is still active, still operating to this day, 50+ victims, few have heard of....because he attacks marginalized groups like black runaways rather than white people."

Your implication is that white people can't be marginalized. Economics cut across skin color.

But biased police judgement doesn’t...

LOL the green river killer is quite well known and I'd never heard of the Chicago Strangler.

No, not white meth addicts. But middle class or wealthy white people, abso-fucking-lutely.

In another comment in this thread, you mention that a condition of being marginalized is being non-white. The logical inverse of that is white people cannot be marginalized. Yet here, you acknowledge that white people can be marginalized.

So, which is it?

The common thread seems to be economic status as another commenter stated.

He never said that was a condition. He only said that that serial killer targets black runaways, and that that is a marginalized group.

> ... because he attacks marginalized groups like black runaways rather than white people.

That strongly implies that a white person couldn't be marginalized.

That isn't that clear to me, I feel that you are reading to much into it and seem to be looking for a fight where there is none?

Alright, my previous comment was too fuzzy, let me try to be more clear.

Directly contrasting a specific "non-white marginalized group" with "all white people" does, for me, evoke the impression as if the assumption was that there were no people among "white people" that could be marginalized the same way.

> He only said that that serial killer targets black runaways, and that that is a marginalized group.

This is the part of the comment I was replying to that I took issue with and felt I had to rebut, because it's simply a false summary. The original comment definitely was a stronger statement than that through the broad comparison it drew.

If the original post had been phrased "... rather than white middle class people" (which I believe was the intention), I would completely agree with it.

No it doesn't.

Yes. The police have had a long history of chalking up death in impoverished black neighborhoods to “gang violence” and closing investigations. Topically, Chapelle had a famous stand up bit about it.

I'm not a student of serial killers but it's hard for me to even begin to formulate a motive for this particular guy. Men that kill women is common; women that poison men is pretty common. Let's theorize these people have a fetish for killing. Another category is those with automatic weapons that kill groups of people all at once. Just for notoriety knowing they will be caught or expect to commit suicide at some point in the process.

But Zodiac is killing couples he doesn't know at a distance with a gun (or a knife, likely because a gunshot would draw too much attention). He wants to be notorious but not personally notorious? He just has a hate on for anonymous couples? Are there (m)any more examples of this kind of killer? Hypothetically, if he could kill say a hundred couples from a distance with a bomb would that motivate him? I'm just not getting it.

There are many ways to be deeply evil, in some sense it’s just chance which style of evil any particular person grows attached to.

Video games and internet.

Bored people are unpredictable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_in_the_...

It does kind of look like it.

I’ve read before that the FBI estimates there are ~50 to 70 active serial killers in the U.S. at any given time. The problem is they’re incredibly sporadic and sometimes go dormant for any number of reasons for months, years, or decades at a time.

Surveillance is much easier these days with that little computer in our pockets. Doesn't that nearly everyone still publishes their location to services like FB. I predict that the West will move closer to Chinese style surveillance and censorship. Actually, I don't have to predict it. It's already happening little by little.

Like a lot of things these days, people don't take pride in their craft anymore. Everyone takes shortcuts. Today's serial killers are sloppy and just want to do things quick and easy so they can get back to browsing facebook and instagram.

There are more parallel killers though, the number of school shootings is not exactly going down.

Let me just toss out a recommendation to the 2007 film Zodiac, which I really enjoyed. Directed by David Fincher (The Social Network). Great movie and a nice summation of events.

Frightening and disturbing movie. It's very dark, very realistic. Unless you're very hardened against watching realistic depictions of death it will likely leave you clenching your fists and feeling tense. Similar to Spielberg's Munich. It is not a thriller or anything like that, it has none of the fantastical over-the-topness of a fictional story like Se7en-- it's a very cold depiction of truth.

By the way if you liked this movie, plug for Bong Joon-Ho's Memories of Murder, which is terrific (and much less difficult to watch.)

Can I just say I love all those movies you mentioned. And memories of murder was next on my list. I think I've found my movie twin ! Would you be open to recommend more ? I'd happily recommend you more noir or any other genre.

Oh I would definitely love to have any recommendations you'll give me, I feel like I've seen so many movies that it's hard to find good ones now.

In the emotional vein of the movies discussed above:

Nightcrawler is very very good and very unusual. Prisoners is very good though more ordinary in its plot and characters and I found that I forgot about it after a while and didn't realize I'd seen it until I was rewatching it... It's not especially tense but it's well written. Drive is an incredible noir thriller. Goodfellas is another one that has unforgettable moments that will force you to just clench your fists, even if in the end the story left me feeling a bit empty. I should probably throw out American History X too, which is a different sort of movie but still has that feeling of "oh my God did that just happen?"

Lol I've seen them all, my ranking for those from high to low -

- American History X (Prescient and ever relevant at the same time) - Drive (Love Ryan G in everything, also check out Ides of March and Blue Valentine) - Goodfellas (Classic) - Nightcrawler - Prisoners (I think this is a remake)

Wow, all of them, you must watch a ton of movies too. So you know my difficulty in finding new ones, maybe! Ides of March I haven't seen, that looks great! And I actually agree with your ranking perfectly. I only feel bad that nightcrawler and prisoners are side by side, when there's a pretty wide gulf between them in terms of how memorable they are.

I assume you've seen Place Beyond the Pines since it has Ryan Gosling, and Requiem for a Dream I think everyone's seen, and idk if you'd like Irréversible; I didn't because its story doesn't quite keep up with its violence, but it is quite a jarring film.

Frankly, excluding movies that are only exhibitions of violence and don't have a story to match, there are precious few movies in this vein! Precious few films have the power to truly shock the audience, at least in this way. OH! Cloverfield Lane is pretty solid. Very tense.

Note that I'm only mentioning movies that are striking for their tension or sudden spikes of violence, since that was the original topic. Just remembered Fatal Attraction, too!

Ooh, and Ex Machina in its own way.

Continuing here...Chernobyl was fantastic. I haven't seen Irréversible, will give that a chance.

I just finished Memories of Murders. It's a league above Zodiac. The ending had me scared, oh my god, the way it's shot. Just harrowing. Also really funny in parts. It never got slow, something that Zodiac suffered with. I have so many questions about the case though. It's so bizarre that the perpetrator was caught last year.

I know. And the guy actually looks like the one they cast in the movie too.

If you haven't seen it, try Sacred Games. I'd love your opinion on it, even the 1st 2 episodes.

Will definitely check it out! Always looking for new stuff. OH I just remembered: _Chenobyl._ 100% worth checking out if you haven't already.

Also maybe Seven by David Fincher which is about a serial killer, too.

He mentioned Se7en.

I overlooked it and searching the page for "seven" did not turn it up. That's what you get for the artistic spelling :) In fact I could not remember how it is spelled and tried "7even" in a Google search.

I think it's worth stating here pretty pointedly that despite what some comments below speculate about the killer's supposed low intelligence based on grammatical and spelling errors in the text of his messages, I very much doubt that anyone without a fairly strong level of cognitive capacity could have or even would have created such fairly complex ciphers (and without the aid of more widespread computing or knowledge of crypto as is the case today).

It's interesting how some basic permutations (not being a pure rectangle for the second chunk) and mistakes (paradice) likely inadvertantly made the text more robust against computerized cryptanalysis.

I wonder if a number of previous efforts were just a few steps away but their computer program rejected it interpreting the mistakes as an incorrect guess

> NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE

Anyone care to share where the idea of your victims in this life become slaves in the next came from? I'm curious about that and I remember that idea was also shared by one US killer that massacred at an elementary school.

Its an ancient tribal myth, that enemiess you slay in this life, become your slaves in the afterlife? I can remember it being part of norse mythology in modern culture?

https://www.brutenorse.com/blog/2018/4/17/an-old-norse-word-...

Thanks for the info. I'm a little confused why the killers would think their victims happen to be their enemies for the relationship towards norse mythology to be true? I could see the connection if there was a personal relationship between the killer and the victim, but not when the killers are targeting random strangers they know nothing about personally.

I'm sure "random strangers they know nothing about personally" made up a large portion of the Vikings enemies.

I'd also wager that the battlefield scenario that the Viking belief was developed around would simply divide everyone into "allies" and "enemies." So a killer who sees himself as following that logic would apply the same black and white logic, their victims being enemies in some personal war.

I think it helps to consider that the killer is likely insane and therefore not applying the amount of logic you're giving it.

I've also read some theories about Zodiac in particular that he might not have genuinely believed in that storyline either, that he was just taunting the public. Whether he believed it or not I guess we cannot know, but I would still say based on his actions he wasn't the most reasonable person on the planet.

this was also a scythian belief, and iirc some peoples of ancient mesopotamia

Many societies have believed some version of this myth. https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2019/7/5/eternal-subju...

It looks like the "is life" was added by mistake. If you remove it it reads much better. Also, "death" at the end looks out of place, is this his signature? It could also mean "life is death".

> You can see their full and fascinating methodology in the video below.

> This content is blocked. Contact the site owner to fix the issue.

Anyone have the video?

https://youtu.be/-1oQLPRE21o

Plays for me, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1oQLPRE21o

It is an amazing story. Also watched the video.

Anyone give a layman's guide why the coded message was divided in 9, 9, 2 sections?

How were the individual characters encoded?

it's explained by the crackers in a YouTube video. It's a pretty basic substitution encoding, except one letter of the alphabet can be encoded by a variety of symbols.

It was difficult to solve because the cypher has three different sections, and they're intended to be read diagonally, but each section also has some additional minor ad hoc rules.

https://youtu.be/-1oQLPRE21o

It would be interesting to know how they realized there were 3 different sections.

In the video, he notes that 2 of the three sections have the same number of lines (10 iirc) and the 3rd section has only 2 lines.

I wonder if it was just trial and error that made them realize there were 3 sections or if there were "compositional" differences that made each section stand out from the others.

The code breakers said that discovering Z340 was three sections was "luck" but it's likely they were informed by previous zodiac antics:

"On July 31, 1969, Zodiac sent his first cipher: the famous three-part cipher Z408. The Z408 was separated into three different parts..."

Why is this new worthy? More inspiration for future serial killers? Your pseudo intellectual nonsense lives forever?

Guess this meme will be buried for good then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz–Zodiac_Killer_meme

Nah. Ted Cruz is still the most likely candidate.

I am genuinely surprised I haven't seen an authentic looking long form troll video that methodically decodes the cipher and reveals at the finale text including "I am the soon to be born Ted Cruz".

> That month, "is ted cruz the zodiac killer" was the second highest suggestion in Google's autocomplete for "is ted", but by April it was not in the autocomplete at all.[1][5] News.com.au writer Matthew Dunn suggested that Google was censoring the search term, showing evidence that it accounted for 89% of total searches when compared to other terms in the autocomplete

How often does google censor autocomplete? Does apple do this on their keyboard as well?

Google seemingly does this a lot (although I don't know if it's included in their transparency report or if anyone has tried to measure it -- both of which would be nice). You can report predictions as "inappropriate" (look at the lower right of a prediction list in a desktop browser) and you'll see something like

  Which predictions were inappropriate?
  [...]

  The predictions selected above are:
  Irrelevant
  Violence or gore
  Sexually explicit, vulgar, or profane
  Hateful against groups
  Sensitive or disparaging for individuals
  Dangerous or harmful activity
  Other

If Google agrees with the complaint, the prediction could be removed regardless of the popularity of the underlying search.

It's censored in Google search, not keyboard.

He tweeted out "uh oh" today at the news, so it might live on.

https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1337480518074503170

I almost feel bad at the replies. They look like they were written by people whose job is to look at Twitter all day.

Yeah that's a job that's almost as bad as yours!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com