The only thing creepier than the Zodiac killer calling himself the “Zodiac killer” and murdering a lot of people in the ’60s was his trademark codes. And 40 years later, most of them remain unsolved. Unless you ask this guy.
Corey Starliper, a Californian amateur codebreaker and devout Zodiac historian, says he’s busted the murderer’s toughest cipher. The result? A mostly coherent jumble of killer-ranting, and proof of Zodiac’s true identity.
Foster City Patch explains that Starliper’s method wasn’t so sophisticated, merely using an old code technique known as the Caesar to swap in replacement letters. He had to do some guesswork with the non-alphabetic characters, but the yield is something that resembles English sentences. And it’s scary: begging for help, claiming a loss of control and a lust for blood, the alleged code solution fingers Arthur Leigh Allen, the case’s main suspect who died an innocent man in 1992.
But not everyone’s buying Starliper’s claim — in fact, police and other cryptographers are dismissing it entirely. “That really ticked me off,” he laments. “With a code that constantly changes a pattern… you can’t attack it using brute force. There are people who have tried. Out of all of the solutions that I’ve seen this one has the highest readability and probability for accuracy that I’ve ever come across.” [Patch]
Photo by Brandon Schillemat