Kaye’s name and the South Lake Tahoe location were too much to be a coincidence, he thought. The typo was similar to ones found in previous ciphers, he noticed, likely errors made by the killer when encoding the message. The work consumed his thoughts, waking him up at night and plunging him into a constant state of anxiety as he learned gruesome details about the murders.
Ziraoui said he then worked through a half-dozen steps including letter-to-number substitutions, identifying coordinates in numbers and using a code-breaking program he created to crunch jumbles of letters into coherent words. That produced a sequence of random letters from the alphabet. (It never did, even though police failed to crack the code.) So he said he applied it to the 32-character cipher, which the killer had included in a letter as the key to the location of a bomb set to go off at a school in the fall of 1970. What if the killer used that same encryption key for the two remaining ciphers? The code-crackers who had solved the 340-character cipher in December had been able to do so by identifying the encryption key, which they had put into the public domain when announcing their breakthrough. Numerous sleuths have claimed to have figured out the mystery through various techniques over the decades, but have had their theories debunked.īut Mr. Half a century of unsuccessful research had led many to believe that the identity of the Zodiac killer would forever remain a mystery.
#ZODIAC CIPHER SERIAL#
The ciphers had long baffled cryptographers, law enforcement agents and amateur sleuths obsessed with the unidentified serial killer with a penchant for ciphers. Ziraoui stumbled across an article in a French magazine in December saying that no one had ever solved two ciphers attributed to the Zodiac killer, who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and ’70s, he thought, “Why not me?” Ziraoui, a 38-year-old French-Moroccan business consultant, said in an interview at his home in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil.Īnd so, when Mr. “I’ve never set limits on what I can learn,” Mr.
#ZODIAC CIPHER SOFTWARE#
More recently, he developed virtual reality software that allows people to experience life in a space capsule. As a teenager, he designed 3-D animations.
ARGENTEUIL, France - Fayçal Ziraoui loves a good challenge.
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