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Fear stalks the streets of San Francisco. This guy is a pathological uh psycho uh killer. As the death toll mounts, the killer sends out coded messages. It's like something from a horror movie. He calls himself the Zodiac, but could cracking the killer code reveal his name? He sets up this one by saying, "My name is." But every new code is more complex than the last. The total number of permutations would be bigger than the number of atoms in the universe.
Now, 50 years on, there's been a breakthrough. Kind of chilling here were the words of the Zodiac being heard again for the first time in half a century. These are the codes that changed our world. Bizarre markings, random letters, and numbers. Words that make no sense. But cracking them unlocks military secrets, decodes ancient civilizations, and reveals enemies in our midst. Now, we uncover how they were decoded, the genius minds that broke them, and the secrets they revealed. San Francisco, Northern California, 1968, the week before Christmas.
The bodies of teenagers David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen are discovered on a secluded lane in the North Bay area of the city. David has been shot in the head. Betty Lou has been shot in the back five times. The boy was shot right at this side of the car and the girl apparently tried to run and she was shot and found 28 ft further on. From the very outset, it was clear to the police that they had a serious problem. The first couple discovered shot multiple times lying next to their car in the most innocuous of all places, a make-out spot.
One of the first assumptions is robbery. You know, just somebody pulling up and robbing these two people and somehow went south and killed them both. But nothing was taken. The whole community was in uproar. It was out of the blue. No one knew what happened or why. Despite media coverage, detailed forensic work, and intensive interviews with the couple's family, friends, and acquaintances, the police failed to make any arrests. One of the first questions the police ask whenever they come across a murder is what is the motive. The vast majority of murders are committed by people who knew the victim, a friend, a business associate, a family member. So, they're going to look for some
connection to the killer, but there seems to be no apparent motive for the killings. With no leads, the trail quickly goes cold. Then, less than 7 months later, there's another shooting just a few miles from the first crime scene. The victims are 22-year-old Darlene Ferrin and 19-year-old Mike Mageau. The MO is disturbingly familiar. You have a couple parked in a secluded location, approached and brutally assaulted again with no apparent motive. Car pulls up behind them. A lone guy gets out. Opens fire. He got back in his car and then drove away. 40 minutes after the shootings, the nearby Vallejo Police Department receives an anonymous call.
The caller has detailed information about the crime. He's able to describe the location, the color of the car, and even the weapon used in the murder. A 9-mm handgun. These are details only the killer could know. Police are now thinking, "How do you know this? You must have been there. It can't just be a prank call. This can't be a coincidence." And the caller makes a second chilling confession. He claims responsibility for the killings 7 months earlier. But before the police can trace the call, he hangs up. It's clear to them though that the same man is responsible for these crimes. As news of a second double shooting spreads across the North Bay
Area, local journalist Duffy Jennings senses the panic spreading. The fear and the tension started to build because of the media exposure. The one difference between the killer's first and second attacks is that this time there's a survivor. But, 19-year-old Mike Macheau is so traumatized, the police still have little to go on. The description is so vague, it really doesn't leave the police with any clues that they can follow successfully. He's had such a traumatic experience that the things that he'll remember from that moment will blur into one. He was shot. He was left for dead.
Two brutal attacks, 7 months apart, and there's still little progress in finding the killer. We don't know who he is. We don't know why he's doing it. We don't know where he's going to shoot somebody next. It was a real mystery. The trail for the serial killer goes cold. Then, 8 months after the killing spree began, there's an astonishing twist. Someone claiming to be the killer sends handwritten letters to three local newspapers. This is a really unprecedented set of circumstances. A killer that is openly communicating about the crimes they've committed.
The letters contain unpublished details that only the police and the murderer could know. And each letter carries the same strange sign-off. When the killer wrote to the newspaper, signing off with this symbol, which was a circle with crossed lines in it, everyone immediately took that to mean the crosshairs of a rifle scope. The killer sends more than just the letters. Each of the newspapers also receives a sheet of paper covered in strange combinations of letters and symbols. They were circles, circles with lines through them, triangles, and everything had this kind of crude, handwritten quality.
It is the killer's personal and very deadly code. Containing more than 400 letters and symbols. Police are not trained in espionage. This is not their area of expertise. So, when they receive this code, it's just out of their league. To focus police attention on his mysterious code, the killer promises that cracking it will reveal his identity. Police work is based on a specific methodology, forensics, and looking at the crime scene and speaking with witnesses. And now they're getting this mysterious code directly from the killer themselves. They just don't know what to do with it.
The police reach out to the FBI's top cryptographers. But cracking the strange code isn't the investigators' only problem. Because the killer's letter also contains a threat. Print a section of the code on the front covers of the three national newspapers, or the body count will keep rising. The newspapers are the thing that everybody reads, that everybody will see. You're going to get out to a lot of people to make sure that you are noticed. He's letting people know that he's here. In a bid to prevent any more deaths, the decision is made to concede to the killer's demands.
The coded messages are published. But the police publicly cast out on the messages' authenticity and request more from the letter writer to prove he's the killer. On the surface, they're saying, "You know, prove that you're telling the truth. Prove you are who you say you are." But really, they're just trying to get the information necessary to catch the guy. They need him to fall over a bit so that they can catch up with him. The plan to goad the killer into responding pays off.
He sends another letter. This time, his opening line is haunting. Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking. For the first time, he identifies himself as the Zodiac Killer, and that's how he'll be known from here on out. The Zodiac Killer is now forcing his own narrative. He's taking control of his new persona and his new personality. He is the Zodiac. He's here, and he's building his brand. And by giving himself a title, he's handed the press journalistic gold. You know, they have a villain that they can write stories about, and that name will soon become a household name. And you have to think that with all his actions, this is exactly what the Zodiac Killer hoped for.
First of all, he's saying, "I'm smarter than anybody else." And second, he can kind of a game to him while people are lying dead and their families are mourning are mourning their dead relatives, you know, this guy's getting a kick out of whatever he's sending. Once again, the letter contains details only the killer could know. And he taunts the authorities for their failure to crack his code. He doesn't really think they're going to break the code, and he's just going to sort of tease them a bit about it. Again, trying to assert that he's the superior person here, that he's really running the show, not the police.
He's really enjoying this cat and mouse game. He's sending out something, the mystery, the legacy that he's leaving. He's really enjoying making people confused, making people think, and making people fearful. That is exciting to him. The Zodiac's latest letter doesn't bring the police any closer to working out his identity. But, making the code public has an unintended benefit. The police and FBI cryptographers are joined by hundreds of amateur code breakers across America. All searching for ways to break the Zodiac's cryptic code.
Zodiac killer uses a cipher that seems to be replacing each letter with some kind of secret symbol, and these are symbols that apparently he's invented. The first step in decoding it is just to figure out what type of cipher it is. The patterns of symbols lead many code breakers to suspect the Zodiac is using a variant of a code dating back to the 1st century BC. Substitution ciphers were used by one of the most famous Roman leaders of all time. Turns out that Julius Caesar was quite a keen cryptographer.
Caesar would shift every letter up three places. So, A becomes D, B becomes E, C becomes F, and so on. And that is the classic Caesar shifting every letter up three places. But nowadays, when we talk about a Caesar cipher, we're just saying shift up letters any number of places. The key to cracking this basic substitution cipher is knowing the shift pattern. In its most basic form, the Caesar cipher is limited to the number of other letters in the alphabet other than itself. Giving 25 different possibilities. The problem with a classic simple substitution cipher is that you can break it with frequency analysis. So, uh by that I mean some letters are more common than others. In English, the letter A accounts for 8%
of all letters in a typical page of text. E accounts for 11%. T appears 7% of the time. And Q just 0.1%. That means if all letters are substituted by just a single symbol, working out the percentage they appear within a text will reveal which letter each symbol represents. And sooner or later, uh probably sooner, we'll find out what the message says. The FBI cryptologists and the amateur code breakers suspect the Zodiac is using a substitution cipher. But despite that, this code is stubbornly difficult to crack because the Zodiac has added a complex twist to his coding method. It's immediately clear that this is not a one-to-one substitution of the English alphabet because in the English alphabet, there are only 26 letters.
Even if you add in the numbers from zero to nine, the numerals, it's still not enough. There's something else going on. There are more than twice the number of symbols in the Zodiac's code than there are letters in the alphabet. Cryptologists suspect he's using more than one symbol to represent the same letter. For example, for the A, you might have the number one or be the letter M or another symbol. So, you have several symbols to choose from. And that means frequency analysis on its own isn't enough to break the Zodiac's code. Because there's nothing that's standing out, because there's no obvious variations in frequencies, it's very hard to then begin to decipher that message.
As efforts to crack the Zodiac's code continue, the unknown killer remains at large. The feeling of terror across San Francisco intensifies. So, releasing this code to the public, it's a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you're enlisting this vast knowledge base to help you solve this mystery. But on the other hand, you're giving something that's already received press even more press, and you run the risk of greatly exacerbating the fear that the general population already is suffering from about this guy. Two weeks after the Zodiac's coded message is published, parts of the city feel like they're verging on hysteria.
The police are at a total loss. Then, a breakthrough comes from left field. Two crossword puzzle enthusiasts get in touch with the police. Some of the greatest code breakers have been people who also love crossword puzzles and word games and number games. Because you have to have a mind that's able to focus on the details, but also think about kind of crazy, intuitive, out-of-the-box possibilities. Teacher Donald Harden and his wife, Betty, claimed to have done what the best minds in the FBI couldn't.
They say they've cracked the killer's code. Betty and Donald Harden became intrigued by the Zodiac puzzle, like thousands of other people. And almost as if they were sitting down to solve a Sunday crossword puzzle, they went to work on it. But they worked on it with a really smart plan. They knew they had to find some set of characters they could connect to a real word, something that frequently repeats in the document. This is a classic technique for code breaking. You look for what's called a crib. Some combination that keeps popping up. The Hardens have used exactly the same techniques created more than three decades earlier by some of the greatest code breakers in history.
During World War II, the German army relied on a secret code to pass messages onto Nazi forces. Generated by their now legendary Enigma machines. The encrypted messages were thought to be impenetrable. The Enigma code is a substitution cipher. You swap one letter for a different letter. But the difference with the Enigma cipher is it's dynamic. The same letter is being encrypted by a letter differently each time you hit the key. The Enigma machine's dynamic encryptions made British code breaking efforts almost impossible.
There are millions upon millions of different permutations that are going on here. And unless you know the millions upon millions of permutations, you've got no idea what this gobbledygook really means. There's no way of going back to the original message. The Germans made cracking Enigma even harder by changing its settings every 24 hours. It would have taken an army of analysts decades to crack the code. British code breaking efforts were only saved by the discovery of a critical design flaw in Enigma. It couldn't code a letter as itself. If I type the letter A into an Enigma machine, you know, a lamp board lights up with another letter.
That letter will never be A. If I type B, B will never light up. C, C And it narrows down all the possibilities. It was a critical breakthrough for British code breakers. They just needed to find a way to exploit their discovery. So, they look for things called cribs, which are essentially repeating words. So, this might be Heil Hitler, which was used frequently as a sign-off. And if we can match one word that you've guessed in the message with a bit of the encrypted message, then you can begin to pin down the settings of the machine. Enigma settings were changed at midnight. So, to give them as much time as possible, the British code breakers hunted
for cribs to Enigma's daily codes in one of the most mundane early morning transmissions. A weather report sent out at 6:00 a.m. every day. So, a weather report was particularly useful because it would be a daily transmission that they would make. It was fairly routine. So, any repeating pattern like that was vital. British code breakers searched the early morning code for strings of characters that could disguise the words for weather report in German. So, let's imagine I've intercepted a message from weather station, and I think it's got the word "Wetter" in it, w e t e r, the German word for weather. It must be in there somewhere.
It's a weather station report. Well, is it at the beginning of the message? w e t e r. Well, no, because the first letter of the encrypted text is a w, and I know no letter can be encrypted as itself. So, I shift the Wetter along a little bit until I find the word Wetter encrypted with six completely different letters. Now, that doesn't mean that's the right place for Wetter, but it tells me that it's potentially the right place. [snorts] So, if they identified a word that was repeating, such as weather report, that would give them all of those individual letters, which was a massive key to then unlock the rest of the day's coding. It was a huge advantage.
Weather report was the first of many cribs that British code breakers correctly deduced. All these cribs were key to cracking Enigma. It provided British intelligence with some of the German military's most closely guarded secrets. Once you know how these messages work, it's very easy to guess the cribs, and you're cracking them more and more quickly as the war progresses. All of this information was absolutely vital to the Allied war effort. People now looking back say perhaps it shortened the war by even up to two years.
30 years later, crossword enthusiasts Donald Harden and his wife Betty apply the same crib hunting technique to try to crack the Zodiac killer's code. So, the Hardens thought, well, this guy's a killer, he's bragging about his killing. What are some of the words he might be using in the document? The Hardens begin their search by looking for patterns in the symbols that could represent a very obvious word choice for a serial murderer. Kill. And slowly, the Zodiac code finally begins to crack. The first step is spotting a character that appears more than once.
Like the half-filled squares. They spot some symbols that repeated. So, that could be the double L in kill. If these represent double L, then the diagonal line could be a K. And the triangle could be an I, completing the word kill. The I is really useful because it's the first letter of the message. And as part of the guesswork of figuring out what this killer is trying to say, it really stands to reason that I would be the first word of the message. The symbol the Hardens believe is the letter I match. And a possible first line begins to emerge. The first line of the Zodiac killer message was the key for the solution of the how the two broke into the cipher. But the killer has used far more symbols
than there are letters in the alphabet. So, the Hardens know each letter has more than one substitution. Just like solving a crossword, they use a mixture of logic and educated guesswork. Until every word in the first line is revealed. And eventually the entire message. A pair of crossword loving amateurs has succeeded where some of the country's most elite code breakers have failed. The message confirms just how twisted the Zodiac is. The ciphering starts, I like killing people because it's so much fun.
It's more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all. When the decrypted message was released, it had probably exactly the result the Zodiac killer wanted. It just horrified people. Someone who was taking this perverse pleasure in not only killing people but then bragging about it to the public. Despite the killer's promise in his letter, the message the Hardens revealed does not identify him. The police are back to square one. When they do crack this first code, all they really learn is that the killer is taking great pleasure from his acts and that he's not going to stop anytime soon.
The Zodiac is toying with the authorities and they know it. The police are no closer to identifying him than they were the first time he killed. This does nothing to calm the fear rippling across the Bay Area of San Francisco. There is a killer on the loose. He enjoys killing. He strikes seemingly at random and without warning, and the police have no idea who he is. Is he coming for me? Am I going to be targeted? What does he want? I don't understand. All of this will be going through the community's mind.
It's horrifying to think that this person could be out there walking among us looking for the next opportunity to play this really sick game. With the police no closer to catching him, the killer is about to ramp up the fear already infecting San Francisco. September 27th, 1969, less than 3 months after the second Zodiac killings, the Napa County Sheriff's Office receives a phone call. It is from the Zodiac killer. He has struck again. And he wants to be sure the police know it was him. The caller at the time couldn't know that the police had already been tipped off by a local fisherman, so they were on the scene. They were already
investigating the crime when this call comes in. At Lake Berryessa, north of San Francisco, college students Bryan Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard have been stabbed multiple times and left for dead. The latest attack carries many of the hallmarks of the Zodiac. And this time, the attacker has left behind a calling card. There is the message left on the side of the victim's door with the dates of the Solano County murders and ours along with other items that are on there have definitely indicated us that they're one in the same.
This is a killer that is going to spend time setting up the scene. He's communicating a message to whoever's going to discover his victims. Police and park rangers combed the scene for clues until late yesterday. It was here the couple was picnicking and here a man in a mask robbed, tied, and stabbed them leaving them for dead. The Zodiac has now attacked six innocent people. But once again, the killer has slipped up. When the police reached the scene at Lake Berryessa, both victims are still alive.
Sergeant Bill White was first on the scene. The guy told us to take the money. He says, "I don't want it." He says, "I want to do all I want to do is kill you people. I have to kill you." Well, he started stabbing the kid in the back. Real nice college kids. Just stabbed for no reason at all. I never witnessed anything like it before. So, Cecelia is able to give some clues as to the appearance of the Zodiac killer, but her wounds prove fatal and she doesn't survive. So, the Zodiac killer has attacked six people, four of them have been killed, and still the police, beyond this vague description, have no idea who they're dealing with.
Any hopes for a detailed description of the Zodiac killer now lie with Bryan Hartnell. He has been stabbed six times, but miraculously none of his injuries are life threatening. For the first time, police have a full description of the attacker. Can you describe for us what your attacker looked like? He was of medium to short height. He had this black hood on. Came clear down to here. Just little slits in the eyes and where, you know, these clip-on glasses. An artist's impression of the Zodiac based on Bryan Hartnell's description is released to the public.
Finally, terror has an image to go with it. But because the executioner style hood completely obscured the killer's face, it doesn't move the police hunt on. There is still a killer on the loose and no one is certain what he looks like or where he will strike next. This guy is a pathological psycho killer. There's no doubt about it. Day-to-day, you weren't sure where the next random violent attack was going to come from. Just 2 weeks after the stabbings at the lakeside, the Zodiac killer ups the stakes again.
All his previous victims have been found in remote spots on the city's outskirts. But the killer is clearly growing in confidence or at least in his thirst for publicity. When taxi driver Paul Stine is discovered shot dead in his car in Presidio Heights, a busy neighborhood of San Francisco, it is such a different MO, the police don't immediately connect it to the Zodiac killer. When they got there and found the with a, you know, with the bullet in his head, blood all over the place, assumption was that it was a robbery. And so, they just conducted it as a regular homicide investigation. That all changes when the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle receives a package containing a piece of Paul Stine's blood-soaked shirt.
Packed in with the shirt is the third letter with a now disturbingly familiar symbol at the end. That was the first and only known time that he struck in the city of San Francisco, and it broke his MO of attacking young couples in Lover's Lane or picnicking situations as he had done three times prior to that. So, now all bets are off. The Zodiac's latest letter suggests there are now no lengths he will not go to increase his notoriety. The letter says he's come up with a whole new kind of killing spree. This time, it will be children leaving their school bus. With the letters threatening more killings, threatening to shoot kids coming out of a school bus, now the entire region
is gripped in this fear of the unknown potential killer. Police respond extraordinarily. They put out extra patrol cars. They assign police to monitor the school buses. The bus patrol has started first in this county Wednesday. Police units from various agencies using marked and unmarked cars follow buses on their runs to and from schools. They're trying to everything possible to prevent the attack that the Zodiac Killer has threatened. The massive patrols are responses to the Zodiac Killer's threat to stop a bus and shoot children.
Local beat cops work up a picture of a man seen near the Stein killing. Could this be the face of the Zodiac Killer? If it is, it still produces no leads. For 10 months, the Zodiac Killer has terrorized the San Francisco area. He has brutally slain five people and seriously wounded two more. Although the killings and threats have continued, one thing has stopped. Since his first elaborate Caesar cipher, cracked by two crossword buffs, there have been no further codes. But 3 weeks after the murder of taxi driver Paul Stein, a new code is delivered to the San Francisco Chronicle. And this one is far more complex than
the Zodiac's first attempt. The killer uh realized that his first message was broken pretty soon, so he added another step of complexity to the second one. He probably still wanted it to be solved, but he wanted to make it harder. The Zodiac's new cipher contains 63 different symbols, nine more than his first. And the message is 80 characters shorter. These two changes make cracking this code a monumental challenge. The shorter the message, the fewer words are going to be repeated. The fewer opportunities you have to check what might be a common substitution. So, it's clear at this point that
whoever is conducting these killings is an intelligent individual that he has some type of plan in mind and now he's raised the complexity of things with this new code. You get the sense that he was taking this perverse pleasure in this game. Amateur and professional cryptographers work around the clock to try to crack the Zodiac's latest message. Over the next 5 months, the killer sends a further two letters to the newspapers, mocking the police further for their failure to catch him or crack his latest code.
It's almost as if he got more of a kick out of hiding in plain sight, if you will, almost than the actual murders themselves. 14 months after the Zodiac's killing spree began, the police still have five unsolved murders on their hands. They don't have a single lead. Then in April 1970, the Zodiac releases a third code. This is spurring his ego. Look how intelligent I am. Look how great I am. I'm going to give you something that you're never going to figure out.
The latest code contains just 13 characters and the Zodiac promises that cracking it will finally reveal his identity. But no one can crack it. Because that's impossible. This one, he sets up by saying, "My name is" and then he delivers 13 characters, 13 symbols. That made it essentially impossible to decrypt if it wasn't closely related to one of his previous ciphers. If the message is short as it is here, uh it's not possible to uh check if your assumption is correct. The whole third code is nothing more than yet another opportunity to taunt the police for their failure.
Hundreds of people sat down to try to break it and came up with plausible sounding explanations, but pretty much any 13-letter word might be plausible. There was no way to prove or disprove even the likelihood that one explanation was better than another. Something is changing in the Zodiac Killer's approach. Killing seems to be taking a backseat to increasingly bizarre demands for publicity. An increase in threatening letters. A diagram of a homemade bomb he warns he's going to plant somewhere. He even demands that the public starts wearing buttons carrying his notorious signature symbol.
These are thoughts of a delusional person that's his narcissism has gone to a different level here. I'm now impatient. You need to do what I'm telling you to do. Why haven't you seen how great and powerful I am before now? When the demand that people wear his symbol fails, the Zodiac sends a fourth code and a map. He claims that combining the map with the 32-character cipher will reveal the location of a bomb. So, the police have this map, but they need to break this code if they're going to get what seems to be a vital piece of information. The coordinates where the bomb is hidden and hopefully save some lives.
He's no longer boasting about his achievements. Instead, he's sending a warning. A warning with just one purpose. Fear. He's now changed his tactic, and he's doing it to try and build that fear. He wants the recognition from further afield, and what's more recognizable? Well, an act of terrorism. But if the bomb's coordinates really are hidden within the 32-character cipher, code breakers fail to reveal them. No explosion is ever reported. It is the last code the Zodiac ever sends. The letters, however, do keep coming. Between 1970 and 1974, up to 10 more are sent to the police and press. And each time, the tally of victims the Zodiac claims to have killed
increases. As far as we know, Paul Stein is the last victim, but another letter is received in which the Zodiac claims to be responsible for 37 other deaths. It's an extraordinary claim, very hard to back up. In 1974, the taunting letters suddenly stop. The Zodiac killer disappears without a trace, leaving just one last mystery. Who was the Zodiac killer? The police never closed the case. For decades, the last three codes that could reveal the Zodiac's true identity remain uncraked.
Until 2020. Half a century after the killer sent out his second and most complex cipher. When a team of amateur code breakers spread across three continents attacks the second Zodiac cipher with cutting-edge software. They had tools at their disposal that just didn't exist in 1970. By 2020, there was no question that computers could easily handle running thousands and thousands of tests of different possible substitutions. The team suspects that after creating his substitution cipher, the Zodiac may have mixed up the symbols using a pattern known only to him. If that was the case, then before they can even start on his original cipher, they have to unscramble the symbols.
If a message in some kind of cipher has been manipulated, jumbled up in a way that rearranges all the letters, first you have to solve that layer. You have to get back to what the original cipher was, and then you can go to work trying to break that cipher. The team tests this theory by using the message he sent as a starting point and trying to work backwards to reconstruct the killer's original cipher. Hackers call this reverse engineering. It's very difficult to decrypt a message when you don't even know which direction it's written in. So, what they were trying to do essentially is reverse engineer whatever kind of grid or algorithm the
Zodiac was using in creating this cipher. The team's computer program generates 650,000 possible versions of the encrypted text. Any one of them could be the Zodiac's original ciphered message. So, like there was no guarantee that this would work, right? It could be that the right permutation was not in their list because the total number of permutations would be bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. The code breakers run all 650,000 versions through a decryption program they have created.
Its sole purpose is cracking the Zodiac code. In the scrambled message, nothing's repeated. It's all random. But, if you can get the randomness out of it, now you can start looking for those telltale repeats of certain groups of characters that could stand in for certain words. For weeks, the decryption program produces streams of garbled text. Then, on December 3rd, 2020, many months into the project, they make a breakthrough. On one of their many versions of the unscrambled message, they started seeing some recognizable words. They saw the phrase I hope you are, and then elsewhere on the page, trying to catch me.
Painstaking analysis reveals the successfully decrypted words were read in a diagonal direction, starting in the upper left corner and moving across two places for every subsequent line. Now they had strong clues about how the original message was scrambled. In effect, they'd reverse-engineered the Zodiac's system. So, once you know the pattern for how to reorder the symbols, and you think you've got a lot of the words correct, you can lock in those words and look for substitutions for the remaining letters to try to crack the rest of the cipher.
The team modifies the decryption software and runs it again. And after more than 50 years, the Zodiac's second code begins to break. After going through this process, the team was faced with an almost complete paragraph. The first line reads, "I hope you're having lots of fun in trying to catch me." This was a real breakthrough and also kind of chilling. Here were the words of the Zodiac being heard again for the first time in half a century. Mirroring events of more than 50 years ago, it's amateur code breakers who finally break into a Zodiac code. Many were hoping that breaking the second code would finally nail the identity of the man who terrorized San Francisco half a century ago.
It doesn't, which is no surprise to those who studied him. This code is repeating the same lines, the same things how he enjoys killing, and he doesn't mind dying. But this doesn't necessarily mean this is what he's thinking. This is bravado. The Zodiac is constantly putting out there that he's going to reveal he's going to tell the police what they want to know, he's going to come out. But why would he? The ciphers, the codes, that's what's keeping him alive. If he was a real person, then that would all disappear. We wouldn't have this like legacy and this myth that surrounds him. So he's never going to give anything away.
The true identity of the Zodiac killer remains unknown. We still don't know who Zodiac is or was, if he's alive, if not. If he is, where is he? That's what keeps this story going is the questions that don't get answered. Two of the Zodiac codes remain unbroken and it's possible they do contain clues that will one day reveal the identity of one of history's most notorious serial killers. But based on the contents of the messages that have been decrypted so far, that seems unlikely. We're still left with the question whether his name is really in that code at all or is it just another hurdle for the authorities to jump over?
I'm sitting here 50 plus years later still trying to answer the question. I think this will just be one of those cases that we probably will never know. Would cracking all of his codes give us the final pieces of the puzzle? Would we know the full extent of his crimes and would we understand the mind of that killer? Perhaps, but that requires us to crack those codes. The fact that there are still these uncracked codes out there means people will continue to obsess over the Zodiac, try to break these codes, try to figure out who he was, which in kind of a chilling way is probably exactly what the Zodiac killer intended.
