Zodiac killer code cracked by Australian mathematician 50 years after first murder | ABC News

a melbourne mathematician and two fellow cryptologists have been officially recognized by the fbi for solving a 50-year-old cryptic message written by the zodiac serial killer at least five people were killed by the zodiac killer in the 1960s but the killer's identity is not known dr samuel blake is that mathematician he joins us now from melbourne dr blake welcome to abc news this is an extraordinary discovery congratulations how does it feel to be involved in unraveling this code and what does it say yeah thank you for having me arts uh uh it was it was such a long shot we we tried several hundred thousand incorrect ways of solving the cipher and just by chance we happened to sort of stumble upon a fragment of of how it could be solved and using that fragment we reverse engineered the the entire solution and uh got the the entire message out from the zodiac so what was that all important message that took so much work to find so i mean i'm not i'm not an expert on on what the zodiac had to say i i managed to help to to get that message out um it doesn't reveal his identity it doesn't give a lot of clues to his identity i think more what it does is the the method that he was able to use to create that uh that cipher may help uh track down who he is and when you say we obviously you weren't alone in this process you worked with at least two other people at this point of because it's more than 50 years since that message was first published so just take us through how you work together and who was involved with with doing this yeah so david ranchack is from the united states and he has been working on trying to solve this cipher in his spare time for 15 years uh which is a herculean effort i i saw some of the videos that he put online promoting analysis that he'd done of this cipher and i thought they were excellent and so i reached out to him in i think about march of this year and it was sort of a way of getting through the the melbourne covert lockdown uh was to to play around with this in my spare time amazing and was there any special technology that uh helped to finally i mean you talked about reverse engineering um when you finally found a couple of pieces of the puzzle yeah so uh what you can see on the screen now is a program called a z decrypt which is written by a guy from belgium called yale van ike and that was a central piece of technology that we used and then i used the spartan supercomputer at melbourne university to run some of our candidate uh reading directions through the cipher in order to work out which was the right direction to look through the cipher and so it was a it was a large problem of trial and error and um with this i mean what was it that made the code so difficult to break it was a combination of two things so uh it was a homophonic substitution cipher so uh letters in the uh the text that the zodiac was encrypting is replaced with multiple symbols but then the the reading direction that we're normally used to is you know left to right top to bottom on a page uh whereas what the zodiac did in this in this cipher was to to write it out down the diagonals of the of the page so he went uh one one row down two columns across one row down two columns across in order to write it out and trying to stumble across that correct enumeration was uh was one of the main difficulties here and as you point out um this is just a step towards hopefully solving the case it's still an active case so so how do you feel about being involved in um something like this and uh are you working on any further clues which might help people finally solve the identity yeah i think the chances that we were going to be at all involved in this was so small because the chances of solving this after 50 years was next to next to zero and so being able to play a role in this is fantastic um you know i hope this decryption may lead to uh you know better narrowing down who this person is um but i guess we'll have to wait and see in regards to the other two ciphers that he sent we're we're looking at those to see if there's ways in which we can we can uh use the work that we've done on the 340 cipher to to solve those but none of that is clear at this stage well you've already made a huge inroad it's an extraordinary effort as i said earlier thank you dr sam black there in melbourne so much for your time thank you you

Channel: ABC News (Australia)

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Keywords: Australia, abc, abc news, news, zodiac, zodiac killer, code, fbi, code cracked, zodiac killer code cracked, serial killer, crime, murder, cryptologist, latest australian news, crime news, australian news, australia news

Id: 8f2Z3olILxg

Length: 5min 20sec (320 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020