-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
The Zodiac Killer's 340-character cipher has been cracked after 51 years!
- Thread starter WhySoDevious
- Start date
Wasn't that filmed shot at 1080p? Like, the DI was 2k, but the camera they used captured at 1920x1080.
Besides a professional upscale job instead of relying on the player to do it live, and benefits of more modern compression codec, would they're really be much of a boost? It's not like the film is particularly complex in terms of visual information, like say Pacific Rim, where the standard blu-ray becomes a swarm of macroblocks during fight scenes with rain.
I swear to God I thought this was going to be a joke on that lol
It was also right after he was very close to getting caught (Paul Stine murder). He probably got spooked.
Same reason the pee tape morphed from Trump watching porn stars peeing on a bed Obama used to the general public thinking it was Trump being peed on. Large scale game of telephone and lots of innuendo and shorthand (rather than explicit and fully detailed explanation) morphing the story.
(granted those two cases are very different in likely credibility, but the details being lost in translation occurred the same way)
I don't know the technical aspects behind a movie, but even a 2K intermediary can have great results beyond a standard Blu-ray (as fantastic as it looks). The recently released Collateral is evidence of that. Even the digi-cam bits look great on UHD.
This made me laugh way too much. Bonus points for being seasonal
Honestly I don't know that he was as detached from reality as his letters imply. Killers sometimes invent personas that they sort of play into when communicating with the police or press (the letters David Berkowitz sent to the cops are a particularly transparent example) and something about the Zodiac's writing says "this is mostly performance" to me.
I read that he misspelled it on purpose to make it harder to crack the code. Whether that's true or not I don't know.
He spells it that way even on his unencrypted writing. He is a loon and probably not that smart. Or at least roleplays as such
Wasn't there something else about him killing people to make them slaves in the afterlife? If it wasn't him it was another, I'm 100% sure I've heard that before.
The paradice thing, it could be him knowing there is was some writing of him out there with that typo, maybe some school assignment or some such, hence he's purposely re-making that typo as hint for investigators who might need to find such a clue.
Also, it appears that Paradice is sometimes a name. https://www.name-doctor.com/name-pa...text=MEANING:,similarly reflects "royal park".
The paradice thing, it could be him knowing there is was some writing of him out there with that typo, maybe some school assignment or some such, hence he's purposely re-making that typo as hint for investigators who might need to find such a clue.
Also, it appears that Paradice is sometimes a name. https://www.name-doctor.com/name-pa...text=MEANING:,similarly reflects "royal park".
He spells it that way in an earlier much simplier cipher where it doesn't really hinder attempts to break it, as well as in plain text in some other letters. It's more likely this is just the way he spells the word, or how his made up Zodiac persona spells it. Either way, it's consistent across all the verified correspondence from the killer.
I wonder if anyone has actually used that spelling of the word to try crack the cipher in the past, in hindsight it seems like something worth a try.
I'm not sure how the codebreakers figured out at which points to split the cipher, but it seems like a fairly simple cipher to killer devise for something that's taken over 50 years to crack. Also interesting that the killer straight up made mistakes in it which may have contributed to its difficulty.
And the LIFE IS and DEATH parts that don't even follow the pattern in the rest of the cipher. What's stopping someone making a message, transposing it into a set of letters, and then dispersing the resulting letters absolutely randomly across a grid and calling it a cipher?
Yep, he's made reference to slaves and paradice in other letters, which I think is a big clue in the validity of the solution.
It's hard to tell if his spelling mistakes genuinely reflect how he spells or whether it's just an aspect of the Zodiac persona to throw off investigators, but as I was watching the solution video, I kept wondering if they've looked into whether there were people who spelt things the way Zodiac does as a possible lead.
What I'm getting from the video is that due to random probability, brute forcing it through as many possible solutions will generate valid words or even strings of legible text amongst the garbage. It seemed to be almost pure luck that they sighted and took notice of key words that had direct relevance and context to the killer and continued working on it from there rather than discarding the results.
So it wasn't really the time required for machines to crunch, but that it also required manual human verification. But it sounds like they abandoned work to decipher it somewhere along the line and left it to the amateur community.
Last edited:
To me this type of discovery is exactly the type of thing you might expect dedicated amateurs to stumble upon, not least given the brute forcing that was involved in deciphering it. As much as the FBI is probably still interested in the Zodiac killer their priorities should inevitably be elsewhere; private citizens, on the other hand, are more than happy to pool their time together (and even take time off from their work, as was the case in this instance) to give this a go.
Unfortunately the remaining ciphers are too short so there's not enough to work with to decipher them with any degree of certainty. Unless he used the same method as he used here, but I'm pretty certain somebody would've taken a crack at them using this method already.
OP
OP
Its still so crazy to me that they in all likelihood would have caught this guy if not for a massive police fuck up.
After he killed that cab driver a bunch of teenagers witnessed him getting out of the car. Described him as a white man about 5'11. Somehow the police got that confused and radioed that they were looking for a black man instead.
Two cops were patrolling the area and saw a white man matching the original description walk right by their car but because they were looking for a black man they went right past him. He later gloated that they had him literally feet away and he walked right past.
After he killed that cab driver a bunch of teenagers witnessed him getting out of the car. Described him as a white man about 5'11. Somehow the police got that confused and radioed that they were looking for a black man instead.
Two cops were patrolling the area and saw a white man matching the original description walk right by their car but because they were looking for a black man they went right past him. He later gloated that they had him literally feet away and he walked right past.
Yep. Has to go down as some of the worst policing in history
You know, I grew up watching movies and TV shows about serial killers, and they are always those super geniuses that mere mortals can't hope to outsmart. But then you actually read about those cases and it's much much more about gross police incompetence and just generally being shitty at solving crimes, especially against vulnerable people.
Like they always do that thing where they need to put the serial killer in like a Magneto prison to even hope and contain them, but Ted Bundy escaped because they let him go to the public library and then cops let him go to the bathroom unattended so he jumped out of the window.
We'll probably gonna have to recruit another genius serial killer if we have any chance of catching him.
The Dahmer one was the worst. Cop literally handed a victim back to a serial killer...
There's a reason the vast majority of serial killers were from at least 30 years ago. Technology has finally advanced enough that it can make up for really awful police work most of the time.
These days someone might be able to get away with 1 or 2 completely random murders but after that I think they'd be fucked.
The details of this are so gross and upsetting I honestly didn't even want to type them in this thread.
I want to believe this is true but do we have any data on serial killers these days? People still go missing quite a bit maybe police don't make a media thing about it anymore.
Possibility I suppose but I would think if several people went missing in the same area and bodies started turning up it would be pretty massive news.
I just guess that it would be way, way harder to get away with multiple killings with DNA, cell phone cameras, security cameras, GPS tracking in phones etc. I can't see someone committing multiple murders these days and being careful enough to avoid being caught by any of the above.
I can tell you at least around here, the cops seem uninterested in investigating homeless people deaths.
A lot of the serial killers targeted homeless people, and almost all of them went after vulnerable populations.
It still happens, it doesn't get too much media attention and we don't always call them serial killers these days
Man Pleads Guilty in San Diego Homeless Killing Spree
The man behind a string of brutal attacks and murders throughout San Diego in 2016, many on homeless people, pleaded guilty to 15 felonies, including four counts of murder on Monday, the District Attorney’s Office confirmed.
www.nbcsandiego.com
Former Marine Arrested in California Homeless Serial Killer Case
Police suspect he is attacking homeless.
www.thedailybeast.com
I don't think we are catching all of them.
Impressive and lucky. I've heard of the Zodiac, but never familiar with the details. Upon looking up how he got away :
God dammit.
God dammit.
Yeah he's likely just dumb. Evading police wasn't exactly hard back then, so while we have this image of him as some mastermind, he probably fit the mold of most criminals and had low education.
There are fewer serial killers these days. A quick Google search showed in 2015, the 2010s were tracking for less than a fourth of the serial killers of the 60s and 70s.
The main reasons for the decline are increased forensics and technology (prints, cameras, you name it), and modern day caution. Finding a dozen victims these days is harder since nobody hitchhikes or just takes off with random people anymore. Half the time when I'm reading or watching some murder in the 60s-80s, I'm like "why the hell would they do that" when the victim ended up in the killer's path.
I was just watching Forensic Files and somebody got killed in the early 90s. On a remote back road, the killer got behind the victim and laid on the horn, and the victim pulled over in case the honking was for a broken taillight or something like that. No chance in hell of me ever doing that
Israel Keyes is probably what a modern serial killer would have to be. Crisscrossing states, left kill kits stashed all over the country, no real victim type, etc.
en.wikipedia.org
Israel Keyes - Wikipedia
Tracking the Murders of Israel Keyes
The FBI believes skulls drawn in blood are the number of victims murdered by a prolific serial killer. Inside the FBI search to identify them. "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant reports
www.cbsnews.com
First time hearing of this one. He was smart enough to hide but used a victims debit card multiple times. Stupid.Israel Keyes is probably what a modern serial killer would have to be. Crisscrossing states, left kill kits stashed all over the country, no real victim type, etc.
Israel Keyes - Wikipedia
Tracking the Murders of Israel Keyes
The FBI believes skulls drawn in blood are the number of victims murdered by a prolific serial killer. Inside the FBI search to identify them. "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant reportswww.cbsnews.com
I think without a social connection it is difficult to investigate a murder. Seems to me these serial killers are caught when they do something really dumb.
Yeah but the Zodiac Killer was actually competent. Swinging a golf club is the height of his physical prowess.
Ya there are still serial killers, there's the long island killer which is still at large I think. And the metro Detroit serial killer was active in 2020.
Wow, that was a really amazing accomplishment. You can just feel right away that this solution is right, as opposed to those previous garbage ones.
And what a predictably stupid message, jfc.
And what a predictably stupid message, jfc.
that's the MO for a lot of serial killers inevitably getting caught. they get so into a routine and ritual of their deed that they skip a step they may have previously religiously observed and that simple mistake is one that lands them in jail. cops rarely come out on top as outsmarting a serial killer. Just pure human stupidity wins out in the end.
i watched a couple of his other episodes in the series, most of them retread the same information repeatedly.
however episode 1 looked into Grayson's solution and its interesting that his has the word "slaves" in it and this final one has "slaves" as well. Its already such a feat to solve it as it is, but maybe there's some sort of other solution too? Who knows.
however episode 1 looked into Grayson's solution and its interesting that his has the word "slaves" in it and this final one has "slaves" as well. Its already such a feat to solve it as it is, but maybe there's some sort of other solution too? Who knows.
Keyes is so confusing as his MO was so patient and detailed, yet after the murder of the young woman in Alaska he turned into a bumbling idiotIsrael Keyes is probably what a modern serial killer would have to be. Crisscrossing states, left kill kits stashed all over the country, no real victim type, etc.
Israel Keyes - Wikipedia
Tracking the Murders of Israel Keyes
The FBI believes skulls drawn in blood are the number of victims murdered by a prolific serial killer. Inside the FBI search to identify them. "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant reportswww.cbsnews.com
yes other serial killers have had the same notion. Some actually trying to pour acid into peoples' skulls to lobotomize them and make them zombies, and/or just thinking killing and eating people made them their slaves in the afterlife.
Yeah, It reminds me of BTK, who, for all his theatrical letter writing, ultimately seemed to be frighteningly coherent. It was only his ego and lack of technical knowledge that ultimately led to his capture.