An Australian mathematician is among a team of volunteer codebreakers who cracked a mysterious cipher sent more than 50 years ago to a newspaper by the San Francisco serial killer who called himself Zodiac.
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The Zodiac Killer - who was never caught - shot or stabbed seven people in the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of about year in 1968 and 1969, killing all but two of them.
During his murderous spree, he sent a series of terrifying letters to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper.
Some of the notes were in code, including a particularly complex missive with 340 characters that became known as the 340 cipher.
David Oranchak, a US-based software developer, Sam Blake, a Melbourne mathematician, and Jarl Van Eycke, a programmer based in Belgium, cracked the cipher last week, according to a video posted on YouTube by Oranchak.
"I hope you are having lots of fun trying to catch me," the cipher says.
"I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice (sic) all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me."
Like the murders themselves, solving the Zodiac ciphers has become an international fixation for true-crime followers.
Oranchak said in the video he had hoped the cipher would yield information about the killer's identity.
"The message doesn't really say a whole lot," he said.
"It's more of the same attention-seeking junk from Zodiac."
Blake said cracking the code "was absolutely trial and error".
"We were wrong 650,000 times, we got right once," Blake told Australia's Seven Network.
"Hopefully the FBI and others will be able to take it from there and help find this person after such a long time."
The San Francisco office of the FBI on Friday confirmed the group had cracked the coded message, and said the investigation into the half-century-old case was ongoing.
"The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens," the FBI posted on Twitter.
"The Zodiac Killer terrorised multiple communities across Northern California, and even though decades have gone by, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes."
No one was charged in the Zodiac case and theories abound about the killer's identity.
The case has inspired numerous books and movies, including 1971's Dirty Harry starring Clint Eastwood and 2007's Zodiac with Robert Downey Jr.
Australian Associated Press
