French Engineer Claims He's Solved the Zodiac Killer's Final Code

The New York Times tells the story of Fayçal Ziraoui, a 38-year-old French-Moroccan business consultant who "caused an online uproar" after saying he'd cracked the last two unsolved ciphers of the four attributed to the Zodiac killer in California "and identified him, potentially ending a 50-year-old quest." Maybe because he said he cracked them in just two weeks. Many Zodiac enthusiasts consider the remaining ciphers — Z32 and Z13 — unsolvable because they are too short to determine the encryption key. An untold number of solutions could work, they say, rendering verification nearly impossible. But Mr. Ziraoui said he had a sudden thought. The code-crackers who had solved the [earlier] 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. What if the killer used that same encryption key for the two remaining ciphers? 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. (It never did, even though police failed to crack the code.) That produced a sequence of random letters from the alphabet. Mr. 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... After two weeks of intense code-cracking, he deciphered the sentence, "LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST." The message referred to coordinates based on the earth's magnetic field, not the more familiar geographic coordinates. The sequence zeroed in on a location near a school in South Lake Tahoe, a city in California referred to in another postcard believed to have been sent by the Zodiac killer in 1971. An excited Mr. Ziraoui said he immediately turned to Z13, which supposedly revealed the killer's name, using the same encryption key and various cipher-cracking techniques. [The mostly un-coded letter includes a sentence which says "My name is _____," followed by a 13-character cipher.] After about an hour, Mr. Ziraoui said he came up with "KAYR," which he realized resembled the last name of Lawrence Kaye, a salesman and career criminal living in South Lake Tahoe who had been a suspect in the case. Mr. Kaye, who also used the pseudonym Kane, died in 2010. The typo was similar to ones found in previous ciphers, he noticed, likely errors made by the killer when encoding the message. The result that was so close to Mr. Kaye's name and the South Lake Tahoe location were too much to be a coincidence, he thought. Mr. Kaye had been the subject of a report by Harvey Hines, a now-deceased police detective, who was convinced he was the Zodiac killer but was unable to convince his superiors. Around 2 a.m. on Jan. 3, an exhausted but elated Mr. Ziraoui posted a message entitled "Z13 — My Name is KAYE" on a 50,000-member Reddit forum dedicated to the Zodiac Killer. The message was deleted within 30 minutes. "Sorry, I've removed this one as part of a sort of general policy against Z13 solution posts," the forum's moderator wrote, arguing that the cipher was too short to be solvable.

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