a 50-year-old mystery was recently solved when a group of intellectuals decoded a message from the Zodiac Killer. 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. Australian mathematician Samuel Blake was one of the people who helped decrypt what's known as the 340 cipher. The message was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969 from someone calling himself Zodiac, who claimed to have killed 37 people in the Bay Area, although reports say he is believed to have only killed five. He sent cryptic messages to law enforcement and media outlets up until 1974. Blake says earlier this year he joined a group of amateur code breakers already working to decode the message, and he was able to enlist the help of a supercomputer at the University of Melbourne. It was such a long shot. 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 how it could be solved, and using that fragment, we reverse-engineered the entire solution and got the entire message out from the Zodiac. The achievement of decoding the message was more exciting than the message itself. It reads, in part, I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me. It did not identify Zodiac as other messages had promised, and the case remains unsolved. The FBI released a statement saying the Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco Division and our local law enforcement partners. While it wasn't the outcome many were hoping for, Blake says he does hope it can be of some help to investigators. I hope this decryption may lead to, you know, better narrowing down who this person is, but I guess we'll have to wait and see. There are still two remaining ciphers.

from zodiac that have yet to be decoded. And Blake says he and his team will now work on those in hopes of finally putting this case to rest. For Inside Edition Digital, I'm Mara Matalbano.

Zodiac Killer’s Message Decoded by Amateur Sleuths

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