SF CHRONICLE CROSSWORDS SERIAL
SF CHRONICLE CROSSWORDS PROFESSIONAL

But despite the best efforts of the country’s leading intelligence agencies, no one knew who he was. The Zodiac had tallied his victims in marker on the side of a car, drafted homemade ciphers, and mailed scraps of evidence to newspapers. Witnesses to his crimes had provided enough information for law enforcement to create a composite sketch of his face. His handwriting was on file, along with a recording of his voice.

SF CHRONICLE CROSSWORDS SERIAL

Here was a serial killer who had gone out of his way to taunt the police. The Zodiac had a thick case file for amateur sleuths like Oranchak to peruse. Before he knew it, he was down the rabbit hole, immersed in the Zodiac’s story and gaining a reputation as one of the reigning experts on the killer’s ciphers. Tempted by the chance to unlock a slate of notorious cold cases, he started nosing around online discussion boards about the Zodiac. Around 2006, Oranchak became intrigued by the 340’s apparent resistance to a solution, a key had eluded the best efforts of professionals and experts. When he’s not running ultramarathons near his home in Roanoke, Virginia, the 47-year-old computer programmer spends most of his time working out practical solutions to problems, whether in his coding work or his passion for Shinro, a Japanese derivation of Sudoku. “There’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to it, which makes it very impressive that anyone solved it.”ĭave Oranchak has always been a puzzle geek. Some speculated that the cipher would never be solved-that it was too sophisticated, too challenging for even contemporary cryptographers. For more than fifty years, the cipher remained an unsolvable enigma, one that grew to almost mythic proportions among codebreakers and cryptography sleuths. Neither could the Naval Intelligence Office or the FBI.

SF CHRONICLE CROSSWORDS PROFESSIONAL

They published the 340 the next day, hoping it might bring them one step closer to the serial killer’s identity, or lead them to his next victims.īut the 340 stumped both amateur and professional cryptographers alike-not just in the weeks following its publication, but for decades. The paper’s editors, along with local law enforcement officials, had no reason to doubt the Zodiac’s most recent threat. PS could you print this new cipher in your frunt page? I get aufully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing !!!!!! It came with a letter for the Chronicle, reading in part: The second, now known as “the 340” due to the number of characters in it, would prove a much more difficult challenge. The Zodiac’s first cipher, included in the July 31 letter, had been solved within a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team-but it had only revealed more of the killer’s raving. But in addition to these overt threats, he included baffling ciphers for investigators to crack, troubling grids of symbols and letters that presumably masked a secret about his identity, intentions, or victims (to this day, the killer has never been found). He promised to blow up buses of schoolchildren and unleash a “death machine” on San Francisco. He shared haunting details of his attacks.

He signed his “name” with a crosshairs symbol. The Zodiac’s letters were replete with grisly imagery.

The Zodiac had mailed the Chronicle a piece of the victim’s bloodied shirt as evidence of the crime. His most recent murder-of a San Francisco cab driver, by gunshot-had occurred just four weeks before this new envelope arrived. By the time of the November letter, the Zodiac had already attacked seven people, murdering five. Th e envelope arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969 without a return address, its directive to the recipient, in handwriting distinctively slanted and words unevenly spaced, to “please rush to editor.” The Chronicle newsroom had seen the scrawl before, on previous letters sent from the Zodiac, a self-monikered serial killer who threatened to go on a “kill rampage” if the paper didn’t publish his writing on its front page.

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