Criminology - Zodiac Ciphers Conversation

Episode Date: October 21, 2017

In this episode, we take a deeper dive into Zodiac's Cipher communications. Dave Oranchak joins us to provide greater insight into the ciphers. Why was the 408 cipher solved while subsequent ciphers were not? What were the differences between them all that make some harder to solve than others?  Join Ferg and Morf as they tap into the wealth of knowledge that Dave brings to the subject. We also talk to Dr. Katherine Ramsland who sheds light on what it may have meant to Zodiac to write these as well as the connection to BTK.   You can support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital Production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. I'd like to welcome everyone to episode 11 of criminology, season one. This is all about the Zodiac. In the last episode, we finished up talking about the Zodiac suspects. And at the end, we gave you a little special Easter egg. and we really hope everybody got to hear that. Hopefully you found it.

If not, go back, give it a listen. It's at the very end right after the music. And at the end of this episode, we have another surprise for you. It's a very special guest announcement, so be sure to listen to the end. You don't want to miss it. So just a quick recap of last episode, episode 10,

we wrapped up the Zodiac case suspects and the persons of interest and we went pretty deep. And it was fascinating to take a look at some of those men and see how and why they were looked at as possible Zodiac suspects. But now we're going to move on to another big piece of the Zodiac mystery and that's the Zodiac's ciphers and cryptograms. The Zodiac killer seems to crave publicity. He sent letters and cryptograms to newspapers and the police, recounting his crimes, threatening more murders, and making Bay Area residents very edgy. So the ciphers in the Zodiac case have always been of major interest, in part because how many killers in the history of crime have taunted police with the coded messages?

Probably not many. But that's exactly what Zodiac did. And although the first cipher he sent was solved, the others that are the other is that. that he sent weren't. And that leads us to the question, was Zodiac some sort of cipher expert or just an amateur who somehow fooled the experts? We asked Dr. Catherine Ramsland about serial killers using ciphers. And we know that it's pretty rare. But Dr. Ramsland told us that BTK, Dennis Rader, actually also used codes. The first thing you have to look at, obviously, is the content. and the second thing is the form,

and the third thing is the frequency. So the content of Zodiac, similar to BTK, were these strange ways of doing codes. And I'll just tell you, when Dennis Rader and I started, one of the things he put me to the test was I had to learn his codes because he wanted to do the whole thing

in coded language. And you might think, oh, wow, that's really strange. But he actually had some, some rationale that made sense, and that was to keep guards from, you know, understanding what he was saying when he sent letters to me. But also he fancied himself to be a hitman and a spy, and so he wanted to keep up this whole facade. I think that that would probably be similar to what Zodiac was doing. One of the things about using codes and using mystical messages and symbolism and and naming himself is to create a mystique.

It makes them a bit more larger than life. They love the idea that they're making people think about them. They're making people try to figure out what they're saying. They're holding people enthrall. And just about everything about Zodiac's communications indicates that's what he wanted to do. Like at one point, he's complaining that people aren't wearing the buttons, the Zodiac buttons. he wanted them to wear the San Francisco people.

And that's sort of a throwback to the axe murderer in the 1920s in New Orleans who said he wanted, he was going to kill people unless everybody in New Orleans threw a party that night. So like holding people hostage, you know, if you don't do this, I'm going to kill a lot of people. Just to see what would happen. He's trying to see how much power he has, how widely his influence is dispersed around the city. and when people, you know, are trying to figure out his codes, it's so exciting to him because this is a nobody who now is a somebody. Back in the 1960s and 70s, experts with the FBI, naval intelligence, and just about every other governmental agency took a crack at some of these ciphers,

and they couldn't crack them. And the fact that with the use of high-tech computer programs today, they still aren't solved, that really says a lot. One thing's for sure. Mike and I are not cipher experts by any stretch. I spent an entire weekend once trying to solve one of the codes and wound up slamming my laptop shut and frustration. We felt that we needed to bring on an expert to discuss,

break down, and dissect the Zodac ciphers. So that's what we did. In this episode, we have Dave or Ranchak with us to try and tackle these ciphers. Dave is a software engineer with 20 years of vision. experience. He started tackling the Zodiac ciphers after his own interest in codes and ciphers crossed paths with the unsolved Zodiac ciphers. Since then, Dave has developed software to try and decode the ciphers, and he's been a contributor to several Zodiac documentaries. You can find his website that's dedicated to the Zodiac ciphers at ZodiacKillers.com. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

So, Dave, if you would, please tell us how you got into the whole Zodiac cipher thing. At some point, probably in around 2006, I read about the Zodiac case. And I must have seen the information about the unsolved 340 character cryptogram that had been unsolved for 30 or 40 years by that point. And it really caught my imagination because I have an interest in puzzles. And because I had been a programmer for so long, I thought, well, there's the perfect combination of, you know, maybe I can apply what I know about programming to the unsolved Zodiac cipher. And, you know, this is a trap that a lot of programmers fall in because, you know, I've met other programmers over the years who thought, well, maybe they could solve the code in the same way, applying their programming skills.

And, you know, so far nobody's been able to do it. But in the process, we've all come up with a lot of different ideas and ways to attack the problem. And it's been a fulfilling experience so far, even though no solution's been found yet. I'm still optimistic, of course. In the meantime, I've been analyzing a lot of the claims that have come out over the years. Because in reading about the case, I would see all these people saying, hey, I've got the solution to the cipher. It's done. is cases solved.

And so I would look at those ciphers and they just didn't seem right. And so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why they didn't seem right. And I've discovered that in most cases, they would use invalid techniques for coming up with these solutions. And so that became part of my approach to the case, was not only trying to crack the codes, but also to analyze the solution claims. And so, Morph, if you want to talk about how you and Dave go back, and you can do that now if you want. Yeah, so I run ZodiacKillarsight.com, of course, and Dave's been a long time member.

They're a moderator. And I've just seen what he's done over the years with, in respect to the cipher devotion to checking them and trying to solve them and whatever else. And it's for me, personally, I think for a lot of people, it's probably one of the hardest parts of the case to comprehend. So having somebody like Dave, that knows of stuff inside and out, what's valid and what's not, I think is a big plus for the case.

I'm excited to have him on because I think he's really going to be able to help our audience understand a lot of parts of the ciphers and the codes that Zodiac sent. Well, because it's also, it's not just trying to crack the cipher. Dave, as you mentioned, it's also looking at the people's claims where they say they have cracked it and either debunking it or, right? Because there's a lot of people around the world that are trying to solve the unsolved. Definitely, yeah.

And there's certainly a lot of motivation for it. You know, as soon as somebody comes up with an answer to the puzzle, and it turns out to be correct, they're going to get a lot of notoriety. But the unfortunate aspect of this case is that even when people come up with false solutions, they do still sometimes get notoriety for it.

So they're rewarded for these solutions that turn out to be bogus. For example, the Corey Starlipper, he went through several rounds of news cycles, his claim to have solved the cipher and finding Arthur Lee Allen finding his name in it, you know, that was reported all over the place. And it went viral for, you know, on several different occasions. And so he got a lot of attention for basically inventing a plain text that was just a result of his imaginative, his imagination. And so there's a number of times that that happens. And it's frustrating whenever it does because it's a lot easier to get clicks and ratings when you report on a false solution on a cold case because it's exciting.

But it's not exciting to report on why it's wrong. But I do agree that when it comes to the. media, right? We all know it's glamorous to publish something that is exciting. Yeah. What is not glamorous is to then go back and say, oh, this wasn't right or this turned out to be false. So the first one is on page one or two. The retraction or the revelation that something was wrong is at the end of the newspaper. Right.

And I was going to say, Dave, that it seems like, too, some of these people, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, go into solving the cipher with somebody already in mind that needs to fit the cipher. Exactly, yes. So they're looking for certain words, certain names. So they're already going into it not from a neutral standpoint of I just want to solve this to I'm solving this, but I'm also looking for this suspect or this word. Yeah. And there's times when that's appropriate. Like if you look at how the Hardens solved the 408, you know, the amateurs that solved the 408, presumably before any of the authorities had come up with their own solution, they had some intuition that certain words would appear in the message. And they use that, you know, as a part of their trial and error approach to solving it to eventually unravel the entire message.

it was very helpful to them to guess that, for instance, Graysmith said that Donald's wife, Betty, she thought that the cipher would start by saying, I like killing, because she figured the killer was egotist and wanted to brag about his crimes. So when they started plugging in some guesses for letters based on patterns that appeared in the cipher text, they saw that, you know, that I like killing would fit in the beginning of the cipher. So they tried that out and, you know, it kind of led to more revelations about what would be in the message. And then they puzzled it out and eventually came up with the full solution. So in that situation, the guess on the words was very helpful. But in what you're talking about, more of forcing the names to appear, what usually happens is someone will try to plug the name in. And if it doesn't fit, they'll change the rules of the cipher to make it fit.

So there'll be some, you know, conflicts or mistakes. that arise when they try the name using the normal rules like of an existing type of cipher, an existing scheme, like a substitution cipher. There's only certain things that are going to fit because of the way the symbols appear. But if you change the rules and say, well, you can do these weird mathematical steps or rearrange symbols or start to take liberties with the cipher text, well, then you can make all sorts of things appear, including your own suspect's name. And so the burden of proof then is on you to prove that the name that you made it appear is actually a unique solution.

And the other names that you can produce using the same method are invalid. And that's very difficult to overcome. And most people don't bother to try to overcome it. They just assert that the name that they forced to appear is the correct name. So Dave, how different is it? And I'm going to date myself here and talk about Rubik's Cube. How different is it from getting three-fourths of the way into solving a Rubik's Cube and saying, all right, I can't get it.

I'm going to peel off the stickers. That's exactly like that. That's a really good analogy. And I'm just going to change them. Yeah. I did the same thing when I was a kid. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. I wonder what's emergency.

We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer. For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, Blood and Water. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. So when the newspapers get this first set of ciphers, each one getting a piece of it, I think we have to say that this right from the story, start showed that this case was not going to be quote unquote normal right this was going to be something different than what most people were used to the killer was making direct threats to the public you know with these letters and he was very effectively manipulating the publishers of these newspapers to you know to publish his ciphers and his letters because they were afraid you know that

he would murder more people if they didn't comply. So he was making basically a terrorist threat against these papers. And knowing that they would probably be skeptical that he was the killer. You know, by that point, what was it? There were four victims of his crimes, so the two couples. Yeah, two, three that died and one that lived. Right. And so since he knew that people would be skeptical,

He included as much detail as he could about those crimes so that the police and the reporters could confirm that, yeah, that must have been the killer. So, Dave, can you tell us a little bit about the structure of the first three-part cipher that was sent? So the killer, he put together three different mailings. And the letters that he included were virtually identical. He had written these almost identical letters with basically taking. credit for the two couples that were attacked previously. And then he included a section saying, you know, published the cipher or I may kill again, basically. He mailed that out on, the letters were postmarked July 31st, 1969. The Vallejo News Chronicle published it the very

next day. So they came to a quick decision and published it the very next day. Oh, I should say each newspaper received a separate part of the cipher. So at first they didn't know that there was one entire cipher that had been split into three parts, I guess until they collaborated with each other since they all received the same basic letter. But they each had a single part of this entire 408 character cryptogram, which was split into these eight-line parts,

each part was, I guess, 136 characters long and eight lines each. So the examiner didn't publish their piece of the 408, 408 character cryptogram until that Sunday, the third. So it was, you know, three days after they received it. And in Graysmith's book, he said he thinks it's because they didn't, they weren't sure that it was really from the killer. They thought it might have been a hoax. But that seems to be speculation on Graysmith's part. I'm not sure. Maybe they held it back intentionally. Which agencies tried to solve these ciphers when they initially were mailed in?

When they received the ciphers, they sent it to the nearby naval base because apparently there was a cryptography unit or intelligence unit at that base. I think it was Mayor Island. It's right there in Vallejo. So it's a local thing for them, for Vallejo PD to just send it over to the cryptography unit there. So that was one thing. That was in the reports that came out in the papers at the time, was that they sent it to these Navy cryptographers. And in the Graysmith book, he claims that the codes were also sent to the NSA and the CIA. I still wonder if they actually did work on.

I can't imagine that they wouldn't have worked on those codes once they learned about them, because surely their cryptographers would just, it would be like blood in the water. They would go for it, you know. They would want to solve that. And I'm still wondering, I haven't seen any material or reports about their efforts to solve those codes.

So I'm wondering if there's a Freedom of Information Act request that somebody could make that would eventually produce more materials that indicate what they had done. According to an article published at the time, the FBI were not sent the letters until that Monday, the 4th, August 4th. So the papers had received the codes, you know, three days prior, well, actually five days prior on the July 31st. And they published the first part on the first of August. And then the others were published the second and third. So there was some delay there before the FBI got a hold of it.

So they didn't really have, they didn't start working on it right away. That's the point. They did do some document analysis and things like that. but I don't know how much progress they made with the ciphers. But the interesting thing was by that point, Donald Hardin and his wife Betty had already solved it. They already solved it by that Monday. So we touched on the hardens solving the cipher back in an early episode. But if you can, Dave, tell us a little bit more about the hardens in their background in relation to the case.

So Donald Hardin, as I understand it, was a history teacher at a high school. And he was described as having a boyhood interest. and codes and ciphers. And he would work on codes from the papers and whatnot. And the story was that he and Betty started working on the codes that were published in the papers on that Sunday, the 3rd of August. So by that time, all three parts had been published. And they decided, well, it's a quiet Sunday afternoon. Let's start working on this thing.

The way Graysmith tells the story is that Donald, found a book in his library called Secret and Urgent, The Story of Codes and Ciphers. It was written by Fletcher Platt. It's a history of classic cryptography. So it's a book that has a lot of information about the ways that people have been hiding messages in the past. And he used the book to try to figure out what kind of cipher it was. And apparently by looking at the, by counting the symbols that were in the three parts,

eventually deduced that it was a substitution. cipher, which means every letter in the message that you're trying to encode is replaced by a different symbol. So, for example, every time you see an E in the message you're trying to hide, you replace it with the letter Q. So that's a simple example. But when you look at the 408, which is what I'm calling the entire code, when you add all the three parts together, there's 408 symbols. If you look at those symbols, if it was a normal substitution cipher, it would only have 26 different symbols in it. But if you look at the 408, there's 54 different symbols. There are the regular letters, and then there are some special shapes, you know, circles and squares,

different varieties of those. So there's something else going on with the code. It's not a simple substitution cipher that you would typically see in a newspaper. So what that means is, in this particular case, it turned out to be what's known as a homophonic substitution cipher, which means each letter in the message was replaced with more than one symbol. So as an example, every time you see an E in your secret message that you're trying to hide, instead of replacing it with just a cue, you can replace it with a Q or a B or an F or a P or any other letter or symbol. And what that does is it hides some of the clues that people use to crack the codes. The clues are things like if you look at the encrypted message,

you can count up the letters that are used. And because the letter E is the most frequently used letter in the English language, any symbol that is occurring the most frequently in the encoded message is very likely to stand for the letter E because it's reflecting the underlying distribution of English letters in the English language. And so by assigning multiple symbols, you're kind of hiding some of those clues.

So that's what Zodiac was trying to do with that first code. So that was one problem, was figuring out which symbols belong to which letters. So he and Betty had to figure that out. The other part was how to figure out what order they appeared in. Because they figured, well, the three parts belonged to the same overall message, but we have to rearrange them in the correct order. I'm not sure how they worked that out.

But in Graysman's book, he said he figured out that if you look at the letters, the first part of the code came in an envelope that had two stamps on it. The second part came in an envelope that had three stamps on it. three stamps on it, and the fourth part came in an envelope that had four stamps on it. So if you order them in sequence, two, three, and four, they correspond to the first, second, and third parts. Now, if that was an intentional clue or not, I don't know. It's possible that it's a coincidence, but it's also possible that it was an intentional clue

placed there by the killer. So another thing making the puzzle difficult for them was that there are no breaks for words. You can't tell where a word begins or ends. Most of the substitution ciphers that you find in the newspapers in those days, that people just do like they work on crossword puzzles and word searches. You could tell where the words were. So there were spaces in between the words, but those spaces aren't there in the 408. So that makes it a little bit harder. But they kept at it. They worked on it for I think 20 hours total. And the way that they describe breaking it

was by finding other patterns in the ciphertext that were not hidden by the extra symbols. For example, one of the things that they found was that certain symbols were doubles. And that means that there was a symbol that was immediately followed by the same symbol. And that made them think, well, what are the most common

double letters in English? because those have to stand for a letter followed by the very same letter. So if the symbols are a square followed by a square, because of the way the substitution cipher works, that one symbol has to stand for a single letter. So as it turns out, the most common double in English is L.L. So there are a lot of words that have LL in them. And of course, the most relevant example is kill.

So they found other pairs of symbols that kind of matched this pattern and other fragments that were repeating. And they figured that, well, kill may fit in these patterns. They can use the word kill to substitute for these patterns. So once they started plugging that word in different places of the cipher, they could see other parts of the message coming through. Not all of it, but some of it. and then at some point Betty said that she thought

the cipher would begin with I like killing and if you plug that in at the very beginning even more parts of the text the hidden message start to come out and then I imagine they went through a lot of trial and error

and eventually found the complete solution from that point on so according to the story it took them a total of 20 hours they reported their solution to the Chronicle

on that Monday, August the 4th. They were told to physically mail the solution to the paper, who would then forward it to Vallejo Police. Graysmith said that the Naval Intelligence Division confirmed the solution. I don't know if there's proof of that somewhere. But the Vallejo PD report on August 8th says that the solution checked out, quote, against itself in all respects. So they probably just plugged in the key.

and said, yep, that's definitely the solution. Meanwhile, I think on the fourth, that same day, Monday, there was another letter that came from Zodiac. And he was saying, have you cracked my cipher yet? If you do, you'll have me. So it's suggesting that maybe his name or identity was in the solution. But in fact, the solution didn't have his name. He explicitly said in the solution that he would not give the name.

So, Dave, one thing I want to ask is, is, and I think something that listeners would be wondering is how did these two civilians do something that trained cryptographers couldn't accomplish? Yeah, that's been a question that's come up a lot. I think they could have done it. I think the FBI would have come up with a solution. In fact, later, there's a, I think it's a police report from Lake Beriesa, about the Lake Barriess. killing that happened later. And in that report, it says something like that the FBI had solved it independently of the Hardens. But there's no details, really. It's just a kind of a offhand remark

in the report. And I don't know to what extent the FBI attacked the ciphertext. But I don't see any reason why they couldn't. It's not, you know, when you look at it, it's not that hard. It seems hard because there's all these extra symbols. But given the history of code breaking in the intelligence communities, this kind of code is not difficult for them to solve. So I would be very skeptical of claims that the NSA and CIA would not have been able to solve this.

In fact, because the Hardin solved it so quickly, they probably just didn't need to. Once they confirmed, once these other people confirmed their solution, there was no need to spend the effort. to actually try to crack it. Right around the time the Hardin solved the 408, a cipher code key was mailed to the Vallejo PD. Some people have suspected that the Hardens themselves

mailed that code key to Vallejo because they didn't want to wait, but other people think that perhaps it was the Zodiac that mailed it in. Dave, what's your take on that code key? Yeah, so that card's very interesting. I don't know which of those sense. scenarios is the correct one. There are some compelling reasons to believe that I think the top two are, the top two possibilities are, it's somebody who just read the solution and decided, oh, I'll just come up with the key. So the solution in the papers is just, here's the message. And it's just, they just print the message. And then somebody would have to go back and look at the symbols and decide, okay, which symbols belong to which letters in the message. And so that's what was sent with this concerned citizen card and letter. It was basically a card which was typewritten and a letter which had the keys, the key handwritten.

And on the card it says, Dear Sergeant Lynch, I hope the enclosed key will prove to be beneficial to you in connection with the cipher letter writer. Working puzzles, cryptograms, and word puzzles is one of my pleasures. Please forgive the absence of my signature or name, as I do not wish to have my name in the papers, and it could be mentioned by a slip of the tongue, with best wishes concerned citizen. And so when you look at the key that comes with it, you know, it's handwritten, and it's an accurate key.

There's a Vallejo Police Department report from the 11th of August, so I guess the day after it was sent. It says that this anonymous letter was received and what they referred to as a set of alternatives. So if you look at the letter that has the key on it, there's two lists. One of them shows the letters of the normal alphabet, you know, A, B, C, D, F, G, and so on. And then the list of symbols that belong to each one of those. So anytime you find one of those symbols in the message, you replace it with the corresponding letter, the regular letter. but there's another list which shows the alternates.

And the alternates, what they're referring to or what's known as polyphones. The polyphone is a symbol that can actually stand for more than one English letter, like a regular plain text letter. Normally a symbol in this kind of cipher has exactly one regular letter of plain text letter.

But in some cases, in this cipher, there are more than one plain text letter associated with certain symbols. Some of this is due to transcription errors in the cipher text or, you know, the poor quality of the image in the newspapers. You know, it's easy to mistake one symbol for another. But there's some other oddities in this list that I haven't been able to figure out why

these oddities are there. They don't make a big difference in the solution, but it's just interesting to me why these certain aspects exist. I won't go into too many details on that. because it's too technical. But there's some symbol assignments there that don't make sense. And so if this came from, let's say it came from the Hardens, well, why would these weird mistakes exist?

I mean, they know what their message was. They know what their key was. So why would they introduce these new mistakes? If it came from somebody in the paper, it kind of makes sense why these mistakes would be there because they were looking at poor quality reproductions of the messages and the ciphers. And in different articles, they had different interpretations of the plain text because of certain typos and missing words.

As it turns out, the 408 was very sloppily made. The killer made some mistakes in spelling. Some of them seemed to be because of the original message having the mistake in it. Others seem to be because he mistook his own symbols for other symbols when he made another copy of the cipher. But there's some other interesting things about the, this letter, like, according to the same Vallejo PD report, they had sent it to Donald Hardin to see if they could use the key to help unscramble the last 18, which is something I didn't mention before. When we were talking about the 408, the Hardens came up with a solution for the entire message, except for the last 18 characters, which turned out to be a sequence of gibberish. and no one's been able to figure out what they mean.

And this led to a lot of people trying to unscramble the last 18 symbols or the letters of the decoded message to try to spell out somebody's name because the killer did say that his name was in the cipher. So maybe even if he didn't mention it in the earlier text, maybe it's in these last 18. So people have been trying to come up with different schemes and anagrams to find the name.

The noteworthy one that was published in the papers at the time was Robert Emmett the hippie. And, you know, it's not very good. It's not a very good solution because it requires a lot of misspellings to produce it. And it's also an anagram. So you have to accept that one anagram is better than all the other ones that are possible. In fact, if you rearrange the last 18, there's close to a billion different possibilities of rearrangements that you can pick from. And just to touch on what you said, Dave, in regards to those leftover characters at the end of the 408, isn't it a possibility that they are simply there as filler so that you can't tell where the message actually ends? Each paper got a equally sized piece of the cipher, you know, eight lines and a rectangular block, and they were all the same size.

If his message was not exactly that length, then he had to just add random stuff to the end to make it fit. to make it look even. And that's a common encryption technique. It's known to be done. And there's a lot of evidence supporting that as the hypothesis for why those last 18 are there. So we have to move on to the 340 cipher that ultimately winds up not being solved. And that 340 cipher is mailed about three months after the 408 was solved. what are the key differences between the unsolved 340 and the Sol 408?

Well, at first glance, when you look at the 340, it looks very similar to the 408. It's laid out in a grid, you know, has a similar grid layout and uses a lot of the same symbols and types of symbols that you see in the 408. So, you know, at first glance, you think, well, maybe it's the same kind of substitution cipher. The differences are when you look at it in detail, you see that there's some new symbols that he introduced. And there are some symbols that were in the 408 that don't appear in the 340. The 340 is also not split into different parts. For some reason, he just sent it as one piece, you know, one big cipher. Overall, it's a little bit shorter in length.

So the message is shorter. It's 340 characters instead of 408. but there's more symbols. In the 340 there's 63 different symbols, whereas in the 408 there's 54. So there's nine more symbols to deal with. And the effect that that has is, if it's a substitution cipher,

is that it means there's more possibilities for solutions because there's more symbols in the key. So the key is longer. One of the other unusual things about it that's different is, you know, with this kind of cipher, if it's a homophonic substitution cipher, normally you're trying to hide the symbol frequencies. You're trying to make them flat, which means you don't see something that's occurring a lot that will make you think that that stands for a certain letter.

But in the 340, the plus symbol, there's an unusual number of them. It happens very frequently. I think there's 24 occurrences in it, which is about 7% of the entire cipher. In the 408, I think the most commonly occurring symbol occurred only 12 times. So in a shorter message, this plus sign is occurring twice as often as the top symbol from the 408. It's just a strange, like, why would this symbol appear so often? Maybe it has something to do with why we can't solve it. It has a special meaning that we haven't discovered yet.

There's some other differences, too. Like, if you look at the 408, there's other clues that led to the solution, like the pairs of symbols that repeat. There's patterns of three or more symbols that repeat that you can look at and uses clues because similar patterns occur in the English language. So those kinds of things help you find, you know, what direction the message is written in and what words might fit. Those patterns exist in the 340, but there's not as many of them. so there seems to be some effort in the 340 to hide more of these clues especially the repeating bygrams those are the pairs of symbols that you can find repeating multiple times in the cipher

if you look at the 408 there are certain pairs of symbols that that repeat and there are many of them and the reason there are many of them is because in the English language, that happens naturally. Like, think of the first two letters of the. You know, the T and the H appear very often in words, the, this, those, there. And so that you can use that as a clue in a cipher to figure out, oh, that must stand for T and H.

But you don't see a lot of those in the 340. They're in there, but there's not as many as you would expect for a message of that length. So those things I think so far have contributed to it not being solved. It's made it harder. And Dave, let me ask this. Is there a possibility that this is not even a real message? And that's why it hasn't been solved.

Yeah, I have a number of possibilities there. Here are the different scenarios that I can think of. The first possibility that most people believed probably for a long time was that it's just that because there's more symbols and the message is shorter, there's more keys to search. So that's something true about this. If you treat it as a normal substitution cipher,

the number of keys that are possible is much higher than the number of keys that are possible for the 408. And that's because of the number of symbols. There's more symbols in the 340 than the 408. But I think that this possibility is excluded that it's not true because if you treat it as a substitution cipher, it has gone, you know, there have been many years of software-based attacks on the cipher that haven't cracked it. And the reason for this confidence that it's not substitution ciphers is because you can make a cipher that's just like it

and you hide a message and have the same number of symbols. But all of those ciphers will be cracked by these software tools. So there are these tools that are very good at solving these kinds of substitution ciphers, and they're very good at solving the test ciphers that look just like the 340. So I think that has led lots of people to believe that, you know, if this was strictly a substitution cipher, it would have been solved by now. So, Dave, before we move on from the 340 cipher, I just wanted to ask you one more thing. A few years back, the FBI announced that they had high confidence in something relating to this cipher.

Can you tell us just why they're so confident in regards to the 340? Yeah, I think you're referring to when I think Dan Olson, he's the head of the cryptanalysis and racketeering records units, unit of the FBI. They're in charge of they get all these documents from criminal investigations and where there's hidden information. They're trying to recover hidden information from those documents, you know, encoded documents. They got a lot of stuff from gang activity or people. in prison trying to send messages to the outside world to try to coordinate crimes and things. He said that he thought that there was a message in the, that it was definitely a message, but that it was split into halves, that you could take the first half of the 340 and cut out the bottom half,

then take that bottom half and like paste it to the right side of the top half. And then you could read off the message. He also said he thought that some of the rows. had no message, but that others had the message. And so I think that was based on counting the number of repeating symbols in each of the rows. Like there are certain rows where there's no repeating symbols whatsoever. It kind of goes against expectation, I guess. But even with that rearrangement of the halves in mind, people have run all different kinds of combinations of those through software tools to try to

crack the message and so far they haven't turned up anything. So there is neither confirmation or denial of his suggestion. Dave, can you tell us a little bit about the very short April 1970s cipher than the my name is cipher? That one, he referred to the 340 at the beginning of that letter. He says, by the way, have you cracked the last cipher I sent you? So that was I think six months after the 340 was mailed. Okay. So he essentially what he's doing is he wants to follow up because they're not solving it. He wants to see what's going on with it. Yeah, he's had time to notice that, you know, no solutions have been published.

And I guess, you know, the first time around that cipher, the 408 was solved rather quickly. And so he may have, you know, had a different reaction to that. And then when the 340 was published, there was no feedback with solutions in the media this time. So, I don't know, maybe he was happy that there was no solution. And people have been wasting so much time on it. You know, six months is really not that long compared to almost 50 years it's been that people are still trying to work on it. But it almost seems like he's trying to give a hint with the 13 symbol cipher. And let me just follow up too.

So the my name is cipher. My name is and then 13 characters. Referencing the 13 characters, do you think that could be a clue to going back to solving the actual 340? Going back and saying, hey, he's telling us there's 13 characters here we need to be looking for. Could there be something in that that will help solve the 340? Yeah, I think that idea has come up a lot because he does. seem to be referencing the 340 in this

part of the letter that included the cipher so it's possible that these symbols have some importance in the 340 or I mean some of the symbols in the 13 character cryptogram are not in the 340 like the circle dates

and the I don't know if the upside down T the upside down T I don't think is in the 340 you know there's a lot of speculation around that so how would you apply those 13 symbols to the 340 to help get the key. And I've seen people try different ideas, but it obviously hasn't led to anything yet. But I think that's something worth thinking about when approaching these two ciphers, the 13 and the 340.

In June of 1970, Zodiac mailed a cipher along with a Philip 66 map. Tell us a little bit about that one. You know, by that point, he was on a role with writing all. all these letters about bombs and his death machine, shooting up school buses. So this persona that he had built up was quite prominent by then. And so when the map and this code were released, it was like icing on his cake, his project. He had this big project talking about his bombs and his death machine and keeping his name alive in the newspapers. So this seemed to be another way to do that.

But the cipher itself, it's interesting, but it has a similar problem to the 13 character cipher, namely that it's rather short. You know, other short ciphers are solvable. But the reason why the 32-character cipher is not solvable is because there are very few repeated symbols. So if you assume that it's a substitution cipher, there are only a few symbols that repeat.

So that means you can fit, you can fit just about anything into those 32 characters. So there's not much to go on as far as being able to verify a solution. And that's the key to knowing if you have the right answer for these sorts of puzzles. You need to be able to verify that your answer is unique and better than all the other alternate solutions. And so that that cipher is rather difficult to deal with. There's not much you can do with it. I think with the wrap up with a little about the unconfirmed 1973 Zodiac cipher mailed in Albany, New York.

And I know that you found some things when digging into that. Tell us what your findings were, Dave. So the Albany cipher was 51 symbols, I think. So it's a little short, but it's not too short. the FBI solved it and their solution is in the publicly available Zodiac-related files. The name of the possible victim, do you think they came up with that or you think they just didn't share it? What do you think the deal is with that? I think they didn't share it.

They redacted it because it was, yeah. I got you. So they probably came up with a name and on your own, you were able to come up with some possible names. Yeah, I was. But the problem is that they had the originals, presumably, or, a really good copy of the original letter that had the cipher on it. But the copy that we have from these reproductions in these files, it's a very poor image quality.

So the beginning of the cipher, which has the name in it, it's very hard to see what the symbols are. And so that makes it difficult to know for sure if the names are matching properly. There are a few that fit, But so far, I don't think any of them have lined up with actual people that were working at the, or living in the Albany area or specifically female staff working at the Albany Medical Center at the time. That would be the ultimate match is to find the woman who was specifically threatened there, referenced in the cipher. And as far as the, so is that? a substitution cipher as well?

Yeah, it's just a simple substitution cipher. So if you plug in the key that the FBI came up with, you'll get, you know, for the part after the name portion, you would get Albany Medical Center, this only the beginning. Okay. So, and then it's sort of like the solved Zodiac cipher in which one character, you know, is equal to a symbol. That's right, yes.

And it's similar in that respect. The differences are the Albany Seipher seems to have different symbols. They don't quite look like Zodiac symbols. There's kind of a crosshairs type symbol, I think, in that that could be compared to the Zodiac's favorite symbol. And I guess some of the square symbols maybe, but there are some unusual symbols in there that Zodiac didn't use. in his ciphers. The other difference is that the 408 was homophonic,

which means you can, you know, a normal substitution cipher, you would take the letter E and then only have one symbol to represent the letter E. But in the 408, he used seven different symbols to represent the same letter E.

And that was to kind of hide the clues that codebreakers use to break the code. I don't think that's happening in the Albany cipher. It's just one to one, which means, you know, E is always represented by the same symbol. So sort of like A is one, B is two, and there's not three different symbols for the letter E, for example. Yeah, that's correct. All right.

And let me ask you, so what's your overall opinion of that cipher? Do you think it could be a legitimate one? Do you think it's a hoax? And if either way, why do you feel the way you feel about your conclusions? Well, I'm not a document examiner. But when you look at the other zodiac letters, you kind of get a sense of what you would expect a zodiac letter to look like. You know, if one came in the mail today, you'd kind of have a sense of what the handwriting would look like. And I don't feel that way about the Albany cipher.

The letter that it came on, just the handwriting seems so much different to me than the zodiac handwriting. And, you know, people get into these discussions about what. well, you might have changed hands or changed, you know, like purposefully tried to hide his handwriting and so forth. And you could use that argument with so many different letters and make it and suggest that, you know, they too are zodiac letters. So, yeah, I don't get this, I don't get the impression that it's the actual zodiac. I think it may be a copycat. And we've had plenty of copycats since the Zodiac was active. So once again, that was Dave Oranchak. and he really gave us some very specific explanations of the Zodiac ciphers.

We hope that gives everybody more of an insight into the ciphers written by Zodiac. So Morf, as we're wrapping up episode 11, we're reaching the end of season one. I mean, next episode number 12, that's it. That is it for the first season of criminology. Yeah, Mike, it's amazing that it went by so fast. We've really covered a lot of ground here in season one. And if the Zodiac case was new to you, we hope you have an appreciation for the case. And if you already know the Zodiac case, we're hoping that you picked up something new.

One of the common things that we've heard all season long is that despite people knowing the case or thinking they knew the case, that we were able to give them a lot of information that they didn't know. But we still have episode 12 next week. We have a lot of stuff to touch on. We have an interview with Tom Voight, webmaster of the longest running Zodiac Killer site, Zodiackiller.com. We're going to talk about all the movies, the books, the documentaries that have been made. And of course, we're going to cover your unanswered questions and go over your theories. So all season long, we've been asking you to send in your emails, leave your voicemails, share your theories and your unanswered questions about the case.

And in episode 12, we're going to read your emails and clear a lot of stuff up. So we're going to talk about some questions and theories that you've submitted so far. So if you like the show, make sure you subscribe. And right now it's even more important because we're getting ready to finish up season one. We're working on what we're going to cover in season two. So make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it when we're. come back. Take a minute, rate and review on iTunes or your favorite Android app. And be sure to follow us on social media. We're on Twitter at Criminology Pod, and you can find us on Facebook by searching

criminology podcast. And if you want to join our Facebook discussion group to discuss the podcast or the case, you can search Facebook for our group, which is Criminology Podcast, Discussion, and Fans. We love hearing from you, so be sure to send us to your emails at Criminology Podcast at gmail.com. Or you can leave us a voicemail by Kong 661-77 crime. And if you've enjoyed season one of criminology, which we hope you have, we'd really appreciate it if you'd spread the word about the show. Some more, if I think it's time to announce our guest host for next week, and it's going to be none other than Gibby himself,

my co-host for True Crime All the Time and True Crime All the Time Unsolved. Gibby is a movie addict, a movie file. I don't even know if that's a word. So we wanted to have him on at least talking about the movies related to Zodiac. Now, anybody that listens to True Crime All the Time or True Crime All The Time Unsolved will know that even though Gibby thinks he knows a lot about movies, the best part is when he gets to talking and 10 seconds in, realize, is he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. That's the best part for me, Morp. And I think that's the best part for the audience.

So how can we not have him on? Yeah, Mike, I've been excited all season long to have Gibby on and it's something we've been thinking about. So it should be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to it. I know my sister-in-law is a big Gibby fan, team Gibby. So it should be fun. Well, and it's going to be an episode to bring him on because, you know, you and I have been pretty serious, right, with the case of the Zodiac. That's how we chose to do it. We wanted to

lay out the facts. We wanted to be very factual, very matter of fact. But episode 12, we can let loose a little bit more. Now, I'm not saying it's going to be no holds barred, but we don't have to be as straight laced as we have been for the first 11 episodes. Let's put it that way. So we want to leave you with a promo for a true crime podcast that we really think you'll enjoy. And this one's for our friends, Ember and Angel over at Color Me Dead. Have a listen. Hello, fellow skin suits. This is Angel and Ember. Deep down, do you have a secret passion for true crime, sarcasm, inappropriate jokes, but you still want to hear all those lovely details.

However, you still need a little bit of humor to get you through those dark moments. Then come hang out with us over at the Color Me Dead podcast. We try to balance both humor and facts perfectly. We also go on some pretty extraordinary squirrel hunts. We can be found on iTunes and all other podcast apps. Come over to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and see us at Color Me Dead podcast for the latest updates and gory chat. We release on Wednesdays because on Wednesdays we wear murder.

Don't forget to spay and neuter your pets and stay out of chalk lines. All right, so that's it for us. That's it for episode 11. Make sure you tune in next week for the final episode, episode 12. We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everybody.