Oranchak met both Van Eycke and Blake online. “That's when I knew - oh my god, this is it,” Oranchak said.
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“THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW,” read the further unraveled lines of text. After he spotted the two phrases, Oranchak pulled out a smaller first section of the text, locked the phrases in place, and ran the program again. Perhaps the real Zodiac had something to say about the show or his impersonator, Oranchak thought. The second cipher went out a few weeks later. “You’re not going to the gas chamber,” Dunbar responded as the pair tried to coax information out of the caller, whose claim on the Zodiac's identity was later disproved by police. “I don’t want to go to the gas chamber,” the caller told Dunbar and Melli. San Francisco,” to speak to host Jim Dunbar and attorney Melvin Belli. That morning, a man claiming to be the killer had called into a live television show, “A.M. Two phrases jolted him: “HOPE YOU ARE TRYING TO CATCH ME.” “THE GAS CHAMBER.” The second made Oranchak think back to October 22, 1969, a moment in Zodiac history he had once read about.
He would set a few aside and keep moving through the thousands left, until December 3, 2020. While a handful of the solutions Oranchak sifted made him pause, none made him stop. He sent the variations in batches to Oranchak, who fed them through a program Van Eycke had designed to decrypt the symbols into plain English text. Oranchak, Blake, and Van Eycke had produced their cipher solutions in several steps broken up between them: Blake rearranged the second cipher's 340 symbols in 650,000 ways, moving them around in unique patterns using a technique known as transposition in cryptography, the age-old practice of making and breaking codes. Published by the San Francisco Chronicle on November 12, 1969, the cipher was the second of four the Zodiac had written for the police, the papers, and the public, and along with his identity, it had gone unsolved for more than half a century.
The hope was that in one of them, the trio would find the message sent by the self-described Zodiac, the man responsible for five murders committed in the San Francisco Bay Area from December 1968 to October 1969.
#Zodiac killer cipher software#
Oranchak, a Roanoke-based software developer and a 1997 computer engineering graduate of Virginia Tech, had been working with Australian applied mathematician Sam Blake and Belgian warehouse operator and programmer Jarl Van Eycke to produce and examine the solutions since March 2020.
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