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| Zodiac Killer |
Fayçal Ziraoui, 38, a French-Morrocan
business consultant said he spent two weeks on the puzzles, after which he
believed he had solved them. He shared his findings with the Reddit sub-thread
devoted to the quest of solving the ciphers, according
to reports.
Moderators of the 50,000-member subreddit
removed the post in question because it was "too short" and the
puzzle "is not solvable at all without more information from the
author."
Someone on zodiackillersite.com denounced
the solution, citing the length of time as reason enough to doubt
Ziraoui, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Ziraoui took up code-breaking as a hobby
during the pandemic and after an article was published in a French magazine in
December 2020 that sparked his interest in the killer’s puzzles.
The puzzle has captured the public imagination since the initial killings in California in the late '60s: The first cipher was solved shortly after police received it in 1969, but some of the later puzzles took years – even decades – to solve if anyone solved them at all.
Ziraoui used the same key used to solve a 340-character cipher last year and applied
it to the remaining puzzles. His approach opened up an opportunity for more
creative approaches in the following stages.
He quickly grew obsessed with solving the
puzzle.
"I was obsessed with it, 24 hours a
day, that’s all I could think about," Ziraoui told The New York Times.
He deciphered the longer puzzle of 32
characters, which claimed to hold the location of a bomb in a school set to
detonate in 1970, as "LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST,"
coordinates that use the magnetic field rather than geographic locators.
Ziraoui then applied his work to the final
cipher, which he said he solved in an hour. He found the name "KAYR,"
which he thought resembled the last name of Lawrence Kaye, a suspect in the
case who lived in South Lake Tahoe.
The coordinates locate a school in South
Lake Tahoe, as well.
Ziraoui found that the typo was common to
the killer’s other messages, and he thought the results were too much to be a coincidence.
Other codebreakers remain divided over Ziraoui’s work: David Naccache, a professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a cryptographer, believes that Ziraoui’s solution is sound, while Rémi Géraud, also from the École Normale Supérieure, argued that the Ziraoui made arbitrary choices.
As Kaye died in 2010, it is impossible to
confirm whether Ziraoui’s work is correct until other codebreakers attempt his
solution, but five months after posting the solution, Ziraoui retreated from
the online community that rejected him.
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