So, who is this marine biology student at SF State? The bank messenger one?

So, who is this marine biology student at SF State? The bank messenger one?

He was described as a 25-year old SF state graduate student in marine biology who worked two jobs as a bank messenger and a night watchman during the summer.
But his name was never revealed.

doranchak said, "Hidden clues: Are they real or fake?"

Regarding Pivot 1 (which has no decoded spelling errors):
With ciphertext decoded into plaintext (below underscores _ used
for HTML spacing);

_ _ _ O
_ _ _ S
_ _ _ E
O S E A

An implied meaning could be ‘Officer, Sea‘.

Regarding Pivot 2 (which contains a decoded textual spelling error):
With ciphertext decoded into plaintext without any correction for
incorrectly spelled words (again, underscores _ used for HTML
spacing);

_ _ _ E
_ _ _ N
_ _ _ E
E N E O

To people taught within a military, or possibly military-like,
organization the letters ‘ENE’ suggest the word ‘engineer’.

An implied meaning could be ‘Engineer(ing) Officer‘.

The leftmost letter ‘E’ in the horizontal section of Pivot 2, is
actually an incorrect spelling of (that part of) the decoded text,
that is, the decoded text with error reads "BECAUSE E NOW", while
the decoded text with the error corrected reads "BECAUSE I NOW".
Notwithstanding that there may be other reasons why the Zodiac
Killer allowed spelling errors to occur in the decoded text, one of
the reasons for the spelling error in this particular part of the Z340
could perhaps be an intentional amusingly sly emphasis or linkage
of the word ‘I’ as a singular first person pronoun, in conjuction
with the decoded plaintext (with error) in the horizontal portion of
Pivot 2 of ‘E N E O’ (if ‘ENE’ is in fact meant to imply ‘engineer’).

Another point about Pivot 2, is that the two decoded letters
immediately to the left of the horizontal section of Pivot 2 and
the two decoded letters immediately vertically above the vertical
section of Pivot 2, are as shown below;

_ _ _ _ _ _ I _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ L I F E I S
_ _ _ _ _ _ E _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ N _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ E _ _ _ _
M E E N E O _ _ _ _

The decoded plaintext phrase "LIFE IS" seen above did not
follow the Z340 ciphertext methodology of moving across two
letters and down one letter to get to the next sequential letter
of the plaintext. The phrase "LIFE IS" has been deliberately,
separately emplaced by the Zodiac Killer within the decoded
text. Interestingly, it can be seen that symetrically for two
letters leftwards horizontally and for two letters vertically about
Pivot 2 are more instances of singular first person pronouns (in
conjuction with ‘ENE’).

Regarding the Top Box Corner (it has no decoded spelling errors):
decoded plaintext (below underscores _ used for HTML spacing);

_ E
S A

Regarding the Bottom Box Corner (it has no decoded spelling
errors):
decoded plaintext (below underscores _ used for HTML spacing);

A S
E _

Obviously, the word ‘SEA’ can be made from those letters.

Are all these points interesting coincidences or was there an
intentional design here? Time may tell.
Cheers

Let’s Crack Zodiac: Episode 9 is out!

Brilliant. Been hanging out for more of your work.

"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." Albert Einstein

 

How hard was it to make it so that certain words are being implied by the symbols, i.e. the quasi-Zodiac signature in the bottom line, or the backwards motorcycle up there in the middle?

So, who is this marine biology student at SF State? The bank messenger one?

He was described as a 25-year old SF state graduate student in marine biology who worked two jobs as a bank messenger and a night watchman during the summer.
But his name was never revealed.

Here is the article :-

Better copies can be seen on RichardG’s site

https://www.zodiacciphers.com/zodiac-news/the-diagonal-structure-of-the-340-cipher

It’s odd that SF State keeps showing up. Bates’ fiance went to college there. Paul Stine attended college there. Mystery codebreaker went to college there.

Great video, as always!

"I HOPE YOU " , is interesting .

I don’t know the timeline of the Z letters that contain this common fragment of the cipher , I will research

Could the Eureka mailing have anything to do with 1 down 2 across?

One observation I’ve had, which I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere (though it may have been and I just haven’t seen it)…

We know that some of the spelling mistakes come from Zodiac mistakenly putting in the wrong cipher character. That’s how we got "dangertue", as discussed in the 408 video. Here, we have "bringo", where he put an R instead of a filled P. It’s possible this was done intentionally, but we’ll probably never know. It makes sense that it could have been a mistake. The fact that there’s no K in the key might also explain "worv", or perhaps the key did have a K and it looked similar to a filled circle. Who knows?

Anyway, the ending of the second section is ambiguous. "I am not afraid because I know that my new [life is] life will be an easy one in paradice [death]". We can remove the bracketed words and the message makes sense: "I know that my new life will be an easy one…"

My thought is that the T symbol is a circle with a vertical line through it, and the W symbol is a circle with a horizontal line through it. We can make the second section end properly by substituting that: "I am not afraid because I know what my new life is". Then maybe this is supposed to be followed with death. The context of the message suggests that he doesn’t fear the unknown because he thinks he knows what to expect.

Of course, it then begs the question: why is "life is" on its own, inconsistent with the reading rule, at the top of the section? If it fits, why did he change it? Just to throw codebreakers off? Or is it supposed to be separate? Maybe his message had 11 symbols missing and he just thought up "life is death" and stuck them in there randomly to fill in space.

It doesn’t really matter if there are still ambiguities. It’s been over half a century and we still haven’t figured out if the ending of the 408 is a secret message or if it’s just filler. The bulk of the message has been decoded, and it’s really pretty boring and pointless. The only thing of interest is that he seemed content with the number of people he had killed. The last confirmed killing happened before this was mailed. I wonder, if it had been cracked back then, would he have continued to kill in order to get attention? Or was he really satisfied with his delusional belief that he had enough slaves for his afterlife?

We’ll probably never know. The only thing I can say is that, if he’s not already dead, I hope Z gets a nasty shock when he gets to Paradice and finds that it’s predominantly red and fiery and that the slaves he sees around him are not his… and that he is one of them. And on the off-chance that Hades allows for visitors from Paradise (with an S), I hope David, Betty Lou, Darlene, Cecilia, and Paul (and possibly more) have the opportunity to stop by and make him do their bidding every once in a while.