self-gratification. he thought could create something that couldn’t be solved and in the process waste the time of police.

He wanted people to waste their time trying to solve them.

So, you both believe he didn’t want them solved? Then why create a solvable cipher to begin with? Why not just create jibberish and tell everyone it meant something, and laugh as they struggled helplessly?

Then why create a solvable cipher to begin with?

The guy was nutty as a fruitcake. Your guess is as good as mine. I just find it hard to believe he created a cipher that no one else can solve.

My take is that the first one was deliberately "easy" to uncipher, and the following ones are just gibberish so he can have fun "watching" people trying to solve them. Maybe he even reads us here once in a while just to have a good laugh, who knows? :/

he was playing a game. he created the rules. it was important to him to feel superior. in his mind the game is invalid if he creates a jibberish cipher. it has to be "solvable" (although he can make it nearly impossible) in order for him to feel like the cops/fbi are stupid. it also serves to drum up the kind of press he seemed to enjoy. "cipher killer sends another letter", in his mind, striking fear into thousands of people.

the memorable part of the zodiac isn’t the murders, it’s the letters and ciphers. they served as a way of making him the boogeyman, making him infamous, and he certainly seemed to put more time and energy into the correspondences than the killings. only brs appears to have more effort than ambush-shoot-leave. you even see him reveal a bit of his personality with the melvin buttons letter – he didn’t like it when the press stopped writing about him, and he didn’t like that his public impact wasn’t more pronounced or permanent.

the 408 told us nothing about him. maybe an incidental clue that he read the most dangerous game, but that’s it. i don’t think the 340 is going to tell us anything revealing either, but i do think it’s solvable. he was embarrassed that the 408 was solved so quickly so he added a step to the 340 to make it harder. he wasn’t an elite codebreaker, he wasn’t even patient enough to start over when he made the backwards "k" mistake.

he was playing a game. he created the rules. it was important to him to feel superior. in his mind the game is invalid if he creates a jibberish cipher. it has to be "solvable" (although he can make it nearly impossible) in order for him to feel like the cops/fbi are stupid. it also serves to drum up the kind of press he seemed to enjoy. "cipher killer sends another letter", in his mind, striking fear into thousands of people.

the memorable part of the zodiac isn’t the murders, it’s the letters and ciphers. they served as a way of making him the boogeyman, making him infamous, and he certainly seemed to put more time and energy into the correspondences than the killings. only brs appears to have more effort than ambush-shoot-leave. you even see him reveal a bit of his personality with the melvin buttons letter – he didn’t like it when the press stopped writing about him, and he didn’t like that his public impact wasn’t more pronounced or permanent.

the 408 told us nothing about him. maybe an incidental clue that he read the most dangerous game, but that’s it. i don’t think the 340 is going to tell us anything revealing either, but i do think it’s solvable. he was embarrassed that the 408 was solved so quickly so he added a step to the 340 to make it harder. he wasn’t an elite codebreaker, he wasn’t even patient enough to start over when he made the backwards "k" mistake.

Thanks, masootz.

I agree 100%. I believe Alfred E Neuman is the solution to the Z13 – partly because I think that is the kind of goofy prank Zodiac would love to pull. He’s a trickster. A joker. A troll. He delights in mocking something as serious as murder.

I think the Z408 is solvable. I don’t think it’s a particularly advanced code. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason it hasn’t been solved is that Zodiac screwed up his own coding system and unintentionally ended up with jibberish rather than some highly advanced, complex code that the created.

Well, if his idea was to make those cyphers solvable, he f*cked up big time! That also means the key was too complex to find, so these coded texts are as good as gibberish, just pure nonsense.

Or he tried to make them difficult but went way over the top and made them virtually impossible.

I still think – based on nothing more than gut feeling – that he screwed up his own coding system somehow and ended up with a code that makes no sense.

The first code was a pretty straightforward substitution cipher. Even the message in it was rather banal and cliched. To think that by the next code Zodiac had become some master encryption expert with all sorts of funky tricks and such is really misguided IMO. He was an amateur and nothing suggests otherwise. Remember, the BTK wrote a code that wasn’t solved either and he wasn’t any kind of genius with codes.

Or he tried to make them difficult but went way over the top and made them virtually impossible.

this, precisely. he wanted it to take a while but he didn’t want it to be unsolvable. i’m sure he hoped it would take months and months, fbi involvement, etc and then they’d crack the message which would be completely unrevealing and pointless, like the 408. that would be perfection for a guy like him – force the cops to take great pains to solve it only for the message to be useless.

Yes. He certainly wanted the radians code to be solved. He was so anxious to have it solved, he provided a rather explicit clue.

I thin you’re exactly right. He wanted all the time and effort and attention to be poured into a code who’s message was probably about as vague and vapid as the Z408. Then he could laugh and laugh at trolling all the smart people trying to catch him.

Not sure if this has been discussed, but why do you all think he wrote the ciphers?

Did he write them intending for them to be solved? Surely, he did, otherwise he would have just created fakes ones. Based on the 408, we can assume they are legitimate codes. So, would Zodiac really have created codes that could never be solved? Did he get more enjoyment from writing the codes? Or from stumping people on them? Or having his message revealed?

I would say it was to create sensationalism around himself. For the same reason he demanded people wear "nice zodiac buttons". He wanted to be the talk of the town. A secret code would garner such attention, and it did.

My sense has always been that he approached these things with a sort of immature, cinematic mind. He clearly liked fiction, strange stories, etc.

I don’t think he was a genius codemaker. Just self taught and motivated.

I don’t buy into the 340 being gibberish. Where’s the fun in that for him?

It’s not like he can watch ppl try and fail solving it – the thrill for him would be in anticipating if they might break it someday.

I believe it’s a real cipher, but has either an extremely difficult 2nd step applied or a mistake that effectively renders it useless.

Or a one time pad.

I’ve always thought it’s probably about berryessa and the costume but that’s total speculation!

I think he knew by sending ciphers which would claim to reveal his name and give clues it would generate massive attention and publicity. As people would try to solve them etc.

He was right because 50 years later the ciphers still draw many people to this case.