Serial murderers have exercised a peculiar and morbid public fascination since 1888, but the Cult of the Serial Killer really kicked off in the 1970s. Even today, as we enter the likely twilight of the serial killer (due to modern technology making it so much harder for human predators to prowl the fringes of the global village undetected for long), the serial killer is enjoying a new lease of life thanks to a slew of true crime shows.
Shows like Mindhunter focus around the serial killers who were caught, in an examination of the psychology of evil. But the ones who were never caught loom even larger. In a strange nexus of pop culture and crime, Dirty Harry mythologised the crimes of the real-life Zodiac Killer almost in real time. But where Harry Callahan brings “Scorpio” to rough justice, the real-life Zodiac Killer got away with it.
One of the most enduring legacies of the Zodiac Killer was not just a trail of destroyed and blighted lives, but the infamous series of encrypted notes he sent during his killing spree. The cypher the notes were written in defied the best efforts of cryptographers for over 50 years.
Earlier this year, an international team finally cracked the code.
The Zodiac Killer’s letters, which were sent to local newspapers, included detailed descriptions of the crimes, and he demanded they be published. Some of these letters contained complex cryptograms […]
The Zodiac Killer’s second cipher, known as the Z340 letter, was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle on November 8, 1969, and proved to be astonishingly difficult to decode. It was so difficult, in fact, that it took 51 years before anyone was able to crack it.
That day came on December 5, 2020, when US-based software developer David Oranchak, Australian mathematician Sam Blake, and Belgian cipher expert Jarl Van Eycke uncovered the mystery behind the Zodiac Killer’s cipher and had their work confirmed by the FBI […]
They found that Z340’s cipher alphabet consisted of 63 different symbols – a system complicated even further because multiple symbols could each represent a single letter from the alphabet. Moreover, the letter was rife with misspellings and transpositions, which made the codebreaking all the more complex.
So, what did the elusive murderer have to say?
“I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME,” the Z340 cipher begins. “THAT WASN’T ME ON THE TV SHOW” – referring to a recent live call-in purportedly from the Zodiac on A.M. San Francisco. The cipher continues:
“WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME
I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER
BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER
BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME
WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE
SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH
I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS
LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH”
While, disappointingly, decoding the cypher doesn’t appear to have brought us any closer to identifying the killer, at least one mystery is finally solved.
One prolific serial killer who was caught, was John Wayne Gacy. Gacy’s alter-ego as children’s entertainer “Pogo the Clown” makes the sadistic sex-murderer even more perversely fascinating.
But did Gacy prowl alone? His death-row lawyer doesn’t think so. Not only does attorney Karen Conti believe that Gacy may have killed 20 more than his accepted 33 victims, but she is convinced he committed at least some of them with help.
Police eventually found 26 bodies concealed in the crawl space of John Wayne Gacy’s house, as well as three more buried in the yard. The other four victims of John Wayne Gacy were dumped in the Des Plaines River […]
Karen Conti also said that she does not believe that John Wayne Gacy’s victims were his alone, and that he had help in some cases. During his killing spree, two men lived with him and had sex with him, and it’s likely, in her opinion, that they helped him commit his vile crimes.
“They were taking money and drugs from him, and they testified at trial that they actually dug the trenches underneath the house,” Conti said. “To me, it’s impossible for them not to have known what they were doing and why they were doing that. And it’s impossible for me to believe that Gacy, who was very portly, could actually go down into that crawlspace and carry bodies down there and bury them alone.”
One lucky victim, who escaped Gacy’s clutches alive, was Jeffrey Rignall. Rignall was lured into Gacy’s car and drugged and taken to the killer’s house. There, Rignall was tortured and sexually assaulted before Gacy dropped him back at the park where they’d met. Rignall allegedly told police that someone else was at Gacy’s house during the assault.
Adding to the suspicions is that victim Robert Gilroy was murdered and buried under Gacy’s house – but Gilroy went missing while Gacy was apparently out of town. The murder of Gilroy and another victim, Russell Nelson, differed from Gacy’s usual MO.
Still, while the Zodiac Killer has – to date – escaped justice, Gacy at least was executed in 1994.
