Tag: zodiac killer

UNLV gunman ID’d as Anthony Polito, 67, professor who failed to get job at school

The madman who slaughtered three people in a mass shooting at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on Wednesday was a professor who failed to secure a job at the school and claimed to have solved the mystery of the Zodiac Killer and missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.

Anthony Polito, 67, had unsuccessfully applied for a professorship at UNLV before he unleashed his deadly rampage on the campus just before noon, law enforcement sources told ABC News.

Polito was armed with a handgun during his massacre and was killed following a shootout with two police detectives, the outlet reported.

The shooting began around 11:45 a.m. on the fourth floor of Beam Hall, UNLV’s business school, near the student union building.

Police found three people dead when they arrived.

A fourth person was taken to an area hospital, where they were listed in critical but stable condition.

Four others were hospitalized after suffering panic attacks and two officers were treated for minor injuries suffered while clearing buildings, LVMPD police said.

Polito’s LinkedIn account states he was a “semi-retired university professor” based in Las Vegas and attended undergraduate at Radford University in Virginia, where he graduated with a double major in mathematics and statistics before he earned his master’s degree at Duke University and completed his doctorate of philosophy at the University of Georgia.

He served as an associate professor for 15½ years at East Carolina University from August 2001 to January 2017.

During that time, he also ran a personal website about his life, in which he posted a 15-page theory claiming he decoded the messages left by the Zodiac Killer, who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s.

“Just so you won’t initially write off my solution as that of a total crackpot, let me first say that I have been a member of MENSA for 35 years, I hold a double undergraduate degree in Mathematics & Statistics (two skills closely associated with successful cryptographers) … and I hold a masters degree and a doctoral degree from top-tier universities as well,” Polito wrote in the introduction.

“So I am not a dumb guy!”

He further claimed to have solved the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and figured out the true meaning of Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2010 film “Inception.”

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Zodiac witness speaks out for first time to claim the murders were the work of multiple killers – because the man she saw did not match criminal sketches made after notorious cab driver shooting

The Zodiac killings of the late 1960s and 1970s may have been the work of more than one murderer, a witness has suggested. 

The terrifying new theory was revealed by a woman who believes she saw the man responsible for one of the gruesome murders in the new Peacock docuseries, ‘Myth of the Zodiac Killer,’ which premiered on Tuesday. 

‘The Zodiac’, as the killer became known, was believed to be responsible for five deaths and two more attempted murders in the San Francisco bay area, but his correspondence claims he killed 37 people.  

The supposed murderer wrote confessional letters to local news outlets and four cryptic ciphers, but his identity has never been revealed. 

Now a witness at Lake Berryessa in Napa County – where Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22, and Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, were stabbed in broad daylight on September 27, 1969 – has spoken publicly for the first time. 

Shepard survived but Hartnell died, and before leaving the park the killer left the dates of two previous murders on the side of Hartnell’s car. 

Linda Jensen, who was sunbathing at Lake Berryessa that day, claims the man she believes she saw is inconsistent with police sketches from other supposed Zodiac murders. 

‘There are other drawings that came out, of the Zodiac, that looked nothing like what I saw that day,’ Jensen told the documentary. 

Jensen was at the lake sunbathing with friends when a strange man had stalked the group and hid behind a tree for around 45 minutes. 

The group pretended he wasn’t there, for their own safety, she explained. 

Jensen believes the man she saw had notably different hair, eyes and facial features to another sketch produced after the murder of a 29-year-old cab driver named Paul Lee Stine who was shot by a passenger on October 11, just a few weeks later. 

‘He had very smooth, parted hair and combed [it] really straight…[he looked] just very intense, like focused,’ Jensen, said of the man she saw.  

‘The vibes coming off of him were bad, were dark. All of us felt that’ she said. 

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FBI has IDENTIFIED Zodiac Killer as Air Force veteran Gary Francis Poste – who died in 2018 – and has partial DNA sample that could link him to five serial murders, cold case investigator claims

A cold case investigator is claiming that the FBI has identified the man suspected to be the infamous ‘Zodiac Killer’, who killed at least five people in the late 1960s.

Journalist Thomas Colbert alleges that an FBI whistleblower confirmed to him that Air Force veteran Gary Francis Poste, who has been previously posited as the killer, is currently listed by the bureau as a suspect.

Colbert claims FBI labs have a ‘partial’ DNA sample on Poste – who has been dead since 2018 – that links him to the murders, and believes authorities didn’t look into him enough when he was alive.

‘The felon has been secretly listed as the Zodiac “suspect” in Headquarters’ computers since 2016,’ Colbert’s organization, Case Breakers, said in a statement.

While the Zodiac killer is known to have killed five people in Northern California, the true figure is believed to be between 20 and 28 people, while the killer themselves claimed to have killed 37 in taunts sent to officials.

The FBI has long denied that the long-open case has been solved, confirming it remains open as recently as October 2021.

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FBI Confirms Zodiac Killer’s Infamous 340 Cipher Has Been Decoded, And His Message Finally Revealed

A team of codebreakers decided to try and crack the code specifically because they knew it would be a challenge. 

David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke used software to help them break the cipher, first by finding the many possible reading directions that could be used if the cipher was transpositional. By sheer luck, Oranchak found that one solution for how the cipher could be transposed revealed fragments of messages, including “hope you are,” “trying to catch me” and “or the gas chamber”.

This gave them clues that the message wasn’t transcribed in one big block as it was presented, but instead was broken into three smaller blocks of text made up of nine lines, followed by nine lines, followed by a final two.

By starting in the top left hand corner, then moving down one line and across two spaces to get the next letter, a key which could be translated into letters and then words emerged. The letter “B” for instance, was represented by “□7”, “c” by a simple “9” and “A” by a whole load of symbols unavailable on a keyboard. You can see these neatly shown in the video released by the team below. 

Through use of this method, and some slight adjustments by ignoring a few words that stood out before transposing the text, a message was revealed:

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME
THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW
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 

“Of all the things that stood out was the line ‘that wasn’t me on the TV show’,” Oranchak explained in the video. “At this point I jumped out of my chair because I knew the cipher was received on November 8, 1969, which is about two weeks after someone calling themselves Zodiac called into a TV talk show hosted by Jim Dunbar. While the caller was on the air, he said ‘I need help, I’m sick, I don’t want to go to the gas chamber.'”

This for Oranchak made the solution seem real, as it fit with the events around the time it was received. The rest of the message also seemed quite in character for the Zodiac Killer. 

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Cold case team says Zodiac Killer ID’d, linking him to another murder

A team of specialists who investigate cold cases says it has identified the Zodiac Killer, one of America’s most prolific serial murderers who terrorized communities in the San Francisco area in the late 1960s with a series of brutal slayings and unsolvable riddles.

The Case Breakers, a team of more than 40 former law enforcement investigators, journalists and military intelligence officers, has tackled other mysteries such as the D.B. Cooper hijacking heist, the disappearance of former labor union boss Jimmy Hoffa and other unsolved cases. The group believes the killer is responsible for a slaying hundreds of miles away that was never linked to him. 

The Zodiac Killer has been connected to five murders that occurred in 1968 and 1969 in the San Francisco area. Unlike most serial killers, the Zodiac taunted authorities with complex ciphers in letters sent to newspapers and law enforcement. The slayings have spawned books, movies and documentaries in the years since, and amateur and professional sleuths have pored over the case in an effort to unmask the killer. 

In the decades since the first murder, many potential suspects have been investigated. 

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French Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Zodiac Killer’s Remaining Ciphers

An engineer in France believes that he has cracked the two remaining ciphers written by the infamous Zodiac Killer, but convincing other researchers has proven to be a far more difficult puzzle to solve. Back in December, Faycal Ziraoui reportedly became intrigued by the indecipherable missives said to have been penned by the serial killer and set about trying to unravel the mystery that has stumped researchers and experts for over 50 years. “I was obsessed with it, 24 hours a day, that’s all I could think about,” he recalled. Amazingly, Ziraoui claims to have managed to decode the messages in a mere two weeks, which understandably raised eyebrows in the often contentious world of Zodiac research.

After confidently posting his findings online, Ziraoui almost immediately found his work dismissed by highly skeptical individuals who have spent years studying the case. They largely argued that the two ciphers are simply too short to ever truly be confirmed at correctly decoded, since they consist of only 32 and 13 characters respectively. Dubious of that critique, Ziraoui’s brother postulated that the community of armchair researchers really took issue with the codes being cracked because “these people don’t want the game to end.” That said, beyond the online world, opinions of the engineer’s work is also divided as a pair of French cryptographers have lent credence to Ziraoui’s research, while a third argued that there are flaws with his methodology.

To that end, Ziraoui says that he based his process for decoding the letters on the much-heralded solution to a Zodiac cipher that was announced late last year. He proceeded to take the encryption key for that letter and applied it to the last remaining unsolved missives, dubbed Z32 and Z13. After using a few different cryptographic techniques, which he details in-depth on YouTube, Ziraoui ultimately came upon what he believes is the solution to the coded messages. Specifically, he says, one cipher contains coordinates for where the serial killer claimed to have hidden a bomb and the other actually reveals the name of the mysterious murderer. That individual, Ziraoui contends, was a man named Lawrence Kaye, who has long been considered a Zodiac suspect by one faction of the research community.

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Zodiac’s cipher codebreaker speaks out: Killer was his own self-defeating “publicist”

Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician, first learned of the Zodiac Killer’s unsolved ciphers — a series of encrypted messages — from a documentary in the 1990s. His interest marginally increased in 2007 after the release of David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” but it wasn’t until last year that it completely was cemented while watching code-breaking expert David Oranchak’s “Let’s Crack Zodiac” YouTube series. 

The series was dedicated to solving the codes the Northern California serial killer sent in letters to newspapers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the ciphers, called the 408 cipher, was solved in 1969 by a schoolteacher and his wife, but it did not reveal the killer’s identity; the additional three puzzles remained unsolved for over 51 years, despite advances in computer technology. 

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What a Mathematician Learned From Cracking the Zodiac Killer’s Code

A group of three hobbyist cryptographers last week cracked one of the most infamous ciphers created by the Zodiac Killer, more than half-a-century after the murderer claimed their first confirmed victim.

The unnamed Zodiac killed at least five people in Northern California between the late 1960s and early 1970s, and derived their pseudonym from a series of taunting letters sent to the San Francisco Bay Area press up until 1974. Those letters included four cryptic messages, known as “ciphers.” Up until a few days ago, only one of those ciphers had ever been convincingly decoded.

Cryptologist David Oranchak, who has been trying to crack the notorious “340 cipher” (it contains 340 characters) for more than a decade, made a crucial breakthrough earlier this year when applied mathematician Sam Blake came up with about 650,000 different possible ways in which the code could be read. From there, using code-breaking software designed by Jarl Van Eycke, the team’s third member, they came up with a small number of valuable clues that helped them piece together a message in the cipher:

“I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME 

THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW 

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”

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Genius! These codebreakers just cracked the Zodiac Killer’s infamous 340 cipher, 51 YEARS after it was first published.

On December 5th, 2020 Sam Blake, Jarl Van Eycke, David Oranchak finally cracked the Zodiac Killer’s unsolved 340-character cipher.

The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who was active in Northern California in the 1960s and ’70s. His name came from the taunting letters he would send to the San Francisco Bay Area press which included a total of four ciphers. It was confirmed that he killed at least five people, though he claimed to have murdered 37.

Police still don’t know the identity of the Zodiac Killer, though they’ve long hoped that solving his ciphers would reveal more details about him.

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