A French-Moroccan man claims he solved two of the Zodiac killer’s ciphers weeks after a team of hobbyist cryptologists cracked another. But he continues to face skepticism from online enthusiasts and even some experts.
Fayçal Ziraoui, a 38-year-old freelance business consultant with degrees from France’s top engineering and business schools, told The New York Times in a story published Tuesday that he used the same encryption key uncovered by the three-person team that solved the killer’s 340-character cipher in December.
Applying the key to a 32-character cipher that the killer said, in one letter, provided the location of a bomb ready to detonate at a school in the fall of 1970, Ziraoui said he deciphered the code after two weeks of work: "LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST."
Those coordinates, based on the earth’s magnetic field, pointed to a school in South Lake Tahoe. A 1971 postcard that the killer is believed to have sent referred to the city.
Zaroui then said it took him an hour to solve the remaining 13-character cipher, which was preceded by the words "My name is __." He landed on "KAYR." Zaroui believed it was a typo – citing similarities to errors in the other ciphers – for "KAYE," referring to a suspect in the case named Lawrence Kaye.
Kaye, who also used the pseudonym "Kane" and died in 2010, lived in South Lake Tahoe in the early 1970s.
But Zaroui’s post on a 50,000-member Reddit page dedicated to the killer was deleted within minutes of posting on Jan. 3, and he almost immediately encountered doubt from enthusiasts on other forums and sites.
David Oranchak led the team who solved the 340-character cipher, and he told the paper that "it is practically impossible to determine if any" of the "hundreds" of proposals for 32- and 13-character ciphers – known as Z32 and Z13 – "are correct."
Oranchak said he’s skeptical of Zaroui’s solution, and École Normale Supérieure cryptographer Rémi Géraud told the outlet Zaroui had made arbitrary choices in his work.
Yet two experts who spoke to the paper disagreed. David Naccache – Géraud’s colleague and a cryptographer himself – and French cryptography specialist Emmanuel Thomé thought Zaroui used sound methods and that police should consider his work.
San Francisco police and the FBI declined to comment to the paper, citing an ongoing investigation. In December, the FBI acknowledged awareness of Oranchak and his team’s work, declining to comment beyond that recognition.
In a 10-month span beginning in December 1968, the killer is believed to have murdered five people in the Bay Area and injured two others. In a letter, the killer took credit for as many as 37 killings.
The killer sent four ciphers to media outlets between July 1969 and the following April, the first of which was cracked by a Salinas schoolteacher and his wife. The second was solved 51 years later by Oranchak’s team.
Speculation and theories about the killer’s identity persist five decades after the murders, including within intense online followings centered on specific suspects.
"He came in and told them ‘end of the game,' " Ziraoui’s brother, Youssef, told the paper. "But these people don’t want the game to end."
LISTEN on the Audacy App
Sign Up and Follow Audacy
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram