Killers and Code-Breakers

We compose texts, letters and emails made up of the 26 letters of the English language. The Russian alphabet has 33 letters, the Chinese use characters, some say fluency may mean familiarity with 2000-3000 characters.

Anagrams are defined as “a word, phrase or name formed by rearranging the letters of another.” The local Sunday newspaper—if one still exists in your town—might publish an anagrammatic puzzle. Changing the order still allows or necessitates finding patterns that will uncover familiar-looking groupings. Based on where the letters fall in the sequence of words, “grw” can be “the.” Discovering this could lead you to replacing all “w” occurrences with “e” and so on. It isn’t easy. 

This jumbling of characters has long been used to create codes and secret messages. Ralphie Parker in the movie A Christmas Story works diligently to solve a code from Ovaltine, only to discover that the message is an advertisement for the product.  Some uses of such coding are more altruistic.

The Imitation Game tells the story of math genius Alan Turing, and his team’s efforts to crack The Enigma Code, used by the Germans during World War II. It’s hard to side with Ovaltine, but portions of The Imitation Game are pretty dry.

Nicholas Dietrich was, at one time, Baron of Ottendorf, in Germany. He helped build a corps in the Continental Army in 1776. It’s likely that a popular code, or cipher, the Ottendorf cipher, is named for Dietrich, or rather, his title. His cipher is also known as a book cipher, where numbers are used in the code to refer to page, line and word locations in an agreed, shared text, between the code sender and recipient. This cipher also has a cinematic role, featuring prominently in 2004’s National Treasure.

Not all ciphers have a good reputation. Although police and federal officials have long pointed to one or two individuals as the likely Zodiac killer, no one really knows for sure who committed the slayings in California in 1968 and 1969. Five victims are officially credited to one individual, but the person who contacted law enforcement claimed 37 victims. The San Francisco Bay area was terrorized by the serial killings, and the case has been a staple of popular culture for decades.

The killer sent messages to police and the press which seemed to indicate he (she?) wanted to be captured—a frequent tack among known serial perpetrators. Portions of those messages were well-coded, difficult to crack, but ultimately were solved.

All but “Z32.”  A letter, perhaps from the killer, was received by the San Francisco Chronicle in June of 1970. The killer wrote that the note and an accompanying map would tell authorities the location of a bomb he had buried. The note included a cipher which hasn’t been cracked.

Like the killer’s identity, it’s also unknown who first named the ciphers, but the entity lacked creativity. In November of 1969, the killer mailed a card with a 340-character cryptogram. That message became known as “Z340.” Use your code-cracking skills to determine what the “Z” is for.

Z32 is named in the same fashion. Thirty-two characters, no certain solve. Many people and groups have offered decodes of 32, but no one is sure. It shouldn’t be forgotten that the killer may have had a sense of humor, given that Z13 read “My name is-“ and a cipher that can be unscrambled to read “Alfred E Neuman.” Given that 32 characters can be pushed around any number of ways, it could say: “Splice Today shows entertaining reads.”

But the killer, and code-breakers, like social media feeds, never sleep. TikTok brings us a woman who insists she has solved Z32, on her own, no software or AI assistance involved, “in less than 48 hours.” In what seems like a marketing scheme, she says she’ll offer an explanation of her work, and the solve itself, over several videos “piece by piece, when and as I can.” The poster suggests that in this 32 characters, it’ll be shown “when he killed, who he killed, where he killed… and why.”

That’s some damn concise coding.  I hope that “when and as (she) can” comes soon.  Sooner than the 56 years since the spree, anyway.