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After 51 years, the Zodiac Killer's cipher has been solved by amateur codebreakers

BY LEAH ASMELASH AND CHERI MOSSBURG, CNN

More than 50 years after the so-called Zodiac Killer first began terrorizing the streets of Northern California, a code-breaking team is believed to have finally cracked one of the killer's mysterious coded messages sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969.

Dubbed the "340 cipher," the message was unraveled by a trio of code breakers – David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician.

Decoding the cipher revealed the following message. It was sent in all capital letters without punctuation and included the misspelling of paradise:

"I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me

That wasn't 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 will be an easy one in paradice death."

The TV show the message refers to is "The Jim Dunbar Show," a Bay Area television talk show. The cipher was sent two weeks after a person claiming to be the Zodiac Killer called into the show.

"It was incredible. It was a big shock, I never really thought we'd find anything because I had grown so used to failure," Oranchak, who's been working on solving the killer's messages since 2006, told CNN.

"When I first started, I used to get excited when I would see some words come through they were like false positives, phantoms. I had grown used to that. It was a long shot we didn't even really know if there was a message," he said. …

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