The work consumed his thoughts, waking him up at night and plunging him into a constant state of anxiety as he learned gruesome details about the murders. Ziraoui said he then worked through a half-dozen steps including letter-to-number substitutions, identifying coordinates in numbers and using a code-breaking program he created to crunch jumbles of letters into coherent words. That produced a sequence of random letters from the alphabet. (It never did, even though police failed to crack the code.) So he said he applied it to the 32-character cipher, which the killer had included in a letter as the key to the location of a bomb set to go off at a school in the fall of 1970. But in his new film, “Parallel Mothers,” he dredges up Spain’s most painful history. Pedro Almodóvar built his reputation with raunchy farces.When she saw the downside of fame, she stepped back and built a life beyond the halfpipe. Everyone seemed to love Chloe Kim when she was a snowboarding prodigy.When his lawyers saw the trial transcript, they could only wonder what took so long. Anthony Broadwater was exonerated in the 1981 rape of Alice Sebold, now a best-selling author.Here are more fascinating tales you can’t help but read all the way to the end.
The killer’s hallmark was a series of four ciphers, using letters of the alphabet and symbols, that he sent to media outlets from July 1969 to April 1970 with warnings, and tantalizingly, a promise of his identity.Ī first 408-character cipher, in which the killer said he loved murdering people, was cracked soon after it was sent. At the time, he knew nothing about the Zodiac killer, who was suspected of five murders in the late 1960s but who himself boasted of 37 killings. Ziraoui initially thought code solving would be a fun activity during the coronavirus lockdown. Ziraoui studied in France, where he graduated from École Polytechnique and HEC Paris, the country’s top engineering and business schools, and where he now works as a freelance business consultant. Ziraoui sent his findings, declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.īorn and raised in Morocco, Mr. and the San Francisco Police Department, to which Mr.
“But these people don’t want the game to end.”Īnd it remains unclear whether the case - which has for decades consumed police detectives, generated dozens of stranger-than-fiction claims and inspired a blockbuster movie - will ever be solved. “He came in and told them ‘end of the game’,” said Youssef Ziraoui, his brother and a journalist in Morocco. Ziraoui realized he had been a little tactless, brazenly bursting into a tight-knit community with what he presented as definitive solutions. Numerous sleuths have claimed to have figured out the mystery through various techniques over the decades, but have had their theories debunked.
Half a century of unsuccessful research had led many to believe that the identity of the Zodiac killer would forever remain a mystery.
The ciphers had long baffled cryptographers, law enforcement agents and amateur sleuths obsessed with the unidentified serial killer with a penchant for ciphers. Ziraoui stumbled across an article in a French magazine in December saying that no one had ever solved two ciphers attributed to the Zodiac killer, who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and ’70s, he thought, “Why not me?” Ziraoui, a 38-year-old French-Moroccan business consultant, said in an interview at his home in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil.Īnd so, when Mr. “I’ve never set limits on what I can learn,” Mr.
More recently, he developed virtual reality software that allows people to experience life in a space capsule. As a teenager, he designed 3-D animations. ARGENTEUIL, France - Fayçal Ziraoui loves a good challenge.