The Zodiac Ciphers: Four Codes, Two Solutions, No Name

2026-06-28 · Unsolved Ciphers · 9 min read

On a cold December night in 1968, two teenagers were shot to death beside a car on a dark rural road outside Vallejo, California. There was no robbery, no clear motive, nothing to connect the killer to the young couple he had just destroyed. Six months later, on another lonely road, a man walked up to a parked car, shot the two people inside, calmly returned to his own vehicle, and then telephoned the police himself to report the crime he had committed. What was hunting the back roads of Northern California was not an ordinary murderer. Over roughly a year he attacked seven young people, killing five, and then he did something that almost no killer in history had done: he began writing to the newspapers, and he wrapped his boasting in code.

He signed himself Zodiac, and he marked each letter with a crossed circle, a gunsight drawn over the world. In his letters he claimed a monstrous and almost certainly inflated tally, as many as thirty-seven victims, far more than investigators could ever tie to him. He wrote to be feared, to be printed, to be talked about, and he understood, decades before the phrase existed, how to turn a city's terror into a performance with himself at the center. The ciphers were the heart of that performance. If the police wanted to know who he was, he seemed to say, they would have to earn it, symbol by symbol.

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