Following up on the report last week on the breaking of one of the Zodiac killer’s ciphers, Sam Blake, the Australian mathematician who was one of the teammates who solved the code, had this to say: “I’ve been asked before if I thought the Zodiac understood how much more difficult he made it by doing this [creating the cipher the way he did] and I doubt he did, because otherwise he wouldn’t have put such contemporary material in the contents of the cipher. Like ‘that wasn’t me on the TV show,’ that’s something you would have probably wanted to come out sooner than 51 years [after] he wrote it in there.” So the Zodiac was too smart for his own good in that respect. He created a code that was *too* hard to break. He wanted the cops to crack it. He just didn’t want to make it too easy for them. Turns out he made it too difficult.
Blake isn’t into serial killers, per se. “My interest in them is more [in] the methods of catching them than [I have an interest in] the actual underlying perpetrators.”
There are still two Zodiac ciphers yet to be decrypted, so Blake still has challenges to tackle.