An amateur codebreaker may have just solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac killings
latimes.comhttps://web.archive.org/web/20251224042131/https://www.latim...
https://archive.ph/m9mzE > “It’s irrefutable,” Such absolute language is generally reserved for overconfident people who have jumped to conclusions, not people with experience in statistics and analysis. In particular, substitution ciphers on short strings have a significant number of possibilities. This theory is one, but it is VERY far from "irrefutable", even paired with other circumstantial evidence. Why is it always so difficult to find the details? What kind of cipher was it? How was the key derived from a password? > Why is it always so difficult to find the details? "There’s a new podcast, 'Killer in the Code', from author Michael Connelly that details Baber’s supposed solution tying both cases to the same guy. All the publicity about this today stems from the debut of that podcast yesterday" [1]. Judging from TFA none of this was determined. They (allegedly) matched the length of the encrypted name using a process of elimination from an AI-generated pool of possible names, arriving at one name that happened to match the name of Elizabeth Short's murderer, and then a bunch of other circumstantial details aligned. In the article it also says the key to deicpher was Elizabeth and that the solution was approved by two cryptographers at the NSA Huh, apparently I didn't read the whole thing then. Any reverse linkages, by the Zodiac killer referencing the Black Dahlia killings, are potentially explainable, even the "deathbed" Elizabeth painting, as an interest in a historical murder[er]. What's interesting and not easily explainable if true, however, is the suspicion that the Black Dahlia murderer used a motel that at the time was called the Zodiac Motel. That forward-connection would've taken someone obsessed with solving the Black Dahlia murder, not just interested in the nature of the crime; assuming the theory about the Dahlia murder location is correct, the Zodiac killer would have had to solve the location of the Dahlia murder by himself, and then use it as an in-joke for a later series of unconnected murders. So few details