A letter from the Zodiac Killer has finally been deciphered by a person who merely opened a file containing the killer’s iconic cypher with VLC Media Player, after decades of futile attempts by law enforcement authorities and amateur sleuths.
Samantha Talbit, a part-time social media manager who cracked the code while idling at a café, stated, “Honestly, I was just sort of bored and decided to just try it.” “I had the Zodiac letter stored on my desktop and simply dragged it into VLC, which opened it.” It was just a plain old letter insulting police enforcement in plain English. I don’t know, maybe someone should open it in Adobe Acrobat and see what else they can find.”
The letter, according to the FBI, is a step toward justice for Zodiac’s numerous victims.
“Ms. Talbit has solved a problem that has vexed law enforcement and the brightest brains in cryptography for the past fifty years,” stated Darryl Wilmington, the leader of the FBI’s Zodiac Taskforce, which has been in existence since the first recorded murders in 1968. “We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to decode this bit of Zodiac’s communication, and the majority of that time has been wasted running it through Google Translate to no avail.” We even painstakingly rebuilt the letter pixel-by-pixel in Microsoft Paint in the 1990s, which looked great but didn’t help.”
Investigators have already had success using the so-called “VLC Method” to solve other mysteries, inspired by the discovery in the Zodiac case. When viewing the famous Zapruder film of the JFK assassination in VLC Media Player, for example, it becomes clear that President Kennedy shot himself.
“It’s a paradigm shift in how we think about counterintelligence,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who had just returned from an international meeting where VLC was used to screen delegates for security threats. “This software is making a difference in people’s lives.”
At the time of publication, the Zodiac Killer said in a written statement that his sole regret was not encrypting his messages using a more VLC-proof format like Betamax.
