The Zodiac Killer Left a Code That Starts With "My Name Is." It's Still Unsolved

He killed at least five people. Then he wrote to the newspapers, and mailed them a piece of his victim's bloody shirt. He started his letters the same way: "This is the Zodiac speaking." In Northern California in 1968 and 1969, two teenagers were shot on a lonely road, and months later a young couple was attacked in a parked car. Then the letters began. He sent three newspapers a cipher and demanded they print it on the front page, or he would kill again. A schoolteacher and his wife cracked it in about a week. It said he killed because man is the most dangerous animal of all, but it didn't give his name. So he sent another cipher, and that one couldn't be broken for fifty-one years. He attacked a couple at Lake Berryessa wearing a black hood with his crossed-circle symbol on the chest. He shot a taxi driver in San Francisco, and that night two officers passed a man walking away without stopping him. A later letter claimed thirty-seven victims: "SFPD: zero." In 2020, three amateur codebreakers solved the 340 cipher, and the FBI confirmed it: "I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me." Every few years someone claims to have identified him, but the FBI says the case is still open. And one of his unsolved codes begins with three words: "My name is." Who do you think the Zodiac was? 👇 🔔 Subscribe for more real, unsolved mysteries. Sources: FBI statements on the Z340 solution (Dec 2020) and on later identification claims; San Francisco Chronicle archive coverage; Wikipedia, "Zodiac Killer". Image credits (Wikimedia Commons): Zodiac letters and ciphers, Vallejo Times-Herald / San Francisco Examiner / San Francisco Chronicle (public domain); SFPD wanted poster, Oct 1969 (public domain); "Zodiac Z340 cipher key" by Shāntián Tàiláng (CC BY-SA 4.0); "My Name is Cipher" by 2230redondo (CC BY-SA 4.0); "Lake Berryessa" by James Postema (CC BY 4.0); "Presidio Heights" by Tony Webster (CC BY-SA 2.0); "San Francisco from Laurel Heights, 1952" by Charles W. Cushman (CC BY 2.0). Stock footage: Pexels. Music: "Ghost Hollow Whisper Corridor" by Alex Morgan. In memory of David Faraday, Betty Lou Jensen, Darlene Ferrin, Cecelia Shepard and Paul Stine.