Zodiac Killer's Cryptic Code and Identity that Man Claims to have CRACKED

International Business Times ^ | July 23, 2011

[cynwoody]

Did the 707 area code exist back in the 1960’s?

Yes, but the 340 area code (US Virgin Islands, split from 809 in 1997) did not.

There used to be a rule that area codes had to contain a 0 or a 1 in the second position while exchange codes had to have 2-9 in the second position. The rule allowed switching equipment to tell whether a number being dialed was long-distance (included an area code) or not.

Area codes were created in 1947. By the 1990s, they began to fill up. So, the N[01]N rule was relaxed, allowing additional area codes to be assigned, and the requirement to dial 1+area code for long distance was introduced, solving the number length ambiguity problem for switches. See here.

[scrabblehack]

I had forgotten that yes it was Leigh Allen. But the way he assigns letters to symbols and does the Caesar shift - is arbitrary, and this is something of a forced solution.

Apparently he started with “My name is Leigh Allen” and went from there, rather than starting with something like “I like killing people.”