408 Cipher Revisited: Tracking the Pieces Through Language and Error

The cipher fragments are most often shown today in an order that reflects law enforcement records by respected Tom Voigt’s Zodiackiller.com: the Times-Herald received the first third, the Chronicle the second, and the Examiner the third. This ordering has become standard in Zodiac research.

However, a small number of researchers continue to argue that the newspapers reported the correct cipher order originally, since they physically received the letters and may have known best which piece came with which message. What this view rarely considers is the possibility that law enforcement may have asked the newspapers to misreport the order intentionally - to flush out the killer with a correction, or to bait him into offering more detail.

If that was the case, the public’s understanding of the cipher-letter relationships may have been skewed from the start. But a more compelling possibility emerges: what if it wasn’t the media or the police who created the first mismatch - but the Zodiac himself?

In each of the three letters, the Zodiac uses the word “cipher” a different number of times:

Vallejo Times-Herald letter: 2 mentions
San Francisco Chronicle letter: 5 mentions
San Francisco Examiner letter: 3 mentions

Now compare this with the number of known errors - spelling, transcription - in each cipher fragment, based on the modern law enforcement arrangement:

Cipher attributed to Vallejo: 3 errors
Cipher attributed to Chronicle: 5 errors
Cipher attributed to Examiner: 1 error, plus 18 unsolved characters

At first glance, the numbers don’t match. But if the cipher pieces sent to the Vallejo Times-Herald and San Francisco Examiner are switched, a 1:1 relationship appears between the number of “cipher” mentions in each letter and the number of known errors in the associated cipher section:

Vallejo letter (now with a 3-error cipher): 3 cipher mentions
Chronicle letter remains unchanged: 5 cipher mentions, 5 errors
Examiner letter (now with a 1-error cipher): 2 cipher mentions (possibly corresponding to the single known error plus one hidden among the 18 unsolved characters)

This symmetry suggests the Zodiac may have used the number of times he wrote the word "cipher" as a key to correctly match each cipher third to its corresponding letter.

If true, this would not have been accidental. It would reflect the Zodiac’s consistent use of layered meaning, control over narrative, and manipulation of perception. Rather than a police error or a media oversight, this would be a strategic act of misdirection by the killer himself.

It’s also possible that authorities at the time suspected the cipher contained personal information - or even the killer’s name - and that the Chronicle’s inclusion of the phrase “in this cipher is my identity” was assumed to refer to the final, unsolved 18 characters. That assumption may have influenced the decision to deliberately obscure or test the assignment of the cipher thirds in press releases.

This raises another intriguing possibility: that parts of the 408 cipher may have been solved before the Harden solution was released to the public, and the confusion around cipher ordering was less about logistics and more about behavioral probing.

The Chronicle letter contains the often-cited phrase: “In this cipher is my identity.” This sentence has led many to conclude that the final 18 characters - which remain unsolved - must contain the killer’s name or some key identifying feature. But under the revised pairing described above, the unsolved 18 characters would belong to the Vallejo letter, not the Chronicle.

That would suggest the "identity" claim has been misinterpreted for decades.

When the 408 was solved, it did not contain a name, signature, or any verifiable identifier. Instead, it presented a chilling message of power, pleasure, and fear - more of a self-portrait than a confession. That difference is key: the Zodiac’s cipher wasn’t about legal identity. It was about how he wanted to be seen.

If the line “in this cipher is my identity” doesn’t refer to the final 18 characters - or even to the 408 as a whole - it may instead point to something more subtle: the letters themselves. Zodiac may have used steganography, embedding hidden meaning in his language, formatting, and structure. That would make the letters - not the ciphers - the true hiding place of any identity.

Supporting this is his later, possibly intentional confusion of the terms “cipher” and “code” in the August 1969 letter. It may not have been ignorance, but redirection - an effort to draw attention away from where the real messages were hidden.

One last curiosity: the phrase “Vallejo Times-Herald” is exactly 18 characters long - matching the number of unsolved symbols at the end of the cipher that should have went with that paper. Whether that’s symbolic, coincidental, or a sardonic clue remains open - but it fits the Zodiac’s habit of embedding meaning where others fail to look.

The Zodiac Killer was not simply a murderer who sent ciphers - he was a manipulator of language, identity, and perception. The internal correlation between cipher mentions in his letters and the known number of errors in each cipher fragment suggests that the cipher pieces may have been intentionally mismatched by the killer himself. If so, he may have embedded a logic system to point researchers toward the correct alignment - and perhaps toward a deeper understanding of his communicative method.

This reframing casts doubt on long-held assumptions about which letter matches which cipher piece, and invites renewed scrutiny of the unsolved 18 characters. It also suggests that the key to Zodiac’s identity may not be buried in symbols alone, but in the words and structures he used to obscure and reveal - often at the same time.

As with so much in the Zodiac case, the answer may not lie in what we’ve been told to look at, but in what we've been conditioned to overlook.