“I like killing people because it is so much fun it is more fun than killing wild game in the forrest becuase man is the most dangerous animal of all / to kill something gives me the most thrilling experence / it is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl / the best part of it is that when I die i will be reborn in paradice and all the (sic) I have killed will become my slaves / I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife /I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife… Ebeorietemethhpiti.”
This the Zodiac Killer’s 408-cipher text decrypted by Donald and Bettye Harden in the summer of 1969.
Below, highlighted, the symbols corresponding to the last incomprehensible part of the text.
“Ebeorietemethhpiti.” What does it mean?
Could it be an anagram? If so, how can I know how to move each character to the right place?
One of the most important word for Zodiac is “paradice” (parad-ice?), which he seems to prefer to “paradise”.
At the end of the following cipher of 340 symbols that was decrypted in 2020, the word paradice, along with others, appears backwards (“ecidarap”).
"...I am not afraid because I know that my new [efil] life will [eb] be [na] an easy [eno] one [ni] in [cidarap] paradice death."
Z340 decryption by Oranchak-Van Eycke-Blake
Following the method of columnar transposition and using “paradice” as the keyword I think I solved the anagram at the end of Zodiac’s 408-cipher.
The text rearranged is:
“E ereb I tope I’m the hit”
“Eereb”?
Reading it backwards is “beree”.
They are two Italian words, with one verb in the infinitive form.
“E” means “and“;
“Bere” is “to drink“.
Zodiac possibly used the infinitive form “bere” instead of the correct “bevo” for precaution, not to give a strong tip on his ancestry/knowledge of the Italian language.
The adjusted anagram with the two words translated from Italian should be:
“I drink and tope I’m the hit”
The word “hit” is the actual translation of the Norse term “slà” mentioned in the letter from “a friend” (unattributed) postmarked February 3, 1974.
Transposition with the keyword “Paradice”
A number from 1 to 8 must be given to the 8 letters of “paradice” depending on their collocation in the alphabet (A = 1, second A = 2, C = 3…). In this way, the sequence 71824635 is obtained.
The numbers indicate the order to follow for the transpositions of the anagram. So, you have to look at EBEO… starting to solve the anagram by placing the seventh letter as the first of the solution, then the first letter as the second one, then the eighth letter as the third one etc. Each time the sequence ends, you have to restart again.
The result I obtained the first time is in the left column of the diagram below.
At first, I thought I was wrong. I moved forward and the phrase “I’m the hit” became visible in the second and third lines.
I retransposed the first line of the solution using the keyword “paradice” again. The result was “eerebito”.
By reading it backwards and translating it from Italian, the sentence made sense.
A mocking allusion to Zodiac’s identity?
Zodiac Killer - Mostro di Firenze 
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