u/Old-Finger-7140

In 1969 a killer sent a cipher to three San Francisco newspapers simultaneously. Publish this or I'll go on a killing rampage this weekend.

The newspapers published it.

The FBI couldn't crack it. Naval Intelligence couldn't crack it. A schoolteacher and his wife solved it in eight days at their kitchen table. The decoded message boasted about killing. Talked about collecting slaves in the afterlife. Misspelled paradise as "paradice" the same misspelling appeared in every letter he ever sent.

He sent three more ciphers after that.

One took fifty one years to crack. When researchers finally decoded it in 2020 it contained no name, no location, nothing that helped identify him. Solving it told investigators what he was thinking. Not who he was.

One cipher is thirty two characters possibly directions to something that's been sitting in the Bay Area since 1970. Nobody has gone to find it because nobody has finished reading the map.

And then there's Z13. Thirteen symbols. Preceded by three handwritten words: MY NAME IS —

The FBI has had it since April 1970. Fifty six years.

Do you think his name is actually in there or was Z13 always just another taunt?

A neighbor noticed something was wrong because the chickens hadn't been let out.

That's how the Moore family murders were discovered on the morning of June 10th, 1912. Eight people — Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two young girls who had been invited to stay the night — all bludgeoned in their sleep with the blunt end of an axe. The axe had been swung hard enough to gouge the ceiling on the upswing.

Every face was covered with bedclothes afterward. Every window blocked with clothing so nobody could see in.

The killer also apparently ate something. A slab of bacon and a plate of food were found on the floor near where two of the victims slept. Nobody ever explained that.

Three suspects over ten years and none of them stuck. A state senator with motive whose alibi held. A traveling minister who was left-handed, confessed multiple times, and was acquitted twice. And a theory from 2017 linking Villisca to dozens of similar axe murders across the Midwest — same covered faces, same railway towns, same pattern. One suspect. A German immigrant named Paul Mueller. Never caught. Just gone.

The detail I can't get past is the covered faces. That's not concealment. It's something else. A compulsion maybe. A gesture toward the dead from someone who had just killed them.

The Moore house still stands. You can book an overnight stay in the rooms where it happened. People do.

What's your read local killer or Mueller's wider pattern?