I had a go at this some time back, starting with the assumption that it was a cipher in use like previous messages.
I used a genetic algorithm to basically mutate the solution until it started to approach letter frequencies similar to typical written English. I even tried some runs which treated each quandrant as a different cipher. Nothing but gibberish came out of it. Very few readable words even.
Other coders have taken such an approach as well, and come up with somewhat more readable results (better coders I expect), but nobody has had a solution which looked particularly convincing.
I’m definitely on Team Gibberish on this.
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Neat. The movie Zodiac is a pretty interesting movie about the Zodiac killer, though I am sure some of it is changed for drama’s sake. But I did read a synopsis on the case, and the movie reflected who the police think the killer was, though they couldn’t prove it. Him spoofing a code fits with their assumptions.
But in all seriousness @beschizza, my matra is: never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.
The famous CIA Kryptos statue had little progress made for a long time due to a mistake:
Kryptos includes intentional spelling errors and misaligned characters set higher on a line of text than characters around them. But in 2006, Sanborn realized he had also made an inadvertent error, a missing “x” that he mistakenly deleted from the end of a line in section two, a section that was already solved. He discovered the omission while doing a letter-by-letter comparison of the plaintext and coded text in preparation for a book about his work.
The “x” was supposed to signify a period or section-break at the end of a phrase. Sanborn removed it for aesthetic reasons, thinking it wouldn’t affect the way the puzzle was deciphered, but in fact it did. What sleuths had until then deciphered to say “ID by rows” was actually supposed to say “layer two.”
I suspect if Zodiac did similar (s)he wouldn’t admit it
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This is the first, and probably last, time I will argue that inclusive language is unnecessary.
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I know there have been a few female serial killers, however I’m pretty sure zodiac is/was not one of them.
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What evidence supports that theory?
My roiling gut and a just finished binge-watch of Mindhunter. Q.E.D.
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Cool, well personally I find it pretty offensive when someone makes gendered assumptions, so if you have any other unsourced thoughts maybe keep them inside? I don’t find you making flippant comments about my gender cute or funny.
Statistically, the assumption that a serial killer is male is no more dubious than assuming a sexual harasser is male. The experts chasing zodiac assumed they were hunting a male.
Corrected statement
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Statistically the person who broke into my car in a lower-income area was probably black, but I wouldn’t assume it without some video or witness testimony.
Part of proper detective work is putting aside assumptions - snarky assumptions lead to cold cases. But if you value hot takes over human lives, feel free to continue 
Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information should be required reading for, well… for everyone.
Heck, you can pretty much just look at the pictures and still get something out of it.
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But we’re not talking about anything you need a graduate degree in computer science to implement. We’re talking about how to create a cipher with a legal pad, a pencil, and about 30 minutes of your day. We’re talking about “do a frequency count of all the symbols, and if it’s a one-symbol-one-letter cipher, then that’s probably E or maybe T, but then here’s how to make a multiple-symbol-one-letter cipher that’s way harder to crack”. I knew what a one-time pad was and how it worked in the 1970s, and I was ten, because I read books from the public library.
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