The Diana Dors Code

An interesting mystery about this blog's current cover girl, British bombshell Diana Dors.

Illustration by G. Foulard

From Wikipedia:

Before she died [in 1984], Dors apparently hid away what she claimed to be over £2million in banks across Europe. Eighteen months before her death, she gave her son Mark Dawson a sheet of paper, which she told him was a code that would reveal the whereabouts of the money.

Her widower, Alan Lake, supposedly had the key that would crack the code. But Lake committed suicide only five months after Dors died, leaving Dawson an apparently unsolvable code. Dawson, however, was determined to discover his late mother's fortune. He sought out computer forensic specialists Inforenz, who recognised the encryption as the Vigenère cipher. Inforenz then used their own cryptography software to suggest a ten-letter decryption key, DMARYFLUCK (short for Diana Mary Fluck, Dors's real name).

Although the company was then able to decode the entire message and link it to a bank statement found in some of Lake's papers, the location of the money is still unknown. Some speculate whether there may have been a second sheet, whose information might have led to the discovery of the money. Channel 4 made a television programme about the mystery and created a website (now removed) where users can read more and help solve the mystery.