December 22, 2025 • 30 mins
Cold case consultant Alex Baber cracks the Zodiac Killer’s most difficult cypher and it leads to a stunning revelation. Learn more on KillerInTheCode.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
In La, murder often becomes myth. No other place seems
to elevate its killings and killers the way Los Angeles does.
From Manson to Menendez, murders and murderers are often catapulted
into the American zeitgeist and find a permanent place in
the public conscious. The media baptizes them with monikers that
(00:25):
add to the longevity of their horror. The Nightstalker, the
Hillside Stranglers, the grim Sleeper. Perched at the top of
this dark pantheon of murder in the City of Angels
since Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, the
girl who was cut cleanly in two her unsolved murder, refuses,
(00:48):
even after almost eighty years, to diminish in the public imagination,
not just for how she was mercilessly tortured with a
clown smile cut into her face, then left naked and
into parts in a trash drewn lot, but for how
she lived. She had come to La, like so many others,
with a hope and a dream to find love, to
(01:10):
find happiness, to find home. Her end was the end
of the Hollywood dream. Over the decades, shorts horrific demise
has sparked the imagination of many in the fields of
entertainment and law enforcement, be it fiction or documentary. There
are uncounted versions of the story in book and screen form,
(01:34):
and it's a competitive market, with champions of one suspect
tirelessly sniping at those of others. There has also been
no shortage of real life suspects brought forth. Calling a
cold case is a bit ironic when so many investigators
di amateur and professional alike have worked the bones of
Elizabeth Short since the day her body was found in
(01:56):
nineteen forty seven. Mitzi Roberts, who ran the Los Angeles
Police Department's cold case unit until her retirement last year,
says that not a week went by that she didn't
feeld inquiries and unsolicited solutions to the mystery of who
killed Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
It was a hard case to keep because of the
amount of people that would call me on it and
want to have tips or want me to look into
a suspect that they developed, and some of them were
people of importance, I guess, and so the department would
pretty much order me to look into these various theories
(02:38):
and speak with some of these people. Authors, retired investigators
stuff like that, and it took a considerable amount of
my time. And at the time, this was just like
an ancillary case. It was sort of like a hobby case.
But it ended up taking a considerable amount of my
time just to fill all these different people that came
(02:59):
forward with information or wanting to solve the Black Dalua.
I mean, I would get correspondents from people would via
email or phone calls every week, for sure.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Every week. None of the theories or suspects helped promise.
Most were rejected by known facts of the case before
the phone call was even over. In Robert's view, the
case would never be solved and there would be no
justice for Elizabeth Short. That is until she met Alex Baber,
(03:33):
a self styled citizen sleuth who carries no badge and
no law enforcement training. Now, Roberts, perhaps the top living
expert on the Black Dalua case, says, the murder of
Elizabeth Short has been solved.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
When he presented all of his evidence, and you look
at that and it fits so precisely into the case.
It's hard to think that this person is not the
person that was responsible for killing the Black Dallian. I
really believe that he's found the guy. Like he solved
(04:12):
the he solved the Black Dahlia.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
And not only that, but the case was solved almost
by accident when Baber set out to investigate a different
case altogether, the Zodiac Murders of Northern California. I'm Michael
Connolly and this is killer in the Code solving the
Black Dahalia and Zodiac cases. Over the next several episodes,
(04:40):
we are going to detail how a quick spoken and
self proclaimed crime solving genius convinced some of the greatest
minds in murder and code breaking that he has solved
two of the most infamous crimes of the last century.
Dux Favor is fifty years old. He grew up in
(05:02):
rural Florida. He said he learned at an early age
that his grandfather was likely a serial killer who went
undetected because he preyed upon migrant workers who registered no
standing in society or importance with law enforcement, who backwoods Florida.
Bab says it was his family's dark secret that set
(05:24):
him on a path toward redemption through finding answers for
victims and their families.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I can recall vividly how my mother and her siblings
would often speak quietly a FEMA gatherings discussing details surrounding
my grandfather and just crimes from their childhood to instance
stand out to me in particular. And what about any
plantation workers or hired hands that work the fields for
my grandfather and been constructed not to speak to my
aunt and make interpropriate comments. Apparently this happened on a
(05:52):
few occasions, and the individuals involved did not return to
work or were never seen again, so these were always present.
I can remember verse far back is is five years
of age hearing the first story, and then over the
years as I grew up, we would get more details
and more insight into the events as I grew older.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Diagnosed at age twelve with autistic disorder, Baber didn't fit
in at school and was bullied and beaten until he
dropped out. He later picked up a GED without needing
to study for it. By then, he says his IQ
had been tested at above one point sixty on both
the Wexler and Stanford Bennet intelligence scales. Baber has a
(06:36):
fast moving mind and no filter when it comes to
believing himself and his efforts. He talked fast and confidently
about his skills. His personality can be and often has been,
read the wrong way. The first time I spoke to him,
he introduced himself as an autodidact holymath. That's a fancy
way of saying he was a self taught expert in
(06:58):
many fields. He told me focused on unsolved crimes because
he had the ability to find the hidden beneath the hidden.
I have to admit I was put off at first
and skeptical about his claims.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
My confidence is often mistaken for arrogance, but my focus
has always been on purpose, not an ego. I work fast,
I speak directly because uncovering trees requires both my self
taught background spans numerous disciplines that help reveal what owners
might miss or overlook. It's never about claiming to know everything,
only about finding results where others have stopped looking. I
(07:35):
tend to dig a little bit deeper because of my
autistic disorder, and it's hard for me to let go
once I find something that is intriguing or interest to me,
and I will dig until I find an answer, one
way or another.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
There's no shortage to the number of Internet denizens who
have taken the aim at Babe before his blessed during Bravado.
Four years ago, he started a company called Cold Case
Consultants of America. He built a website complete with claims
of crime solving genius and a photo of the founder
wearing leather suspenders that look a lot like a shoulder ulster.
(08:12):
When Baber dipped into an unsolved case, famous or not,
he was often viewed as a carpetbagger looking to make
money off of people haunted and desperate for answers in
their missing, their murdered loved ones cases. Baber insists his
intentions were misunderstood.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
So that I am clear, I nor my company has
ever received a single pinion from a cold case review.
My work has always been conducted independently, without conversation or
financial involvement from any victims family. My goal has never
been a profit from the tragedy of others, but rather progress.
My company's efforts were financed by financial inheritance and advocate investors.
(08:52):
Not one cent has ever been received from a victim's
family for any case that my agency has worked.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Along the way, Baber ad an idea he would collect
all the known writings of serial killers and mass murderers
into a digital database. Through which comparisons could be made
in terms of word choices and phrasing, misspellings, penmanship, syntax,
and even psychological tell He thought it might be a
way of finding the hidden beneath the hidden.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
The Frenchic Linguistic database served a valuable purpose for oursentifiing
linguistic and behavioral parallels between previously unrelated cases. Beyond that,
it offered deeper psychological insight into criminal mind or viewing
similar patterns of thought amongst various cases with connective tissue.
So I was able to identify similarities between the wording
and the choice of words between the Black Value Avenger letters,
(09:46):
which some people said about crank letters, we now know
that they weren't, as well as the twenty two plus
letters of Zodiac mailed in between nineteen sixty nine and
nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Included in his database were the many letters sent to
law enforcement in agencies and newspapers by the self named
Zodiac Killer in northern California. The Zodiacs reign of terror
began in December of nineteen sixty eight, when he shot
to death a young man and woman in a lover's
lane in Solano County over the next ten months, the
(10:19):
same man attacked two more couples, killing two more women,
and then murdered of San Francisco cab driver. In a
series of messages sent to newspapers and law enforcement agencies,
he took credit for the killings, often beginning with the
ominous greeting, this is the Zodiac speaking. The letters threatened
(10:40):
more killings, including a plan to pick off children getting
off a school bus, Though the five murders during the
ten months free were the only slayings officially credited to
the Zodiac, he claimed that various times in various messages,
to have taken seven, then twelve, then fourteen, then seventeen,
(11:01):
and then finally thirty seven lives, stating that he was
accumulating slaves for the afterlife. In four of the messages,
the Zodiac included ciphers composed of letters and hand drawn
symbols in a grid pattern. The first one was the longest,
and it was sent in three parts to three different
(11:23):
newspapers for publication. His code was broken quickly and rather easily,
by a high school teacher and his wife. The next
three ciphers were far more difficult and withstood the efforts
of would be codebreakers and cryptographers for decades until the
year twenty twenty, when the Z three forty cipher, so
(11:44):
named for the number of characters that included in the grid,
was broken by an international team of amateur cryptography enthusiasts.
The remaining two ciphers were much shorter and therefore more
difficult to break because they consisted of a limited number
of characters, making them harder to crack because fewer characters
(12:07):
meant fewer patterns, reducing the effectiveness of traditional decryption methods.
The shortest cipher, the Z thirteen, came after the Zodiac
wrote this is the Zodiac speaking. By the way, have
you cracked the last cipher I sent you? My name
(12:29):
is thirteen letters and symbols followed. Some believed that the
Zodiac was goaded into encrypting his name and sending it
to the San Francisco Chronicle because he had been called
out publicly by the president of the American Cryptogram Association.
He said the Zodiac was a rank amateur when it
(12:52):
came to encryption and would never dare put his name
out in a cipher.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Zodiac most certainly felt confident after his three forty cipher
made unbroken for six months, despite the best efforts of
topic photography experts across the nation. His ego couldn't allow
law enforcement or the American Cryptogram Association to believe they
were smarter than him, so he answered their challenge directly
with the Z thirteam cipher.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
With the advent of artificial intelligence beginning to infiltrate almost
all levels of society, from medical treatment to business applications
to political campaigns, Alex Baber thought, why not law enforcement?
Why not code breaking? The Z three to forty cipher
had been broken two years earlier by identifying a dual
(13:40):
coding system similar to that used by cryptographers to secure
military messaging during World War Two.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
They cracked the Z three forty by applying a layer approach,
first identifying a transposition method inspired by a World War
II coding system, and then applying a substitution layer to
reveal the actual letters. By combining these states niques with
letter frequency and brute force, they systematically unravel as cipher
to expose the Zodiac hidden message.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
With this knowledge, Baber set a site in the Z
thirteen cipher, and using an AI program he designed, he
amassed a list of first and last names that could
fit into the thirteen digit cipher talk about finding a
needle in a haystack. The list was seventy one million
names long, as it was originally written in the Zodiac letter,
(14:33):
the cipher was just one line, but the other ciphers
authored by the Zodiac were much longer and had been
presented in a grid. So Baber broke Z thirteen into
a two x seven grid, adding a fourteenth digit to
make the grid even with seven columns of two characters each.
This added digit is called a knull in code speak,
(14:55):
and would possibly be the space between a first and
last name. The original cipher also contained three symbols that
were repeated twice and a fourth symbol repeated three times.
This narrated the possibilities considerably, and employing other disqualifiers cut
(15:16):
further into the list of names. Based on nine witness
accounts and the possibility that di Ze three forty cipher
was derived from World War II era cryptography methods, bab
started looking for a white male who would have been
in his late thirties or early forties at the time
of the Zodiac attacks. For nine months, he waited for
(15:39):
phone directories from the period, as well as US census data,
voting roles, property records, military archives, birth records, and arrest records,
and was finally able to whittle the list of seventy
one million names down to fourteen possibilities. He then had
(16:01):
to put on his private eyeat and through forensic analysis,
he went through the final fourteen possibilities and eliminated thirteen
through disqualifying factors such as height, background, and proximity to
northern California. That left one name, Marvin Merrill. The name
(16:23):
belonged to a man who had several addresses in California
in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. He also had a
criminal record. Now, before we continue with Alex Baber's deep
dive into who Marvin Merrill was, I have to say
we will be taking a deep dive into his code
(16:44):
breaking methods in the later episode. There is also additional
information on our website Killerinthecode dot com about his investigation.
I happen to know very little about ciphers and cryptography,
but breaking the Z thirteen code is the foundation on
which this entire investigation stands. I had to independently confirm
(17:10):
or refute Baber's work before I took another step down
the path with him. I went to a code breaking
team headed by Ed Georgio, a legend in the world
of cryptography. Georgio spent thirty years in a national security
agency and to this day is the only man Everett
(17:31):
who have served as both NSA's chief codebreaker and code maker.
He accepted the challenge from me and analyzed and reworked
the steps Faber had taken. It took him three weeks.
Then he had his work and conclusions peer reviewed by
two other top code breakers who formerly worked with the NSA.
(17:54):
This is what Ed Georgio told me.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
It was one hell of a piece of work that
Alex and his team did. It was quite convincing.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
I want to emphasize what an incredibly good job Alex
did in he not only had to find a list
of candidates, he had to figure out what the cryptosystem
was to begin with.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
I asked ed to read from the paper he and
his team were authoring on Alex Baber's investigation.
Speaker 4 (18:21):
The Baker team has done an outstanding job identifying and
joining two infamous murders, the Black Volume Murder and the
Zodiac Murders. A central element of their work is the
proposed decryption of the Zodiac Z thirteen psycho, which the
Zodiac claimed would reveal his name. The Baby team combined
(18:42):
cryptanalytics and traditional investigative methods, first using a define set
of encryption assumptions, obfuscation, permutation, and substitution to reduce the
vast number of possible Z thirteen solutions to a manageable subset,
and then applied forensic reasoner to eliminate all but one candidate,
(19:05):
Marvin Merrill. Our independent validation confirmed the internal consistency of
the Baber Team's decryption method.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
We'll hear more from Ed Georgio and his team in
upcoming episodes. For now, let's go back to Alex Paper's investigation.
Once he had the name Marvin Merrill, Baber started to
background the man he believes he had identified as the Zodiac.
He was able to place him in northern California at
(19:38):
the time of the Zodiac killings. He learned that in
nineteen seventy one, Merrill had been charged in Oceanside, California
with five counts of fraud and spent three years on probation,
a period of time that matched with a period of
time when the Zodiac had gone silent. He also learned
(19:59):
that Merrill had done to Santa Barbara in nineteen ninety three.
He was sixty eight years old at the time. If
he was the Zodiac, then he had gotten away with it.
But Baber also encountered a problem. He could find no
military property, voting, or census records with Merrill's name on
(20:21):
them before the nineteen sixties. Curious, Baber dubbed deeper. He
learned through Social Security Administration records that Merrill had a
history of using two different Social Security numbers, neither of
which were his. One belonged to a woman who lived
in Chicago. The other belonged to a man named Marvin Margolis,
(20:43):
also out of Chicago. Social Security records stated that Marvin
Merrill was an alias from Marvin Margolis. This was a puzzle.
Long before the Zodiac's murders, free Marvin Merrill was involved
in identity manipulation. The question was why did Marvin Margois
(21:06):
become Marvin Merrill.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
It's one of those Aha moments where you realize that
there's something to this guy that needs to be looked
at deeper. Because an individual, first off, doesn't use someone
else's security number and doesn't file legal documents under that,
and he surely doesn't use an alias in correlation with it.
There has to be a purpose to that. Either he's
(21:28):
running from something, hiding from something, or he's doing something illegal.
And at that moment, that was another Aha moment where
I realized I'm on the right road. I need to
dig deeper into his past, because this guy went from
being an entity or nobody to me right to actually
being a real world individual to being now a real
(21:49):
world individual who is shady that's doing some ille illegal activities.
So right there tells you there's some criminal element to him.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
The deep dive continued. Now. Baber was pursuing Marvin Margolis
across time and building a biography of this mystery man.
He learned through military records that Margolis had served as
a hospital corpsman attached to a marine battalion that made
the first landing on Okinawa during World War Two. Baber
(22:22):
found a story in the archives of the Chicago newspaper
that hailed his return from the war. He posed for
a photo with the rifle he had taken off a
Japanese soldier he said he had killed. After the war,
Margolis was mustered out of the Navy in his hometown
of Chicago, but soon turned up in California. In nineteen
(22:44):
forty six, he was living in Hollywood and taking pre
med classes at the University of Southern California, and then
Baber made a startling discovery. Margolis's name was in the
nineteen fifty one grand jury report on the unsolved murder
of Elizabeth Short. The report said that Margois had been
(23:09):
one of the prime suspects in the killing of the
Black Dahlia.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
At that moment, I had another aha moment, like, holy shit,
this guy that was Merril, that was Margolis, that used
a security number, is now the same individual. And the
reason I knew it was the same identical individual Michaels
because in the records they use this date of birth
in his hometown, which you've read in his military report.
So I knew, same birthday, same name, same on town.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
We had the right guy.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
How crazy is that?
Speaker 1 (23:43):
In nineteen forty nine, the two year old Black Dahia
case was still big news in Los Angeles, and despite
a massive effort to identify a suspect and make an arrest,
the LAPD had come up empty. A grand jury was
impaneled and for two years her testimony from witnesses, including
the lead investigators on the case. They provided the grand
(24:06):
jury with a list of twenty one possible suspects in
the murder of Elizabeth Short. The list was in no
particular order of importance. Number eleven on it was Marvin Margolis.
According to the grand jury reports, what brought Margolis to
the attention of the investigator was that he and Elizabeth
(24:27):
Short had shared an apartment in Hollywood for twelve days
in October, just three months before our murder. He was
interviewed twice by detectives in the weeks after the murder.
The detectives reported that he was deceitful both times, including
initially lying about knowing Elizabeth Short and denying that the
(24:49):
two had lived together briefly. He provided an alibi for
the time of Short's murder, and his wife, who he
had married a month after sharing the apartment, backed him
up on it. Investigators were not convinced by Margolis or
his wife. It had been the view of the detectives
(25:09):
on the case that someone with a near surgical skill
had performed the bisection of Elizabeth Schwort's body. They learned
that Margois had taken part in the dissection of a
human body at the USC Medical School three months before
the murder, and they learned that Margolis's wartime experiences had
(25:33):
a profoundly negative impact on him psychologically. According to the
grand jury reports, investigators uncovered of psychological report on Margolis
that was written in support of a fifty percent disability
being granted Margolis for battlefield neurosis that grew from his
experiences on Okinawa. This is from the report that was
(25:59):
dated for four months before Elizabeth Schwort's murder. In Okinawa,
Margolis was under bombing and strafing for twenty nine days.
He was then ordered to set up a hospital there.
He worked long hours with little sleep, under frequent air raids,
saw many bodies in mangled shape. He cared for two
(26:21):
companies where there were many casualties. His setup was in
a small cave. A rain caused the sides to cave in.
He was buried all but his head, which was held
tight like a vice. The next morning he dug out.
He became amnesic, emotional, with depression and instability. The psychiatric
(26:45):
diagnosis is as follows. The subject is calm, quiet and
a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression
at present. This man shows a lack of interests, aims,
and ability to concentrate. Margos is sullen. His personality is
not pleasing, apathetic, inclined to sarcasm. He said that the
(27:09):
next time there is a war, two of us are
not going, the one who comes after me and myself.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
So this individual was obviously troubled by his wartime on
that he experience and coming back and was identified as
fifty percent mentally disabled, which at that point was like
mos to shell shock. In today's terminology, he will be
referred to as PTSD.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Blake galex Favor would do. Seventy five years later, the
detectives did a deep dive on Marvin Margolis. They learned
that when he lived at the Guardian Arms on Hollywood Boulevard,
he had a roommate named Bill Robinson, a former cryptographer
and Signal Corps officer during the war. He too was
(27:54):
deemed untruthful when interviewed by detectives and asked about Elizabeth
shore stay at the apartment he shared with Margolis, But
everything they gathered was circumstantial at best. There was no
direct evidence against Margolis. He was never arrested, and soon
after the murder moved back to Chicago. Efforts by the
(28:17):
LAPD and Chicago police to find him for a third
interview failed. He was in the wind and would soon
be adopting a false identity before returning to California. As
one detective would testify about Margolis to the grand jury
in December of nineteen forty nine, it was impossible to
(28:37):
throw him out as a suspect. It was impossible to
tie him in as a suspect. Now, all these years later,
Alex Baber had seemingly tied Margolis to two of the
last century's most infamous unsolved crimes. But was it too
(28:57):
late to go beyond the circumstantial and find the direct
evidence that eluded police for so long. We're willing to
find out in the episodes ahead, as Baber enlists a
high level team of cold case investigators and uncovers a
piece of evidence he calls the smoking gun. This is
(29:18):
just one of those investigators take on Baber's work and
his conclusions.
Speaker 6 (29:24):
I have no doubt this is the person. I have
no doubt at all. And it adds a lot to
stake your reputation on it, but I feel it's totally overwhelming,
circumstantial evidence, and now it has become mixed in with
some physical evidence that supports Alex's suspect as being the
(29:45):
Dahlia and Zodiac killers. It's overwhelming evidence that connects this
man to these murders.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
This is Michael Connolly and you have been listening to
Kill Her in the Code Solving the Black Dahlia and
Zodiac Cases. For more information about these cases and the investigation,
go to Kill Her Inthecode dot com. This podcast was
written and produced by Michael Connolly. It was edited by Teroll,
(30:19):
Lee Langford and Mark Henry Phillips, with sound design and
scoring by Mark Henry Phillips as well. Thank you for listening.
In La, murder often becomes myth. No other place seems
to elevate its killings and killers the way Los Angeles does.
From Manson to Menendez, murders and murderers are often catapulted
into the American zeitgeist and find a permanent place in
the public conscious. The media baptizes them with monikers that
(00:25):
add to the longevity of their horror. The Nightstalker, the
Hillside Stranglers, the grim Sleeper. Perched at the top of
this dark pantheon of murder in the City of Angels
since Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, the
girl who was cut cleanly in two her unsolved murder, refuses,
(00:48):
even after almost eighty years, to diminish in the public imagination,
not just for how she was mercilessly tortured with a
clown smile cut into her face, then left naked and
into parts in a trash drewn lot, but for how
she lived. She had come to La, like so many others,
with a hope and a dream to find love, to
(01:10):
find happiness, to find home. Her end was the end
of the Hollywood dream. Over the decades, shorts horrific demise
has sparked the imagination of many in the fields of
entertainment and law enforcement, be it fiction or documentary. There
are uncounted versions of the story in book and screen form,
(01:34):
and it's a competitive market, with champions of one suspect
tirelessly sniping at those of others. There has also been
no shortage of real life suspects brought forth. Calling a
cold case is a bit ironic when so many investigators
di amateur and professional alike have worked the bones of
Elizabeth Short since the day her body was found in
(01:56):
nineteen forty seven. Mitzi Roberts, who ran the Los Angeles
Police Department's cold case unit until her retirement last year,
says that not a week went by that she didn't
feeld inquiries and unsolicited solutions to the mystery of who
killed Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
It was a hard case to keep because of the
amount of people that would call me on it and
want to have tips or want me to look into
a suspect that they developed, and some of them were
people of importance, I guess, and so the department would
pretty much order me to look into these various theories
(02:38):
and speak with some of these people. Authors, retired investigators
stuff like that, and it took a considerable amount of
my time. And at the time, this was just like
an ancillary case. It was sort of like a hobby case.
But it ended up taking a considerable amount of my
time just to fill all these different people that came
(02:59):
forward with information or wanting to solve the Black Dalua.
I mean, I would get correspondents from people would via
email or phone calls every week, for sure.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Every week. None of the theories or suspects helped promise.
Most were rejected by known facts of the case before
the phone call was even over. In Robert's view, the
case would never be solved and there would be no
justice for Elizabeth Short. That is until she met Alex Baber,
(03:33):
a self styled citizen sleuth who carries no badge and
no law enforcement training. Now, Roberts, perhaps the top living
expert on the Black Dalua case, says, the murder of
Elizabeth Short has been solved.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
When he presented all of his evidence, and you look
at that and it fits so precisely into the case.
It's hard to think that this person is not the
person that was responsible for killing the Black Dallian. I
really believe that he's found the guy. Like he solved
(04:12):
the he solved the Black Dahlia.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
And not only that, but the case was solved almost
by accident when Baber set out to investigate a different
case altogether, the Zodiac Murders of Northern California. I'm Michael
Connolly and this is killer in the Code solving the
Black Dahalia and Zodiac cases. Over the next several episodes,
(04:40):
we are going to detail how a quick spoken and
self proclaimed crime solving genius convinced some of the greatest
minds in murder and code breaking that he has solved
two of the most infamous crimes of the last century.
Dux Favor is fifty years old. He grew up in
(05:02):
rural Florida. He said he learned at an early age
that his grandfather was likely a serial killer who went
undetected because he preyed upon migrant workers who registered no
standing in society or importance with law enforcement, who backwoods Florida.
Bab says it was his family's dark secret that set
(05:24):
him on a path toward redemption through finding answers for
victims and their families.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
I can recall vividly how my mother and her siblings
would often speak quietly a FEMA gatherings discussing details surrounding
my grandfather and just crimes from their childhood to instance
stand out to me in particular. And what about any
plantation workers or hired hands that work the fields for
my grandfather and been constructed not to speak to my
aunt and make interpropriate comments. Apparently this happened on a
(05:52):
few occasions, and the individuals involved did not return to
work or were never seen again, so these were always present.
I can remember verse far back is is five years
of age hearing the first story, and then over the
years as I grew up, we would get more details
and more insight into the events as I grew older.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Diagnosed at age twelve with autistic disorder, Baber didn't fit
in at school and was bullied and beaten until he
dropped out. He later picked up a GED without needing
to study for it. By then, he says his IQ
had been tested at above one point sixty on both
the Wexler and Stanford Bennet intelligence scales. Baber has a
(06:36):
fast moving mind and no filter when it comes to
believing himself and his efforts. He talked fast and confidently
about his skills. His personality can be and often has been,
read the wrong way. The first time I spoke to him,
he introduced himself as an autodidact holymath. That's a fancy
way of saying he was a self taught expert in
(06:58):
many fields. He told me focused on unsolved crimes because
he had the ability to find the hidden beneath the hidden.
I have to admit I was put off at first
and skeptical about his claims.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
My confidence is often mistaken for arrogance, but my focus
has always been on purpose, not an ego. I work fast,
I speak directly because uncovering trees requires both my self
taught background spans numerous disciplines that help reveal what owners
might miss or overlook. It's never about claiming to know everything,
only about finding results where others have stopped looking. I
(07:35):
tend to dig a little bit deeper because of my
autistic disorder, and it's hard for me to let go
once I find something that is intriguing or interest to me,
and I will dig until I find an answer, one
way or another.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
There's no shortage to the number of Internet denizens who
have taken the aim at Babe before his blessed during Bravado.
Four years ago, he started a company called Cold Case
Consultants of America. He built a website complete with claims
of crime solving genius and a photo of the founder
wearing leather suspenders that look a lot like a shoulder ulster.
(08:12):
When Baber dipped into an unsolved case, famous or not,
he was often viewed as a carpetbagger looking to make
money off of people haunted and desperate for answers in
their missing, their murdered loved ones cases. Baber insists his
intentions were misunderstood.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
So that I am clear, I nor my company has
ever received a single pinion from a cold case review.
My work has always been conducted independently, without conversation or
financial involvement from any victims family. My goal has never
been a profit from the tragedy of others, but rather progress.
My company's efforts were financed by financial inheritance and advocate investors.
(08:52):
Not one cent has ever been received from a victim's
family for any case that my agency has worked.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Along the way, Baber ad an idea he would collect
all the known writings of serial killers and mass murderers
into a digital database. Through which comparisons could be made
in terms of word choices and phrasing, misspellings, penmanship, syntax,
and even psychological tell He thought it might be a
way of finding the hidden beneath the hidden.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
The Frenchic Linguistic database served a valuable purpose for oursentifiing
linguistic and behavioral parallels between previously unrelated cases. Beyond that,
it offered deeper psychological insight into criminal mind or viewing
similar patterns of thought amongst various cases with connective tissue.
So I was able to identify similarities between the wording
and the choice of words between the Black Value Avenger letters,
(09:46):
which some people said about crank letters, we now know
that they weren't, as well as the twenty two plus
letters of Zodiac mailed in between nineteen sixty nine and
nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Included in his database were the many letters sent to
law enforcement in agencies and newspapers by the self named
Zodiac Killer in northern California. The Zodiacs reign of terror
began in December of nineteen sixty eight, when he shot
to death a young man and woman in a lover's
lane in Solano County over the next ten months, the
(10:19):
same man attacked two more couples, killing two more women,
and then murdered of San Francisco cab driver. In a
series of messages sent to newspapers and law enforcement agencies,
he took credit for the killings, often beginning with the
ominous greeting, this is the Zodiac speaking. The letters threatened
(10:40):
more killings, including a plan to pick off children getting
off a school bus, Though the five murders during the
ten months free were the only slayings officially credited to
the Zodiac, he claimed that various times in various messages,
to have taken seven, then twelve, then fourteen, then seventeen,
(11:01):
and then finally thirty seven lives, stating that he was
accumulating slaves for the afterlife. In four of the messages,
the Zodiac included ciphers composed of letters and hand drawn
symbols in a grid pattern. The first one was the longest,
and it was sent in three parts to three different
(11:23):
newspapers for publication. His code was broken quickly and rather easily,
by a high school teacher and his wife. The next
three ciphers were far more difficult and withstood the efforts
of would be codebreakers and cryptographers for decades until the
year twenty twenty, when the Z three forty cipher, so
(11:44):
named for the number of characters that included in the grid,
was broken by an international team of amateur cryptography enthusiasts.
The remaining two ciphers were much shorter and therefore more
difficult to break because they consisted of a limited number
of characters, making them harder to crack because fewer characters
(12:07):
meant fewer patterns, reducing the effectiveness of traditional decryption methods.
The shortest cipher, the Z thirteen, came after the Zodiac
wrote this is the Zodiac speaking. By the way, have
you cracked the last cipher I sent you? My name
(12:29):
is thirteen letters and symbols followed. Some believed that the
Zodiac was goaded into encrypting his name and sending it
to the San Francisco Chronicle because he had been called
out publicly by the president of the American Cryptogram Association.
He said the Zodiac was a rank amateur when it
(12:52):
came to encryption and would never dare put his name
out in a cipher.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Zodiac most certainly felt confident after his three forty cipher
made unbroken for six months, despite the best efforts of
topic photography experts across the nation. His ego couldn't allow
law enforcement or the American Cryptogram Association to believe they
were smarter than him, so he answered their challenge directly
with the Z thirteam cipher.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
With the advent of artificial intelligence beginning to infiltrate almost
all levels of society, from medical treatment to business applications
to political campaigns, Alex Baber thought, why not law enforcement?
Why not code breaking? The Z three to forty cipher
had been broken two years earlier by identifying a dual
(13:40):
coding system similar to that used by cryptographers to secure
military messaging during World War Two.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
They cracked the Z three forty by applying a layer approach,
first identifying a transposition method inspired by a World War
II coding system, and then applying a substitution layer to
reveal the actual letters. By combining these states niques with
letter frequency and brute force, they systematically unravel as cipher
to expose the Zodiac hidden message.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
With this knowledge, Baber set a site in the Z
thirteen cipher, and using an AI program he designed, he
amassed a list of first and last names that could
fit into the thirteen digit cipher talk about finding a
needle in a haystack. The list was seventy one million
names long, as it was originally written in the Zodiac letter,
(14:33):
the cipher was just one line, but the other ciphers
authored by the Zodiac were much longer and had been
presented in a grid. So Baber broke Z thirteen into
a two x seven grid, adding a fourteenth digit to
make the grid even with seven columns of two characters each.
This added digit is called a knull in code speak,
(14:55):
and would possibly be the space between a first and
last name. The original cipher also contained three symbols that
were repeated twice and a fourth symbol repeated three times.
This narrated the possibilities considerably, and employing other disqualifiers cut
(15:16):
further into the list of names. Based on nine witness
accounts and the possibility that di Ze three forty cipher
was derived from World War II era cryptography methods, bab
started looking for a white male who would have been
in his late thirties or early forties at the time
of the Zodiac attacks. For nine months, he waited for
(15:39):
phone directories from the period, as well as US census data,
voting roles, property records, military archives, birth records, and arrest records,
and was finally able to whittle the list of seventy
one million names down to fourteen possibilities. He then had
(16:01):
to put on his private eyeat and through forensic analysis,
he went through the final fourteen possibilities and eliminated thirteen
through disqualifying factors such as height, background, and proximity to
northern California. That left one name, Marvin Merrill. The name
(16:23):
belonged to a man who had several addresses in California
in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. He also had a
criminal record. Now, before we continue with Alex Baber's deep
dive into who Marvin Merrill was, I have to say
we will be taking a deep dive into his code
(16:44):
breaking methods in the later episode. There is also additional
information on our website Killerinthecode dot com about his investigation.
I happen to know very little about ciphers and cryptography,
but breaking the Z thirteen code is the foundation on
which this entire investigation stands. I had to independently confirm
(17:10):
or refute Baber's work before I took another step down
the path with him. I went to a code breaking
team headed by Ed Georgio, a legend in the world
of cryptography. Georgio spent thirty years in a national security
agency and to this day is the only man Everett
(17:31):
who have served as both NSA's chief codebreaker and code maker.
He accepted the challenge from me and analyzed and reworked
the steps Faber had taken. It took him three weeks.
Then he had his work and conclusions peer reviewed by
two other top code breakers who formerly worked with the NSA.
(17:54):
This is what Ed Georgio told me.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
It was one hell of a piece of work that
Alex and his team did. It was quite convincing.
Speaker 5 (18:03):
I want to emphasize what an incredibly good job Alex
did in he not only had to find a list
of candidates, he had to figure out what the cryptosystem
was to begin with.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
I asked ed to read from the paper he and
his team were authoring on Alex Baber's investigation.
Speaker 4 (18:21):
The Baker team has done an outstanding job identifying and
joining two infamous murders, the Black Volume Murder and the
Zodiac Murders. A central element of their work is the
proposed decryption of the Zodiac Z thirteen psycho, which the
Zodiac claimed would reveal his name. The Baby team combined
(18:42):
cryptanalytics and traditional investigative methods, first using a define set
of encryption assumptions, obfuscation, permutation, and substitution to reduce the
vast number of possible Z thirteen solutions to a manageable subset,
and then applied forensic reasoner to eliminate all but one candidate,
(19:05):
Marvin Merrill. Our independent validation confirmed the internal consistency of
the Baber Team's decryption method.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
We'll hear more from Ed Georgio and his team in
upcoming episodes. For now, let's go back to Alex Paper's investigation.
Once he had the name Marvin Merrill, Baber started to
background the man he believes he had identified as the Zodiac.
He was able to place him in northern California at
(19:38):
the time of the Zodiac killings. He learned that in
nineteen seventy one, Merrill had been charged in Oceanside, California
with five counts of fraud and spent three years on probation,
a period of time that matched with a period of
time when the Zodiac had gone silent. He also learned
(19:59):
that Merrill had done to Santa Barbara in nineteen ninety three.
He was sixty eight years old at the time. If
he was the Zodiac, then he had gotten away with it.
But Baber also encountered a problem. He could find no
military property, voting, or census records with Merrill's name on
(20:21):
them before the nineteen sixties. Curious, Baber dubbed deeper. He
learned through Social Security Administration records that Merrill had a
history of using two different Social Security numbers, neither of
which were his. One belonged to a woman who lived
in Chicago. The other belonged to a man named Marvin Margolis,
(20:43):
also out of Chicago. Social Security records stated that Marvin
Merrill was an alias from Marvin Margolis. This was a puzzle.
Long before the Zodiac's murders, free Marvin Merrill was involved
in identity manipulation. The question was why did Marvin Margois
(21:06):
become Marvin Merrill.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
It's one of those Aha moments where you realize that
there's something to this guy that needs to be looked
at deeper. Because an individual, first off, doesn't use someone
else's security number and doesn't file legal documents under that,
and he surely doesn't use an alias in correlation with it.
There has to be a purpose to that. Either he's
(21:28):
running from something, hiding from something, or he's doing something illegal.
And at that moment, that was another Aha moment where
I realized I'm on the right road. I need to
dig deeper into his past, because this guy went from
being an entity or nobody to me right to actually
being a real world individual to being now a real
(21:49):
world individual who is shady that's doing some ille illegal activities.
So right there tells you there's some criminal element to him.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
The deep dive continued. Now. Baber was pursuing Marvin Margolis
across time and building a biography of this mystery man.
He learned through military records that Margolis had served as
a hospital corpsman attached to a marine battalion that made
the first landing on Okinawa during World War Two. Baber
(22:22):
found a story in the archives of the Chicago newspaper
that hailed his return from the war. He posed for
a photo with the rifle he had taken off a
Japanese soldier he said he had killed. After the war,
Margolis was mustered out of the Navy in his hometown
of Chicago, but soon turned up in California. In nineteen
(22:44):
forty six, he was living in Hollywood and taking pre
med classes at the University of Southern California, and then
Baber made a startling discovery. Margolis's name was in the
nineteen fifty one grand jury report on the unsolved murder
of Elizabeth Short. The report said that Margois had been
(23:09):
one of the prime suspects in the killing of the
Black Dahlia.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
At that moment, I had another aha moment, like, holy shit,
this guy that was Merril, that was Margolis, that used
a security number, is now the same individual. And the
reason I knew it was the same identical individual Michaels
because in the records they use this date of birth
in his hometown, which you've read in his military report.
So I knew, same birthday, same name, same on town.
Speaker 4 (23:36):
We had the right guy.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
How crazy is that?
Speaker 1 (23:43):
In nineteen forty nine, the two year old Black Dahia
case was still big news in Los Angeles, and despite
a massive effort to identify a suspect and make an arrest,
the LAPD had come up empty. A grand jury was
impaneled and for two years her testimony from witnesses, including
the lead investigators on the case. They provided the grand
(24:06):
jury with a list of twenty one possible suspects in
the murder of Elizabeth Short. The list was in no
particular order of importance. Number eleven on it was Marvin Margolis.
According to the grand jury reports, what brought Margolis to
the attention of the investigator was that he and Elizabeth
(24:27):
Short had shared an apartment in Hollywood for twelve days
in October, just three months before our murder. He was
interviewed twice by detectives in the weeks after the murder.
The detectives reported that he was deceitful both times, including
initially lying about knowing Elizabeth Short and denying that the
(24:49):
two had lived together briefly. He provided an alibi for
the time of Short's murder, and his wife, who he
had married a month after sharing the apartment, backed him
up on it. Investigators were not convinced by Margolis or
his wife. It had been the view of the detectives
(25:09):
on the case that someone with a near surgical skill
had performed the bisection of Elizabeth Schwort's body. They learned
that Margois had taken part in the dissection of a
human body at the USC Medical School three months before
the murder, and they learned that Margolis's wartime experiences had
(25:33):
a profoundly negative impact on him psychologically. According to the
grand jury reports, investigators uncovered of psychological report on Margolis
that was written in support of a fifty percent disability
being granted Margolis for battlefield neurosis that grew from his
experiences on Okinawa. This is from the report that was
(25:59):
dated for four months before Elizabeth Schwort's murder. In Okinawa,
Margolis was under bombing and strafing for twenty nine days.
He was then ordered to set up a hospital there.
He worked long hours with little sleep, under frequent air raids,
saw many bodies in mangled shape. He cared for two
(26:21):
companies where there were many casualties. His setup was in
a small cave. A rain caused the sides to cave in.
He was buried all but his head, which was held
tight like a vice. The next morning he dug out.
He became amnesic, emotional, with depression and instability. The psychiatric
(26:45):
diagnosis is as follows. The subject is calm, quiet and
a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression
at present. This man shows a lack of interests, aims,
and ability to concentrate. Margos is sullen. His personality is
not pleasing, apathetic, inclined to sarcasm. He said that the
(27:09):
next time there is a war, two of us are
not going, the one who comes after me and myself.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
So this individual was obviously troubled by his wartime on
that he experience and coming back and was identified as
fifty percent mentally disabled, which at that point was like
mos to shell shock. In today's terminology, he will be
referred to as PTSD.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Blake galex Favor would do. Seventy five years later, the
detectives did a deep dive on Marvin Margolis. They learned
that when he lived at the Guardian Arms on Hollywood Boulevard,
he had a roommate named Bill Robinson, a former cryptographer
and Signal Corps officer during the war. He too was
(27:54):
deemed untruthful when interviewed by detectives and asked about Elizabeth
shore stay at the apartment he shared with Margolis, But
everything they gathered was circumstantial at best. There was no
direct evidence against Margolis. He was never arrested, and soon
after the murder moved back to Chicago. Efforts by the
(28:17):
LAPD and Chicago police to find him for a third
interview failed. He was in the wind and would soon
be adopting a false identity before returning to California. As
one detective would testify about Margolis to the grand jury
in December of nineteen forty nine, it was impossible to
(28:37):
throw him out as a suspect. It was impossible to
tie him in as a suspect. Now, all these years later,
Alex Baber had seemingly tied Margolis to two of the
last century's most infamous unsolved crimes. But was it too
(28:57):
late to go beyond the circumstantial and find the direct
evidence that eluded police for so long. We're willing to
find out in the episodes ahead, as Baber enlists a
high level team of cold case investigators and uncovers a
piece of evidence he calls the smoking gun. This is
(29:18):
just one of those investigators take on Baber's work and
his conclusions.
Speaker 6 (29:24):
I have no doubt this is the person. I have
no doubt at all. And it adds a lot to
stake your reputation on it, but I feel it's totally overwhelming,
circumstantial evidence, and now it has become mixed in with
some physical evidence that supports Alex's suspect as being the
(29:45):
Dahlia and Zodiac killers. It's overwhelming evidence that connects this
man to these murders.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
This is Michael Connolly and you have been listening to
Kill Her in the Code Solving the Black Dahlia and
Zodiac Cases. For more information about these cases and the investigation,
go to Kill Her Inthecode dot com. This podcast was
written and produced by Michael Connolly. It was edited by Teroll,
(30:19):
Lee Langford and Mark Henry Phillips, with sound design and
scoring by Mark Henry Phillips as well. Thank you for listening.
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