December 22, 2025 • 23 mins
Alex Baber’s gumshoe work leads to the discovery of undeniable physical evidence linking two of most infamous murder cases in history. Learn more on KillerInTheCode.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Citizens. Sleuth Alex Baber believed he had identified the killer
responsible for two of the most infamous crimes in history,
the Black Dahia and Zodiac murders, but his case was
built on circumstantial evidence, the breaking of a code left
behind by the Zodiac more than fifty years ago. Baber
(00:23):
knew that over the decades there had been many like him,
people who claimed to have solved these cases, only to
have their theories be dismissed or ignored for lack of evidence.
He knew that unraveling the Zodiac code was one thing,
getting hard evidence to go with it would be another.
Baber had built what he called the Forensic Linguistic Database,
(00:47):
containing the largest collection in the world of the writings
of serial killers and other infamous murderers BTK, Son of Sam,
the Atlanta child murderer, and so on. He had handwriting exemplar,
as they call them, from both the Zodiac and Black
Dahlia killers in the database, and a program using artificial
intelligence to compare the two had found linguistic similarities in
(01:11):
terms of the use of words and phrases. For example,
the Zodiac had promised in a letter to a San
Francisco newspaper to supply even more quote material in regard
to the murders he had committed. Twenty plus years earlier.
The so called Black Dahlia Avenger had promised a Los
Angeles newspaper editor that he would assist by providing additional
(01:36):
material about the horrific murder of Elizabeth Short. It's just
one simple word, but odd and significant when used in
context to describe the giving of forensic evidence in two
seemingly unrelated cases. Still, it was proof of nothing. It
was what would be considered circumstantial evidence at best, and
(01:59):
the more linguist to connections that could be made was
all the better, but still not good enough to make
his case and persuade the skeptics he knew would come
out of woodwork once he made his claims. Baber knew
he would need direct evidence. He would need to find
a smoking gun if he were to credibly connect the
(02:19):
two cases to the same killer. I'm Michael Connolly and
you're listening to Killer in the Code Solving the Black
Dahlia and Zodiac Killer Cases. This is chapter two. Let's
recap where we are on the morning of January fifteenth,
(02:40):
nineteen forty seven. The desecrated body of twenty two year
old Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot in
Los Angeles. She had been mercilessly tortured and murdered. Her
body had been neatly cut in two, severed at the midriff,
and drained of blood. It was a crime that horrified
(03:01):
the world and has remained unsolved for nearly eighty years.
In death, Elizabeth Short became better known as the Black Dahlia.
Her killer, calling himself the Black Dahlia Avenger, sent a
package to a local newspaper following the murder that contained
the property she carried with her, including her birth certificate
(03:24):
and an address book. Twenty two years after her murder,
and almost four hundred miles north of Los Angeles, the
self proclaimed Zodiac killer took five lives in a spree
that terrorized northern California. Was seemingly random murders committed across
(03:44):
a wide swath of geography. The Zodiac stoked the terror
with repeated written communications with newspapers, claiming more victims in
the past and future. In four of the notes, the
Zodiac provid coded messages, three of which remained unbroken for
a half a century. The most tantalizing of these was
(04:08):
the my Name Is cipher, in which the Zodiac boldly
claimed to reveal his name in a thirteen character cipher.
Because of his brevity, the so called Z thirteen code
was believed to be unbreakable. That is until fifty year
old Alex Baber came along. Baber is not a cop
(04:30):
and not a private detective. He's the founder of Cold
Case Consultants of America. He devised a computer program that
used artificial intelligence to weed through seventy one million possible
names that fit the Z thirteen cipher and knock it
down to a handful of manageable possibilities. Traditional gumshew work followed,
(04:52):
and Baber focused on one man whose name fit the cipher,
Marvin Merrill and alias belonged to a man originally named
Marvin Margolis, one of the prime suspects in the Black
Dahlia case. Now, to be clear, this was not the
(05:13):
first time the Dahlia and Zodiac cases had been linked.
A retired homicide detective for the Los Angeles Police Department
named Steve Hodell had connected the cases through his father,
doctor George Hodell, who was also a suspect in the
murder of Elizabeth Short Odell wrote a book about it
that I felt at the time was so convincing that
(05:34):
I even endorsed it with a blurb put on the
back cover. I lived to regret that because a subsequent
investigation by the LAPD Cold Case Unit determined that the
son's investigation of his father was flawed and the conclusion
was not valid. So now had Alex Baber wandered down
the same wrong path as he connected the two infamous
(05:56):
cases to a different suspect. He believed in the cryptography
that identified Marvin Merrill, but he knew that as groundbreaking
as it was, it wasn't enough.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
The Z thirty solution was never viewed as a piece
of evidence. It was always viewed as an investigative tool,
and looking at it from that standpoint, I knew that
I would need some additional evidence to confirm the solution
because I couldn't I couldn't expect experts to support my
findings based on a possible solution has numerous variables, like
(06:33):
there's you could literally.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
There's thousands and thousands of possible solutions. We needed to
have something that was physical that could confirm it.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Ultimately, I needed to have something that I can say, Okay,
let me let me show you what I have that
shows that this name can be associated with the real
world individual, that we can attach to the case not
by speculation, but by physical evidence.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
He started with the FLD, the forensic linguistic database he
had created. He had the handwritten notes from both the
Zodiac and Black Dalua Avenger in the FLD. The handwriting
and the messages is very distinctive and you can go
to killer inthecode dot com to see them. Baber knew
that if he could locate writing's author by Marvin Merrill,
(07:19):
then he could have an expert handwriting analyst do a
comparison to see if they had come from Merrill's hand
And I have to say the use of handwriting analysis
an investigation is on the wayne, but still it would
be a start. Problem was Marvin Merrill was long gone.
(07:39):
He died of cancer in nineteen ninety three in Santa Barbara.
Would it be possible to even find an example of
his handwriting after so many years. Baber had made a
deep dive into the life of Marvin Merrill after the
name was identified as fitting the Z thirteen cipher. While
it was documented that Meryl, using his real name Margolis,
(08:02):
had shared an apartment with Elizabeth short three months before
her death. He had gotten married shortly after and had
started a family, becoming a father. In nineteen forty eight,
Baber uncovered marriage and birth records indicating he had been
married twice during his lifetime and had fathered four children.
(08:23):
Not all the children were still alive. Baber focused on
Meryl's youngest surviving child, a son born in the early
nineteen sixties, who he had located at an address in
southern California. Baber decided to reach out, but knew that
contacting someone out of the blue and saying your father
was a serial killer was not the best way to
(08:44):
gain cooperation and a handwriting example.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
In order to get him to respond, I had to
present myself from a different perspective than an investigator or
an investigative consultant. What I did was I reached out
and I said, hey, you know, I'm doing some background
into World War two and the Battle of Okinawa is
a turning point in World War Two that your father
(09:10):
was involved in. And I was able to come to
this conclusion based on a nineteen forty five Chicago interview
where he gives details about his experiences in Okinawa, and
I opened the door that way, hoping that he might
be able to revide me some additional background on Marvin,
and he was open to that.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
The son agreed to meet Baber and a member of
his team, but he was not in southern California. He
was in upstate New York. They set up a meeting
in a local restaurant near his home there. Baber went
to the meeting with his partner, Laurie Halstead, and they
recorded the conversation. The restaurant was loud and the recording
was not so good, but the surprises as they exchanged
(09:53):
information were clearly audible. And by the way, we're not
going to name Marvin Merrill's son on the podcast, because
he eventually agreed to cooperate with Alex and his investigation
if his privacy was protected. But Baber quickly came clean
and revealed the real reason for the meeting, Marvin Merrill's
(10:13):
connection to the Black Dhalia and Zodiac murder cases. It
became clear in the conversation that while the son grew
up with a worldview that was quite different from his father's,
he had no idea about the depth of the darkness
in which his father dwelled. Baber had brought a binder
with him that contained copies of the twenty two different
(10:36):
letters sent by the Zodiac to newspapers during his reign
of terror. The son started flipping through and he.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Immediately recognized the handwriting.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
It's that of his father's.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
There was a point where he reached across the table
and actually grabbed my hands.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
And made the statement that you know, it's going to be.
Speaker 5 (10:57):
All right, We're going to be all right.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
His reaction was not that of a normal individual looking
at a letter that they did not recognize the handwritten
off you know, he definitely zoned in and identified it,
and it moved him.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
The son revealed he had a storage location in southern
California where he kept the things left to him when
his father died. He said this included letters and journals
and business documents such as handwritten checks that could be
compared by experts to the Zodiac letters. He agreed to
turn it all over to.
Speaker 6 (11:33):
Baber, and I actually exposed the connection to Elizabeth Short,
the black value that we had discovered, and I said,
are you aware that your father was the last known
boyfriend of Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 7 (11:44):
She says, Elizabeth.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
I said, yes, Elizabeth, he said, I have something I
need to show you.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
So he pulls out his phone and he starts looking
through it, and my mind went to the fact that
his father had a background with art, and I said.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
In the audio or to say, is do you have
a painting? He said, no, a sketch.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
And at that point he pulled it up on his phone.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
Oh my god, Wow, looking at a sketch of a
nude woman, you know from the Waystop that appears to
have punctual wounds torso area with smear blood and it.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
Has Elizabeth in bold writing, the biggest, the biggest writing
on the entire sketches, says Elizabeth.
Speaker 8 (12:24):
This was a piece of evidence and it was smoking gun.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I was searching for The sketches clearly dated nineteen ninety two,
the last full year of Merrill's life, when he was
dealing with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. He just signed
Marty Merrell, which was one of the alias he was
known to have used, along with Marvin Skip and Skipton,
among his many different advocations in life. Merrill was both
(12:49):
an artist and an art dealer. The sketches. As Baber
described it, a striking image of a nude woman from
the waist up, eerily mirroring the bi section of the
black Dahlia. There are contour lines on the torso and
smear marks that also mirror some of the injuries that
Elizabeth Short suffered. It is titled Elizabeth in large letters
(13:12):
that crossed the entire piece. The mutilation of her mouth
and breasts are not evident, but it would stand the
reason that including such tortures would have been an immediate
and major giveaway, engendering automatic questions of the dying artist.
Alex Baber believed he had found a piece of evidence
(13:32):
that was a game changer, and Marvin merril'son was willing
to take him back to his residence where he had
the sketch framed and hanging on a wall.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Well, I couldn't believe what we're staring at. It was
a smoking gun. We knew that this sketch was a
piece of evidence. It was physical evidence for the first time.
Since the package was mailed to the local newspapers in
la on January twenty fourth, nineteen forty seven. Since then,
there has been no physical evident It's discovered in her case,
and here I am looking at it with the offer
(14:05):
to go back and physically see it myself, well, you know,
in his residence, knowing that it's there, that's it still exists.
It's not a photo of something that's been destroyed. It
was a moment where I knew at that point that
it was game over.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
There's nothing, there's nothing that can refute that sketch being
signed and dated by Marvin Margolis under his.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Alias, that contains guilty evidence.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
If Marvin Merrill was alive today, we could prosecute him
based on the evidence.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
With the masketch. We were caught in a moment of
almost disbelief what we were looking at when he handed
the hand of his phone to me and I zoomed
in on it, on the torso area in particular, and
to see the stab wounds and the smeared blood image.
(14:59):
At that moment, I knew what I was looking at,
and as soon as I turned the phone to Laurie,
Laurie knew what she was looking at as well. It
was instant, and it was almost like in all honestly,
it's almost like time froze for a moment and everything
around us just went mute. It was.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
It was one of those moments in your life where
you realize what you're looking at shouldn't be there.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
But you know it's a reality, like it's it's it's
in your hands, you know it exists. We arrived, you'd
share the Zodiac's letters with him to see if he
recognized him, which which he did, and and then all
of a sudden we get the smoking gun that's in
our hands.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
At that moment, we knew was game over.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I do believe that the term that I used with
Laurie when we exited the restaurant, I said to her,
this is game over. Do you do realize what we have?
Speaker 7 (15:55):
Laurie said absolutely.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
You can go to our website Killerinthecode dot com to
view the sketch of Elizabeth and other documents and photos
relating to Alex Baber's investigation. We are not providing autopsy
photos for comparison to the sketch because they are extremely
graphic and available elsewhere on the internet. I have to say,
(16:23):
when I first saw the sketch, I felt a chill
go down my spine, and I was not alone. Missy Roberts,
the former LAPD homicide investigator who ran the cold case
unit until her retirement last year, was the keeper of
the Black Dahia case for the last sixteen years of
her career. She believes the sketch is direct evidence of
(16:45):
Marvin Merrill's culpability in the murder.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
If I was still at the LAPD, I would have
been in New York already knocking on the door and
retrieving that.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Evidence, because it's we don't have a lot.
Speaker 8 (16:59):
Of physical evidence in this case, and that is crucial evidence.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Roberts former partner and longtime cold case investigator Rick Jackson, agrees.
Speaker 9 (17:11):
It's almost like a calling card, something left behind, a
deathbed confession, if you will.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Roberts and Jackson were part of the team Baber assembled
after the discovery of the sketch. This included a retired
FBI supervisory agent, several season cold case homicide investigators, and
a prosecutor. One by one, they were briefed on Baber's
code breaking and follow up investigation. One by one, they
(17:39):
were turned from skeptics to believers that after all these decades,
two of the greatest crime mysteries in history had finally
been solved.
Speaker 9 (17:52):
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 Dahlia and Zodiac killers.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
I need to say here that after Marvin Merrill's son
agreed to cooperate with Alex Baber's investigation and even turned
over the sketch as well as two boxes of his
father's documents, he is not convinced his father is the
infamous Zodiac and Black Dahlia killer, and of course that
is the son's prerogative. Moving on, the value of the
(18:32):
Elizabeth sketch went beyond it being evidence that connected Merrill
to the Black Dallia murder. Remember what Alex Baber said
to me the first day we met. He boldly claimed
that he had the ability to find the hidden beneath
the hidden. And now as he studied the Elizabeth sketch
and thought about that long history of the Zodiac's cryptic
(18:53):
clues and the I'm smarter than you taunts to the
public and the police, Baber started thinking about the hidden
beneath the hidden.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
If Marvin was who we suspected he was, then that
sketch itself wasn't just something he created, It was a message.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
It was a means to an end for him.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
He knew his life was short, he.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Knew that he wouldn't be on the face of the
earth much longer. And it was in my eyes, it was.
Speaker 7 (19:24):
A deathbeck confession. It was his way of releasing whatever
guilt or whatever that was in him, if there was guilt,
by putting it out there, knowing that one day.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Somebody would come along and discover it and say, look,
this is a piece of history that connects directly to
his former girlfriend who was murdered. And that's the idea.
Once I knew that the zodiac was connected through the
Z thirteen and the son identifying some of the evidence,
I knew at that moment that this there could be
(19:57):
something more to this sketch than just Elizabe.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
And at that moment, that's when.
Speaker 6 (20:02):
I decided that we would look at the sketch from
a different perspective and run it through, you know, a
light spectrum in contrasts, you know, peel off layers, so
I could see if there was anything beneath that.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
This non invasive imaging is technically known as infrared reflectography
and is a technique used by art historians to study
the layers of paintings and sketches to find what is
hidden below the surface to identify the creative's depths and
changes made by the artist. When Baber applied this technique
(20:37):
to the Elismus sketch, using color and contrast fields, he
found a single word hidden beneath the dark shading that
outlined the central image of the woman. That hidden word
was Zodiac.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
I just think that it was his way of saying,
you know, here I am, I'm dying. I got I
got away with it, but I'm hoping somedays somebody will
come along that will discover this sketch and identify me
as the perpetrator. One thing that we're absolutely sure about
is the fact that the Zodiac was egotistical and he
(21:16):
was a genius level at aless. That being said, there's
no way that the individual that committed these crimes would
have left this planet without leaving behind some source of
identifying him. He couldn't do that.
Speaker 8 (21:29):
It's like Jack the Ripper, right, whether it's ever solved
or not, Jack the Ripper will go down, you know,
as being probably the most infamous serial killer with the
exception of this case, once we're done, but he'll never
be identified there's just no DNA left, there's no evidence there.
With zodiacs a different, different circumstances.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
He wants to be known.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
In order to be known, you have to give him
a name and a face, and I believe that's what
the sketch represents.
Speaker 7 (21:55):
It concretely ties the two cases together.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
In case you are wondering, the Elizabeth sketch has been
secured for further analysis by an independent art expert. We
will have a report on that in the episodes that followed.
The sketch, of course, energized the whole investigation, but Alex
Baber did not drop his focus on the angle of
investigation that led him to the sketch in the first place,
(22:22):
the handwriting analysis. We'll have more on that in future
episodes of the podcast. We will be back with the
continuing story of the investigation on January fifteenth, the seventy
ninth anniversary of Elizabeth Shortz murder. We'll tell you then
about breaking the final Zodiac code and its direct connection
(22:44):
to the Black Dahlia. For more information, go to Killernthecode
dot com. This podcast was written and produced by Michael Connolly.
It was edited by Teroll, Lee Langford and Mark Henry Phillips,
with sound design and scoring by Mark Henry Phillips as well.
Thank you for listening.
Citizens. Sleuth Alex Baber believed he had identified the killer
responsible for two of the most infamous crimes in history,
the Black Dahia and Zodiac murders, but his case was
built on circumstantial evidence, the breaking of a code left
behind by the Zodiac more than fifty years ago. Baber
(00:23):
knew that over the decades there had been many like him,
people who claimed to have solved these cases, only to
have their theories be dismissed or ignored for lack of evidence.
He knew that unraveling the Zodiac code was one thing,
getting hard evidence to go with it would be another.
Baber had built what he called the Forensic Linguistic Database,
(00:47):
containing the largest collection in the world of the writings
of serial killers and other infamous murderers BTK, Son of Sam,
the Atlanta child murderer, and so on. He had handwriting exemplar,
as they call them, from both the Zodiac and Black
Dahlia killers in the database, and a program using artificial
intelligence to compare the two had found linguistic similarities in
(01:11):
terms of the use of words and phrases. For example,
the Zodiac had promised in a letter to a San
Francisco newspaper to supply even more quote material in regard
to the murders he had committed. Twenty plus years earlier.
The so called Black Dahlia Avenger had promised a Los
Angeles newspaper editor that he would assist by providing additional
(01:36):
material about the horrific murder of Elizabeth Short. It's just
one simple word, but odd and significant when used in
context to describe the giving of forensic evidence in two
seemingly unrelated cases. Still, it was proof of nothing. It
was what would be considered circumstantial evidence at best, and
(01:59):
the more linguist to connections that could be made was
all the better, but still not good enough to make
his case and persuade the skeptics he knew would come
out of woodwork once he made his claims. Baber knew
he would need direct evidence. He would need to find
a smoking gun if he were to credibly connect the
(02:19):
two cases to the same killer. I'm Michael Connolly and
you're listening to Killer in the Code Solving the Black
Dahlia and Zodiac Killer Cases. This is chapter two. Let's
recap where we are on the morning of January fifteenth,
(02:40):
nineteen forty seven. The desecrated body of twenty two year
old Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot in
Los Angeles. She had been mercilessly tortured and murdered. Her
body had been neatly cut in two, severed at the midriff,
and drained of blood. It was a crime that horrified
(03:01):
the world and has remained unsolved for nearly eighty years.
In death, Elizabeth Short became better known as the Black Dahlia.
Her killer, calling himself the Black Dahlia Avenger, sent a
package to a local newspaper following the murder that contained
the property she carried with her, including her birth certificate
(03:24):
and an address book. Twenty two years after her murder,
and almost four hundred miles north of Los Angeles, the
self proclaimed Zodiac killer took five lives in a spree
that terrorized northern California. Was seemingly random murders committed across
(03:44):
a wide swath of geography. The Zodiac stoked the terror
with repeated written communications with newspapers, claiming more victims in
the past and future. In four of the notes, the
Zodiac provid coded messages, three of which remained unbroken for
a half a century. The most tantalizing of these was
(04:08):
the my Name Is cipher, in which the Zodiac boldly
claimed to reveal his name in a thirteen character cipher.
Because of his brevity, the so called Z thirteen code
was believed to be unbreakable. That is until fifty year
old Alex Baber came along. Baber is not a cop
(04:30):
and not a private detective. He's the founder of Cold
Case Consultants of America. He devised a computer program that
used artificial intelligence to weed through seventy one million possible
names that fit the Z thirteen cipher and knock it
down to a handful of manageable possibilities. Traditional gumshew work followed,
(04:52):
and Baber focused on one man whose name fit the cipher,
Marvin Merrill and alias belonged to a man originally named
Marvin Margolis, one of the prime suspects in the Black
Dahlia case. Now, to be clear, this was not the
(05:13):
first time the Dahlia and Zodiac cases had been linked.
A retired homicide detective for the Los Angeles Police Department
named Steve Hodell had connected the cases through his father,
doctor George Hodell, who was also a suspect in the
murder of Elizabeth Short Odell wrote a book about it
that I felt at the time was so convincing that
(05:34):
I even endorsed it with a blurb put on the
back cover. I lived to regret that because a subsequent
investigation by the LAPD Cold Case Unit determined that the
son's investigation of his father was flawed and the conclusion
was not valid. So now had Alex Baber wandered down
the same wrong path as he connected the two infamous
(05:56):
cases to a different suspect. He believed in the cryptography
that identified Marvin Merrill, but he knew that as groundbreaking
as it was, it wasn't enough.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
The Z thirty solution was never viewed as a piece
of evidence. It was always viewed as an investigative tool,
and looking at it from that standpoint, I knew that
I would need some additional evidence to confirm the solution
because I couldn't I couldn't expect experts to support my
findings based on a possible solution has numerous variables, like
(06:33):
there's you could literally.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
There's thousands and thousands of possible solutions. We needed to
have something that was physical that could confirm it.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Ultimately, I needed to have something that I can say, Okay,
let me let me show you what I have that
shows that this name can be associated with the real
world individual, that we can attach to the case not
by speculation, but by physical evidence.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
He started with the FLD, the forensic linguistic database he
had created. He had the handwritten notes from both the
Zodiac and Black Dalua Avenger in the FLD. The handwriting
and the messages is very distinctive and you can go
to killer inthecode dot com to see them. Baber knew
that if he could locate writing's author by Marvin Merrill,
(07:19):
then he could have an expert handwriting analyst do a
comparison to see if they had come from Merrill's hand
And I have to say the use of handwriting analysis
an investigation is on the wayne, but still it would
be a start. Problem was Marvin Merrill was long gone.
(07:39):
He died of cancer in nineteen ninety three in Santa Barbara.
Would it be possible to even find an example of
his handwriting after so many years. Baber had made a
deep dive into the life of Marvin Merrill after the
name was identified as fitting the Z thirteen cipher. While
it was documented that Meryl, using his real name Margolis,
(08:02):
had shared an apartment with Elizabeth short three months before
her death. He had gotten married shortly after and had
started a family, becoming a father. In nineteen forty eight,
Baber uncovered marriage and birth records indicating he had been
married twice during his lifetime and had fathered four children.
(08:23):
Not all the children were still alive. Baber focused on
Meryl's youngest surviving child, a son born in the early
nineteen sixties, who he had located at an address in
southern California. Baber decided to reach out, but knew that
contacting someone out of the blue and saying your father
was a serial killer was not the best way to
(08:44):
gain cooperation and a handwriting example.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
In order to get him to respond, I had to
present myself from a different perspective than an investigator or
an investigative consultant. What I did was I reached out
and I said, hey, you know, I'm doing some background
into World War two and the Battle of Okinawa is
a turning point in World War Two that your father
(09:10):
was involved in. And I was able to come to
this conclusion based on a nineteen forty five Chicago interview
where he gives details about his experiences in Okinawa, and
I opened the door that way, hoping that he might
be able to revide me some additional background on Marvin,
and he was open to that.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
The son agreed to meet Baber and a member of
his team, but he was not in southern California. He
was in upstate New York. They set up a meeting
in a local restaurant near his home there. Baber went
to the meeting with his partner, Laurie Halstead, and they
recorded the conversation. The restaurant was loud and the recording
was not so good, but the surprises as they exchanged
(09:53):
information were clearly audible. And by the way, we're not
going to name Marvin Merrill's son on the podcast, because
he eventually agreed to cooperate with Alex and his investigation
if his privacy was protected. But Baber quickly came clean
and revealed the real reason for the meeting, Marvin Merrill's
(10:13):
connection to the Black Dhalia and Zodiac murder cases. It
became clear in the conversation that while the son grew
up with a worldview that was quite different from his father's,
he had no idea about the depth of the darkness
in which his father dwelled. Baber had brought a binder
with him that contained copies of the twenty two different
(10:36):
letters sent by the Zodiac to newspapers during his reign
of terror. The son started flipping through and he.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Immediately recognized the handwriting.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
It's that of his father's.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
There was a point where he reached across the table
and actually grabbed my hands.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
And made the statement that you know, it's going to be.
Speaker 5 (10:57):
All right, We're going to be all right.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
His reaction was not that of a normal individual looking
at a letter that they did not recognize the handwritten
off you know, he definitely zoned in and identified it,
and it moved him.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
The son revealed he had a storage location in southern
California where he kept the things left to him when
his father died. He said this included letters and journals
and business documents such as handwritten checks that could be
compared by experts to the Zodiac letters. He agreed to
turn it all over to.
Speaker 6 (11:33):
Baber, and I actually exposed the connection to Elizabeth Short,
the black value that we had discovered, and I said,
are you aware that your father was the last known
boyfriend of Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 7 (11:44):
She says, Elizabeth.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
I said, yes, Elizabeth, he said, I have something I
need to show you.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
So he pulls out his phone and he starts looking
through it, and my mind went to the fact that
his father had a background with art, and I said.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
In the audio or to say, is do you have
a painting? He said, no, a sketch.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
And at that point he pulled it up on his phone.
Speaker 5 (12:04):
Oh my god, Wow, looking at a sketch of a
nude woman, you know from the Waystop that appears to
have punctual wounds torso area with smear blood and it.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
Has Elizabeth in bold writing, the biggest, the biggest writing
on the entire sketches, says Elizabeth.
Speaker 8 (12:24):
This was a piece of evidence and it was smoking gun.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
I was searching for The sketches clearly dated nineteen ninety two,
the last full year of Merrill's life, when he was
dealing with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. He just signed
Marty Merrell, which was one of the alias he was
known to have used, along with Marvin Skip and Skipton,
among his many different advocations in life. Merrill was both
(12:49):
an artist and an art dealer. The sketches. As Baber
described it, a striking image of a nude woman from
the waist up, eerily mirroring the bi section of the
black Dahlia. There are contour lines on the torso and
smear marks that also mirror some of the injuries that
Elizabeth Short suffered. It is titled Elizabeth in large letters
(13:12):
that crossed the entire piece. The mutilation of her mouth
and breasts are not evident, but it would stand the
reason that including such tortures would have been an immediate
and major giveaway, engendering automatic questions of the dying artist.
Alex Baber believed he had found a piece of evidence
(13:32):
that was a game changer, and Marvin merril'son was willing
to take him back to his residence where he had
the sketch framed and hanging on a wall.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Well, I couldn't believe what we're staring at. It was
a smoking gun. We knew that this sketch was a
piece of evidence. It was physical evidence for the first time.
Since the package was mailed to the local newspapers in
la on January twenty fourth, nineteen forty seven. Since then,
there has been no physical evident It's discovered in her case,
and here I am looking at it with the offer
(14:05):
to go back and physically see it myself, well, you know,
in his residence, knowing that it's there, that's it still exists.
It's not a photo of something that's been destroyed. It
was a moment where I knew at that point that
it was game over.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
There's nothing, there's nothing that can refute that sketch being
signed and dated by Marvin Margolis under his.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Alias, that contains guilty evidence.
Speaker 4 (14:32):
If Marvin Merrill was alive today, we could prosecute him
based on the evidence.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
With the masketch. We were caught in a moment of
almost disbelief what we were looking at when he handed
the hand of his phone to me and I zoomed
in on it, on the torso area in particular, and
to see the stab wounds and the smeared blood image.
(14:59):
At that moment, I knew what I was looking at,
and as soon as I turned the phone to Laurie,
Laurie knew what she was looking at as well. It
was instant, and it was almost like in all honestly,
it's almost like time froze for a moment and everything
around us just went mute. It was.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
It was one of those moments in your life where
you realize what you're looking at shouldn't be there.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
But you know it's a reality, like it's it's it's
in your hands, you know it exists. We arrived, you'd
share the Zodiac's letters with him to see if he
recognized him, which which he did, and and then all
of a sudden we get the smoking gun that's in
our hands.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
At that moment, we knew was game over.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
I do believe that the term that I used with
Laurie when we exited the restaurant, I said to her,
this is game over. Do you do realize what we have?
Speaker 7 (15:55):
Laurie said absolutely.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
You can go to our website Killerinthecode dot com to
view the sketch of Elizabeth and other documents and photos
relating to Alex Baber's investigation. We are not providing autopsy
photos for comparison to the sketch because they are extremely
graphic and available elsewhere on the internet. I have to say,
(16:23):
when I first saw the sketch, I felt a chill
go down my spine, and I was not alone. Missy Roberts,
the former LAPD homicide investigator who ran the cold case
unit until her retirement last year, was the keeper of
the Black Dahia case for the last sixteen years of
her career. She believes the sketch is direct evidence of
(16:45):
Marvin Merrill's culpability in the murder.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
If I was still at the LAPD, I would have
been in New York already knocking on the door and
retrieving that.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Evidence, because it's we don't have a lot.
Speaker 8 (16:59):
Of physical evidence in this case, and that is crucial evidence.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Roberts former partner and longtime cold case investigator Rick Jackson, agrees.
Speaker 9 (17:11):
It's almost like a calling card, something left behind, a
deathbed confession, if you will.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Roberts and Jackson were part of the team Baber assembled
after the discovery of the sketch. This included a retired
FBI supervisory agent, several season cold case homicide investigators, and
a prosecutor. One by one, they were briefed on Baber's
code breaking and follow up investigation. One by one, they
(17:39):
were turned from skeptics to believers that after all these decades,
two of the greatest crime mysteries in history had finally
been solved.
Speaker 9 (17:52):
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 Dahlia and Zodiac killers.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
I need to say here that after Marvin Merrill's son
agreed to cooperate with Alex Baber's investigation and even turned
over the sketch as well as two boxes of his
father's documents, he is not convinced his father is the
infamous Zodiac and Black Dahlia killer, and of course that
is the son's prerogative. Moving on, the value of the
(18:32):
Elizabeth sketch went beyond it being evidence that connected Merrill
to the Black Dallia murder. Remember what Alex Baber said
to me the first day we met. He boldly claimed
that he had the ability to find the hidden beneath
the hidden. And now as he studied the Elizabeth sketch
and thought about that long history of the Zodiac's cryptic
(18:53):
clues and the I'm smarter than you taunts to the
public and the police, Baber started thinking about the hidden
beneath the hidden.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
If Marvin was who we suspected he was, then that
sketch itself wasn't just something he created, It was a message.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
It was a means to an end for him.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
He knew his life was short, he.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Knew that he wouldn't be on the face of the
earth much longer. And it was in my eyes, it was.
Speaker 7 (19:24):
A deathbeck confession. It was his way of releasing whatever
guilt or whatever that was in him, if there was guilt,
by putting it out there, knowing that one day.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Somebody would come along and discover it and say, look,
this is a piece of history that connects directly to
his former girlfriend who was murdered. And that's the idea.
Once I knew that the zodiac was connected through the
Z thirteen and the son identifying some of the evidence,
I knew at that moment that this there could be
(19:57):
something more to this sketch than just Elizabe.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
And at that moment, that's when.
Speaker 6 (20:02):
I decided that we would look at the sketch from
a different perspective and run it through, you know, a
light spectrum in contrasts, you know, peel off layers, so
I could see if there was anything beneath that.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
This non invasive imaging is technically known as infrared reflectography
and is a technique used by art historians to study
the layers of paintings and sketches to find what is
hidden below the surface to identify the creative's depths and
changes made by the artist. When Baber applied this technique
(20:37):
to the Elismus sketch, using color and contrast fields, he
found a single word hidden beneath the dark shading that
outlined the central image of the woman. That hidden word
was Zodiac.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
I just think that it was his way of saying,
you know, here I am, I'm dying. I got I
got away with it, but I'm hoping somedays somebody will
come along that will discover this sketch and identify me
as the perpetrator. One thing that we're absolutely sure about
is the fact that the Zodiac was egotistical and he
(21:16):
was a genius level at aless. That being said, there's
no way that the individual that committed these crimes would
have left this planet without leaving behind some source of
identifying him. He couldn't do that.
Speaker 8 (21:29):
It's like Jack the Ripper, right, whether it's ever solved
or not, Jack the Ripper will go down, you know,
as being probably the most infamous serial killer with the
exception of this case, once we're done, but he'll never
be identified there's just no DNA left, there's no evidence there.
With zodiacs a different, different circumstances.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
He wants to be known.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
In order to be known, you have to give him
a name and a face, and I believe that's what
the sketch represents.
Speaker 7 (21:55):
It concretely ties the two cases together.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
In case you are wondering, the Elizabeth sketch has been
secured for further analysis by an independent art expert. We
will have a report on that in the episodes that followed.
The sketch, of course, energized the whole investigation, but Alex
Baber did not drop his focus on the angle of
investigation that led him to the sketch in the first place,
(22:22):
the handwriting analysis. We'll have more on that in future
episodes of the podcast. We will be back with the
continuing story of the investigation on January fifteenth, the seventy
ninth anniversary of Elizabeth Shortz murder. We'll tell you then
about breaking the final Zodiac code and its direct connection
(22:44):
to the Black Dahlia. For more information, go to Killernthecode
dot com. This podcast was written and produced by Michael Connolly.
It was edited by Teroll, 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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