January 7, 2026 • 37 mins
When Ed Giorgio’s cryptology team confirmed Alex Baber’s codebreaking, they uncovered a key piece of evidence themselves and a startling connection to Elizabeth Short. Learn more on KillerInTheCode.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to Killer in the Code Solving the Black
Dahia and Zodiac cases. I'm Michael Connelly and this is
chapter four. Today we're going to sit down with the
professional codebreakers that were brought in to independently backcheck a
major breakthrough in these two infamous cases, but then proceeded
(00:23):
to come up with two major breakthroughs of their own,
and in the process found the digital evidence that may
solve another cold case. If I was writing this as
a novel, it would definitely be a page turner. And
that's sort of my task today to try to take
this highly technical story and turn it into everyday language
(00:43):
that any listener can follow and understand. I'll do my best.
This all began with cold case consultant Alex Baber cracking
the Holy Grail of Zodiac ciphers, the Z thirteen, so
named because it had only thirteen digits, making it previously
(01:04):
believed to be unbreakable. Z thirteen is also known as
the My Name Is cipher because the Zodiac boasted that
he had put his name into the code. Efforts to
break it were unsuccessful for fifty plus years until Baber
came along and used a combination of AI aided data
(01:25):
crunching and legwork to weed through seventy one million names
and narrow it down to one. Marvin Merrill, also known
as Marvin Margolis, one of the top suspects in the
nineteen forty seven murder of Elizabeth Short, better known as
the Black Dahlia. Baber put together a team of investigators
(01:49):
to help him look for evidence that would support his
findings and lead to the solving of the cases that
have fascinated people for decades. When I was asked to
join the team, the first thing I did was look
for the kind of professional cryptographer that would independently confirm
or condemn Baber's work. If the entire investigation was going
(02:10):
to be built on Baber's claim to have broken Z thirteen,
I had to make sure that claim was legitimate. I
reached out to Ed Georgio, who spent thirty years with
the National Security Agency and is the only man in
the agency's history to hold both chief codebreaker and chief
code maker positions. Georgio, in turn, brought in two other
(02:34):
veteran cryptographers, Patrick Henry and Rich Rozanouski to conduct a
peer review of his work. Together, the three code breakers
have nearly one hundred years of experience, mostly working on
classified projects for the NSA or its British counterpart, the
Government Communications Headquarters. All three are still active in cybersecurity
(02:55):
and sleuthing. As reported in episode one of the podcast,
the Cryptography Team confirmed the work Baber did in arriving
at the name Marvin Merrill hidden in the Z thirteen code.
In the Los Angeles Times, Giorgio called Baber's work the
greatest sluice story ever told, and as he continues work
(03:16):
on the case, he is not backing down.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Believes that this was a monumental discovery.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
The world of cryptology is a mystery in itself. It's
populated by mathematicians and cyber experts that speak their own language.
Sometimes what they say is as hard to decipher as
the codes they make or break. But the confirmation of
Baber's breaking of the Z thirteen is based on several
steps that identify the Zodiac's methodology and keywords that in
(03:45):
a way act like the passwords we use on our
computers and phones and websites in everyday life. Each step
successfully take and reduce the possibility of error in Baber's work,
and closed in on Marvin Merrill as the only name
that finally fit the cipher.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
There are many people out there who correctly claim that
you could make this cipher decrypt to any name you like.
That's not quite true, but it's it's not strictly incorrect.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
That was at Georgio again. I sat down with him
and a member of his team, Patrick Henry, to discuss
their work on the case. Let's start with the original
code maker. In this case, that would be the Zodiac.
He wrote many catch me if you can letters to
the newspapers in the sixties and seventies. For these included
(04:36):
ciphers starting with the Z four oaid. Once again, the
numbers in these code names reflects the number of characters
in the cipher. It is standard knowledge in cryptography that
the longer a cipher is, the better chance there is
that it can and will be broken. The four OA
code was presented in a grid. It was sent in
(04:58):
three parts to three different newspapers. Most of it was
broken within a week by a pair of school teachers.
Not only was it long, but it was designed using
only a substitution methodology, meaning that letters were replaced by
numbers or symbols or other letters. By studying the frequency
(05:18):
of these characters and noting double letters and other anomalies,
a de encryption map could be arrived at that translated
each character in the cipher's grid to the correct letter
in the alphabet. There was an eighteen character tale to
the four to H eight cipher that was not broken,
but we will get to that later in the episode.
(05:41):
Possibly because his first cipher was so easily broken, the
Zodiac made a second cipher, the so called Z three forty,
much tougher. He used a substitution code with a permutation,
which means the characters were shuffled in some way after
the substitution process. Giorgio said it seems clear to him
(06:02):
that the Zodiac stepped up his game with Z three forty.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
He probably thought it would be hard to break, if
not secure, but it was broken. That taught him a lesson.
The lesson it taught him was, I need a permutation,
and I'm going to use the knights tour. And that's
what he did, and it went unsolved for fifty years,
and I worked on it myself fifty years ago.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
The Z three forty was also a grid cipher. It
finally was broken just a few years ago by a
team of mathematicians and cryptology enthusiasts. They identified the use
of the knight's tour chess move as the permutation in
the cipher. This permutation required shuffling the characters and the
grid in the way a knight is moved on a
(06:48):
chess board that is two squares vertically or horizontally, followed
by one square to the right. In late nineteen sixty nine,
the president of the American Cryptogramociation publicly belittled the Zodiac's
code making skill and challenged him to put his name
in a cipher, expressing doubt that he ever would dare
(07:10):
to do it, but he was wrong. On April twentieth,
nineteen seventy, the Zodiac's third cipher, the Z thirteen, arrived
at the San Francisco Chronicle, with the Zodiac boldly claiming
that he put his name into the thirteen character string
of symbols and letters. By keeping it under fifteen characters.
(07:30):
The Zodiac most likely believed it was unbreakable. Most of
the manuals and literature on code of the day told
him so, but nevertheless, the Zodiac used two coding methodologies
to double down and make sure we will get into
the construction in a minute, but I just wanted to
(07:51):
mention that the Zodiac's last known cipher came in a
few months later, the Z thirty two cipher, which we
talked about in episode three. We'll also have more to
say about that later in the episode. When Ed Giorgio
and his team took up the task of backtracking the
work of Alex Baber, they were chiefly concerned with two things.
(08:13):
The first was to learn how Baber broke the code
and what methods he used to do it. The second
was to put themselves in the Zodiac's shoes and learn
what methods he had used to compose the cipher in
the first place. In a way, these were two separate
investigations that would wrap around each other like a double halix.
(08:35):
There were outside factors that had to be considered at
the start, namely, how did the Zodiac learn cryptology? Baber
believed that the Zodiac's code making had origins in military
code work. This was not a new concept, and the
Georgio team thought the same. We discussed this in chapter
three of the podcast. But here was cryptographer Patrick Henry
(08:58):
with a refresher on the materials that would have been
available to someone encrypting messages in the late nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
The book that I believe would have been the most
readily available was by Helen Gaines, and it's called Cryptanalysis,
A Study of Ciphers and a Solution. And you can
see on the cover a sort of grid based cipher
right there the Army Field Manual on Basic Cryptography, which
(09:29):
was actually published in nineteen fifty after the war. So
it's not clear that he would have had access to
that specifically, but other materials similar materials may have been
available to him.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Henry also mentioned a book originally published in nineteen sixteen
called Manual for the Solution of Military Ciphers by Parker
hit In his investigation, Alx Baber spent two years working
on Z thirteen and trying to identif the methodology used
in the encryption. It was obviously a substitution cipher, but
(10:06):
there was also a permutation that needed to be identified.
Though the cipher was presented by the Zodiac on one
line in the letter to the Chronicle, Baber noted that
the other three Zodiac codes were grid ciphers. He decided
to take Z thirteen and put it on a grid
that is Instead of keeping it on one line, he
(10:27):
broke it into two rows of seven characters with the
addition of a blank or a knull to make sure
there would be seven columns with two characters each. That
move by Baber eventually broke things open when he was
able to identify the methodology use. The seven columns were
(10:48):
shuffled first, and then each letter was replaced in the
substitution scheme. Baber then spent nine months using an AI
program to weed through all the names that fit with
the permutation until there was one name left, Marvin Merrill.
The Georgio team followed the same path and confirmed what
(11:08):
Baber had done. They found that the Z thirteen encryption
method was a variation on the methodology used in the
other zodiac ciphers.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
I know it's a difficult concept, but the permutation that
Alex gave us we believe is correct in part because
the method of encryption is very consistent with his prior
methods of encryption, and what Patrick just said about the
games book that tells you this is the way to
(11:41):
do it.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
If this was a movie, this is where the story
would suddenly pivot and pick up speed ed and Patrick
and Rich the x NSA. Guys didn't leave it there.
With the confirmation of Alex Baber's methodology and solution, they
went from code breaking to code making. They started thinking
like the zodiac and how you would have composed the
(12:05):
Z thirteen cipher. Every book in text and primer on
code making, including those mentioned, already tells you to start
with a keyword that can be used to compose as
well as unravel the cipher. A word with at least
six to eight letters that can be numbered in order
of their appearance in the alphabet. The resulting number becomes
(12:27):
the permutation key or the substitution key. For example, if
you have your message in a grid with say four columns,
you want a keyword that is at least four characters long.
So say you use the word flag as your keyword.
You start by placing F above the first column, L
above the second column, A above the third, and G
(12:50):
above the fourth. Then you sort the columns to put
the letters of the keyword in alphabetical order, which with
the word flag would be A, F, G, L. The
A originally started above the third column, but A comes
before all the others in the alphabet, so that third
column gets re arranged to be in the first position.
(13:13):
The first column F would be the next letter in
the keyword to come alphabetically, So the F column moves
into the second position, followed by the G column, and
then finally the L column. You have now shuffled the columns.
Cryptographers then typically converts such a keyword into numbers. The
(13:34):
keyword flag, for example, would have a numerical of two
four one three, again by sorting the letters of the
word flag according to the order they come in in
the alphabet. The A comes first, so it gets assigned
the number one, and F is the second, so it
gets to number two. G gets number three, and the
(13:55):
fourth letter alphabetically is L, so it gets a four.
So F L A G becomes two four one three.
It's complicated, and I hope I have explained it clearly.
But you can go to our website to find links
to sites that further explaining this permutation, which is often
referred to as a Columner transposition with his Z thirteen code.
(14:19):
The permutation key, if it could be discovered, would reveal
the correct order of the seven shuffled columns, and that,
of course, would further confirm Baber's solution. Patrick believed that
the sophistication of the Zodiac ciphers indicated that demand behind
them would have used a key, so he started looking
(14:39):
for it.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Patrick was convinced that the permutation wasn't random and spent
days reverse engineering it. And I said to myself, geez.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
He's probably going down a dead death, and he kept saying,
I mean no, there's got to be some way. He
came up with the permutation and Patrick stuck it out
out tried every combination.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
So I had moved on I would I didn't do that.
So it just shows how what the value of a
team is.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
The bottom line is Patrick found it. You turn a
key to unlock a door. Patrick found that the keyword
that unlocked the door when Z thirteen was Elizabeth. And
by the way, you can only use a letter once
in a permutation key. So it became clear that the
Zodiac had dropped the first D in Elizabeth.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
After an AHA moment, definitely.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
So Alex recovered the permutation and Patrick figured out how
it was generated in the first place. It was generated
by a standard scheme using the keyword Elizabeth.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
That's something that really lends weight to this solution being correct.
It's not just an anagram of the ciphertext that you
then apply it septstitute to and get a random name.
It's a very structured reordering using the kinds of permutations
(16:12):
that were used in standard reference works. They all start with, okay,
here's how to make a substitution. Now here's how to
make a permutation, which is commonly called a columnar transposition,
and then a discussion of okay, well we want to
(16:32):
combine these two in order to get a cipher that's
really resistant to announce us.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
It was a stunning discovery Marvin Merrill. It used the
name of the black Dahlia as the keyword to a
zodiac cipher. It was another irrefutable connection between the cases.
All three parts of the crypto investigation came together, methodology, keyword,
and solution.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
So when people out there assert, hey, you can make
this decrypt to any name you want, they are correct.
But can you make it decrypt to something that has
all these other attributes, like we had prior knowledge that
this was a suspect, like we had prior knowledge of
the encryption system, like we had prior knowledge that this
was this person called Elizabeth.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
You can't, You just can't.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
Put all those three things together and come up with
the answer. Excuse me, come up with a believable answer.
You have to take all three as a package. The
first thing is the suspect's name. The second thing is what.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Actual encryption method was used? All right, not what the
answer was, what was the method. So we think that
his method looks very much like his prior methods. It
also the method is well informed by the gains text.
The third thing is, hey, a keyword actually generates the permutation,
(18:02):
and what is that keyword? That keyword is Elizabeth. Oh
my god. We've got great prior evidence in favor of that.
So what we see in the cipher text that crazy
thirteen long sequence is a precise mapping. From that, all
of those three assumptions have to be correct to.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Get at every stage in the way from the Z
thirteen to Marven Merrill. We have a believable, clausible method
to get from one to the other. And they all
kind of make sense, and they all hang together. And
generally that is not the kids Like if you have
(18:43):
a one of the other thousands of names that could
fit in terms of having the right number of repeats
in them, they won't necessarily match this permutation method with
any permutation, and if they do, the permutation keyword might
not be believable. And if they do, the name might
(19:07):
end up being something that isn't the name of a
real life person or a real dead person in this case.
And if they do, then you end up with a
substitution that has no known structure to it. But at
every stage in this we have structure. We have a
sort of a method of construction that is believable, matches
(19:30):
what was commonly described in texts and was and sort
of build in our confidence that this is the right solution.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
I asked Georgia or Henry why they thought the Zodiac
would use a keyword that, if discovered, could connect him
to another case.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I think he would. He was trying to leave clues,
and he was trying to make it sort of tantalife
sing but hard, and so that when somebody did finally
come up with the solution, they would be able to
see how it was constructed and what the keyword was
and it wasn't just something made at random.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
The keyword discovery galvanized the cryptography team because they now
understood that if the Zodiac used a keyword for the
Z thirteen codes permutation. Then he most likely used a
keyword for the substitution scheme as well. Once again they
were back in the zodiac shoes, figuring out what steps
(20:36):
he would have taken.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
I think he would have started with the writing his
name in the grid and thinking what do I do next? Okay,
I do a permutation. So I'll come up with a keyword.
Use the keyword to make a permutation. All right, I'm
going to use Elizabeth. And so he used Elizabeth and
then reordered the letters. Now, just reordering the letter is
(21:02):
not going to be anywhere and it is secure enough.
So you have to have a substitution as well. And
how do you come up with the substitution. We don't
know how he came up with the substitutions, but his
earliest ciphers, we do believe that he used a keyword
for the substitution in Z thirteen.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Having brought in late to Patrick's belief that there was
a permutation keyword, ed dove headlong into the search for
a keyword to the substitution scheme in Z thirteen. He
worked at night and day, and on Thanksgiving morning, he
was once again back in front of the computer. Earlier,
he had identified the exact mapping of symbols to letters
(21:46):
in the code. He now had to find the keyword
that corresponded to it. An exhaustive search came up with
nineteen possibilities. Most of these words were nouns, verbs, and
adjectives ascending, freighter, and cherished. Only three of the nineteen
words were recognizable as names, Siegfried, Frederico, and Scherry Joe
(22:12):
with Sherry spelled unusually with a C, and Joe without
an E. The names and words meant nothing to Georgio.
He fed them into an AI program and asked if
any of the words on the list held any significance
in either the Zodiac or Black Dahia cases. The answer
was immediate. Cherry Joe Bates was murdered in Riverside, California,
(22:35):
in nineteen sixty six and thought by many to be,
but never officially declared by police, to be a victim
of the Zodiac.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
So this was kind of the second AHA moment.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Cherry Joe Bates was an eighteen year old college dudent
at Riverside Community College. She was murdered on the night
of October thirtieth, nineteen sixty six. Shortly after leaving the
school's library, her car had been disabled, and she walked
off with a man promising to give her help and
a ride home. She was slashed and stabbed during a struggle,
(23:13):
and her body was found the next morning. Police determined
that the distributor on her Volkswagen's engine had been disconnected,
which indicated her murder was premeditated. In the weeks that followed,
police and local newspapers received a variety of letters from
her alleged killer. Most were proven to be hoaxes, but
(23:35):
one so called confession letter was determined to be from
the actual killer because of the details it provided, including
that he had pulled the middle wire on the Volkswagen's distributor.
Police also recovered a wooden desk from the library with
references to Sherry Joe's murder written on it. This was
also determined to have been the work of the real killer.
(24:00):
Three years later, with the murder unsolved, Riverside detectives noted
the similarities to what was happening up in the Bay
area with the so called Zodiac killer. He too had
a pension for reaching out to newspapers and threw them
to the police. The Riverside detectives met privately with their
Bay Area counterparts to compare the cases, but the possible
(24:23):
connection between the cases was not exposed publicly until late
nineteen seventy, when the San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery,
later to be portrayed by Robert Downey Junior in the
movie Zodiac, broke the story. There were several intriguing connections
between the cases, including the use of similar words and
duplicate misspellings in the letters from the Zodiac and the
(24:45):
Riverside Killer, For example, both used the word twitch in
their writing, both misspelling it the same way. In a
newspaper interview with Sherry Joe's father a year after the murder,
he spoke of their loneliness in his life since losing
her and could only refer to her killing as quote
this thing that happened. Two years later, but before the
(25:09):
possible connection between the cases were revealed publicly, the Zodiac
said in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, I
get awfully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I
could do my thing. While there were many other similarities,
there were things that didn't quite fit the specific targeting
(25:34):
of Sherry Joe, as opposed to the seemingly randomness of
the Zodiac killings, the distance between Riverside and the Bay Area,
the fact that the Riverside confession letter was tight and
all the Zodiac communications were handwritten. Though in the years
that followed the FBI investigated the possible links between the cases,
(25:56):
the investigations were never fully and officially combined when the
different seemed to outweigh the similarities. The team investigating Marvin
Merrill believes they are now inextricably linked because the zodiaci's
Cherry Joe has a keyword in composing the Z thirteen cipher,
at least four months before the San Francisco Chronicle and
(26:18):
Paul Avery broke the story that the cases might be linked.
This is veteran homicide detective Rip Jackson.
Speaker 6 (26:27):
That's a mind boggling fact that would rivet any detective
that was connected with an unsolved murderer. The unsolved murder
of Cherry Joe bates. What are the chances that that
kind of thing happens, That the killer or potential killer
includes her name and a cipher keyword when the cases
(26:49):
haven't even been seriously looked at or connected until months
later by an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's
off the charts that that kind of stuff just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Missy Roberts, the former supervisor of the Los Angeles Police
departments Cold Case Unit, said the Cherry Joe keyword confirms
the connection to the Zodiac and says it offers valuable
insights into the killers evolving m What are.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
The odds that those keywords would be the exact names
of two of the most famous unsolved gruesome murders similar murders,
by the way, gruesome murders in California history.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Cherry Joe bas was slashed and stabbed two years later,
the Zodiac began as murder spree using a handgun. Roberts
says that is not a reason to view the cases
as unconnected.
Speaker 7 (27:44):
In every killer, you see that a lot the evolving
of an m O. Things that works, things that didn't work.
You know, there's a lot of risk with a murder
like Sharry Jel where you're murdering somebody in public. You know,
she was kind of secreted in between two buildings, but
it's in public, very bloody. You're you know, you're coming
out now into the street covered with I I would
(28:06):
imagine blood and evidence, and there's there was said to
be a huge struggle, which that is going to alert people,
alert law enforcement. And so these are things that would
have went wrong for the killer that he's going to
try and perfect. A serial killer is going to try
(28:27):
and perfect and get better because he doesn't want to
get caught. Even though he's taunting law enforcement and he's saying,
you know, catch me if you can. This is a
game to him and he wants to keep playing. And
so with the Zodiac, yeah, you know, he sneaks up,
very sneaky.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
They don't even know.
Speaker 7 (28:45):
That he's there until he's right there in the window
of the cars.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
More planning and just he's perfecting.
Speaker 7 (28:54):
He's perfecting his game so he can continue to do it.
And anytime you use a gun, I think you know,
you have less it's quicker, it's less personal.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
You can keep a distance from your victim.
Speaker 7 (29:06):
You know, you have more time to just get away
without a bunch of evidence on yourself. As we start
to fill in those gaps and things start to fall
into place, we see the killer evolving and getting better.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
At his craft.
Speaker 7 (29:24):
And there's a reason why he wasn't caught because he
did evolve.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
It should be noted that Marvin Merrill initially he checks
some of the boxes in relation to the Base murder,
namely proximity. At the time of the murder, he was
living an hour and fifteen minutes away in Vista, California.
He also was operating an auto repair business at the
time called Buck Savers, which would have likely given him
(29:49):
the knowledge of which wire to pull in a distributor
to disable Sherry Joe Basse's Volkswagen. Alex Babors team is
continuing the investigation of Merrill's connection to the Bates murder,
and we will have more on that in later episodes.
Let's go back now to our cryptographers. Their work on
(30:10):
this project certainly gives legitimacy to Alex Baber's work and
claimed that Marvin Merrill born Marvin Margolis is the killer
of Elizabeth Short as well as the victims of the
Zodiac Spree. Highest Baber about this.
Speaker 8 (30:25):
I think that this alone that validates my initial discovery
and findings of Marvin Merrill as being the solution to
the z thirteen as well as I think it it
adds another layer of credibility because it was independently discovered.
It wasn't it wasn't in house to me and my team.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Another game changing confirmation came in last week from Stockholm, Sweden,
where a data analyst reported a startling new insight when
the Zodiac's first cipher, the Z four oh eight. This
was the cipher broken very quickly in NI eighteen sixty
nine by its school teachers Donald and Betty Harden, except
it wasn't completely broken. The last line of the cipher,
(31:08):
eighteen characters long, was not decoded and has remained so
ever since. Over the years, it was thought to be
gibberish or a line of meaningless symbols used to even
out the three grids that comprise the cipher. The last
line became known informally as the Z eighteen. Last week,
(31:28):
Thomas Hefner of Stockholm reported that he applied methodology employed
by Baber in breaking Z thirteen to the so called
Z eighteen and was able to decrypt it. He says
it contains a name Marvin Merrill. Hefner has no background
(31:50):
in cryptography, but works for a tech investment firm in
Stockholm and specializes in pattern recognition and hypothesis of validation.
Attended college in Los Angeles and was familiar with both
the Zodiac and Black Dalia cases because of movies he
saw that were based on each case. He saw news
(32:10):
stories on Alex Baber's discovery and look for pattern similarities
between Z thirteen and Z eighteen. He noticed that if
he discounted the five e's contained in Z eighteen and
applied Baber's methodology to the remaining thirteen characters, you got
the same result. Hefner told me he was excited by
(32:31):
the discovery, but also a little bit spooped.
Speaker 9 (32:35):
Work itself was about seeing the patterns and trying to
understand the system itself behind it, and it sort of
puts you in the space where you are trying to
you start thinking. You feel at least like you're thinking
like the person who created these patterns on the system,
and it's you realize that you're suddenly getting in the
head of the killer, the serial killer.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
It's quite it's an airy feeling.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Sner's work has been confirmed by Baber. It's solid.
Speaker 8 (33:04):
It's rock solid. I tested it first twice to make
sure it was accurate. It was. I therefore shared it with.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Ed Georgia and Henry are still reviewing the construction of
Hefner's solution to Z eighteen, but told me that their
initial review of it founded to be plausible. I want
to finish up here with Ada and Patrick. I asked
them to review Baber's work on the Z thirty two side,
for which was part of the discussion in chapter three
(33:32):
of the podcast. I asked for a no holds barred review.
This is Patrick Henry.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
The Z thirty two has a similar property that you
can have lots and lots of solutions, so it's really
hard to build confidence in the correctness of any given
solution because in a sense, almost all solutions are valt
I think Alex has really convincing evidence outside of the
(34:05):
cipher where you take that large circle cross, he's got
a very heavily inked in zero and you line that
up with the map and put the center on Mount Diabler,
and you end up with the burial location of Elizabeth Short.
(34:25):
And yeah, we verified that with the map. That certainly
lines up. That all seems very plausible. The question of
how would you get from the given plaintext to that ciphertext, Well,
it doesn't have we don't have any sort of convincing
argument that this solution is structurally any better than any
(34:50):
other solution. The evidence that Alex points out that is
outside of the cipher has some weight to it.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
We said that because the Z thirty two cipher was
a simple substitution code, there are no keywords that can
be found to confirm a solution.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
That was the way that we kind of build confidence
on the Z thirteen solution is looking at how would
you construct this, and when we found out, okay, this
is how you constructed and you end up with these
keywords that the highly relevant to the case being the
keys that really sort of cemented it for us, but
(35:30):
we don't have that full Z thirty two.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Before signing off with the cryptographic team, I had to
ask at Georgio why he pitched in and build a
team to help confirm Alex babors solution to the Zodiac code.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
We believe that you know this was a monumental discovery.
We were asked by you to verify the result. So
this is the normal experimental science thing that cryptanalysts do
every day. This is my passion. It's enormously fun. I'm
not getting paid, and I have very important other work
to do that. We're Patrick and I and Rich of
(36:12):
finding the Bad Guys on the Internet. Now that's a
research and development program because it's a work in progress,
but I have a strong connection to the history of
Coote breaking a story like this. I'm sailing a little
close to the wind because we're showing cryptanalytic techniques that
would have been considered classified in the day they were used.
(36:35):
Some of them are still considered classified today, but we're
in it to solve important problems. We think this is important,
but we also think it's terribly exciting.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
We'll be back with a new episode of the podcast
on the anniversary of Elizabeth Short's death, when the investigators
take it to the street in search of the place
where the Black Dahlia may have been murdered. I'm Michael Connelly,
and you've been listening to Killer in the Code solving
the Black Dahia and Zodiac cases. This episode was written
(37:13):
and produced by Michael Connolly. It was edited by Terall
Lee Langford, with sound designed by Michael Odemark and music
by Mark Henry Phillips. Subscribe to the podcast so you'll
be informed of new episodes and check out killerindecode dot
com for information on the investigation. Thank you for listening.
You're listening to Killer in the Code Solving the Black
Dahia and Zodiac cases. I'm Michael Connelly and this is
chapter four. Today we're going to sit down with the
professional codebreakers that were brought in to independently backcheck a
major breakthrough in these two infamous cases, but then proceeded
(00:23):
to come up with two major breakthroughs of their own,
and in the process found the digital evidence that may
solve another cold case. If I was writing this as
a novel, it would definitely be a page turner. And
that's sort of my task today to try to take
this highly technical story and turn it into everyday language
(00:43):
that any listener can follow and understand. I'll do my best.
This all began with cold case consultant Alex Baber cracking
the Holy Grail of Zodiac ciphers, the Z thirteen, so
named because it had only thirteen digits, making it previously
(01:04):
believed to be unbreakable. Z thirteen is also known as
the My Name Is cipher because the Zodiac boasted that
he had put his name into the code. Efforts to
break it were unsuccessful for fifty plus years until Baber
came along and used a combination of AI aided data
(01:25):
crunching and legwork to weed through seventy one million names
and narrow it down to one. Marvin Merrill, also known
as Marvin Margolis, one of the top suspects in the
nineteen forty seven murder of Elizabeth Short, better known as
the Black Dahlia. Baber put together a team of investigators
(01:49):
to help him look for evidence that would support his
findings and lead to the solving of the cases that
have fascinated people for decades. When I was asked to
join the team, the first thing I did was look
for the kind of professional cryptographer that would independently confirm
or condemn Baber's work. If the entire investigation was going
(02:10):
to be built on Baber's claim to have broken Z thirteen,
I had to make sure that claim was legitimate. I
reached out to Ed Georgio, who spent thirty years with
the National Security Agency and is the only man in
the agency's history to hold both chief codebreaker and chief
code maker positions. Georgio, in turn, brought in two other
(02:34):
veteran cryptographers, Patrick Henry and Rich Rozanouski to conduct a
peer review of his work. Together, the three code breakers
have nearly one hundred years of experience, mostly working on
classified projects for the NSA or its British counterpart, the
Government Communications Headquarters. All three are still active in cybersecurity
(02:55):
and sleuthing. As reported in episode one of the podcast,
the Cryptography Team confirmed the work Baber did in arriving
at the name Marvin Merrill hidden in the Z thirteen code.
In the Los Angeles Times, Giorgio called Baber's work the
greatest sluice story ever told, and as he continues work
(03:16):
on the case, he is not backing down.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Believes that this was a monumental discovery.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
The world of cryptology is a mystery in itself. It's
populated by mathematicians and cyber experts that speak their own language.
Sometimes what they say is as hard to decipher as
the codes they make or break. But the confirmation of
Baber's breaking of the Z thirteen is based on several
steps that identify the Zodiac's methodology and keywords that in
(03:45):
a way act like the passwords we use on our
computers and phones and websites in everyday life. Each step
successfully take and reduce the possibility of error in Baber's work,
and closed in on Marvin Merrill as the only name
that finally fit the cipher.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
There are many people out there who correctly claim that
you could make this cipher decrypt to any name you like.
That's not quite true, but it's it's not strictly incorrect.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
That was at Georgio again. I sat down with him
and a member of his team, Patrick Henry, to discuss
their work on the case. Let's start with the original
code maker. In this case, that would be the Zodiac.
He wrote many catch me if you can letters to
the newspapers in the sixties and seventies. For these included
(04:36):
ciphers starting with the Z four oaid. Once again, the
numbers in these code names reflects the number of characters
in the cipher. It is standard knowledge in cryptography that
the longer a cipher is, the better chance there is
that it can and will be broken. The four OA
code was presented in a grid. It was sent in
(04:58):
three parts to three different newspapers. Most of it was
broken within a week by a pair of school teachers.
Not only was it long, but it was designed using
only a substitution methodology, meaning that letters were replaced by
numbers or symbols or other letters. By studying the frequency
(05:18):
of these characters and noting double letters and other anomalies,
a de encryption map could be arrived at that translated
each character in the cipher's grid to the correct letter
in the alphabet. There was an eighteen character tale to
the four to H eight cipher that was not broken,
but we will get to that later in the episode.
(05:41):
Possibly because his first cipher was so easily broken, the
Zodiac made a second cipher, the so called Z three forty,
much tougher. He used a substitution code with a permutation,
which means the characters were shuffled in some way after
the substitution process. Giorgio said it seems clear to him
(06:02):
that the Zodiac stepped up his game with Z three forty.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
He probably thought it would be hard to break, if
not secure, but it was broken. That taught him a lesson.
The lesson it taught him was, I need a permutation,
and I'm going to use the knights tour. And that's
what he did, and it went unsolved for fifty years,
and I worked on it myself fifty years ago.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
The Z three forty was also a grid cipher. It
finally was broken just a few years ago by a
team of mathematicians and cryptology enthusiasts. They identified the use
of the knight's tour chess move as the permutation in
the cipher. This permutation required shuffling the characters and the
grid in the way a knight is moved on a
(06:48):
chess board that is two squares vertically or horizontally, followed
by one square to the right. In late nineteen sixty nine,
the president of the American Cryptogramociation publicly belittled the Zodiac's
code making skill and challenged him to put his name
in a cipher, expressing doubt that he ever would dare
(07:10):
to do it, but he was wrong. On April twentieth,
nineteen seventy, the Zodiac's third cipher, the Z thirteen, arrived
at the San Francisco Chronicle, with the Zodiac boldly claiming
that he put his name into the thirteen character string
of symbols and letters. By keeping it under fifteen characters.
(07:30):
The Zodiac most likely believed it was unbreakable. Most of
the manuals and literature on code of the day told
him so, but nevertheless, the Zodiac used two coding methodologies
to double down and make sure we will get into
the construction in a minute, but I just wanted to
(07:51):
mention that the Zodiac's last known cipher came in a
few months later, the Z thirty two cipher, which we
talked about in episode three. We'll also have more to
say about that later in the episode. When Ed Giorgio
and his team took up the task of backtracking the
work of Alex Baber, they were chiefly concerned with two things.
(08:13):
The first was to learn how Baber broke the code
and what methods he used to do it. The second
was to put themselves in the Zodiac's shoes and learn
what methods he had used to compose the cipher in
the first place. In a way, these were two separate
investigations that would wrap around each other like a double halix.
(08:35):
There were outside factors that had to be considered at
the start, namely, how did the Zodiac learn cryptology? Baber
believed that the Zodiac's code making had origins in military
code work. This was not a new concept, and the
Georgio team thought the same. We discussed this in chapter
three of the podcast. But here was cryptographer Patrick Henry
(08:58):
with a refresher on the materials that would have been
available to someone encrypting messages in the late nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
The book that I believe would have been the most
readily available was by Helen Gaines, and it's called Cryptanalysis,
A Study of Ciphers and a Solution. And you can
see on the cover a sort of grid based cipher
right there the Army Field Manual on Basic Cryptography, which
(09:29):
was actually published in nineteen fifty after the war. So
it's not clear that he would have had access to
that specifically, but other materials similar materials may have been
available to him.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Henry also mentioned a book originally published in nineteen sixteen
called Manual for the Solution of Military Ciphers by Parker
hit In his investigation, Alx Baber spent two years working
on Z thirteen and trying to identif the methodology used
in the encryption. It was obviously a substitution cipher, but
(10:06):
there was also a permutation that needed to be identified.
Though the cipher was presented by the Zodiac on one
line in the letter to the Chronicle, Baber noted that
the other three Zodiac codes were grid ciphers. He decided
to take Z thirteen and put it on a grid
that is Instead of keeping it on one line, he
(10:27):
broke it into two rows of seven characters with the
addition of a blank or a knull to make sure
there would be seven columns with two characters each. That
move by Baber eventually broke things open when he was
able to identify the methodology use. The seven columns were
(10:48):
shuffled first, and then each letter was replaced in the
substitution scheme. Baber then spent nine months using an AI
program to weed through all the names that fit with
the permutation until there was one name left, Marvin Merrill.
The Georgio team followed the same path and confirmed what
(11:08):
Baber had done. They found that the Z thirteen encryption
method was a variation on the methodology used in the
other zodiac ciphers.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
I know it's a difficult concept, but the permutation that
Alex gave us we believe is correct in part because
the method of encryption is very consistent with his prior
methods of encryption, and what Patrick just said about the
games book that tells you this is the way to
(11:41):
do it.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
If this was a movie, this is where the story
would suddenly pivot and pick up speed ed and Patrick
and Rich the x NSA. Guys didn't leave it there.
With the confirmation of Alex Baber's methodology and solution, they
went from code breaking to code making. They started thinking
like the zodiac and how you would have composed the
(12:05):
Z thirteen cipher. Every book in text and primer on
code making, including those mentioned, already tells you to start
with a keyword that can be used to compose as
well as unravel the cipher. A word with at least
six to eight letters that can be numbered in order
of their appearance in the alphabet. The resulting number becomes
(12:27):
the permutation key or the substitution key. For example, if
you have your message in a grid with say four columns,
you want a keyword that is at least four characters long.
So say you use the word flag as your keyword.
You start by placing F above the first column, L
above the second column, A above the third, and G
(12:50):
above the fourth. Then you sort the columns to put
the letters of the keyword in alphabetical order, which with
the word flag would be A, F, G, L. The
A originally started above the third column, but A comes
before all the others in the alphabet, so that third
column gets re arranged to be in the first position.
(13:13):
The first column F would be the next letter in
the keyword to come alphabetically, So the F column moves
into the second position, followed by the G column, and
then finally the L column. You have now shuffled the columns.
Cryptographers then typically converts such a keyword into numbers. The
(13:34):
keyword flag, for example, would have a numerical of two
four one three, again by sorting the letters of the
word flag according to the order they come in in
the alphabet. The A comes first, so it gets assigned
the number one, and F is the second, so it
gets to number two. G gets number three, and the
(13:55):
fourth letter alphabetically is L, so it gets a four.
So F L A G becomes two four one three.
It's complicated, and I hope I have explained it clearly.
But you can go to our website to find links
to sites that further explaining this permutation, which is often
referred to as a Columner transposition with his Z thirteen code.
(14:19):
The permutation key, if it could be discovered, would reveal
the correct order of the seven shuffled columns, and that,
of course, would further confirm Baber's solution. Patrick believed that
the sophistication of the Zodiac ciphers indicated that demand behind
them would have used a key, so he started looking
(14:39):
for it.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Patrick was convinced that the permutation wasn't random and spent
days reverse engineering it. And I said to myself, geez.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
He's probably going down a dead death, and he kept saying,
I mean no, there's got to be some way. He
came up with the permutation and Patrick stuck it out
out tried every combination.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
So I had moved on I would I didn't do that.
So it just shows how what the value of a
team is.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
The bottom line is Patrick found it. You turn a
key to unlock a door. Patrick found that the keyword
that unlocked the door when Z thirteen was Elizabeth. And
by the way, you can only use a letter once
in a permutation key. So it became clear that the
Zodiac had dropped the first D in Elizabeth.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
After an AHA moment, definitely.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
So Alex recovered the permutation and Patrick figured out how
it was generated in the first place. It was generated
by a standard scheme using the keyword Elizabeth.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
That's something that really lends weight to this solution being correct.
It's not just an anagram of the ciphertext that you
then apply it septstitute to and get a random name.
It's a very structured reordering using the kinds of permutations
(16:12):
that were used in standard reference works. They all start with, okay,
here's how to make a substitution. Now here's how to
make a permutation, which is commonly called a columnar transposition,
and then a discussion of okay, well we want to
(16:32):
combine these two in order to get a cipher that's
really resistant to announce us.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
It was a stunning discovery Marvin Merrill. It used the
name of the black Dahlia as the keyword to a
zodiac cipher. It was another irrefutable connection between the cases.
All three parts of the crypto investigation came together, methodology, keyword,
and solution.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
So when people out there assert, hey, you can make
this decrypt to any name you want, they are correct.
But can you make it decrypt to something that has
all these other attributes, like we had prior knowledge that
this was a suspect, like we had prior knowledge of
the encryption system, like we had prior knowledge that this
was this person called Elizabeth.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
You can't, You just can't.
Speaker 5 (17:22):
Put all those three things together and come up with
the answer. Excuse me, come up with a believable answer.
You have to take all three as a package. The
first thing is the suspect's name. The second thing is what.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Actual encryption method was used? All right, not what the
answer was, what was the method. So we think that
his method looks very much like his prior methods. It
also the method is well informed by the gains text.
The third thing is, hey, a keyword actually generates the permutation,
(18:02):
and what is that keyword? That keyword is Elizabeth. Oh
my god. We've got great prior evidence in favor of that.
So what we see in the cipher text that crazy
thirteen long sequence is a precise mapping. From that, all
of those three assumptions have to be correct to.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Get at every stage in the way from the Z
thirteen to Marven Merrill. We have a believable, clausible method
to get from one to the other. And they all
kind of make sense, and they all hang together. And
generally that is not the kids Like if you have
(18:43):
a one of the other thousands of names that could
fit in terms of having the right number of repeats
in them, they won't necessarily match this permutation method with
any permutation, and if they do, the permutation keyword might
not be believable. And if they do, the name might
(19:07):
end up being something that isn't the name of a
real life person or a real dead person in this case.
And if they do, then you end up with a
substitution that has no known structure to it. But at
every stage in this we have structure. We have a
sort of a method of construction that is believable, matches
(19:30):
what was commonly described in texts and was and sort
of build in our confidence that this is the right solution.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
I asked Georgia or Henry why they thought the Zodiac
would use a keyword that, if discovered, could connect him
to another case.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
I think he would. He was trying to leave clues,
and he was trying to make it sort of tantalife
sing but hard, and so that when somebody did finally
come up with the solution, they would be able to
see how it was constructed and what the keyword was
and it wasn't just something made at random.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
The keyword discovery galvanized the cryptography team because they now
understood that if the Zodiac used a keyword for the
Z thirteen codes permutation. Then he most likely used a
keyword for the substitution scheme as well. Once again they
were back in the zodiac shoes, figuring out what steps
(20:36):
he would have taken.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
I think he would have started with the writing his
name in the grid and thinking what do I do next? Okay,
I do a permutation. So I'll come up with a keyword.
Use the keyword to make a permutation. All right, I'm
going to use Elizabeth. And so he used Elizabeth and
then reordered the letters. Now, just reordering the letter is
(21:02):
not going to be anywhere and it is secure enough.
So you have to have a substitution as well. And
how do you come up with the substitution. We don't
know how he came up with the substitutions, but his
earliest ciphers, we do believe that he used a keyword
for the substitution in Z thirteen.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Having brought in late to Patrick's belief that there was
a permutation keyword, ed dove headlong into the search for
a keyword to the substitution scheme in Z thirteen. He
worked at night and day, and on Thanksgiving morning, he
was once again back in front of the computer. Earlier,
he had identified the exact mapping of symbols to letters
(21:46):
in the code. He now had to find the keyword
that corresponded to it. An exhaustive search came up with
nineteen possibilities. Most of these words were nouns, verbs, and
adjectives ascending, freighter, and cherished. Only three of the nineteen
words were recognizable as names, Siegfried, Frederico, and Scherry Joe
(22:12):
with Sherry spelled unusually with a C, and Joe without
an E. The names and words meant nothing to Georgio.
He fed them into an AI program and asked if
any of the words on the list held any significance
in either the Zodiac or Black Dahia cases. The answer
was immediate. Cherry Joe Bates was murdered in Riverside, California,
(22:35):
in nineteen sixty six and thought by many to be,
but never officially declared by police, to be a victim
of the Zodiac.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
So this was kind of the second AHA moment.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Cherry Joe Bates was an eighteen year old college dudent
at Riverside Community College. She was murdered on the night
of October thirtieth, nineteen sixty six. Shortly after leaving the
school's library, her car had been disabled, and she walked
off with a man promising to give her help and
a ride home. She was slashed and stabbed during a struggle,
(23:13):
and her body was found the next morning. Police determined
that the distributor on her Volkswagen's engine had been disconnected,
which indicated her murder was premeditated. In the weeks that followed,
police and local newspapers received a variety of letters from
her alleged killer. Most were proven to be hoaxes, but
(23:35):
one so called confession letter was determined to be from
the actual killer because of the details it provided, including
that he had pulled the middle wire on the Volkswagen's distributor.
Police also recovered a wooden desk from the library with
references to Sherry Joe's murder written on it. This was
also determined to have been the work of the real killer.
(24:00):
Three years later, with the murder unsolved, Riverside detectives noted
the similarities to what was happening up in the Bay
area with the so called Zodiac killer. He too had
a pension for reaching out to newspapers and threw them
to the police. The Riverside detectives met privately with their
Bay Area counterparts to compare the cases, but the possible
(24:23):
connection between the cases was not exposed publicly until late
nineteen seventy, when the San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery,
later to be portrayed by Robert Downey Junior in the
movie Zodiac, broke the story. There were several intriguing connections
between the cases, including the use of similar words and
duplicate misspellings in the letters from the Zodiac and the
(24:45):
Riverside Killer, For example, both used the word twitch in
their writing, both misspelling it the same way. In a
newspaper interview with Sherry Joe's father a year after the murder,
he spoke of their loneliness in his life since losing
her and could only refer to her killing as quote
this thing that happened. Two years later, but before the
(25:09):
possible connection between the cases were revealed publicly, the Zodiac
said in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, I
get awfully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I
could do my thing. While there were many other similarities,
there were things that didn't quite fit the specific targeting
(25:34):
of Sherry Joe, as opposed to the seemingly randomness of
the Zodiac killings, the distance between Riverside and the Bay Area,
the fact that the Riverside confession letter was tight and
all the Zodiac communications were handwritten. Though in the years
that followed the FBI investigated the possible links between the cases,
(25:56):
the investigations were never fully and officially combined when the
different seemed to outweigh the similarities. The team investigating Marvin
Merrill believes they are now inextricably linked because the zodiaci's
Cherry Joe has a keyword in composing the Z thirteen cipher,
at least four months before the San Francisco Chronicle and
(26:18):
Paul Avery broke the story that the cases might be linked.
This is veteran homicide detective Rip Jackson.
Speaker 6 (26:27):
That's a mind boggling fact that would rivet any detective
that was connected with an unsolved murderer. The unsolved murder
of Cherry Joe bates. What are the chances that that
kind of thing happens, That the killer or potential killer
includes her name and a cipher keyword when the cases
(26:49):
haven't even been seriously looked at or connected until months
later by an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's
off the charts that that kind of stuff just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Missy Roberts, the former supervisor of the Los Angeles Police
departments Cold Case Unit, said the Cherry Joe keyword confirms
the connection to the Zodiac and says it offers valuable
insights into the killers evolving m What are.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
The odds that those keywords would be the exact names
of two of the most famous unsolved gruesome murders similar murders,
by the way, gruesome murders in California history.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Cherry Joe bas was slashed and stabbed two years later,
the Zodiac began as murder spree using a handgun. Roberts
says that is not a reason to view the cases
as unconnected.
Speaker 7 (27:44):
In every killer, you see that a lot the evolving
of an m O. Things that works, things that didn't work.
You know, there's a lot of risk with a murder
like Sharry Jel where you're murdering somebody in public. You know,
she was kind of secreted in between two buildings, but
it's in public, very bloody. You're you know, you're coming
out now into the street covered with I I would
(28:06):
imagine blood and evidence, and there's there was said to
be a huge struggle, which that is going to alert people,
alert law enforcement. And so these are things that would
have went wrong for the killer that he's going to
try and perfect. A serial killer is going to try
(28:27):
and perfect and get better because he doesn't want to
get caught. Even though he's taunting law enforcement and he's saying,
you know, catch me if you can. This is a
game to him and he wants to keep playing. And
so with the Zodiac, yeah, you know, he sneaks up,
very sneaky.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
They don't even know.
Speaker 7 (28:45):
That he's there until he's right there in the window
of the cars.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
More planning and just he's perfecting.
Speaker 7 (28:54):
He's perfecting his game so he can continue to do it.
And anytime you use a gun, I think you know,
you have less it's quicker, it's less personal.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
You can keep a distance from your victim.
Speaker 7 (29:06):
You know, you have more time to just get away
without a bunch of evidence on yourself. As we start
to fill in those gaps and things start to fall
into place, we see the killer evolving and getting better.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
At his craft.
Speaker 7 (29:24):
And there's a reason why he wasn't caught because he
did evolve.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
It should be noted that Marvin Merrill initially he checks
some of the boxes in relation to the Base murder,
namely proximity. At the time of the murder, he was
living an hour and fifteen minutes away in Vista, California.
He also was operating an auto repair business at the
time called Buck Savers, which would have likely given him
(29:49):
the knowledge of which wire to pull in a distributor
to disable Sherry Joe Basse's Volkswagen. Alex Babors team is
continuing the investigation of Merrill's connection to the Bates murder,
and we will have more on that in later episodes.
Let's go back now to our cryptographers. Their work on
(30:10):
this project certainly gives legitimacy to Alex Baber's work and
claimed that Marvin Merrill born Marvin Margolis is the killer
of Elizabeth Short as well as the victims of the
Zodiac Spree. Highest Baber about this.
Speaker 8 (30:25):
I think that this alone that validates my initial discovery
and findings of Marvin Merrill as being the solution to
the z thirteen as well as I think it it
adds another layer of credibility because it was independently discovered.
It wasn't it wasn't in house to me and my team.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Another game changing confirmation came in last week from Stockholm, Sweden,
where a data analyst reported a startling new insight when
the Zodiac's first cipher, the Z four oh eight. This
was the cipher broken very quickly in NI eighteen sixty
nine by its school teachers Donald and Betty Harden, except
it wasn't completely broken. The last line of the cipher,
(31:08):
eighteen characters long, was not decoded and has remained so
ever since. Over the years, it was thought to be
gibberish or a line of meaningless symbols used to even
out the three grids that comprise the cipher. The last
line became known informally as the Z eighteen. Last week,
(31:28):
Thomas Hefner of Stockholm reported that he applied methodology employed
by Baber in breaking Z thirteen to the so called
Z eighteen and was able to decrypt it. He says
it contains a name Marvin Merrill. Hefner has no background
(31:50):
in cryptography, but works for a tech investment firm in
Stockholm and specializes in pattern recognition and hypothesis of validation.
Attended college in Los Angeles and was familiar with both
the Zodiac and Black Dalia cases because of movies he
saw that were based on each case. He saw news
(32:10):
stories on Alex Baber's discovery and look for pattern similarities
between Z thirteen and Z eighteen. He noticed that if
he discounted the five e's contained in Z eighteen and
applied Baber's methodology to the remaining thirteen characters, you got
the same result. Hefner told me he was excited by
(32:31):
the discovery, but also a little bit spooped.
Speaker 9 (32:35):
Work itself was about seeing the patterns and trying to
understand the system itself behind it, and it sort of
puts you in the space where you are trying to
you start thinking. You feel at least like you're thinking
like the person who created these patterns on the system,
and it's you realize that you're suddenly getting in the
head of the killer, the serial killer.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
It's quite it's an airy feeling.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Sner's work has been confirmed by Baber. It's solid.
Speaker 8 (33:04):
It's rock solid. I tested it first twice to make
sure it was accurate. It was. I therefore shared it with.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Ed Georgia and Henry are still reviewing the construction of
Hefner's solution to Z eighteen, but told me that their
initial review of it founded to be plausible. I want
to finish up here with Ada and Patrick. I asked
them to review Baber's work on the Z thirty two side,
for which was part of the discussion in chapter three
(33:32):
of the podcast. I asked for a no holds barred review.
This is Patrick Henry.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
The Z thirty two has a similar property that you
can have lots and lots of solutions, so it's really
hard to build confidence in the correctness of any given
solution because in a sense, almost all solutions are valt
I think Alex has really convincing evidence outside of the
(34:05):
cipher where you take that large circle cross, he's got
a very heavily inked in zero and you line that
up with the map and put the center on Mount Diabler,
and you end up with the burial location of Elizabeth Short.
(34:25):
And yeah, we verified that with the map. That certainly
lines up. That all seems very plausible. The question of
how would you get from the given plaintext to that ciphertext, Well,
it doesn't have we don't have any sort of convincing
argument that this solution is structurally any better than any
(34:50):
other solution. The evidence that Alex points out that is
outside of the cipher has some weight to it.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
We said that because the Z thirty two cipher was
a simple substitution code, there are no keywords that can
be found to confirm a solution.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
That was the way that we kind of build confidence
on the Z thirteen solution is looking at how would
you construct this, and when we found out, okay, this
is how you constructed and you end up with these
keywords that the highly relevant to the case being the
keys that really sort of cemented it for us, but
(35:30):
we don't have that full Z thirty two.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Before signing off with the cryptographic team, I had to
ask at Georgio why he pitched in and build a
team to help confirm Alex babors solution to the Zodiac code.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
We believe that you know this was a monumental discovery.
We were asked by you to verify the result. So
this is the normal experimental science thing that cryptanalysts do
every day. This is my passion. It's enormously fun. I'm
not getting paid, and I have very important other work
to do that. We're Patrick and I and Rich of
(36:12):
finding the Bad Guys on the Internet. Now that's a
research and development program because it's a work in progress,
but I have a strong connection to the history of
Coote breaking a story like this. I'm sailing a little
close to the wind because we're showing cryptanalytic techniques that
would have been considered classified in the day they were used.
(36:35):
Some of them are still considered classified today, but we're
in it to solve important problems. We think this is important,
but we also think it's terribly exciting.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
We'll be back with a new episode of the podcast
on the anniversary of Elizabeth Short's death, when the investigators
take it to the street in search of the place
where the Black Dahlia may have been murdered. I'm Michael Connelly,
and you've been listening to Killer in the Code solving
the Black Dahia and Zodiac cases. This episode was written
(37:13):
and produced by Michael Connolly. It was edited by Terall
Lee Langford, with sound designed by Michael Odemark and music
by Mark Henry Phillips. Subscribe to the podcast so you'll
be informed of new episodes and check out killerindecode dot
com for information on the investigation. Thank you for listening.
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