Codebreaker Ties Zodiac Killer To Black Dahlia Murder, Naming Suspect: Report

The Black Dahlia and Zodiac murder cases have long frustrated California investigators. But one man — along with some retired cold case detectives and NSA crypto-mathematicians — thinks he's cracked the mysteries of what some argue are the state's most harrowing killings. His bombshell conclusion? The Zodiac Killer also murdered the Black Dahlia.

Trouble is, the alleged suspect — Marvin Merrill, aka Marvin Margolis — is dead, resting peacefully at Riverside National Cemetery.

"In my opinion, these are solved cases," retired homicide detective Rick Jackson told the Los Angeles Times in an article published Tuesday. "There are too many links with both. There’s overwhelming circumstantial evidence. He’s left breadcrumbs all along."

Jackson served at both the LAPD and the San Mateo County sheriff’s office. He bases his opinion on the work of Alex Baber, a 50-year-old autistic West Virginia man and Florida native obsessed with code breaking.

Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia case is part of the Golden State's lexicon. On the morning of January 15, 1947, a mother taking her child for a walk in a Los Angeles neighborhood stumbled upon a gruesome sight: the body of a young naked woman sliced in half at the waist, her face carved with a clown smile.

The body was posed in such a way that the mother reportedly thought it was a mannequin at first glance.

Despite extensive mutilation to the body, there wasn’t a drop of blood at the scene, indicating the woman was killed elsewhere.

The victim turned out to be a 22-year-old Hollywood hopeful named Elizabeth Ann Short — later dubbed the “Black Dahlia” by the press.

Based on early suspicions that the murderer may have had medical dissection skills because Short's body was so cleanly cut, agents were also asked to check out a group of students at the nearby University of Southern California Medical School.

Police had questioned 21-year-old Marvin Merrill. The USC premed student, who was a shell-shocked World War II veteran looking to practice surgery, became a suspect.

He did not initially tell detectives that he lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her killing. Though he later confessed to their cohabitation, he soon moved to Chicago and changed his name from Merrill to Margolis.

Despite the suspicions about Merrill, for nearly 80 years, Short's killer has remained at large.

Link To Zodiac?

About 20 years after Short's death, a rash of apparent serial killings began in the San Francisco Bay Area. A person who identified as the Zodiac claimed credit for the murders via letters and cryptograms sent to law enforcement and the media.

The first known Zodiac killings occurred on December 20, 1968. David Arthur Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16, were shot and killed on Lake Herman Road in Benicia.

Three more attacks occurred in the area on separate occasions — all linked to the Zodiac. In total, five victims died (including Faraday and Jensen), and two survived.

Baber, the self-taught code-breaker, told the Los Angeles Times that Margolis was the killer.

“It’s irrefutable,” he told the news outlet.

Baber operates Cold Case Consultants of America. Since 2021, he has devoted himself day and night to proving a link between the Zodiac and Black Dahlia cases.

That nexus, he claims, is in a letter the Zodiac sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in April 1970.

"My name is ___" the letter reads, followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols.

The cryptic letter became known as the Z13 cipher. It's referred to as the Holy Grail of Zodiac research: the alleged killer sent it to the newspaper after the American Cryptogram Association publicly dared the murderer to put his real name in a code.

Baber became fixated on translating the Z13 cipher.

"This takes me nine months of working 18-20 hour days," Baber told the Los Angeles Times.

The name Baber found buried in the Z13 code: “Marvin Merrill.”

According to two veteran homicide detectives who once served at the LAPD — including the former cold case detective who oversaw the Elizabeth Short investigation — Margolis is probably responsible for both the Short murder and the five murder cases attributed to the Zodiac, according to Los Angeles Times reporting.

The investigators say Margolis "left a complex lattice of hidden clues connecting both cases," the Times reported. "Among the links, they contend, is his eerie 1992 sketch of a woman that carries the name 'ELIZABETH' in plain writing and the name 'ZODIAC' hidden in the shading, but visible with the aid of filters."

At the urging of the retired detectives, crime writer Michael Connelly contacted someone who knows a thing or two about cryptic code. Ed Giorgio, a mathematician who served as the chief codemaker and codebreaker for the National Security Agency, agreed to review Baber’s findings on the Z13 cipher.

"All of Alex’s work checked out to me,” Giorgio told the Los Angeles Times.

To verify Baber's findings, Giorgio contacted two other former NSA crypto-mathematicians, Patrick Henry and Rich Wisniewski. They endorsed the Z13 solution, according to the Times. Henry added his own discovery, cementing the link between the cases, the Times reported: “Elizabeth" is the keyword that generated the Zodiac code

The odds of finding so many connections between the two cases are small, Giorgio told the newspaper.

"The probability that anything else is correct is orders of magnitude smaller," he said. "It is the greatest sleuth story ever told."

A Troubled History, A Last Cryptic Message

Margolis' background made him an initial suspect in the Black Dahlia case in large part because of his psychological instability and his penchant for surgery.

Lt. Frank Jemison, who worked at the district attorney’s investigative unit, studied his military records and learned that Margolis witnessed gruesome carnage in the Navy medical corps. He was also among the first wave of troops landing on Okinawa in April 1945.

Three months later, Margolis was diagnosed with “tremulousness, recurring battle dreams, tiredness which is chronic and intermittent, startled reactions and periods of depressions,” according to Jemison’s May 1950 summary of the records, which the Los Angeles Times unearthed.

The Navy torpedoed Margolis’ ambition to be a surgeon.

"He desired operation room technique which was never granted to him and this is one of the underlying bases for his resentment and disgust," Jemison wrote.

Because of his mental trauma, the Navy discharged Margolis with a 50% disability, the Los Angeles Times found.

Margolis never became a doctor. After dropping out of USC, he worked across different states as a builder, architect and portrait painter. He married twice and had four kids.

In a 1961 news article published in the Wellington Daily News in Kansas, Margolis was profiled. He exaggerated his service record and his time at USC.

Later, in California, Margolis ran a restaurant in Atascadero and worked as an engineer at Intel in Santa Clara. In the early 1970s, he ran Bucksavers Automotive Repair & Parts Supply in Oceanside, according to the Times reporting.

Baber tracked down one of Margolis' children, and the two talked about the Black Dahlia case. The son had a piece of his father's artwork. The sketch, titled "Elizabeth," shows a woman naked from the waist up. One of the nipples looks severed. Her torso has marks, possibly stab wounds. "Zodiac" appears to be hidden in the shading.

The drawing is signed "Marty Merrill '92."

Baber also believes he found the spot in which Short was murdered: 2615 Santa Fe Ave., in Compton, one of the few area motels in 1947 that had a bathtub.

On the night before the Smart killing, newspaper accounts allege that a nervous young man was driving between motels in the area, seeking a room with a bathtub and claiming his wife needed it.

At the time, the Compton bungalow complex was allegedly called the Zodiac Motel.

Marvin Merrill lived under the name Marvin Margolis until his death from cancer in Santa Barbara in July 1993. He was 68. His gravestone at Riverside National Cemetery bears the Margolis name.

Ironically, the October 30, 1966, murder of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside has been linked by some investigators to the Zodiac, though the theory has been debunked by others. The 18-year-old college student was found stabbed and slashed to death at Riverside City College.

Authorities have allegedly been made aware of Baber's findings, but it's unclear whether the Black Dahlia or Zodiac cases will ever be officially solved.

Read the full Los Angeles Times story here.