19 years ago, Alex Baber walked out of the David Fincher film Zodiac with a burning obsession. He would solve the case of the Zodiac killer. Now, all of these years later, he has. Or at least it looks that way. Thanks to a new podcast by fiction writer Michael Connelly about Baber’s investigation into both the Zodiac Killer and the Black Dahlia Avenger. Both of them are the same man. It sounds too far-fetched to be true, but you have to listen to the podcast. By the end of it, you will be, like I was, convinced beyond any doubt.
When last we met with the Zodiac, it was in David Fincher’s masterpiece, which the Academy shamefully ignored. 2007 was a very long time ago, and it was the year that No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood went up against each other. Zodiac was not Academy Award fare, despite the universal acclaim by the critics.
The obsession with both the Zodiac killer and the Black Dahlia Avenger has dedicated communities online with various theories flying around about who might have done the crimes. Nothing I have heard or read comes anywhere this close to having the evidence and the motive that lines up more perfectly. The Killer in the Code convinced me that yes, the Zodiac and the Black Dahlia Avenger are one and the same.
This story, ” The Killer in the Code would be a perfect sequel for David Fincher, either as a series or a film. It’s a doozy.
The only reason this isn’t a bigger story is that the online sleuths have it in for Alex Baber. They think he is a liar and a grifter, like he’s gotten things wrong before. He had a different guy pegged as the Zodiac up until 2022. There are long-form Reddit posts debunking his theories, and that has made the Killer in the Code an uphill climb at becoming the biggest true crime story of the century.
Here is how Baber cracked the Z13 code the Zodiac sent out as a challenge to law enforcement, from the podcast:
“…Using an AI program he designed, he amassed a list of first and last names that could fit into the 13-digit cipher. The list was 71 million names long. As it was originally written in the Zodiac letter, the cipher was just one line, but the other ciphers authored by the Zodiac were much longer and had been presented in a grid. So Baber broke Z13 into a two by seven grid, adding a 14th digit to make the grid even with seven columns of two characters each. This added digit is called a null in code speak and would possibly be the space between a first and last name.
The original cipher also contained three symbols that were repeated twice and a fourth symbol repeated three times. This narrowed the possibilities considerably and employing other disqualifiers cut further into the list of names. Based on eyewitness accounts and the possibility that the Z340 cipher was derived from World War II era cryptography methods, Baber started looking for a white male who would have been in his late 30s to early 40s at the time of the Zodiac attacks. For nine months, he waded through phone directories from the period as well as US census data, voting rolls, property records, military archives, birth records, and arrest records, and was finally able to whittle the list of 71 million names down to 14 possibilities.
Through forensic analysis, he went through the final 14 possibilities and eliminated 13 through disqualifying factors such as height, background, and proximity to Northern California. That left one name, Marvin Merrill. The name belonged to a man who had several addresses in California in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. He also had a criminal record.”
Marvin Merrill, it turns out, used to be Marvin Margolis, but note how each of them has a 13-letter name, just like the cipher the Zodiac sent out.
It’s true that the glasses were placed on the photo, not originally part of the photo, so a little bit of Photoshop AI and this is what he looked like without the glasses:
Marvin Margolis was a World War II vet who had been around soldiers blown apart on Okinawa, Japan. He’d once been buried up to his neck in mud for 24 hours and was said to come out of the war with extreme PTSD. He then became a med student at USC, where, yes, he dissected a corpse, and where he and his buddy picked up two young women in Hollywood, one of them was Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia.
One of the reasons Margolis was let go by the police, even after lying to them about knowing the victim, is that he’d recently gotten married in December, just before Elizabeth Short was murdered. His wife gave him an alibi. But it probably wasn’t the truth because in every way, he fits the perp profile. She was with him for only 12 days, but during that time, Short slept on the couch, indicating she did not want to sleep with Margolis. He was apparently sarcastic and funny but also mercurial and emotionally disturbed, afflicted with PTSD and quick to anger.
In the weeks leading up to her death, she talked of a jealous ex-boyfriend who said he would kill her if she slept with anyone else, but no one at the time knew if she was telling the truth since she often told tall tales. What might have driven Margolis over the edge was that Elizabeth was seeing lots of different men, just not him. He also lied about military service, saying he was part of the same flying group that the one man Elizabeth Short had been engaged to also belonged to before he died.
That isn’t the only strange fact about these two cases. It is theorized that the motel Margolis might have used to cut up Elizabeth was called the Zodiac.
Margolis was Jewish and would marry a Jewish woman, but Betty Short was not. Maybe he was not allowed to marry a non-Jew. Who knows. But his personality type was delusions of grandeur and the belief that the world wasn’t treating him like a king. He thought very highly of himself but was never appreciated by his father, by his employers, by his teachers, and probably by Elizabeth. It’s likely the insane media sensation around Elizabeth Short’s murder gave him a high like no other, which would explain why he’d want to re-create it as we headed into the late 60s and early 70s as the Zodiac.
That is also the time period of America’s involvement in Vietnam, which might have kicked the PTSD back into high gear, leading to not just a murder spree but a desire to create a media sensation around a case that can’t be solved. In both the Dahlia and the Zodiac, the killer is showing off how much smarter he is than everyone else. And indeed, he was smarter than everyone else except one man: Alex Baber.
Baber, who says he’s autistic, had a father who was a serial killer who killed migrant workers, so he grew up in the shadow of deviant criminal behavior, which might partly explain his obsession with solving this and other cold cases.
But William J. Mann, working separately from Baber, also landed on Margolis as the likely suspect who killed Elizabeth Short. He wrote this book, which I just read and is very good:
But it’s Baber who connected the Zodiac to the Black Dahlia Avenger.
Here are the handwriting samples of Black Dahlia and Zodiac:
In Merrill/Margolis’s possession was one of his drawings from the last year of his life, 1992, and as they dug deeper into the photo, they saw the word “Zodiac”. And not only that, the photo, when viewed through a high-resolution lens, shows marks that appear to mimic the Glasgow smile carved into Elizabeth Short’s face. From the Killer in the Code website:
Merrill has all but confessed with this painting, which indicates he probably wanted to be found out. When he died, he believed he’d gotten away with the two most notorious murder cases in California history, but also knew that if someone ever figured it out, he’d leave this as a trail.
What about the Black Dahlia murder matches the Zodiac killings? They have a couple of things in common once you get to understand the killer’s mind. For one thing, there is never any sexual relations had with any of the victims, not Betty Short and not the Zodiac victims, not even the brutal slaying of Cheri Jo Bates, depicted here in a story from the Santa Cruz Sentinel:
William J. Mann’s book, which humanizes Betty Short, paints such a vivid picture of the time and place that led to a mysterious crime. But his book helps us better understand why Margolis is the perfect suspect. The Betty Short most of us knew is nothing like what she was in real life. Yes, she lived in the fast lane. Yes, she often depended on the kindness of strangers for dates and for dinner.
But at the end of the day, she wasn’t what she appeared to be. She often refused sex to men who expected it because everyone who knew her said that’s what she was really like. That makes it much easier to understand why a guy like Marvin Margolis would have gone so nuts over her if he could not get what he wanted and what he believed so many others were getting, which explains why he violated her the way he did to make her pay. Just a theory.
She was just 22, with very bad teeth and nails bitten down to the quick. She couldn’t even afford to pay to have her trunk taken out of storage at the train station. She had nowhere to live, no money and nothing to eat. She was headed out for a date with a man named Red before she disappeared forever. There are too many clues left behind for it to have been anyone else but an arrogant man who thought he was the greatest thing ever, to develop an obsession for the one girl he wanted but could never have.
All of this would make a great movie or long-form series directed by David Fincher. Just saying.
We’ll be doing more podcast reviews here since the new category has been introduced at the Golden Globes and with other award bodies. For my money, Killer in the Code should be recognized for some of the best writing in the true crime genre.
