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Boiling Point
Introducing: Season 4 of Crimes of the Times
00:06:53
Here is a sneak peak at the new season of another Los Angeles Times Studios podcast called "Crimes of the Times." In the show, L.A. Times staff writer Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there. This new season kicks off with a four part series about how an amateur codebreaker may have cracked the Zodiac killer's infamously complex Z13 code, and how the name it reveals potentially connects the Zodiac killer to another notoriously unsolved California murder: The Black Dahlia.
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Transcript12 lines
- [00:00]
A
My mind. Once I start on something, Chris, it's hard to stop. Puzzles are what stimulates my mind, and I like tackling them, you know, My understanding was the Z13 was impossible.
- [00:12]
B
I'm talking to a man named Alex Baber about the Zodiac killings of the late 1960s and the taunting cryptograms the killer sent to police and newspapers. The killer claimed to have killed more than 30 people. Some of the cryptograms were relatively easy to crack, but did not help solve the case. The toughest to decipher and the most tantalizing was the letter he sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in April 1970. The killer seemed to be answering a public challenge posed by the head of the American Cryptogram association, who had dared him to put his real name in a code. In this letter, the Zodiac wrote the words, my name is, followed by a 13 character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher. And one thing that made it so hard to break was its brevity. Its stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle masters. It became the ultimate prize in Zodiac studies because it promised to reveal the killer's identity. Enter Alex Baber.
- [01:17]
A
What possible solutions or names can we generate from that? So with the help of AI and C computing and progressions, I was able to eliminate 93, almost 94% of the field just on the fact that the combinations of names did not correlate with a real world individual.
- [01:37]
B
Baber is 50 years old, a West Virginia man, and the founder of Cold Case Consultants of America, which is funded by victim advocate investors and money he inherited. He'd been interested in the Zodiac case since seeing David Fincher's film Zodiac in 2007. The film was based on former newspaper cartoonist Robert Graysmith's book of the same name, which focused on a man named Arthur Leigh Allen as the suspect. Alan was a Navy veteran and an elementary school teacher in Atascadero who was arrested on child molestation charges but never arrested for the Zodiac killings. Thanks to the book and movie, however, generations have grown up with Allen as the foremost candidate. Alex baber thought the Z13 cipher might be the key to solving the case. It wasn't till 2021 that he began devoting his time, day and night, to cracking it, that there was so many
- [02:31]
A
solutions, that there were so many outcomes that you couldn't identify one name in particular. But I knew that it wasn't an infinite number. And eventually I would get down to only one being left. I just didn't know how long it would take.
- [02:46]
B
Baber is a firehose of information. Dates, names, locations, surprising linkages, and he delivers it all with cocksure certainty. He's never been a cop. He's not a licensed private eye. He's an amateur sleuth who styles himself as a modern day Sherlock Holmes.
- [03:06]
A
Well, I'm very matter of fact. I speak fast, I'm detail oriented, and I come across as being arrogant or overly confident. And I am confident in my ability and my skills.
- [03:17]
B
Baber's lack of credentials and his personality have made him an easy target for critics who call him overconfident and under qualified. One critic said, this guy is a great smooth talker, but it's a lot of empty calories.
- [03:32]
A
You know, that's difficult for people when they see me. They see me either. I don't know if it's as a threat or right because I have no traditional background. But they don't want to accept me right away and they try to attack me rather than taking the time to get to know me.
- [03:47]
B
Baber says his autism made him the target of constant bullying in school and he dropped out of high school. For decades he sought out jobs that involve the most minimal human interaction possible. But he also credits his autism with fueling his single minded focus as a self taught criminologist.
- [04:05]
A
There was a moment I remember waking up and saying, look, you have somewhat of a gift. That's what people have been telling you your entire life, but you're just pissing it away. From that moment. I went and I started purchasing these books online for forensics, fingerprint analysis, handwriting, building my expertise in multiple fields. It was very difficult for me, Chris, to earn the respect of those who are experts in their fields. And it was a uphill battle from the moment I said go. And then you start to build credibility and word starts to spread. That's what happens.
- [04:41]
B
He says he attacked the Z13 cipher using artificial intelligence and generated a list of 71 million possible 13 letter names. Then he used known details about the Zodiac killer based on eyewitness descriptions. And he cross checked remaining names against military, marriage, census and other public records. He says the candidates narrowed to 185, then to 14, and finally to 1. The name he found buried in the Z13 was Marvin Merrill. Who was Marvin Merrill? Baber discovered that it was the alias of a man who had died in Santa Barbara in 1993 at age 68. A man whose real name was Marvin Margolis. Who was Marvin Margolis. It turned out to be a name associated with the other most notorious unsolved case in American crime, the 1947 murder of a homeless, jobless young woman named Elizabeth Short, who became known as the Black Dahlia. Is it possible the same man was behind both cases, which on the surface seem wildly dissimilar? Baber and his team say they found a complex lattice of hidden clues connecting them. Over the next four episodes of Crimes of the Times, we will examine how the evidence stacks up. How is it that despite millions of words devoted to the Black Dahlia case across a shelf of books, students of the case devoted minuscule attention to Margolis as a suspect until very recently? And if he's also the Zodiac, how did it escape the notice of generations of professional detectives, obsessive amateur crime solvers, historians and crime writers from the Los Angeles Times and LA Times studios, I'm Christopher Goffer. Check out our new season on YouTube and listen to it on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Dahlia murder of 1947 is arguably California's most notorious unsolved case. Its only rival might be the Zodiac murders a generation later. Now an amateur sleuth is attracting attention with the claim that the same killer is responsible for both cases. I'm Christopher Goffard, host of Crimes of the Times. Check out our new season on YouTube and listen to it on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.