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Crimes of the Times
The Dahlia Zodiac Connection: Part One
00:25:43
The identity of the Zodiac Killer has remained a mystery for decades, but new developments may finally point to an answer. At the center is the infamous Z13 cipher, a 13-character code sent to the San Francisco Chronicle that has long defied experts. Self-taught codebreaker Alex Baber used artificial intelligence and exhaustive analysis to narrow millions of possibilities down to a single name. As his theory gained traction, former detectives and intelligence experts began testing its credibility. The result is a provocative possibility: the name hidden in the cipher may also belong to the man behind another infamous California murder — the Black Dahlia.
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- [00:01]
Christopher Goffard
This is an la times studios podcast.
- [00:11]
Alex Baber
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.
- [00:23]
Christopher Goffard
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 Zodiac claimed to have murdered 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.
- [01:29]
Alex Baber
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.
- [01:48]
Christopher Goffard
Basically, Weber 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 had 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. Allen 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 Alan 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
- [02:43]
Alex Baber
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.
- [02:57]
Christopher Goffard
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. What is it that people misread about you, Alex?
- [03:18]
Alex Baber
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.
- [03:29]
Christopher Goffard
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.
- [03:44]
Alex Baber
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, 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 them taking the time to get to know me.
- [03:59]
Christopher Goffard
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.
- [04:17]
Alex Baber
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.
- [04:53]
Christopher Goffard
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 nineteen nineteen ninety three at age sixty eight. 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 miniscule 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 Goffert.
- [07:04]
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- [08:14]
Christopher Goffard
When Elizabeth Short's body was found in a weedy lot in January 1947, Los Angeles detectives had a high pressure investigation on their hands. The grisly condition of her body alone would have been enough to generate headlines. She had been stripped naked and cut in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. She'd been found by a Mother taking her kid for a walk at a stroller because she wore black clothes and dyed her hair jet black. Short quickly became known for a nickname that she might not even have possessed during the 22 years she lived. The Black Dahlia. This helped put the publicity into the stratosphere, along with wild speculation, most of it baseless, about the victim's sex life. The killer seemed to love attention, sending taunting notes to police and newspapers. LA detectives did the logical thing. They interviewed the men who had known the victim. One of them was a troubled 21 year old man named Marvin Margolis. Initially, he lied about their relationship. He did not want cops to know that he'd lived with her on Hollywood Boulevard three months before her murder. He became one of the top suspects. But at one point, he seemed to have an alibi. And busy detectives, scrambling to track down countless other leads shifted their focus elsewhere. As the investigation grew, there were more than 300 suspects and dozens of false confessions that needed to be checked. Margolis disappeared, moved states, changed his name, and was never charged. A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in four seemingly random attacks. A man who called himself The Zodiac committed five murders from 1968 to 1969. He attacked three couples in their teens and early 20s by gun and by knife, and then shot to death a San Francisco cab driver. This killer, too, craved attention, taunting police and journalists with letters and phone calls and ciphers. Like Elizabeth Short's killer, the Zodiac was never caught. Rick Jackson is a retired homicide detective with the lapd. He was one of the first people Baber reached out to with his findings about Marvin Margolis, who changed his name to the one Baber found in the code. Marvin Merrill.
- [10:51]
Rick Jackson
We set out and get briefed by Alex and he of course goes into the code breaking, which is way beyond us.
- [10:59]
Christopher Goffard
Jackson tells me he was skeptical when Baber first approached him with his findings in early 2025, but ultimately came to endorse his views.
- [11:08]
Rick Jackson
He even tries to lay it out simply. But we say, okay, you can lay it out as simply as you want, but we'll need to get some verification on this code. Once we got this call, I kind of laughed because the first meeting, it was a pretty impressive list of things that if we could substantiate it and corroborate it, it's knocked out of the park, in my opinion.
- [11:36]
Christopher Goffard
Jackson tells me that although the Zodiac murders appeared random, the condition of Elizabeth Short's body reflected the savagery of an intensely personal fury. She was naked, posed and mutilated, her face carved with a clown smile. He says the neat bisection reflected anatomical knowledge Margolis would have possessed. Margolis had served as a Navy corpsman during the Okinawa campaign, a battlefield on which so called foxhole surgery included combat knife amputations.
- [12:11]
Rick Jackson
Everybody agreed that whoever did this back in 1947 had to have some kind of medical training so that, you know, yes, he wasn't a doctor, but he had done things that doctors oftentimes do. He has the background to do that, not only from his short time in medical school, but from his military service, where he was a medic and a corpsman who did autopsies and surgeries and things in the field.
- [12:37]
Christopher Goffard
Jackson says he brought the Margolis theory to his former partner and homicide detective, Mitzi Roberts.
- [12:44]
Mitzi Roberts
And I was like, come on, Rick. Like the Black Dahlia, like, really? And he's like. He's like, no. He's like, I can't even tell you, but I promise you there's something there. Like, I wouldn't waste your time. So I was like, okay, well, if you endorse it, then I'll listen to it.
- [13:03]
Christopher Goffard
Roberts knew the case well. When she was a member of the Cold Case unit at the LAPD around 2007, she volunteered to take it.
- [13:12]
Mitzi Roberts
Nobody raised their hand except me. And I was thinking, how lucky am I, right? Like, what's wrong with these people? You know, Such a mystery and amazing to be able to look into the files and read about it and try to solve it.
- [13:27]
Christopher Goffard
So what was. What was the. The case file like? How threadbare was it in terms of usable evidence?
- [13:36]
Mitzi Roberts
It was just packed full of documents. You know, as far as usable evidence, fingerprints, DNA, things like that, it just didn't exist. But as far as document evidence, witness statements, theories at the time, investigator statements, all the investigative reports, which is evidence in itself. That was a full four drawer file cabinet just overflowing with information, photos, you know, which took over a month just to. Just to get in there and just try to wrap my brain around a case that's that old.
- [14:15]
Christopher Goffard
Roberts worked on it off and on for about five years, but it was a 1947 murder. The department was short on detectives, and the LAPD decided to prioritize cases with a higher likelihood of being solved, cases in which the killers might still be alive to prosecute.
- [14:34]
Mitzi Roberts
The Cold Case Unit was basically being stripped of investigators. You know, I had an active serial case right around that time, and there was just a lot going on. So this wasn't a case that was ever like my primary duty. And honestly I feel like that's what it needed to be to get the proper attention and we just didn't have the resources. But it's the type of case that could be a full time job for an investigator.
- [15:01]
Christopher Goffard
After the break, we'll talk about how the amateur investigator Alex Baber stepped into the breach and how he sold these two veterans of the homicide department on his ideas.
- [15:15]
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- [18:23]
Christopher Goffard
Last year, former LAPD homicide detective Rick Jackson invited his former partner, Mitzi Roberts, to listen to a presentation from a man who claimed he had cracked two of America's most notorious unsolved crimes. The Black dahlia case from 1947 and the Zodiac murders from 1968 and 1969. And so what was the tipping point for you? What made you say, there's not just something to this, but this is likely the killer?
- [18:55]
Mitzi Roberts
I was fascinated from just his presentation, but I honestly, I didn't understand a lot of the cryptology and how he broke the code. And, you know, it was way over my head as far as my expertise, and I felt like I was just taking his word for it, you know, And Rick was sold. Rick was like, you know, there's too much other coincidences and facts and circumstantial evidence. And I said, yeah, but it's all, if you don't have the breaking of that code, then it's all just stuff that's kind of already out there. And it's really the nexus of what connects the two cases is that Code
- [19:34]
Christopher Goffard
Jackson attracted the interest of his friend, the crime writer Michael Connolly, who. Who in turn enlisted the help of Ed Giorgio, who once worked for the National Security Agency, both as its top code maker and top code breaker. Is it fair to say that the Z13 cipher is kind of regarded as the Holy Grail of Zodiac studies?
- [19:56]
Ed Giorgio
Yes, because ultimately people worked on him not because they wanted to hear his philosophy, but because they wanted to know who he was. And it was always hoped that the plaintext would reveal his identity or give the police some clue.
- [20:10]
Christopher Goffard
This is Giorgio. He agreed to check out Alex Baber's methods for cracking the Z13.
- [20:16]
Ed Giorgio
I said to my daughter, I doubt this is going to turn out. And she said, oh, at least go into it with an open mind. So I went into it with an open mind, and I was blown away at the first meeting, okay, And I'm a tough guy to get something by. And all of Alex's work checked out to me. But then I said, you know, it's never good to do this by yourself.
- [20:40]
Christopher Goffard
So Giorgio reached out to two of the brightest crypto mathematicians he knows, Patrick Henry and Rich Wisneski, both of them former colleagues at the nsa. This is Patrick Henry.
- [20:52]
Patrick Henry
With such a small ciphertext, it's very easy to come up with a valid solution. It's very easy to come up with tens of thousands of valid solutions. The question is, can you back it up somehow? Can you say this valid solution is somehow better than all the others? So that's what we started trying to build confidence in. Alex gave us basically the way to get from the ciphertext to the plaintext. If you go the other way to get from the plaintext to the ciphertext, that permutation is constructed using, using the word Elizabeth. And as soon as I saw that, I realized, oh, this has to be onto something here.
- [21:40]
Christopher Goffard
Henry had independently discovered something that Baber had not known.
- [21:46]
Alex Baber
I overlooked this. I never looked for a keyword. That's the difference between me and the nsa, right? I'm self taught, right? I'm a genius. They claim that's the myth, but I taught myself and I cracked it. However, I never approached it the way an expert would. And for them to come back and discover Elizabeth was a moment. I have to be honest with you. There's been a few of these aha moments. Everything around you freezes for a moment because you realize that you've made a discovery that will change history.
- [22:17]
Christopher Goffard
What did the codebreaker Discover? That the Z13 cipher was generated by the keyword Elizabeth, meaning both the name Marvin Merrill and the first name of the woman he supposedly killed had always been embedded in it, waiting to be discovered.
- [22:34]
Ed Giorgio
The fact that he was actually a suspect, you can't consider that a coincidence.
- [22:39]
Christopher Goffard
Ed Giorgio again.
- [22:41]
Ed Giorgio
And then the fact that Elizabeth's name popped up in the decrypt, that's not a coincidence. You know, as a mathematician, we talk about, I hate to use a word, but we talk about a likelihood ratio. The probability of anything else being true is so much smaller that this is clearly the winner. Okay. That's all I can say without going into the mathematics. It's something between a thousand to one and a million to one.
- [23:08]
Christopher Goffard
If you were on a jury, you would convict Margolis of both cases, I suppose.
- [23:14]
Ed Giorgio
Absolutely.
- [23:22]
Christopher Goffard
The crypto mathematicians told me that the creator of the Zodiac cryptograms appeared to rely on one of the three foundational cryptology texts from the World War II era. In your opinion, what is the level of skill and intelligence that we need to assume the person who did this code is capable of? Like, how smart was the codemaker?
- [23:47]
Alex Baber
I don't know if you would agree,
- [23:48]
Christopher Goffard
Patrick, but I would think that this is not extremely complex encipherment technique. This is rich Wisdeski. I don't think it would take a lot of effort on a reasonably intelligent person.
- [24:02]
Patrick Henry
No. And the Z13 in particular seems like a sort of basic application of commonly used techniques.
- [24:12]
Christopher Goffard
Here's Patrick Henry, and you go through
- [24:15]
Patrick Henry
the foundational text and it's like, okay, you've got a chapter on permutations, and you've got a chapter on substitutions, and you read through them and you follow the instructions and you've got your output. This 13 long one? No, it's pretty simple.
- [24:33]
Christopher Goffard
So a killer who wanted to taunt police who had access to a standard cryptology text would have been able to construct even the puzzle that stymied experts for so long. Marvin Margolis, if he's that man, would have been in his mid-40s at the time, and he would have been 21 in 1947 when he was dating Elizabeth Short. On the next episode, we will explore who Marvin Margolis was and how he was able to slip away from detectives investigating Short's murder, despite being one of the original top suspects. From LA Times Studios, this is Crimes of the Times. To read more about these cases, check out crimes of the timesatimes.com we also have a link to our video episodes in the show Notes. This episode was written and reported by me, your host, Christopher Goffard. Our senior producers are Mary Knoff and Jonathan Shiflett of Studio Phonic. Our editor is Cindy Chang and our associate producer is Jordan Patterson. Our camera operators are Michael Siegel, Josh Summers and Peter Green Grayson. Our director of post production is Patrick Stewart, and our senior sound recording engineer is Nick Norton, with additional engineering by Jordan Patterson. Our podcast marketing manager is Bryn Jura. Our senior Media Marketing manager is Will Dobson, and our product Marketing director is Becca Dorman. Our podcast senior Finance manager is Jenner Canaleo. Special thanks to LA Times Studio President, Anna Mazonian, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Argenteri and Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times, Terry Tang. Crimes of the Times is executive produced and co created by Darius Derek Shahn and me, Christopher Goffard. A beloved 75 year old man washing up, getting ready for bed is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hixt. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcasts this year, but they're not Crime Beat. Search for and follow the award winning podcast Crime Beat on on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever you find your favorite podcasts.