Has an AI sleuth unmasked the Zodiac Killer? - The Sunday Story

Summary

Podcast Summary: “Has an AI sleuth unmasked the Zodiac Killer?” – The Story (July 26, 2026)

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Overview

In this gripping episode of The Story from The Times and The Sunday Times, hosts Manveen Rana and US Chief Reporter Josie Ensor dig deep into the astonishing claim that Alex Baber—an amateur sleuth wielding artificial intelligence—has identified the Zodiac Killer after more than half a century of mystery. They explore Baber’s personal journey, the story and legacy of the Zodiac, the controversial evidence, and the community’s divided response. The investigation takes an even more dramatic turn when possible links between the Zodiac murders and the infamous Black Dahlia case emerge.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Revisiting the Zodiac Killer Case

• Background and Enduring Mystery

  • The Zodiac Killer terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s, with at least five confirmed murders and a series of enigmatic ciphers taunting police and press.
  • The case persists in the public imagination globally, not just in America.
    • “He was enjoying it. I mean, he was taunting the police, he was sending letters to the local newspapers.” – Josie Ensor [05:00]
  • Despite investigating some 2,500 suspects, the killer’s identity was never confirmed.

• The Infamous Ciphers

  • Zodiac’s cryptic messages baffled even professional cryptographers.
    • The most notable, Z340, wasn’t cracked until 2020.
    • The unsolved Z13 cipher, consisting of 13 symbols, is especially tantalizing as it appeared to conceal the killer’s name.

2. Who is Alex Baber?

• Background and Motivation

  • Alex Baber is a 50-year-old amateur investigator from rural West Virginia, with a complex personal history involving autism, a difficult upbringing, and even serial killers in his own family:
    • His grandfather, Neil Eady, was a suspected serial killer, discovered posthumously when human remains were found under a barn on his property.
      • “They found human guns, human remains underneath the furnace.” – Rourke Merrill [10:36]
    • His uncle was a convicted murderer.
  • Baber was inspired by early exposure to criminology, reading Sherlock Holmes and True Detective magazines, and later self-educating in cryptography and forensic science.

• Launching Cold Case Consultants of America

  • Founded in 2021, the organization operates with a small team, often taking on cases pro bono for families neglected by law enforcement.

3. The AI Sleuth and the Breakthrough

• AI Meets Cold Cases

  • The catalyst: In 2022, new census and military recruitment data from the relevant period became publicly accessible due to the expiration of a 75-year privacy rule.
    • Baber developed an AI program to sift through tens of millions of names, narrowing down with known Zodiac traits (age, height, race, location).
  • After 9 months and exhaustive cross-referencing, Baber isolated one name: Marvin Merrill—real name Mervyn Margulis.

• About the Suspect: Mervyn Margulis

  • Born in Chicago in 1925 to Russian/Polish immigrants.
  • Served as a US Navy hospital corpsman at Okinawa, gaining cryptography and medical training.
  • Lived for a period with a Signals Corps roommate.
  • Changed his name in the 1960s, often lived near or in locations tied to Zodiac crimes.
    • “Either this guy is the perpetrator or he’s the most unlucky individual on the face of this planet.” – Alex Baber, quoted by Ensor [17:00]

• Physical Resemblance and Evidence

  • Police sketches of the Zodiac bear an uncanny resemblance to Margulis.
    • “It’s eerie … the rimmed glasses, the furrowed brow, you also have this distinctive widow's peak.” – Josie Ensor [18:24]

4. The Potential Black Dahlia Link

• Connecting to Elizabeth Short (“The Black Dahlia”)
  • The Black Dahlia murder (Los Angeles, 1947) involved an aspiring actress, Elizabeth Short, whose murder was gruesome and featured medically precise dismemberment.
  • Like the Zodiac, the killer sent taunting letters to the media, using knowledge to evade identification.
  • Margulis reportedly dated Short and was questioned by police in the case, but was alibied by his wife.
  • Notable circumstantial evidence:
    • Margulis allegedly checked into the “Zodiac Motel” near the time of the Black Dahlia murder, seeking a bath for his “wife,” and the detail that Short might have been killed and dismembered in a bathtub.

5. Meeting the Suspect’s Son & Physical Evidence

• Interview with Rourke Merrill (Margulis’s son):
  • Baber arranged a meeting under pretense of researching WWII service.
  • Revealed his suspicions about Rourke’s father; presented a binder of Zodiac handwriting samples.
    • “Rourke turns pale and confirms it matches his dad’s [handwriting].” – Josie Ensor [26:23]
  • Rourke showed Baber a 1992 portrait his father painted titled “Elizabeth”—the woman matching Black Dahlia victim.
    • When scanned, the painting revealed wounds corresponding to autopsy photos (not publicly known at the time), and the word “Zodiac” hidden under the paint.

6. The Reaction & Controversy

• Skepticism and Debate

  • Devoted online “Zodiology” communities are generally skeptical, citing Baber’s lack of formal cryptography training and previous failed suspects.
  • Detractors argue the Zodiac and Black Dahlia crimes are too different in style and time, and some say Baber seeks glory.
    • “If someone had all their money and had spent all this time and effort on another suspect, it can be quite deflating.” – Josie Ensor [30:03]

• Support from Experts

  • Some experts, including NSA’s retired chief codebreaker Ed Giorgio, endorse Baber’s findings.
    • “I can confidently say that I think Alex has the right person.” – Ed Giorgio via Ensor [32:44]

7. What Happens Next?

• Pending Forensic Evidence
  • California detective Rick Jackson discovered Margulis’s government fingerprint card from his 1943 military service.
  • LAPD is now testing letters sent by the Zodiac and Black Dahlia suspects against this print—a definitive answer may be weeks or months away, with the caveat that this historic case isn’t prioritized over live investigations.
    • “In the coming weeks or months, we could find out if there is actually a match to this fingerprint.” – Josie Ensor [33:01]

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Notable Quotes / Memorable Moments

• “He was enjoying it. I mean, he was taunting the police … he was sending these coded messages daring them to catch him.” – Josie Ensor [05:00]
• “I hope you’re having lots of fun and trying to catch me … I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner.” – Zodiac cipher decoded, quoted by Josie Ensor [06:35]
• “Either this guy is the perpetrator or he’s the most unlucky individual on the face of this planet.” – Alex Baber (via Ensor) [17:00]
• “It’s eerie … the rimmed glasses, the furrowed brow, you also have this distinctive widow’s peak.” – Josie Ensor [18:24]
• “Rourke turns pale and confirms [the Zodiac writing] matches his dad’s.” – Josie Ensor [26:23]
• “Beneath the paint … it appeared that the mouth was cut and then covered. And all the wounds matched the autopsy … then ... the word ‘Zodiac’.” – Ensor, on the Elizabeth portrait [27:49]
• “I can confidently say that I think Alex has the right person.” – Ed Giorgio, retired NSA codebreaker [32:44]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:15] Introduction to the Zodiac claim and Alex Baber
• [03:30] Background on the Zodiac case and ciphers
• [07:54] Deep dive into Alex Baber’s background and motivations
• [10:01] Family history of crime and serial killing
• [12:53] The Z13 cipher and Baber’s AI breakthrough
• [16:46] Identification of Mervyn Margulis
• [21:43] Introduction to the Black Dahlia connection
• [26:12] Baber’s meeting with Rourke Merrill, the suspect’s son
• [27:49] The revealing portrait of “Elizabeth”
• [30:03] Community skepticism and expert endorsements
• [33:01] Pending forensic evidence and next steps

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Conclusion

This episode masterfully interweaves the enduring enigma of the Zodiac Killer with the latest, potentially explosive development—a breakthrough made possible not just by new technology, but by obsession, personal history, and unconventional thinking. The investigation is not without controversy, and the ultimate answer now likely rests with cold case forensics. While listeners await definitive confirmation, the episode offers a riveting glimpse into how artificial intelligence, data science, and human doggedness may finally solve America’s greatest true crime mystery.

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For further details, check out Josie Ensor’s full article on The Times website.

Transcript

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[Josie Ensor]

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[Manveen Rana]

from the Times and the Sunday Times. This is the story on Sunday. I'm Manveen Rana. It was late one September evening in 2024. Alex Baber was sitting on his bed at home in rural West Virginia, his laptop open in front of him, his partner by his side. He was on the cusp of an extraordinary discovery.

[Josie Ensor]

So Alex has been working furiously for nine months. At this point, he's gone from an infinite number of possibilities. You know, he's crunching it down, crunching it down.

[Manveen Rana]

Alex Baber is a man who functions on very little sleep, sometimes four hours, sometimes less. And for months now, every waking hour has been spent obsessing over one of the most enduring mysteries in history of American crime.

[Josie Ensor]

It's become his life's purpose. And as he's sitting there on the laptop, suddenly he's left with one name.

[Manveen Rana]

Alex Baber isn't the first would be detective who's become obsessed with the infamous Zodiac killer, one of the most prolific serial killers America has ever seen. But unlike the others, he may be the first in the 57 years since the killer ended his spree to have solved the crime. The story today has this amateur AI sleuth unmasked The Zodiac Killer. Well, Josie, would you mind just starting by introducing yourself?

[Josie Ensor]

I'm Josie Ensor. I'm the US Chief reporter.

[Manveen Rana]

Josie. To understand why this is such an important discovery, I suppose we really have to look at the Zodiac Killer and why it's become one of those stories that America can't quite forget. So for anyone who hasn't followed it closely, just remind us about the case of the Zodiac Killer. Where does this begin?

[Josie Ensor]

So I think the Zodiac killing has lived in the public imagination, not just in America, but, you know, in the UK and worldwide. It was a serial killer who basically terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s. It's probably the most notorious unsolved case in American history. The Zodiac was operating at the very cusp of what is maybe unfortunately referred to as the golden age of serial murder. This was for many reasons. So, you know, the US had just completed this expansive highway system that was allowing these people to kind of abduct and terrorize victims in one state and move them across state lines. And because of the lack of coordination between the states in the US at that time, a lot of people went undetected, so they were allowed to kill and keep killing. And the Zodiac Killer. At least five murders have been attributed to him, but there's a possibility that there were more. He seemed to target these young couples who were parked up at night on date nights, in beauty spots. In one case, he went down what was known locally as Lovers Lane. And what made this spree stick out, apart from, you know, the obvious, is that he was. He was enjoying it. I mean, he was taunting the police, he was sending letters to the local newspapers. Just thought he was too smart for all of them. And, you know, it turned out that he was, and he was sending these coded messages daring them to catch him.

[Radio Host]

Listeners to KGO Television's AM talk show heard a voice this morning purporting to be that of the Zodiac Killer. The man phoned the show after advising police last night that he would.

[Josie Ensor]

At one point, he was even threatening to shoot up a school bus full of children. Police looked at something like 2,500 suspects over the year, but no one was ever charged.

[Manveen Rana]

So this is California in the 1960s. A spate of murders. The police, the press, everybody is obsessed with it. You mention that this is a killer whose seems terribly pleased with his own intelligence, and that's evidenced by his sort of playing with codes. Just remind us about that.

[Josie Ensor]

Yeah. So there were four main ones, and they were given names by police and investigators as they all Tried to crack them. The one that was solved in 2020 was the Z340. It's called 340 because it has 340 characters in this encrypted message that was sent to San Francisco Chronicle in November of the 1969. The cipher contains 63 unique symbols. So, you know, letters, backward letters, triangles, crosshairs, which baffled cryptographers and the FBI. So you have this team of professional cryptographers who are working together using, you know, computer software to figure it out. And they use what's known as a homophonic substitution. So they're looking at every letter and trying to figure out what it means. They revealed this hidden text, which was itself a chilling taunt, which was, I hope you're having lots of fun and trying to catch me. This wasn't me on the TV show. I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner.

[Manveen Rana]

Wow. I mean, that really is chilling. So he's putting out these ciphers, these, these coded messages to the press, to the police, really, as a taunt. These are clues that they can't crack at the time. He seems to be everywhere. He's presenting himself to them, and yet they can't figure out who this man is. That mystery is never solved. People try many, many times over the years. There are so many people who've attempted to write about this, to investigate it, and then several decades later, enter Alex Baber. Now tell us about him.

[Josie Ensor]

Alex is an interesting man. So he's 50 years old. He lives in this very remote part of West Virginia with his partner and two children. He doesn't like to go into great detail about, you know, their names and identities because I think he's. He works on some pretty high profile cases. So he's quite private about that. The roads around his house are so remote that he was kind of locked in by this snowstorm at the time. So it was very dramatic. When we were talking, are you snowed in?

[Rourke Merrill]

We are getting hammered right now. Literally, like everything's white outside with this huge.

[Josie Ensor]

He grew up in this quite rural back quarter of Florida with his mom and his brothers. And he was 12 when he received this diagnosis of autism. And he talks to me about how he found it difficult to fit in. He was bullied at school. He wasn't quite the same as everyone else. And this was a time when, you know, parents didn't know what to do with the diagnosis of autism. So his mother didn't really know what to do with him. And it was around this Time that his interest in criminology was peaked. So he was reading Sherlock Holmes family copies of the True Detective magazine. And he left high school before earning his ged, which is kind of like a high school diploma. And he basically went online and read books and taught himself cryptography and these forensic methods in computer science. He was kind of doing this as a hobby, and in the meantime, to kind of earn actual money. He took up various odd jobs in his 20s, didn't he, sitting his house, and he's thinking, how can I make this a living? So kind of at the tail end of the pandemic, in 2021, he founded this cold case investigations organization called Cold Case Consultants of America. He uses a bit of inheritance money and donations from victim advocate organizations, and he has just three private detectives working with him and a kind of a small handful of forensic experts. And the kind of cases he started working on, he would often do pro bono, which is people would approach him to help with missing family members that the police had given up on.

[Manveen Rana]

It's fascinating because his own family history is quite intriguing when it comes to

[Josie Ensor]

serial killers, probably unlike many of the people that are working on trying to solve the Zodiac and these other big killings. Alex actually told me he has a family serial killer law of his own. He said in the 1970s, his grandfather owned this farm, a kind of apple orchard and peach orchard, and he was hiring these kind of young itinerant workers, and they kept going missing from this farm in the kind of Tampa area of Florida. And after his. His grandfather, Neil Eady, died in the 1980s, the family sold the land and tore down the barn.

[Rourke Merrill]

When they sold the property in 1985, they tore down his barn they had in the back, and they found human guns, human remains underneath the furnace.

[Josie Ensor]

So he tells me his grandfather was a suspected serial killer, and then there was his uncle, who is a convicted murderer.

[Rourke Merrill]

On Christmas Eve, 1969, he shot my Aunt Vivian and my Uncle Duane point blank in the face with a shotgun because my grandfather put him up to it.

[Manveen Rana]

I mean, that's an extraordinary family history. And presumably one reason a young Alex Baber becomes fascinated by murders and crimes and serial killers. What was it about the Zodiac Killer in particular, though, that kept drawing him back?

[Josie Ensor]

I think it's by many Cold case investigators, amateur or otherwise, it's seen as the Holy Grail. So he was digging into this case long before he founded his cold case investigations company, but he was obsessed with the Zodiac. After watching the 2007 film, I don't know if any of you have watched it, The Jake Gyllenhaal Zodiac movie. Got any hard suspects? About 90 an hour.

[Rourke Merrill]

Come up to around 500. You got four crime scenes, not a single usable print. You can't think of this case in normal police terms.

[Josie Ensor]

He's breaking the pattern. You became fixated on this case after watching that.

[Manveen Rana]

Is there something about the intelligence of the killer too, or the, you know, self professed intelligence of the killer?

[Josie Ensor]

Yeah, I mean, something that came up several times in my interview with Alex is he describes him as this kind of diabolical genius.

[Rourke Merrill]

He was a forward thinker. He knew how to evade identification through fingerprint.

[Josie Ensor]

So I think there's this kind of alluring prospect too, of being the person that can maybe finally outsmart this person.

[Manveen Rana]

And he did leave a bunch of clues. These ciphers that we mentioned earlier just remind us of one in particular. This is the one that has never been solved, but could show us the killer's name, talk us through what Alex was trying to do with this cipher.

[Josie Ensor]

So he thought the clue to solving this whole case was this one unsolved cipher, the Z13. The Zodiac sent this handwritten letter, the San Francisco Chronicle in April of 1970. And the note read, this is the Zodiac speaking. By the way, have you cracked the last cipher I sent you? My name is. And then 13 symbols follow. So this is a mysterious 13 character string of letters and symbols at the end of one of his notes that has eluded the world's best code breakers for more than half a century. Alex says, you know, he's telling us, he's giving us his name. We should take him at his word. So first Alex looked at the method that was used to solve the Z340. And that was a couple of years earlier. The method is known as homophonic alphabetic substitution. So this is where common letters are assigned multiple symbols. The problem with the Z13 is that cryptographers for decades have been saying, you know, this is the shortest code. It's far Shorter than the 340 symbols and characters that were given in the other one. Basically, it produces too many possible variations. So it gave Alex the idea to then apply what is known in code breaking as a columnar transposition. So that's where the order of the letters is rearranged in the columns. So he did that, but he was left with millions of possible arrangements of letters.

[Manveen Rana]

So this doesn't mean that they're in the right order. So it's not only that these are ciphers for different letters, but they may not even be in the right order. This might be a jumbled up version of the name. I mean, I'm looking at it now and it's sort of handwritten and it's like an A, an E, an N, and then a couple of noughts with sort of symbols over them. So it's not even just letters that you're playing with. So how does Alex go about solving this?

[Josie Ensor]

So then I think what's crucial to all this is in 2022, what became available is census data that had not been previously available to the public. So in America there's a 75 year rule. So a lot of this Social Security data, you know, birth records, that sort of thing, can't be released to the public for 75 years. So if you think about the period that a lot of this was happening, we hadn't had all the names and the data public until 2022. So Alex has an aha moment. You know, he suddenly has all this data to work with, all these names that we previously didn't have. So he sets about developing this kind of artificial intelligence program. He now has this census data, but he can also use military recruitment data. We have all the people who signed up to fight, not just in Okinawa and Japan, but in Vietnam, decades later. So he's plugging in all this data into this AI program that he's developed. It's whistling it down. It's gone from tens of millions to tens of thousands. And now what he's doing is he has to cross reference those with the known characteristics of the Zodiac. So what do we know? He was white, he was middle aged, somewhere in the 30s, 40s, he's about six foot tall, give or take a few inches. And he's most likely based in California, at least during this time period. That eliminated 94% of the candidates. So then this aha moment, he spent nine months processing all these names in the data set, working 16 to 20 hour days. He tells me he describes himself as a kind of chronic insomniac. You know, he's eating peanut butter jelly sandwiches, he's doing very little else, doesn't have time to make dinner. And then the candidates keep narrowing until it came down with one name, which was Marvin Merrill.

[Manveen Rana]

I mean, that's extraordinary. He's whittled it down to, to one person. Who is Marvin Merrill? Why does Alex think this man could be the killer?

[Josie Ensor]

So it turns out that Marvin Merrill was an alias. So the person's birth name, his given name, was Mervyn Margulis. And this individual seems to change his name sometime in the 60s. So Margulis was born in Chicago, Illinois, 1925. He was the eldest of three sons born to immigrants from Russia and Poland. Alex could see from Veteran affairs records that he served as the U.S. navy Hospital Corpsman during the first wave of the invasion of Okinawa. He was discharged with shell shock and PTSD. He then lived for a while in the 1940s with a roommate who used to work in Signals Corps. So he has a knowledge of cryptography that perhaps he shared during this time. He has sidearm training from his military experience. He signed up to become a doctor and studied for a little bit, and he was very interested in kind of cutting up cadavers, which we think he might have been doing in. In Okinawa anyway. Plus, everywhere the guy goes, Alex tells me, you know, zodiac crime is committed. So to quote Alex, he says, either this guy is the perpetrator or he's the most unlucky individual on the face of this planet.

[Manveen Rana]

And, Josie, a really key detail here is that, you know, there were these police sketches of what the Zodiac killer looked like from some of the people who had survived. And it does look quite a lot like Marvin Merrill.

[Josie Ensor]

It's eerie. I'm going to make a plug to our online story, but if you go online, the production is incredible. It kind of shows the e fit that police created morphing into Marvin's face. And it's uncanny. So you have the rimmed glasses, you kind of have the furrowed brow, you have the pursed lips, you have the distance between the eyes, and you also have this distinctive widow's peak.

[Manveen Rana]

And then there's an even more shocking realization, and that's that these aren't the only murders he might be associated with.

[Josie Ensor]

Yes. So that's where perhaps the most interesting development in all of this comes, is he might not have just cracked one of America's most notorious unsolved murders, but actually possibly two.

[Manveen Rana]

Coming up, we'll delve into that second famous American crime and try and work out how much evidence there is that Marvin Merrill or Marvin Margulis is the man behind them both. That's in just a moment.

[Josie Ensor]

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[Josie Ensor]

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[Manveen Rana]

Josie, you were just describing how Alex made this shocking discovery. He's whittled these names down to one, and it's this man, Marvin Merrill or Marvin Margulis, who was once a suspect in another murder case. And this is another case that has haunted America for a very long time. Just remind us what it is.

[Josie Ensor]

So this woman, her name was Elizabeth Short. She was this aspiring actress that had this kind of raven black hair. And this was a woman who was killed, and she was found dead in a parking lot in Los Angeles, California. So the media had come to to call her the Black Dahlia, because a year before this gruesome, very public murder happened, there was a film out called the Blue Dahlia. This is obviously a couple hundred miles away from the Bay Area near San Francisco, where the other zodiac killings happened several decades later. But this case became highly publicized due to the kind of very graphic nature of this crime. So she was actually discovered on January 15th of 1947 when a mother was pushing a pram and she saw what she thought was a shop mannequin lying in this kind of weedy lot in South Los Angeles. But what she stumbled upon was Short's body. It didn't seem like the site that she was found was the murder site. So she seemed to have been washed clean and then kind of macabrely arranged. And it appeared to be someone who was working with a very specialist medical knowledge.

[Manveen Rana]

It's such a horrendous killing. It obviously made huge news at the time. There was also similar to the Zodiac killers, there was some messaging to the police by the killer.

[Josie Ensor]

Yes. So nine days after, there was an envelope that was sent to the Los Angeles examiner newspaper that was containing a cryptic Letter and also Short's birth certificate, which appeared to be kind of slick with gasoline, which suggested to investigators that this was someone who understood and knew how to evade identification. Because obviously this gasoline from the oil would dissolve the fingerprints. And the killer was playing up sending more letters and signing them the Black Dahlia Avenger. And again, there was a lot of media coverage of this one. So there were also other things that became kind of circumstantial evidence that helped Alex build his case. And he was cross referencing this police notes, and he actually noticed that a phone that the Zodiac used to call police to tell them where to find two of his victims was actually an eyesight of a house in Vallejo, which Elizabeth had lived with her father before her death. And he would have known that because Marvin Margulis actually dated Elizabeth for a short period of time before her murder.

[Rourke Merrill]

Elizabeth was one of only two boyfriends she ever resided with. We know that he threatened her life.

[Josie Ensor]

So, you know, he knew who she was. He was questioned several times by the police, but at the time, his wife had actually given him an alibi for the days that they were questioning him about. There was another crucial thing which answers the question that many had for many years, which is investigators theorized that Elizabeth may have been killed in a different place and kind of dissected and washed in perhaps a bathtub, as no blood was found in or around the body. So Alex looks through these old local newspaper reports and also listings and newspaper for hotels, and actually discovers that there was a man going around that time asking different motels in the area if they had a bath, saying his wife desperately needed a bath. So this man is sort of nervous seeming, driving around, trying to find a bath for his supposed wife, and then he ends up checking into the Zodiac Motel. The fact that more has not been made of this is because the Zodiac Motel actually changed its name not long afterwards and then converted into flats. So Alex has another aha moment where he thinks, if these two murders are linked, and they date back to the 40s when he committed his first murder murder, he did so at a place called the Zodiac Motel.

[Manveen Rana]

Is this the first time they've actually been put together?

[Josie Ensor]

So this is not the first time that both murders have been connected, but this is the first time there's such compelling evidence. Marvin Margulis actually died of cancer in 1992. So Alex tracks down Marvyn Margulis son, who happens to live in upstate New York.

[Manveen Rana]

What was that meeting like? Because it's very difficult to turn up and ask someone if their father might have been a serial killer.

[Josie Ensor]

Yes. So this was an interesting one. He's one of the sons of Marvin. His name's Rourke Merrill. Alex contacts him under the pretense that he was researching his father's Second World War service. So Rourke, who's 64, agrees to meet him at this diner near his home in upstate New York in this place called Whitehall. Alex sits down at this diner with him and reveals his real intentions. I think he feared that if he put that all out there in an email, that he might not agree to meet. So, you know, he told him that he suspected his dad was a Zodiac killer, but as well as that, he suspected he might be the Black Dahlia Killer. And Alex says it was a bit of a lot to swallow. So I think Rook was seven at the time of the Zodiac killers, and I think he was in a bit of disbelief. And then at that point, Alex kind of presented this binder of dozens of examples of the Zodiac killer's handwriting, and he shows it to him. And Alex talks about this moment where he kind of. Rourke turns pale and confirms it matches his dad's. Then Alex says, you know, I actually think he might be involved in the Elizabeth Short murder. And Rourke pulls out his phone, and he shows Alex this 1992 sketch that his dad made, titled Elizabeth, that actually hung on the wall of his office. So this was just a couple of weeks or months before his death that he painted this picture that he named

[Manveen Rana]

Elizabeth, the name of the woman who'd been killed. What does it show?

[Josie Ensor]

Alex then goes to Rock's house. He says, I want to see it in person. So Rook shows him this portrait of a woman who's sort of peering through this curtain of hair. She's naked from the waist up. And what Alex does is he asks if he can scan the photo. So he puts it under this kind of high definition scanner, and he says below the top level of paint, it appeared that the mouth was cut and then covered. And all of the wounds that were kind of under this top layer of paint matched the autopsy and some of the uncensored photos that weren't made public. So essentially, at the time that he made these, the detail of those wounds weren't necessarily known. So then he made another discovery. So he's using these, the scanner's color and contrast filters, and he found a single word hidden beneath some dark shading, and it appears to show the word Zodiac.

[Manveen Rana]

Wow. What does Marvin Margulis's son, Roark. What does he make of it? What does he say, about the sort of father he was.

[Josie Ensor]

After the Elizabeth Short killing, Marvin bounced around a lot. He had different jobs. He at one point said he was a painter that studied on the Salvador Dali. So he's a bit of a kind of Walter Mitti character who had kind of an incredible life of kind of different chapters and different things. And I think. I'm not sure how close Rourke was to his father, but I think there was definitely a sense of disbelief. And I think still to this day, I think he doesn't like to accept that his father may have been this person.

[Manveen Rana]

And again, this is a mystery that has gone on and on. I mean, there are Hollywood movies about both the Zodiac killer and Black Dahlia. Nobody's had a solution till now. Alex thinks he's found one. Since you wrote this piece for the Times expanding on his theory, explaining what he's come up with, there's been quite the reaction. Tell us a bit about that. Because not everybody agrees with Alex's solution.

[Josie Ensor]

Yes. So what's fascinating about which I learned very quickly after getting into all of this is that you have this pretty dedicated group of people that call themselves a Zodiologist. So they talk on Reddit forums and various other places online and in chat forums where they kind of share theories. And actually, there's an incredible amount of detective work going on in these forums. Many of them don't like Alex's conclusion. I think for many of them, there can be a sense of sour grapes. If someone had all their money and had spent all these time and effort on another suspect, it can be quite deflating. I think that some of them don't like that he thinks outside the box that he's never been formally trained in cryptography. You know, how could this man have solved something that kind of eluded all of these code breakers at the top of their field for so many decades? So there's a lot of frustration about it, and some of it has got personal. Talking about how he likes to claim glory for things. He calls himself the kind of the new Sherlock Holmes. Some of them say these killings took place decades apart. They were done very differently. You know, one of them was very meticulous and cold, and one of them was just very graphic, seem to be motivated in a very different way. So people say the profile of both of these killings is so fundamentally different, they can't resolve that. Then you also have more serious doubts that have been raised by someone called David Aranchak. He's a software developer who was one of the team of people who's cracked the Z340 code in 2020. So a lot of this has got quite public. And, you know, Aranchex posted this video on YouTube asking whether Babe is a Sherlock or a charlatan.

[Rourke Merrill]

I'm surprised that those other cryptographers have endorsed this solution and aren't concerned with the serious problems I've pointed out.

[Josie Ensor]

Alex had posited another possible name for the Zodiac Killer, but that hadn't worked on this.

[Manveen Rana]

He did have a different solution to who the Zodiac Killer was before he

[Josie Ensor]

did so many, many years ago. He posited a different name for the Zodiac Killer, which was Lawrence Kane, who was also one of the kind of suspects acknowledged by police. And Alex went on to concede that he was wrong about Cain after new evidence came to light, but that was much thinner and before he had the resources he had and before he says he's cracked the code. So you have kind of Team Anti Alex, and then you have Team Pro Alex. And I spoke to some of those people. Several seasoned cryptography experts and former detectives who worked on both cases actually support Alex's findings. Ed Giorgio, who is the retired chief codebreaker at nsa, who himself made many attempts to crack the code before himself retiring in the late 90s, and he just said, I can confidently say that I think Alex has the right person.

[Manveen Rana]

I mean, there's a lot of very compelling but circumstantial evidence there. Now, what happens next? Is there any evidence that could prove or disprove these theories? Are the authorities looking into this?

[Josie Ensor]

Alex has been working with a kind of a network of people who've been sharing files with him, and he's been sharing his hypothesis with people. Rick Jackson, who's this homicide detective in California who is working on the Zodiac case, he found in his files Marvin Margulis government fingerprint card from 1943. So this was taken during the military service intake and something that police had not previously investigated. So now the LAPD right now is actually testing possible evidence, and they have at least one sample to compare it to from the letters that. That the suspect was sending authorities and newspapers. A week after Elizabeth's murder. They now actually have the opportunity finally to cross check this. So unfortunately for Alex, this testing is at the back of the queue because obviously it doesn't take precedent over live cases. So, you know, in the coming weeks or months, we could find out if there is actually a match to this fingerprint for Margaret Margulis.

[BetterHelp User]

Foreign.

[Manveen Rana]

That was Josie Ensor, chief U.S. reporter for the Times. You can read her Full Article An AI sleuth claims to have finally unmasked the Zodiac murderer, one of America's most notorious serial killers, on the Times website. I'd highly recommend it. Later this week we're going to have our monthly Q and A episode, so if you have any questions about this video story or any others do drop us a line to thestoryatthetimes.com the producer today was Emily Webb and sound design was by Dave Creasy. The executive producers were Sophie McNulty and Edward Drummond. We'll be back tomorrow as usual. See you then.

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