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- [00:00]
Odoo Advertiser
When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoo@odoo.com that's O D O
- [00:28]
Chelsea Handler
O.com this is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea after the Big Game, like most people, I kept thinking about the commercials, and there was one that stayed with me. It was from the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, and it wasn't loud or flashy. It showed a Jewish kid being targeted at school and another student who chose not to ignore it. As someone who was Jewish, that moment felt very real to me. Not dramatic, just familiar. And what struck me was how clearly it showed that hate doesn't always announce itself, but the impact is still huge. If you saw the Blue Square spot during the Big Game, it's worth thinking about. And if you want to show support, sharing the Blue Square is one small way to do that.
- [01:07]
Malcolm Gladwell
For a long time, the path to the top was about efficiency. You followed the best practices, you managed the process and you moved up. But in 2026, that ladder has been automated. If your value is based on being logical, you're competing with a machine that doesn't sleep. So how do you become irreplaceable? You stop waiting for inspiration and you start using a system. This is what Sir John Haggerty teaches in Creativity for Growth, an eight part course designed to give you a repeatable, rigorous framework for fresh thinking. John doesn't just talk about art, he talks about the system. First, you your philosophy, helping you find a unique point of view so you stop sounding like everyone else. Second, a process, a repeatable method to embed creativity in your career. And third, culture, the skill of leading others so your ideas can become reality. By the end of this course, you'll have a toolkit to move from executing a strategy to defining it. This is your career insurance. It's the difference between being a commodity and being an architect. Creativity is a system, not a spark. Learn it today. Visit creativityforgrowth.com.
- [02:32]
Betsy Shepard
Pushkin hi, Valley of Shadows listeners. It's Betsy Shepard. I'm dropping in to share a sneak peek of the new season of Crimes of the Times, a podcast from the Los Angeles Times Studios. In the show, LA 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 code breaker may have cracked the Zodiac killers in infamously complex Z13 code. And how the name it reveals potentially connects the Zodiac Killer to another notorious unsolved California murder. The Black Dahlia.
- [03:23]
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, was impossible.
- [03:34]
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 news. 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. It 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.
- [04:40]
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.
- [04:59]
Christopher Goffard
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 in 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
- [05:53]
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.
- [06:08]
Christopher Goffard
Baber is a fire hose 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.
- [06:28]
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.
- [06:40]
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.
- [06:55]
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 taking the time to get to know me.
- [07:09]
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 involved the most minimal human interaction possible. But he also credits his autism with fueling his single minded focus as a self taught criminologist.
- [07:27]
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 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.
- [08:04]
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 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've 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 Margol 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.
- [10:16]
Chelsea Handler
This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. After the Big Game. Like most people, I kept thinking about the commercials, and there was one that stayed with me. It was from the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate. And it wasn't loud or flashy. It showed a Jewish kid being targeted at school and another student who chose not to ignore it. As someone who was Jewish, that moment felt very real to me. Not dramatic, just familiar. And what struck me was how clearly it showed that hate doesn't always announce itself, but the impact is still huge. If you saw the blue square spot during the Big Game, it's worth thinking about. And if you want to show support, sharing the blue square is one small way to do that.
- [10:53]
Malcolm Gladwell
This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. In a world where everyone has access to the same data and the same AI, how do you actually win? Most people are fighting for 1% gains. But the real upside, the exponential growth, comes from the creative leap. It's what Sir John Hegarty calls the creative dividend. It's the ability to make your entire business irreplaceable, from your product and your process to your company culture. John's eight part series, Creativity for Growth, is the playbook for building your creative capability and embedding it into your organization. Creativity is a system, not a spark. Learn it today. Visit creativityforgrowth.com when you buy business software
- [11:38]
Odoo Advertiser
from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O o dot com. That's odoo. Com.