A Troubled Veteran Returns Home
Margolis joined the U.S. Navy in 1943, serving in the Pacific theater of the war as a medic. At one point, he was buried alive in a cave and forced to claw his way out. Near the end of his military service, Margolis was described by Navy officials as “resentful” and aggressive. He was denied the chance to serve in the Navy’s surgical unit and left partly on the grounds of mental disability.
After his discharge, he settled in California and enrolled in medical school at the University of Southern California, where, among other tasks, Margolis dissected human corpses. He also lived with Short for several days during a brief relationship, a fact he initially kept from police investigators, who placed Margolis on a short list of murder suspects. Shortly after police questioning, he fled Los Angeles and began an itinerant life, moving through Chicago, Atlanta, Kansas and Arizona. He also started using the pseudonym Marvin Merrill, possibly to evade detection.
Margolis displayed a hunger for attention and a distinctive flair for outrageous lies: In one Kansas newspaper article, Margolis embellished his military record and described himself as an artist who studied under famed surrealist Salvador Dalí. By 1962, he had moved again and was living with his second wife and children in the San Diego area.
Who Was the Black Dahlia?
Short achieved in death the fame that eluded her in life. Her ghastly murder earned her the tabloid nickname “the Black Dahlia,” based in part on her penchant for wearing black clothes and the popularity of the 1946 film noir The Blue Dahlia.
Police were confounded by the manner of her death: Short’s body, drained of blood, had been cut in half with surgical precision and carefully arranged in the vacant lot. Both sides of her mouth had been sliced wide into a grotesque smile. Investigators believed she had been killed elsewhere and then brought to the vacant lot.
Soon after the murder, Jimmy Richardson, an editor at the Los Angeles Examiner, began receiving cryptic letters and packages from an anonymous “Black Dahlia Avenger.” Sentences were formed with cutout letters from newspaper and magazine headlines, and Short’s birth certificate and other personal items were included in one of the packages.
After a few years, the investigation, which yielded hundreds of suspects but no arrests, disappeared from headlines as California continued its booming postwar growth.
The Rise of the Zodiac Killer
Years later, a series of unsolved murders began occurring in Southern California, many of which are suspected to be the work of the Zodiac Killer. By the late 1960s, the Zodiac Killer began identifying himself as such in letters and cryptograms linked to a series of killings in the San Francisco Bay Area. At one point, he claimed to be responsible for 37 deaths.
Despite decades of police work, the Zodiac Killer has never been identified, and the case remains open, as does the Black Dahlia murder. Both cases have been the subjects of countless films, books, podcasts, amateur investigations, wild-eyed theories and lengthy lists of suspects.
Baber became interested in cracking the Zodiac case after watching the 2007 film Zodiac starring Jake Gyllenhaal. He runs a firm called Cold Case Consultants of America and was diagnosed with autism in grade school. He attributes the condition to helping him crack codes that are indecipherable to others.
“Once I start on something, I have to see it through. The deeper I go, the harder I push. My mind’s wired differently,” Baber told the Los Angeles Times, adding that he often spent up to 20 hours a day working on the project.
Alex Baber Cracks the Mysterious Z13 Cipher?
The big break in the case came from a cryptogram the Zodiac Killer sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1970, in which the murderer stated, “My name is,” followed by a string of 13 characters. The code, infamous as the Z13 cipher, has baffled experts for decades, but Baber claims that with the help of AI, he cracked the code, revealing the 13-letter name of the killer: Marvin Merrill, the alias Margolis used for decades.
“It's irrefutable. It's just mathematically impossible for it not to be him,’ Baber told the Daily Mail. “With all the connections, either he's the unluckiest man in the history of the world—in the wrong place at the wrong time, every time—or he's the perpetrator.”
Besides his presence in areas where all the murders occurred, other evidence possibly connects Margolis to all the crimes. He had the medical training to perform a surgical dismemberment on Short’s body; a man fitting his description was seen in the area where her body was found and where there was a motel called the Zodiac Motel, which had bathtubs suitable for draining blood from a body; all the murders were followed by letters that taunted police and reporters; and, on at least one occasion, the Zodiac Killer used a Japanese-style bayonet blade very similar to a souvenir that Margolis brought back from World War II.
Shortly before Margolis died in California in 1993, he drew a sketch of a woman that may have alluded to Short and the Zodiac killings. Titled “ELIZABETH,” the drawing features a dark-haired nude woman seen only from the waist up. Hidden in the sketch is the word “ZODIAC.” Other drawings by Margolis show nude women in odd poses, including one depicting a woman who appears to be strung up with a definite line across her waist. Baber considers the drawings a deathbed confession.
‘The Greatest Sleuth Story Ever Told’
Baber’s exhaustive research has been supported by some of the most experienced men and women in the police and cryptographic community. Retired Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Rick Jackson told bestselling crime author Michael Connelly in the Killer In The Code podcast covering Baber’s work, “I have no doubt this is the person.”
“It’s overwhelming evidence that connects this man to these murders…I really believe he’s found the guy. He solved the Black Dahlia,” said Jackson, who once led the LAPD’s cold case team and has thoroughly analyzed the Black Dahlia case. He also told the Los Angeles Times, “In my opinion, these are solved cases.”
Some critics have questioned Baber’s methods and findings, including Margolis’s youngest son, who told the Daily Mail, "I would love for the families to have peace in the Zodiac killings. But there’s just no way it was my dad…just no way my dad killed kids.”
Crime author Elon Green stated in Defector, “the podcasters [Connelly and Baber] have acted with certainty where they ought to embrace caution, and worse, gone about the process backward. With no concrete supporting evidence, they reached a conclusion—that MARVIN MERRILL was the solution to Z13—and then backfilled an explanation.”
But Ed Giorgio, former chief codebreaker at the National Security Agency, agrees with Baber’s solution for the Z13 cipher. “All of Alex’s work checked out to me,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “The probability that anything else is correct is orders of magnitude smaller. It is the greatest sleuth story ever told."
