Speaker 1: In La, murder often becomes myth. No other place seems
Speaker 1: to elevate its killings and killers the way Los Angeles does.
Speaker 1: From Manson to Menendez, murders and murderers are often catapulted
Speaker 1: into the American zeitgeist and find a permanent place in
Speaker 1: the public conscious. The media baptizes them with monikers that
Speaker 1: add to the longevity of their horror. The Nightstalker, the
Speaker 1: Hillside Stranglers, the grim Sleeper. Perched at the top of
Speaker 1: this dark pantheon of murder in the City of Angels
Speaker 1: since Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, the
Speaker 1: girl who was cut cleanly in two her unsolved murder, refuses,
Speaker 1: even after almost eighty years, to diminish in the public imagination,
Speaker 1: not just for how she was mercilessly tortured with a
Speaker 1: clown smile cut into her face, then left naked and
Speaker 1: into parts in a trash drewn lot, but for how
Speaker 1: she lived. She had come to La, like so many others,
Speaker 1: with a hope and a dream to find love, to
Speaker 1: find happiness, to find home. Her end was the end
Speaker 1: of the Hollywood dream. Over the decades, shorts horrific demise
Speaker 1: has sparked the imagination of many in the fields of
Speaker 1: entertainment and law enforcement, be it fiction or documentary. There
Speaker 1: are uncounted versions of the story in book and screen form,
Speaker 1: and it's a competitive market, with champions of one suspect
Speaker 1: tirelessly sniping at those of others. There has also been
Speaker 1: no shortage of real life suspects brought forth. Calling a
Speaker 1: cold case is a bit ironic when so many investigators
Speaker 1: di amateur and professional alike have worked the bones of
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Short since the day her body was found in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven. Mitzi Roberts, who ran the Los Angeles
Speaker 1: Police Department's cold case unit until her retirement last year,
Speaker 1: says that not a week went by that she didn't
Speaker 1: feeld inquiries and unsolicited solutions to the mystery of who
Speaker 1: killed Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 2: It was a hard case to keep because of the
Speaker 2: amount of people that would call me on it and
Speaker 2: want to have tips or want me to look into
Speaker 2: a suspect that they developed, and some of them were
Speaker 2: people of importance, I guess, and so the department would
Speaker 2: pretty much order me to look into these various theories
Speaker 2: and speak with some of these people. Authors, retired investigators
Speaker 2: stuff like that, and it took a considerable amount of
Speaker 2: my time. And at the time, this was just like
Speaker 2: an ancillary case. It was sort of like a hobby case.
Speaker 2: But it ended up taking a considerable amount of my
Speaker 2: time just to fill all these different people that came
Speaker 2: forward with information or wanting to solve the Black Dalua.
Speaker 2: I mean, I would get correspondents from people would via
Speaker 2: email or phone calls every week, for sure.
Speaker 1: Every week. None of the theories or suspects helped promise.
Speaker 1: Most were rejected by known facts of the case before
Speaker 1: the phone call was even over. In Robert's view, the
Speaker 1: case would never be solved and there would be no
Speaker 1: justice for Elizabeth Short. That is until she met Alex Baber,
Speaker 1: a self styled citizen sleuth who carries no badge and
Speaker 1: no law enforcement training. Now, Roberts, perhaps the top living
Speaker 1: expert on the Black Dalua case, says, the murder of
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Short has been solved.
Speaker 2: When he presented all of his evidence, and you look
Speaker 2: at that and it fits so precisely into the case.
Speaker 2: It's hard to think that this person is not the
Speaker 2: person that was responsible for killing the Black Dallian. I
Speaker 2: really believe that he's found the guy. Like he solved
Speaker 2: the he solved the Black Dahlia.
Speaker 1: And not only that, but the case was solved almost
Speaker 1: by accident when Baber set out to investigate a different
Speaker 1: case altogether, the Zodiac Murders of Northern California. I'm Michael
Speaker 1: Connolly and this is killer in the Code solving the
Speaker 1: Black Dahalia and Zodiac cases. Over the next several episodes,
Speaker 1: we are going to detail how a quick spoken and
Speaker 1: self proclaimed crime solving genius convinced some of the greatest
Speaker 1: minds in murder and code breaking that he has solved
Speaker 1: two of the most infamous crimes of the last century.
Speaker 1: Dux Favor is fifty years old. He grew up in
Speaker 1: rural Florida. He said he learned at an early age
Speaker 1: that his grandfather was likely a serial killer who went
Speaker 1: undetected because he preyed upon migrant workers who registered no
Speaker 1: standing in society or importance with law enforcement, who backwoods Florida.
Speaker 1: Bab says it was his family's dark secret that set
Speaker 1: him on a path toward redemption through finding answers for
Speaker 1: victims and their families.
Speaker 3: I can recall vividly how my mother and her siblings
Speaker 3: would often speak quietly a FEMA gatherings discussing details surrounding
Speaker 3: my grandfather and just crimes from their childhood to instance
Speaker 3: stand out to me in particular. And what about any
Speaker 3: plantation workers or hired hands that work the fields for
Speaker 3: my grandfather and been constructed not to speak to my
Speaker 3: aunt and make interpropriate comments. Apparently this happened on a
Speaker 3: few occasions, and the individuals involved did not return to
Speaker 3: work or were never seen again, so these were always present.
Speaker 3: I can remember verse far back is is five years
Speaker 3: of age hearing the first story, and then over the
Speaker 3: years as I grew up, we would get more details
Speaker 3: and more insight into the events as I grew older.
Speaker 1: Diagnosed at age twelve with autistic disorder, Baber didn't fit
Speaker 1: in at school and was bullied and beaten until he
Speaker 1: dropped out. He later picked up a GED without needing
Speaker 1: to study for it. By then, he says his IQ
Speaker 1: had been tested at above one point sixty on both
Speaker 1: the Wexler and Stanford Bennet intelligence scales. Baber has a
Speaker 1: fast moving mind and no filter when it comes to
Speaker 1: believing himself and his efforts. He talked fast and confidently
Speaker 1: about his skills. His personality can be and often has been,
Speaker 1: read the wrong way. The first time I spoke to him,
Speaker 1: he introduced himself as an autodidact holymath. That's a fancy
Speaker 1: way of saying he was a self taught expert in
Speaker 1: many fields. He told me focused on unsolved crimes because
Speaker 1: he had the ability to find the hidden beneath the hidden.
Speaker 1: I have to admit I was put off at first
Speaker 1: and skeptical about his claims.
Speaker 3: My confidence is often mistaken for arrogance, but my focus
Speaker 3: has always been on purpose, not an ego. I work fast,
Speaker 3: I speak directly because uncovering trees requires both my self
Speaker 3: taught background spans numerous disciplines that help reveal what owners
Speaker 3: might miss or overlook. It's never about claiming to know everything,
Speaker 3: only about finding results where others have stopped looking. I
Speaker 3: tend to dig a little bit deeper because of my
Speaker 3: autistic disorder, and it's hard for me to let go
Speaker 3: once I find something that is intriguing or interest to me,
Speaker 3: and I will dig until I find an answer, one
Speaker 3: way or another.
Speaker 1: There's no shortage to the number of Internet denizens who
Speaker 1: have taken the aim at Babe before his blessed during Bravado.
Speaker 1: Four years ago, he started a company called Cold Case
Speaker 1: Consultants of America. He built a website complete with claims
Speaker 1: of crime solving genius and a photo of the founder
Speaker 1: wearing leather suspenders that look a lot like a shoulder ulster.
Speaker 1: When Baber dipped into an unsolved case, famous or not,
Speaker 1: he was often viewed as a carpetbagger looking to make
Speaker 1: money off of people haunted and desperate for answers in
Speaker 1: their missing, their murdered loved ones cases. Baber insists his
Speaker 1: intentions were misunderstood.
Speaker 3: So that I am clear, I nor my company has
Speaker 3: ever received a single pinion from a cold case review.
Speaker 3: My work has always been conducted independently, without conversation or
Speaker 3: financial involvement from any victims family. My goal has never
Speaker 3: been a profit from the tragedy of others, but rather progress.
Speaker 3: My company's efforts were financed by financial inheritance and advocate investors.
Speaker 3: Not one cent has ever been received from a victim's
Speaker 3: family for any case that my agency has worked.
Speaker 1: Along the way, Baber ad an idea he would collect
Speaker 1: all the known writings of serial killers and mass murderers
Speaker 1: into a digital database. Through which comparisons could be made
Speaker 1: in terms of word choices and phrasing, misspellings, penmanship, syntax,
Speaker 1: and even psychological tell He thought it might be a
Speaker 1: way of finding the hidden beneath the hidden.
Speaker 3: The Frenchic Linguistic database served a valuable purpose for oursentifiing
Speaker 3: linguistic and behavioral parallels between previously unrelated cases. Beyond that,
Speaker 3: it offered deeper psychological insight into criminal mind or viewing
Speaker 3: similar patterns of thought amongst various cases with connective tissue.
Speaker 3: So I was able to identify similarities between the wording
Speaker 3: and the choice of words between the Black Value Avenger letters,
Speaker 3: which some people said about crank letters, we now know
Speaker 3: that they weren't, as well as the twenty two plus
Speaker 3: letters of Zodiac mailed in between nineteen sixty nine and
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1: Included in his database were the many letters sent to
Speaker 1: law enforcement in agencies and newspapers by the self named
Speaker 1: Zodiac Killer in northern California. The Zodiacs reign of terror
Speaker 1: began in December of nineteen sixty eight, when he shot
Speaker 1: to death a young man and woman in a lover's
Speaker 1: lane in Solano County over the next ten months, the
Speaker 1: same man attacked two more couples, killing two more women,
Speaker 1: and then murdered of San Francisco cab driver. In a
Speaker 1: series of messages sent to newspapers and law enforcement agencies,
Speaker 1: he took credit for the killings, often beginning with the
Speaker 1: ominous greeting, this is the Zodiac speaking. The letters threatened
Speaker 1: more killings, including a plan to pick off children getting
Speaker 1: off a school bus, Though the five murders during the
Speaker 1: ten months free were the only slayings officially credited to
Speaker 1: the Zodiac, he claimed that various times in various messages,
Speaker 1: to have taken seven, then twelve, then fourteen, then seventeen,
Speaker 1: and then finally thirty seven lives, stating that he was
Speaker 1: accumulating slaves for the afterlife. In four of the messages,
Speaker 1: the Zodiac included ciphers composed of letters and hand drawn
Speaker 1: symbols in a grid pattern. The first one was the longest,
Speaker 1: and it was sent in three parts to three different
Speaker 1: newspapers for publication. His code was broken quickly and rather easily,
Speaker 1: by a high school teacher and his wife. The next
Speaker 1: three ciphers were far more difficult and withstood the efforts
Speaker 1: of would be codebreakers and cryptographers for decades until the
Speaker 1: year twenty twenty, when the Z three forty cipher, so
Speaker 1: named for the number of characters that included in the grid,
Speaker 1: was broken by an international team of amateur cryptography enthusiasts.
Speaker 1: The remaining two ciphers were much shorter and therefore more
Speaker 1: difficult to break because they consisted of a limited number
Speaker 1: of characters, making them harder to crack because fewer characters
Speaker 1: meant fewer patterns, reducing the effectiveness of traditional decryption methods.
Speaker 1: The shortest cipher, the Z thirteen, came after the Zodiac
Speaker 1: wrote this is the Zodiac speaking. By the way, have
Speaker 1: you cracked the last cipher I sent you? My name
Speaker 1: is thirteen letters and symbols followed. Some believed that the
Speaker 1: Zodiac was goaded into encrypting his name and sending it
Speaker 1: to the San Francisco Chronicle because he had been called
Speaker 1: out publicly by the president of the American Cryptogram Association.
Speaker 1: He said the Zodiac was a rank amateur when it
Speaker 1: came to encryption and would never dare put his name
Speaker 1: out in a cipher.
Speaker 3: Zodiac most certainly felt confident after his three forty cipher
Speaker 3: made unbroken for six months, despite the best efforts of
Speaker 3: topic photography experts across the nation. His ego couldn't allow
Speaker 3: law enforcement or the American Cryptogram Association to believe they
Speaker 3: were smarter than him, so he answered their challenge directly
Speaker 3: with the Z thirteam cipher.
Speaker 1: With the advent of artificial intelligence beginning to infiltrate almost
Speaker 1: all levels of society, from medical treatment to business applications
Speaker 1: to political campaigns, Alex Baber thought, why not law enforcement?
Speaker 1: Why not code breaking? The Z three to forty cipher
Speaker 1: had been broken two years earlier by identifying a dual
Speaker 1: coding system similar to that used by cryptographers to secure
Speaker 1: military messaging during World War Two.
Speaker 3: They cracked the Z three forty by applying a layer approach,
Speaker 3: first identifying a transposition method inspired by a World War
Speaker 3: II coding system, and then applying a substitution layer to
Speaker 3: reveal the actual letters. By combining these states niques with
Speaker 3: letter frequency and brute force, they systematically unravel as cipher
Speaker 3: to expose the Zodiac hidden message.
Speaker 1: With this knowledge, Baber set a site in the Z
Speaker 1: thirteen cipher, and using an AI program he designed, he
Speaker 1: amassed a list of first and last names that could
Speaker 1: fit into the thirteen digit cipher talk about finding a
Speaker 1: needle in a haystack. The list was seventy one million
Speaker 1: names long, as it was originally written in the Zodiac letter,
Speaker 1: the cipher was just one line, but the other ciphers
Speaker 1: authored by the Zodiac were much longer and had been
Speaker 1: presented in a grid. So Baber broke Z thirteen into
Speaker 1: a two x seven grid, adding a fourteenth digit to
Speaker 1: make the grid even with seven columns of two characters each.
Speaker 1: This added digit is called a knull in code speak,
Speaker 1: and would possibly be the space between a first and
Speaker 1: last name. The original cipher also contained three symbols that
Speaker 1: were repeated twice and a fourth symbol repeated three times.
Speaker 1: This narrated the possibilities considerably, and employing other disqualifiers cut
Speaker 1: further into the list of names. Based on nine witness
Speaker 1: accounts and the possibility that di Ze three forty cipher
Speaker 1: was derived from World War II era cryptography methods, bab
Speaker 1: started looking for a white male who would have been
Speaker 1: in his late thirties or early forties at the time
Speaker 1: of the Zodiac attacks. For nine months, he waited for
Speaker 1: phone directories from the period, as well as US census data,
Speaker 1: voting roles, property records, military archives, birth records, and arrest records,
Speaker 1: and was finally able to whittle the list of seventy
Speaker 1: one million names down to fourteen possibilities. He then had
Speaker 1: to put on his private eyeat and through forensic analysis,
Speaker 1: he went through the final fourteen possibilities and eliminated thirteen
Speaker 1: through disqualifying factors such as height, background, and proximity to
Speaker 1: northern California. That left one name, Marvin Merrill. The name
Speaker 1: belonged to a man who had several addresses in California
Speaker 1: in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. He also had a
Speaker 1: criminal record. Now, before we continue with Alex Baber's deep
Speaker 1: dive into who Marvin Merrill was, I have to say
Speaker 1: we will be taking a deep dive into his code
Speaker 1: breaking methods in the later episode. There is also additional
Speaker 1: information on our website Killerinthecode dot com about his investigation.
Speaker 1: I happen to know very little about ciphers and cryptography,
Speaker 1: but breaking the Z thirteen code is the foundation on
Speaker 1: which this entire investigation stands. I had to independently confirm
Speaker 1: or refute Baber's work before I took another step down
Speaker 1: the path with him. I went to a code breaking
Speaker 1: team headed by Ed Georgio, a legend in the world
Speaker 1: of cryptography. Georgio spent thirty years in a national security
Speaker 1: agency and to this day is the only man Everett
Speaker 1: who have served as both NSA's chief codebreaker and code maker.
Speaker 1: He accepted the challenge from me and analyzed and reworked
Speaker 1: the steps Faber had taken. It took him three weeks.
Speaker 1: Then he had his work and conclusions peer reviewed by
Speaker 1: two other top code breakers who formerly worked with the NSA.
Speaker 1: This is what Ed Georgio told me.
Speaker 4: It was one hell of a piece of work that
Speaker 4: Alex and his team did. It was quite convincing.
Speaker 5: I want to emphasize what an incredibly good job Alex
Speaker 5: did in he not only had to find a list
Speaker 5: of candidates, he had to figure out what the cryptosystem
Speaker 5: was to begin with.
Speaker 1: I asked ed to read from the paper he and
Speaker 1: his team were authoring on Alex Baber's investigation.
Speaker 4: The Baker team has done an outstanding job identifying and
Speaker 4: joining two infamous murders, the Black Volume Murder and the
Speaker 4: Zodiac Murders. A central element of their work is the
Speaker 4: proposed decryption of the Zodiac Z thirteen psycho, which the
Speaker 4: Zodiac claimed would reveal his name. The Baby team combined
Speaker 4: cryptanalytics and traditional investigative methods, first using a define set
Speaker 4: of encryption assumptions, obfuscation, permutation, and substitution to reduce the
Speaker 4: vast number of possible Z thirteen solutions to a manageable subset,
Speaker 4: and then applied forensic reasoner to eliminate all but one candidate,
Speaker 4: Marvin Merrill. Our independent validation confirmed the internal consistency of
Speaker 4: the Baber Team's decryption method.
Speaker 1: We'll hear more from Ed Georgio and his team in
Speaker 1: upcoming episodes. For now, let's go back to Alex Paper's investigation.
Speaker 1: Once he had the name Marvin Merrill, Baber started to
Speaker 1: background the man he believes he had identified as the Zodiac.
Speaker 1: He was able to place him in northern California at
Speaker 1: the time of the Zodiac killings. He learned that in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one, Merrill had been charged in Oceanside, California
Speaker 1: with five counts of fraud and spent three years on probation,
Speaker 1: a period of time that matched with a period of
Speaker 1: time when the Zodiac had gone silent. He also learned
Speaker 1: that Merrill had done to Santa Barbara in nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 1: He was sixty eight years old at the time. If
Speaker 1: he was the Zodiac, then he had gotten away with it.
Speaker 1: But Baber also encountered a problem. He could find no
Speaker 1: military property, voting, or census records with Merrill's name on
Speaker 1: them before the nineteen sixties. Curious, Baber dubbed deeper. He
Speaker 1: learned through Social Security Administration records that Merrill had a
Speaker 1: history of using two different Social Security numbers, neither of
Speaker 1: which were his. One belonged to a woman who lived
Speaker 1: in Chicago. The other belonged to a man named Marvin Margolis,
Speaker 1: also out of Chicago. Social Security records stated that Marvin
Speaker 1: Merrill was an alias from Marvin Margolis. This was a puzzle.
Speaker 1: Long before the Zodiac's murders, free Marvin Merrill was involved
Speaker 1: in identity manipulation. The question was why did Marvin Margois
Speaker 1: become Marvin Merrill.
Speaker 3: It's one of those Aha moments where you realize that
Speaker 3: there's something to this guy that needs to be looked
Speaker 3: at deeper. Because an individual, first off, doesn't use someone
Speaker 3: else's security number and doesn't file legal documents under that,
Speaker 3: and he surely doesn't use an alias in correlation with it.
Speaker 3: There has to be a purpose to that. Either he's
Speaker 3: running from something, hiding from something, or he's doing something illegal.
Speaker 3: And at that moment, that was another Aha moment where
Speaker 3: I realized I'm on the right road. I need to
Speaker 3: dig deeper into his past, because this guy went from
Speaker 3: being an entity or nobody to me right to actually
Speaker 3: being a real world individual to being now a real
Speaker 3: world individual who is shady that's doing some ille illegal activities.
Speaker 3: So right there tells you there's some criminal element to him.
Speaker 1: The deep dive continued. Now. Baber was pursuing Marvin Margolis
Speaker 1: across time and building a biography of this mystery man.
Speaker 1: He learned through military records that Margolis had served as
Speaker 1: a hospital corpsman attached to a marine battalion that made
Speaker 1: the first landing on Okinawa during World War Two. Baber
Speaker 1: found a story in the archives of the Chicago newspaper
Speaker 1: that hailed his return from the war. He posed for
Speaker 1: a photo with the rifle he had taken off a
Speaker 1: Japanese soldier he said he had killed. After the war,
Speaker 1: Margolis was mustered out of the Navy in his hometown
Speaker 1: of Chicago, but soon turned up in California. In nineteen
Speaker 1: forty six, he was living in Hollywood and taking pre
Speaker 1: med classes at the University of Southern California, and then
Speaker 1: Baber made a startling discovery. Margolis's name was in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty one grand jury report on the unsolved murder
Speaker 1: of Elizabeth Short. The report said that Margois had been
Speaker 1: one of the prime suspects in the killing of the
Speaker 1: Black Dahlia.
Speaker 3: At that moment, I had another aha moment, like, holy shit,
Speaker 3: this guy that was Merril, that was Margolis, that used
Speaker 3: a security number, is now the same individual. And the
Speaker 3: reason I knew it was the same identical individual Michaels
Speaker 3: because in the records they use this date of birth
Speaker 3: in his hometown, which you've read in his military report.
Speaker 3: So I knew, same birthday, same name, same on town.
Speaker 4: We had the right guy.
Speaker 3: How crazy is that?
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty nine, the two year old Black Dahia
Speaker 1: case was still big news in Los Angeles, and despite
Speaker 1: a massive effort to identify a suspect and make an arrest,
Speaker 1: the LAPD had come up empty. A grand jury was
Speaker 1: impaneled and for two years her testimony from witnesses, including
Speaker 1: the lead investigators on the case. They provided the grand
Speaker 1: jury with a list of twenty one possible suspects in
Speaker 1: the murder of Elizabeth Short. The list was in no
Speaker 1: particular order of importance. Number eleven on it was Marvin Margolis.
Speaker 1: According to the grand jury reports, what brought Margolis to
Speaker 1: the attention of the investigator was that he and Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Short had shared an apartment in Hollywood for twelve days
Speaker 1: in October, just three months before our murder. He was
Speaker 1: interviewed twice by detectives in the weeks after the murder.
Speaker 1: The detectives reported that he was deceitful both times, including
Speaker 1: initially lying about knowing Elizabeth Short and denying that the
Speaker 1: two had lived together briefly. He provided an alibi for
Speaker 1: the time of Short's murder, and his wife, who he
Speaker 1: had married a month after sharing the apartment, backed him
Speaker 1: up on it. Investigators were not convinced by Margolis or
Speaker 1: his wife. It had been the view of the detectives
Speaker 1: on the case that someone with a near surgical skill
Speaker 1: had performed the bisection of Elizabeth Schwort's body. They learned
Speaker 1: that Margois had taken part in the dissection of a
Speaker 1: human body at the USC Medical School three months before
Speaker 1: the murder, and they learned that Margolis's wartime experiences had
Speaker 1: a profoundly negative impact on him psychologically. According to the
Speaker 1: grand jury reports, investigators uncovered of psychological report on Margolis
Speaker 1: that was written in support of a fifty percent disability
Speaker 1: being granted Margolis for battlefield neurosis that grew from his
Speaker 1: experiences on Okinawa. This is from the report that was
Speaker 1: dated for four months before Elizabeth Schwort's murder. In Okinawa,
Speaker 1: Margolis was under bombing and strafing for twenty nine days.
Speaker 1: He was then ordered to set up a hospital there.
Speaker 1: He worked long hours with little sleep, under frequent air raids,
Speaker 1: saw many bodies in mangled shape. He cared for two
Speaker 1: companies where there were many casualties. His setup was in
Speaker 1: a small cave. A rain caused the sides to cave in.
Speaker 1: He was buried all but his head, which was held
Speaker 1: tight like a vice. The next morning he dug out.
Speaker 1: He became amnesic, emotional, with depression and instability. The psychiatric
Speaker 1: diagnosis is as follows. The subject is calm, quiet and
Speaker 1: a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression
Speaker 1: at present. This man shows a lack of interests, aims,
Speaker 1: and ability to concentrate. Margos is sullen. His personality is
Speaker 1: not pleasing, apathetic, inclined to sarcasm. He said that the
Speaker 1: next time there is a war, two of us are
Speaker 1: not going, the one who comes after me and myself.
Speaker 3: So this individual was obviously troubled by his wartime on
Speaker 3: that he experience and coming back and was identified as
Speaker 3: fifty percent mentally disabled, which at that point was like
Speaker 3: mos to shell shock. In today's terminology, he will be
Speaker 3: referred to as PTSD.
Speaker 1: Blake galex Favor would do. Seventy five years later, the
Speaker 1: detectives did a deep dive on Marvin Margolis. They learned
Speaker 1: that when he lived at the Guardian Arms on Hollywood Boulevard,
Speaker 1: he had a roommate named Bill Robinson, a former cryptographer
Speaker 1: and Signal Corps officer during the war. He too was
Speaker 1: deemed untruthful when interviewed by detectives and asked about Elizabeth
Speaker 1: shore stay at the apartment he shared with Margolis, But
Speaker 1: everything they gathered was circumstantial at best. There was no
Speaker 1: direct evidence against Margolis. He was never arrested, and soon
Speaker 1: after the murder moved back to Chicago. Efforts by the
Speaker 1: LAPD and Chicago police to find him for a third
Speaker 1: interview failed. He was in the wind and would soon
Speaker 1: be adopting a false identity before returning to California. As
Speaker 1: one detective would testify about Margolis to the grand jury
Speaker 1: in December of nineteen forty nine, it was impossible to
Speaker 1: throw him out as a suspect. It was impossible to
Speaker 1: tie him in as a suspect. Now, all these years later,
Speaker 1: Alex Baber had seemingly tied Margolis to two of the
Speaker 1: last century's most infamous unsolved crimes. But was it too
Speaker 1: late to go beyond the circumstantial and find the direct
Speaker 1: evidence that eluded police for so long. We're willing to
Speaker 1: find out in the episodes ahead, as Baber enlists a
Speaker 1: high level team of cold case investigators and uncovers a
Speaker 1: piece of evidence he calls the smoking gun. This is
Speaker 1: just one of those investigators take on Baber's work and
Speaker 1: his conclusions.
Speaker 6: I have no doubt this is the person. I have
Speaker 6: no doubt at all. And it adds a lot to
Speaker 6: stake your reputation on it, but I feel it's totally overwhelming,
Speaker 6: circumstantial evidence, and now it has become mixed in with
Speaker 6: some physical evidence that supports Alex's suspect as being the
Speaker 6: Dahlia and Zodiac killers. It's overwhelming evidence that connects this
Speaker 6: man to these murders.
Speaker 1: This is Michael Connolly and you have been listening to
Speaker 1: Kill Her in the Code Solving the Black Dahlia and
Speaker 1: Zodiac Cases. For more information about these cases and the investigation,
Speaker 1: go to Kill Her Inthecode dot com. This podcast was
Speaker 1: written and produced by Michael Connolly. It was edited by Teroll,
Speaker 1: Lee Langford and Mark Henry Phillips, with sound design and
Speaker 1: scoring by Mark Henry Phillips as well. Thank you for listening.