Speaker 1: You're listening to Killer in the Code Solving the Black
Speaker 1: Dahia and Zodiac cases. I'm Michael Connelly and this is
Speaker 1: chapter four. Today we're going to sit down with the
Speaker 1: professional codebreakers that were brought in to independently backcheck a
Speaker 1: major breakthrough in these two infamous cases, but then proceeded
Speaker 1: to come up with two major breakthroughs of their own,
Speaker 1: and in the process found the digital evidence that may
Speaker 1: solve another cold case. If I was writing this as
Speaker 1: a novel, it would definitely be a page turner. And
Speaker 1: that's sort of my task today to try to take
Speaker 1: this highly technical story and turn it into everyday language
Speaker 1: that any listener can follow and understand. I'll do my best.
Speaker 1: This all began with cold case consultant Alex Baber cracking
Speaker 1: the Holy Grail of Zodiac ciphers, the Z thirteen, so
Speaker 1: named because it had only thirteen digits, making it previously
Speaker 1: believed to be unbreakable. Z thirteen is also known as
Speaker 1: the My Name Is cipher because the Zodiac boasted that
Speaker 1: he had put his name into the code. Efforts to
Speaker 1: break it were unsuccessful for fifty plus years until Baber
Speaker 1: came along and used a combination of AI aided data
Speaker 1: crunching and legwork to weed through seventy one million names
Speaker 1: and narrow it down to one. Marvin Merrill, also known
Speaker 1: as Marvin Margolis, one of the top suspects in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven murder of Elizabeth Short, better known as
Speaker 1: the Black Dahlia. Baber put together a team of investigators
Speaker 1: to help him look for evidence that would support his
Speaker 1: findings and lead to the solving of the cases that
Speaker 1: have fascinated people for decades. When I was asked to
Speaker 1: join the team, the first thing I did was look
Speaker 1: for the kind of professional cryptographer that would independently confirm
Speaker 1: or condemn Baber's work. If the entire investigation was going
Speaker 1: to be built on Baber's claim to have broken Z thirteen,
Speaker 1: I had to make sure that claim was legitimate. I
Speaker 1: reached out to Ed Georgio, who spent thirty years with
Speaker 1: the National Security Agency and is the only man in
Speaker 1: the agency's history to hold both chief codebreaker and chief
Speaker 1: code maker positions. Georgio, in turn, brought in two other
Speaker 1: veteran cryptographers, Patrick Henry and Rich Rozanouski to conduct a
Speaker 1: peer review of his work. Together, the three code breakers
Speaker 1: have nearly one hundred years of experience, mostly working on
Speaker 1: classified projects for the NSA or its British counterpart, the
Speaker 1: Government Communications Headquarters. All three are still active in cybersecurity
Speaker 1: and sleuthing. As reported in episode one of the podcast,
Speaker 1: the Cryptography Team confirmed the work Baber did in arriving
Speaker 1: at the name Marvin Merrill hidden in the Z thirteen code.
Speaker 1: In the Los Angeles Times, Giorgio called Baber's work the
Speaker 1: greatest sluice story ever told, and as he continues work
Speaker 1: on the case, he is not backing down.
Speaker 2: Believes that this was a monumental discovery.
Speaker 1: The world of cryptology is a mystery in itself. It's
Speaker 1: populated by mathematicians and cyber experts that speak their own language.
Speaker 1: Sometimes what they say is as hard to decipher as
Speaker 1: the codes they make or break. But the confirmation of
Speaker 1: Baber's breaking of the Z thirteen is based on several
Speaker 1: steps that identify the Zodiac's methodology and keywords that in
Speaker 1: a way act like the passwords we use on our
Speaker 1: computers and phones and websites in everyday life. Each step
Speaker 1: successfully take and reduce the possibility of error in Baber's work,
Speaker 1: and closed in on Marvin Merrill as the only name
Speaker 1: that finally fit the cipher.
Speaker 2: There are many people out there who correctly claim that
Speaker 2: you could make this cipher decrypt to any name you like.
Speaker 2: That's not quite true, but it's it's not strictly incorrect.
Speaker 1: That was at Georgio again. I sat down with him
Speaker 1: and a member of his team, Patrick Henry, to discuss
Speaker 1: their work on the case. Let's start with the original
Speaker 1: code maker. In this case, that would be the Zodiac.
Speaker 1: He wrote many catch me if you can letters to
Speaker 1: the newspapers in the sixties and seventies. For these included
Speaker 1: ciphers starting with the Z four oaid. Once again, the
Speaker 1: numbers in these code names reflects the number of characters
Speaker 1: in the cipher. It is standard knowledge in cryptography that
Speaker 1: the longer a cipher is, the better chance there is
Speaker 1: that it can and will be broken. The four OA
Speaker 1: code was presented in a grid. It was sent in
Speaker 1: three parts to three different newspapers. Most of it was
Speaker 1: broken within a week by a pair of school teachers.
Speaker 1: Not only was it long, but it was designed using
Speaker 1: only a substitution methodology, meaning that letters were replaced by
Speaker 1: numbers or symbols or other letters. By studying the frequency
Speaker 1: of these characters and noting double letters and other anomalies,
Speaker 1: a de encryption map could be arrived at that translated
Speaker 1: each character in the cipher's grid to the correct letter
Speaker 1: in the alphabet. There was an eighteen character tale to
Speaker 1: the four to H eight cipher that was not broken,
Speaker 1: but we will get to that later in the episode.
Speaker 1: Possibly because his first cipher was so easily broken, the
Speaker 1: Zodiac made a second cipher, the so called Z three forty,
Speaker 1: much tougher. He used a substitution code with a permutation,
Speaker 1: which means the characters were shuffled in some way after
Speaker 1: the substitution process. Giorgio said it seems clear to him
Speaker 1: that the Zodiac stepped up his game with Z three forty.
Speaker 2: He probably thought it would be hard to break, if
Speaker 2: not secure, but it was broken. That taught him a lesson.
Speaker 2: The lesson it taught him was, I need a permutation,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to use the knights tour. And that's
Speaker 2: what he did, and it went unsolved for fifty years,
Speaker 2: and I worked on it myself fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: The Z three forty was also a grid cipher. It
Speaker 1: finally was broken just a few years ago by a
Speaker 1: team of mathematicians and cryptology enthusiasts. They identified the use
Speaker 1: of the knight's tour chess move as the permutation in
Speaker 1: the cipher. This permutation required shuffling the characters and the
Speaker 1: grid in the way a knight is moved on a
Speaker 1: chess board that is two squares vertically or horizontally, followed
Speaker 1: by one square to the right. In late nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: the president of the American Cryptogramociation publicly belittled the Zodiac's
Speaker 1: code making skill and challenged him to put his name
Speaker 1: in a cipher, expressing doubt that he ever would dare
Speaker 1: to do it, but he was wrong. On April twentieth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, the Zodiac's third cipher, the Z thirteen, arrived
Speaker 1: at the San Francisco Chronicle, with the Zodiac boldly claiming
Speaker 1: that he put his name into the thirteen character string
Speaker 1: of symbols and letters. By keeping it under fifteen characters.
Speaker 1: The Zodiac most likely believed it was unbreakable. Most of
Speaker 1: the manuals and literature on code of the day told
Speaker 1: him so, but nevertheless, the Zodiac used two coding methodologies
Speaker 1: to double down and make sure we will get into
Speaker 1: the construction in a minute, but I just wanted to
Speaker 1: mention that the Zodiac's last known cipher came in a
Speaker 1: few months later, the Z thirty two cipher, which we
Speaker 1: talked about in episode three. We'll also have more to
Speaker 1: say about that later in the episode. When Ed Giorgio
Speaker 1: and his team took up the task of backtracking the
Speaker 1: work of Alex Baber, they were chiefly concerned with two things.
Speaker 1: The first was to learn how Baber broke the code
Speaker 1: and what methods he used to do it. The second
Speaker 1: was to put themselves in the Zodiac's shoes and learn
Speaker 1: what methods he had used to compose the cipher in
Speaker 1: the first place. In a way, these were two separate
Speaker 1: investigations that would wrap around each other like a double halix.
Speaker 1: There were outside factors that had to be considered at
Speaker 1: the start, namely, how did the Zodiac learn cryptology? Baber
Speaker 1: believed that the Zodiac's code making had origins in military
Speaker 1: code work. This was not a new concept, and the
Speaker 1: Georgio team thought the same. We discussed this in chapter
Speaker 1: three of the podcast. But here was cryptographer Patrick Henry
Speaker 1: with a refresher on the materials that would have been
Speaker 1: available to someone encrypting messages in the late nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: The book that I believe would have been the most
Speaker 3: readily available was by Helen Gaines, and it's called Cryptanalysis,
Speaker 3: A Study of Ciphers and a Solution. And you can
Speaker 3: see on the cover a sort of grid based cipher
Speaker 3: right there the Army Field Manual on Basic Cryptography, which
Speaker 3: was actually published in nineteen fifty after the war. So
Speaker 3: it's not clear that he would have had access to
Speaker 3: that specifically, but other materials similar materials may have been
Speaker 3: available to him.
Speaker 1: Henry also mentioned a book originally published in nineteen sixteen
Speaker 1: called Manual for the Solution of Military Ciphers by Parker
Speaker 1: hit In his investigation, Alx Baber spent two years working
Speaker 1: on Z thirteen and trying to identif the methodology used
Speaker 1: in the encryption. It was obviously a substitution cipher, but
Speaker 1: there was also a permutation that needed to be identified.
Speaker 1: Though the cipher was presented by the Zodiac on one
Speaker 1: line in the letter to the Chronicle, Baber noted that
Speaker 1: the other three Zodiac codes were grid ciphers. He decided
Speaker 1: to take Z thirteen and put it on a grid
Speaker 1: that is Instead of keeping it on one line, he
Speaker 1: broke it into two rows of seven characters with the
Speaker 1: addition of a blank or a knull to make sure
Speaker 1: there would be seven columns with two characters each. That
Speaker 1: move by Baber eventually broke things open when he was
Speaker 1: able to identify the methodology use. The seven columns were
Speaker 1: shuffled first, and then each letter was replaced in the
Speaker 1: substitution scheme. Baber then spent nine months using an AI
Speaker 1: program to weed through all the names that fit with
Speaker 1: the permutation until there was one name left, Marvin Merrill.
Speaker 1: The Georgio team followed the same path and confirmed what
Speaker 1: Baber had done. They found that the Z thirteen encryption
Speaker 1: method was a variation on the methodology used in the
Speaker 1: other zodiac ciphers.
Speaker 2: I know it's a difficult concept, but the permutation that
Speaker 2: Alex gave us we believe is correct in part because
Speaker 2: the method of encryption is very consistent with his prior
Speaker 2: methods of encryption, and what Patrick just said about the
Speaker 2: games book that tells you this is the way to
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 1: If this was a movie, this is where the story
Speaker 1: would suddenly pivot and pick up speed ed and Patrick
Speaker 1: and Rich the x NSA. Guys didn't leave it there.
Speaker 1: With the confirmation of Alex Baber's methodology and solution, they
Speaker 1: went from code breaking to code making. They started thinking
Speaker 1: like the zodiac and how you would have composed the
Speaker 1: Z thirteen cipher. Every book in text and primer on
Speaker 1: code making, including those mentioned, already tells you to start
Speaker 1: with a keyword that can be used to compose as
Speaker 1: well as unravel the cipher. A word with at least
Speaker 1: six to eight letters that can be numbered in order
Speaker 1: of their appearance in the alphabet. The resulting number becomes
Speaker 1: the permutation key or the substitution key. For example, if
Speaker 1: you have your message in a grid with say four columns,
Speaker 1: you want a keyword that is at least four characters long.
Speaker 1: So say you use the word flag as your keyword.
Speaker 1: You start by placing F above the first column, L
Speaker 1: above the second column, A above the third, and G
Speaker 1: above the fourth. Then you sort the columns to put
Speaker 1: the letters of the keyword in alphabetical order, which with
Speaker 1: the word flag would be A, F, G, L. The
Speaker 1: A originally started above the third column, but A comes
Speaker 1: before all the others in the alphabet, so that third
Speaker 1: column gets re arranged to be in the first position.
Speaker 1: The first column F would be the next letter in
Speaker 1: the keyword to come alphabetically, So the F column moves
Speaker 1: into the second position, followed by the G column, and
Speaker 1: then finally the L column. You have now shuffled the columns.
Speaker 1: Cryptographers then typically converts such a keyword into numbers. The
Speaker 1: keyword flag, for example, would have a numerical of two
Speaker 1: four one three, again by sorting the letters of the
Speaker 1: word flag according to the order they come in in
Speaker 1: the alphabet. The A comes first, so it gets assigned
Speaker 1: the number one, and F is the second, so it
Speaker 1: gets to number two. G gets number three, and the
Speaker 1: fourth letter alphabetically is L, so it gets a four.
Speaker 1: So F L A G becomes two four one three.
Speaker 1: It's complicated, and I hope I have explained it clearly.
Speaker 1: But you can go to our website to find links
Speaker 1: to sites that further explaining this permutation, which is often
Speaker 1: referred to as a Columner transposition with his Z thirteen code.
Speaker 1: The permutation key, if it could be discovered, would reveal
Speaker 1: the correct order of the seven shuffled columns, and that,
Speaker 1: of course, would further confirm Baber's solution. Patrick believed that
Speaker 1: the sophistication of the Zodiac ciphers indicated that demand behind
Speaker 1: them would have used a key, so he started looking
Speaker 1: for it.
Speaker 2: Patrick was convinced that the permutation wasn't random and spent
Speaker 2: days reverse engineering it. And I said to myself, geez.
Speaker 4: He's probably going down a dead death, and he kept saying,
Speaker 4: I mean no, there's got to be some way. He
Speaker 4: came up with the permutation and Patrick stuck it out
Speaker 4: out tried every combination.
Speaker 2: So I had moved on I would I didn't do that.
Speaker 2: So it just shows how what the value of a
Speaker 2: team is.
Speaker 1: The bottom line is Patrick found it. You turn a
Speaker 1: key to unlock a door. Patrick found that the keyword
Speaker 1: that unlocked the door when Z thirteen was Elizabeth. And
Speaker 1: by the way, you can only use a letter once
Speaker 1: in a permutation key. So it became clear that the
Speaker 1: Zodiac had dropped the first D in Elizabeth.
Speaker 3: After an AHA moment, definitely.
Speaker 2: So Alex recovered the permutation and Patrick figured out how
Speaker 2: it was generated in the first place. It was generated
Speaker 2: by a standard scheme using the keyword Elizabeth.
Speaker 3: That's something that really lends weight to this solution being correct.
Speaker 3: It's not just an anagram of the ciphertext that you
Speaker 3: then apply it septstitute to and get a random name.
Speaker 3: It's a very structured reordering using the kinds of permutations
Speaker 3: that were used in standard reference works. They all start with, okay,
Speaker 3: here's how to make a substitution. Now here's how to
Speaker 3: make a permutation, which is commonly called a columnar transposition,
Speaker 3: and then a discussion of okay, well we want to
Speaker 3: combine these two in order to get a cipher that's
Speaker 3: really resistant to announce us.
Speaker 1: It was a stunning discovery Marvin Merrill. It used the
Speaker 1: name of the black Dahlia as the keyword to a
Speaker 1: zodiac cipher. It was another irrefutable connection between the cases.
Speaker 1: All three parts of the crypto investigation came together, methodology, keyword,
Speaker 1: and solution.
Speaker 2: So when people out there assert, hey, you can make
Speaker 2: this decrypt to any name you want, they are correct.
Speaker 2: But can you make it decrypt to something that has
Speaker 2: all these other attributes, like we had prior knowledge that
Speaker 2: this was a suspect, like we had prior knowledge of
Speaker 2: the encryption system, like we had prior knowledge that this
Speaker 2: was this person called Elizabeth.
Speaker 1: You can't, You just can't.
Speaker 5: Put all those three things together and come up with
Speaker 5: the answer. Excuse me, come up with a believable answer.
Speaker 5: You have to take all three as a package. The
Speaker 5: first thing is the suspect's name. The second thing is what.
Speaker 2: Actual encryption method was used? All right, not what the
Speaker 2: answer was, what was the method. So we think that
Speaker 2: his method looks very much like his prior methods. It
Speaker 2: also the method is well informed by the gains text.
Speaker 2: The third thing is, hey, a keyword actually generates the permutation,
Speaker 2: and what is that keyword? That keyword is Elizabeth. Oh
Speaker 2: my god. We've got great prior evidence in favor of that.
Speaker 2: So what we see in the cipher text that crazy
Speaker 2: thirteen long sequence is a precise mapping. From that, all
Speaker 2: of those three assumptions have to be correct to.
Speaker 3: Get at every stage in the way from the Z
Speaker 3: thirteen to Marven Merrill. We have a believable, clausible method
Speaker 3: to get from one to the other. And they all
Speaker 3: kind of make sense, and they all hang together. And
Speaker 3: generally that is not the kids Like if you have
Speaker 3: a one of the other thousands of names that could
Speaker 3: fit in terms of having the right number of repeats
Speaker 3: in them, they won't necessarily match this permutation method with
Speaker 3: any permutation, and if they do, the permutation keyword might
Speaker 3: not be believable. And if they do, the name might
Speaker 3: end up being something that isn't the name of a
Speaker 3: real life person or a real dead person in this case.
Speaker 3: And if they do, then you end up with a
Speaker 3: substitution that has no known structure to it. But at
Speaker 3: every stage in this we have structure. We have a
Speaker 3: sort of a method of construction that is believable, matches
Speaker 3: what was commonly described in texts and was and sort
Speaker 3: of build in our confidence that this is the right solution.
Speaker 1: I asked Georgia or Henry why they thought the Zodiac
Speaker 1: would use a keyword that, if discovered, could connect him
Speaker 1: to another case.
Speaker 3: I think he would. He was trying to leave clues,
Speaker 3: and he was trying to make it sort of tantalife
Speaker 3: sing but hard, and so that when somebody did finally
Speaker 3: come up with the solution, they would be able to
Speaker 3: see how it was constructed and what the keyword was
Speaker 3: and it wasn't just something made at random.
Speaker 1: The keyword discovery galvanized the cryptography team because they now
Speaker 1: understood that if the Zodiac used a keyword for the
Speaker 1: Z thirteen codes permutation. Then he most likely used a
Speaker 1: keyword for the substitution scheme as well. Once again they
Speaker 1: were back in the zodiac shoes, figuring out what steps
Speaker 1: he would have taken.
Speaker 3: I think he would have started with the writing his
Speaker 3: name in the grid and thinking what do I do next? Okay,
Speaker 3: I do a permutation. So I'll come up with a keyword.
Speaker 3: Use the keyword to make a permutation. All right, I'm
Speaker 3: going to use Elizabeth. And so he used Elizabeth and
Speaker 3: then reordered the letters. Now, just reordering the letter is
Speaker 3: not going to be anywhere and it is secure enough.
Speaker 3: So you have to have a substitution as well. And
Speaker 3: how do you come up with the substitution. We don't
Speaker 3: know how he came up with the substitutions, but his
Speaker 3: earliest ciphers, we do believe that he used a keyword
Speaker 3: for the substitution in Z thirteen.
Speaker 1: Having brought in late to Patrick's belief that there was
Speaker 1: a permutation keyword, ed dove headlong into the search for
Speaker 1: a keyword to the substitution scheme in Z thirteen. He
Speaker 1: worked at night and day, and on Thanksgiving morning, he
Speaker 1: was once again back in front of the computer. Earlier,
Speaker 1: he had identified the exact mapping of symbols to letters
Speaker 1: in the code. He now had to find the keyword
Speaker 1: that corresponded to it. An exhaustive search came up with
Speaker 1: nineteen possibilities. Most of these words were nouns, verbs, and
Speaker 1: adjectives ascending, freighter, and cherished. Only three of the nineteen
Speaker 1: words were recognizable as names, Siegfried, Frederico, and Scherry Joe
Speaker 1: with Sherry spelled unusually with a C, and Joe without
Speaker 1: an E. The names and words meant nothing to Georgio.
Speaker 1: He fed them into an AI program and asked if
Speaker 1: any of the words on the list held any significance
Speaker 1: in either the Zodiac or Black Dahia cases. The answer
Speaker 1: was immediate. Cherry Joe Bates was murdered in Riverside, California,
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty six and thought by many to be,
Speaker 1: but never officially declared by police, to be a victim
Speaker 1: of the Zodiac.
Speaker 2: So this was kind of the second AHA moment.
Speaker 1: Cherry Joe Bates was an eighteen year old college dudent
Speaker 1: at Riverside Community College. She was murdered on the night
Speaker 1: of October thirtieth, nineteen sixty six. Shortly after leaving the
Speaker 1: school's library, her car had been disabled, and she walked
Speaker 1: off with a man promising to give her help and
Speaker 1: a ride home. She was slashed and stabbed during a struggle,
Speaker 1: and her body was found the next morning. Police determined
Speaker 1: that the distributor on her Volkswagen's engine had been disconnected,
Speaker 1: which indicated her murder was premeditated. In the weeks that followed,
Speaker 1: police and local newspapers received a variety of letters from
Speaker 1: her alleged killer. Most were proven to be hoaxes, but
Speaker 1: one so called confession letter was determined to be from
Speaker 1: the actual killer because of the details it provided, including
Speaker 1: that he had pulled the middle wire on the Volkswagen's distributor.
Speaker 1: Police also recovered a wooden desk from the library with
Speaker 1: references to Sherry Joe's murder written on it. This was
Speaker 1: also determined to have been the work of the real killer.
Speaker 1: Three years later, with the murder unsolved, Riverside detectives noted
Speaker 1: the similarities to what was happening up in the Bay
Speaker 1: area with the so called Zodiac killer. He too had
Speaker 1: a pension for reaching out to newspapers and threw them
Speaker 1: to the police. The Riverside detectives met privately with their
Speaker 1: Bay Area counterparts to compare the cases, but the possible
Speaker 1: connection between the cases was not exposed publicly until late
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, when the San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery,
Speaker 1: later to be portrayed by Robert Downey Junior in the
Speaker 1: movie Zodiac, broke the story. There were several intriguing connections
Speaker 1: between the cases, including the use of similar words and
Speaker 1: duplicate misspellings in the letters from the Zodiac and the
Speaker 1: Riverside Killer, For example, both used the word twitch in
Speaker 1: their writing, both misspelling it the same way. In a
Speaker 1: newspaper interview with Sherry Joe's father a year after the murder,
Speaker 1: he spoke of their loneliness in his life since losing
Speaker 1: her and could only refer to her killing as quote
Speaker 1: this thing that happened. Two years later, but before the
Speaker 1: possible connection between the cases were revealed publicly, the Zodiac
Speaker 1: said in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, I
Speaker 1: get awfully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I
Speaker 1: could do my thing. While there were many other similarities,
Speaker 1: there were things that didn't quite fit the specific targeting
Speaker 1: of Sherry Joe, as opposed to the seemingly randomness of
Speaker 1: the Zodiac killings, the distance between Riverside and the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: the fact that the Riverside confession letter was tight and
Speaker 1: all the Zodiac communications were handwritten. Though in the years
Speaker 1: that followed the FBI investigated the possible links between the cases,
Speaker 1: the investigations were never fully and officially combined when the
Speaker 1: different seemed to outweigh the similarities. The team investigating Marvin
Speaker 1: Merrill believes they are now inextricably linked because the zodiaci's
Speaker 1: Cherry Joe has a keyword in composing the Z thirteen cipher,
Speaker 1: at least four months before the San Francisco Chronicle and
Speaker 1: Paul Avery broke the story that the cases might be linked.
Speaker 1: This is veteran homicide detective Rip Jackson.
Speaker 6: That's a mind boggling fact that would rivet any detective
Speaker 6: that was connected with an unsolved murderer. The unsolved murder
Speaker 6: of Cherry Joe bates. What are the chances that that
Speaker 6: kind of thing happens, That the killer or potential killer
Speaker 6: includes her name and a cipher keyword when the cases
Speaker 6: haven't even been seriously looked at or connected until months
Speaker 6: later by an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. It's
Speaker 6: off the charts that that kind of stuff just doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: Missy Roberts, the former supervisor of the Los Angeles Police
Speaker 1: departments Cold Case Unit, said the Cherry Joe keyword confirms
Speaker 1: the connection to the Zodiac and says it offers valuable
Speaker 1: insights into the killers evolving m What are.
Speaker 7: The odds that those keywords would be the exact names
Speaker 7: of two of the most famous unsolved gruesome murders similar murders,
Speaker 7: by the way, gruesome murders in California history.
Speaker 1: Cherry Joe bas was slashed and stabbed two years later,
Speaker 1: the Zodiac began as murder spree using a handgun. Roberts
Speaker 1: says that is not a reason to view the cases
Speaker 1: as unconnected.
Speaker 7: In every killer, you see that a lot the evolving
Speaker 7: of an m O. Things that works, things that didn't work.
Speaker 7: You know, there's a lot of risk with a murder
Speaker 7: like Sharry Jel where you're murdering somebody in public. You know,
Speaker 7: she was kind of secreted in between two buildings, but
Speaker 7: it's in public, very bloody. You're you know, you're coming
Speaker 7: out now into the street covered with I I would
Speaker 7: imagine blood and evidence, and there's there was said to
Speaker 7: be a huge struggle, which that is going to alert people,
Speaker 7: alert law enforcement. And so these are things that would
Speaker 7: have went wrong for the killer that he's going to
Speaker 7: try and perfect. A serial killer is going to try
Speaker 7: and perfect and get better because he doesn't want to
Speaker 7: get caught. Even though he's taunting law enforcement and he's saying,
Speaker 7: you know, catch me if you can. This is a
Speaker 7: game to him and he wants to keep playing. And
Speaker 7: so with the Zodiac, yeah, you know, he sneaks up,
Speaker 7: very sneaky.
Speaker 2: They don't even know.
Speaker 7: That he's there until he's right there in the window
Speaker 7: of the cars.
Speaker 2: More planning and just he's perfecting.
Speaker 7: He's perfecting his game so he can continue to do it.
Speaker 7: And anytime you use a gun, I think you know,
Speaker 7: you have less it's quicker, it's less personal.
Speaker 2: You can keep a distance from your victim.
Speaker 7: You know, you have more time to just get away
Speaker 7: without a bunch of evidence on yourself. As we start
Speaker 7: to fill in those gaps and things start to fall
Speaker 7: into place, we see the killer evolving and getting better.
Speaker 1: At his craft.
Speaker 7: And there's a reason why he wasn't caught because he
Speaker 7: did evolve.
Speaker 1: It should be noted that Marvin Merrill initially he checks
Speaker 1: some of the boxes in relation to the Base murder,
Speaker 1: namely proximity. At the time of the murder, he was
Speaker 1: living an hour and fifteen minutes away in Vista, California.
Speaker 1: He also was operating an auto repair business at the
Speaker 1: time called Buck Savers, which would have likely given him
Speaker 1: the knowledge of which wire to pull in a distributor
Speaker 1: to disable Sherry Joe Basse's Volkswagen. Alex Babors team is
Speaker 1: continuing the investigation of Merrill's connection to the Bates murder,
Speaker 1: and we will have more on that in later episodes.
Speaker 1: Let's go back now to our cryptographers. Their work on
Speaker 1: this project certainly gives legitimacy to Alex Baber's work and
Speaker 1: claimed that Marvin Merrill born Marvin Margolis is the killer
Speaker 1: of Elizabeth Short as well as the victims of the
Speaker 1: Zodiac Spree. Highest Baber about this.
Speaker 8: I think that this alone that validates my initial discovery
Speaker 8: and findings of Marvin Merrill as being the solution to
Speaker 8: the z thirteen as well as I think it it
Speaker 8: adds another layer of credibility because it was independently discovered.
Speaker 8: It wasn't it wasn't in house to me and my team.
Speaker 1: Another game changing confirmation came in last week from Stockholm, Sweden,
Speaker 1: where a data analyst reported a startling new insight when
Speaker 1: the Zodiac's first cipher, the Z four oh eight. This
Speaker 1: was the cipher broken very quickly in NI eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: nine by its school teachers Donald and Betty Harden, except
Speaker 1: it wasn't completely broken. The last line of the cipher,
Speaker 1: eighteen characters long, was not decoded and has remained so
Speaker 1: ever since. Over the years, it was thought to be
Speaker 1: gibberish or a line of meaningless symbols used to even
Speaker 1: out the three grids that comprise the cipher. The last
Speaker 1: line became known informally as the Z eighteen. Last week,
Speaker 1: Thomas Hefner of Stockholm reported that he applied methodology employed
Speaker 1: by Baber in breaking Z thirteen to the so called
Speaker 1: Z eighteen and was able to decrypt it. He says
Speaker 1: it contains a name Marvin Merrill. Hefner has no background
Speaker 1: in cryptography, but works for a tech investment firm in
Speaker 1: Stockholm and specializes in pattern recognition and hypothesis of validation.
Speaker 1: Attended college in Los Angeles and was familiar with both
Speaker 1: the Zodiac and Black Dalia cases because of movies he
Speaker 1: saw that were based on each case. He saw news
Speaker 1: stories on Alex Baber's discovery and look for pattern similarities
Speaker 1: between Z thirteen and Z eighteen. He noticed that if
Speaker 1: he discounted the five e's contained in Z eighteen and
Speaker 1: applied Baber's methodology to the remaining thirteen characters, you got
Speaker 1: the same result. Hefner told me he was excited by
Speaker 1: the discovery, but also a little bit spooped.
Speaker 9: Work itself was about seeing the patterns and trying to
Speaker 9: understand the system itself behind it, and it sort of
Speaker 9: puts you in the space where you are trying to
Speaker 9: you start thinking. You feel at least like you're thinking
Speaker 9: like the person who created these patterns on the system,
Speaker 9: and it's you realize that you're suddenly getting in the
Speaker 9: head of the killer, the serial killer.
Speaker 2: It's quite it's an airy feeling.
Speaker 1: Sner's work has been confirmed by Baber. It's solid.
Speaker 8: It's rock solid. I tested it first twice to make
Speaker 8: sure it was accurate. It was. I therefore shared it with.
Speaker 1: Ed Georgia and Henry are still reviewing the construction of
Speaker 1: Hefner's solution to Z eighteen, but told me that their
Speaker 1: initial review of it founded to be plausible. I want
Speaker 1: to finish up here with Ada and Patrick. I asked
Speaker 1: them to review Baber's work on the Z thirty two side,
Speaker 1: for which was part of the discussion in chapter three
Speaker 1: of the podcast. I asked for a no holds barred review.
Speaker 1: This is Patrick Henry.
Speaker 3: The Z thirty two has a similar property that you
Speaker 3: can have lots and lots of solutions, so it's really
Speaker 3: hard to build confidence in the correctness of any given
Speaker 3: solution because in a sense, almost all solutions are valt
Speaker 3: I think Alex has really convincing evidence outside of the
Speaker 3: cipher where you take that large circle cross, he's got
Speaker 3: a very heavily inked in zero and you line that
Speaker 3: up with the map and put the center on Mount Diabler,
Speaker 3: and you end up with the burial location of Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 3: And yeah, we verified that with the map. That certainly
Speaker 3: lines up. That all seems very plausible. The question of
Speaker 3: how would you get from the given plaintext to that ciphertext, Well,
Speaker 3: it doesn't have we don't have any sort of convincing
Speaker 3: argument that this solution is structurally any better than any
Speaker 3: other solution. The evidence that Alex points out that is
Speaker 3: outside of the cipher has some weight to it.
Speaker 1: We said that because the Z thirty two cipher was
Speaker 1: a simple substitution code, there are no keywords that can
Speaker 1: be found to confirm a solution.
Speaker 3: That was the way that we kind of build confidence
Speaker 3: on the Z thirteen solution is looking at how would
Speaker 3: you construct this, and when we found out, okay, this
Speaker 3: is how you constructed and you end up with these
Speaker 3: keywords that the highly relevant to the case being the
Speaker 3: keys that really sort of cemented it for us, but
Speaker 3: we don't have that full Z thirty two.
Speaker 1: Before signing off with the cryptographic team, I had to
Speaker 1: ask at Georgio why he pitched in and build a
Speaker 1: team to help confirm Alex babors solution to the Zodiac code.
Speaker 2: We believe that you know this was a monumental discovery.
Speaker 2: We were asked by you to verify the result. So
Speaker 2: this is the normal experimental science thing that cryptanalysts do
Speaker 2: every day. This is my passion. It's enormously fun. I'm
Speaker 2: not getting paid, and I have very important other work
Speaker 2: to do that. We're Patrick and I and Rich of
Speaker 2: finding the Bad Guys on the Internet. Now that's a
Speaker 2: research and development program because it's a work in progress,
Speaker 2: but I have a strong connection to the history of
Speaker 2: Coote breaking a story like this. I'm sailing a little
Speaker 2: close to the wind because we're showing cryptanalytic techniques that
Speaker 2: would have been considered classified in the day they were used.
Speaker 2: Some of them are still considered classified today, but we're
Speaker 2: in it to solve important problems. We think this is important,
Speaker 2: but we also think it's terribly exciting.
Speaker 1: We'll be back with a new episode of the podcast
Speaker 1: on the anniversary of Elizabeth Short's death, when the investigators
Speaker 1: take it to the street in search of the place
Speaker 1: where the Black Dahlia may have been murdered. I'm Michael Connelly,
Speaker 1: and you've been listening to Killer in the Code solving
Speaker 1: the Black Dahia and Zodiac cases. This episode was written
Speaker 1: and produced by Michael Connolly. It was edited by Terall
Speaker 1: Lee Langford, with sound designed by Michael Odemark and music
Speaker 1: by Mark Henry Phillips. Subscribe to the podcast so you'll
Speaker 1: be informed of new episodes and check out killerindecode dot
Speaker 1: com for information on the investigation. Thank you for listening.