Speaker 1: This is actually like a perfect locatient with the hidden
Speaker 1: driveway and the detached buck clothes.
Speaker 2: Hey, I think they're ready.
Speaker 3: I got it. Seventy nine years ago today, Elizabeth Short
Speaker 3: was tortured and murdered, her body disguarded in a vacant
Speaker 3: field in Los Angeles. In death, she became known as
Speaker 3: the Black Dahlia, the girl who was cut cleanly into
Speaker 3: the horror of what happened to her led to one
Speaker 3: of the largest and widest investigations ever mounted by the
Speaker 3: Los Angeles Police Department. Some have called it a state
Speaker 3: of the art investigation for its time in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 3: Others look back and see it as flawed, with leeds
Speaker 3: unfollowed and suspects not exhaustively pursued. Either way, no one
Speaker 3: was ever brought to justice for the killing of Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 3: One thing that stands out very clearly from the police
Speaker 3: reports and media accounts of the day is that the
Speaker 3: investigators put a high priority on finding the so called
Speaker 3: murder room where Short was tortured and killed, the place
Speaker 3: where her body was bisected, drained of blood, and thoroughly
Speaker 3: washed before being taken to Lamert Park and discarded by
Speaker 3: the side of the road. But as with the suspect,
Speaker 3: the place where Elizabeth Short took her last painful breadth
Speaker 3: was never found, maybe until now Citizen sleuth Alex Baber
Speaker 3: believes he has found it. Be it seventy nine years
Speaker 3: too late, and we're going to go there with him today.
Speaker 3: You're listening to kill her. In the Code Solving the
Speaker 3: Black Dahlia and Zodiac cases, I'm Michael Connelly and this
Speaker 3: is chapter five, a quick recap here of where we
Speaker 3: are at. With the help of our AI program, Public Wreckers,
Speaker 3: genealogy sites, and the self taught cryptography skills, Alex Baber
Speaker 3: spent nine months waiting through millions of possible names and
Speaker 3: solutions to the most tantalizing of cipher's left behind by
Speaker 3: the so called Zodiac Killer of Northern California. That was
Speaker 3: the z thirteen, so named for its thirteen characters, a
Speaker 3: cipher so short it was said to be unbreakable, also
Speaker 3: known as the my name as cipher because the Zodiac
Speaker 3: claimed to have encrypted his name in his thirteen letters
Speaker 3: and symbols, in a solution that has now been independently
Speaker 3: confirmed by some of the top cryptographers in the world,
Speaker 3: Baber came up with the name Marvin Merrill, which in
Speaker 3: turn was one of a number of aliases used by
Speaker 3: Marvin Margolis, a prime suspect in the nineteen forty seven
Speaker 3: murder of Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia.
Speaker 3: Margolis died in Santa Barbara in nineteen ninety three. In
Speaker 3: his last year, while dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis,
Speaker 3: he drew a sketch entitled Elizabeth, which depicted a nude
Speaker 3: young woman with dark hair, signed Marty Merrill, another Margolis alias,
Speaker 3: and dated nineteen ninety two. The sketch shows her from
Speaker 3: the waist up, eerily matching the bisection of Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 3: There are also action lines on the torso that are
Speaker 3: similar to lacerations documented during Short's autopsy. When Baber applied
Speaker 3: light fielding software to a photo of the sketch, he
Speaker 3: found a word hidden in the dark shading surrounding the torso.
Speaker 3: The word was Zodiac. Following these discoveries, Baber pulled together
Speaker 3: a team of professional investigators to continue his efforts on
Speaker 3: the cases. The team included cold case detective Rick Jackson
Speaker 3: and MITCHI Roberts, who retired from the Los Angeles Police
Speaker 3: department as supervisor of the cold case in it. She
Speaker 3: was also the custodian of the Black Dalia case files
Speaker 3: for the last fifteen years of her career. An update
Speaker 3: on the Elizabeth sketch is that Margolus's son turned the
Speaker 3: sketch over to Baber's team for a professional analysis. Roberts
Speaker 3: took it to an independent forensic analyst named George Reese
Speaker 3: of Imaging Consultants. During his ninety minute study of the
Speaker 3: sketch witnessed by Roberts and myself, Reese, who donated his
Speaker 3: time to the project, used several different lighting and filtering
Speaker 3: techniques to confirm the existence of the hidden word. Reese
Speaker 3: was also able to determine that the hidden word was
Speaker 3: added to the sketch with a pencil, as were several
Speaker 3: other shadings and highlights on the piece. Graphight shading around
Speaker 3: the marks on the torso give it the appearance of
Speaker 3: a blood smear. You can see the sketch for yourself
Speaker 3: on killernnecode dot com. Because the graph ight from the
Speaker 3: pencil overlays the black marker used to create the main
Speaker 3: image of the sketch, it appears that the pencil was
Speaker 3: used to add final accents to the piece. Curiously, when
Speaker 3: Reese removed the sketch from its frame for the analysis,
Speaker 3: he found another sketch beneath it. It was possibly added
Speaker 3: to keep the Elizabeth image from slipping in its matted frame.
Speaker 3: The new sketches both sides of a piece of paper
Speaker 3: and depicts four in versions of neckties that say Ross
Speaker 3: Perot for President. In a way, it helps date the
Speaker 3: Elizabeth sketch because Piot unsuccessfully ran for president of the
Speaker 3: United States in nineteen ninety two, Margolis's last full year
Speaker 3: of life. We also have some updates regarding the work
Speaker 3: done on the Zodiac codes. We reported in episode four
Speaker 3: that an amateur cryptographer in Stockholm, Sweden, took Alex Baber's
Speaker 3: methodology for breaking Z thirteen and applied it to what
Speaker 3: is known as Z eighteen, which refers to the final
Speaker 3: eighteen characters of the Zodiac's first cipher, Z four eight
Speaker 3: That cipher was largely decoded way back in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 3: shortly after it was sent in three parts to three
Speaker 3: different Bay Area newspapers. However, the last line of the
Speaker 3: cipher was not decoded and thought for decades to be
Speaker 3: extra symbols. Phil added to make the three parts equal
Speaker 3: in length. But a pattern analyst named Thomas Hefner in
Speaker 3: Stockholm used Baber's method and found it to include the
Speaker 3: name Marvin Merrill. Now the independent team of former NSA
Speaker 3: codebreakers brought in to backcheck Baber's code work have analyzed
Speaker 3: Hefner's work. They have concluded that, using three different methodologies
Speaker 3: of code breaking, including Babers, that de encryption comes back
Speaker 3: to Marvin Merrill. On z eighteen, here is Ed Georgio,
Speaker 3: former chief codebreaker for the NSA and leader of the
Speaker 3: independent team of cryptographers that agreed to batcheck Baber's work.
Speaker 3: It is certainly getting solid by the day. As I mentioned,
Speaker 3: the simple intersection.
Speaker 2: Of the possible names under the Baver solution with potential
Speaker 2: suspects in either case only has one name on it.
Speaker 2: It's Marvin Merrill. So even before I go to the
Speaker 2: new evidence, Martin Merrill is a very strong candidate. Now
Speaker 2: we showed earlier that when Patrick Henry discovered the keyword Elizabeth,
Speaker 2: that made it even more likely, and now we have
Speaker 2: additional confirmation from Thomas Hefner. His initial observation which was later,
Speaker 2: as I mentioned, extended by Patrick and.
Speaker 4: Rich is yet another confirmation that we have it correct.
Speaker 4: So the bottom line is that when you look at
Speaker 4: the combination of two cipher messages, one name, one keyword Elizabeth,
Speaker 4: one encryption method, and the potential keyword Jerry Joe. And
Speaker 4: so the evidence went from likely to very likely to
Speaker 4: very very likely to almost beyond the shadow of a
Speaker 4: doubt likely.
Speaker 3: And from Sweden we go to Australia where a longtime
Speaker 3: Zodiac analyst named Paul Brookbanks has confirmed Baber's interpretation of
Speaker 3: Z thirty two and taken it a few steps further.
Speaker 3: A landscape architect by trade, brook Banks has been fascinated
Speaker 3: by the Z thirty two because of the clues supplied
Speaker 3: by the Zodiac, saying that the cipher concerns radiance and
Speaker 3: measurements on a map. The solution brook Banks independently plotted
Speaker 3: match Babers, which charted a path on a Zodiac provided
Speaker 3: map to Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, the place where
Speaker 3: Elizabeth Short is buried.
Speaker 5: You know, I was hovering and all that areas and
Speaker 5: looking trying to scale along that area. There's not much
Speaker 5: else there, But it was really Alex that's pinpointed that
Speaker 5: as mountain VW symmetry because I just didn't know the
Speaker 5: significance of Mountain view symmetry. I think it's a really
Speaker 5: good story that you've got. You know, two people on
Speaker 5: different sides of the world come up the same solution.
Speaker 5: That's good validation. You know, it's a reasonable suggest that
Speaker 5: this is a correct solution and a really compelling solution.
Speaker 3: You can go to our website for a link to
Speaker 3: Brookbanks YouTube channel where he discusses Z thirty two and
Speaker 3: other aspects of the Zodiac case. Now let's go back
Speaker 3: to the search for the scene of the crime, the
Speaker 3: place where Elizabeth Short met her demise. I say up
Speaker 3: front that we are speculating here based on the facts
Speaker 3: of the original investigation into the death of the Black Dahlia.
Speaker 3: Short's bisected body was found January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven,
Speaker 3: alongside South Norton Avenue in an area known as Leemurk Park.
Speaker 3: It was less than two years since the end of
Speaker 3: World War II and the eve of the massive post
Speaker 3: war growth the city would see. The area where the
Speaker 3: body was discarded was not yet fully developed. Crime scene
Speaker 3: photos show a vast emptiness surrounding the spot where Elizabeth
Speaker 3: Short's body was found. Captain Jack Donague, who was in
Speaker 3: charge of the investigation for the LAPD, said the area
Speaker 3: was known as a lover's Lane. There would be an
Speaker 3: erie corollary to this twenty two years later, when the
Speaker 3: Zodiac would start shooting couples in remote lover's lane areas
Speaker 3: in the North Bay. From the start, the police mounted
Speaker 3: a strong effort to find the place where Short was
Speaker 3: tortured and killed. It was suspected that she was likely
Speaker 3: bisected in a bathtub, her body scrubbed afterward with a
Speaker 3: stiff brush that left coconut bristles on her body. Here
Speaker 3: is veteran homicide investigator Rich Jackson.
Speaker 6: No word a murder took place the crime scene. It
Speaker 6: would be a major thing to.
Speaker 3: Have.
Speaker 6: You have potential for witnesses, you have potential for tons
Speaker 6: of forensics, especially in a case like this, So there's
Speaker 6: so many things that can be gleaned from having that
Speaker 6: answer and an investigation.
Speaker 3: During the initial stages of the investigation, Captain Donyue sent
Speaker 3: a failings of officers, a mix of detectives and uniformed
Speaker 3: officers into the area where the body was found to
Speaker 3: question nearby residents. And attempt to find the killing room. Eventually,
Speaker 3: the search expanded, and Doniue later told reporters that it
Speaker 3: was believed that Short was likely slain outside of the
Speaker 3: populated areas of the city and then brought back to
Speaker 3: the field of Norton Avenue. Two days after the murder,
Speaker 3: the Los Angeles City Council put up a reward of
Speaker 3: ten thousand dollars for information leading to an arrest in
Speaker 3: the case. Rewards often bring in calls from the cranks
Speaker 3: and the crazies. Here's Rick Jackson again.
Speaker 6: To control a reward, it can be a nightmare. You're
Speaker 6: going to get a lot of people calling, especially on
Speaker 6: a high profile case like this. It's time consuming, but
Speaker 6: it doesn't hurt to try if you strike out, because
Speaker 6: the worst that could happen is you don't get anything,
Speaker 6: and then the money is not spent. But yet you're
Speaker 6: you know, you're shut out from getting any any helpful information.
Speaker 3: When three different people report the same thing, you take notice.
Speaker 3: Operators of three different motels in the South Bay area
Speaker 3: reported them. On the night of the murder, a nervous
Speaker 3: young man came to their motel and asked if their
Speaker 3: rooms had bath tubs, he said that his wife was
Speaker 3: ill and under doctor's care and needed to use a tub.
Speaker 3: In each incidence, the motel employees said they noticed that
Speaker 3: the man had parked a black four door Sedan a
Speaker 3: good distance from the motel.
Speaker 6: A crucial call on crucial information like this were three independent,
Speaker 6: non connected people calling with the same type of information.
Speaker 6: That's huge.
Speaker 3: King on the idea that Short's body may have been
Speaker 3: bisected and washed in a bathtub, the focus of the
Speaker 3: investigation shifted to the South Bay. The three motels were
Speaker 3: clustered along a stretch of what was Route one sixty five,
Speaker 3: which would later become the Harbor Freeway. All three of
Speaker 3: the motel operators gave the same description of the quote, jittery,
Speaker 3: nervous man seeking a room with a bathtub. He had
Speaker 3: bushy blonde hair, was five foot nine and twenty one
Speaker 3: to twenty three years old. When the night Elizabeth Short
Speaker 3: was murdered, Mark van Margolis was twenty one years old.
Speaker 3: His military records placed him at five foot ten, though
Speaker 3: in later photos he has light brown hair. He was
Speaker 3: described to police by at least one person who knew
Speaker 3: him back in nineteen forty seven as having blonde highlights
Speaker 3: or dirty blonde hair.
Speaker 7: All the accounts were between twenty one and twenty three
Speaker 7: years of age, and Marvin's right in the middle of it.
Speaker 7: So he's literally a fitting description.
Speaker 3: Had they said.
Speaker 7: Twenty five to thirty, that would have been an obstacle
Speaker 7: we'd have to overcome. But for them to inipily give
Speaker 7: this same age range across the board is very compelling
Speaker 7: to us as far as investigators like they knew that
Speaker 7: this guy was younger and they anticipated being in his
Speaker 7: early twenties.
Speaker 3: Two weeks after the murder, another citizen came forward. An
Speaker 3: investigator for the DMD said on the night of the
Speaker 3: murder that she had been waiting at a bus stop
Speaker 3: just northwest of the three motels. She set a blood
Speaker 3: curdling scream, drew her attention to a passing car, black
Speaker 3: four door sed Anne, where she saw a woman struggling
Speaker 3: with a man in the back seat while a second
Speaker 3: man was driving and a second woman was in the
Speaker 3: front passenger seat. Could that have been Elizabeth Shore trying
Speaker 3: to escape from her ex boyfriend Marvin Margolis. If so,
Speaker 3: it meant Margolis had accomplices. We'll talk about that possibility
Speaker 3: later in the podcast. What Alex Baber did with this
Speaker 3: information was charged these four reports on a map that
Speaker 3: also included Elizabeth Short's final destination on South Nordon Avenue.
Speaker 3: These stops showed that the man looking for a bathtub
Speaker 3: was moving south from the motel to motel, but the
Speaker 3: report from the DMV investigator included her observation that the
Speaker 3: car was heading north.
Speaker 7: Where it is I took him out, but it took
Speaker 7: two pens up with a pen at the corner of
Speaker 7: San Antonio and Orange, which is where Arlene Donalson said
Speaker 7: she witnessed the account the pen in Limc Park where
Speaker 7: her body was discovered The next day, you cannet the arm.
Speaker 7: I searched out using the archives of any motels, hotels,
Speaker 7: or auto courts within that area.
Speaker 3: He came across an advertisement in a local paper that
Speaker 3: caught his eye. It was the announcement of a new
Speaker 3: motel opening in June of nineteen forty six. It offered
Speaker 3: one bedroom bungalows with a bath and it was called
Speaker 3: the Zodiac Motel.
Speaker 7: That was a one of those moments, as we referred
Speaker 7: to as AHA moment. Once I noticed the name in
Speaker 7: the correlation between what we uncovered with Marvin in North
Speaker 7: Bay and then the motel Right at that moment, I
Speaker 7: was on the track of okay, this could be a
Speaker 7: possibility as being an inspiration or a origin of the moniker.
Speaker 7: And then at that point, once identified the details about
Speaker 7: the rooms being not individual and the motel having bathtubs,
Speaker 7: I knew then that this was the location that Elizabeth
Speaker 7: Short was murdered.
Speaker 3: At Baber's confidence. Aside, there are no records available from
Speaker 3: the Zodiac Motel that would confirm whether Marvin Margolis ever
Speaker 3: checked into one of its bungalows. It also is not
Speaker 3: clear whether the advertisement of a bath meant a bathtub
Speaker 3: or an inunit bathroom. Still, when you consider the secret
Speaker 3: word hidden in that Elizabeth sketch and Margolis' is alias
Speaker 3: being found in two of the Zodiac ciphers, it's a
Speaker 3: coincidence that cannot be easily dismissed. That's why Baber and
Speaker 3: members of his team went there on a recent morning
Speaker 3: to see and get a feel for the place for themselves. Yes,
Speaker 3: the twenty two bungalows of the Zodiac Motel still stand
Speaker 3: on North Santa Fe Avenue in Compton, though they were
Speaker 3: converted to apartments long ago. They are neatly kept and
Speaker 3: painted in warm colors. Two opposing rows of eleven free
Speaker 3: standing bunks with bars on their windows. If Margols brought
Speaker 3: Elizabeth Short here seventy nine years ago at the end
Speaker 3: of a night's search for a room with a bathtub,
Speaker 3: and he lect into finding a place on the fly
Speaker 3: that would have been most suitable for murder, it was
Speaker 3: called a motor court in nineteen forty seven, the kind
Speaker 3: of place that served a post war Los Angeles where
Speaker 3: freeways were coming and the population would shift from cable
Speaker 3: cars and trolleys to the automobile. It was the dawn
Speaker 3: of what was to be in autotopia, And at the
Speaker 3: Zodiac Motel, every bungalow came with its own parking space
Speaker 3: on the side and an entrance just steps from the
Speaker 3: car door. This is Missy Roberts.
Speaker 1: I just think it's so interesting, these concealed parking areas
Speaker 1: between the buildings. But it's also interesting too as an investigator.
Speaker 1: I want to get in there and I want to see,
Speaker 1: you know, I want to see the bathtub, and I
Speaker 1: want to see the layout, and I want more knowledge
Speaker 1: to again put those pieces together that are missing.
Speaker 3: We as a resident of the complex if we could
Speaker 3: take a look inside his bungalow. He allowed us in,
Speaker 3: but when we checked out the unit's bathroom, there was
Speaker 3: no tub, only a foam booth sized shower. But a
Speaker 3: careful inspection of the apartment's layout revealed what appeared to
Speaker 3: have been a renovation in which an area in the
Speaker 3: bathroom that was the size of a bathtub was at
Speaker 3: some point divided into creating the small shower in the
Speaker 3: bathroom and a space in the adjoining kitchenette for a
Speaker 3: full size refrigerator to be recessed into the newly created space.
Speaker 3: This would fit with social and cultural history. The Zodiac
Speaker 3: Motel was built shortly after the end of the Second
Speaker 3: World War, opening its doors in mid nineteen forty six.
Speaker 3: It lasted five years as a motel and then became apartments.
Speaker 3: During the post war prosperity of the nineteen fifties, full
Speaker 3: size refrigerators became a household staple. That trend could have
Speaker 3: dictated a renovation that would remove the tub to create
Speaker 3: space for the bigger capacity cold storage. Despite the cheery
Speaker 3: pastel colors of the bungalows of the former Zodiac Motel,
Speaker 3: there was something haunting about the place. It was sad
Speaker 3: to think about it possibly being the last stop in
Speaker 3: the short life of the Black Dahlia.
Speaker 1: It's a bit eerie, of course, to think that anytime
Speaker 1: you think that somebody lost their life at a location
Speaker 1: is the sort of hollow ground.
Speaker 3: It certainly felt that way to me. I'm Michael Conley,
Speaker 3: and you've been listening to Killer in the Code Solving
Speaker 3: the Black Dahlia in Zodiac Cases. We'll be back with
Speaker 3: chapter six soon. When we tried to decode perhaps the
Speaker 3: biggest cipher of them all, Marvin Martin. We're going to
Speaker 3: track him across time and murder. This episode was written
Speaker 3: and produced by Michael Conley. It was edited by Terrell
Speaker 3: Lee Langford, with sound design and music by Mark Henry Phillips.
Speaker 3: Subscribe to the podcast so you'll be informed of new episodes,
Speaker 3: and check out killerindecode dot com for information on the investigation.
Speaker 3: Thank you for listening.