Speaker 1: Citizens. Sleuth Alex Baber believed he had identified the killer
Speaker 1: responsible for two of the most infamous crimes in history,
Speaker 1: the Black Dahia and Zodiac murders, but his case was
Speaker 1: built on circumstantial evidence, the breaking of a code left
Speaker 1: behind by the Zodiac more than fifty years ago. Baber
Speaker 1: knew that over the decades there had been many like him,
Speaker 1: people who claimed to have solved these cases, only to
Speaker 1: have their theories be dismissed or ignored for lack of evidence.
Speaker 1: He knew that unraveling the Zodiac code was one thing,
Speaker 1: getting hard evidence to go with it would be another.
Speaker 1: Baber had built what he called the Forensic Linguistic Database,
Speaker 1: containing the largest collection in the world of the writings
Speaker 1: of serial killers and other infamous murderers BTK, Son of Sam,
Speaker 1: the Atlanta child murderer, and so on. He had handwriting exemplar,
Speaker 1: as they call them, from both the Zodiac and Black
Speaker 1: Dahlia killers in the database, and a program using artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence to compare the two had found linguistic similarities in
Speaker 1: terms of the use of words and phrases. For example,
Speaker 1: the Zodiac had promised in a letter to a San
Speaker 1: Francisco newspaper to supply even more quote material in regard
Speaker 1: to the murders he had committed. Twenty plus years earlier.
Speaker 1: The so called Black Dahlia Avenger had promised a Los
Speaker 1: Angeles newspaper editor that he would assist by providing additional
Speaker 1: material about the horrific murder of Elizabeth Short. It's just
Speaker 1: one simple word, but odd and significant when used in
Speaker 1: context to describe the giving of forensic evidence in two
Speaker 1: seemingly unrelated cases. Still, it was proof of nothing. It
Speaker 1: was what would be considered circumstantial evidence at best, and
Speaker 1: the more linguist to connections that could be made was
Speaker 1: all the better, but still not good enough to make
Speaker 1: his case and persuade the skeptics he knew would come
Speaker 1: out of woodwork once he made his claims. Baber knew
Speaker 1: he would need direct evidence. He would need to find
Speaker 1: a smoking gun if he were to credibly connect the
Speaker 1: two cases to the same killer. I'm Michael Connolly and
Speaker 1: you're listening to Killer in the Code Solving the Black
Speaker 1: Dahlia and Zodiac Killer Cases. This is chapter two. Let's
Speaker 1: recap where we are on the morning of January fifteenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty seven. The desecrated body of twenty two year
Speaker 1: old Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. She had been mercilessly tortured and murdered. Her
Speaker 1: body had been neatly cut in two, severed at the midriff,
Speaker 1: and drained of blood. It was a crime that horrified
Speaker 1: the world and has remained unsolved for nearly eighty years.
Speaker 1: In death, Elizabeth Short became better known as the Black Dahlia.
Speaker 1: Her killer, calling himself the Black Dahlia Avenger, sent a
Speaker 1: package to a local newspaper following the murder that contained
Speaker 1: the property she carried with her, including her birth certificate
Speaker 1: and an address book. Twenty two years after her murder,
Speaker 1: and almost four hundred miles north of Los Angeles, the
Speaker 1: self proclaimed Zodiac killer took five lives in a spree
Speaker 1: that terrorized northern California. Was seemingly random murders committed across
Speaker 1: a wide swath of geography. The Zodiac stoked the terror
Speaker 1: with repeated written communications with newspapers, claiming more victims in
Speaker 1: the past and future. In four of the notes, the
Speaker 1: Zodiac provid coded messages, three of which remained unbroken for
Speaker 1: a half a century. The most tantalizing of these was
Speaker 1: the my Name Is cipher, in which the Zodiac boldly
Speaker 1: claimed to reveal his name in a thirteen character cipher.
Speaker 1: Because of his brevity, the so called Z thirteen code
Speaker 1: was believed to be unbreakable. That is until fifty year
Speaker 1: old Alex Baber came along. Baber is not a cop
Speaker 1: and not a private detective. He's the founder of Cold
Speaker 1: Case Consultants of America. He devised a computer program that
Speaker 1: used artificial intelligence to weed through seventy one million possible
Speaker 1: names that fit the Z thirteen cipher and knock it
Speaker 1: down to a handful of manageable possibilities. Traditional gumshew work followed,
Speaker 1: and Baber focused on one man whose name fit the cipher,
Speaker 1: Marvin Merrill and alias belonged to a man originally named
Speaker 1: Marvin Margolis, one of the prime suspects in the Black
Speaker 1: Dahlia case. Now, to be clear, this was not the
Speaker 1: first time the Dahlia and Zodiac cases had been linked.
Speaker 1: A retired homicide detective for the Los Angeles Police Department
Speaker 1: named Steve Hodell had connected the cases through his father,
Speaker 1: doctor George Hodell, who was also a suspect in the
Speaker 1: murder of Elizabeth Short Odell wrote a book about it
Speaker 1: that I felt at the time was so convincing that
Speaker 1: I even endorsed it with a blurb put on the
Speaker 1: back cover. I lived to regret that because a subsequent
Speaker 1: investigation by the LAPD Cold Case Unit determined that the
Speaker 1: son's investigation of his father was flawed and the conclusion
Speaker 1: was not valid. So now had Alex Baber wandered down
Speaker 1: the same wrong path as he connected the two infamous
Speaker 1: cases to a different suspect. He believed in the cryptography
Speaker 1: that identified Marvin Merrill, but he knew that as groundbreaking
Speaker 1: as it was, it wasn't enough.
Speaker 2: The Z thirty solution was never viewed as a piece
Speaker 2: of evidence. It was always viewed as an investigative tool,
Speaker 2: and looking at it from that standpoint, I knew that
Speaker 2: I would need some additional evidence to confirm the solution
Speaker 2: because I couldn't I couldn't expect experts to support my
Speaker 2: findings based on a possible solution has numerous variables, like
Speaker 2: there's you could literally.
Speaker 3: There's thousands and thousands of possible solutions. We needed to
Speaker 3: have something that was physical that could confirm it.
Speaker 2: Ultimately, I needed to have something that I can say, Okay,
Speaker 2: let me let me show you what I have that
Speaker 2: shows that this name can be associated with the real
Speaker 2: world individual, that we can attach to the case not
Speaker 2: by speculation, but by physical evidence.
Speaker 1: He started with the FLD, the forensic linguistic database he
Speaker 1: had created. He had the handwritten notes from both the
Speaker 1: Zodiac and Black Dalua Avenger in the FLD. The handwriting
Speaker 1: and the messages is very distinctive and you can go
Speaker 1: to killer inthecode dot com to see them. Baber knew
Speaker 1: that if he could locate writing's author by Marvin Merrill,
Speaker 1: then he could have an expert handwriting analyst do a
Speaker 1: comparison to see if they had come from Merrill's hand
Speaker 1: And I have to say the use of handwriting analysis
Speaker 1: an investigation is on the wayne, but still it would
Speaker 1: be a start. Problem was Marvin Merrill was long gone.
Speaker 1: He died of cancer in nineteen ninety three in Santa Barbara.
Speaker 1: Would it be possible to even find an example of
Speaker 1: his handwriting after so many years. Baber had made a
Speaker 1: deep dive into the life of Marvin Merrill after the
Speaker 1: name was identified as fitting the Z thirteen cipher. While
Speaker 1: it was documented that Meryl, using his real name Margolis,
Speaker 1: had shared an apartment with Elizabeth short three months before
Speaker 1: her death. He had gotten married shortly after and had
Speaker 1: started a family, becoming a father. In nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 1: Baber uncovered marriage and birth records indicating he had been
Speaker 1: married twice during his lifetime and had fathered four children.
Speaker 1: Not all the children were still alive. Baber focused on
Speaker 1: Meryl's youngest surviving child, a son born in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, who he had located at an address in
Speaker 1: southern California. Baber decided to reach out, but knew that
Speaker 1: contacting someone out of the blue and saying your father
Speaker 1: was a serial killer was not the best way to
Speaker 1: gain cooperation and a handwriting example.
Speaker 3: In order to get him to respond, I had to
Speaker 3: present myself from a different perspective than an investigator or
Speaker 3: an investigative consultant. What I did was I reached out
Speaker 3: and I said, hey, you know, I'm doing some background
Speaker 3: into World War two and the Battle of Okinawa is
Speaker 3: a turning point in World War Two that your father
Speaker 3: was involved in. And I was able to come to
Speaker 3: this conclusion based on a nineteen forty five Chicago interview
Speaker 3: where he gives details about his experiences in Okinawa, and
Speaker 3: I opened the door that way, hoping that he might
Speaker 3: be able to revide me some additional background on Marvin,
Speaker 3: and he was open to that.
Speaker 1: The son agreed to meet Baber and a member of
Speaker 1: his team, but he was not in southern California. He
Speaker 1: was in upstate New York. They set up a meeting
Speaker 1: in a local restaurant near his home there. Baber went
Speaker 1: to the meeting with his partner, Laurie Halstead, and they
Speaker 1: recorded the conversation. The restaurant was loud and the recording
Speaker 1: was not so good, but the surprises as they exchanged
Speaker 1: information were clearly audible. And by the way, we're not
Speaker 1: going to name Marvin Merrill's son on the podcast, because
Speaker 1: he eventually agreed to cooperate with Alex and his investigation
Speaker 1: if his privacy was protected. But Baber quickly came clean
Speaker 1: and revealed the real reason for the meeting, Marvin Merrill's
Speaker 1: connection to the Black Dhalia and Zodiac murder cases. It
Speaker 1: became clear in the conversation that while the son grew
Speaker 1: up with a worldview that was quite different from his father's,
Speaker 1: he had no idea about the depth of the darkness
Speaker 1: in which his father dwelled. Baber had brought a binder
Speaker 1: with him that contained copies of the twenty two different
Speaker 1: letters sent by the Zodiac to newspapers during his reign
Speaker 1: of terror. The son started flipping through and he.
Speaker 2: Immediately recognized the handwriting.
Speaker 1: It's that of his father's.
Speaker 4: There was a point where he reached across the table
Speaker 4: and actually grabbed my hands.
Speaker 3: And made the statement that you know, it's going to be.
Speaker 5: All right, We're going to be all right.
Speaker 4: His reaction was not that of a normal individual looking
Speaker 4: at a letter that they did not recognize the handwritten
Speaker 4: off you know, he definitely zoned in and identified it,
Speaker 4: and it moved him.
Speaker 1: The son revealed he had a storage location in southern
Speaker 1: California where he kept the things left to him when
Speaker 1: his father died. He said this included letters and journals
Speaker 1: and business documents such as handwritten checks that could be
Speaker 1: compared by experts to the Zodiac letters. He agreed to
Speaker 1: turn it all over to.
Speaker 6: Baber, and I actually exposed the connection to Elizabeth Short,
Speaker 6: the black value that we had discovered, and I said,
Speaker 6: are you aware that your father was the last known
Speaker 6: boyfriend of Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 7: She says, Elizabeth.
Speaker 3: I said, yes, Elizabeth, he said, I have something I
Speaker 3: need to show you.
Speaker 4: So he pulls out his phone and he starts looking
Speaker 4: through it, and my mind went to the fact that
Speaker 4: his father had a background with art, and I said.
Speaker 2: In the audio or to say, is do you have
Speaker 2: a painting? He said, no, a sketch.
Speaker 3: And at that point he pulled it up on his phone.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, Wow, looking at a sketch of a
Speaker 5: nude woman, you know from the Waystop that appears to
Speaker 5: have punctual wounds torso area with smear blood and it.
Speaker 4: Has Elizabeth in bold writing, the biggest, the biggest writing
Speaker 4: on the entire sketches, says Elizabeth.
Speaker 8: This was a piece of evidence and it was smoking gun.
Speaker 1: I was searching for The sketches clearly dated nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: the last full year of Merrill's life, when he was
Speaker 1: dealing with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. He just signed
Speaker 1: Marty Merrell, which was one of the alias he was
Speaker 1: known to have used, along with Marvin Skip and Skipton,
Speaker 1: among his many different advocations in life. Merrill was both
Speaker 1: an artist and an art dealer. The sketches. As Baber
Speaker 1: described it, a striking image of a nude woman from
Speaker 1: the waist up, eerily mirroring the bi section of the
Speaker 1: black Dahlia. There are contour lines on the torso and
Speaker 1: smear marks that also mirror some of the injuries that
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Short suffered. It is titled Elizabeth in large letters
Speaker 1: that crossed the entire piece. The mutilation of her mouth
Speaker 1: and breasts are not evident, but it would stand the
Speaker 1: reason that including such tortures would have been an immediate
Speaker 1: and major giveaway, engendering automatic questions of the dying artist.
Speaker 1: Alex Baber believed he had found a piece of evidence
Speaker 1: that was a game changer, and Marvin merril'son was willing
Speaker 1: to take him back to his residence where he had
Speaker 1: the sketch framed and hanging on a wall.
Speaker 3: Well, I couldn't believe what we're staring at. It was
Speaker 3: a smoking gun. We knew that this sketch was a
Speaker 3: piece of evidence. It was physical evidence for the first time.
Speaker 3: Since the package was mailed to the local newspapers in
Speaker 3: la on January twenty fourth, nineteen forty seven. Since then,
Speaker 3: there has been no physical evident It's discovered in her case,
Speaker 3: and here I am looking at it with the offer
Speaker 3: to go back and physically see it myself, well, you know,
Speaker 3: in his residence, knowing that it's there, that's it still exists.
Speaker 3: It's not a photo of something that's been destroyed. It
Speaker 3: was a moment where I knew at that point that
Speaker 3: it was game over.
Speaker 2: There's nothing, there's nothing that can refute that sketch being
Speaker 2: signed and dated by Marvin Margolis under his.
Speaker 3: Alias, that contains guilty evidence.
Speaker 4: If Marvin Merrill was alive today, we could prosecute him
Speaker 4: based on the evidence.
Speaker 2: With the masketch. We were caught in a moment of
Speaker 2: almost disbelief what we were looking at when he handed
Speaker 2: the hand of his phone to me and I zoomed
Speaker 2: in on it, on the torso area in particular, and
Speaker 2: to see the stab wounds and the smeared blood image.
Speaker 2: At that moment, I knew what I was looking at,
Speaker 2: and as soon as I turned the phone to Laurie,
Speaker 2: Laurie knew what she was looking at as well. It
Speaker 2: was instant, and it was almost like in all honestly,
Speaker 2: it's almost like time froze for a moment and everything
Speaker 2: around us just went mute. It was.
Speaker 3: It was one of those moments in your life where
Speaker 3: you realize what you're looking at shouldn't be there.
Speaker 2: But you know it's a reality, like it's it's it's
Speaker 2: in your hands, you know it exists. We arrived, you'd
Speaker 2: share the Zodiac's letters with him to see if he
Speaker 2: recognized him, which which he did, and and then all
Speaker 2: of a sudden we get the smoking gun that's in
Speaker 2: our hands.
Speaker 3: At that moment, we knew was game over.
Speaker 2: I do believe that the term that I used with
Speaker 2: Laurie when we exited the restaurant, I said to her,
Speaker 2: this is game over. Do you do realize what we have?
Speaker 7: Laurie said absolutely.
Speaker 1: You can go to our website Killerinthecode dot com to
Speaker 1: view the sketch of Elizabeth and other documents and photos
Speaker 1: relating to Alex Baber's investigation. We are not providing autopsy
Speaker 1: photos for comparison to the sketch because they are extremely
Speaker 1: graphic and available elsewhere on the internet. I have to say,
Speaker 1: when I first saw the sketch, I felt a chill
Speaker 1: go down my spine, and I was not alone. Missy Roberts,
Speaker 1: the former LAPD homicide investigator who ran the cold case
Speaker 1: unit until her retirement last year, was the keeper of
Speaker 1: the Black Dahia case for the last sixteen years of
Speaker 1: her career. She believes the sketch is direct evidence of
Speaker 1: Marvin Merrill's culpability in the murder.
Speaker 2: If I was still at the LAPD, I would have
Speaker 2: been in New York already knocking on the door and
Speaker 2: retrieving that.
Speaker 3: Evidence, because it's we don't have a lot.
Speaker 8: Of physical evidence in this case, and that is crucial evidence.
Speaker 1: Roberts former partner and longtime cold case investigator Rick Jackson, agrees.
Speaker 9: It's almost like a calling card, something left behind, a
Speaker 9: deathbed confession, if you will.
Speaker 1: Roberts and Jackson were part of the team Baber assembled
Speaker 1: after the discovery of the sketch. This included a retired
Speaker 1: FBI supervisory agent, several season cold case homicide investigators, and
Speaker 1: a prosecutor. One by one, they were briefed on Baber's
Speaker 1: code breaking and follow up investigation. One by one, they
Speaker 1: were turned from skeptics to believers that after all these decades,
Speaker 1: two of the greatest crime mysteries in history had finally
Speaker 1: been solved.
Speaker 9: It's totally overwhelming, circumstantial evidence and now it has become
Speaker 9: mixed in with some physical evidence that supports Alex's suspect
Speaker 9: as being the Dahlia and Zodiac killers.
Speaker 1: I need to say here that after Marvin Merrill's son
Speaker 1: agreed to cooperate with Alex Baber's investigation and even turned
Speaker 1: over the sketch as well as two boxes of his
Speaker 1: father's documents, he is not convinced his father is the
Speaker 1: infamous Zodiac and Black Dahlia killer, and of course that
Speaker 1: is the son's prerogative. Moving on, the value of the
Speaker 1: Elizabeth sketch went beyond it being evidence that connected Merrill
Speaker 1: to the Black Dallia murder. Remember what Alex Baber said
Speaker 1: to me the first day we met. He boldly claimed
Speaker 1: that he had the ability to find the hidden beneath
Speaker 1: the hidden. And now as he studied the Elizabeth sketch
Speaker 1: and thought about that long history of the Zodiac's cryptic
Speaker 1: clues and the I'm smarter than you taunts to the
Speaker 1: public and the police, Baber started thinking about the hidden
Speaker 1: beneath the hidden.
Speaker 2: If Marvin was who we suspected he was, then that
Speaker 2: sketch itself wasn't just something he created, It was a message.
Speaker 3: It was a means to an end for him.
Speaker 2: He knew his life was short, he.
Speaker 3: Knew that he wouldn't be on the face of the
Speaker 3: earth much longer. And it was in my eyes, it was.
Speaker 7: A deathbeck confession. It was his way of releasing whatever
Speaker 7: guilt or whatever that was in him, if there was guilt,
Speaker 7: by putting it out there, knowing that one day.
Speaker 2: Somebody would come along and discover it and say, look,
Speaker 2: this is a piece of history that connects directly to
Speaker 2: his former girlfriend who was murdered. And that's the idea.
Speaker 2: Once I knew that the zodiac was connected through the
Speaker 2: Z thirteen and the son identifying some of the evidence,
Speaker 2: I knew at that moment that this there could be
Speaker 2: something more to this sketch than just Elizabe.
Speaker 3: And at that moment, that's when.
Speaker 6: I decided that we would look at the sketch from
Speaker 6: a different perspective and run it through, you know, a
Speaker 6: light spectrum in contrasts, you know, peel off layers, so
Speaker 6: I could see if there was anything beneath that.
Speaker 1: This non invasive imaging is technically known as infrared reflectography
Speaker 1: and is a technique used by art historians to study
Speaker 1: the layers of paintings and sketches to find what is
Speaker 1: hidden below the surface to identify the creative's depths and
Speaker 1: changes made by the artist. When Baber applied this technique
Speaker 1: to the Elismus sketch, using color and contrast fields, he
Speaker 1: found a single word hidden beneath the dark shading that
Speaker 1: outlined the central image of the woman. That hidden word
Speaker 1: was Zodiac.
Speaker 2: I just think that it was his way of saying,
Speaker 2: you know, here I am, I'm dying. I got I
Speaker 2: got away with it, but I'm hoping somedays somebody will
Speaker 2: come along that will discover this sketch and identify me
Speaker 2: as the perpetrator. One thing that we're absolutely sure about
Speaker 2: is the fact that the Zodiac was egotistical and he
Speaker 2: was a genius level at aless. That being said, there's
Speaker 2: no way that the individual that committed these crimes would
Speaker 2: have left this planet without leaving behind some source of
Speaker 2: identifying him. He couldn't do that.
Speaker 8: It's like Jack the Ripper, right, whether it's ever solved
Speaker 8: or not, Jack the Ripper will go down, you know,
Speaker 8: as being probably the most infamous serial killer with the
Speaker 8: exception of this case, once we're done, but he'll never
Speaker 8: be identified there's just no DNA left, there's no evidence there.
Speaker 8: With zodiacs a different, different circumstances.
Speaker 1: He wants to be known.
Speaker 2: In order to be known, you have to give him
Speaker 2: a name and a face, and I believe that's what
Speaker 2: the sketch represents.
Speaker 7: It concretely ties the two cases together.
Speaker 1: In case you are wondering, the Elizabeth sketch has been
Speaker 1: secured for further analysis by an independent art expert. We
Speaker 1: will have a report on that in the episodes that followed.
Speaker 1: The sketch, of course, energized the whole investigation, but Alex
Speaker 1: Baber did not drop his focus on the angle of
Speaker 1: investigation that led him to the sketch in the first place,
Speaker 1: the handwriting analysis. We'll have more on that in future
Speaker 1: episodes of the podcast. We will be back with the
Speaker 1: continuing story of the investigation on January fifteenth, the seventy
Speaker 1: ninth anniversary of Elizabeth Shortz murder. We'll tell you then
Speaker 1: about breaking the final Zodiac code and its direct connection
Speaker 1: to the Black Dahlia. For more information, go to Killernthecode
Speaker 1: dot com. This podcast was written and produced by Michael Connolly.
Speaker 1: It was edited by Teroll, Lee Langford and Mark Henry Phillips,
Speaker 1: with sound design and scoring by Mark Henry Phillips as well.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening.