Speaker 1: This is Michael Connolly and you are listening to Killer
Speaker 1: in the Code Solving the Black Dahia and Zodiac Cases.
Speaker 1: This is chapter nine. Today we are going to talk
Speaker 1: to author William Mann, who has a new book out
Speaker 1: about the Black Dahlia case. But before we get to that,
Speaker 1: I want to give a quick update on our investigation.
Speaker 1: As you must know by now, our suspect in the
Speaker 1: Zodiac killings and the gruesome torture and murder of Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Short is Marvin Margolis, also known as Marvin Merrill, also
Speaker 1: known as Marty Merrill, among several other names. A key
Speaker 1: piece of evidence uncovered in the investigation headed by Citizens
Speaker 1: Salute Alex Baber is the so called Elizabeth sketch that
Speaker 1: was created and signed by Marty Merrill in nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: at a time he was dying of cancer. The sketches
Speaker 1: of a young, dark haired woman and his titled Elizabeth.
Speaker 1: She is nude, and the sketch depicts her from the
Speaker 1: waist up hereily mirroring the bisection of Elizabeth Short. There
Speaker 1: are also contour lines on the body that also mirror
Speaker 1: some of the injuries sustained by Short. In the shading
Speaker 1: Surrounding the figure, Baber found a hidden word zodiac. The
Speaker 1: sketch was framed under glass by Meryl's son and turned
Speaker 1: over to the Baby Team, along with three boxes of
Speaker 1: documents and other property inherited after his father's death in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three. We can now reveal something else hidden
Speaker 1: in the Elizabeth sketch, but first the story of how
Speaker 1: it was found. All the property turned over by Meryl's
Speaker 1: son was cataloged by veteran homicide detectives Rick Jackson and
Speaker 1: Missy Roberts, both longtime cold case detectives formerly with the
Speaker 1: Lost Angeles Police Department. Dozens and dozens of documents and
Speaker 1: other items were listed on the inventory and a receipt
Speaker 1: given to the sun. This was because it was all
Speaker 1: on loan from the son, who was hopeful that the
Speaker 1: material might be used to disprove his father's connection to
Speaker 1: two of the most infamous unsolved crimes in American history.
Speaker 1: While several items in the inventory tended to support Merrill
Speaker 1: as the suspect, the sketch was perhaps the most convincing.
Speaker 1: Jackson called it a deathbed confession, and though late in
Speaker 1: his life Merrill knew another person whose middle name was Elizabeth.
Speaker 1: The Baber team confirmed she was much older and her
Speaker 1: physical descriptors were far different from both Elizabeth Short and
Speaker 1: the Elizabeth in the sketch. It came time last week
Speaker 1: to return Merrill's property to his son, as was promised,
Speaker 1: but before it was delivered, a forensic photographer was brought
Speaker 1: in to document every item we had received. Thousands of
Speaker 1: photos were taken, and when it came time to shooting
Speaker 1: the sketch, it was removed from beneath the glass of
Speaker 1: its frame so it could be photographed without reflection. Sometimes
Speaker 1: a photo can pick up what cannot easily be noticed
Speaker 1: by the naked eye. I'll let Rick Jackson describe what
Speaker 1: was seen and captured through the macro lens of the camera.
Speaker 2: We took the glass off of the sketch and there
Speaker 2: was an indentation that extended from the left edge of
Speaker 2: the mouth, curled upwards. It was probably a quarter of
Speaker 2: an inch or three eighths of an inch, which you know,
Speaker 2: a significant win.
Speaker 3: It's a small sketch that were curled upward toward the ear,
Speaker 3: much like the Dahlia's body was found with the curled
Speaker 3: insized wound all the way up, kind of toward her
Speaker 3: tempt on both sides. The right side of the sketch's
Speaker 3: mouth is covered with the hair, so you see nothing there,
Speaker 3: but it was definitely an indentation that extended from that
Speaker 3: side of the mouth. You can really see it under
Speaker 3: the macro lens, especially with the peripheral lighting from the side. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so it was intentional that. It was like almost like
Speaker 3: somebody had taken maybe a dull nail and extended the
Speaker 3: mouth a little bit right from the corner. The indentation
Speaker 3: is definitely there. It looks like a shorter version of
Speaker 3: the incised wounds that went from both sides of Elizabeth
Speaker 3: Short's mouth by the killer. It was deliberately set right there,
Speaker 3: there's no doubt about it. It matches right in line
Speaker 3: with the curled smile. It's very very clear.
Speaker 1: You can see the photo taken during the process we
Speaker 1: are talking about out here under episode nine on our
Speaker 1: website at killerndecode dot com. It is known as a
Speaker 1: Glasgow smile as it was a torture originated with criminal
Speaker 1: gangs in Glasgow, Scotland in the nineteen twenties. According to
Speaker 1: her autopsy report, Elizabeth Short was cut in such a
Speaker 1: way while she was still alive. How Its Baber believes
Speaker 1: the indentation seen on the Elizabeth sketch leaves no doubt
Speaker 1: about who the subject of the sketches.
Speaker 4: I don't think that we have any other conclusion everything
Speaker 4: the fact that it is Elizabeth Short. This means that
Speaker 4: the sketch is what we thought it was. It's a
Speaker 4: representation of Elizabeth Short's last moments. So I think at
Speaker 4: this point nobody can can challenge us on what the
Speaker 4: sketch represents.
Speaker 1: And now that the line of indentation on the sketch
Speaker 1: subject's mouth has been seen, we realized it was there
Speaker 1: and even noticeable all along. Back in December, we posted
Speaker 1: a photo of the sketch on the website along with
Speaker 1: other extras relating to episode two. The photo was taken
Speaker 1: before the sketch was ever taken out of glass and examined.
Speaker 1: And yet there is the line of indentation stretching from
Speaker 1: the corner of the mouth, but wasn't noticed then is
Speaker 1: clearly seen now the Glasgow smile. Okay, so let's move on.
Speaker 1: I am joined now by William J. Mann, who is
Speaker 1: on the road promoting his new book, Black Dahlia Murder.
Speaker 1: Monsters and madness in mid century Hollywood. I'm not a
Speaker 1: professional critic, but I am a reader and a professional writer.
Speaker 1: And my one word take when William's book is riveting.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's because these days I'm steeped in everything and
Speaker 1: anything Black Dahia. I ended up losing a night's sleep
Speaker 1: on this book. I'm more of an audiobook guy because
Speaker 1: I can be writing when most people can be reading.
Speaker 1: So I started listening to this book a couple fridays
Speaker 1: ago when I went to bed with the plan of reading,
Speaker 1: listening to a few chapters, and then turning it off.
Speaker 1: But I never turned it off. I just had to
Speaker 1: go through the night listening to it. I finished it
Speaker 1: the following Saturday afternoon. It's exhaustedly researched, well written, and
Speaker 1: it's elevated. And by that I mean it takes this
Speaker 1: awful crime that we're going to talk about here and
Speaker 1: puts it in the context of that time in our history.
Speaker 1: You know, a country emerging victoriously from a world war
Speaker 1: and a city on the cusp of tremendous expansion, and
Speaker 1: this is the lands through which William sees this young
Speaker 1: woman's life. I also have to say that William quite
Speaker 1: methodically and carefully goes through the many suspects in the
Speaker 1: killing them is be short and convincingly knocks them down
Speaker 1: one by one until he reaches who he calls the
Speaker 1: last man standing. And we'll get to him that man
Speaker 1: in the course of our conversation. So thanks for joining William.
Speaker 1: You've told me that you didn't set out to find
Speaker 1: the killer in this story, that you wanted to find
Speaker 1: the victim, Elizabeth Short, So I want you to kind
Speaker 1: of get me off the hook here. I will be
Speaker 1: the first to admit that on this podcast we have
Speaker 1: not paid enough attention to Elizabeth the victim, but luckily
Speaker 1: you have. You made a deep dive into her short
Speaker 1: life and times you say she had wanderlust. I would
Speaker 1: like to start with that. Tell us what Elizabeth wanderlust,
Speaker 1: tell us about it and what she was looking for
Speaker 1: before she met her untimely and horrible end.
Speaker 5: Well, I think I'm not sure she even knew what
Speaker 5: she was looking for necessarily, but she was not content
Speaker 5: to stay in her small town, New England suburb of Boston.
Speaker 5: That was not what she wanted. She didn't want to
Speaker 5: be her sisters who got married or one of them
Speaker 5: went off to the into the service. Her mother had
Speaker 5: spent all her life really raising four daughters. Her husband
Speaker 5: had abandoned the family when Elizabeth was six, and Elizabeth
Speaker 5: was fired with some curiosity to see places beyond that
Speaker 5: small town. She was a sickly child for a while.
Speaker 5: She'd been suffering from pleurisy. She'd had an operation for that,
Speaker 5: and she had asthma that caused the cold weather to
Speaker 5: really affect her. So her mother had agreed to let
Speaker 5: her go for part of the winters down to Florida.
Speaker 5: So she got used to traveling and spending time on
Speaker 5: her own, and she liked that. She really felt that
Speaker 5: I can find the world, you know, I can make
Speaker 5: my own decisions, and she wanted more of that. So
Speaker 5: in nineteen in the summer of nineteen forty six, she
Speaker 5: gets an offer to meet a boyfriend. Wasn't serious, but
Speaker 5: she told her mother it was and meet him in
Speaker 5: Long Beach. He was stationed there. He was in the Army,
Speaker 5: And so she takes a bus ride across the country,
Speaker 5: stopping first in Indianapolis and then Chicago. Because you know,
Speaker 5: at wanderlust, she wants to see places, she wants to
Speaker 5: meet people, and then finally arrives in Long Beach. And
Speaker 5: I think what she was looking for was adventure, new ideas,
Speaker 5: new places, new people. Her father had left the family
Speaker 5: when she was so young that she had very little
Speaker 5: memory of him, but to her he seemed like, you know,
Speaker 5: he was this adventurer there he's out seeing the world,
Speaker 5: and she wanted to be like him. And she had
Speaker 5: gone to see him at one point at an earlier time.
Speaker 5: It went badly he rejected her for a second time.
Speaker 5: So possibly in hers she was looking for some affirmation,
Speaker 5: maybe some sense of her father, you know, maybe some
Speaker 5: you know, male approval, because she did she did like
Speaker 5: to make friends with older men, though she was very
Speaker 5: puritanical in a way. But so long answer to say,
Speaker 5: I'm not sure she knew what she was looking for,
Speaker 5: but she was definitely looking for something and that wasn't
Speaker 5: to be found in her small town.
Speaker 1: In the context of that time. Wasn't this a real
Speaker 1: transformative time and country, especially for women. You know, they
Speaker 1: had been called out of the homes to kind of
Speaker 1: keep the country running while most of the men were
Speaker 1: off at war, right, and then it was the war's over,
Speaker 1: and it's like, you can't go back to being normal, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, you know, you can't see Elizabeth's story
Speaker 5: without understanding that context. This was a period when many
Speaker 5: young women were not following the old rules of staying
Speaker 5: at home, getting married, having children. They want to see
Speaker 5: the world a little bit.
Speaker 3: More.
Speaker 5: Women, as you say, during the war had saved the
Speaker 5: economy and they had gone into the factories, the offices
Speaker 5: and really kept the country running while the men were away.
Speaker 5: And then when the men came home, they were encouraged
Speaker 5: to go back, put on an apron, have more babies.
Speaker 5: And for some women that wasn't ever going to happen again.
Speaker 5: They had tasted autonomy and they wanted more of it.
Speaker 5: So Elizabeth was part of that movement. I'm not sure
Speaker 5: she was actually consciously thinking in those terms, but she
Speaker 5: was part of that movement of single women making lives
Speaker 5: for themselves in the nation cities.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we see that in our history. I think you
Speaker 1: said she did a lot of CouchSurfing, but she also
Speaker 1: did that with other women that were also exercising their autonomy. Yes. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: You've already talked about the impact that her father's abandonment
Speaker 1: had on her. She also did this thing that was
Speaker 1: a pretty common thing during wartime. That is a wartime
Speaker 1: romance where she actually got engaged to a man that
Speaker 1: was in the military that she really didn't even know,
Speaker 1: and that also ended with a big impact. Can you
Speaker 1: talk about that a little bit. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 5: While she was in Florida, she met a one of
Speaker 5: the heroes of the Flying Tigers. It was a unit
Speaker 5: that was pretty independent, but it was President Roosevelt had
Speaker 5: sanctioned it to go after and protect mainland China, and
Speaker 5: so the Flying Tigers were a heroic group of people,
Speaker 5: and Matt Gordon was the maverick of them. You know,
Speaker 5: he was Tom Cruise. I mean, he was the guy
Speaker 5: that flew the planes and was glamorous and handsome. And
Speaker 5: Elizabeth met him one night. They had a lovely evening
Speaker 5: and then he was flying out the next day and
Speaker 5: he asked her if she would wait for him, and
Speaker 5: she said yes. And you know, later on it would
Speaker 5: be you know, seen as if this was this longtime,
Speaker 5: great romance.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 5: They met once. So that's important to point out that
Speaker 5: his Matt's mother later revealed that, but that shouldn't necessarily
Speaker 5: diminish the relationship. You know, they wrote to each other frequently,
Speaker 5: and you know, Elizabeth's head was filled with all sorts
Speaker 5: of you know, romantic notions, and he seems to have
Speaker 5: liked her very much too, from the letters to his mother. Unfortunately,
Speaker 5: Matt was killed in a in an accident. It wasn't
Speaker 5: it wasn't in combat, but he was killed in an
Speaker 5: accident shortly before he was planned to come home and
Speaker 5: ask Elizabeth to marry him. He did have a ring
Speaker 5: for her. It was sent to her by one of
Speaker 5: his friends. And you know, she was she was surely crushed.
Speaker 5: She was surely you know, bereffed by this. But part
Speaker 5: of me wonders would she have really married him? You know,
Speaker 5: I don't think she was at a point where she
Speaker 5: wanted to settle down quite yet. But who knows because
Speaker 5: she never had the chance to make that decision.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So she comes to La ends up becoming famous
Speaker 1: in death, you know, for this horrible crime. I mean
Speaker 1: so horrible. We're still talking about it, we're still writing
Speaker 1: about it eighty years later, right, I guess I want
Speaker 1: to get into that fame that came in the Moniker,
Speaker 1: the Black Dahlia. It really took her in a false direction,
Speaker 1: didn't it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, the Black Dahlia is so different, completely
Speaker 5: different from Elizabeth Short. As as you know, the name
Speaker 5: came only after the death. It was it was given
Speaker 5: to her by the by the press, by the newspapers,
Speaker 5: and you know, it was it was a name that
Speaker 5: became the calling card for the case, and it conjured
Speaker 5: up all sorts of ideas of the you know, the
Speaker 5: sinister woman who walked by night in black sheer clothing
Speaker 5: and you know, you know, making connections with dangerous men
Speaker 5: and all of this. You know, it really layers itself
Speaker 5: right into film noir, which is a genre that was
Speaker 5: coming into existence just as Elizabeth was murdered. So you know,
Speaker 5: she becomes this huge, uh you know, meme in some ways,
Speaker 5: you know, in in in noir fiction and noir films,
Speaker 5: and had very little to do with with Elizabeth Short.
Speaker 5: She was she was rather puritanical. She loved to flirt,
Speaker 5: but she rarely slept with a guy. She was she
Speaker 5: was very good at getting a man to buy her
Speaker 5: a hamburger while she's sitting at a lunch counter, because
Speaker 5: she'd bat her eyes and say, well, I'm hungry. But
Speaker 5: she she wasn't a sex worker, which is what the
Speaker 5: myth would later make her out to be a sex
Speaker 5: worker or you know, pornographic actress or you know, a
Speaker 5: bit part player who wants to be famous, and all
Speaker 5: of that. She was none of them. She was just
Speaker 5: a young woman who was twenty two years old, let's remember,
Speaker 5: and just going from place to place seeing what she
Speaker 5: could find.
Speaker 1: So the myth is largely built by the media, and
Speaker 1: I think there was five or six newspapers in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles at that time, a very heavily competitive market, and
Speaker 1: it kind of to me, it kind of feels like
Speaker 1: the media emerged as one of the villains in this
Speaker 1: story because of what they did to her.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I would agree that part of the blame for
Speaker 5: the original detectives not being able to zero in and
Speaker 5: a killer right away, I think was because of the
Speaker 5: distractions the media was constantly throwing at them. The two
Speaker 5: original detectives, Harry Hanson and Finest Brown, in my opinion,
Speaker 5: were good detectives. They were doing their job. They knew
Speaker 5: how to research these kinds of crimes, though this one
Speaker 5: was obviously beyond anything they had seen up until that point,
Speaker 5: but it was, you know, it was a way of
Speaker 5: keeping the truth from coming out because in some ways,
Speaker 5: the media didn't want the truth. They didn't want this
Speaker 5: story to be over. It was selling a lot of
Speaker 5: newspapers for them. Jimmy Richardson of the Los Angeles Examiner
Speaker 5: said that the Dahlia case was selling more newspapers than
Speaker 5: Pearl Harbor. So they made sure that there were column
Speaker 5: inches available for the Dahlia case on every front page.
Speaker 5: So every front page had some Dahlia news. And that's
Speaker 5: not just the Examiner, it is also the Herald Express,
Speaker 5: the Daily News, even the Times, though they were a
Speaker 5: little more sober, but the Times also had that it
Speaker 5: was on page two. And so if they didn't have
Speaker 5: new Dallia news, they made stuff up. They literally made
Speaker 5: stuff up. And so Harry Hanson and Finest Brown are obligated.
Speaker 5: Captain Donahue would say, you know, go investigate this. Somebody's
Speaker 5: just confessed over the Examiner, and they'd have to stop
Speaker 5: what they were doing and go over and examine, you know,
Speaker 5: the latest crazy confessor. So, yeah, the media is one
Speaker 5: of the reasons why, and not just one of the reasons,
Speaker 5: but one of the main reasons why the detectives were
Speaker 5: unable to zero in on somebody early.
Speaker 1: On, Yeah, the I think it was Brown, one of
Speaker 1: those two guys, Brown or Handsome. And then they testified
Speaker 1: to the grand jury in nineteen forty nine said they
Speaker 1: had three hundred suspects. In total, they had something like
Speaker 1: nineteen confessors. And so even when they whittled it down
Speaker 1: to a list of twenty two, I mean, that is
Speaker 1: a massive list in itself. Absolutely, it's no wonder stuff.
Speaker 1: Things slipped through, and including the guy you call the
Speaker 1: last man standing. So, yeah, you know, I guess you
Speaker 1: kind of already answered this, but I was going to
Speaker 1: say that it wasn't a a state of the art investigation,
Speaker 1: wasn't really even a textbook investigation. The tark the department
Speaker 1: had budget issues. Sometimes these detectives didn't even have a
Speaker 1: car or they could use. But let's talk about that guy,
Speaker 1: the last man standing, Marvin Margolis. He's the same suspect
Speaker 1: that we've landed on in this podcast. You quite methodically
Speaker 1: knocked down that list of twenty two prime suspects until
Speaker 1: there was only Marvin Margolis left. Why didn't you knock
Speaker 1: him off the list?
Speaker 5: Well, because Margolis is the only suspect who contains both
Speaker 5: qualities that the detectives speculated needed to be to determine
Speaker 5: who this killer is. So he had both the how
Speaker 5: and the why, which you know, if how plus why
Speaker 5: equals who was one FBI equation that's used. And he
Speaker 5: had how because he had been in the military and
Speaker 5: he had served in a medical unit, so he assisted
Speaker 5: in surgical procedures. And he had the the why, which
Speaker 5: is the rationale or the motivation for killing. When he
Speaker 5: was discharged, he had terrible PTSD and was discharged with
Speaker 5: a fifty percent psychiatric disability, and the psychiatrist at the
Speaker 5: time said, you know, he could be dangerous. He's a
Speaker 5: you know, he's he didn't use these phrases, but you
Speaker 5: know he was a loose cannon. And those two attributes
Speaker 5: do not turn up in any of the other suspects.
Speaker 5: He also has other circumstantial evidence that makes me say,
Speaker 5: of all of them, he's the only one I can't
Speaker 5: rule out. He's the only one who does not have
Speaker 5: something in his story that just disqualifies him. And for
Speaker 5: the earlier candidates, whether they be Mark Hanson or or
Speaker 5: Carl Bausinger, they don't have the surgical ability. There's they
Speaker 5: could not have conducted that that bisection. They couldn't. They
Speaker 5: did not have the ability to do that. Somebody like
Speaker 5: Ballsinger too was he was. He was a fraud fraudulent guy.
Speaker 5: He was. He was rested several times. But at the
Speaker 5: same time he didn't possess the rage of society that
Speaker 5: is needed. He you know, he got away with stuff,
Speaker 5: so he wasn't really raging against society. He got his
Speaker 5: way against society. The same is true with Glenn Wolf
Speaker 5: who was another suspect. They they might have been sociopaths,
Speaker 5: but they weren't angry sociopaths. They they knew how to
Speaker 5: get what they wanted from society without without being frustrated.
Speaker 5: Marvin Margoliz was constantly frustrated. He was never given the
Speaker 5: the the praise in when he was in the military.
Speaker 5: He wanted more experience in the operating room, was always
Speaker 5: denied that he was put into the far pharmacy instead
Speaker 5: of the instead of the surgery centers. His father had
Speaker 5: told him he was a would never make make any good.
Speaker 5: That he was he was never going to be anything,
Speaker 5: you know, from an early age, and then when he
Speaker 5: goes to he enrolls at University of Southern California, he's
Speaker 5: constantly dropping out of his classes. He can't hack it,
Speaker 5: and his professors are telling him, you know, yeah, you
Speaker 5: don't have it, you don't have what it takes. So
Speaker 5: this is a guy with anger and resentment at the world,
Speaker 5: plus has the surgical skills to do what was done
Speaker 5: to Eldzabeth Short. I can't one hundred percent say he
Speaker 5: was the killer, because we know there's records that haven't
Speaker 5: been released, But he's the only one that I can't
Speaker 5: rule out. And as you say, he is the last
Speaker 5: man standing, and I think he was the last man
Speaker 5: standing for the detectives at the time too.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of people out there seems eliminated, and
Speaker 1: I think he was initially, you know, and like that
Speaker 1: was one of the things where they were overwhelmed and
Speaker 1: they checked the box with him right right and moved on.
Speaker 1: But your study of the records that are available, what
Speaker 1: is the evolution of that of Marvin Margolis in terms
Speaker 1: of whether he was eliminated and when and whether he
Speaker 1: was then reinstated as a key suspect.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he was early on, he was investigated, he was questioned,
Speaker 5: and the other reason he was question was because his
Speaker 5: roommate Bill Robinson, who had also lived with Elizabeth Short
Speaker 5: and Marjorie Graham with with Marvin. He came forward and said, okay,
Speaker 5: I know this girl. I lived with her. And they said, well,
Speaker 5: who else lived with you? And he said, Marvin Markgolis.
Speaker 5: We need to talk to him. And he said, well,
Speaker 5: he doesn't want to come in. So he is then
Speaker 5: forced to come in, apparently because he does speak with
Speaker 5: Hanson and Brown and he has an alibi for that
Speaker 5: night of the night of the murder. His wife he's
Speaker 5: recently gotten married, and his wife says, you know, he
Speaker 5: was with me. So spousal alibis are always a little
Speaker 5: bit suspicious. But you know, for the time being, they
Speaker 5: put all, you know, Marvin Margolis aside because they had,
Speaker 5: you know, a new suspect coming in every day, whether
Speaker 5: that be Robert Manley or Lynn Martin. There was always
Speaker 5: somebody new to investigate. And it's not until the district
Speaker 5: attorney steps in around nineteen forty eight forty nine that
Speaker 5: Marvin re emerges from the records. I think Frank Jemison
Speaker 5: was going through them and probably said to from finest Brown,
Speaker 5: what about this guy.
Speaker 1: He looked at it.
Speaker 5: He's got surgical experience. He was a boyfriend he you know,
Speaker 5: has this rage why not him? And after getting more
Speaker 5: information about him, Finess Brown actually tells the grand jury
Speaker 5: he could be a very good suspect. And that's really
Speaker 5: that the last record we have before things that the
Speaker 5: District Attorney closes down its investigation. And it is clear
Speaker 5: from some of the newspaper records I found was that
Speaker 5: Brown began interviewing people about Marvin Margolis. And why I
Speaker 5: say that is he goes to Boston to interview Marjorie Graham,
Speaker 5: and Marjorie Graham would have known Marvin Margolis's He's the
Speaker 5: only suspect he could have been going to Marjorie to
Speaker 5: ask about. So I think by the by nineteen fifty,
Speaker 5: certainly the Marvin had risen back up in prominence in
Speaker 5: the detective's research.
Speaker 1: And by then he's under another name. That's right, the
Speaker 1: wind Right.
Speaker 5: That's right, that's right. He had changed his name. He
Speaker 5: moved to Kansas, where he reinvents himself as an artist.
Speaker 5: And interestingly, when he's in Kansas, he begins telling another
Speaker 5: story about himself, you know, instead of being the frustrated
Speaker 5: surgical assistant that he now he's a member of the
Speaker 5: Flying Tigers. And if if your listeners recall Matt Gordon
Speaker 5: was a member of the Flying Tigers. And suddenly, suddenly
Speaker 5: Marvin is describing himself as if he was Matt Gordon.
Speaker 5: And it has to you wonder did Elizabeth ever compare
Speaker 5: him unfavorably to you know when she dated him. Well,
Speaker 5: you're nothing like my Matt Gordon, who was a hero,
Speaker 5: and you know he flew the planes and did that?
Speaker 1: Did that.
Speaker 5: Upset marc OLiS?
Speaker 1: The psychology of that is really interesting. You know the
Speaker 1: guy's experience in Okinawa, you know his hero stuff. Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: but that wasn't good enough for him, right, tell the
Speaker 1: newspaper that's right. I don't know. There's there's something deep
Speaker 1: about that and h and him leaving clues if you
Speaker 1: asked me. But I'm not a not a psychologist.
Speaker 5: Yep, I agree.
Speaker 1: Well, you set out to find the victim, not necessarily killer,
Speaker 1: but I think you found in both. It's a really
Speaker 1: good book and I appreciate you spending some time and
Speaker 1: letting me use you to deliver some Elizabeth.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm happy to do it because Elizabeth Short, I
Speaker 5: think deserves to be remembered. Her death was grizzly and sensational,
Speaker 5: but her life, while it was ordinary and unremarkable, is
Speaker 5: still more important than her death.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to kill her in the Code Solving
Speaker 1: the Black Dahia and Zodiac cases. This episode was written
Speaker 1: and produced by me Michael Connolly, with editing by Terall
Speaker 1: Lee Langford and music by Mark Henry Phillips. We will
Speaker 1: be back with chapter ten soon. Thank you for listening, Y,