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An amateur sleuth and self-taught cryptography expert is convinced he’s cracked the notorious unsolved Zodiac and Black Dahlia murders — and that the killer is the same man.
Alex Baber — a 50-year-old West Virginian with autism — used AI programs and his codebreaking prowess to whittle down the Zodiac killer’s infamous 1970 clue he sent to newspapers and identify a single suspect with an overwhelming connection across all the murders: a late Chicagoan named Marvin Margolis.
“It’s my autism. Once I start on something, I have to see it through. The deeper I go, the harder I push. My mind’s wired differently,” Baber told the LA Times, explaining he’d spent up to 20 hours a day on the code for months at a time.
Baber took the riddle sent by the Zodiac killer to taunt California police after his five murders across 1968 and 1969 — in which he wrote “My name is” followed by 13 mysterious symbols — and asked an AI program to compile a list of 13-letter names.
That returned 71 million possibilities, and Baber — who owns Cold Case Consultants of America — pored through witness accounts and known details about the killer, while cross-checking them against census and public records.
He was able to narrow that enormous list down to 185, then again to 14, and finally landed on a single name: Marvin Merrill, an alias assumed by Marvin Margolis after he was investigated for the 1947 Black Dahlia murder.
Margolis was about 21 years old when he lived in Los Angeles with Elizabeth Short, the 22-year-old aspiring actress who would become known as the “Black Dahlia” after her body was found mutilated in an abandoned lot in 1947.
The murder was grisly — Short’s torso had been carefully cut in half at the waist, drained of blood, and a terrifying smile was carved from the ends of her mouth across her cheeks — prompting investigators to suspect the killer had some kind of medical expertise.
And that’s exactly what Margolis had.
He was a frontline Navy medic in World War II, where he’d been trained to treat troops on the fly with crude methods — including conducting amputations with basic combat knives known as “foxhole surgery.”
Margolis also had plenty of practice in the grim trade, having landed in the first wave of the bloody battle of Okinawa in the Pacific theater just two years before Short’s murder.
“He wasn’t a doctor, but he had done things doctors often do,” said Rick Jackson, a former LAPD homicide detective who has become convinced by Baber’s findings.
“He had a lot of experience dealing with the human body.”
Margolis had aspirations to become a surgeon after the war, but his dreams were crushed after he was diagnosed with “tremulousness, recurring battle dreams, tiredness which is chronic and intermittent, startled reactions and periods of depression.” He was discharged from the Navy on disability due to PTSD.
That left him “a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression,” a military psychiatrist wrote after treating him at the time.
“He desired operation room technique which was never granted to him and this is one of the underlying bases for his resentment and disgust,” the doctor added.
Years later, Margolis was living with Short before her murder — but was cleared as a suspect while investigators were under the impression she’d been kidnapped days before the killing.
He also had a purported alibi; however, the LAPD report did not provide details of it, the LA Times noted.
Margolis then relocated to California and changed his name to Marvin Merrill.
He then spent years moving numerous times across the country with stints in California.
Margolis’ possible connections to the Zodiac killings became downright eerie once Baber uncovered newspaper accounts from the Dahlia killing describing a man frantically driving around Compton motels looking for a room with a bathtub the night before the murders.
One of the lodgings was called the “Zodiac Motel” at the time.
“That was the key to where she was murdered as well as his future moniker,” Baber told the LA Times.
The circumstantial evidence continued when Baber contacted Margolis’ son — who showed him a Japanese bayonet his father brought back from WWII that matched one of Zodiac’s possible murder weapons, and was even branded with a symbol that matched one from Zodiac’s famous code, the Daily Mail reported.
And even more chilling was a drawing Margolis made just a year before his 1993 death in Santa Barbara titled “Elizabeth,” which depicted a naked woman from the waist up with markings similar to Short’s stab wounds, Baber explained.
The word “Zodiac” even appeared to be written beneath dark shading.
“It’s irrefutable,” Baber said.
However, there are critics who don’t agree.
One skeptic told the LA Times that Baber was “a great smooth talker” but had “a lot of empty calories” and few real qualifications.
Still, the amateur sleuth convinced others with plenty of experience.
“All of [Baber’s] work checked out to me,” said former chief codebreaker for the National Security Agency, Ed Giorgio.
And former LAPD homicide detective Jackson put it more bluntly.
“In my opinion, these are solved cases,” he said.
“There are too many links with both. There’s overwhelming circumstantial evidence. He’s left breadcrumbs all along.”
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