Christopher Goffard, reporting for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link):
When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of
Elizabeth Short — who became known as the Black Dahlia — he lied
about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been
found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed
neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill.Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old
premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who
had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was “a
resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression,”
a military psychiatrist had concluded.At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with
Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months
before her January 1947 murder. […]A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who
called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area
with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting
police and media for years with letters and cryptograms.The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to
the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words “My name is —”
followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came
to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied
generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies.Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of
high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has
cracked the Zodiac killer’s identity — and in the process solved
the Black Dahlia case as well.“It’s irrefutable,” said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and
cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a
firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages.
What a story. The circumstantial evidence pointing to Margolis seems pretty strong. What I can’t find is an explanation of Baber’s solution to the Z13 cypher. The “irrefutable” description hinges on that. There’s a new podcast, “Killer in the Code”, from author Michael Connelly that details Baber’s supposed solution tying both cases to the same guy. All the publicity about this today stems from the debut of that podcast yesterday.
