An amateur sleuth claims to have cracked the Black Dahlia and Zodiac killings
An amateur code breaker is claiming to have solved the Zodiac killer’s long-unsolved identity — and, in the process, to have linked the slayings to the 1947 killing of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia.
The theory, reported in depth by the Los Angeles Times, names Marvin Margolis, a former premed student and World War II Navy corpsman, as the man behind both crimes. Margolis later lived under a series of aliases and was questioned by police in the Black Dahlia case but never charged.
The claim comes from Alex Baber, 50, a self-taught cryptographer from West Virginia who says he cracked the Zodiac’s elusive 13-character cipher, known as Z13, which was mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1970.
The cipher begins with the phrase “My name is —” and has long resisted decoding.
Baber says the answer hidden in the code is “Marvin Merrill,” the name Margolis adopted after Short’s killing.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/black-dahlia-zodiac-killings-new-theory-21259726.php
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