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Impact x Nightline - Season 4 - Episode 14: Kill Code: Black Dahlia & Zodiac - Two Cases, One Killer?
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00:04Who? Zodiac? One of the great unsolved serial killing mysteries of all times. Forget about
00:12closure. They never got justice. That's why the cases still torture me, because I know
00:20how this affects the living.
00:35The first two known Zodiac victims, a young couple, David Faraday, Betty Lou Jensen, were
00:43on Lover's Lane. So they're parking, and all of a sudden, Zodiac shows up and kills them
00:50both. The two victims were ordered out of the car and shot out of the car outside.
01:05Just a few months later, it happens again. Darlene Farron and Michael Majau. But one
01:14of them survives and sees the Zodiac. So now all we can do is wait, perhaps, for
01:20that next phone call from the man who calls himself Zodiac, who has killed five and says
01:26he's going to kill again. The Zodiac killer began taunting police and media. But he did
01:32it in an altogether different way with an elaborate cipher system. He would kill, then communicate,
01:40kill, then communicate, daring police and media to figure out who he was and stop him.
01:48You say you cracked that code. Now, six decades later, one amateur sleuth says he solved the case.
01:56I can just show you how I broke it. I took it from a scientific perspective that there was
02:00ultimately one solution. You cracked the code on the Zodiac, not realizing that it would also
02:06crack the code on Black Dahlia. The Black Dahlia, it's the crown jewel of unsolved murders. This is
02:13arrest when she was underage drinking. Elizabeth Short's body was cut in half. Her body was severed
02:20just above the waist. She is forever frozen in time as a 22-year-old girl. Recently, the two cases
02:29have been linked, and it has been proposed that Zodiac is Black Dahlia Avenger, that they are one
02:37and the same. What does all this circumstantial evidence say to you? Marvin Margolis is a Zodiac
02:43killer and the Black Dahlia Avenger. You're that sure? Without sounding cocky or arrogant,
02:48I have to say, yes, I am undoubtedly sure that this is the right guy.
03:10The 60s was marked by political and social upheaval, this idea of counterculture,
03:18with protests against the Vietnam War, civil rights.
03:22You've got assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and it's a very weird and
03:30tumultuous time. Psychedelics and drugs. You have a weird mix of out with the old and in with the new.
03:39A lot of bad things can happen, and that's exactly what happened during the Zodiac murders.
03:50The Zodiac killings threw the public into pandemonium. Young people were not allowed to go
03:58out. The streets were being patrolled by police. There was hysteria. The Zodiac killings seemed to
04:04have these subtle similarities. It's killing couples or people in lover's lane.
04:12September 1969. Cecilia Shepard. Cecilia was stabbed. Now, that was in Napa, California,
04:21and Brian Hartnell. Once again, a couple attacked. I have no malice. I mean,
04:27in my heart against him. I just don't want this to happen again to anyone else.
04:32That chilling moment dramatized in the 2007 thriller Zodiac. He's coming towards us.
04:41Oh my God, he has a gun. Don't move. After the Zodiac killer kills a couple in Vallejo on
04:49Lover's Lane, he goes to a payphone and calls law enforcement. I want to report a double murder.
04:56I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye. The Zodiac was playing a game with the public
05:03and with the newspapers and with the police. Police are now convinced that it was the killer
05:09of a San Francisco cab driver who sent in a swatch of bloody cloth with a letter to the San
05:14Francisco
05:14Chronicle. Dear editor, this is the Zodiac. When he threatened to bomb a bus,
05:22parents started driving their kids to school. We're trying to keep our route. We change them
05:28practically every day to whether we won't have the same pattern.
05:33This man might be that crazy to come along and kill these kids. The case remains open. Investigators
05:39still looking 20 years after for a man with horn-rimmed glasses and crew cut hair.
05:44Over the decades, there have been a number of theories and conspiracies as to who could be the Zodiac
05:49killer. Arthur Lee Allen has been named as a potential suspect, but he was never arrested or charged with
05:55these crimes.
05:58The Zodiac killer released a number of ciphers or encrypted letters.
06:04They look like Egyptian symbols that you might read on the side of a pyramid or inside of a tomb.
06:13And you're like, what is that? You practically need a Rosetta Stone to figure out what it means.
06:21Enter Alex Baber, the amateur sleuth, a self-styled investigative consultant,
06:26founder of Cold Case Consultants of America.
06:29What first drew you to the Zodiac?
06:32Initially, 2007, David Fincher released the Zodiac movie.
06:35And he gave himself a name.
06:42Me and a friend, we viewed the movie. As we left, there was discussion about the cipher.
06:47When I returned home, she's like, why don't you take a crack at it? You're really good at puzzles.
06:52As soon as I looked at it, my mind was ticking.
06:55We cropped the top of the hair like the sketch.
06:57Now, nearly two decades later, he says he's finally solved the puzzle that reveals Zodiac's
07:03identity. And he says his solution solves another epic murder mystery.
07:09The Black Dahlia and the Zodiac killer are probably on the Mount Rushmore of American
07:14true crimes that have yet to be solved.
07:16The Daily Mail breaking the world exclusive with Alex's stunning theory.
07:22Baber credits his autism with his drive and his ability to try to crack the code.
07:27Read this for me. And what does this tell you?
07:30This is Zodiac speaking. By the way, have you cracked the last cipher I sent you?
07:33Question mark. My name is Dash. That tells me that he's telling the person who's reading this
07:38that his name is encrypted in this. This is what's called the Z13. 13 characters represent the number
07:4213. Z meaning Zodiac. So you have it here, here, and here.
07:47If you look at Z13, there's a very clear paragraph and a last line saying,
07:52my name is, with an intentional blank space. And then this kind of assortment of letters and symbols,
07:59A, E, N, symbols, symbol. What could that mean?
08:04Baber set out to crack it using AI to randomly generate names and then cross-check them with
08:10public records. Today we're going to do a visual breakdown of the Z13 proposed solution. And there's
08:1813 character or symbols represented below it. And now these consist of alphabetical letters
08:26and symbols. How did you crack the code? I got every male name and surname, not just in California,
08:33but across the nation. And we took that data set and we entered it. You looked at 71 million names.
08:39What I did was I was able to eliminate 94% of 71 million right off the top just because
08:43they weren't
08:43real people. And so then you were down to? And then it went from there to a little over 7
08:48,000. And then
08:50from there, it went down to 184, and then to 35, then to 14, and then to one.
08:57Alex Baber teamed up with Michael Connolly, journalist turned crime novelist,
09:01chronicling every new twist of this now hot cold case.
09:06I told him, I'm going to find an independent person to confirm what you're doing. Is that going
09:11to be a problem? He said, absolutely not. And I had a secret in my back pocket that I had
09:16a brother
09:16who worked for the NSA, and I knew he could get me somebody really good to either tear this apart
09:21or confirm it. And it was like three guys with about 100 years of experience at NSA
09:27doing cryptology work came back and said, this is legit. He did it. They called it monumental,
09:33what he did. What was the one name? Marvin Merrill.
09:41Marvin Merrill. Born Marvin Margolis, long suspected by authorities not in the Zodiac killings,
09:48but in another legendary unsolved murder, the Black Dahlia.
09:53I was able to reverse engineer my investigation and track him back through time. And at that point,
09:59I realized that Marvin Merrill was in fact Marvin Margolis.
10:12The Hollywood strip is not a burlesque, but a section of Sunset Boulevard flanked by celebrated
10:18nightclubs and cafes. America was at a turning point. This was right after World War II. You have all
10:24the GIs coming home from war. You have the whole era of move west, young man. Los Angeles is growing
10:30into what would become the second largest city in the country. This expansion of the American might
10:37and dream and all this positivity. And then there's this very, very dark story. When I think of the Black
10:43Dahlia, I think of probably one of the first and most gruesome true crime stories that have yet to be
10:49solved. Her body was placed prominently near a sidewalk where a mother and her child walking
10:57the next day saw the body. The body was bisected. It was cut in two. And it was cut in
11:04two so expertly
11:05that the killer was able to avoid all internal organs damaging none of them. She was found completely
11:12naked. She was posed out in the open. Her bottom half, the rest of her torso and her legs naked
11:21were
11:21placed near the torso and they were in an obscene position. Her legs were spread. The two patrolmen
11:30who found the body thought they were looking at a mannequin at first. William J. Mann is the author of
11:36The Black Dahlia, Murder Monsters and Madness in Mid-Century Hollywood. This was clearly someone
11:42who had the medical and surgical skills to be able to commit this crime. Her body had been drained
11:51of blood. This was no butcher. This was not a guy that worked in the meat section at Kroger. This
11:56killer is more akin to a surgeon. Her killer inserted a knife blade into her mouth and gave her a
12:05glasgow
12:05smile which unleashed a flow of blood in her mouth and that's what killed her. Have you ever seen the
12:13Joker? From the edges of the mouth, an incision cuts are made all the way to the ear where you
12:22have a
12:23permanent incised smile on your face. It's horrific. The LAPD and FBI quickly identifying the body as 22
12:33year old Elizabeth Short. She was a homeless person basically. She was sleeping in all night theaters
12:39and sleeping on couches and so it was a very sad existence. She wanted to see the world. She wanted
12:46to explore. She didn't have any great ambitions of being an actress. That's a myth. She was just really
12:51this normal girl that came to California to try to be somebody. The 1947 headline read,
12:57young girl slain and that's exactly what Elizabeth Short was. 22 years old. The words Black Dahlia,
13:05everybody knows that picture. A beautiful brunette bombshell if you will.
13:11She was a woman post-World War II who was trying to find herself. She was looking for a place
13:17in the
13:17world and that was taken from her. I've heard people call the Black Dahlia the Chanteuse of Los Angeles
13:23Noir and she really was in some ways because think of the movies that came out. There's always this
13:29reference to the young woman alone in the big city and filled with dreams and ambitions and that gets
13:35cut down by the corruption of the city of Hollywood, the land of illusion. Elizabeth Short was murdered in
13:4247. She got a nickname. There was a movie out a year before called The Blue Dahlia because Elizabeth Short
13:49was
13:49known for her raven hair and dark clothes and so she became known as the Black Dahlia. The killer of
13:56Black
13:56Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, immediately begins taunting the media and police. A few days after the murder of
14:04the Black Dahlia, law enforcement gets an envelope mailed to them and within it are some personal items
14:10like her address book, her wallet without any money and her birth certificate. The killer had taken
14:16letters from the newspaper to write a message basically telling the police that what they found
14:23in the envelope was Elizabeth Short's belongings. That was very obvious that had to come from her.
14:29Former homicide detective Mitzi Roberts was in charge of all things Dahlia at the LAPD for 17 years.
14:36I volunteered for it because I thought who wouldn't want to solve the Black Dahlia. Now I realize why I
14:41was
14:41the only one that sort of raised my hand because it really was a full-time job, is a full
14:45-time job.
14:46Roberts has caught real-life serial killers, her career inspiring a TV show, Ballard. She and her
14:53former partner, both legendary homicide veterans, are unpaid consultants for Baber. Rick Jackson still
15:00solves cold cases after retiring from 36 years with the LAPD. I said before I die there are a couple
15:08of
15:08cases I would like to get answers to. I said I'm interested in the Black Dahlia but that's not the
15:14main one.
15:15The main case that I would want to know and answer to is the Zodiac case. Jackson is another
15:22real-life inspiration for the crime drama Bosch, both shows created by crime novelist Michael Connolly.
15:29I write fiction for a living and it's just one after another proof of that adage that the truth is
15:36stranger in fiction. They too believe Marvin Merrill is both the Black Dahlia murderer and the Zodiac killer.
15:42In terms of your level of confidence, one to a hundred, where are you? I'm at a hundred percent. I'm
15:4899.9.
15:49But it seemed that for eight decades the killer had gotten away with murder.
15:53Police didn't have a location of the murder. When you put together no forensics, no ID,
16:01and no location, technical legal term, you're screwed.
16:08Alex Baber's research has led the team of cold case investigators here to this modest set of bungalows
16:15where they believe Elizabeth was butchered. And so you're convinced that that's where
16:22the Black Dahlia was murdered? I checked every possible motel and hotel within that area and
16:28there's only one that could have possibly been and that was the one called the Zodiac Motel which opened
16:34in June of 1946, six months earlier. They're probing as part of Connolly's eight-part podcast,
16:40killer in the code. Well, first of all, it's just hollowed sacred ground if you believe that that
16:47was the final resting place of Elizabeth Short. They believe the murder scene would have been so
16:53bloody the killer would have needed a bathtub. Police reports from the time say there was a man
16:58who went from hotel to hotel in this neighborhood asking if they had a bathtub. This set of bungalows
17:04did and at the time it was called the Zodiac. What are the odds that the Dahlia might have been
17:10killed
17:11at the Zodiac? We have isolated bungalows. They're not connected. There's parking in between with side
17:17entrance which is ideal for removing somebody from a vehicle. Out of sight? Out of sight. You can't hear
17:23really what your neighbor between the wall, whether the water's running, whether there's muffled screaming.
17:29Now private residences, one of the current tenants let them and our cameras inside one of the bungalows.
17:44This is ideally what he would have needed. Isolation, side entrance, no shared walls. Honestly,
17:52it's a little eerie. I mean not that this is the unit by any means. I ended up feeling very
17:57sad and
17:57you got to go into this very small, sad room and that this is where this 22 year old girl's
18:05destination took her. It's really sad. So how did this young woman cross paths with her alleged killer,
18:14Marvin Merrill? In 1943, he was still Marvin Margolis, a young man from Chicago who joined the Navy
18:22and served as a corpsman with the 1st Marine Division. Who was Marvin Margolis at the time of the Black
18:27Dahlia?
18:28Murder. He's a very troubled, sick individual. I mean, somebody that was discharged from the military
18:36because of PTSD, what we know as PTSD now, but psychological issues. I mean, this is a person
18:43that wasn't a surgeon but was thrown in to do field surgery and things like that and probably
18:48so. And during a very, very brutal war, probably saw some real carnage on the battlefield.
18:57He was also given the task in Okinawa during some of the fiercest fighting of the war to go out
19:05into the
19:05battlefield and collect body parts and then bring them back and catalog them. I think Marvin Margolis had a
19:12rage against society, not just Elizabeth Short. I think she was the unlucky person in that moment.
19:21In L.A., Marvin Merrill continued as a pre-med student
19:24at USC, rooming with a fellow World War II veteran and codebreaker. That's when Margolis,
19:30at age 21, started dating a 22-year-old Elizabeth Short.
19:35And they clicked. They thought, you know, Elizabeth thought Marvin was very funny. It was a chance
19:41meeting on Hollywood Boulevard. He was obsessive and controlling. He told Elizabeth Short and
19:46and friends of hers verified this, that she was not to see other men. She revealed to other people
19:53that she was afraid of him. They had lived together, albeit briefly, for about 12 days. Now,
19:59statistically speaking, your love interest, be it your husband, your boyfriend, your ex, the guy at
20:06the grocery store that has a crush on you, is most likely your killer. So yes, I absolutely believe, even
20:14if not only statistically, that Merrill, aka Margolis, could very well be the Black Dahlia Avenger.
20:24Marvin Margolis has both the how and the why. He has the surgical skills,
20:28and he has the rage to do it.
20:35At the time of the Black Dahlia's murder, law enforcement actually speaks to Marvin Margolis.
20:40He's somewhat on their radar. Margolis provides what law enforcement believes is a pretty airtight alibi.
20:47His name showed up in the grand jury list of suspects.
20:50Yes, and they interviewed him twice, and he lied. And if there was any kind of slip up,
20:56it was the effort to find him once he left town.
21:00He just slips into the darkness.
21:02Yeah. And then, of course, he changed his name, and he moved around a lot.
21:07Two decades later, when the Zodiac killing spree begins,
21:11Margolis, now 43, is on his second marriage, three kids.
21:15People also point to the gap in time. We're talking 1947 for the Black Dahlia,
21:19and 1968 for the beginning of the Zodiac killings. Why the time gap?
21:24How do you refute what most lay people say? Like, it was 22 years apart.
21:29We're not saying, first of all, that nothing happened in between.
21:33And I know personally two cases that I strongly believe,
21:36as does Alex, that are connected to the Zodiac.
21:40Yeah.
21:41Baber tracks Merrill living in striking distance to the Zodiac kill zone during the murder spree.
21:47And so we got a time stamp from 1969 from a dress that was located in San Jose.
21:52Baber believes he was still obsessed with the Black Dahlia,
21:55and that he called police as the Zodiac from a payphone near the home where he believes Dahlia
22:01first lived in California decades earlier.
22:04What does it say to you about him that he made that phone call from that payphone?
22:07There's a personal connection to Elizabeth Short. For him to pick,
22:10there's, I think, somewhere around 400, 450 towns and cities in California alone, right?
22:16He picks Vallejo to commit his crimes.
22:20You tracked down and reached out to Marvin Margolis slash Marvin Merrill's son.
22:27Correct. It's very difficult to tell somebody you believe their father is a serial killer.
22:34He was very open to speaking to us.
22:37He appeared to want to cooperate, and he stated he wanted what was best for the victim's families.
22:42I said, your father dated Elizabeth Short the Black Dahlia. Are you aware of that?
22:45And he said, no, I'm not aware of that. So I break out the binder on Elizabeth Short.
22:49I open it up, and there's a picture of his father. And then he stopped for a second.
22:52He goes, I got something I want to show you. And he hands me the phone.
22:56And I see this sketch of a nude woman from the waist up, no navel.
23:00And then it has Elizabeth written in large capital letters across the bottom. And it's signed and
23:05dated by him. And he had mentioned to us, well, my dad dated another woman named Elizabeth.
23:09And so he thought it was Elizabeth that his dad had dated, maybe.
23:13I can only tell you what he told me.
23:16Marvin's son says he does not believe his father is a killer and declined to comment to ABC News.
23:23But Baber is still sticking with his investigation.
23:27I'm thinking here to myself, okay, Zodiac loved games. He referenced games all the time. What if
23:35he hid something within this sketch that could possibly link to two cases?
23:41Baber says he and his team used image-enhancing software to penetrate deeper layers of the sketch,
23:47which you can't see with the naked eye.
23:49So my gears started turning, and we started peeling the layers off.
23:55And in the very lower right, during the advent, the word which appears to be Zodiac,
23:59capital Z, lowercase O, capital D, lowercase IAC appeared.
24:05And it's on his deathbed that he creates this within a year, which again, to me,
24:12shows you he wants to leave a calling card or another clue.
24:18The hidden word, that to me is the real smoking gun. To hide a word in there, the word Zodiac,
24:24which kind of connects everything, is to me a stunning revelation.
24:29It's the first physical evidence in the case in 78 years since her package was mailed in on January 24,
24:361947.
24:37This is how the sketch came to me in this, packaged in this box. And it was wrapped and preserved
24:44with
24:44evidence tape. Nobody had altered or opened it before that. And there it is.
24:52We're in the process of confirming by an expert what's significant is the linking of the cases,
25:00the linking of the Zodiac. Now, some people say, well,
25:03is it really a Zodiac? Or are you just seeing what you want to see?
25:06I mean, it's blatantly obvious. I could take anybody off the street and take 10 people randomly
25:10and say, what word do you read here? Put a flashlight on it. I guarantee at least nine hours in
25:13it are going to say Zodiac.
25:14It could be people seeing what they want to see, having blinders and saying, hey,
25:19I'm trying to solve this. I'm trying to see this. Is that a Z? Is that a D?
25:23I find it extremely probative, but it must be authenticated to make sure it's not a ruse.
25:29The sketch, just one of a string of clues Baber says he's uncovered.
25:38Baber points to this Chicago newspaper profile of Margolis with a photo of his wartime souvenirs.
25:44And in that article, he's actually quoted stating he brought home a Japanese bayonet and gun,
25:54that he had taken off a Japanese soldier. Another stunning connection, a bayonet style
26:01blade was used in one of the Zodiac's layings. Though they don't have the actual bayonet,
26:07Baber says along with the rifles, the Japanese military issued bayonets with these unique markings,
26:13the very same symbol used in the Zodiac cipher. What does that have to do with anything? If you
26:19look at the bayonet, it has some symbols on it that look like the symbols in the cipher.
26:29Does that alone mean anything? No. But combined with other circumstantial evidence, it may.
26:36Four of the five Zodiac victims were killed by gunshots. As a Navy corpsman, Margolis had been
26:42trained to use guns. Baber says he found another tantalizing piece of the puzzle while examining
26:50archives, a front page photo in the LA Daily Express, with this caption describing evidence
26:56being examined by detectives. If we are correct, which all of us believe we are,
27:00the Zodiac might tell us the last location, Elizabeth took her final breath. They had to relocate
27:06their body. So the ideal would be an ice bag with handles. And the weather had gotten to it,
27:12it had rained, so it diluted what would appear to be bloodstains in the bottom of the bag. But on
27:15the
27:16bag was one letter in red, a big Z. So I did some research, and I discovered that the Iceman
27:22back then
27:22would come around with the truck, and they would put the first initial, or first two initials, of their
27:28delivery location on the ice bag. Could the Z on the ice bag stand for the Zodiac Motel?
27:38Here's my issue with Elizabeth Short's murder and Zodiac being connected.
27:43They are completely different MMOs, which is motive, means, and opportunity. If you look at the murder of
27:50Elizabeth Short being bisected, brutal, it is a crime of serious passion. Twenty years later,
27:59you look at Zodiac. The means of that is a firearm. Very rarely have you seen a murderer, killer,
28:07change their means. We do know that serial killers can change their MO. Do I have to say Ted Bundy,
28:16for Pete's sake? He went from these meticulous stalking scenarios and posing the bodies and having
28:25sex with the bodies post-mortem, putting on their makeup, doing their hair, freak, to wandering around
28:32with a club and hitting women in the head. Vastly different MMOs, yet the same killer. So you can't
28:42pin all of your deductions based on a changing MO. And yet online sleuths continue to challenge
28:49Baber's credibility, pointing to this image of Marvin in photoshopped glasses. There's a valid
28:56criticism of saying Alex Baber has come up with theories in the past. And those theories, with their
29:01own criticisms, may have been wrong. Why should this newest theory be correct? I literally got involved
29:08this 2007, March of 2007. I cracked it and it gave me a name. So in 2007, you got it
29:14wrong. Yes, I did.
29:15I was, uh, I believe that Lawrence Kane Klein was a Zodiac for many, many years. You don't have to
29:21sit there and throw it all out there to the universe and see what sticks. Because victims' families
29:26deserve more than that. And what about the criticism that you, it's sort of confirmation bias,
29:32that you have blinders on? It's impossible. I'm probably my own toughest critic when it comes to that.
29:37And detectives can, can tell you that themselves. I remain very excited and very open to the idea
29:44that Margolis may have been Zodiac killer. But I want to see some hard evidence. You know,
29:49a great chef knows when the cake is ready. I don't think it's quite ready. I see a potential correlation
29:58between Zodiac and Dahlia. Has it been proven beyond a reasonable doubt to me? No, it has not.
30:05But it bears investigation. Los Angeles police sources telling ABC News they are taking Baber's
30:11findings seriously and have long suspected a possible link between Black Dahlia and Zodiac. But they
30:17insist other Black Dahlia theories remain in play. Officially, the LAPD said the Black Dahlia murder
30:23investigation remains open and the department will not comment. We have run this by a still working
30:30deputy district attorney. And he said his quote was, I have convicted people on far less evidence
30:37than this. So does the investigator in you think we got him? Oh, for sure. For sure. And what level
30:45of
30:45satisfaction does that give you? It's overwhelming. After a while, a coincidence followed by coincidence
30:51and so on and so forth is no longer a coincidence. It's circumstantial evidence. Either Marvin is the
30:58most unluckiest man on the planet because everywhere he goes, there's a Zodiac crime, suspected crime,
31:02or a letter sent. Or Marvin Margolis is a Zodiac killer and the Black Dahlia avenger. Marvin Merrill,
31:09otherwise known as Marvin Margolis, died in California in 1993. What did you promise
31:15Elizabeth Short's family? I would see this through to the end.
31:20You promised you'd solve the puzzle? I promised to get answers. And I've got those answers.
31:26And what goes through your mind thinking about that promise and where you sit now?
31:33I wish she could have heard it.
31:38I can't let the son of a bitch get away with this. It's hard to ignore and walk away.
32:14It's hard to consume.
32:15So for your dreaming of a lot on death now, only makes some progress.
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