This is actually like a perfect locatient with the hidden driveway and the detached buck clothes.

Hey, I think they're ready.

I got it.

Seventy nine years ago today, Elizabeth Short was tortured and murdered, her body disguarded in a vacant field in Los Angeles.

In death, she became known as the Black Dahlia, the girl who was cut cleanly into the horror of what happened to her led to one of the largest and widest investigations ever mounted by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Some have called it a state of the art investigation for its time in nineteen forty seven.

Others look back and see it as flawed, with leeds unfollowed and suspects not exhaustively pursued.

Either way, no one was ever brought to justice for the killing of Elizabeth Short.

One thing that stands out very clearly from the police reports and media accounts of the day is that the investigators put a high priority on finding the so called murder room where Short was tortured and killed, the place where her body was bisected, drained of blood, and thoroughly washed before being taken to Lamert Park and discarded by the side of the road.

But as with the suspect, the place where Elizabeth Short took her last painful breadth was never found, maybe until now Citizen sleuth Alex Baber believes he has found it.

Be it seventy nine years too late, and we're going to go there with him today.

You're listening to kill her.

In the Code Solving the Black Dahlia and Zodiac cases, I'm Michael Connelly and this is chapter five, a quick recap here of where we are at.

With the help of our AI program, Public Wreckers, genealogy sites, and the self taught cryptography skills, Alex Baber spent nine months waiting through millions of possible names and solutions to the most tantalizing of cipher's left behind by the so called Zodiac Killer of Northern California.

That was the z thirteen, so named for its thirteen characters, a cipher so short it was said to be unbreakable, also known as the my name as cipher because the Zodiac claimed to have encrypted his name in his thirteen letters and symbols, in a solution that has now been independently confirmed by some of the top cryptographers in the world, Baber came up with the name Marvin Merrill, which in turn was one of a number of aliases used by Marvin Margolis, a prime suspect in the nineteen forty seven murder of Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia.

Margolis died in Santa Barbara in nineteen ninety three.

In his last year, while dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis, he drew a sketch entitled Elizabeth, which depicted a nude young woman with dark hair, signed Marty Merrill, another Margolis alias, and dated nineteen ninety two.

The sketch shows her from the waist up, eerily matching the bisection of Elizabeth Short.

There are also action lines on the torso that are similar to lacerations documented during Short's autopsy.

When Baber applied light fielding software to a photo of the sketch, he found a word hidden in the dark shading surrounding the torso.

The word was Zodiac.

Following these discoveries, Baber pulled together a team of professional investigators to continue his efforts on the cases.

The team included cold case detective Rick Jackson and MITCHI Roberts, who retired from the Los Angeles Police department as supervisor of the cold case in it.

She was also the custodian of the Black Dalia case files for the last fifteen years of her career.

An update on the Elizabeth sketch is that Margolus's son turned the sketch over to Baber's team for a professional analysis.

Roberts took it to an independent forensic analyst named George Reese of Imaging Consultants.

During his ninety minute study of the sketch witnessed by Roberts and myself, Reese, who donated his time to the project, used several different lighting and filtering techniques to confirm the existence of the hidden word.

Reese was also able to determine that the hidden word was added to the sketch with a pencil, as were several other shadings and highlights on the piece.

Graphight shading around the marks on the torso give it the appearance of a blood smear.

You can see the sketch for yourself on killernnecode dot com.

Because the graph ight from the pencil overlays the black marker used to create the main image of the sketch, it appears that the pencil was used to add final accents to the piece.

Curiously, when Reese removed the sketch from its frame for the analysis, he found another sketch beneath it.

It was possibly added to keep the Elizabeth image from slipping in its matted frame.

The new sketches both sides of a piece of paper and depicts four in versions of neckties that say Ross Perot for President.

In a way, it helps date the Elizabeth sketch because Piot unsuccessfully ran for president of the United States in nineteen ninety two, Margolis's last full year of life.

We also have some updates regarding the work done on the Zodiac codes.

We reported in episode four that an amateur cryptographer in Stockholm, Sweden, took Alex Baber's methodology for breaking Z thirteen and applied it to what is known as Z eighteen, which refers to the final eighteen characters of the Zodiac's first cipher, Z four eight That cipher was largely decoded way back in nineteen sixty nine, shortly after it was sent in three parts to three different Bay Area newspapers.

However, the last line of the cipher was not decoded and thought for decades to be extra symbols.

Phil added to make the three parts equal in length.

But a pattern analyst named Thomas Hefner in Stockholm used Baber's method and found it to include the name Marvin Merrill.

Now the independent team of former NSA codebreakers brought in to backcheck Baber's code work have analyzed Hefner's work.

They have concluded that, using three different methodologies of code breaking, including Babers, that de encryption comes back to Marvin Merrill.

On z eighteen, here is Ed Georgio, former chief codebreaker for the NSA and leader of the independent team of cryptographers that agreed to batcheck Baber's work.

It is certainly getting solid by the day.

As I mentioned, the simple intersection.

Of the possible names under the Baver solution with potential suspects in either case only has one name on it.

It's Marvin Merrill.

So even before I go to the new evidence, Martin Merrill is a very strong candidate.

Now we showed earlier that when Patrick Henry discovered the keyword Elizabeth, that made it even more likely, and now we have additional confirmation from Thomas Hefner.

His initial observation which was later, as I mentioned, extended by Patrick and.

Rich is yet another confirmation that we have it correct.

So the bottom line is that when you look at the combination of two cipher messages, one name, one keyword Elizabeth, one encryption method, and the potential keyword Jerry Joe.

And so the evidence went from likely to very likely to very very likely to almost beyond the shadow of a doubt likely.

And from Sweden we go to Australia where a longtime Zodiac analyst named Paul Brookbanks has confirmed Baber's interpretation of Z thirty two and taken it a few steps further.

A landscape architect by trade, brook Banks has been fascinated by the Z thirty two because of the clues supplied by the Zodiac, saying that the cipher concerns radiance and measurements on a map.

The solution brook Banks independently plotted match Babers, which charted a path on a Zodiac provided map to Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, the place where Elizabeth Short is buried.

You know, I was hovering and all that areas and looking trying to scale along that area.

There's not much else there, But it was really Alex that's pinpointed that as mountain VW symmetry because I just didn't know the significance of Mountain view symmetry.

I think it's a really good story that you've got.

You know, two people on different sides of the world come up the same solution.

That's good validation.

You know, it's a reasonable suggest that this is a correct solution and a really compelling solution.

You can go to our website for a link to Brookbanks YouTube channel where he discusses Z thirty two and other aspects of the Zodiac case.

Now let's go back to the search for the scene of the crime, the place where Elizabeth Short met her demise.

I say up front that we are speculating here based on the facts of the original investigation into the death of the Black Dahlia.

Short's bisected body was found January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven, alongside South Norton Avenue in an area known as Leemurk Park.

It was less than two years since the end of World War II and the eve of the massive post war growth the city would see.

The area where the body was discarded was not yet fully developed.

Crime scene photos show a vast emptiness surrounding the spot where Elizabeth Short's body was found.

Captain Jack Donague, who was in charge of the investigation for the LAPD, said the area was known as a lover's Lane.

There would be an erie corollary to this twenty two years later, when the Zodiac would start shooting couples in remote lover's lane areas in the North Bay.

From the start, the police mounted a strong effort to find the place where Short was tortured and killed.

It was suspected that she was likely bisected in a bathtub, her body scrubbed afterward with a stiff brush that left coconut bristles on her body.

Here is veteran homicide investigator Rich Jackson.

No word a murder took place the crime scene.

It would be a major thing to.

Have.

You have potential for witnesses, you have potential for tons of forensics, especially in a case like this, So there's so many things that can be gleaned from having that answer and an investigation.

During the initial stages of the investigation, Captain Donyue sent a failings of officers, a mix of detectives and uniformed officers into the area where the body was found to question nearby residents.

And attempt to find the killing room.

Eventually, the search expanded, and Doniue later told reporters that it was believed that Short was likely slain outside of the populated areas of the city and then brought back to the field of Norton Avenue.

Two days after the murder, the Los Angeles City Council put up a reward of ten thousand dollars for information leading to an arrest in the case.

Rewards often bring in calls from the cranks and the crazies.

Here's Rick Jackson again.

To control a reward, it can be a nightmare.

You're going to get a lot of people calling, especially on a high profile case like this.

It's time consuming, but it doesn't hurt to try if you strike out, because the worst that could happen is you don't get anything, and then the money is not spent.

But yet you're you know, you're shut out from getting any any helpful information.

When three different people report the same thing, you take notice.

Operators of three different motels in the South Bay area reported them.

On the night of the murder, a nervous young man came to their motel and asked if their rooms had bath tubs, he said that his wife was ill and under doctor's care and needed to use a tub.

In each incidence, the motel employees said they noticed that the man had parked a black four door Sedan a good distance from the motel.

A crucial call on crucial information like this were three independent, non connected people calling with the same type of information.

That's huge.

King on the idea that Short's body may have been bisected and washed in a bathtub, the focus of the investigation shifted to the South Bay.

The three motels were clustered along a stretch of what was Route one sixty five, which would later become the Harbor Freeway.

All three of the motel operators gave the same description of the quote, jittery, nervous man seeking a room with a bathtub.

He had bushy blonde hair, was five foot nine and twenty one to twenty three years old.

When the night Elizabeth Short was murdered, Mark van Margolis was twenty one years old.

His military records placed him at five foot ten, though in later photos he has light brown hair.

He was described to police by at least one person who knew him back in nineteen forty seven as having blonde highlights or dirty blonde hair.

All the accounts were between twenty one and twenty three years of age, and Marvin's right in the middle of it.

So he's literally a fitting description.

Had they said.

Twenty five to thirty, that would have been an obstacle we'd have to overcome.

But for them to inipily give this same age range across the board is very compelling to us as far as investigators like they knew that this guy was younger and they anticipated being in his early twenties.

Two weeks after the murder, another citizen came forward.

An investigator for the DMD said on the night of the murder that she had been waiting at a bus stop just northwest of the three motels.

She set a blood curdling scream, drew her attention to a passing car, black four door sed Anne, where she saw a woman struggling with a man in the back seat while a second man was driving and a second woman was in the front passenger seat.

Could that have been Elizabeth Shore trying to escape from her ex boyfriend Marvin Margolis.

If so, it meant Margolis had accomplices.

We'll talk about that possibility later in the podcast.

What Alex Baber did with this information was charged these four reports on a map that also included Elizabeth Short's final destination on South Nordon Avenue.

These stops showed that the man looking for a bathtub was moving south from the motel to motel, but the report from the DMV investigator included her observation that the car was heading north.

Where it is I took him out, but it took two pens up with a pen at the corner of San Antonio and Orange, which is where Arlene Donalson said she witnessed the account the pen in Limc Park where her body was discovered The next day, you cannet the arm.

I searched out using the archives of any motels, hotels, or auto courts within that area.

He came across an advertisement in a local paper that caught his eye.

It was the announcement of a new motel opening in June of nineteen forty six.

It offered one bedroom bungalows with a bath and it was called the Zodiac Motel.

That was a one of those moments, as we referred to as AHA moment.

Once I noticed the name in the correlation between what we uncovered with Marvin in North Bay and then the motel Right at that moment, I was on the track of okay, this could be a possibility as being an inspiration or a origin of the moniker.

And then at that point, once identified the details about the rooms being not individual and the motel having bathtubs, I knew then that this was the location that Elizabeth Short was murdered.

At Baber's confidence.

Aside, there are no records available from the Zodiac Motel that would confirm whether Marvin Margolis ever checked into one of its bungalows.

It also is not clear whether the advertisement of a bath meant a bathtub or an inunit bathroom.

Still, when you consider the secret word hidden in that Elizabeth sketch and Margolis' is alias being found in two of the Zodiac ciphers, it's a coincidence that cannot be easily dismissed.

That's why Baber and members of his team went there on a recent morning to see and get a feel for the place for themselves.

Yes, the twenty two bungalows of the Zodiac Motel still stand on North Santa Fe Avenue in Compton, though they were converted to apartments long ago.

They are neatly kept and painted in warm colors.

Two opposing rows of eleven free standing bunks with bars on their windows.

If Margols brought Elizabeth Short here seventy nine years ago at the end of a night's search for a room with a bathtub, and he lect into finding a place on the fly that would have been most suitable for murder, it was called a motor court in nineteen forty seven, the kind of place that served a post war Los Angeles where freeways were coming and the population would shift from cable cars and trolleys to the automobile.

It was the dawn of what was to be in autotopia, And at the Zodiac Motel, every bungalow came with its own parking space on the side and an entrance just steps from the car door.

This is Missy Roberts.

I just think it's so interesting, these concealed parking areas between the buildings.

But it's also interesting too as an investigator.

I want to get in there and I want to see, you know, I want to see the bathtub, and I want to see the layout, and I want more knowledge to again put those pieces together that are missing.

We as a resident of the complex if we could take a look inside his bungalow.

He allowed us in, but when we checked out the unit's bathroom, there was no tub, only a foam booth sized shower.

But a careful inspection of the apartment's layout revealed what appeared to have been a renovation in which an area in the bathroom that was the size of a bathtub was at some point divided into creating the small shower in the bathroom and a space in the adjoining kitchenette for a full size refrigerator to be recessed into the newly created space.

This would fit with social and cultural history.

The Zodiac Motel was built shortly after the end of the Second World War, opening its doors in mid nineteen forty six.

It lasted five years as a motel and then became apartments.

During the post war prosperity of the nineteen fifties, full size refrigerators became a household staple.

That trend could have dictated a renovation that would remove the tub to create space for the bigger capacity cold storage.

Despite the cheery pastel colors of the bungalows of the former Zodiac Motel, there was something haunting about the place.

It was sad to think about it possibly being the last stop in the short life of the Black Dahlia.

It's a bit eerie, of course, to think that anytime you think that somebody lost their life at a location is the sort of hollow ground.

It certainly felt that way to me.

I'm Michael Conley, and you've been listening to Killer in the Code Solving the Black Dahlia in Zodiac Cases.

We'll be back with chapter six soon.

When we tried to decode perhaps the biggest cipher of them all, Marvin Martin.

We're going to track him across time and murder.

This episode was written and produced by Michael Conley.

It was edited by Terrell Lee Langford, with sound design and music by Mark Henry Phillips.

Subscribe to the podcast so you'll be informed of new episodes, and check out killerindecode dot com for information on the investigation.

Thank you for listening.