07/17/2026
The Zodiac Killer murdered at least 5 people across northern California in the late 1960s, mocked investigators with coded letters, and left one cipher, the 13-character Z13, uncracked for more than half a century.
Baber, an amateur investigator who built the AI program himself, says it decoded Z13 into a name: Marvin Merrill. The program combed millions of military, census, marriage, birth, and Social Security records for 13-letter names that fit the cipher, and Baber filtered the hits against the Zodiac's known age, race, height, and California ties.
Merrill turned out to be an alias for Marvin Skipton Margolis, a former suspect in the 1947 killing of Elizabeth Short, the aspiring Hollywood actress the papers called "the Black Dahlia." Margolis had briefly dated Short and lived with her for two weeks months before her murder. He initially lied to police about knowing her before admitting the relationship under questioning.
Margolis was a former Navy hospital corpsman who had studied medicine, dissected a cadaver, and reportedly had experience with weapons, engineering, and cryptography. Baber says he matched the Zodiac's physical description and repeatedly lived near locations tied to the killings, including a phone booth the Zodiac used to call police that sat within sight of a house where Short had once lived with her father. Baber also believes Short may have been killed and cleaned inside a Compton motel called the Zodiac Motel, which had a bathtub and later changed its name.
Margolis's son reportedly recognized the Zodiac letters as resembling his father's handwriting, and owned a 1992 painting by him titled "Elizabeth" that Baber believes depicts Short's injuries. A high-definition scan allegedly revealed the word "ZoDiac" hidden beneath the paint, which Baber describes as a possible deathbed confession.
Some retired detectives and cryptography experts back the theory, and the LAPD is reportedly testing Margolis's old fingerprint card. Critics counter that the cipher method is questionable and the two crimes' styles are very different. Both cases remain officially unsolved.
Based on reporting by Josie Ensor, published June 21, 2026 in The Sunday Times.
****Pulled from The Creepy Catalog
