After nearly 80 years, hope for answers to the infamous 1947 Black Dahlia murder had faded into nothingness.
It was, as best-selling writer Michael Connelly said in 2024, “an unsolvable case.” One for which he imagined a different outcome in his then-new book, “The Waiting,” to “keep the lure of the case alive, so that in a way it’s solved, but unsolved.”
“I just thought, ‘Hey, I write about L.A. in novels now for 30 years,” Connelly said then about his thrillers, which included popular series about LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch and detective Renee Ballard, head of the LAPD cold-case unit. “I should at least say something about this most notorious case.’”
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Alex Baber, founder of Cold Case Consultants of America, discovered in researching the Zodiac Killer which pointed to one man as responsible for both those murders in Northern California as well as the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles. Michael Connelly’s podcast Killer in the Code explores those cases and Baber’s investigation and evidence. (Photo courtesy of Alex Baber and Killer in the Code podcast.)
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Alex Baber, founder of Cold Case Consultants of America, discovered in researching the Zodiac Killer which pointed to one man as responsible for both those murders in Northern California as well as the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles. Michael Connelly’s podcast Killer in the Code explores those cases and Baber’s investigation and evidence. (Photo courtesy of Alex Baber and Killer in the Code podcast.)
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Then, six or seven months after that interview, Connelly heard from former LAPD homicide detective Rick Jackson, his model for Bosch, and former LAPD cold-case chief Mitzi Roberts, his inspiration for Ballard, with news that felt impossible to believe.
The Black Dahlia case was solved, and, oh yeah, the killer was also the Zodiac Killer, responsible for at least five murders in Northern California in 1968 and 1969.
Let that sink in: One man, two of the most sensational unsolved murder cases this side of Jack the Ripper.
In the new podcast, “Killer in the Code,” Connelly explores how a citizen sleuth named Alex Baber, using cutting-edge technology, including AI, alongside old-fashioned gumshoe investigative work, discovered new evidence in both cases that has convinced those who’ve studied it that these infamous cold cases can be closed.
Simply put, Baber’s team cracked one of the Zodiac Killer’s never-before-solved ciphers – which he’d said in the letter that delivered it concealed his true identity name – and revealed the name Marvin Merrill. Further investigative work discovered that this was an alias used by a man born Marvin Margolis.
Margolis was listed in contemporaneous LAPD and grand jury documents as a suspect in the Black Dahlia murder. This was in part because Elizabeth Short, the woman who after death became known as the Black Dahlia, had lived briefly with Margolis in a Hollywood apartment, a fact the pre-med student lied about when first questioned by police.
Baber, founder of Cold Case Consultants of America, went looking for someone in Bay Area law enforcement to whom he could present his findings. He found Jackson, the former LAPD detective, now working as a cold-case investigator for San Mateo County, Connelly says. Jackson and his partner, Dave Tresmontan, met with Baber and were impressed.
“There was a giant coincidence that Rick Jackson’s former partner at LAPD was Mitzi Roberts, who was custodian of the Black Dahlia case for about 15 years until she retired last year,” Connelly says. “So Rick said, ‘You’re in luck, or you’re in trouble, because I know the person who knows more about this case than anyone alive at the moment.”
Roberts was also impressed by what Baber’s team had found, too; in May 2025, she and Jackson suggested Baber talk to Connelly to see if he might be interested in helping bring the story to the public.
“I’m very skeptical,” Connelly says of first hearing Baber’s findings. “But Alex was three for three with homicide detectives who have about 75 years experience between them all.
“Rick was pretty much all-in right from the beginning,” he says. “Mitzi had a hesitation that was the same as mine, and that is that I don’t know the first thing about breaking codes.
“All this works and this is amazing, and it’s mind-boggling if the codework can be confirmed.”
Connelly, a former Los Angeles Times police reporter, worked to confirm the cryptology and other aspects of Baber’s investigation. His podcast, “Killer in the Code,” launched earlier this month on all the major podcasting platforms.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Connelly talked about how he was convinced of Baber’s conclusions, the revelations the investigation reveals, as well as an update on his work in fiction and television.
A: So how did you confirm that Baber had accurately cracked the Zodiac cryptogram?
Q: My job was to find somebody outside of Alex, who doesn’t even know Alex, to look at this. Somebody very credible. And I’m very lucky that I have a brother who used to work for the NSA [National Security Agency] and is now a professor of cybersecurity. I went to him and said, “Who would I go to for this?”
He said, “Well, active NSA, they’re not going to be allowed to talk to you, but there’s a guy who’s a living legend, who spent 30 years at the NSA and was the only guy that was ever the top code breaker and then became the top code maker.” He said I can go to him and see if he’ll talk to you. And that was Ed Giorgio.
Q: And he said yes.
A: When he heard it, he said, “I’ll work on this and let the chips fall where they fall. And I’m also going to have it peer-reviewed.” Because Ed actually runs an email list-serve of about 80 cryptographers from around the world.
They confirmed what Alex did and actually took it further in terms of finding out keywords and so forth. [One keyword used in making the cipher was “Elizabeth,” they learned. Another piece of code revealed the name “Cheri Jo,” which seemed to prove that the long-held belief that the Zodiac had killed Riverside college student Cheri Jo Bates two years before his Bay Area spree began.]
At that point, I was totally convinced, and so was Mitzi. And when you add in the stuff beyond the code-breaking and all these different things, the bottom line for me is the totality of the evidence that has been collected so far. It’s overwhelming.
I don’t know if you’ve heard the latest podcast, but some guy weighing in from Stockholm, Sweden, has added a very significant piece of corroborating evidence. [Thomas Hefner, using Baber’s methodology, solved another previously uncracked Zodiac cipher and found it also hid the name Marvin Merrill.]
Q: When did you join the project?
A: I was first contacted in May. I didn’t get to Ed Giorgio until almost all the way to September. He’s a busy guy, as he says in [the podcast]. He’s actually working on a very altruistic program of identifying the bad people on the internet.
So I kind of laid low on it. I did some checking that I could do on Alex. Alex is a character. He rubs people the wrong way. He’s rubbed me the wrong way. And that adds to some of the skepticism. I should say a lot of the skepticism. And he’s made some wrong steps with people, and then they go on the internet and light him up. [Baber’s confidence has rankled others in the internet citizen sleuth world.]
Q: Was it Alex who reached out to you? Or Rick or Mitzi?
A: Alex might be a self-proclaimed autodidact polymath, but he doesn’t really know a lot about the media and [Jackson and Roberts] thought he was making some wrong steps in who he was trying to reach out to. So they said you should really talk to Michael. Not that I know everything about media, but I’m 30 years into dealing with the media [as an author] and before that, I was part of the media.
Q: Tell me more about how you went from skeptical to convinced.
A: I think my trust in Mitzi Roberts and Rick Jackson was a very convincing thing for me. I write about murder cases. I’ve never solved one.
It was very strange that I spent some time with her [in working on 2024’s “The Waiting”], asking about the Black Dahlia in larger parameters, so I could fit a fictional story. And then, like six months later, they bring me Alex Baber, who says he’s solved it. How do you solve something that old? I am very skeptical.
Q: Has Baber’s work been taken to the LAPD or other active law enforcement?
A: We have talked to active police and prosecutors, and I don’t know if they’ll ever be interested in taking this further, because our suspect is dead. There’s no one to prosecute, and then it becomes a question of, do you take somebody or a pair of detectives off cases, where there are live killers out there, to go down this path that is very complicated?
We went to an active [Los Angeles County] prosecutor, and that’s what he told us. He said, “I’ve gotten convictions with less evidence than this, but there’s nothing I can do because we prosecute people who are alive. We’re not in the business of stamping something closed where there’s no prosecution involved.” So that’s what we face on an official level.
So that kind of says to me I can do 10 episodes of a podcast saying it’s Marvin Merrill, it’s Marvin Merrill but, you know, it’s just going to probably add to the lore of it even though everyone on this team feels very convinced that it was him.
Q: After the reveal of Miller’s name in the cryptogram, what are some of the other holy cow moments for you in the investigation?
A: The sketch and the phone booth thing. They’re like, “Oh wow!”
[Baber tracked down Merrill’s son, who had a sketch his father did shortly before his death, depicting a young woman with apparent wounds on her torso and the title “Elizabeth.” Forensic exam found the word “Zodiac” hidden in the drawing. Baber’s investigation also discovered that a Vallejo phone booth that the Zodiac used to tell police where to find two victims was within eyesight of a house where Elizabeth Short had lived with her father.]
The phone booth, because one of the big boxes you’ve got to check is his proximity. We’re talking with the Dahlia almost 80 years, with Zodiac 50. We’re never going to say Marvin Merrill was on this street on that day. That’s never going to happen.
But to find his name twice in the ciphers, it’s just pretty amazing.
Q: I’ve seen that not everyone who talks about the Zodiac and the Black Dahlia online is convinced yet.
A: This is another story. I’ve got to do an episode on this, just the whole social media construct of people who have invested so much of their time into this stuff. There’s so many people saying this is all phony and I’ve been played, but at the same time they’re saying, “But I’m not going to even listen to it.”
We have stepped into people’s lives and they don’t want us in their lives because we’re saying something counter to what they’ve invested a lot of time in.
Q: Will it be 10 episodes? Or is that still fluid?
A: I plan to do eight, but as we go along, I know we’re getting more information. We started with one family member [of Marvin Merrill] talking to us, and now we have more. The two homicide detectives say this is how it happens. You get the ball rolling, and then stuff starts coming in.
And we’re trying to be as transparent as we can be because we know there are people pot-shotting Alex as a character. So I’ve been talking to law professors, defense attorneys, prosecutors. I’m going to add an episode where they can have at it. Here’s what we’ve got, tell me what you think?
Would you be able to convict somebody? As a defense attorney, would you be able to get them off? That wasn’t planned for before, but I feel that’s going to be a pretty good episode.
Q: Solving one of these cases would be crazy after all these years. But to have them linked to the same person?
A: Well, someone else did this [speculated that the Black Dahlia and Zodiac were the same person], but linked to a different person, like 25 years ago. The book was called “Black Dahlia Avenger” by Steve Hodel. [Hodel, a former LAPD detective, believed his father, Dr. George Hodel, who was a suspect in the Black Dahlia case, was also the Zodiac.]
That got so much attention, the police chief at the time told the cold-case unit to take the book and confirm or say what’s wrong with it, and they pretty much shot it down.
Q: How many episodes are finished?
A: The four that are out are the only four that are done. The one that came out today was finished yesterday at 2 p.m. It allows us [if] something new comes in or something doesn’t seem right to add or take stuff out. It does kind of remind me of my days in daily journalism.
I was down in your neck of the woods today. I was in Santa Ana, taking the sketch to a forensic expert to be analyzed. Stuff is happening every day.
Q: What were you having him look at?
A: Verifying the hidden word [on the Elizabeth sketch] because that was something Alex found, and I just demand we independently confirm everything. In a preliminary thing, he did tell me I had something wrong in the first episode. He said [the word “Zodiac”] wasn’t underneath [the drawing], it was on top of the drawing and then covered again.
Q: Do you expect to continue with the story past the podcast – documentary, book, TV or movie adaptations?
A: There’s interest in all that stuff, but that’s not going to include me. My goal, when I heard this story, is something in me as a former journalist, and I said, “I want to break this story.” I think I’ve done that. At the end of the day, I’m a book writer. I have to get back to work.
I actually put aside a Harry Bosch and Renee Ballard book to work with the inspirations for those characters on this, and I really can’t wait to get back to it.
Q: So this year you’ll release that after the second Detective Stillwell book? Where are things with the TV series?
A: We start filming season two of “Ballard” next month. Season four of “The Lincoln Lawyer” comes out next month, and then we’ll soon film season five. And we have this Bosch prequel that’s also coming close to production. It’s “Bosch: Start of Watch, and it’s Bosch as a rookie patrol officer in 1992 Los Angeles.
Obviously, a very tense time in the city. A lot of interesting storytelling to do there.
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