Crime Stories with Nancy Grace
ZODIAC SERIAL KILLER CASE CRACKED? LINKED TO DISMEMBERED ACTRESS?
26 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Guaranteed human. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Has the Zodiac serial killer case finally been cracked? And is it linked? to a starlet, a dismembered actress. Repeat, dismembered. Her limbs not attached to her body, severed just above the waist and positioned for a mom and her child out on a walk to find half her body. Are they connected? I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories.
Chapter 2: What is the connection between the Zodiac Killer and the Black Dahlia case?
I want to thank you for being with us.
An active serial killer terrorizes Northern California, launching a violent rampage and identifying himself through the media as the Zodiac Killer, spreading fear across the state.
The Zodiac Killer's case, very complex. But what we need to know, bottom line, he was a mad dog killer that killed seemingly at random. The MO, modus operandi, method of operation, is very, very different between the known Zodiac murders, a slew of dead bodies typically found on lover's lanes where couples were alone together,
Very, very different from the murder, the intricately planned, meticulously carried out murder of a young Hollywood starlet. Listen.
It was headlines for 30 days straight.
They had a thousand law enforcement officers working on the case. This is Los Angeles' most notorious unsolved murder.
It was Elizabeth Short. She was nude. She had been bisected at the waist. Bottom half of her body was posed obscenely.
Her body bore torture marks, and her mouth was cut ear to ear into a hideous grin.
I started looking at the crime itself. And what I discovered, to my surprise, was that the killer was a surgeon, not a meat cutter, not a butcher, a skilled professional surgeon.
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Chapter 3: How did Elizabeth Short's murder unfold and what are the details?
So the blood would have to be pulled out and hence drain. And this is something that is commonly done in butchery. You see it everywhere. When bodies are actually embalmed, the fluids are pushed through the body with a pump. I don't think that that's what's happened here. There's no indication that there's any kind of injection sites or anything like that. Let me cut the chase, Joe Scott. Yeah.
Baber and others believe that Elizabeth Short's body was bisected and likely drained at a motel, the Zodiac Motel, possibly. In the bathroom, in the bathtub. I don't see that. I'm not saying Zodiac is not the killer of Elizabeth Short yet, but I'm saying I don't think that could go down in a motel bathtub because you have to suspend the body to drain it of blood. That's where I'm going with this.
Yeah, well, it would depend upon how prepared the person was to do this. They could bring something with them, just like they would bring tools. All right. So if this is something that they've planned out in their mind, you know, and here's something curious about the bathtub. You could not go back and do this now.
But, you know, in modern cases like this, I know of at least three off the top of my head that I've covered. where you go into all of these, to the plumbing, and you pull out the drain traps, and you can find blood, you can find other tissue. People think that everything gets washed away, and that's not necessarily the case. That's something that would have had to have been done back then.
I do not believe that was done in this case, Joe Scott, and you're absolutely correct. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Dr. Angela Arnold joining us, renowned psychiatrist at Angela Arnold MD. Angela, I'm asking you for a forensic reason.
I find it hard to believe, and Baber disagrees with me, that the same man that murdered Elizabeth Short so meticulously bisected her like a surgeon, his MO, modus operandi, method of operation, In that case, it's entirely different than he wasn't seen, he was never spotted, even though he put the remains in a neighborhood area for pedestrians to find, never seen.
So how does that jive with the M.O. of the Zodiac Killer who basically hunts down whoever he can find on Lover's Lane and shoots them dead? He's actually spotted. for Pete's sake, an eyewitness sees him, is very haphazard compared to the murder of Elizabeth Short. How could that be the same person? Because I believe Elizabeth Short's killer had to go through this process, this almost
religious moment where he kills the woman. He bisects her. He drains her blood. He wipes her body down and cleans it. He poses her in a certain way. He gives her a Glasgow smile. Is that the same guy that sneaks up on lovers on Lovers Lane and shoots them dead? I do agree with you, Nancy. Since when we look at serial killers, we try to see commonalities in what they do.
And these two things are so completely different between the ritual and the haphazardness between the way this, the way the dahlia, the black dahlia was touched and manipulated and the others were not. They were stabbed and shot, but that was completely different from the way she was killed.
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Chapter 4: What forensic evidence links the Zodiac Killer to Elizabeth Short?
According to Alex Baber, therein lies the rub, what happened after the murders. That is the link between the two. Listen.
James Richardson, the Los Angeles Examiner editor, receives a phone call from a man claiming to have killed Short, who promises to send Richardson souvenirs. Three days later, the Examiner receives a manila envelope containing Short's birth certificate, business cards, and an address book with the message, Here is Dahlia's belongings, letter to follow.
The paper then receives a handwritten note, quote, Turning in Wednesday, January 29th, 10 a.m., had my fun at Police, Black Dahlia Avenger. Police wait at the location the writer specifies, but no one appears to turn themselves in.
And now joining us, the man of the hour, Alex Baber. Alex Baber is the director of the Cold Case Consultants of America, and he is the investigative consultant who says he has used AI and his own code-breaking skills to crack the Zodiac Killer's letter. He also says Zodiac is also the Black Dahlia Avenger, the killer. Alex Baber, thank you for being with us tonight. Alex...
Before I get into the evidence in the Black Dahlia Elizabeth Short case. Tell me about what happened after the murders. Both killers began taunting the police and the media. That's correct, Nancy. Thank you for having me.
What we discovered was that in both incidents, the perpetrator mailed in multiple letters to multiple newspapers to announce his crime that he committed and to take credit for it.
He had this black hood on, little slits in the eyes. He goes around killing people by rope, by gun, by knife.
And he says, I'm going to call myself Zodiac. American law enforcement has never seen anything like this.
It turned into a public obsession. The TV shows, the books, the movies.
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Chapter 5: What role does AI play in solving cold cases like the Zodiac Killer?
And I've heard other people make this claim before. So for me, scientifically, I'm gonna have to have something, I'm gonna need to see something that is scientifically connective here, the tissue here. You know, we can talk about cuts all day long.
Yeah, you're right. You're right. I hear you. Not only is there the taunting that is similar, not exactly the same, but there is more. I want you to hear this. We have identified the individual who committed these crimes. He is probably the smartest criminal to ever live. He had a medical background. He was a USC medical student, and he was also a former Marine.
Alex Baber, the co-founder of Cold Case Consultants of America, claims AI helped him definitively solve the Z13 cipher. Baber says the program narrowed down 71 million possible names to 14 based on age, gender, and possible experience with World War II code-making methods, due to the methods used in the Z480 and Z340 ciphers.
Baber then eliminated 13 of those names with old-fashioned detective work, leaving Marvin Merrill as the solution to the cryptogram. Ed Giorgio, former NSA chief codebreaker and maker, reviews Baber's work and says the methods are sound.
To the man of the hour, Alex Baber, who claims that Zodiac and the Black Dahlia Avenger is one and the same, you, by cracking that cipher along with help from AI and more, you cracked it. You're saying that it absolutely proves that Marvin Merrill is Zodiac. What did Marvin Merrill have to do with Elizabeth Short?
Okay, so to start out, we know that Marvin Margolis was the last known boyfriend of Elizabeth Short, according to the files. They lived together for 12 days in October. We know she left October 22nd under threat from him. She's on the street. She gets picked up by a guy named Glenn Kearns, who gives her a ride. They make an agreement.
Glenn returns to apartment 726 that Margolis lived in and gathers her belongings for her. And she does not go. He does it for her. That tells you how scared she is. She goes on a run from him for three months. She gets on a bus. She even heads to San Diego where she has no friends, no family, no money, no food.
It's discovered in a 24-hour theater called the Aztec by the French daughter who takes her in for 30 days with her mom, Vera. She tells them, I'm fearful of my ex-Marine boyfriend who's searching for me. That's why I'm down here hiding. And then he finds her because she makes a phone call and asks for $20 from Mark Hansen. So he shows up at the door beating on it that night.
The next day, she has Red Manley take her back to L.A. So he's stalking her for three months leading up to her murder. And there was no missing week. We identified reports, including one from Officer Merrill McBride, who had reported her approaching her in a state of hysteria on the evening of the 14th. She identified Elizabeth Short's body.
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Chapter 6: How does the M.O. of the Zodiac Killer differ from that of Elizabeth Short's murderer?
One assumed that he was in the Vista Oceanside area. The other ones are like, we don't know where our dad was, right? And then we find out that his background, we can connect directly to the area in the north while also having these overlaps between the events that took place in the crimes and his traveling or where he was at at the time. We can go all the way back to 1962.
So when he arrives in Oceanside in February of 62, A month and a half later, a cab driver named Ray Davis is murdered. And this was not from me, but if you search the internet, you'll see that there is other people who have linked him as being a possible Zodiac suspect back to 62. As a cab driver, it mimics the Paul Stein attack almost identical. There's call to law enforcement mocking them.
There's the murders committed. And then they make fun of law enforcement for not catching him. And then he threatens to take out a bus. It's almost a mirror image of what happened with Paul Stein.
so Margolis moves into Oceanside a month and a half later this murder takes place right and then the same thing happens some what seven years later and is that a coincidence every place that this guy goes every place that he lives there's either a zodiac uh crime committed there's a suspected zodiac crime committed or there's a zodiac letter melt across the nation Literally, even in Atlanta.
We'll discuss that later in our podcast, but every time this guy goes somewhere, there's a connection. Either he's the most unluckiest guy on the planet, or he's the perpetrator. When you say everywhere Margolis, aka Meryl, goes, there was a Zodiac-type killing, where? We have the ones in the Oceanside area. We have the ones in the Bay Area.
We have the letters that connect not just in those two locations or communications, but we also have those that are connected into Atlanta in early 80s. I mean, there's everywhere, literally, where this guy goes and there's a Zodiac letter mailed or cried, he's there. He has connections to it. You know what? That's very, very probative. It proves something to me.
What was holding me up was the difference in the M.O.s and the time lapse between Elizabeth Short's murder and the commencement of the Zodiac killings. But if you can nail him, Merrill, in Zodiac, I don't think it's a leap. For short, because of their relationship, it's very obvious, as Nima Rahmani said earlier, you look to who is dating or living with the person at that time, and it was Meryl.
What do you make of all these other theories? I played just a few of them. Well, there's multiple theories out there. Everybody's accused their brother, their sister, their father, their dog, their mailman. But none of them have substantiated evidence or physical evidence as we do the sketch. And, you know, we have these other things.
There's over 132 pieces of circumstantial evidence plus physical evidence that we've gathered. That's overwhelming. We spoke to one of the active DAs in Los Angeles who said he's convicted people on lesser evidence. Alex, let me ask you, you spent so much time on this cipher. What in the cipher convinces you, it's a Zodiac cipher, what in the cipher convinces you Zodiac is Merrill?
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