I always push back on this, namely because what Zodic did took a sick, twisted, version of balls, and much like a bankrupt summer camp, Ted Cruz has no balls.
Watch the doc. It's actually insane this guy wasn't arrested. He also ended up confessing on his death bed and was the lead suspect. The murders stopped when he was arrested for molesting a child and the letters restarted when he was released from prison. But the police even had him in the area of the crimes. Always with a terrible alibi. Crazy amount of circumstantial evidence but they couldn't find anything concrete enough to charge him when they searched his property. Basically everyone that knew the guy including himself said he was the Zodiak.
As I said before, I have watched it. If you think it *had to be him and only him based upon that, then Arthur Leigh Allan isn’t the only individual mentioned in this conversation whose has ceased to have meaningful function above his tentorium.
And do share all the other evidence you said that was consistent with it not being him?
The dude bragged about shooting people on Lover's Lane.
As far as I know they basically couldn't get a fingerprint or DNA match what samples they had. That's it. Everything else points to him. And those samples were poor quality.
I take it you've never seen anything about how common it is for people to falsely claiming to be responsible for high profile crimes. Look at the "Geordie accent" false lead in the Yorkshire Ripper case
His DNA and fingerprints not matching would be the big ones. Also the cop who saw Paul Stine's killer said he was at least 100 lbs heavier than the person he saw. The dispatcher said that he did not sound like the man who called in.
Personally, I suspect that the same person committed all of the crimes and that whomever wrote the letters took responsibility for a few things he did not personally do just to scare the hell out of people. It wouldn't be the first time there were two independent serial killers operating in an area at a time.
I suspect Arthur Leigh Allan might have been responsible for at least one of the initial shootings but I don't think the evidence is sufficient to pin all the killings on him especially not the Stine case which is the one with the strongest evidentiary link to the letter writer since their is no physical evidence that ties him to the letters and the best witness said it wasn't him.
This was extremely convincing and well done. Essentially all evidence points to him and he even confessed. The killings line up exactly with his location and stop when he is arrested and jailed.
What were the gaps? He was the lead suspect AND confessed on his death bed? He even admitted to being in the area of the crime scenes around the time of the murders. Everyone that knew him said it was him.
I agree that the use of AI to uncover facts is a bad idea, due to hallucination etc.
But to be fair, the article does not claim that the suspect was determined by AI. It says that AI was used to create a list of millions of possible suspects. Then it says the list was narrowed to this guy (doesn’t say how, doesn’t imply that AI was the determining factor in landing on this guy).
It also says that the Zodiac Motel was discovered by AI, but that seems to mean that he just used a search engine that incorporates AI (they most do these days). At any rate, the motel point is irrelevant because the LA Times is reporting as fact that there was a motel named Zodiac at that address at that time with a bathtub. Since its existence is corroborated, the manner in which the guy found the motel is irrelevant.
They absolutely do say how. The guy repeats about 5x throughout the article that his autism showed him the way. This isn't me using internet insults either, go ahead and ctrl+f autism on the article.
You'd have to look deeper into it, but it seems pretty accepted that the police either knew who did it, or had a very good idea who did it, and deemed it in their best interest to shrug their shoulders. The dahlia, that is.
It's unfortunately one of those cases where in order to secure a conviction they'd need an absolutely water tight case. The most likely suspect was extremely wealthy and well connected and would be able to buy his way out of a conviction with anything else.
There is that. The main suspect is indeed dead. Unfortunately there's still enough obfuscation around the evidence, so this case won't ever be properly solved.
I think this is a good point. However, keep in mind that this guy was the Dahlia victim’s ex boyfriend and one of the key suspects in her death. If the Zodiac Killer said he was the Dahlia killer, it could have narrowed the suspects for the Zodiac quickly and led to his discovery.
Personally, I’m not convinced this solution is accurate, because it all hinges on the decoding and I’m not qualified enough in encryption to have a meaningful opinion. The surrounding evidence is circumstantial. But the experts who support the decoding do seem quite qualified, so I think this should not be dismissed out of hand.
Y'all should maybe read the article. It says two cryptographers signed off on the conclusion; AI was not used for the actual cryptography.
Giorgio said that many people have approached him over the years with similar claims, which were easily debunked.
“All of Alex’s work checked out to me,” he said. To verify his work, Giorgio contacted two other former NSA crypto-mathematicians, Patrick Henry and Rich Wisniewski.
Not only did they endorse the Z13 solution, but Henry discovered another detail cementing the link between the two unsolved cases: the Zodiac code was generated by the key word “Elizabeth.”
Sadly there are no details on how the cryptographic part actually works...
Yes, this was what was exciting to me, the fact that multiple mathematicians and cryptographers examined his work on the code and said it checked out. Why are people not more excited that the code was solved? Is there an expert that disagrees or something? What am I missing?
How many people did Henry Lee Lucas claim to kill? Tommy Lynn Sells? That claim from the Zodiac is very likely a bit of exaggeration designed to scare people and build up the myths around him.
IDK whether the guy in the article is Zodiac. But the 3 Robbins described the Zodiac as in his early 40's, and Officer Fouke described him as 35-45. So there is a good chance the Zodiac was middle aged.
He was a surgical student with severe PTSD from being a Navy corpsman during World War II. He also happened to live with the Black Dahlia for 3 months prior to her death. He moved and lived in several states in the 20-year gap and happened to be in the San Francisco Bay Area during the zodiac killings. He was in his early twenties during the first killing and early forties during the Zodiac murders.
I mean they do this all the time, first it was... "was the Unabomber and Golden State Killer the same person? OR the Zodiac killer and Unabomber the same person? Or are they all fucking D.B. Cooper? LOL Like the human brain if obsessed enough can connect and decode whatever they want and make it make sense in their own minds. That's why the bible code and Nostradamus stuff was always hilarious to me.
Isn't there a nut case detective who thinks Edward Edwards was responsible for everything from Black Dahlia to Zodiac to Jimmy Hoffa and JB Ramsey and more? LMAO.
There's also a guy, who at one time was a reputable detective, who has gone completely off the deep end trying to convince people that his dad killed Elizabeth Short.
How can this article 1. Not have the details on how to solve the cypher 2. Not include a photo of the Elizabeth Zodiac drawing 3. Mention why the reasons it’s unlikely to be the same person?
This article is fairly explicit that this solution is a result of several assumptions, maybe likely assumptions, but assumptions nonetheless. It even says “We have a proposed solution from Alex Baber, but this is just one of many possible solutions.”
The biggest assumption Baber made is the character substitution key, which is selected in order to force the result marvin merrill. It's not a solution, it's backwards forcing.
I didn’t think about it in those words but you’re right, it’s definitely just backwards forcing. It also assumes that he’d use his alias and not his real name.
What??? A couple of paragraphs in and the BS already stinks to high heaven. Actual information from the LAPD states that Margolis was investigated and cleared. The story about him fleeing to Chicago looks like a rip-off of the (also BS) story about George Hodel escaping to the Philippines to get the cops off his tail (in fact Hodel was also investigated and cleared).
You’re cherry picking the article — it makes clear the LAPD continued to consider him a suspect in the Dahlia killing, and that the extent of his “clearing” was an undisclosed alibi for a period of time that doesn’t include all the possible times in which Short could have been killed.
It’s plain and simple that a victim’s ex-boyfriend — any victim’s ex-boyfriend — is one of the prime suspects in any murder. Extra evidence only underlines that — eg the fact that he was suffering from PTSD, that a year before his death he had a drawing of a naked woman labeled Elizabeth, that he was in medical school, that he was a Marine when the victim apparently feared for her life from
a Marine ex-boyfriend.
Certainly the Zodiac stuff is a step much further than that, hinging on cryptography stuff which I don’t know enough to judge. But undoubtedly he’s a major suspect in Dahlia, one that anyone would be crazy to discount.
Margolis was ruled out on the basis that police assumed whoever killed Short had abducted her as far back as a week from the murder.
His alibi fit that theory, IE, he had an alibi for multiple days prior to the murder, not the immediate day before.
Also, the Zodiac case is perhaps the worst case of all time to pedal the “police = correct” argument. The killer would have been caught after the Stine murder if it weren’t for the most incomprehensible and still unexplainable dispatch message, which told police to search for a black man rather than a white man, leading two officers to cruise past someone in immediate proximity to the site due to him being white.
Amongst many other examples, you also have the lead investigator likely fabricating Zodiac letters, one of those two officers claimed they spoke to that suspect they cruised past, while the other claims no such thing occurred.
There is a mountain of shoddy police work that led to Zodiac becoming the infamous cold case(s) we read about today.
This is a solid theory (one of my favourite Zodiac theories) and I’m open to it until it gets shut down by someone of note.
We don’t actually know the details of his alibi, so it’s speculation on your part to state that he didn’t have an alibi for the day before. The actual report uses the phrase “during the time the victim was missing” which would include the day before. This is the problem with Black Dahlia theories. They all rest upon surmises and speculation like this.
The codebreaker's putative solution seems far more likely re: Black Dahlia. The speculation on Margolis' connection to Zodiac is based on so little as to be worthless.
So, he kills a woman, in a highly specific way at a random hotel. Then waits 20 years before killing multiple people in an entirely unrelated & incomparable way, naming himself after the hotel he committed Murder 1 in and sending ciphers to mock the police.
And the conclusion is this is the same guy? If there is any hotel connection here it's that the name inspired the Zodiac, but if the fact the Dahlia happened there wasn't well known anyway, then it's entirely coincidental. There are multiple hotels, all around the world, called Zodiac. It's also not an uncommon word in general use anyway!
A guy calling himself Zodiac in California, and a Zodiac hotel even within 100 miles is not a connection. This article actually does a fine job of explaining why he links Margolis & the hotel to Short, but basically just goes "woooo Zodiac!" afterwards.
But it's an unverified claim because there's no other evidence to confirm it. That's what you keep missing.
Also, in any profession, if you ask around enough you'll find someone who wants attention enough to support any claim that will get their name in a news story as an expert.
Are we pretending Cecilia Shepherd wasn't brutally stabbed to death? How did Elizabeth Short die again? Did the Black Dhalia murderer not mail the Los Angeles Examiner Short's personal items such as birth certificate, Social security card etc as well as a letter praising their coverage of the case?
Yes but the Dahlia killer displayed a level of organization and executive function that is extremely unusual for this type of killer, while the Zodiac was chaotic and nervous (hands shaking during the Hartnell/Shepherd attack). The similarities are few and the differences are great.
I’m usually the first person to roll my eyes at “amateur sleuth SOLVES legendary cold case” stories. 99% of the time it’s pattern-matching, vibes, and wishful thinking. But the more you dig into the Margolis angle, the harder it is to just say “yeah right” and move on.
Police already had Marvin Margolis on their radar back in 1947. He wasn’t some random name pulled out of thin air, he lived with Elizabeth Short shortly before her death, lied to detectives about how well he knew her, had medical training as a Navy corpsman, and had documented psychological issues from the war. Then he abruptly moved, changed his name, and essentially vanished. Among all the suspects, he was the only pre-med student known to have been romantically involved with her. That alone is a pretty big red flag. Fast-forward to the late ’60s: Margolis was living in the Bay Area during the exact window of the Zodiac murders in. At one of the Zodiac crime scenes, investigators documented a shoe print believed to belong to the killer's, identified as Navy-issued “wing walkers.” Margolis was a Navy veteran and bared a pretty uncanny resemblance to the police sketch of the Zodiac at the time. Then you’ve got an amateur investigator who doesn’t just claim to have cracked the Zodiac’s Z13 cipher, but gets multiple former NSA cryptographers to independently verify his work. The name that allegedly comes out of the cipher? “Marvin Merrill”, the alias Margolis used for most of his adult life. On top of that, the cipher key reportedly centers on the name “Elizabeth,” which is hard to ignore. Add in the timeline issues that may have allowed Margolis to skate on an early alibi, his anatomical experience, his repeated use of aliases, the later artwork that eerily echoes the Black Dahlia case, and even the possible origin of the “Zodiac” name itself, and you start getting a pile of circumstantial evidence. None of these things alone prove anything, but together, it’s a lot of smoke.
Is it courtroom-ready, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt proof? No. And with Margolis long dead, it probably never will be. But this also isn’t your usual YouTube cork board theory. When retired homicide detectives, cold-case specialists, and ex-NSA cryptographers all independently say “we can’t find the holes,” that’s when I stop dismissing it outright. At minimum, it’s one of the strongest circumstantial cases ever put forward for either the Black Dahlia or the Zodiac, let alone a possible connection between the two.
His son said he lived in SoCal at the time of the Zodiac murders. Dahlia is more plausible since he was a named suspect, but still more unlikely than not. The cops didn’t think he was very compelling.
He moved to Southern California in 1971, after the last Zodiac murder happened in 1969. Before that, he worked at Intel in Santa Clara and had a series of other jobs around the Bay Area and lived in Atascadero around the same time period that the Zodiac was active. The Zodiac stopped sending letters to the media and police in 1971 and started again in 1974, which lines to when Marivn was on probation for petty theft and false advertising.
That’s not what the Daily Mail article states. It places him on Southern California in the sixties and states that the Bay Area addresses and jobs are from a later date.
No they’re not, but they actually looked into some of his claims by asking the son about it. He contradicted what this researcher claims. This whole thing looks like Hodel 2.0, even cribbing some aspects of that story as well as the Leslie Dillon story.
Can you post the reliable source of him living/working in the Bay Area during the Zodiac murders? Did the people who unraveled the case post anything to prove the Daily Mail wrong?
Baber asserted that Merrill was linked to addresses in San Jose, northern California, and that he worked there for computer company Intel in 1969, placing him in the Bay Area at the time of the Zodiac murders.
Marvin Margolis, who also used the alias Marvin Merrill, had multiple residential and professional ties to the Bay Area and Northern California that overlap with the period of the Zodiac murders. He worked as an engineer at Intel in Santa Clara, placing him squarely within the geographic region where the Zodiac was active. Margolis also spent time in Atascadero, California, where he reportedly operated a restaurant. In 1971, while living in Oceanside, California, Margolis was investigated for fraud and ultimately pleaded guilty in December of that year to petty theft and false advertising, receiving a three-year probation sentence. Investigators have noted that the Zodiac’s letters ceased in 1971 and did not resume until 1974, a period that closely coincides with Margolis’s legal supervision and probation in Oceanside. His relocation to Southern California could also help explain why the Zodiac murders stopped after 1969. During his time in the Bay Area, Margolis was involved in businesses related to real estate, construction, and auto repair. According to Baber, these activities may have provided him access to multiple vehicles and properties, potentially allowing him to move between Northern California locations without drawing attention.
An additional, striking coincidence emerges from Margolis’s earlier life. During his time in Los Angeles in the 1940s, he lived with Bill Robinson, a World War II Signal Corps cryptographer. This connection offers a plausible explanation for how Margolis could have been exposed to advanced, wartime-era encryption techniques.
You said he had multiple ties to the Bay Area but you only mention one, Santa Clara, which is the South Bay and Vallejo is north (70 mi away). You wouldn’t randomly find yourself on the backroads of Benicia/Vallejo if you live in Santa Clara, unless something specifically brought you there. Also Atascadero and Oceanside are no where close to the Bay Area.
I think Margolis is a good suspect, but his known ties to the Bay Area are weak and that’s a problem.
I lived in the Bay Area most of my life. One could definitely find themselves traveling 70 miles or more randomly. I definitely did and so did a lot of people I knew.
Baber asserted that Merrill was linked to addresses in San Jose, northern California, and that he worked there for computer company Intel in 1969, placing him in the Bay Area at the time of the Zodiac murders.
Not only that, zodiac shot couples quick and bailed. Even berryesa was rather quick. Short’s killer took her to his house or a safe house and spent a shit ton of time with the body. A Killer to fantasize about kidnapping, torturing, and experimenting with corpse is not going to wait twenty years to switch MO to offing people as quick as he can to achieve his fantasy of landing on front page of newspapers.
It is a fun theory, but there is no proof he was the zodiac. Hell, I have a bayonet and can make ciphers. Doesn't make me him. Before ya'll start investigating me, I am not old enough to be him.
If anything, he very well could be the killer of Elizabeth Short.
The article does a decent job of describing the evidence in favor of Margolis with regard to Short’s murder but doesn’t really provide much supporting evidence linking him to the Zodiac killings aside from some very circumstantial evidence (the hotel, painting). Corpsmen are typically not trained in Cryptography. Where did Margolis learn that if he’s the Zodiac? Also, the MO’s between Black Dahlia and Zodiac are very different.
Thank you for the link. Much better article IMHO. The roommate seems to be a stretch but there is some connection. So the article states that handwriting analysis confirmed similarities between Margolis and the Black Dahlia Avenger but did they find the same similarities between Margolis’s handwriting and the Zodiac’s. The article mentioned the schematic they thought matched Zodiac’s diagram for the school bus shootings but I don’t recall seeing anything about matching his known handwriting to the Zodiac’s or similarities between Zodiac’s and Black Dahlia Avenger. It might have been mentioned, and I might have missed it, but I read the article once and skimmed it a second time.
Mathematically, a short cipher allows for other theoretical solutions; you could likely engineer a key to produce 'Arthur L. Allen' if you tried hard enough. However, the solution is compelling because it aligns three independent factors: a known suspect, the relevant 'Elizabeth' key, and a period-accurate encryption method presented in the books available at the time. The odds of all three aligning are vanishingly small.
Some of the points of evidence and endorsements of the theory:
The candidates narrowed to 185, to 14, and then, he said, to one. The name he found buried in the Z13 code: “Marvin Merrill.”
“In my opinion, these are solved cases,” said Rick Jackson, who was a homicide detective for 36 years, both at the LAPD and at the San Mateo County sheriff’s office. “There are too many links with both. There’s overwhelming circumstantial evidence. He’s left breadcrumbs all along.”
Ed Giorgio, a mathematician who served as the chief codemaker and codebreaker for the National Security Agency, … agreed to check out Baber’s solution to the Z13 cipher. Giorgio said that many people have approached him over the years with similar claims, which were easily debunked. “All of Alex’s work checked out to me,” he said. To verify his work, Giorgio contacted two other former NSA crypto-mathematicians, Patrick Henry and Rich Wisniewski. Not only did they endorse the Z13 solution, but Henry discovered another detail cementing the link between the two unsolved cases: the Zodiac code was generated by the key word “Elizabeth.”
Margolis remained an active suspect [in the Dahlia case] even after he relocated to Chicago. In remarks before a grand jury, a prosecutor found it relevant that Margolis had lived with Short not long before her death, and noted that as a USC student he would have dissected a body.
That evidence included the account of a policewoman who claimed (at least initially) that on the day before the body’s Jan. 15 discovery, she found Short at a downtown bus station, sobbing in fear that an ex-boyfriend was stalking her and wanted to kill her. (Short also told people the ex-boyfriend she feared had been a Marine — a branch which Margolis, as a corpsman, had served with.)
The sketch [by Merrill late in life], called “Elizabeth,” depicts a woman who is peering with one eye through a curtain of hair that hangs over her face. She is naked from the waist up. Her lower half is not visible, as if cut off above the navel. One of the nipples appears to be severed. The torso bears a series of marks that might be stab wounds, amid an area of shading that suggests blood. It is signed “Marty Merrill ‘92,” reflecting another alias Margolis used.
Because Margolis died in 1993, Baber and the two retired detectives view the drawing as a kind of deathbed confession to Short’s murder. And because “Zodiac” appears to be hidden in the shading, they also see it as a confession to the Zodiac crimes.
On the night before the [Dahlia] killing, newspaper accounts say, a nervous young man had been driving between motels in the area, desperately seeking a room with a bathtub and claiming his wife needed it. At the time, the Compton bungalow complex was called the Zodiac Motel. [It was] one of the few area motels in 1947 that had a bathtub.
I listened to a podcast with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes (who helped solve the Golden State Killer case) (Buried Bones) where they discussed The Black Dahlia. It's a tough listen at the end where he describes in detail what happened to the Black Dahlia in terms of her murder (I almost wish I hadn't heard it). But what he points out is that there was/is a subculture of people (sexual sadists) who would treat women the way the Dahlia was treated, and he pointed out that in the year(s?) before her murder, there were at least 3 murders in the San Francisco area that were identical to hers. So if this amateur codebreaker is talking about those murders, he probably learned of them from Buried Bones.
One thing Holes points out is that this idea that you had to have surgical expertise to sever a body in half is a bunch of hokum. He said people cut bodies in half or dismember them so they can move them, and it doesn't take rocket science to know that cutting a body in half at the waist is one of the logical places to do it. There are a lot of cases where the perpetrator had no knowledge of medicine or surgery and were able to dismember a woman (in fact, in one of the episodes of Buried Bones they discuss a woman who murdered and dismembered two of her roommates in the early 1900s). He says murders do it just to be able to move a body (half a body weighs less than a full body).
The Zodiac, in my mind, couldn't be the same murderer as the person who killed The Black Dahlia because he walked up to people and shot them. The person who murdered The Black Dahlia did terrible things to her before she died, including being forced to eat human waste (that's why her mouth was slashed on both sides). I mean, that's only one of the things. It was truly horrible. Not that the Zodiac didn't do horrible things, but nothing on the level of what was done to The Black Dahlia. The killer of the Black Dahlia got off on forcing her to do things and to be sodomized with objects. The Zodiac did none of that. But if there is information about Margolis also being a sexual sadist and committing killings similar to Short's, I would change my mind.
You know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, this could be uh uh uh uh uh a lot more complex... I mean, it's not just... It might not be just such a simple... You know?
the zodiac gets solved more often than wordle....
Didn't we decide it was Ted Cruz?
This is my favorite conspiracy
It's my second favourite, after Biden = DB Cooper
To round out top 3, currently it's that Elon Musk is getting his Optimus robots to do kung fu
In an effort to make that fill the google search results and bury the references to the 'kung fu lessons' organised by Gislane Maxwell and Epstein
The DB stands for Dats Biden
BINGO
Dark Brandon
I think Tommy Weiseau is DB Cooper and this has all been an elaborate ruse so people would think there’s no way THAT GUY is DB cooper
I didn't hijack the plane, it's not true, it's bullshit, I didn't hijack the plane. I did naaht! Oh hi Feds!
At least he was kind to the stewardess on the plane and did not hit her
he is their favorite customer
Oh I forgot about that link
Tommy Weiseau just appeared one day with money hey
I thought the conspiracy theory was that Forrest Fenn = DB Cooper
Yes and Ted Cruz's father was the second gunman in the Kennedy assassination.
I thought that was Woody Harrelson's dad?
Na no way. That would make him ‘interesting’
I always push back on this, namely because what Zodic did took a sick, twisted, version of balls, and much like a bankrupt summer camp, Ted Cruz has no balls.
Yeah a connection between the Zodiac and Black Dahlia is kinda like a rite of passage in true crime lol.
What if they’re all right 🤯
Given that they don't have a shred of actual evidence, the odds of that are about as good as my chances of being elected the next Pope.
They did solve the Zodiak killer though. They made a documentary about it that lays it out pretty damn clear.
[Edit] For the down voters https://chico.newsreview.com/2024/11/12/killer-confirmed-netflix-doc-this-is-the-zodiac-speaking-reveals-info-that-seemingly-solves-the-infamous-case/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Leigh_Allen
Documentary doesn’t mean it’s actually solved, just that someone made a movie about their theory.
It's pretty damn convincing.
https://chico.newsreview.com/2024/11/12/killer-confirmed-netflix-doc-this-is-the-zodiac-speaking-reveals-info-that-seemingly-solves-the-infamous-case/
Documentaries are meant to be convincing
Yeah, they do seem quite convincing when they leave out all the bits that don't match the writer's narrative. Especially to a credulous audience.
Exactly. A lot of people struggle with media literacy and think non-fiction = true and unbiased, but that is very wrong.
Even something seemingly unrelated such as the production company that distributes the documentary can shift the narrative.
True but I would not even class those as strictly non-fiction. It borders on kind of a weird form of fan fiction at times.
Watch the doc. It's actually insane this guy wasn't arrested. He also ended up confessing on his death bed and was the lead suspect. The murders stopped when he was arrested for molesting a child and the letters restarted when he was released from prison. But the police even had him in the area of the crimes. Always with a terrible alibi. Crazy amount of circumstantial evidence but they couldn't find anything concrete enough to charge him when they searched his property. Basically everyone that knew the guy including himself said he was the Zodiak.
Watch the doc. It basically has to be this guy. But he's dead so I doubt they ever charge him.
As I said before, I have watched it. If you think it *had to be him and only him based upon that, then Arthur Leigh Allan isn’t the only individual mentioned in this conversation whose has ceased to have meaningful function above his tentorium.
Merry Christmas mate.
And do share all the other evidence you said that was consistent with it not being him?
The dude bragged about shooting people on Lover's Lane.
As far as I know they basically couldn't get a fingerprint or DNA match what samples they had. That's it. Everything else points to him. And those samples were poor quality.
I take it you've never seen anything about how common it is for people to falsely claiming to be responsible for high profile crimes. Look at the "Geordie accent" false lead in the Yorkshire Ripper case
His DNA and fingerprints not matching would be the big ones. Also the cop who saw Paul Stine's killer said he was at least 100 lbs heavier than the person he saw. The dispatcher said that he did not sound like the man who called in.
Personally, I suspect that the same person committed all of the crimes and that whomever wrote the letters took responsibility for a few things he did not personally do just to scare the hell out of people. It wouldn't be the first time there were two independent serial killers operating in an area at a time.
I suspect Arthur Leigh Allan might have been responsible for at least one of the initial shootings but I don't think the evidence is sufficient to pin all the killings on him especially not the Stine case which is the one with the strongest evidentiary link to the letter writer since their is no physical evidence that ties him to the letters and the best witness said it wasn't him.
I have some terrible news about documentaries that you won’t want to hear.
This was extremely convincing and well done. Essentially all evidence points to him and he even confessed. The killings line up exactly with his location and stop when he is arrested and jailed.
https://chico.newsreview.com/2024/11/12/killer-confirmed-netflix-doc-this-is-the-zodiac-speaking-reveals-info-that-seemingly-solves-the-infamous-case/
There's this thing....it's called "illusory correlation". Have you heard of it.
Which documentary would that be?
https://chico.newsreview.com/2024/11/12/killer-confirmed-netflix-doc-this-is-the-zodiac-speaking-reveals-info-that-seemingly-solves-the-infamous-case/
I challenge you to watch it and come to any other conclusion.
I did. The difference is that I also know the case well enough to recognize the gaps and misrepresentations in what they presented.
What were the gaps? He was the lead suspect AND confessed on his death bed? He even admitted to being in the area of the crime scenes around the time of the murders. Everyone that knew him said it was him.
I'll wait for the formal press release, thanks.
go on...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Leigh_Allen
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt33480540/
The fact that the discovery process involves "facts uncovered by using AI" should tell you all you need to know about the potential accuracy.
The premise of solving Z13 is all you need to know.
I agree that the use of AI to uncover facts is a bad idea, due to hallucination etc.
But to be fair, the article does not claim that the suspect was determined by AI. It says that AI was used to create a list of millions of possible suspects. Then it says the list was narrowed to this guy (doesn’t say how, doesn’t imply that AI was the determining factor in landing on this guy).
It also says that the Zodiac Motel was discovered by AI, but that seems to mean that he just used a search engine that incorporates AI (they most do these days). At any rate, the motel point is irrelevant because the LA Times is reporting as fact that there was a motel named Zodiac at that address at that time with a bathtub. Since its existence is corroborated, the manner in which the guy found the motel is irrelevant.
Got it. Sounds super reputable!
They absolutely do say how. The guy repeats about 5x throughout the article that his autism showed him the way. This isn't me using internet insults either, go ahead and ctrl+f autism on the article.
So you didn’t read the article
It honestly doesn’t matter how he found the name. If the name truly is encoded, with the keyword Elizabeth, into the Zodiac text, then that’s that.
If that’s not the case, and the cryptography experts who back up this finding are proven wrong, then all the circumstantial evidence is just that.
Sounds like pretty standard confirmation bias to me.
People love your comment. But what difference does it make how it’s solved. Assuming what ever a computer or person spits out is verified of course.
The problem is that it isn't verified by other evidence.
Exactly! Lol
Are you in general against using AI?
And I’m Marie of Romania.
Love the Dorothy Parker shout-out.
Always happy to oblige.
Oh FFS. Not this crap again.
Im new to this theory. Could you explain why its a throw away theory?
You'd have to look deeper into it, but it seems pretty accepted that the police either knew who did it, or had a very good idea who did it, and deemed it in their best interest to shrug their shoulders. The dahlia, that is.
It's unfortunately one of those cases where in order to secure a conviction they'd need an absolutely water tight case. The most likely suspect was extremely wealthy and well connected and would be able to buy his way out of a conviction with anything else.
Whoever killed the Black Dahlia is almost certainly dead, so one will ever be tried or convicted.
There is that. The main suspect is indeed dead. Unfortunately there's still enough obfuscation around the evidence, so this case won't ever be properly solved.
Nope, it was Dick Van Dyke.
I knew he had to have a fault!
So like OJ?
Informant.
Then why’d they bother putting OJ on trial.
This is only like the fifth time someone has made this claim.
Also the nonsense about "discovered with AI" also argues that it's likely completely disconnected from reality.
Yeah, sure. Never heard that before.
A killer obsessed with media attention and getting credit for his kills doesn't ensure attribution for the dahlia. Doubt.
I think this is a good point. However, keep in mind that this guy was the Dahlia victim’s ex boyfriend and one of the key suspects in her death. If the Zodiac Killer said he was the Dahlia killer, it could have narrowed the suspects for the Zodiac quickly and led to his discovery.
Personally, I’m not convinced this solution is accurate, because it all hinges on the decoding and I’m not qualified enough in encryption to have a meaningful opinion. The surrounding evidence is circumstantial. But the experts who support the decoding do seem quite qualified, so I think this should not be dismissed out of hand.
AI is just as unqualified to decode something that actual cryptography software failed to crack as you are to assess it.
Y'all should maybe read the article. It says two cryptographers signed off on the conclusion; AI was not used for the actual cryptography.
Sadly there are no details on how the cryptographic part actually works...
Yes, this was what was exciting to me, the fact that multiple mathematicians and cryptographers examined his work on the code and said it checked out. Why are people not more excited that the code was solved? Is there an expert that disagrees or something? What am I missing?
There's no evidence that it was solved. It's just an unverified claim.
I don’t think the article claims that AI decoded it, just that it was used to identify and narrow suspect lists.
Devil’s advocate- Zodiac himself claimed to have killed 36. So at least in his own twisted mind, there’s murders he hasnt bragged about.
How many people did Henry Lee Lucas claim to kill? Tommy Lynn Sells? That claim from the Zodiac is very likely a bit of exaggeration designed to scare people and build up the myths around him.
He was also Jack the Ripper and any other unsolved serial killer
It was that time traveler master criminal Israel Keyes.
Then he became DB Cooper.
That was Loki. Maybe he was those others too.
isnt there like a 20 year gap between the 2? what was he doing then? im not certain a middle aged person could commit all of the zodiac killings
Probably responsible for any other unsolved murder between those years, duh!!!
IDK whether the guy in the article is Zodiac. But the 3 Robbins described the Zodiac as in his early 40's, and Officer Fouke described him as 35-45. So there is a good chance the Zodiac was middle aged.
Boy, I remember when middle aged meant 45-55. How times have changed...
Absolutely positive the Zodiac & Black Dahlia weren't the same.
Apparently I’ve been using middle aged wrong. I thought middle aged was like 40-50. Not 45-65.
He was a surgical student with severe PTSD from being a Navy corpsman during World War II. He also happened to live with the Black Dahlia for 3 months prior to her death. He moved and lived in several states in the 20-year gap and happened to be in the San Francisco Bay Area during the zodiac killings. He was in his early twenties during the first killing and early forties during the Zodiac murders.
Why not?
Oh brother.
The accomplice
where are....
Ok, but was he their father?
I mean they do this all the time, first it was... "was the Unabomber and Golden State Killer the same person? OR the Zodiac killer and Unabomber the same person? Or are they all fucking D.B. Cooper? LOL Like the human brain if obsessed enough can connect and decode whatever they want and make it make sense in their own minds. That's why the bible code and Nostradamus stuff was always hilarious to me.
Don't forget the HH Holmes and Jack The Ripper being the same person one!
Isn't there a nut case detective who thinks Edward Edwards was responsible for everything from Black Dahlia to Zodiac to Jimmy Hoffa and JB Ramsey and more? LMAO.
There's also a guy, who at one time was a reputable detective, who has gone completely off the deep end trying to convince people that his dad killed Elizabeth Short.
How can this article 1. Not have the details on how to solve the cypher 2. Not include a photo of the Elizabeth Zodiac drawing 3. Mention why the reasons it’s unlikely to be the same person?
Drawing is here: https://killerinthecode.com/chapter-2
And here are the cipher details: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/19p4n1aMyeYte1jC4P3GKflMgD6xuZAvV?usp=sharing#scrollTo=k7lAUZqdouB-
This article is fairly explicit that this solution is a result of several assumptions, maybe likely assumptions, but assumptions nonetheless. It even says “We have a proposed solution from Alex Baber, but this is just one of many possible solutions.”
The biggest assumption Baber made is the character substitution key, which is selected in order to force the result marvin merrill. It's not a solution, it's backwards forcing.
I didn’t think about it in those words but you’re right, it’s definitely just backwards forcing. It also assumes that he’d use his alias and not his real name.
Did he do Jack The Ripper as well before ?
What??? A couple of paragraphs in and the BS already stinks to high heaven. Actual information from the LAPD states that Margolis was investigated and cleared. The story about him fleeing to Chicago looks like a rip-off of the (also BS) story about George Hodel escaping to the Philippines to get the cops off his tail (in fact Hodel was also investigated and cleared).
You’re cherry picking the article — it makes clear the LAPD continued to consider him a suspect in the Dahlia killing, and that the extent of his “clearing” was an undisclosed alibi for a period of time that doesn’t include all the possible times in which Short could have been killed.
It’s plain and simple that a victim’s ex-boyfriend — any victim’s ex-boyfriend — is one of the prime suspects in any murder. Extra evidence only underlines that — eg the fact that he was suffering from PTSD, that a year before his death he had a drawing of a naked woman labeled Elizabeth, that he was in medical school, that he was a Marine when the victim apparently feared for her life from a Marine ex-boyfriend.
Certainly the Zodiac stuff is a step much further than that, hinging on cryptography stuff which I don’t know enough to judge. But undoubtedly he’s a major suspect in Dahlia, one that anyone would be crazy to discount.
Margolis was ruled out on the basis that police assumed whoever killed Short had abducted her as far back as a week from the murder.
His alibi fit that theory, IE, he had an alibi for multiple days prior to the murder, not the immediate day before.
Also, the Zodiac case is perhaps the worst case of all time to pedal the “police = correct” argument. The killer would have been caught after the Stine murder if it weren’t for the most incomprehensible and still unexplainable dispatch message, which told police to search for a black man rather than a white man, leading two officers to cruise past someone in immediate proximity to the site due to him being white.
Amongst many other examples, you also have the lead investigator likely fabricating Zodiac letters, one of those two officers claimed they spoke to that suspect they cruised past, while the other claims no such thing occurred.
There is a mountain of shoddy police work that led to Zodiac becoming the infamous cold case(s) we read about today.
This is a solid theory (one of my favourite Zodiac theories) and I’m open to it until it gets shut down by someone of note.
We don’t actually know the details of his alibi, so it’s speculation on your part to state that he didn’t have an alibi for the day before. The actual report uses the phrase “during the time the victim was missing” which would include the day before. This is the problem with Black Dahlia theories. They all rest upon surmises and speculation like this.
Always mistrust true crime stories where famous cold cases are 'solved'.
The codebreaker's putative solution seems far more likely re: Black Dahlia. The speculation on Margolis' connection to Zodiac is based on so little as to be worthless.
Absurd.
So, he kills a woman, in a highly specific way at a random hotel. Then waits 20 years before killing multiple people in an entirely unrelated & incomparable way, naming himself after the hotel he committed Murder 1 in and sending ciphers to mock the police.
And the conclusion is this is the same guy? If there is any hotel connection here it's that the name inspired the Zodiac, but if the fact the Dahlia happened there wasn't well known anyway, then it's entirely coincidental. There are multiple hotels, all around the world, called Zodiac. It's also not an uncommon word in general use anyway!
A guy calling himself Zodiac in California, and a Zodiac hotel even within 100 miles is not a connection. This article actually does a fine job of explaining why he links Margolis & the hotel to Short, but basically just goes "woooo Zodiac!" afterwards.
The Zodiac connection for Margolis doesn’t rest on the hotel thing, which is basically irrelevant to the theory.
The Zodiac connection for Margolis comes from the code, the solution for which prominent cryptography experts support.
But it's an unverified claim because there's no other evidence to confirm it. That's what you keep missing.
Also, in any profession, if you ask around enough you'll find someone who wants attention enough to support any claim that will get their name in a news story as an expert.
Was the hotel biltmore known as zodiac? I cant find any reference to this.
No, different motel where he possibly carved her up. The article explains the theory.
Are we pretending Cecilia Shepherd wasn't brutally stabbed to death? How did Elizabeth Short die again? Did the Black Dhalia murderer not mail the Los Angeles Examiner Short's personal items such as birth certificate, Social security card etc as well as a letter praising their coverage of the case?
Yes but the Dahlia killer displayed a level of organization and executive function that is extremely unusual for this type of killer, while the Zodiac was chaotic and nervous (hands shaking during the Hartnell/Shepherd attack). The similarities are few and the differences are great.
It's also Israel Keyes, and the same person who 'kidnapped' Amy Bradley!
You're thinking of hamas.
Nah Israel Keyes only 11 letters
I’m usually the first person to roll my eyes at “amateur sleuth SOLVES legendary cold case” stories. 99% of the time it’s pattern-matching, vibes, and wishful thinking. But the more you dig into the Margolis angle, the harder it is to just say “yeah right” and move on.
Police already had Marvin Margolis on their radar back in 1947. He wasn’t some random name pulled out of thin air, he lived with Elizabeth Short shortly before her death, lied to detectives about how well he knew her, had medical training as a Navy corpsman, and had documented psychological issues from the war. Then he abruptly moved, changed his name, and essentially vanished. Among all the suspects, he was the only pre-med student known to have been romantically involved with her. That alone is a pretty big red flag. Fast-forward to the late ’60s: Margolis was living in the Bay Area during the exact window of the Zodiac murders in. At one of the Zodiac crime scenes, investigators documented a shoe print believed to belong to the killer's, identified as Navy-issued “wing walkers.” Margolis was a Navy veteran and bared a pretty uncanny resemblance to the police sketch of the Zodiac at the time. Then you’ve got an amateur investigator who doesn’t just claim to have cracked the Zodiac’s Z13 cipher, but gets multiple former NSA cryptographers to independently verify his work. The name that allegedly comes out of the cipher? “Marvin Merrill”, the alias Margolis used for most of his adult life. On top of that, the cipher key reportedly centers on the name “Elizabeth,” which is hard to ignore. Add in the timeline issues that may have allowed Margolis to skate on an early alibi, his anatomical experience, his repeated use of aliases, the later artwork that eerily echoes the Black Dahlia case, and even the possible origin of the “Zodiac” name itself, and you start getting a pile of circumstantial evidence. None of these things alone prove anything, but together, it’s a lot of smoke.
Is it courtroom-ready, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt proof? No. And with Margolis long dead, it probably never will be. But this also isn’t your usual YouTube cork board theory. When retired homicide detectives, cold-case specialists, and ex-NSA cryptographers all independently say “we can’t find the holes,” that’s when I stop dismissing it outright. At minimum, it’s one of the strongest circumstantial cases ever put forward for either the Black Dahlia or the Zodiac, let alone a possible connection between the two.
His son said he lived in SoCal at the time of the Zodiac murders. Dahlia is more plausible since he was a named suspect, but still more unlikely than not. The cops didn’t think he was very compelling.
He moved to Southern California in 1971, after the last Zodiac murder happened in 1969. Before that, he worked at Intel in Santa Clara and had a series of other jobs around the Bay Area and lived in Atascadero around the same time period that the Zodiac was active. The Zodiac stopped sending letters to the media and police in 1971 and started again in 1974, which lines to when Marivn was on probation for petty theft and false advertising.
That’s not what the Daily Mail article states. It places him on Southern California in the sixties and states that the Bay Area addresses and jobs are from a later date.
The Daily Mail is not a reliable news source at all. The case is being unraveled here: https://killerinthecode.com/
No they’re not, but they actually looked into some of his claims by asking the son about it. He contradicted what this researcher claims. This whole thing looks like Hodel 2.0, even cribbing some aspects of that story as well as the Leslie Dillon story.
Can you post the reliable source of him living/working in the Bay Area during the Zodiac murders? Did the people who unraveled the case post anything to prove the Daily Mail wrong?
How was Margolis’s connected to the Bay Area during the time of the Zodiac crimes?
Marvin Margolis, who also used the alias Marvin Merrill, had multiple residential and professional ties to the Bay Area and Northern California that overlap with the period of the Zodiac murders. He worked as an engineer at Intel in Santa Clara, placing him squarely within the geographic region where the Zodiac was active. Margolis also spent time in Atascadero, California, where he reportedly operated a restaurant. In 1971, while living in Oceanside, California, Margolis was investigated for fraud and ultimately pleaded guilty in December of that year to petty theft and false advertising, receiving a three-year probation sentence. Investigators have noted that the Zodiac’s letters ceased in 1971 and did not resume until 1974, a period that closely coincides with Margolis’s legal supervision and probation in Oceanside. His relocation to Southern California could also help explain why the Zodiac murders stopped after 1969. During his time in the Bay Area, Margolis was involved in businesses related to real estate, construction, and auto repair. According to Baber, these activities may have provided him access to multiple vehicles and properties, potentially allowing him to move between Northern California locations without drawing attention.
An additional, striking coincidence emerges from Margolis’s earlier life. During his time in Los Angeles in the 1940s, he lived with Bill Robinson, a World War II Signal Corps cryptographer. This connection offers a plausible explanation for how Margolis could have been exposed to advanced, wartime-era encryption techniques.
You said he had multiple ties to the Bay Area but you only mention one, Santa Clara, which is the South Bay and Vallejo is north (70 mi away). You wouldn’t randomly find yourself on the backroads of Benicia/Vallejo if you live in Santa Clara, unless something specifically brought you there. Also Atascadero and Oceanside are no where close to the Bay Area.
I think Margolis is a good suspect, but his known ties to the Bay Area are weak and that’s a problem.
I lived in the Bay Area most of my life. One could definitely find themselves traveling 70 miles or more randomly. I definitely did and so did a lot of people I knew.
Wow…Ted Cruz really put in a lot of work back then.
Truly only theory that holds any basis. 😔
The Zodiac killer shot couples. The person who killed Elizabeth Short cut her in half and drained her blood. Hardly similar.
Not only that, zodiac shot couples quick and bailed. Even berryesa was rather quick. Short’s killer took her to his house or a safe house and spent a shit ton of time with the body. A Killer to fantasize about kidnapping, torturing, and experimenting with corpse is not going to wait twenty years to switch MO to offing people as quick as he can to achieve his fantasy of landing on front page of newspapers.
Exactly. It just doesn't seem like the work of the same person.
how would this make sense
It is a fun theory, but there is no proof he was the zodiac. Hell, I have a bayonet and can make ciphers. Doesn't make me him. Before ya'll start investigating me, I am not old enough to be him.
If anything, he very well could be the killer of Elizabeth Short.
The article does a decent job of describing the evidence in favor of Margolis with regard to Short’s murder but doesn’t really provide much supporting evidence linking him to the Zodiac killings aside from some very circumstantial evidence (the hotel, painting). Corpsmen are typically not trained in Cryptography. Where did Margolis learn that if he’s the Zodiac? Also, the MO’s between Black Dahlia and Zodiac are very different.
The daily mail article includes the detail that he was roommates with a cryptographer https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/crime-desk/article-15392213/Zodiac-Black-Dahlia-suspect-identified-killer.html?ito=native_share_article-nativemenubutton
Thank you for the link. Much better article IMHO. The roommate seems to be a stretch but there is some connection. So the article states that handwriting analysis confirmed similarities between Margolis and the Black Dahlia Avenger but did they find the same similarities between Margolis’s handwriting and the Zodiac’s. The article mentioned the schematic they thought matched Zodiac’s diagram for the school bus shootings but I don’t recall seeing anything about matching his known handwriting to the Zodiac’s or similarities between Zodiac’s and Black Dahlia Avenger. It might have been mentioned, and I might have missed it, but I read the article once and skimmed it a second time.
I hope they explain how the roommate cryptographer learned Margolis everything he knew.
It looks as if the code breakers wrapped this up.
A E R L I R E M E V R A M
His decision to leave two letters unencoded demonstrates an intention for the problem to be solvable.
Cipher: A = E
Alphabet, Elizabethan Substitution Cipher - Also Victim's Name: Write key, then remaining alphabet
The amount times we hear this…
The analysis from the former chief codemaker of the NSA and his team is compelling:
https://x.com/edgiorgio/status/2003450396979966330
Here's the Jupyter (Colab) Notebook that describes the research of the algorithm and determining the encryption key used is "Elizabeth":
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/19p4n1aMyeYte1jC4P3GKflMgD6xuZAvV?usp=sharing#scrollTo=k7lAUZqdouB-
Mathematically, a short cipher allows for other theoretical solutions; you could likely engineer a key to produce 'Arthur L. Allen' if you tried hard enough. However, the solution is compelling because it aligns three independent factors: a known suspect, the relevant 'Elizabeth' key, and a period-accurate encryption method presented in the books available at the time. The odds of all three aligning are vanishingly small.
Some of the points of evidence and endorsements of the theory:
Honestly the main thing convincing me it’s him is the fact that Reddit thinks it’s BS lol
What a fascinating article. I would love to see that photo he left his son
Chapter 2
Interesting… what area is the part that they said you can see Zodiac in the shading?
Reading that article was almost painful.
The 13 character cipher is impossible to solve. Impossible. More than likely his name was not even there in the first place.
And DB Cooper, and the Chowchilla kidnapper. have fun
I listened to a podcast with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes (who helped solve the Golden State Killer case) (Buried Bones) where they discussed The Black Dahlia. It's a tough listen at the end where he describes in detail what happened to the Black Dahlia in terms of her murder (I almost wish I hadn't heard it). But what he points out is that there was/is a subculture of people (sexual sadists) who would treat women the way the Dahlia was treated, and he pointed out that in the year(s?) before her murder, there were at least 3 murders in the San Francisco area that were identical to hers. So if this amateur codebreaker is talking about those murders, he probably learned of them from Buried Bones.
One thing Holes points out is that this idea that you had to have surgical expertise to sever a body in half is a bunch of hokum. He said people cut bodies in half or dismember them so they can move them, and it doesn't take rocket science to know that cutting a body in half at the waist is one of the logical places to do it. There are a lot of cases where the perpetrator had no knowledge of medicine or surgery and were able to dismember a woman (in fact, in one of the episodes of Buried Bones they discuss a woman who murdered and dismembered two of her roommates in the early 1900s). He says murders do it just to be able to move a body (half a body weighs less than a full body).
The Zodiac, in my mind, couldn't be the same murderer as the person who killed The Black Dahlia because he walked up to people and shot them. The person who murdered The Black Dahlia did terrible things to her before she died, including being forced to eat human waste (that's why her mouth was slashed on both sides). I mean, that's only one of the things. It was truly horrible. Not that the Zodiac didn't do horrible things, but nothing on the level of what was done to The Black Dahlia. The killer of the Black Dahlia got off on forcing her to do things and to be sodomized with objects. The Zodiac did none of that. But if there is information about Margolis also being a sexual sadist and committing killings similar to Short's, I would change my mind.
Buried Bones podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1tpSJOVEWI
Fuck this and all other crackpot theories. The Zodiac was also the Lindbergh baby, and inexplicably, also Bobby Dunbar.
I literally had AI try and id a random scene in 1949 Little Women and they told me it was from Meet Me in St Louis…
What a bunch of baloney! There is absolutely NO evidence that these crimes are related.
My AI says that Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer were the same person.
The algorithm Might need a little more tweaking…
I think it makes more sense Black Dahlia was killed by the Torso Killer.
Who exactly are you referring to? When I look up Torso Killer I get a guy who was less than a year old when Elizabeth Short was killed haha
The Cleveland Torso Murderer
Hmm.
Interesting therory
Hypothesis. A theory requires evidence.
There is a account on X showing decipher for Z13. It is Inact_order66 and has a few others like Tamam Shud.
You know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, this could be uh uh uh uh uh a lot more complex... I mean, it's not just... It might not be just such a simple... You know?
[deleted]
Everything you said is unsubstantiated.