An Amateur Codebreaker May Have Just Solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac Killings
- Reference: 0180451665
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/24/187259/an-amateur-codebreaker-may-have-just-solved-the-black-dahlia-and-zodiac-killings
- Source link:
> When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short -- who became known as the Black Dahlia -- he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was "a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression," a military psychiatrist had concluded.
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> At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her January 1947 murder. Margolis later admitted they had lived together in Apartment 726 at the Guardian Arms Apartments. But he soon moved to Chicago and changed his name, frustrating further attempts to question him. Among many suspects, a district attorney investigator would note, Margolis was "the only pre-medical student who ever lived as a boy friend with Beth Short."
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> A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms. The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words "My name is -" followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies.
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> Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer's identity -- and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well. "It's irrefutable," said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages.
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> [...] To attack the problem, Baber used artifical intelligence and generated a list of 71 million possible 13-letter names. Using known details of the Zodiac killer, based on witness descriptions, he cross-checked those names against military, marriage, census and other public records. "This takes me nine months of working 18-20 hour days," he said. "I'm starting to kill this onion. I'm starting to eliminate layers: Too tall, too short, or wrong race." The candidates narrowed to 185, to 14, and then, he said, to one. The name he found buried in the Z13 code: "Marvin Merrill."
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-12-23/black-dahlia-zodiac-killings-connected-one-killer-theory
[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/black-dahlia-zodiac-killings-new-theory-21259726.php
Re: (Score:2)
> I believe the zodiac killings are the work of two are more people. The guns used in different murders are different calibers and one killing involved a ridiculous costume and a knife. Serial killers aren't known for changing methods like that.
The smart ones do . . .
Re: (Score:1)
> I believe the zodiac killings are the work of two are more people. The guns used in different murders are different calibers and one killing involved a ridiculous costume and a knife. Serial killers aren't known for changing methods like that.
Based on the ones who got caught.
Re: An Amateur Codebreaker May Have Just Solved.. (Score:3)
War ended when he was 19 so presumably he could have enlisted at 18.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh I see. Thanks. I thought the post was talking about the present day
Re: (Score:1)
> How can a 21-year-old be World War II veteran?
Because that statement was from 1947.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, thank you.
A thousand monkeys ... (Score:2)
A thousand monkeys, each with a typewriter. One will everntually type "Marvin Merrill".
Re: (Score:2)
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?!
Too easy (Score:2)
If it's the assumed name of Margolis who was initially a suspect, who had been caught lying is the answer, how on earth has it eluded so many professionals since? I can't imagine that many all missed something that obvious.
Extremely low quality "solution" (Score:5, Insightful)
A person with an unusual mind who was obsessively focused on this thing for quite a while - they label that as "autism" and suggests it gave him special powers to break the case.
There's another type of person with an unusual mind and tendency to obsessiveness, we generally call them "cranks". Are you sure we have a magical rain man and not a crank?
Margolis was a suspect for the Dahlia case, but he was cleared by the police due to having an alibi.
No non-cranks have suggested a link between that murder and the zodiac murders, since they're nothing like each other and also far removed in time.
That "Elisabeth" is the key to z13 is nonsense, since only a few of the ciphertext letters in z13 are even letters. Our "autist genius" had to give himself a lot of leeway to squeeze that interpretation in.
The most likely decoding of z13 is "Alfred E Neuman". That's the MAD magazine mascot. It's a joke. He didn't put his name in there, just like he didn't in any of the other ciphers. There's internal corroboration: the three first letters of the ciphertext are A E N - the initials of the solution.
Re: (Score:2)
> No non-cranks have suggested a link between that murder and the zodiac murders, since they're nothing like each other and also far removed in time.
This.
I don't see any attempt to build a connection between the two cases. The claim is that the Zodiac case was solved (maybe) by some intensive cryptanalysis while the Black Dahlia case was solved by pretty standard police investigative procedures and deduction.
It would have been pretty typical of Slashdot if it was claimed that Z13 decoded was "Donald Trump".
Re: (Score:2)
No, Ted Cruz's dad was the Zodiac Killer.
Keep it straight.
Much more detailed news story (Score:3)
This [1]long article [dailymail.co.uk] contains all the many details and drawings and photos. Much more in-depth than the two short articles in the summary.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/crime-desk/article-15392213/Zodiac-Black-Dahlia-suspect-identified-killer.html
Or do we have... (Score:2)
Another case of someone being told by an AI that they're a super genius and they've solved the unified field Theory and invented penicillin.
The LA DA's office ... (Score:3)
The DA of LA already stated a few years back that if it was up to him he has more than enough evidence and believes 100%he would charge the late George Hodel in the Elizabeth Short case for her murder. Hodel went overseas (the Phillipines) when the police really started to suspect him only returning to the US much later in life. His son, a retired LA police homicide investigator, has photos of a woman matching Elizabeth Short in his father's old picture collections. Hodel lived only blocks away from where she was found, and in his basement had the same brand of cement bag that was found under Short's gruesomely tortured body. Plus, contemporary photos of Hodel are a dead ringer for the police suspect drawings of Short's murderer. He was just too influential and well known medical professional at the time to be a investigated thoroughly.
Petition to ban AI nonsense (Score:1)
Hearing about AI bringing down the global economy, or driving people to psychotic breaks, or committing mass copyright infringement is all well and good. But hearing about some vaguely delusional losers AI powered revelation is lame as fuck and should be banned as a story