An Amateur Detective May Have Solved Six of California’s Most Notorious Murders

A pretty interesting story from the LA Times today suggests that an amateur codebreaker in West Virginia may have solved both the famous Black Dahlia murder, which happened in Los Angeles in 1947 and the Zodiac killings which took place in 1968-69 in northern California. There are a lot of kooks out there calling themselves investigators these days, but Alex Baber seems to have really done it.

The notorious Black Dahlia killing involved the murder of a woman named Elizabeth Short who was killed and cut in half, apparently by someone with surgical experience. Police suspected a former boyfriend who initially lied about living with her for several weeks. His name was Marvin Margolis. He’d seen some very traumatizing service in WWII and wanted to become a surgeon. He was studying to be a doctor at USC but eventually dropped out.

Police initially believed that Short had been kidnapped and held by the killer for several days. That timeline gave Margolis an alibi because he’d been seen elsewhere in the days before the murder. He was never ruled out as a suspect, but he eventually moved to Chicago and started going by a different name. Years later he moved back to California.

In 1968 and 69 a killer calling himself Zodiac murdered five women and left a series of cryptograms for police. One of those allegedly contained his real name.