Famed crime writer brings Zodiac Killer controversy to Bay Area event

In the 2007 film “Zodiac,” Jake Gyllenhaal, as political cartoonist-turned crusading sleuth Robert Graysmith, lays out the chain of facts and coincidences that lead him to believe he’s discovered the identity of the elusive Zodiac Killer. But after listening, Mark Ruffalo, as San Francisco Police Department Inspector Dave Toschi, concedes it could be true but says: “I can’t prove this.”

With that, director David Fincher ends “Zodiac” in an unsettling but perhaps realistic way, suggesting that the late 1960s Zodiac murders are one of America’s great mysteries — similar to the assassination of JFK — that we may never get to the bottom of.

Still, people keep trying to get to the bottom of it. Most recently, with considerable publicity as well as push-back by Zodiac experts, New York Times best-selling crime novelist Michael Connelly has joined forces with two former LAPD homicide detectives, Rick Jackson and Mitzi Roberts, and a self-styled cold case consultant and amateur code breaker, Alex Baber, to announce they have solved the Zodiac murders — and so much more.

They also say they have the “smoking gun” and “overwhelming” evidence to prove their suspect committed another famous unsolved case from two decades earlier — the 1947 torture and mutilation killing of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles — aka the Black Dahlia murder.

The Connelly team members are laying out their case in a podcast, “Killer in the Code.” They also will be in the Bay Area on Feb. 21 to promote their theory in a fundraiser for the Danville-based Eugene O’Neill Foundation. The fundraiser will take place 7:30 p.m. at the Village Theatre in Danville; tickets are $125.

Jackson, an inspiration for Connelly’s lucrative Harry Bosch novels and streaming series, moved to Danville after retiring from the LAPD in 2013. He became a supporter of the foundation and now investigates cold cases for the San Mateo County sheriff’s office. He told told the Los Angeles Times: “In my opinion, these are solved cases. There are too many links with both.”

But some Zodiac experts cite a number of reasons why they believe this connection is “a stretch” and “far-fetched,” starting with the M.O.’s being so dissimilar — from a murder that appeared to be so brutally personal to the Zodiac’s seemingly random attacks on strangers. Beyond that, they say the podcast has not presented “objective, identifying physical evidence,” linking the two cases, as described by Contra Costa County Sheriff’s crime lab chief Paul Holes, who helped identity the Golden State Killer. Holes was not commenting directly on the Connelly team theory but on the evidence it takes, in general, for anyone to say a cold case is “solved.” To solve the Zodiac killings, investigators would need to put their suspect at any of the four established Zodiac attacks in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa and San Francisco, between December 1968 and October 1969, the criminalist said.

“I do think Zodiac is solvable, but (you) need to have that physical evidence, which, in this day and age, is either going to be DNA from a crime scene, or it’s going to be finding a remainder of the bloody shirt (from one of the Zodiac attacks) in a suspect’s storage locker or whatever,” Holes said.

Others say this new theory rests on a flawed premise. It originates from Baber, a self-taught cryptographer who speaks of his autism diagnosis as his investigative super power. He said Fincher’s movie inspired him to crack one of Zodiac’s four “ciphers.” These are the mysterious strings of letters and symbols, purportedly revealing the Zodiac’s motive and identity, that the killer included in letters sent to Bay Area newspapers to taunt police and terrorize the public. Baber focused on “Z-13,” the cipher mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1970, in which the killer said, “my name is,” followed by a 13-character code. Baber said he discovered the suspect’s identity using artificial intelligence to generate millions of names. He then narrowed down the names by cross-referencing witness descriptions and public records, including military, census and marriage files. He eventually arrived at a sole suspect, a young, traumatized World War II Navy veteran who knew Short and was questioned in her killing.

But Baber is facing scrutiny for boasting about his supposed, related crime-solving accomplishments. In a 2022 video interview with CrimeHQ, he said he was working with law enforcement “behind the scenes” to prove that his suspect also was responsible for 1970s killings in Ohio and Washington, D.C., and for 14 of the Atlanta child murders. More audaciously, video and a transcript of the more-than-hourlong interview show Baber saying there were “two Zodiacs,” two men who “worked together in unison,” separated, lived with their families and came back together to “commit homicides.” Baber also said he has fingerprint and DNA evidence to link his two Zodiac suspects to more than 100 killings over five decades and might be sharing this information with Dr. Phil, Rolling Stone and People, and might work on a documentary with Hulu.

Over nine episodes, Baber’s two-Zodiac-killer theory has not been mentioned, nor have the Atlanta child murders. Connelly and Jackson declined to comment or to be interviewed for this story. In an email, Baber said his 2022 comments were taken “out of context.” He said the interview was supposed to be framed as a “hypothetical,” with him speaking hypothetically about linguistic database software he was developing to potentially crack cold cases. “Honestly, we went public far too prematurely on the software and today’s investigation far exceeds 2021 on every single level,” he said.

With regard to Baber “breaking”  Z-13, David Oranchak, a Virginia software developer whose work to help solve another Zodiac cipher, “Z340,” was confirmed by the FBI in 2020, said: “I don’t believe Baber has successfully cracked Z-13. He found a solution that fits within his parameters, but many other alternative solutions also fit within his parameters.”

“Regarding his other non-crypto evidence, I haven’t really seen anything that screams out ‘slam dunk’ to me,” Oranchak continued. The podcasters’ suspect is “an interesting suspect for the Black Dahlia crime, but the Zodiac connection is a big stretch in my opinion,” Oranchak said.

Michael Butterfield, who runs the Zodiac Killer Facts website and wrote the 2025 book “The Zodiac Killer: America’s Most Elusive Murderer,” said he has seen many Zodiac claims, often using “a handful of trivia points” to fit a particular theory. With this new theory, “the so-called evidence doesn’t seem as compelling as the hype would suggest.”

Larry Harnisch, a former Los Angeles Times copy editor and writer who has spent 30 years investigating the Black Dahlia murder, strongly disputes the contention that the podcasters’ suspect killed Short. He also said it’s unfortunate that Connelly and his advisers didn’t first “do a minimal background check” on Baber, as it would reveal his “history of dubious claims.”

On the podcast, Connelly said he became convinced of Baber’s Z-13 solution after Ed Giorgio, a former chief codemaker and codebreaker for the National Security Agency, vouched for it. Baber said the FBI is currently reviewing his solution, and he said h’s had favorable discussions with law enforcement agencies. The team also attended a multi-jurisdictional meeting in September and “the investigation is still active,” he said.

The Zodiac Killer is officially linked to the murders of five people, three of which involved young couples. Those killed were two teenagers, Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday, shot to death in a Benicia lover’s lane; 22-year-year-old Darlene Ferrin, shot in her car in a Vallejo park while with a male friend who also was wounded; Cecelia Shepard, fatally stabbed while visiting Lake Berryessa with a male friend who was also stabbed but survived; and cab driver Paul Stine, shot to death by a man he dropped off in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights neighborhood.

The Zodiac cemented his place in the American imagination by giving himself his moniker and infamous crosshairs symbol in letters he sent to newspapers. He threatened to “wipe out a school bus” and to explode a bomb, perhaps on or near Mount Diablo. For the Lake Berryessa attack, he wore a menacing black, hooded outfit with his symbol emblazoned on his chest. In the press, he claimed to have killed 37 people.

In his solution for Z-13, Baber said he discovered the name “Marvin Merrill.” This was an alias for Marvin Margolis, a former Navy corpsman who Baber said was mentioned as a suspect in Short’s killing in a grand jury report. It’s been established that Margolis met Short, a troubled, near-homeless young woman, three months before her death. Baber and the Connelly team said Margolis and Short were romantically involved, and he became so obsessed with her that in January 1947, he killed her, cut her in half at the waist and posed her body in a vacant lot in South Los Angeles. They argue that Margolis had the necessary medical training to bisect a body, possibly from his service during the Battle of Okinawa, or from his USC undergraduate pre-med or pharmacy studies.

Harnisch said Margolis never dated Short, only just briefly roomed with her. He married soon after, never received surgical training at USC and was interrogated and cleared by LAPD investigators, he said. The podcasters argue that he took Merrill as his new last name as he left town. He moved around the country, marrying and divorcing twice, trying different professions, starting failed businesses, exaggerating his accomplishments and serving time in jail for fraud.

According to the podcasters, the “smoking gun” and direct, “prosecutable” “physical evidence,” tying their suspect to both cases, is a sketch he made before dying in 1993. It’s titled “ELIZABETH” and shows a woman from the waist up, nude with possible wounds on her body that they say approximate Short’s. The woman in the drawing has long straight hair falling across one eye, and there’s shading in the corner that Baber said hides the word “Zodiac.” Jackson called it a “deathbed confession,” and Roberts said, “It 100 percent concretely ties the two cases together.” But critics dismiss the idea of this drawing as “a smoking gun,” if only because the woman doesn’t look like Short, who had curly hair.

Connelly said that Merrill checked “boxes” for Zodiac. He resembled police sketches of a stocky, bespectacled Zodiac figure, received firearms training in the military and first demonstrated his “mania for publicity” by sending an envelope to a Los Angeles newspaper with items from Short’s purse. To get him to the Bay Area, Connelly’s team say public records and documents shared by family show he had a home in San Jose and worked at the newly formed Intel in the late 1960s. They try to link their suspect to the July 1969 shooting in Vallejo by noting that a person, believed to be the Zodiac, used a phone booth in town to call police and claim responsibility. They say that payphone was 500 feet from the house where Short briefly lived in the 1940s with her father, before moving to Los Angeles. But reporter Elon Green, citing Los Angeles County District Attorney’s records, reported in a Defector piece that Short actually lived a half mile away. Butterfield said other known Zodiac suspects had established links to crime scenes, while Gyllenhaal’s suspect in “Zodiac,” lived near that payphone.

Baber contends he found a Zodiac link to Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, where Short is buried, by decoding a Bay Area map, sent to the Chronicle, which highlights Mount Diablo with the cross-hairs symbol. Jackson and Roberts dismiss concerns about the dissimilarities in the M.O., saying serial killers are known to change M.Os. As for their acknowledged difficulty in placing their suspect in the Bay Area, Roberts said she’s “irritated” when people say he therefore can’t be the Zodiac: “So everything else that we have proven, the cryptology and all the other things that we have, we’re just supposed to put that aside because of one or two things.” Jackson added: “And so there are going to be things we’re not going to have answers to, but overall it’s a very, very strong case.”

But to critics like Elon Green, who asked “What was Michael Connelly thinking?” in his Defector report, the takeaway from this experiment could be that even high-profile figures in the world of crime can make the mistake of acting “with certainty where they ought to embrace caution.”