Chapter 11: From The Grave

Killer In The Code

This episode of Killer in the Code delves into new evidence from Marvin Margolis's military personnel file, revealing his traumatic wartime experiences during World War II and offering profound

Key takeaways

• Marvin Margolis's military file reveals severe psychological trauma from combat experiences in WWII, including PTSD and deep emotional distress.
• The file contains personal letters written decades after the war that express profound anguish over lost liberty and forgotten comrades, suggesting a long-standing internal conflict.

Main topics

• Marvin Margolis military file and psychological evaluation
• Link between WWII trauma and the Black Dahlia/Zodiac murders

Notable quotes

"Freedom is to be free of a fear to be free. My brave friends who fought and valiantly died shall never know that they gave their lives in vain..."

Conclusion

The military file provides critical psychological context for Marvin Margolis, reinforcing the theory

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) Welcome back to Killer in the Code, solving the Black Dahlia and Zodiac cases. I'm your host, Michael Connolly. We are calling this season two because we've been gone for a few months, but technically it is chapter 11. And we weren't on vacation, I can assure you of that. The investigation headed by Alex Baber and backed by a team of veteran homicide investigators and code breakers. has continued and we have some interesting updates and new information and evidence to bring you over the next few episodes. First, I think we should do a quick recap of the investigation and get up to date. This is such a big and sprawling story about two of the most infamous crimes in California history that it's hard to put it into a brief synopsis, but I'm going to try so we can get to the new stuff sooner rather than later. 51-year-old Alex Baber is a citizen sleuth. He runs an organization called Cold Case Consultants of America. He's on the autism spectrum, but doesn't consider it any sort of affliction. He says it gives him a mindset that brings new ideas and fresh angles to cold case investigation. It allows him to find the hidden beneath the hidden. It also means that when he fixates on a case, he becomes relentless in his pursuit of it. An amateur and self-taught cryptanalyst, he has long been obsessed with the codes left behind by the Zodiac, the serial killer that held Northern California in the grip of fear almost 60 years ago. Until now, the Zodiac has never been identified. In the wake of the five seemingly random murders attributed to him, the Zodiac sent four different ciphers to local newspapers. The first was partially broken almost immediately. The next three withstood the test of time and the best minds in cryptology until very recent years. Baber focused on the Z13, so-called because it contained a scramble of only 13 letters and symbols. As such, it was deemed by many in the field of cryptanalytics to be unbreakable because it was so few characters, it would be impervious to traditional code-breaking methods and tools. Speaker 1 (2:23) The Z13 was considered by many to be the holy grail of Zodiac ciphers because the killer claimed in his note to the media that it contained his name. Three years ago, Baber built a database of 71 million names that fit the 13-digit cipher and then used a variety of screening tools, artificial intelligence, and government databases to whittle the list down name by name until he had cut it to double digits. A deeper dive ensued and a list of 35 names was knocked down to 14 and then 14 became 7 and eventually there was one name left standing, Marvin. Merrill. It wasn't long before Baber determined through social security records that Marvin Merrill was an alias used by a man named Marvin Margolis, a known suspect in the so-called Black Dahlia case, the infamous killing of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947. The name was already in a database Baber had accumulated when he had previously researched the Black Dahlia case. Speaker 1 (3:34) Baber enlisted a team of three veteran homicide investigators to check his work and let the chips fall where they may. They included Rick Jackson, who worked homicides for the Los Angeles Police Department for nearly 30 years and was now investigating cold cases for the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office in Northern California. His partner, Dave Tresmonton, also joined the Baber Review, and the third addition was Missy Roberts. a veteran LAPD homicide investigator who retired as officer in charge of the cold case unit. During the last 15 years of her career with the LAPD, Roberts also had custody of the Black Dahlia case. All three of these seasoned investigators reviewed Baber's work and arrived at the same conclusion. Marvin Margolis, a.k.a. Marvin Merrill, was responsible for these murders. Also added to the investigation was a team of cryptanalysts led by Ed Giorgio and including Patrick Henry and Rich Wisniewski. Together, these men had more than 100 years' experience making and breaking codes for the National Security Agency. In fact, Giorgio is the only man in history to serve as both chief codebreaker and chief codemaker for the NSA. The impeccable credentials of the team Baber put together are important. If you have listened to the earlier episodes of this podcast, you know that there has been pushback from some to Baber's work and conclusions. The pushback comes from those with vested interests in other suspects they have long clinged to. If Baber's team is right, then they are wrong, and nobody likes being proved wrong. We will get into all that in later episodes of the podcast. But suffice it to say that these six highly experienced and accomplished professionals have expertise that dwarfs that of the critics of this investigation. They have reviewed and re-reviewed Baber's work and find it convincing. And through their own work, they have even added evidence that points to Meryl Margolis, and they remain unswayed by the critics. They say these crimes are solved. This is Rick Jackson. Speaker 6 (5:51) Yes, I'm totally still on this. And as we go, the connections between Merrill Margolis to the cases that we've connected into get even stronger. And again, I have no doubt that this is the guy. The evidence that we've presented, the connections we've presented is extraordinary. Speaker 1 (6:16) And Speaker 6 (6:16) this Speaker 1 (6:16) is Mitzi Roberts. Speaker 6 (6:17) I Speaker 2 (6:18) am fully committed to this suspect. I wouldn't be still working so strongly on it if I didn't believe that we were on to the right person, that this is 100 % the lead we should be tracking down. I still say that the evidence that we have and the amount of the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. We have more evidence in this case. I don't like to say we have less evidence in my other cases, but we have more evidence in this case than I have in several of the cases I can think of where they've resulted in prosecutions, like difficult cases that have resulted in prosecutions. This case, I believe we have more evidence even in those cases. Speaker 1 (7:00) Since we last posted an episode, the investigation has continued and we have widened the peer review. Ed Giorgio has convened a work group with dozens of professional cryptanalysts joining the review. So far, not one has punched a hole in Baber and his team's work on this. And these are not amateurs or hobbyists. They are pros. We have also gone out wider in law enforcement and the justice system to peer review the findings. In the episodes ahead, you will hear from judges and prosecutors and what they think of the evidence the team has put together. Okay, so let's get this going. One of the most significant advances in the investigation made since you last heard from us was the acquiring of Marvin Margolis' 221-page military personnel file. It contains several new pieces of the puzzle that was Marvin Margolis. New insights into this suspect's damaged psyche and direct connections to the crimes the team is investigating. Finally, and most importantly, it allows us to hear from Margolis in his own words, a harrowing account of the traumatic and life-altering experiences he had while serving in the military during World War II. This is Alex Baber. All right, so as far Speaker 7 (8:19) as Marvin Margolis' background, what we learned from his military file that Rick secured, we were able to get the detailed psych evaluations. What this does for us, it gives us a deeper dive into his psychology. And this is Mitzi Roberts. Speaker 2 (8:35) It's the closest I think we could get to talking to him with him not being here, but being able to like have his words and kind of have a pretty clear picture when he left the service of his mindset. And, you know, with the PTSD and, you know, he definitely left the service being in a dark, like a dark, dark place, you know, not a healthy mind state at all. Speaker 1 (9:08) Getting the file was no easy task. As a homicide investigator who has worked cases across five decades, Rick Jackson has often had to run down the military service of suspects, victims, and witnesses in cases. The place you start is the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The NPRC is one of the largest federal archives in existence. The building alone covers seven acres and holds more than 100 million military and civil service personnel files. While digitizing began in the 90s, finding a singular hard file dating back to the 1940s is not like finding a book in a library. It's more like finding a needle in a haystack. Military records are divided by branch of service and date of enlistment or discharge. Added to that, a massive fire in 1973 destroyed millions of military files while leaving much of the rest in disarray. But over the years as a homicide investigator, Jackson learned who to go to and what to ask at the NPRC. After a lengthy search, a hard copy of Margolis' full file was found and shared with Jackson. Speaker 6 (10:22) As a veteran homicide detective, I mean, you always want... to throw out the biggest net you can to get information on where you're going in an investigation, whether it's a suspect or whether it's witnesses that you have issues with. But with a suspect, you really want to do