"The origin of Michael Connelly's new true crime podcast, Killer in the Code, was a rather far-fetched tip fielded by Rick Jackson, a retired detective from the Los Angeles Police Department. A self-described "cold case consultant" named Alex Baber told him that he'd cracked two legendary mysteries. The first was the killing of Elizabeth Short, known posthumously as the Black Dahlia, whose bisected corpse was left in South Los Angeles in 1947."
"This was his third cryptographic missive; he'd sent two much longer efforts the previous year. "My name is -," the killer wrote and, in lieu of his identity, provided a string of thirteen characters. Unlike the earlier ciphers, which have been decoded (the first within days, the second in 2020), Z13 had not been definitively solved. Baber claimed to have cracked the code and to have unearthed the name of the killer: Marvin Merrill."
"History is littered with such endeavors-fingering all sorts of unlucky souls as America's great uncaught murderer, whether it's Janice Knowlton pinning the death of Short on her own father or San Francisco Chronicle's political cartoonist Robert Graysmith using the 1986 bestseller Zodiac to connect the crimes to Arthur Leigh Allen. There was even a prior effort to link these two specific cases, when former LAPD detective Steve Hodel attributed the crimes on his own father."
Rick Jackson, a retired LAPD detective, received a tip from Alex Baber, a self-described cold case consultant who claimed to have solved both the Black Dahlia and Zodiac cases. Baber said he found a name in Z13, the Zodiac's 1970 thirteen-character cipher, and identified Marvin Merrill as the killer. Z13 had remained unsolved while two earlier Zodiac ciphers were decoded. The Black Dahlia murder and the Bay Area Zodiac homicides have attracted numerous speculative claims and theories over decades, including attempts by Janice Knowlton, Robert Graysmith, and Steve Hodel to name specific suspects.
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