Has the Black Dahlia Murder Been Solved?

Last December the Los Angeles Times published a remarkable story about an obsessed investigator in West Virginia who claimed to have not only identified the Zodiac killer but to have also tied that same person to the so-called Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles many years earlier. Here's what I wrote at the time.

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...

Margolis was married twice and had four kids. Baber approached one of them, claiming he had questions abut his father's service in the war. The son, Roark Merrill, had inherited a drawing which his father had done as he was dying of cancer. It was called Elizabeth.

The sketch, called “Elizabeth,” depicts a woman who is peering with one eye through a curtain of hair that hangs over her face. She is naked from the waist up. Her lower half is not visible, as if cut off above the navel. One of the nipples appears to be severed. The torso bears a series of marks that might be stab wounds, amid an area of shading that suggests blood. It is signed “Marty Merrill ‘92,” reflecting another alias Margolis used.

No one has ever proven where Elizabeth Short was killed, but Baber thinks he knows. He identified a motel in Compton which, in 1947, was one of the few that had bathtubs in the bungalows. Reports the day after the killing suggested a man had been driving from one hotel to the next looking for a room with a bathtub, which he said his wife needed.

Baber found a newspaper ad for it. It was called the Zodiac Motel.

Marvin Margolis eventually returned to California and Baber believes he became the Zodiac killer. Baber's theory about the Zodiac killer's identity and connection to the murder of Elizabeth Short aka the Black Dahlia killing, made its way to a pair of actual detectives in Los Angeles both of whom shared it with crime fiction writer Michael Connelly. Connelly, whose books about an LA detective are the basis for the TV series Bosch, then became convinced and produced a podcast laying out the case.

The second season of that podcast is about to launch and with it comes a story about the investigation from the NY Times.

“I have no doubts,” Connelly said in the run-up to the second season, which focuses on advancing the case against Margolis as if he were still alive. The evidence pointing to Margolis as the killer, Connelly added, was “completely convincing.”

Margolis has been floated before as a suspect in the Short killing, but never with such confidence. And he has never been previously connected with the Zodiac killings. The podcast has infuriated many in the true crime community. Connelly is viewed by some as a carpetbagger and completely out of his depth...

What keeps him going is an enduring fascination with Short, the patron saint of every lost soul to wander down Sunset Boulevard. “She was missing something,” Connelly said. “That’s the secret of L.A. Everybody here came from somewhere else because they’ve been missing something. Myself included.”...

Dozens of men were investigated, none charged. The case has long been cold, but for Connelly it’s also frozen, preserved with chilling clarity. “I have a daughter who’s just a few years older than Elizabeth Short was,” he said.

The case for Margolis as the killer is partly based on him being someone who could have carried out such a grisly murder in which the corpse of Short was cut in half in what appeared to be a surgical way.

A native of Chicago, Margolis served as a medic in World War II and lived with Short in Los Angeles for a little less than two weeks in 1946. After the murder, he was questioned and cleared. But in 1949, an L.A.P.D. homicide investigator told a grand jury that Margolis was “possibly a very good suspect” in Short’s murder...

“Killer in the Code” argues that Margolis was transformed by what he saw at the Battle of Okinawa, where he was a medic. Heavy rain collapsed the field hospital inside a cave where he was working, and Margolis was buried up to his neck for 24 hours, leaving him with what the military described as “battlefield neurosis.”...

After the war, Margolis briefly took pre-med courses at the University of Southern California, where he participated in human dissection. He lived with a former military cryptographer, who would have had access to the kinds of books the Zodiac likely used to create his ciphers years later.

It all sounds plausible but there are other investigators who claim to have proof Margolis was not the killer (though they won't say who was).

Filmmakers behind an upcoming documentary series, “Deconstructing Dahlia,” said last month that they had found dozens of blood samples behind drywall in the room where they believe Short was murdered. “We know it’s not Marvin Margolis,” said Kimberly Lupini, one of the producers...

So the dispute over who is responsible for this grisly murder from 1947 is ongoing. Connelly has been accused of backing his version of the story for money, but he says he paid for the podcast himself and has yet to break even. Personally, I'd like to think that cases this cold can still be solved. The killer is certainly dead no matter who he was, but it would be nice to know he didn't ultimately get away with it without at least being identified.

Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.

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