King of crime Michael Connelly is convinced these notorious unsolved murders are linked
When he was a young crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times, Michael Connelly admired the detectives who worked a case even after it had gone colder than yesterday’s coffee. The ones who were “undaunted and relentless”, as he recently put it, restless and patient at the same time. It’s the quality that makes Harry Bosch, the detective Connelly created, such a memorable character.
“A city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost,” a captain tells Bosch in one of Connelly’s novels. Real cops he came to know liked that saying so much, they turned it into a sign at the cold case unit at the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. When the office moved a few years ago, they gave the sign to Connelly.
“There’s this emptiness that comes from knowing that people get away with it,” Connelly said. He’s written more than 40 novels, sold 90 million books. His writing room is decorated with posters of stars who’ve played his characters: Titus Welliver as Bosch. Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. Maggie Q as Renée Ballard.
The late nights at the Short Stop, the legendary Echo Park cop bar, are long gone; Connelly lives in the Hollywood Hills now. But what was true then remains true today. A murder unsolved is a city unmoored.
So when two of Connelly’s most trusted collaborators – retired LAPD detectives Rick Jackson (partly the basis for Bosch) and Mitzi Roberts (the inspiration for Ballard) – came to him early last year with the claim that an amateur sleuth in West Virginia had solved the most notorious murder in LA history, there was only one thing Connelly could do: work the case as if he were still a young reporter ravenous for the big scoop.
That investigation resulted in Killer in the Code, a podcast whose second season has returned with the first two episodes of six. The 10-episode first season roiled the true-crime community by arguing that a World War II veteran named Marvin Margolis was responsible for two of the most famous unsolved crimes in California history: the 1947 Los Angeles murder of Elizabeth Short, immortalised as the Black Dahlia, and the five killings committed by the Zodiac throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s.
“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 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 out of his depth, duped by bad cryptography and shoddy evidence.
“Mike was a fine reporter, but those reporting days are in the rearview mirror,” said Larry Harnisch, a leading Black Dahlia expert who has led the opposition to Killer in the Code.
Connelly, now 70, admits that when he first got involved in the podcast, he did not think it would become something of a second job. Instead, the story has swallowed him whole.
It all began when he learned that a self-taught investigator in West Virginia claimed to have finally solved one of the Zodiac’s cryptograms. “As homicide investigators like to say, it goes where it goes,” Connelly said.
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 LA. Everybody here came from somewhere else because they’ve been missing something. Myself included.”
Born and raised in the Boston area, Short went to California in 1942 in an attempt to reconcile with her estranged father, before coming to Los Angeles in 1946, at 21. Hers was a precarious, itinerant existence, maybe not down-and-out but definitely not moving up.
On the morning of January 15, 1947, a mother pushing her toddler in a stroller found Short’s naked body in an empty lot. Lurid newspaper accounts of her killing and the investigation that followed tagged her with a nickname that has stuck to this day: the Black Dahlia.
Dozens of men were investigated, none charged. The case has long been cold, but for Connelly it’s also frozen, preserved with chilling clarity.
“To me, it kind of feels like the media emerged as one of the villains in this story because of what they did to her,” Connelly said in one episode of the first season of Killer in the Code. The podcast takes a sensitive approach to Short’s challenging life. But the central question remains: Who was responsible for her death?
Last year, Connelly came across what he thought might be a route to the answer when Jackson and Roberts told him about the work of that West Virginia investigator, a cold-case obsessive named Alex Baber.
Baber had started out focused on an entirely different crime, wanting to crack the encrypted letters the Zodiac killer had sent to newspapers. With the help of artificial intelligence, he claims to have solved the so-called Z13 cipher, famous for its brevity (13 characters), which he believed would reveal the Zodiac’s name.
The lone suspect, Baber said, was a guy named Marvin Merrill, an alias for Marvin Margolis.
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 LAPD homicide investigator told a grand jury that Margolis was “possibly a very good suspect” in Short’s murder. Still, he lived for decades before his death in 1993 without facing serious scrutiny.
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”.
“There are clear indications of a traumatic brain injury based on the symptoms documented in his records,” Baber wrote in an email. “Marvin resented the system because he felt it let him down – left him behind.”
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.
The peripatetic Short stayed with them for 12 days, at the Guardian Arms apartment complex on Hollywood Boulevard. “Police records call him her last known boyfriend,” Connelly said of Margolis in the podcast’s first season.
The first season of Killer in the Code arrived at almost exactly the same time as William J. Mann’s new book, Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood, which argues that Margolis is the most likely killer. Mann came to that conclusion on his own (the Zodiac killer was outside the scope of his investigation).
But many aren’t persuaded. David Fincher’s 2007 film Zodiac boosted the belief that Arthur Leigh Allen was the killer, though DNA analysis appeared to clear him in 2002. A 2024 Netflix documentary, This Is the Zodiac Speaking, also points to Allen.
Steve Hodel, a former LAPD detective, also believes the Black Dahlia and Zodiac killings were committed by the same person: his late father, Dr. George H. Hodel. “The Merrill proposal does not withstand even basic structural scrutiny,” Hodel wrote on his blog.
None of this has shaken Baber’s confidence. “There’s nobody in history that comes remotely close to Marvin Margolis. Nobody,” he said.
The second season attempts to prove it. Stephen S. Trott, a former associate U.S. attorney general, deputy Los Angeles County district attorney and a senior federal appellate judge, says in the second episode that the podcast had produced “s