• .

• .

• .

A man who died in 1993 is suspected, by some, to have been the murderer of Elizabeth ("The Black Dahlia") Short whose body was found in a vacant Los Angeles lot on January 15, 1947. The birth name of the man is Marvin Skipton Margolis. In his adult life, he sometimes went by the name Marvin Merrill. His name came under scrutiny because an amateur sleuth discovered that it is one of several names which could fit the cipher hint which the person claiming to be the Zodiac Killer included in one of his letters to police in 1970. In my opinion, there is a reasonable chance Margolis could have killed Elizabeth Short. They cohabitated for about a month not long before her murder. As for the possibility that Margolis committed the Zodiac murders, one intriguing link is the hand-printed letter "M" which is similar among the Black Dahlia and Zodiac mailings to the police.