The Dahlia Zodiac Connection: Part One

Crimes of the Times

L.A. Times Studios

Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles, La Times, Los Angeles Times, True Crime, Chris Goffard, News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 42.8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2026

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The identity of the Zodiac Killer has remained a mystery for decades, but new developments may finally point to an answer. At the center is the infamous Z13 cipher, a 13-character code sent to the San Francisco Chronicle that has long defied experts. Self-taught codebreaker Alex Baber used artificial intelligence and exhaustive analysis to narrow millions of possibilities down to a single name. As his theory gained traction, former detectives and intelligence experts began testing its credibility. The result is a provocative possibility: the name hidden in the cipher may also belong to the man behind another infamous California murder — the Black Dahlia.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an LA Times Studios podcast.
0:05.0	My mind, once I start on something, Chris, it's hard to stop.
0:14.0	Puzzles are what stimulates my mind, and I like tackling them.
0:19.0	You know, my understanding was the Z-13 was impossible.
0:22.8	I'm talking to a man named Alex Baver about the Zodiac killings of the late 1960s,
0:28.0	and the taunting cryptograms the killer sent to police and newspapers.
0:32.1	The Zodiac claimed to have murdered more than 30 people.
0:35.7	Some of the cryptograms were relatively easy to crack,
0:39.1	but did not help solve the case. The toughest to decipher and the most tantalizing was the letter
0:44.9	he sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in April 1970. The killer seemed to be answering a public
0:51.3	challenge posed by the head of the American Cryptogram Association,
0:55.3	who had dared him to put his real name in a code.
1:00.7	In this letter, the Zodiac wrote the words,
1:03.4	My Name Is, followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols.
1:08.9	It came to be called the Z-13 cipher.
1:12.0	And one thing that made it so hard to break was its brevity.
1:15.8	It stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle masters.
1:19.5	It became the ultimate prize in Zodiac Studies
1:22.5	because it promised to reveal the killer's identity.
1:26.7	Enter Alex Baeber.
1:28.9	What possible solutions or names can we generate from that?
1:33.0	So with the help of AI and C++ computing and progressions, I was able to eliminate 93, almost
	...

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