Los Angeles detectives initially considered Margolis a viable suspect in Elizabeth Short’s murder, but he has received relatively little attention in the carnival free-for-all of Black Dahlia literature. Other theories proliferate: The killer was a bellhop, a Skid Row alcoholic, the gangster Bugsy Siegel, the director Orson Welles, a venereal-disease doctor.
William J. Mann’s upcoming “Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood” takes Margolis seriously as a suspect. Former Times copy editor Larry Harnisch, a longtime student of the case, has already denounced the book as “fraud and fakery” and regards the Margolis-as-killer theory as a waste of time.
Harnisch points to an LAPD report that says police interviewed and cleared Margolis, along with his sometimes housemate, “due to their work and where they were during the time the victim was missing.”
The report does not give details of the supposed alibi, however, and other evidence makes it clear Margolis remained an active suspect even after he relocated to Chicago. In remarks before a grand jury, a prosecutor found it relevant that Margolis had lived with Short not long before her death, and noted that as a USC student he would have dissected a body.
Betty Short, a.k.a. Elizabeth Short.
Roberts, the former cold case detective at the LAPD, said the original investigators erred in assuming that Short was kidnapped soon after she was seen at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on Jan. 9, 1947, while dismissing evidence she had been alive and free for days afterward.
That evidence included the account of a policewoman who claimed (at least initially) that on the day before the body’s Jan. 15 discovery, she found Short at a downtown bus station, sobbing in fear that an ex-boyfriend was stalking her and wanted to kill her. (Short also told people the ex-boyfriend she feared had been a Marine — a branch which Margolis, as a corpsman, had served with.)
Roberts said the mistaken timeline — the assumption that Short’s killer had control of her for a whole week — permitted Margolis to peddle a convincing alibi.
“He was in the Top 10 [suspects] in the D.A. file,” Roberts said. “He got pushed to the back because of the timeline.”
But he could not be ruled out, she said, and then he vanished.
The initial investigation uncovered evidence of Margolis’ psychological instability. Lt. Frank Jemison, who worked at the district attorney’s investigative unit, studied his military records. He learned that Margolis had seen immense carnage in the Navy medical corps, and was among the first wave of troops landing on Okinawa in April 1945.
Three months later, Margolis was diagnosed with “tremulousness, recurring battle dreams, tiredness which is chronic and intermittent, startled reactions and periods of depressions,” according to Jemison’s May 1950 summary of the records.
The Navy had thwarted Margolis’ ambition to be a surgeon. “He desired operation room technique which was never granted to him and this is one of the underlying bases for his resentment and disgust,” Jemison wrote.
Because of his mental trauma, the Navy discharged him with a 50% disability. He seemed to suggest that he would kill whoever tried to send him to war again. “The next time there is a war, two of us are not going — the one who comes after me and myself,” he told a military psychiatrist.
In August 1945, after the war, Margolis was back in Chicago, his hometown. He posed smiling with his battle ribbons and a rifle for a glowing feature story in the Chicago Garfieldian newspaper, which said he had cared for the wounded as a “pharmacist’s mate” during the war.
“Professionally Margolis plans to be a surgeon,” the article said.
He never became a doctor. After dropping out of USC, he moved between several states and plied many trades, working as a builder, architect and portrait painter. He married twice and had four kids.
He seemed to relish attention, and in 1961, he was smiling again as the subject of another glowing feature story, this time in the Wellington Daily News in Kansas.
He was now calling himself “Skip Merrill.” The article described him as an artist and an intellectual who hoped to bring artistic culture to Kansas. He exaggerated his service record, saying he was a pilot with the Flying Tigers during the war, and claimed to have studied art under Salvador Dali at USC.
Later, in California, he ran a restaurant in Atascadero and worked as an engineer at Intel in Santa Clara. In the early ‘70s, he ran Bucksavers Automotive Repair & Parts Supply in Oceanside and got a 30-day jail term — plus three years’ probation — for defrauding customers.
Margolis’ interest in art proved critical in catching him, said Baber, the amateur sleuth.
Baber approached Margolis’ son, Roark Merrill, with the ruse that he was researching his father’s World War II service but soon revealed his interest in the Black Dahlia case.
Merrill, it turned out, had inherited a peculiar drawing from his father, and kept it on his own office wall. His father had sketched it as cancer was killing him. Would Baber care to see it?
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.
To Baber’s team, the similarities it bears to Short’s bisected and mutilated body are hard to ignore, suggesting firsthand knowledge of the killing. Making this claim hard to prove: Graphic photos of her corpse went public as early as the mid-1980s, in Kenneth Anger’s book “Hollywood Babylon II.”
Because Margolis died in 1993, Baber and the two retired detectives view the drawing as a kind of deathbed confession to Short’s murder. And because “Zodiac” appears to be hidden in the shading, they also see it as a confession to the Zodiac crimes.
Although The Times has reviewed an image of the sketch, Roark Merrill — when contacted — declined to grant permission for the image to be published, and also declined to comment.
Baber also believes he has found the so-called “murder room” that has eluded investigators for nearly 80 years — the place Short was killed, drained of blood and cut in half. He thinks it was at 2615 Santa Fe Ave., in Compton, a cluster of stand-alone bungalows and one of the few area motels in 1947 that had a bathtub.
On the night before the killing, newspaper accounts say, a nervous young man had been driving between motels in the area, desperately seeking a room with a bathtub and claiming his wife needed it.
At the time, the Compton bungalow complex was called the Zodiac Motel, a fact Baber discovered by using AI to unearth a newspaper ad. He thinks it inspired the name the Bay Area killer called himself.
“That was the key to where she was murdered as well as his future moniker,” Baber said.
Roberts, the former cold case detective, said the LAPD has been made aware of the new findings, but the case is not one of the department’s priorities. “It’s not a burning thing on their radar right now,” Roberts said. “I don’t think the LAPD will ever take a position and say it’s solved.”
