Chapter 15: The Injustice Collector

0:01 This is a suffering individual. This guy, it's all about recognition. These crimes are about issues of power and anger.

0:15 You're listening to Killer in the Code, solving the Black Dahlia and Zodiac cases. I'm Michael Connolly, and this is Chapter 15. That voice you just heard belongs to former Supervisory Federal Agent Ronald Tunckel. who for many years as an analyst in the FBI's vaunted behavioral analysis unit specialized in using linguistics to identify and profile suspects in violent crimes.

0:43 This episode continues our examination of the writings of the killers from three notorious and unsolved California cases. The murder of Elizabeth Shore, better known as the Black Dahlia, in Los Angeles in 1947. the killing of Sherry Jo Bates in the town of Riverside in 1966, and the Zodiac killings that held San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area in Northern California in the grip of fear in the late 60s and early 70s. We have discussed these cases at length in previous episodes, so there is no need to go through them again here. The investigation headed by citizen sleuth Alex Baber and backed by experts in homicide, and cryptanalytic investigations has linked all these killings to a man named Marvin Margolis, aka Marvin Merrill. It is an

1:37 eight-page letter written by Marvin Margolis in 1987 that allows us to compare his own words with those contained in messages from the killer in each of these cases. Remember, all the letters and messages referred to in this episode are available online on the website KillerInTheCode.com. In our last episode, you heard from linguistic expert and professor Valerie Fridland, who drew clear connections between the letters from the killers and Margolis' lengthy letter to the head of the Navy, as well as President Reagan back in 1987. In this episode, we're going to go a step further and bring in former agent Tunckel, who agreed to carry out a similar analysis, but from a law enforcement perspective and a psychological perspective

2:30 as well. Professor Friedland connected these cases on a linguistic basis. Now we'll look at what the linguistics say about the mind behind the messages. I want to get right into it here. So rather than me tell you who Ron Tunkel is, we're going to let him tell you himself.

2:50 I was an ATF agent for 30 years, but certainly the most thrilling part of my career, the dominant part of my career was I spent 17 and a half years embedded with the FBI and the behavioral analysis unit. And I was trained and certified as a criminal profiler to conduct crime scene assessments, unknown offender profiles, cold case analyses, threat assessments, counterterrorism issues. It was an amazing time in my life. I tell people it was like law enforcement Disneyland.

3:25 I got to do things that I never would have done in a standard ATF career. A lot of people don't know that ATF has profilers at the BAU, but we've had a unique relationship with them dating back to 1986, in which a number of federal agencies and law enforcement officers are actually from all over the world. We're there at the then Behavioral Science Unit, the famed Silence of the Lambs Unit. The idea was to truly create a national center for the analysis of violent crime. Over time, with budget constraints and other agendas, I guess, everyone pulled out except for us. So we stayed and have been there since. I actually had by far the longest tenure of any ATF agent there. A lot of my training, I've developed an interest in statement analysis, looking at people's language,

4:22 be it verbal or written, to identify areas of potential deception, look for hidden meanings, look for motives, look for information that they are providing us, whether consciously or unconsciously, when they might be cutting out, editing information from us to cut things out of their statements. And from that, I developed an interest in linguistics. There was an actual subunit within BAU-1 that focused on threatening communications, forensic linguistics. I ended up co-authoring two book chapters with a colleague entitled The Assessment of Anonymous Threatening Communications. So we developed a very, I call it a boutique, service there. It was definitely grounded in science, but what we brought to the table,

5:17 which couldn't be measured, was our anecdotal experience. At times, I resented the pace we had there. No sooner would one case come in, we'd work it, hopefully to a resolution, and another one would come in. It reminded me of the old TV series, Quantum Leap. No longer would we be done with one case, then boom, we'd be immediately in another. But it gave me a broad experiential base.

5:44 So for that, I'm grateful. And I was blessed with some magnificent training, courtesy of the FBI, ATF, other government agencies. Some of the cases that I think related to this that I worked, I was the primary author of a profile of the anthrax attacker. And in fact, when Dr. Bruce Ivins was finally by science identified as the author, It was rather prescient, I would say. I worked on the Eric Rudolph case, the series of anomalous threatening letters he wrote during his bombing campaign. Of course, I studied the Unabomber. We had a guy in our unit who was the case agent for Unabomber. I learned a lot from him. The very first note I ever looked at in the unit was the Jean Benet Ramsey ransom note.

6:38 which you could teach a whole class on, on anonymous threatening communication. Pertinent to this case was an infamous serial killer. I worked Robert Ben Rhodes, if you look his name up, Rhodes, R-H-O-A-D-E-S, whips and chains. He was a horrific sexual sadist serial killer. And I spent two and a half days interviewing him in a prison in West Texas, what ended up as a very standoffish case. initial meeting turned out to be we got 12 additional bodies out of him and it was quite an experience a true psychopath and people say you can't build rapport with a psychopath maybe not but i believe you can build an operational accord with them and we were able to do that over two and a half days we were having a difficult time establishing

7:29 any kind of connection with him it was very cold at first and one of the things we had requested was that we would a have lunch with him each day. There's something about breaking bread with people. So we ate in the jail. They brought food in from their cafeteria and we ate it with him. He was drinking milk, you know, out of those little grade school things where you open it up. He was drinking milk right out of a carton. I was drinking black coffee. I don't know what made me do it, but I said, Bob, I called him Bob for the purpose of the interview.

8:01 I said, Bob, can I have some of your milk for my coffee? And he looked at me, kind of like, you're asking me for that? And he just pushed the milk over. I put it in my cup, and I drank it. And I think that was the start of a connection. Maybe it wasn't rapport, but it certainly was an operation to look forward in.

8:29 Let's start with Tunkel's conclusion after a lengthy review of the materials and evidence gathered by Baber. and his team.

8:37 Margolis should be considered as a prime suspect in Zodiac. I would put that in an assessment if I were writing a report triaging suspects. If I were leading a team of investigators, a supervisor, I would say, let's make him our first suspect, ladies and gentlemen. Let's concentrate on him. Everything that I've seen, and subsequent to this initial analysis, the coincidences, the geographic links, the linguistic links, his absolute connection with Elizabeth Short, the linguistic matches between Sherry Jo Bates and his writing, and then the later Zodiac writings.

9:22 There's too many coincidences to be overlooked. I'm going to break this out in segments. The Dahlia. There's too much of a personal connection there. referring to it later. Mind you, those initial cut and paste newspaper clippings, think of it this way. Cut and paste as a means to conceal your identity. All block type letters as a means to conceal your identity. And then later on, a secret code to conceal your identity. That's an evolution of his MO in order to conceal his identity. Using the materials and methods he had available at the time. And let's talk about the block letters at one point. I feel he's a prime suspect for Sherry Jo Bates, the diet. And the Sherry Jo Bates confession. Again, the same personality imprint. Deception. Narcissism,

10:21 power and control, denigrating the victim, psychopath, psychopathy, sadism, and the language. And then to the Zodiac series, the unique relation in the language that links them all, uncanny. It's so coincidental that it justifies logic and the behavior and the type of personality who would do that. I never talk in absolutes in my life.

10:48 Never.

10:49 So I'm not going to say I'm absolutely convinced Marvin Margolis is responsible for all of them. I would say from an investigative standpoint, he would be my number one suspect. And in my non-professional opinion, I would say he did it.

11:10 Okay, now let's get into the analysis that led Tunkel to those conclusions. And if you want to see how a profiler works, a little bit of it at least, You can go to KillerInTheCode.com and see the notes that he made on these messages from a killer as he read and analyzed them. As with Professor Fridland, everything starts with the eight-page letter written by Margolis. That's the control document.

11:36 Very simply, we asked these experts if the author of this document could also be identified as the author of any of the documents attributed to the Zodiac or the killer, of Sherry Jo Bates and Elizabeth Short. Tunkel called the Margolis letter the Rosetta Stone of the analysis. Not only did he use it to find linguistic connections among these documents, he also used it to unlock the psychological profile of this suspect. Margolis' eight-page letter was written in 1987 and is essentially a request, maybe even a demand, for a Purple Heart medal he believes he deserved for being wounded during the Battle of Okinawa 42 years earlier during World War II. The request was later denied, and Margolis died

12:25 in 1993. But in his letter, he summarizes his harrowing wartime experiences, and in doing so, reveals much about himself. In this episode, I'm going to interrupt as infrequently as possible as we hear Tunkel give his review and profile.

12:44 The 1987 letter was obviously what I started out with. And the reason I did that, I wanted to be able to assess Margolis without as much taint as possible from the case files, from the investigative reports, from looking at the later materials. I wanted a clear impression of him. And that's one of the things we did. And when you read a document that This is not disguised. It's not cut and paste. It's not anonymous. It's not under a pseudonym. It's something he has written and he has put energy, time, and effort into it. I find there's deception in it, but nonetheless, this gives us a really good base for understanding his personality. And for me, that's what we do as profilers, look for the emotional clues,

13:41 the underlying personality, in one crime, unsolved crime, over a series of unsolved crimes. So that was what I was offering, what I was able to bring to the table in addition to the linguistic analysis. I called it the Rosetta Stone. As you know, they found this stone in Egypt. It was written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek in one of the local languages. And they didn't know how to read hieroglyphics.

14:14 But when they could translate it because they knew Greek, they were able to understand the hieroglyphics and then understand everything. So that's why it just struck me. Rosetta Stone, it talks about the grievance. And this is a key to so much of this. I think you might have seen where I talk about the pathway to violence. And the pathway to violence begins with the grievance. It talks about, I was seeing in the document, narcissism, if not psychopathy, in some of the areas. And we'll go through that more.

14:51 But once I got that personality, remember I told you I had his linguistic scent? That was maybe a bit dramatic. I had a feel for who this guy was. And I continued to see this underlying personality in the Sherry Jo Bates book. Confession, I saw it back in the Dahlia correspondences and then in Zodiac. This constant theme, narcissism, psychopathy, sadism.

15:19 But what kicked it off was understanding his personality. The amazing thing with this was the total lack of the pronoun we. As I told you in my email, only at the very end in this kind of wacky PS that he writes, Do we see our loss and us? But we don't see we at all in this document. And I had some fantastic training. This is a guide.

15:48 I'd recommend this book. If you have any interest in linguistics, James Pennebaker, he wrote this book, The Secret Life of Pronouns. And we actually bought a program he had. It was called Loop. linguistic inquiry word count. It was probably one of the first attempts of AI at looking at language. Jeez, back in the early 2000s, this was. And pronouns tell us so much about communication, about a person's language. It tells us ownership. It tells us accountability. It tells us who's present in a story, who's absent in a story.

16:29 It tells us commitment, hallmark of a truthful statement. first person past tense. So by circling the pronouns, it forces me to slow down my reading, really listen with my eyes. And that's where we can develop some of the nuggets. The absolute absence of the pronoun we in this letter. Oftentimes we see these people who are depressed. They do not build connections with other human beings. They don't feel part of a team. They're anxieties. or debilitating illness that plays on someone's mind and emotions as well. That's what we see with someone like this. And it's almost sad to see such a lack of pronouns. So this is a suffering individual. In the letter, his Jewish faith plays a significant role in his grievance, what happened to him,

17:24 his perceived suffering all those years. But I don't see a man of faith in here. In my business, if someone has a devout relationship or belief in a deity that is loving, kind, that holds them accountable, that is a good thing in how people conduct themselves in their day-to-day lives. I'm not saying everyone has to have a religion.

17:48 There was an atheist that I worked with in the unit, but he had a profound sense of ethics. And that carried into his life, how he treated other people. He was a wonderful human being. But there's none of that in this. There's no spirituality in this. And what I found glaring was in this moment where he's in combat, probably one of the most extreme nights of his life, a time for him to rise to the occasion, be a hero. He says, when I arrived at the side of each hurt man, there was no room for me to hide from the blasts and whirls of shrapnel. I kneeled to help the men and prayed to survive simultaneously.

18:34 Not praying for them. You know, it was about him. And that's what we see with this type of person. All about him. All about himself. There's another note. All about himself. Self-focused, self-absorbed. And a constant theme that I see in these writings and in the unsub writings, the Zodiac writings, is what we would consider narcissism. Now, narcissism is not simply looking in the mirror every time you go by. It's not hogging the conversation at dinner parties.

19:12 It's not being absolutely attentive to how you're dressing and how you look and appear. It's much deeper than that. And there's good narcissism. There's good narcissism. There's bad narcissism. Good narcissism. I got up this morning. I comb my hair. I wash my face. I put on a nice shirt. I cleaned up my office. I want to make a good impression on you guys. Or you go to a presentation.

19:38 You're well-dressed. You've showered. You've done your best to shine your shoes. You want to look good. You want to make a good presentation. That's healthy narcissism. Where it becomes unhealthy is where we engage in a pattern of the whole world revolves around us. Everyone is simply a mirror for this image we have of ourselves. Narcissists certainly can be very manipulative. You've heard the term, I love this, term recently, gaslighting, you know, rewriting the past, something like that. Well, that didn't happen that way. People involved who are involved with a pathological narcissist, it's horrific cruelty. So I see narcissism throughout this writing and certainly throughout the unsub writings.

20:32 And then another psychological construct I mentioned was psychopathy. And that's, we can go into that a bit. A nice thing to think of is all psychopaths are narcissistic, not all narcissists are psychopaths. So I wanted to get that out of the way right in the beginning, because that's kind of how I framed the analysis. And certainly every serial killer that I've worked or studied is highly narcissistic and psychopathic.

21:03 You can't commit that kind of misery and suffering on another human being simply for your own enjoyment. without being narcissistic and psychopathic. On page two of the letter, down at the bottom, but a Jew in that environment amidst some of the most bigoted young men I have ever knew with a target for deprivations and subordination. So I just have a note here that's grievance. And that's one of the things we look for. What is the genesis?

21:32 What is the kickoff point, the watershed moment in their lives that causes this grievance? This grievance he has, or he's writing this letter in 1987, 42 years later, he's holding this grievance. He's got this grievance. When we see, you know, most people, we all get hard knocks in life, kicked down, crazy bosses, crazy situations, crazy girlfriends, crazy family members, whatever.

22:02 But most of us, if you've got a healthy, some sort of emotional maturity, you know, you get over it. that's quarter under the bridge, with this type of personality, they don't let go of a grievance. This is something he's holding on to for 42 years. That is a very dangerous combination. One of the words we used at BAU was injustice collector. It's somebody who, they almost take joy in being offended, having somebody screw them over, talking about it, holding on to it, not getting over it.

22:40 And it can be stuff from the kid who stole their lunch money in the fourth grade to the girl who rebuffed them in the eighth grade at the dance. And they hold on to these things. They collect them. And it can be from all aspects of life. Grievances. People who suffer from alcoholism tend to hold on to grievances and not let them go. Resentments, they call them.

23:10 This is something that people hold on to that is of no value, no good psychologically. You meet squared away, emotionally intelligent, psychologically healed people. They have let go of that shit. They've made peace with it. They've dropped it. The injustice collector grabs it as every opportunity he can.

23:32 Tunkel said that these grievances can metastasize like a cancer into motive and action.

23:39 They hold on to it and they'll pull it out. You have what I want that I can't get. I want to take it from you and I want to be sure you never get it. That is toxic envy. That couple is smooching in a car. She's laughing at his jokes. I never had that. I want that. I want to take it from them. In fact, I want to hurt them so that they never get it. That is toxic envy.

24:06 Tunkel suggested that Margolis may have been intoxicated when he wrote the letter in 87, and that alcohol may have been an issue in his life. Family members of Margolis had previously told the investigative team that alcohol was indeed an issue, and may have contributed to the ending of at least one of Margolis' marriages.

24:27 Well, a psychopathic personality will use substances to... They have a very flat emotional inner world and they need stimulus. They know they're different. And one of the ways they seek those stimulus and seek those experiences through substance and alcohol abuse. So that fits.

24:49 Going back to the Margois letter, Tunkel said there were two overriding psychological themes dealing with cowardice and the need for recognition that carried over into motivation. and ammo when it came to murder.

25:04 Cowardice is an issue here. This is 42 years later. No one in the world has remembered this incident. No one has felt this pain like he has all these years. No one cares. But he wants this reckoning because he's carrying this idea of being a coward all these years. And that's a theme in him. I would imagine as a boy, he might have been humiliated or considered a sissy or a coward, something like that. And that was very humiliating. And this cowardice, this lack of control, this is what he is working out in his crime scenes.

25:49 I'm getting a bit esoteric here, but he's dominating these women. He's punishing them. He's causing them pain. He's working out his anger. This is a Very bad mix. This man will be dangerous. I know he's dead, but one serial killer I worked, they said, oh, is he going to mellow out after all these years? No, this guy's going to be a threat in the nursing home or in the elderly section of the penitentiary. This is a very dangerous human being. This is lifelong. I'm thinking of interview themes.

26:26 If I were doing an interview with him, I would play on that theme of cowardice. And, you know, people never really noticed your bravery. I can understand that. You certainly deserve that Purple Heart. If not a Bronze Star, you would Delta Short Shrift. I can understand how that made you feel. Words like that to kind of butter him up. But cowardice is an issue here. My soul deserves recognition. And that's a note I have. This is all about recognition. He wants credit. Zodiac wants credit. This guy, it's all about recognition. I've got one of my major notes.

27:08 If I boiled this down to anything, it would be psychopathy and narcissism and the need for recognition and sexual sadism.

27:17 Tunkel's analysis concludes that the Margolis letter shares authorship linguistically as well as psychologically. with the messages of the killers that are the focus of this investigation.

27:29 Stylistically, we noticed he starts a lot of sentences with and and but. You're the writer, Michael. I mean, that's technically bad grammar, I would say. I noted it in one of my emails to you. I did it. I did it to add emphasis to what I was saying. But nonetheless, it's a mistake. And we did see that in the unsub letters, the Zodiac letters. starting with and, starting with but. I knew you have a linguist working this.

27:59 So when I, in my mind, was satisfied that I could link these, all of them, investigatively, I didn't do the deep linguistic dive that she would probably do. I thought that might be cumulative. It's something we could do if you wanted that. But I think you've got somebody with more credentials to do it. But just reading them, it was clear to me that these are linked thematically.

28:24 And mind you, this wasn't... Copycats are easy in this day and age. It's so easy for copycats. The information is everywhere. But back then, there wasn't this information superhighway that we have. And so for someone to so copycat this, to describe the crime scenes, talk about them, use the same language, I find that extremely unlikely, bordering on impossible.

28:51 So I'm satisfied in my mind From an investigative standpoint, they're linked. He asks himself if he's paranoid. Certainly someone who holds a grievance that long can be considered paranoid. And a lot of the personality disorders, narcissistic personality disorder, paranoia, antisocial personality disorder, which is like the infancy of psychopathy, histrionics, there's a level of histrionics in here. All of them, you can think of them as circles. And at some point, the circles kind of overlap. So certainly if I were assessing this guy, I would say pathological narcissism, psychopathic traits, paranoid tendencies, things like that.

29:41 As with Professor Fridland, Tunkel keyed on the repeated use and misspelling of the word twitch in the Zodiac letters, the Sherry Jo Bates letters, and the Margois 1987 letter. He called the connections like this nuggets of evidence.

29:57 That is a nugget. Can you take that to trial and convict him for this? No. Can you bring it to a grand jury? That would be something that would be a piece of evidence that would lead to an indictment. I see your project is, this isn't a trial because he can't defend himself, but you're putting it out to the investigative jury that is your listeners. Ladies and gentlemen, do we deserve an indictment of this person?

30:24 Moving on to the Zodiac and Bates letters.

30:27 Zodiac. This is about recognition about his greatness. He wants so bad to tell, but he wants to tell so much. And some great training by this former Mossad agent. And he had this motto, everyone wants to tell everything to everybody all the time. People just want to tell. And if somebody committed a crime and just kept their mouth shut, They have so much greater chance of not being caught.

30:59 People want to tell. And he opined that it was, if you don't tell about it, tell it. It never happened. I would imagine he died a very tortured man because no one ever knew his greatness. No one ever knew that he was Zodiac, that he fucked the cops over all those years. No one ever knew.

31:22 There are two Bates confession letters, each one typed out individually, slightly different in content, composed on a typewriter in all caps. One sent to the police, the other sent to the local Daily Enterprise newspaper. Tunkel said that the messages are part of the crime.

31:40 This is joyful for it. I liken it to a bomber, Ted Kaczynski. When he was crafting these bombs, Unabomber, wood. He's building these bombs. That is joy to him. With each peg that he sands down, with each electrical circuit that he solders in there, the building and the construction of the device brings joy. Writing these letters brings him joy.

32:08 It's part and parcel of the whole crime. This crime is a package deal. From the stalking, the hunting, identifying the control of the victim, empowering them, killing them, dismembering them, displaying the body, escaping undetected, and then claiming credit for it. This is part and parcel. This is joyful for her.

32:34 According to Tunkel, the Bates letters contain significant clues to her killer's psychology and motivation.

32:42 Starting on line three, on his letter to the police, he imposes a series of what might be considered hypothetical statements. Maybe she will be the beautiful blonde that babysits. Maybe she will be the shapely blue-eyed brunette. But maybe it will not be either. So this is a rhetorical question. Not so much. This is a hypothetical statement. It's a hypothetical statement. But hypothetical statements and rhetorical questions like this, when we see an anonymous threat in communications, It can certainly reflect hostility and aggression. Now, the meta-message packaged here, seeming arrogance, is I'm in control. I get to pick and choose my victims. I get to keep you off balance by trying to second-guess me. And I felt that

33:36 certainly reflected narcissism and sadism.

33:40 Tunkel also zeroed in on the line from the base letter. where he threatens to kill again if his letter is not published.

33:48 But that's up to you. It will be on your conscience, not mine. Okay, that's a classic trick of the narcissist and the psychopath, the externalization of blame. They do not take blame for their actions. It's always somebody else's fault, as with the paranoid. I have a note here. Recognition, shock, shame of the victim. That's what he's doing. And he kills Miss Bates. And it's designed to shock the public as a secondary victim, bring shame and humiliation to the victim.

34:25 That is a hallmark of a sexual sadist. He gets pleasure from the pain and suffering and fear, the fear it evokes.

34:38 Tunkel noted that the repeated description of the crimes as being part of a game in the messages sent in the Zodiac, Black Dahlia, and Bates cases is a psychological link.

34:50 We would certainly link them, all the letters. Why, in his mind, it's certainly a game. This is his profession, his life. It's his secret employment. It's everything. This is what he thinks about. He's plotting and scheming. I would certainly another point to link all of them. And you could certainly say it's a game to him. I think it's more than a game. It's what he is.

35:21 Behind the taunts and threats and the messages, Tunkel sees a highly organized killer.

35:27 Again, this is his personality. We've got narcissism. The narcissist spends a lot of time and energy in impression management. how they appear to others, how they appear to the outside world. Their family members will see and know the true them, but outside people will see a different part of them, and that annoys and bothers and hurts the family. Psychopathic, he's very intelligent and high-functioning. Next to Ted Kaczynski, this is probably the most intelligent offender I've ever encountered. This is a major component of criminal profiling. Characteristics of the offense are related to those of the offender. How we act in the commission of a crime, generally a highly stressful act, is a reflection of how we would act

36:19 in our day-to-day lives. Somebody very organized in their crime scenes, methodical, they will have a neat car, they will have a neat workplace that will be methodical and organized in their day-to-day living. That's a very simple thing. This guy, it's about hunting and predation. The way I liken it to, I played sandlot baseball and wiffle ball growing up. Sandlot meaning we'd find some kid who had a good yard, some vacant lot, some field. We would play baseball there.

36:53 I was always looking for fields to play in. To this day, when I'm flying into a city and I go over a parcel of land, I'll see it and think, wow, that'd be a good place to play baseball. Hunters, when they're driving around this summer, they're thinking, you know, I saw a deer here. I could park my car here and put up a deer stand here. They're always on the hunt. And that's what he would have been throughout his entire career, on the hunt, scouting, looking for them, surveillance.

37:27 And again, that's part and parcel of the whole crime. Major themes in his crime, always on the hunt, violence, humiliation, power. the joy of getting ready for the hunting. With his crime, there's many aspects. Scout, prepare, approach, use counterforce, attack, overwhelm, gain control, violence, humiliation, power, transport and display the body, escape undetected, and then write about it. Behavioral observations about his crime, rage, anger, control, domination of women, degrade, humiliate, sexual sadism, acting out his fantasies, Shock the public. The public is a secondary collateral victim. Humiliate the police. The police represent an authority figure. Shows how smart he is, how brilliant. I can do this and never get caught.

38:20 And here's something we haven't addressed before on the podcast. A situation where a killer's routine becomes ritual. It serves as another connecting point between the Black Dahlia and Zodiac cases. That is that in each of the cases, the killer not only sent messages to the police and the public, but also sent actual evidence, something rarely seen in the annals of crime.

38:44 Now we saw in Black Dahlia where he mails in her belongings, which were pretty significant, pretty extensive. And that's showing, hey, he's claiming credit for it. I did this. And look, I'm giving it to you and you can't do anything about it. You can't catch me. And then years later, Zodiac does it with Paul Stein. I think it was three different pieces of cloth from his bloody shirt, three different communications. He mails that in, again, establishing his bona fides.

39:19 You know, that goes to ritual behavior, behavior that is unnecessary to successfully commit a crime and escape undetected, but it's psychologically necessary for the effect. And in this case, he's saying, look, you can't catch me. I did this. And that's part of, again, instilling fear in the public at large. He's getting a kick out of this.

39:45 As with the other veteran detectives on the investigative team, Tunkel had no issue with the geographic range of the hunt. That is, the distances Margolis would have had to travel if he was the killer of Sherry Jo Bates and the victims of the Zodiac. Though Margolis had permanent homes in Southern California through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the investigation has documented that he had a second address in the San Jose area, which put him within 90 miles of the Zodiac killings.

40:18 These guys do drive a lot. I would imagine there were large blocks of time in which he was unaccountable to others. These type of offenders are always on the hunt. Travel. The greater the distance of travel, the greater the hunting area, the greater their mental, their map, that can show how organized they are. Disorganized offenders' states tend to stay closer at home, where organized offenders can move, can branch out.

40:47 It's as simple, they have a vehicle. You know, they have transportation. They have the means to get around. So this in no way does it bother me. And in fact, it talks to his organizational level. And this is a highly organized killer. I mean, he is able to commit these crimes over a period of nearly 30 years and escape undetected, despite some of the, you know, fantastic, Law enforcement force brought to the table against him. So that doesn't bother me. I mean, you know, remember Kaczynski at Unibar.

41:26 He'd take the bus from his cabin in Montana to California to deliver his lethal devices. So he had time on his hands. He didn't necessarily have funds, but he led a very spartan life, Kaczynski. So that does not bother me at all, that range. It speaks to his organizational level. It speaks to the time on his hands.

41:51 But no, that does not dissuade me. And again, the linguistic and the personality linkages, to me, you cannot ignore. Starting with Elizabeth Short.

42:08 Finally, we come to M.O. From the 1947 killing of Elizabeth Short, a very personal attack, To the stranger attacks of the Zodiac, the MOs in these cases seem markedly different, begging the question, how could this be the same killer, the man who tortured Elizabeth Short and severed her body in half, and the man who, 22 years later and 400 miles away, walked casually out of the shadows and fired a handgun into a car with two young people in it? Tunkel says MOs change over time. But what doesn't is the psychological underpinnings of the crimes.

42:48 Whatever your motive is, revenge, underlying emotions, anger, you can boil it down to power. The ability to exercise power, obtaining power, regaining lost power. These crimes are about issues of power and anger. Maintaining power, regaining lost power, demonstrating power.

43:13 Tunkel notes that while these murders may have contributing motivations in sexual sadism, actual sex acts were not part of the commission of the crimes, with the possible exception of the Black Dahlia case where no known sexual assault was involved, while sexual mutilation certainly was. Tunkel posits that the hunt was the thing in these killings, that the suspect was motivated by his desire to kill.

43:42 By his own words, he says he gets more joy out of killing people than having sex. So if the joy is in killing people, remember I talked about MO, it can change. MO, actions an offender takes to successfully commit a crime and escape undetected. It's dynamic. It's malleable. It changes over the course of a criminal career as they learn from their mistakes. If they happen to find themselves in an institution of higher criminal learning, prison and learn from their fellow inmates what works, what doesn't work.

44:17 So yeah, MO can change. And if the whole desire then is, I like killing people. I don't necessarily have to spend time carving them up, getting all that blood all over me, getting that smelly stuff open. No, I just like killing them. That is, to me, you could consider that an evolution of his MO. He's simplifying things He's refining his technique.

44:44 We will likely have more from Ron Tunkel in episodes ahead. Alex Baber joined me during the interviews conducted with Tunkel and Valerie Friedland. So he'll take the last word here on our investigations into the linguistic and psychological connections between Marvin Margolis and these cases.

45:03 So both Agent Tunkel, who's been BAU certified for nearly two decades, and Professor Friedland, independently looked at our letter from Marvin Margolis in 1987, as well as the collection of Zodiac correspondences, the two confessional letters from 1966 for Sherry Jo Bates, as well as the cut and paste and handwritten letters from 1947, January, for the Black Dahlia case. Independently, they both reached the same conclusion on linguistics. And that conclusion is that the author of all of those communications, in particular Marvin's compared to the Zodiac from 69 through 74 and the two 1966 baits, that he is in all probability the author of those correspondence. And this is based on the detailed analysis by both. Fred Linden hit

45:57 21 out of 28 points, independent points linguistically. And then we had Ron come in and look at it without knowing.

46:06 You know, these two individuals, we didn't know them before we brought them in. They're independent experts, one on the academic side, one on law enforcement. So we wanted two different views, and that's what we received. But they reached the same conclusion. So, you know, to have two people of their stature, somebody respected that, you know, has written the books and has the background and the credentials of Professor Friedland, and then Ron's, you know, extensive law enforcement background.

46:32 BAU trained in particular for behavior analysis units. And then you have Ron's profile that he.

46:39 Does after linguistic analysis, which identifies Marvin Margolis on every level as being his number one suspect as the perpetrator of the crimes. It matches up. If you were to layer it one over the other, he again checks all the boxes as a term that we used in season one. It's hard for anybody to challenge or contradict experts After expert after expert, these are credible, known, established experts that are all coming to the same conclusion.

47:15 I'm Michael Connolly, and you have been listening to Killer in the Code, Solving the Black Dahlia and Zodiac Cases. For the next chapter of the podcast, we'd like to hear from you. If you have questions about the investigation, you can email them to podcast at michaelconnolly.com. That's podcast at michaelconnelly.com. And we'll try to answer as many as we can. This episode was written and produced by me, Michael Connelly, and edited by Terrell Lee Langford with music and post-production services by Mark Henry Phillips. Thank you for listening.