AI May Have Uncovered the Zodiac Killer’s Identity. Could It Crack History’s Greatest Mysteries?

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story...Amateur code breaker Alex Baber claims his AI program solved one of the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers, Z13. Not only did the program spit out the name of a real person, but it also linked the Zodiac killings to a suspect in the infamous Black Dahlia cold case. Experts believe that similar AI use could help uncover other historical mysteries, including breaking more cryptic messages and deciphering lost languages. In 2007, Alex Baber saw Zodiac, David Fincher’s movie about the serial killer of the same name, and became obsessed with cracking one of the murderer’s unsolved ciphers, known as Z13. Out of the four ciphers the Zodiac Killer left behind, it’s the shortest, comprised of only 13 characters prefaced by the phrase “My name is…” So the 50-year-old West Virginian began poring over college-level textbooks, teaching himself forensic science and cryptography, the science of breaking codes, while working as a bodyguard outside Charleston.Then, a couple of years ago, Baber also started learning how to code using artificial intelligence (AI) and successfully prompted his AI program to come up with potential names that fit the 13-character cipher. It produced 71 million possibilities. Cross-referencing those names against historical records like social security numbers and birth certificates, “we found out about 93 percent of [them] were never living, breathing people,” Baber explains, “so the list became considerably smaller,” about a couple thousand people. After the program eliminated those who didn’t match the Zodiac’s physical traits—white, middle-aged, about six feet tall—the amateur code breaker was left with an answer to the 67-year-old cipher: Marvin Merrill.To Baber’s surprise, the name was familiar. It was an alias used by Marvin Skipton Margolis, a suspect in the infamous 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old aspiring actress whose decapitated body a pedestrian found slashed in half in a Los Angeles park. Short’s dark hair and wardrobe earned her the nickname “the Black Dahlia,” and her unsolved case has been a fascination of true crime fanatics ever since.Baber’s sleuthing garnered international attention and attracted the interest of crime reporter and novelist Michael Connelly, who hosts a podcast series about Baber’s Zodiac/Black Dahlia theory. “I have no doubts,” he told the New York Times.Other cryptographers, however, have plenty of doubts.Klaus Schmeh, a German computer scientist who has written more than a dozen books about cryptology, says Z13 is virtually unsolvable because of its brevity. “The message is just too short. There are just too many possibilities.”What is certain, Schmeh says, is the potential of AI to solve decades-old and even ancient mysteries.“At the moment, cipher solutions are falling like ripe fruit from the trees,” according to Schmeh. “The autumn of 2026 will undoubtedly go down in the history of cryptology. Thanks to AI-assisted methods, cryptographic cold cases that have resisted solution for decades are suddenly being cracked one after another.”For instance, in late September, Eren Bozbulut, a 22-year-old cybersecurity researcher from Turkey, used AI to crack five encrypted messages that the German spy Walter Koehler left behind during World War II. Using OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Daybreak Blue models to explore possible solutions, Bozbulut discovered a trove of WWII-era ciphers that the U.S. Coast Guard solved—and they happened to look a lot like one of Koehler’s uncracked messages. Combining the two ciphers, AI found the key that Koehler had based his code on: a single page in a Dutch prayer book published in 1893.A few weeks later, an unrelated Russian engineer—Anton Zaytsev—successfully cracked an encrypted message found inside a glass bottle in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg) during the height of the Cold War. Zaytsev instructed his AI program to compare the letter frequencies of the cipher with those of known texts, and it quickly turned up the key: a song from East Germany that was especially popular with a socialist youth organization called the Freie Deutsche Jugend, or the Free German Youth.AI has also shown potential in translating ancient cuneiform as well as Linear A, an undeciphered writing system the Minoan civilization used some 3,000 years ago. Google’s DeepMind Ithaca is helping scholars interpret damaged Greek inscriptions by predicting the missing text. Historians stand to learn a lot about bygone societies should AI prove successful in decoding dead or classical languages.While the developments are exciting, Elonka Dunin, a cryptology expert and author, is quick to point out that AI is also “remarkably good at making things up. It hallucinates and fills in blanks,” she says. A solution that looks right “isn’t necessarily a solution. You have to be able to demonstrate how you got there.”Additionally, while AI has been getting all the credit for cracking old ciphers and translating dead languages, humans are still very much at the helm, Dunin says. “It’s a prompt-and-response relationship. You still have to give AI some sort of prompt to get it rolling, you still need a human.”Schmeh agrees, “AI is making progress and because people are making progress in using AI,” to sort through massive amounts of data infinitely quicker than a human could.Dunin is confident AI will never take all the guesswork out of codebreaking. “Even after all the AI platforms pound on all of them, there will still be unsolved ciphers out there,” she says. “And the question will be: is this a fraud or is it just using a technique that neither humans nor AI have figured out yet?”In the meantime, whether they’re cracking ancient mysteries or recent cold cases, humans will just have to rely on their own wit and diligence.Special Digital IssuesOctober/November 2026Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.➡ America’s Radioactive Graveyard Is Quietly Leaking. 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This Weapon Can Save It.October/November 2022Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ Can America's M1 Abrams Still Compete With China's and Russia's Latest Battle Tanks?➡ Inside the Final Minutes of the Concorde Disaster—and How It Doomed Supersonic Travel for Decades➡ How the Massive Cargo Ship Felicity Ace Sank, Taking $400 Million Worth of Exotic Supercars With It➡ I Turned My Old Gas-Guzzler Into a Zippy EV for $15,000August/September 2022Download HereThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring: ➡ Cosmic Secrets of the 17 Most Powerful Mega-Telescopes on Earth—and Beyond➡ Can the Air Force's Secret, Hypersonic Jet Reclaim the Skies From Russia and China?➡ For 50 Years, the Zodiac Killer's 340 Cipher Stumped the FBI—Then Three Amateurs Cracked the Code➡ America's Most Fearsome Howitzer Has Entered the War in UkraineJune/July 2022DOWNLOAD HEREThis issue is optimized for mobile/tablet viewing.It's also available on Apple News+.Featuring:➡ Every Single Drone Fighting in the Skies Over Ukraine➡ How to Buy a New Car in 2022 Without Getting Fleeced➡ This Megastructure Could Keep Us Alive Forever➡ The Race to Revolutionize EV BatteriesAshley Stimpson is a freelance journalist who writes most often about science, conservation, and the outdoors. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, WIRED, Nat Geo, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbia, Maryland, with her partner, their greyhound, and a very bad cat.