A Short Rabbit Hole Widens
*This essay explores overlapping historical interpretations and cultural context surrounding two unresolved cases; it does not assert definitive conclusions.
Elizabeth, like most young single women back then had a slew of men wanting to date, and who did date her. Soldiers returning from wars and her being a beautiful young woman it was only natural. Add to it all she was a traumatized young woman, with a chronic health condition, and a very dysfunctional family situation, for her those dates were most likely shots at hope towards a future of just existing to survive while she tried to reach for the Stars.
Marvin was one of those young men -
He was born in Chicago and was in the Navy and served as a medic. According to reports in Okinawa in 1945, he was reportedly buried alive when a makeshift hospital cave collapsed. The reports went on to say he needed to claw his way out. Needless to say it is not surprising that experience left him with "recurring battle dreams" and "startled reactions". He ended his military service with a medical discharge. He was able to use the GI Bill benefits to enroll at USC, and work towards a medical degree.
The first reason I have is the Zodiac's targets were couples, surprise attacks, and usually with a gun and/or knife. They were quick, as quick could be in those situations and in some reports words likes sloppy were used to describe the assaults. There was no cutting off of body parts, or moving the victims from one location to another.
I think there is another explanation -
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| Skip Merrill was another alias he was known to use. |
He was into art - surrealism. So much so that post her death, some years later, he popped up in Wellington, Kansas, of all place, and started a Wellington Art Foundation. Interesting, isn't it all - and even more so is what is around Wellington- Near there at the time was Beech Factory Airport: Approximately 36 miles.
Cessna Aircraft Field: Approximately 38 miles. McConnell Air Force Base: Approximately 40 miles. -- Boeing Military Production: Boeing’s Wichita facility was critical, manufacturing bombers like the B-52 and helped to continue to support military needs throughout the 1960s. Quite frankly, it was a hub -and known as the Detroit of Aviation. A whistle call to Navy and Air Force enthusiasts and perhaps others who have business to handle . This broader Cold War landscape, the military research, behavioral psychology, and intelligence programs like Project MKUltra all formed part of the cultural backdrop of the era, whether directly connected or not.. but, I digress....
It was the fact that he was an artist which made me dig a bit deeper and mainly because back in the days when Elizabeth Short was reaching for those Stars in Hollywood a bohemian art scene was taking off, along with society being entertained with science fiction all around - and it was growing.
Margolis told the Kansas newspaper that he was an artist who had studied under surrealist Salvador Dalí - most likely not accurate but while living in Hollywood 1946, he socialized within the local theater community. Elizabeth and him, according to reports, shared an apartment with Marjorie Graham, an actress at the Vagabond Mummers' Playhouse on Sunset Boulevard. It wasn't a longterm arrangement, less than two weeks. As for Elizabeth, she did know quite a few names, or at least made sure to be where they were, in the theater and arts community. It was her obsession to be part of that crowd in hopes to be discovered -
Even with Elizabeth's connection to that world, my first thought went straight to other suspects- a main one, George Hodel, the doctor many believe was the murderer, including a member of his own family, his son, and his close friend, the famous surrealist Man Ray who created the following in 1939, the decade before Elizabeth's murder. It's striking to see it knowing that her body was left for discovery, in pieces, just like this piece of art. She suffered extensive postmortem mutilation, including a surgical bisecting of the body and facial trauma consistent with severe blunt force. The surrealist imagery associated with artists such as Man Ray has often been compared, retrospectively and speculatively, to the staged nature of the crime scene.
Hodel was friends with Baron Ernst von Harringa, according to Hodel's son, Steve. His son goes on to link Harringa with the occult-bohemian milieu that included Jack Parsons and, Hubbard. It was a world where avant-garde art, ritual magic, sexual experimentation, and intellectual rebellion often overlapped.
As it happened, just months before Elizabeth Short’s murder, Parsons and Hubbard had conducted the infamous “Babalon Working,” a series of Thelemic rituals intended to invoke or manifest the divine feminine, an event that, whether symbolic or sincere, illustrates the psychological and cultural atmosphere moving beneath postwar Los Angeles.
Yes, it is a lot to take in, and this represents only a small sampling of what Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard were involved with in the 1940s. When considered alongside the surrealist imagery associated with artists such as Man Ray, and the broader cultural world of postwar Hollywood, it begins to sketch the environment Elizabeth Short moved through in her final months. She was a young woman seeking acceptance and stability in a city defined by ambition, instability, and fragmentation, while also navigating health challenges and a lack of consistent support. Taken together, these elements may help form one interpretive framework for understanding the circumstances surrounding her death. However, none of these connections have been formally substantiated or confirmed by official investigative findings.
As for Margolis, he too appears as part of the wider postwar landscape, an individual shaped by wartime experience, possible trauma, and the difficult transition back into civilian life. Like many of his generation, he moved through artistic and social circles in a period defined by instability and reinvention. In reconstructing these overlapping lives decades later, it becomes easy to imagine a kind of narrative closure or psychological arc being imposed on fragmented histories. But that remains interpretation rather than established fact.
As for the Zodiac killings two decades later, they unfolded in Northern California, far from the postwar Hollywood world Elizabeth Short inhabited. Marvin Merrill’s life had been rooted in Southern California, yet the timing raises its own questions. By the late 1960s, California was moving through another cultural rupture, counterculture, experimentation, psychological research, and the fading shadow of covert government programs. Haight-Ashbury had become synonymous with altered states and social upheaval, while Louis Jolyon West, better known as Jolly West, remained an influential figure in behavioral research. Meanwhile, Project MKUltra was nearing its official end, with many of its records later destroyed under orders from Sidney Gottlieb in 1973. Whether any of that has bearing on the Zodiac murders is impossible to say , but it remains part of the larger psychological landscape of the era.
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