The Phillips 66 oil company mass-produced a paper roadmap spanning the San Francisco Bay Area and surrounding communities in the mid 20th century.

Somewhere within the folds of its landscape and distinctive typography lies a place that once held meaning for the Zodiac killer.

Now, investigative consultant Alex Baber says he has decoded the psychopath’s elusive Z32 cipher to identify the precise location – and argues that its significance further supports his theory that two of America’s most infamous unsolved crimes are connected.

In a world exclusive in December, the Daily Mail revealed that Baber’s years-long investigation had concluded the perpetrator responsible for the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, in Los Angeles and the Zodiac serial killings in northern California in the late 1960s was one and the same man.

That explosive theory rests in part on Baber’s proposed solution to the Zodiac’s Z13 cipher, which he says reveals the name Marvin Merrill – an alias for Marvin Margolis, one of the prime suspects in Short’s grisly murder.

Baber also uncovered a trove of circumstantial evidence linking the suspect to both crimes – material now under review by California law-enforcement agencies.

In the latest development, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal that Baber believes he has also discovered a solution to the Zodiac’s only other unsolved cipher, the Z32 – and uncovered a striking connection to Short hidden within the map itself.

Alex Baber has decrypted the Zodiac’s Z32 cipher, finding a potential solution that links to the murder of the Black Dahlia

The Zodiac killer terrorized California, killing at least five victims and wounding two others in the late-1960s

It was on June 26, 1970, that the serial killer mailed his latest cryptic letter to the San Francisco Chronicle.

By then, the mystery murderer had slain at least five victims and wounded two others in four seemingly random attacks, while sending a stream of taunting missives and codes to local newspapers.

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That letter included a 32-character cipher, known as Z32, along with a Phillips 66 Bay Area roadmap marked with a crosshair over the peak of Mount Diablo and the instruction: ‘0 is to be set to Mag. N.’

‘The map coupled with this code will tell you where the bomb is set,’ the Zodiac wrote.

The killer had previously threatened in letters sent in November 1969 and April 1970 that he had planted roadside bombs targeting buses.

Exactly one month after the Z32, on July 26, 1970, the Zodiac sent another letter that appeared to offer further clues.

It featured a large crosshair with a prominent dark circle in the lower left quadrant. Beneath it was a verse, riddled with errors, from The Mikado opera: ‘As some day it may hapen that a victom must be found. I’ve got a little list. I’ve got a little list, of society offenders who might well be underground who would never be missed who would never be missed.’

The letter also included a second crosshair with an added note: ‘PS. The Mt. Diablo Code concerns Radians & # inches along the radians.’

In June 1970, the serial killer mailed this cryptic letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, including a 32-character cipher, known as Z32, the Phillips 66 Bay Area roadmap and some clues

On July 26, 1970, the Zodiac sent another letter that appeared to offer further clues for the map

Baber explained that, following the Zodiac’s instructions, the map needed to be aligned to magnetic north, which was 16.9 degrees east of true north back in 1970.

Determining that the ‘0’ on the July 26 crosshair represented the directional origin point, Baber overlaid it onto the earlier roadmap from the Z32 letter, rotating it so that zero sat at magnetic north.

He had a hunch that the circle on the large crosshair would then indicate the location of the ‘bomb’ referenced in the Zodiac’s letter.

At that point, he noticed that the circle was roughly four radians – or about 242 degrees – around from the ‘north’ point.

However, Baber believed the crosshair itself might not have been drawn to scale, meaning that the circle would not be in the correct location if simply placed on top of the map.

He therefore reasoned that the Z32 cipher might contain instructions for both angle and distance – echoing the Zodiac’s ‘little list’ note that the code ‘concerns Radians & # inches along the radians.’

Drawing on the confirmed solution to the Zodiac’s Z340 cipher, which was verified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2020, and on his own Z13 work, Baber said that the killer relied on classic encryption methods, including mono-alphabetic substitution (where each letter is consistently replaced by only one other letter or symbol), transposition (characters are rearranged into another order) and homophonic substitution (a letter is replaced by one of several letters or symbols).

Baber believes the Zodiac’s Z32 cipher points to a specific location on the roadmap:  Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, the burial site of Elizabeth Short

Baber concluded that the Z32 must have used a homophonic substitution.

‘The Z32 is very complicated,’ he said. ‘There are only three repeating letters so that accounts for six of the 32 characters – leaving us with another 26. So it has to be a homophonic substitution, which opens the door for multiple possible letters, representing one character or multiple characters.’

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By testing the words ‘radian’ and ‘inches’ within the cipher and accounting for the repeated characters, Baber theorized that the word ‘estimate’ could also be present to reflect the need for rounding.

Radians, as with degrees, measure the amount of rotation around a circle. They can have a decimal value that goes on forever, such as 3.1111…, and so would require simplifying to a more convenient value.

That led to a partial reading of the cipher as: ‘Estimate four radian and XXXXX inches.’

The only number that Baber believes fits the remaining characters is ‘three’: ‘Estimate four radian and three inches.’

Using a rough distance of three inches on the map as a guide, with the correctly scaled crosshair rotated to what was magnetic north in 1970, Baber found that the shaded circle now pinpointed a specific location in Oakland, California.

It fell, just as the Mikado poem had promised, where ‘a victim’ could be found ‘underground.’

The location was Mountain View Cemetery, the burial site of Elizabeth Short, who was laid to rest there on January 25, 1947.

Baber also pointed to another intriguing coincidence potentially linking Short to the Zodiac’s letters: the Mikado opened at the El Patio Theater in Los Angeles on January 9, 1947 – just five days before her body was found severed at the waist in the Leimert Park neighborhood.

Elizabeth Short was found murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947. Her body had been sliced cleanly in two above the waist

Short’s family gathered at her funeral at the Mountain View cemetery in Oakland in January 1947

If Baber’s interpretation is correct, the Zodiac killer’s taunting letter and Z32 cipher pointed to his first potential victim – Short, Margolis’s former lover who was murdered two decades before the serial killing spree in the San Francisco Bay Area began.

However, cryptography experts who previously verified Baber’s solution to Z13 – and confirmed to the Daily Mail that they believe those findings to be correct – have been unable to confirm his solution to Z32.

Ed Giorgio, the former Chief US Codemaker and Chief US Codebreaker at the National Security Agency (NSA), described the finding as ‘plausible’ and ‘consistent with other people’s theories’ about the map and coordinates, but said it lacked cryptographic evidence.

‘There’re two parts to it: the projection of the coordinates and the map. So all that is very intriguing,’ Giorgio told the Daily Mail. ‘But the issue for us is how do you decrypt those 32 characters?’

The Z32’s short length makes it impossible to verify any solution with certainty, he said. It is even harder to decipher than Z13, despite being more than twice as long, because there are fewer repeated characters contained within to help discern a pattern.

Giorgio, who has been working with two former NSA colleagues, Patrick Henry and Rich Wisniewski, on reviewing the cryptography in Baber’s investigation, said that his solution – or any solution – to the Z32 simply cannot be confirmed through cryptography or mathematical evidence.

Any possible solution to the Z32, he said, is based on geometry and coordinates, which are outside the expertise of the top code-breaking experts.

But another amateur Zodiac sleuth has independently substantiated Baber’s interpretation of the Z32 cipher, describing it as a ‘plausible and compelling’ solution.

Marvin Margolis in a high school yearbook photo (left) and a later photo obtained and enhanced by Alex Baber

The Z13 is widely believed to conceal the Zodiac’s real name, with its 13-character code preceded by the teaser: ‘My name is -’ Baber believes he has finally decrypted it to reveal the name Marvin Merrill

Paul Brookbanks, who is based in Australia and shares his findings on YouTube, independently identified ‘Estimate four radian and three inches’ as one of three possible solutions to the cipher.

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On his YouTube channel, Brookbanks said that while the other two solutions pointed to locations in the neighboring communities of Rodeo and Hercules in Contra Costa County or Ingleside Police Department, the first solution does land squarely on Mountain View Cemetery.

Prior to Baber’s investigation linking Short’s murder to the Zodiac killings, he had not been aware of the relevance of that site.

Baber acknowledged that he had approached the Z32 from a ‘perspective of bias’, having decrypted the Z13 and already formed a conclusion about connections between the Zodiac and Black Dahlia murders.

Nonetheless, he believes that it adds to the growing evidence linking the two infamous cases to each other – and to one man – alongside the Z13 cipher solution, the Zodiac Motel where Short could have been murdered, a weapon owned by Margolis similar to that used in one of the serial killings, and a chilling sketch by him regarded by some as a possible deathbed confession.

Margolis’s youngest son has also cooperated with Baber’s cold-case team and has handed over items for forensic analysis.

The Daily Mail understands that some of the relevant police departments are reviewing the investigative findings.

‘For the Z32 to align following his specific instructions… it was one of those moments where I thought, if it is what we think it is, it’s just another piece of supporting evidence to add to the pile,’ Baber said.

‘We have so many pieces that are beyond coincidence.’