When I was a young teenager my hobby was building model aircraft. I had all the gear, sprayguns, scalpels, decals. Research booklets on the various aircraft, mostly WW2. I won one competition and was given a small plastic award cup. I was thrilled at the presentation of it, at a local department store in Winnipeg.

Anyway, I recall building a Flying Tiger with the tiger mouth decals and all. Very small, you could hold these plastic models in one hand, very carefully of course. I think there was even a film about the squadron, all volunteers as I recall.

I’ve been listening to author Michael Connelly’s series ‘Killer in the Code’ podcast on YouTube and I’m up to episode 9, where he’s interviewing author Michael Mann who has a new Dahlia book out. The series is trying to make a connection between the Black Dahlia Avenger and the Zodiac. I’ve so far heard very little evidence that the 2 murders are connected, but I believe their team is making a good case for Marvin Margolis being the murderer of Liz Short.

Liz Had a boyfriend named Matt Gordon who was a pilot with the Flying Tigers in China, where they were based. He’d even stood out in the heroic group as an ace, and a Tom-Cruise-like ‘maverick’, to quote William Mann. She’d met him in Florida and had promised to wait for him, after a single evening together. (Not so unusual for the times, when life was more fleeting for some). They wrote to each other for some time afterwards. Gordon’s plane broke apart in an accident and he was killed before the war’s end. I am still researching the details of his untimely death. It must have hit Liz hard.

Marvin Margolis was a hero at Okinawa in the Pacific theater, WW2, but returned with PTSD. He’d had some surgical experience treating the wounded during the fierce battle, as the podcast explains. He comes back to settle in LA, wants to become a doctor but is pushed into a Pharmacy program instead, possibly because of his disability. So he is frustrated, possibly angry too.

He and a roommate take in Liz short and her friend for 12 days in late ’46. At the end of which time the 2 roomies ask them to leave. It is very tight quarters: 2 single beds and a couch. Liz had taken the couch. The podcast explains there are a few reasons they were booted. But one might be that they were out because they wouldn’t ‘put out’. Margolies was on the suspect list but was alibied by his wife, whom he’d married shortly after the murder. Ned Dehan at YouTube Black Box delves into the situation as well in his excellent discussions on the case.

Jump ahead to the early 50’s, and Margolies has moved to Kansas and reinvented himself as an artist. He also starts telling others that he was a Flying Tiger, just like Liz’s fiance, Matt Gordon. Even though Marvin could have bragged about his own heroic service with the army, he wants obsessively to imagine himself as still connected to her.

I will leave it there except to note that ‘Killer in the Code’ does not show many plausible connections to the Zodiac crimes. My solutions (ie. Herodotus) to the Z13 and my taking apart of the ‘Radians’ theory both conflict with the group’s conclusions. But it is definitely worth a listen. Mann’s just-published book promises to be a good read.

My contribution to the Margolies’ discussion is this. His identifying with The Flying Tigers leads me to believe the so-called Glasgow smile was actually the tiger-mouth insignia of the Tigers. And additionally, that she was posed as a broken aircraft. Both acts indicate a scorned suspect, most likely Margolies. He is the only one with the proven rage, and the surgical experience, who was a major suspect. I submit the photos below in evidence.