August 2026

COUNTING:

Did the Zodiac Kill the Black Dahlia? This Crime Writer Thinks So. (Alexander Nazaryan, Aug. 26, 2026, NY Times)

[W]hen two of Connelly’s most trusted collaborators, the retired Los Angeles Police Department detectives Rick Jackson (partly the basis for Bosch) and Mitzi Roberts (the inspiration for Ballard), came to him early last year with the claim that an amateur sleuth in West Virginia had solved the most notorious murder in L.A. history, there was only one thing Connelly could do: work the case as if he were still a young reporter ravenous for the big scoop.

That investigation resulted in “Killer in the Code,” a podcast whose second season returns on Wednesday with the first two episodes of six. The 10-episode first season, which debuted last December, roiled the true crime community by arguing that a World War II veteran named Marvin Margolis was responsible for two of the most famous unsolved crimes in California history: the 1947 Los Angeles murder of Elizabeth Short, immortalized as the Black Dahlia, and the five killings committed by the Zodiac throughout the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s.

“I have no doubts,” Connelly said in the run-up to the second season, which focuses on advancing the case against Margolis as if he were still alive. The evidence pointing to Margolis as the killer, Connelly added, was “completely convincing.”

Margolis has been floated before as a suspect in the Short killing, but never with such confidence. And he has never been previously connected with the Zodiac killings. The podcast has infuriated many in the true crime community. Connelly is viewed by some as a carpetbagger and completely out of his depth, duped by bad cryptography and shoddy evidence, the kind of thing Bosch or Ballard would see right through.

“Mike was a fine reporter, but those reporting days are in the rearview mirror,” said Larry Harnisch, a leading Black Dahlia expert who has led the opposition to “Killer in the Code.” Back when Connelly was a reporter for The Times, Harnisch was a copy editor at the paper. He hasn’t taken kindly to what he sees as the novelist’s intrusion on his domain. “I’m not going to sit silently and let them do it, because it’s a scam,” Harnisch said.

Despite the criticism, Connelly retains a conviction that he has the right guy, dismissing Harnisch and other detractors as a “small incestuous group” peddling “disproved” theories.

“I knew that, going into this, I would put my reputation on the line,” Connelly said.

“They’re invested in a different theory,” he added, “so to accept our theory, they have to accept that they’re wrong, or they’ve wasted a lot of time.”

The gray goatee, the bulky frame, the raspy voice. Michael Connelly, now 70, may be one of America’s most successful writers, but the vibe he gives off is of a cop on the cusp of retirement yet with something still left to prove.

Connelly admits that when he first got involved in the podcast, he did not think it would become something of a second job. (His latest novel, “Ironwood,” was published in May; a new Bosch novel, “The Hollow,” is coming in October.) He would narrate the story of Margolis, and the Black Dahlia-Zodiac link, then go back to writing books. Instead, the story has swallowed him whole.

It all began when he learned that a self-taught investigator in West Virginia claimed to have finally solved one of the Zodiac’s cryptograms. “As homicide investigators like to say, it goes where it goes,” Connelly said.

He can’t just drop it, like a bad first draft. This Friday, he and the rest of the podcast team will present their findings at the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center, which houses the forensics divisions of the L.A.P.D. and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

What keeps him going is an enduring fascination with Short, the patron saint of every lost soul to wander down Sunset Boulevard. “She was missing something,” Connelly said. “That’s the secret of L.A. Everybody here came from somewhere else because they’ve been missing something. Myself included.”

Educated about serial killers by novels, as we all are, both the gap between murders and the wildly differing manners of killing seem awfully odd.

NOT THE ONION:

The Elvis Impersonator, the Karate Instructor, a Fridge Full of Severed Heads, and the Plot 2 Kill the President: Remember that crazy story about the dude in Mississippi who mailed ricin to Obama and then tried to frame some other dude in Mississippi for the crime? Well, as Wells Tower discovered when he traveled to Tupelo and started poking around, the story is a thousand times crazier than you thought (Wells Tower, September 29, 2013, GQ)

Spend a week or two in Tupelo, Mississippi, and you begin to wonder if the air down here perhaps contains an element that causes dreams to ignite and burn hotter and stranger than elsewhere in the world. What are the dreams that catch fire in this town? They are dreams of rock ‘n’ roll; of valor, metamorphosis, and ruination; sex and betrayal; of the government and shadowy forces; of the grand dream, American. The ether here is surely spiked with something. How else do we explain the dream of the poor hillbilly born in a shotgun shack in east Tupelo, who invented rock ‘n’ roll and changed the world and died on the toilet at the age of 42? How else to understand a man like Kevin Curtis, one of northeastern Mississippi’s preeminent Elvis impersonators, whose life was nearly ruined by the sight of a severed head on a refrigerator shelf? How else to make sense of the story you are about to hear, the tale of Mr. Curtis and Everett Dutschke, two men who might have shared a lovely friendship but instead had a weird feud that ended in the attempted poisoning of the president of the United States?

Theirs is a story of human dismemberment and righteous causes, of martial arts and murder intrigues, sexual perversity, political conviction, and resentments dearly held. What lies behind Mr. Curtis and Mr. Dutschke’s spectacular collision? A lot of odd and complicated things. But in the simplest sense, perhaps it’s that these gentlemen simply had too many dreams in common, and in their particular America, there are only so many dreams to go around.

“MORAL RUIN”:

Fractured Odysseus: The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s books on Homer are the key to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (Colin Dickey, August 20, 2026, American Scholar)

Of all the Homeric translators and commentators over the millennia, Nolan seems most explicitly in dialogue with Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who discovered the therapeutic value of reading The Iliad with Vietnam veterans. Through his clinical practice, Shay came to believe that Homer’s Achilles is suffering from all the symptoms of complex PTSD as we now recognize it. But unlike the American military, Greek culture had numerous cultural means of treating this trauma that have since been either lost or actively suppressed.

From that experience came Shay’s 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Shay pinpoints the beginning of Achilles’s suffering—what he would come to call his “moral injury”—to when Agamemnon betrays him (paralleling how many Vietnam vets felt betrayed by their government). “When a leader destroys the legitimacy of the army’s moral order by betraying ‘what is right,’” Shay writes, “he inflicts manifold injuries on his men. The Iliad is a story of these immediate and devastating consequences.” Numbed by wrath, Achilles turns his back on the fellow Greeks for whom he formerly cared deeply. In this compromised state, the death of Pátroklos destroys him, engendering a berserker rage in which he desecrates the corpses of his fallen enemies, unable to control himself or observe the traditional laws of war.

For Shay, “The Iliad is the tragedy of Achilles’ noble character brought to ruin—moral ruin in his own terms … Achilles’ moral unluckiness, his tragedy, was that events—simply what happened—created the desire to do things that he himself regarded as bad.” It is something he found again and again in the American veterans he was treating.