The Daily Mail has unveiled a fresh suspect in the Zodiac killings, nearly sixty years after the chilling murder spree gripped California with fear.

Family members of Marvin Merrill, the newly identified suspect, have come forward to share disturbing anecdotes about his conduct, which surfaced well before the latest investigation, published in December, pointed to him as the notorious serial killer.

Independent investigators have identified Merrill, a former Marine who passed away in 1993, by cracking a cipher sent to authorities in 1970, part of the Zodiac’s series of taunting messages.

In addition, these researchers have unearthed significant evidence suggesting Merrill’s involvement in the murder of the Black Dahlia, a notorious cold case from Los Angeles dating back several decades.

On the 79th anniversary of Elizabeth Short’s 1947 murder, Merrill’s relatives have described him as a ‘compulsive liar’ who often stole from family and vanished for long intervals.

In an exclusive interview, Merrill’s niece – who asked to be identified only as Elizabeth – said her uncle scammed family members and behaved violently or threateningly toward his own children, leading his siblings to eventually cut him off.

Another relative described Merrill as ‘mysterious and volatile’, ‘mean’, and confirmed he had periods of no contact with his family.

Merrill was named as a potential suspect by cold case consultant Alex Baber, who decoded his name from a cipher mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle by the Zodiac in 1970 after his two-year killing spree.

Marvin Merrill (in an undated family photo) has been named by a cold case investigator as the suspected perpetrator of the Black Dahlia and Zodiac crimes 

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

Born in 1925 in Chicago, Merrill had two younger brothers, Milton and Donald. 

All three are deceased, but Donald’s daughter Elizabeth told the Mail her father warned her of her uncle’s duplicity and fraught relationship with his family.

‘He was a pathological liar,’ she said.

‘It’s like having an addict as a sibling. You want to believe they’re in recovery, and then they slip again.

‘They wanted to believe he’s not going to con them, and then he’d do it again.’

Elizabeth, a Georgia-based homemaker in her 40s, would not go so far as to believe he was capable of murder.

But she said his lies and deception were deeply concerning.

She gave an example of Merrill bragging in 1960s newspaper interviews that he was an artist who studied under famous painter Salvador Dali.

‘He never studied under Salvador Dali. He was not an artist, that was my father. He actually stole my father’s artwork and sold it,’ she said. ‘He was just his next con, that was it.

‘At one point, he disappeared for a while. When they found him, he had been working as an architect for multiple years, even though he had no formal training.’

Elizabeth never met Merrill herself, as her father cut him off from his family to protect them from his alleged scams, but said Donald told her about his behavior.

One alleged scam the brother recounted was that Merrill took money from his mother and in-laws.

‘He borrowed money from his in-laws for a house. He was supposed to pay them back when he sold the house, and never did. That’s the kind of man he was,’ she said.

‘He was getting money from my grandmother. He was playing her and taking all her money. My parents had to get a loan from her to protect the money from him, then pay her back in increments.’

A composite sketch and description circulated by San Francisco Police as they tried – in vain – to catch the Zodiac killer

In 1947, aspiring Hollywood actress Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, was found dead and her body mutilated in Los Angeles

Elizabeth said that her uncle even stole his siblings’ clothes and sold them, after returning from serving in Japan in World War II and moving back in with his parents.

‘You’re not a well person if that’s how you live your life, in my opinion,’ she said.

Property records place Merrill in southern California during the 1960s, when the Zodiac terrorized the state killing five and wounding two others in four horrific attacks around the San Francisco Bay Area.

Despite other compelling evidence, Baber has not been able to produce records showing Merrill was in the Bay during the 1968 and 1969 attacks.

But Elizabeth said that her uncle repeatedly ‘disappeared’, breaking off contact with family and was only traced by the locations he picked up his medicine.

‘He would disappear. My uncle [Milton] would call the VA hospital and that’s how they would find him,’ she said. ‘He would have to get medication, so he would always check in with the VA hospital.’

Elizabeth said she did not know what medications he was on at the time.

Marvin Merrill in a newspaper article where he described himself as an artist. His relative Elizabeth said he ‘was not an artist’ but ‘actually stole my father’s artwork and sold it’

Merrill told his family he left the Navy after taking shrapnel or a bullet to the stomach while serving as a US Marine in Okinawa, Japan, in World War II.

But his Veteran Affairs records, released among grand jury investigatory files from the Black Dahlia case, show that in fact he was discharged on 50 per cent mental disability grounds, with medical notes describing him as ‘resentful’ and ‘apathetic’ with an affinity for ‘aggression’.

Elizabeth said family members had told her Merrill was violent or threatening towards his children at times, though she said it did not seem out of the ordinary for the period he grew up in.

‘To me, it’s inexcusable – who hits a child? – But that was done at that time,’ she said.

Another relative, who asked not to be named, told the Mail Merrill would disappear for periods and that they traced him to as far afield as Florida at one point.

‘His brothers didn’t have a good relationship with him. I was told words like ‘mean’,’ the relative told this website.

‘Whereas Donald and Milton were the nicest humans you could have ever imagined.’

Merrill’s sister-in-law Anne Margolis also described him to family members as ‘mysterious’ and ‘volatile’, the relative said.

Margolis appeared in local paper The Garfieldian after he returned home from the Second World War. The article showed him posing with a Japanese military rifle propped against a wall

A high school yearbook photo of Marvin Margolis. His family are now speaking out to the Daily Mail

However, the family member cautioned that being volatile ‘doesn’t make him a murderer’.

Elizabeth was also skeptical of his status as a Zodiac and Black Dahlia suspect.

‘A lot of this is based on things that he said he did, that were lies,’ she said.

The Georgia mom pointed out that Merrill was six weeks into his first marriage when Black Dahlia victim Elizabeth Short was killed, which made her doubtful of his ongoing romantic involvement with Short – one key link between the young victim and Merrill.

‘The timing does not make sense,’ she said.

‘He was not a well man, but I don’t believe in any way, shape or form, that he was a murderer.’