The Twenty-Year Gap: What Happens Between 1947 and 1968?
The third in a series on the Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis. This article examines the two decades between the Black Dahlia murder and the first Zodiac attack — and what that silence tells us about the offender’s psychology.
In January 1947, Elizabeth Short was murdered in Los Angeles. Her body was mutilated, bisected, and posed. The case became known as the Black Dahlia murder. It remains unsolved.
In December 1968, two teenagers — David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen — were shot in a parked car on a rural lovers’ lane outside Vallejo, California. It was the first confirmed attack by the Zodiac Killer.
Between those two events lies a gap of almost twenty-two years. Two decades of silence. Two decades in which, as far as anyone knows, no one was killed in a way that connects to either case.
For the Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis, that gap is not a footnote. It is the central psychological problem. If the same offender committed both crimes, what happened during those twenty-two years? Why did he stop? And why did he start again?
This article addresses those questions. It draws on established concepts in offender psychology — fantasy-driven offending, the cooling-off period, and narcissistic injury — to examine what a long dormancy might mean. It does not claim to solve the case. It asks what the gap tells us, if the hypothesis is correct.
The Problem of the Gap
Most serial offenders do not wait twenty-two years between murders.
That is not a moral statement. It is an empirical one. The research on serial homicide — from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, from academic studies, from decades of case data — shows that offenders typically have cooling-off periods measured in weeks, months, or occasionally a few years. A gap of two decades is extraordinarily rare.
When a long gap does appear in the literature, it usually has an explanation. The offender was incarcerated for another crime. The offender was institutionalized. The offender was physically incapacitated. The offender died. Or the offender changed — and the change was significant enough that the earlier crimes and the later crimes look like the work of different people.
The Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis requires a different kind of explanation. It requires an offender who was not incarcerated, not dead, not incapacitated — but dormant. An offender who carried a wound for two decades, and then, at a certain point, began to kill again.
Is that psychologically plausible?
Fantasy-Driven Offending
One of the most established concepts in offender psychology is the idea that violent fantasies can be rehearsed over long periods before they are acted on.
The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit — particularly the work of Ressler, Burgess, and Douglas — developed this model through interviews with incarcerated serial offenders. The pattern is consistent: the offender develops a fantasy, often in adolescence or early adulthood. The fantasy is rehearsed privately, sometimes for years. It becomes a way of coping with frustration, humiliation, or a sense of powerlessness. The offender returns to it repeatedly, refining it, elaborating it, until the fantasy becomes a script.
At some point, the script is acted on. The first crime is an attempt to enact the fantasy. And almost always, the reality does not match the fantasy. The crime is less satisfying than the rehearsal. The offender tries again, adjusting, escalating, searching for the version that matches what he imagined.
This model — fantasy-driven offending — is central to the FBI’s understanding of serial homicide. It explains why offenders often escalate over time. It explains why they repeat. And it explains why they sometimes stop — because the fantasy has been exhausted, or because the gap between fantasy and reality has become too painful to continue.
For the Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis, the fantasy-driven model is relevant because it offers a way to think about long gaps. A fantasy can be rehearsed for years before it is acted on. And if the first crime does not satisfy the fantasy — if the reality is less than the imagination — the offender may need to build a new fantasy, a new script, a new target.
The twenty-two-year gap could be the period in which the original fantasy was exhausted, and a new one was built.
The Cooling-Off Period
The cooling-off period is the time between offenses. In most serial cases, it is measured in weeks or months. It is the time during which the offender returns to normal life, relives the crime in memory, and waits for the urge to build again.
For the Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis, the cooling-off period is not measured in months. It is measured in decades. And that raises a question: what happens to an offender’s psychology during a cooling-off period that lasts twenty-two years?
There is no simple answer. The literature on long gaps is thin, because long gaps are rare. But the cases that do exist suggest a few possibilities.
The offender may have been “satisfied” temporarily. If the first crime — the Black Dahlia murder — achieved something for the offender, he may have been able to live on that achievement for years. The memory of the crime, the sense of power it gave him, may have been enough to sustain him. This is consistent with the idea that some offenders keep trophies, scrapbooks, or memories that they return to. The fantasy does not need to be re-enacted if the memory is vivid enough.
The offender may have been building a new life. After the Black Dahlia murder, Marvin Margolis — if he was the offender — fled Los Angeles and lived under an alias. He changed his name. He may have married, had children, held jobs. The construction of a new identity can take years. During that time, the offender may have been focused on survival, on building the facade, on not being caught. The fantasy may have been dormant because the immediate need — to escape, to hide, to survive — took priority.
The offender may have been waiting for something. If the wound that drove the first murder was never healed — if the rejection, the humiliation, the loss of control was still present — then the fantasy might not have gone away. It might have been building. The twenty-two-year gap could be a period of slow accumulation. The rage simmered. The fantasy expanded. And at some point, the pressure became too much.
This third possibility is the one the Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis depends on. It requires an offender who did not forget, did not heal, and did not move on — but instead carried the wound for two decades, and eventually found a new way to express it.
Narcissistic Injury and the Long Game
The concept of narcissistic injury is central here.
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A narcissistic injury is a wound to the ego — a rejection, a humiliation, a loss of control. In offender psychology, it is understood as a driver of violence. The injury creates a sense of powerlessness. Violence becomes a way to restore power, to regain control, to punish the source of the wound.
For the Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis, the original injury was the rejection by Elizabeth Short. If that rejection was experienced as a narcissistic injury — a wound so deep that it could not be resolved — then the twenty-two-year gap is not a period of dormancy. It is a period of slow burn.
The offender does not forget. He does not forgive. He carries the wound with him. He builds a life, but the life is a facade. Underneath, the rage is still there. And over time, it finds new targets. The couples in the lovers’ lanes. The taxi driver. The entire city of San Francisco.
This is the psychological arc the hypothesis proposes. The original wound was personal. The response was overkill. The wound did not heal. And two decades later, it found new forms.
Why Did He Start Again?
The most difficult question is not why the gap lasted so long. It is why the offender started again.
What triggers a dormant offender to resume after twenty-two years?
The literature on desistance and recidivism offers some possibilities. Stress, loss, or a new humiliation can reactivate an old wound. A change in circumstances — a divorce, a job loss, a death — can remove the stabilizers that kept the fantasy in check. The offender may reach a point where the facade is no longer sustainable, and the fantasy becomes the only thing that feels real.
In the Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis, the trigger is unknown. There is no documented event in 1968 that explains why the offender resumed. That is a gap in the theory. It is also a gap in the evidence.
What is known is that the first Zodiac attack — Lake Herman Road, December 1968 — was not random. The victims were a couple. The location was a lovers’ lane. The method was a shooting. It was planned. It was executed. It was, in some sense, a beginning.
If the Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis is correct, that beginning was not a new story. It was a continuation of an old one — a story that began twenty-two years earlier, in a room in Los Angeles, with a woman who rejected a man and walked away.
What Would Disprove This?
The twenty-year gap is the weakest part of the hypothesis. It requires an offender who is psychologically unusual — someone who can carry a wound for two decades and then act on it with a different victim type. That is possible, but it is not common.
This part of the hypothesis can be falsified in several ways:
- Evidence that the offender was active during the gap — that he committed other crimes, or that the gap is an artifact of incomplete records.
- Evidence that the offender was physically or legally incapacitated during the gap — that he was incarcerated, institutionalized, or otherwise unable to offend.
- Evidence that the first Zodiac attack was not planned — that it was an opportunistic killing, not a resumption of a long-standing pattern.
- Psychological evidence contradicting the narcissistic injury model — for example, a documented history that does not fit the profile of an offender who carries a wound for decades.
None of these have been confirmed. Some are under active review. The LAPD is reportedly reviewing fingerprint evidence. No findings have been released.
Why This Matters
The twenty-two-year gap is not just a detail. It is the bridge between the two cases. If the gap cannot be explained, the hypothesis cannot stand.
But the gap is also an opportunity. If the hypothesis is correct, then the two decades are not empty. They are full of something — a life lived under an alias, a wound carried in secret, a fantasy that never fully died. That is a story worth understanding, even if it is never confirmed.
It is also a reminder that cold cases are not cold for the people who lived them. The offender, if he existed, carried the case with him for twenty-two years. The families of the victims carried it for longer. The wound did not close. It just moved.
A Note on Method
I am not a criminologist. I am not a psychologist. I am someone who has studied behavioral analysis science for years — it is a core interest of mine, and I approach it with patience.
This article is the third in a series. The next article will examine the Paul Stine murder — the shift from couples to a lone male — and offer a more detailed analysis of what that shift might mean.
If you see flaws in the reasoning, I want to hear them. If you see connections I’ve missed, I want to know. The goal is not to prove a theory. The goal is to test one.
This is the third article in a series on the Symbolic Proxy Hypothesis. The next article will examine the Paul Stine murder — and why the shift from couples to a lone male matters.
Tags: Zodiac Killer, Criminal Profiling, Behavioral Analysis, True Crime, Cold Case
