A Killer Discovery

In the late sixties, an enigmatic predator stalked the San Francisco Bay area. There’s no definitive tally of the Zodiac Killer’s victims—the “verified” tally lists seven attacked, including two near-miraculous survivals—but the Zodiac claimed, in taunting, coded letters to California police departments and newspapers, to have killed up to thirty-seven. The confirmed victims were all attacked in 1968 and 1969, and the letters from the Zodiac began in ’69 and continued through 1970; but several unsolved murders in the adjacent decades are often attributed to the same killer. 

The Zodiac has joined the Axeman of New Orleans and the Austin Servant Girl Annihilator in the grim pantheon of luridly named, never-caught killers, whose crimes continue to nag at the public consciousness and whose identities are still sought by a determined few. This May, a new book, successfully kept under wraps until its release by HarperCollins, burst onto the bestseller lists with its big, dramatic claim: a Baton Rouge man, Gary Stewart, believes that his birth father committed the Zodiac’s crimes. 

Stewart had been adopted as an infant by a caring and devout Baton Rouge couple. He had researched his adoptive father for years, after making contact with his birth mother as an adult. He didn’t have a lot to go on; his mother had divorced Stewart’s father decades ago and was reticent to share what details she remembered. Gradually, pieces emerged: his parents had met at an ice cream parlor and eloped, which would have been endearing in an Archie-and-Betty kind of way had Earl Van Best Jr., at age twenty-seven, not been nearly twice the age of fourteen-year-old Judy Chandler. Their subsequent escapades and flight across the United States and Mexico was dubbed the “Ice Cream Romance” by scandal-hungry newspapers. While hiding in New Orleans with an increasingly drunk and abusive Van Best, Judy had a son; a month later, Van Best took the boy to Baton Rouge and left him in the foyer of an apartment building. The boy eventually became Gary Stewart; his father eventually became a monster. 

The book generally follows twin narrative threads: both Stewart’s present-day research into his birth-father’s past and, ultimately, the Zodiac Killer’s; and the depressing, inexorable decline of Earl Van Best, an intelligent but profoundly flawed man. A husband who abused multiple wives, eventually unable to hold down any job other than serial fraud, Van Best spent his adult life in a long, slow spiral, eventually choking on his own vomit on a bender and finding his rest in a pauper’s grave in Mexico. The Zodiac or not, this was a bad man coming to a bad end, with all the saw-it-coming inevitability of a Sunday sermon. 

After his research into his father’s life led him to believe he was the son of the Zodiac, Stewart met veteran Baton Rouge crime writer Susan Mustafa through a business acquaintance. Though skeptical, Mustafa read Stewart’s early-stage manuscript. She found it reasonably persuasive—until she found out that Stewart had found his father’s name hidden in one of the ciphered letters the Zodiac had sent. That was an especially convincing tidbit, and Mustafa brought it up with her agent, who found Earl Van Best’s name in another one of the ciphers that evening. He and Mustafa tried searching for their own names, for Stewart’s, for Mary Brown and John Smith and other common names you’d expect to show up coincidentally. No dice. On that evidence, Mustafa was hooked.

Mustafa has written several volumes on some of humanity’s darkest characters, including Derrick Todd Lee and Sean Vincent Gillis. The subject matter is difficult, but for Mustafa, the impetus rises from her training as a journalist and magazine writer—she’s used to ferreting out the truth and considers this kind of storytelling a way to give the victims dignity and presence. We remember the name of Derrick Todd Lee—whose heinous acts were the subject of Mustafa’s first true crime book, co-written with Sue Israel and Tony Clayton—but not Geralyn DeSoto, one of his innocent victims. 

Mustafa tries to flip the power dynamic in her writing, giving victims the humanity their assailants tried to strip from them. Some families seize the opportunity to tell their daughters’ stories, some don’t; but for a number of victims, Mustafa’s voice has served as their final proxy. 

She acknowledges that it’s draining to spend so much time thinking and writing about evil and violence, but the chance to speak for these victims and their families has been worth the sacrifice. Mustafa sees a moral in her writing: women need to exercise caution and protect themselves. While no victim bears any fault in a crime, Mustafa thinks her writing may serve to forewarn—and thus forearm—her readers.

Mustafa had nothing but praise for Gary Stewart and the working relationship they forged while developing the book. His detailed research gave her a solid foundation upon which to build, with respect to both her own research and the arduous task of incorporating another person’s voice, different from Mustafa’s in both gender and experience. The process of sculpting Stewart’s research journal into a clear, compelling memoir took two years, longer than Mustafa’s usual process; but her work paid off this spring, when her publisher called to tell her they’d made the bestseller list of both the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Stewart isn’t the only author who believes he was sired by the Zodiac; at least three other people have claimed their father or stepfather was the killer. One of the claimants had previously avowed that she was JFK’s daughter (you’d think her estimated date of conception would narrow that down, but hope, among other things, springs eternal), and another went for a two-fer, claiming his father was the Zodiac Killer and the perpetrator of the Black Dahlia murder some twenty years before. There are also a number of people who claim a spiritual, rather than blood, connection: the killer is an old friend who confessed on his deathbed, or an oddly confessional stranger encountered at a bar. The thriving online communities devoted to the Zodiac case seem, by and large, to dismiss Earl Van Best as a suspect, making use of the profuse exclamation marks and competing conspiracy theories common to online discourse—“You idiots, J. Edgar Hoover did it before escaping to the moon!” is an exaggeration, but a minor one. For his part, Mustafa said, Stewart spent most of his research process reluctant to see his father as the killer, hoping instead to disprove the hypothesis.

I don’t know if I believe that Stewart’s father was the Zodiac Killer; I simply don’t know how to make that evaluation. I’m not a Zodiac expert by any stretch: of the dozens of books written on the topic and speculating on the killer’s identity, I have read two (and, full disclosure, I fell asleep during the interminable Jake Gyllenhaal movie). What I do believe is that Mustafa thinks that she and Stewart are on the right track, and that Mustafa is an authority worth listening to. 

She’s not the only one to risk her reputation for this theory, either. The handwriting analyst Mustafa approached to compare Van Best’s known writing to the Zodiac letters, Michael N. Washkull, has released a companion book with the go-for-broke title The End of the Zodiac Mystery: How Forensic Science Helped Solve One of the Most Infamous Serial Killer Cases of the Century. The $8.97 purchase price for a Kindle version is a tall order for what is essentially an article with a lot of end matter, but Zodiac buffs might enjoy the step-by-step explanation of why Washkull thinks it’s all but a dead certainty that Earl Van Best Jr. wrote the Zodiac letters. (Washkull does admit that the limited number of surviving samples of Van Best’s writing keeps his conclusion from being a slam-dunk). Like most people who had to learn the standardized Palmer handwriting method in elementary school (remember those loopy capital Gs?), I’m leery of handwriting as an identification tool; but Washkull is another established professional willing to stake his credibility on Van Best’s guilt.

Even if Stewart’s claims are eventually disproven, this story of a well-raised, everyday Joe unearthing a hidden heritage of abduction, madness, and fraud is well worth a read. If you want a light crime story, you can whip through this book and have a good time, but the book also offers plenty of opportunities for the thoughtful reader to meditate on the nature of evil, the legacy of crime, and the morbid fascination an unsolved mystery engenders. A good book raises more questions than it answers: even if Earl Van Best was the Zodiac triggerman, we’re still left asking ourselves why.

Details. Details. Details. 

The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for my Father … and Finding the Zodiac Killer
By Gary L. Stewart and Susan Mustafa
Hardcover: 384 pages. HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.