The Most Dangerous Animal of All

In "The Most Dangerous Animal of All", Gary L. Stewart makes a pretty convincing case that his biological father, Earl Van Best, Jr., was the Zodiac killer (maybe he and Steve Hodel should get together and chat). Stewart spent a long time looking for his biological parents and when he met his birth mother, he was naturally curious to find out more about his birth father. His mother, Judy, was reluctant to tell him, claiming she'd blocked most of it out since she was only fifteen when she had him, but Gary was persistent, doing research, and what he found was troubling. Van spent time in Japan as a youngster and was fascinated by codes and ciphers, he and his dad spent hours trying to fool each other with unbreakable codes (one of the key features of the Zodiac was the ciphers he sent to the papers, one of which has never been decoded). Van's mugshot looks shockingly similar to the police sketches of the Zodiac, taken from eyewitness accounts (even I see the resemblance, and normally I never do). He had Van's handwriting analyzed to compare to the Zodiac's and it looks like it could be a match (the analyst wouldn't go further than that, since they didn't have access to the original documents, just copies). His fingerprints seem to match Zodiac's, including a scar on his thumb. Gary had the SFPD take a DNA sample so they could compare his to the DNA from the Zodiac crime scenes, but as of publication time the police still had no processed his sample. It was well written and quite compelling.