Show caption A still from The Most Dangerous Animal of All. What if you thought your father was the killer? Photograph: FX Documentary The Zodiac Killer has been a mystery for 50 years – but one man thinks he’s solved it In docuseries The Most Dangerous Animal of All, Gary Stewart claims his birth father was one of America’s most notorious serial killers Adrian Horton Fri 6 Mar 2020 07.15 GMT Share on Facebook

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There are few unsolved mysteries that fascinate quite like that of the Zodiac killer. The unknown perpetrator terrorized the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, killing at least seven people (in letters, he claimed to have killed 37), most of them in surprise attacks on so-called “lover’s lanes”. His taunting of the police and press with cryptic letters precipitated an era of media-disseminated public terror; the puzzle of his unsolved ciphers and terrifying peeks into an unhinged mind inspired the David Fincher 2008 film Zodiac, countless true crime TV specials, and passionately active amateur detective forums.

The Zodiac case, in other words, has been prime for a breakthrough for decades. So what if you thought, based on handwriting and fingerprint evidence, family lore and the questionable investigative methods of the mid-century San Francisco police department, that your father was the killer?

That’s the focus of The Most Dangerous Animal of All, a four-part series investigating the 2014 bestselling book of the same name by Gary Stewart and journalist/true crime writer Susan Mustafa. Stewart, a building maintenance business owner from Louisiana, came about the suspicion his birth father was the Zodiac killer incidentally, in reconnecting with his birth mother, then fervently: the series foregrounds the claims made in the book with Stewart’s compulsive, all-consuming obsession with finding out the truth about his family’s past. (The title of both series and book comes from the only one of the Zodiac’s ciphers to be partly solved: “man is the most dangerous animal of all,” a reference to the 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, about a man who hunts humans, by Richard Connell.)

Ross Dinerstein, an executive producer on the series, received Stewart’s book from his agent in 2017. “I’ve always been fascinated by this idea of nature versus nurture, and it was just one of those books that I read and couldn’t put down, and just totally felt a real connection to Gary Stewart,” he told the Guardian. Though the two had different family situations – Stewart was adopted at three months after his birth parents abandoned him in a hotel stairway, and didn’t know their identities until he was 39 – both grew up in the south and are the same age. “I understood his need for answers and for information,” said Dinerstein. The two established a friendship, initially meeting in person in New Orleans, but Dinerstein pushed for more objectivity in the book’s adaptation. “I said for us to do this, he’d have to let go and let myself and the creative team poke holes at everything and look at it from a 30,000ft view. And he understood that.”

The first two episodes stick squarely to Stewart’s perspective, re-imagining scenes from his birth parents’ youth and placing the evidence into a coherent case. Stewart’s abandonment, he frequently and emotionally reiterates to the camera, left a primal, baseline insecurity. It wasn’t until his birth mother, Jude Chandler of San Francisco, contacted him in 2002 that he learned the story of his parents marriage and run from the law that would be shocking even if there were no Zodiac suspicion.

His father, Earl Van Best, was 28 years old when he spotted 13 year-old Jude getting off a school bus in San Francisco – or so the story goes. Stewart is specific in his rendition, which the film-makers re-enact, while Jude is more skittish, remembering little; she tries not to think about it. What is clear from public records is their shocking relationship, dubbed “Ice Cream Romance” on front pages across the country for Van Best’s story of (illegally) wooing the minor at an ice cream parlor, resulted in jail time, a run from the law via a cross-country road-trip, and a harrowing pregnancy at 15 for Jude. After “Van” abandoned their child in New Orleans, Jude returned to her family in San Francisco and never looked back.

Stewart’s suspicions of his father first prickled due to the (understandable, given the trauma) lack of memories and details from his mother, now estranged from Stewart (a fraught family dynamic explored in the series). The details seemed to support a Zodiac theory. The police were wary of providing information on Van Best. He was a cryptogram enthusiast, and spent time in a mental health hospital. One of the killings took place two blocks from Van Best’s apartment. Mustafa brought fingerprint and handwriting experts to the investigation who argued Van Best and the Zodiac were likely one and the same. (Van Best died in 1984 in Mexico, where he’s buried in an unmarked grave).

Gary Stewart in The Most Dangerous Animal of All. Photograph: FX

The evidence was certainly compelling, enough that HarperCollins published the bestselling book. But series director Kief Davidson, who called Stewart “one of the top two of the most complex people I’ve come across,” entered the project with skepticism. From the outset, Davidson and Dinerstein told the Guardian, they were clear that they’d independently assess Gary’s claims, which had already encountered pushback in online true crime or Zodiac forums (a controversy which the series touches on in later episodes).

The team hired an independent private detective, whose father, in keeping with the theme of patrilineal legacies, was himself a noted investigator in San Francisco – to look into the life of Earl Van Best. “The fact that [Stewart] was supportive of us hiring a professional investigator to dig into every aspect of his past, for me really tied into the idea that this man truly believes that his father is the Zodiac,” said Davidson. “That was not only my starting point, but what this film is about – the search for his father and his identity and needing to find out whether he’s correct in his theory.”

The second half of the series interrogates Stewart’s story and, notably for those invested in the Zodiac mystery, forensic developments from a limited DNA sample held by the San Francisco police. “Overall, the big question mark around this was: is Gary right? And are we going to solve this?” said Davidson. Without spoiling too much – the investigation and questions of Stewart’s identity as a man with a mission come to a dramatic head in the second half of the fourth episode – it’s safe to say that the team reached some conclusions.

But Dinerstein and Davidson maintain the show is much more than another stab at the mystery of the Zodiac’s identity; rather, it’s a show investigating the legacy of abandonment, the question of genetic inheritance and what happens when an obsession becomes an identity.

Given the lack of an airtight full DNA sample from the Zodiac killer, “I don’t think [his identity] will ever actually be solved – I don’t think there will ever actually be real closure,” said Dinerstein. But “this story is so much more than just a Zodiac true crime show. It’s about a man searching for his own identity, and recovering from trauma, this primal wound, that he doesn’t even remember.”