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This is Judy, Gary's biological mother who married Van at the age of fourteen.

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Gary's grandfather was a well respected minister that was buoyed in Arlington National Cemetery.

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Sketch of the Zodiac Overlaid Onto Van's Mugshot 

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Sketch of the Zodiac Overlaid Onto Van's Mugshot 

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Documentary covering every aspect of the investigation, including interviews with the original investigators and surviving victims. From the Special Edition DVD of Zodiac (2007) special features.

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RAW: Finding the Zodiac Killer (full interview)

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Gary Stewart sat down and explained to Graham Ulkins why he believes his father was the Zodiac Killer.

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Van's handwriting can be seen on this marriage certificate and was used for the handwriting comparison.

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SF Gate Article on the Reality of the Book

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SF Gate Article on the Reality of the Book

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The Most Dangerous Animal of All

Searching for My Father ... and Finding the Zodiac Killer

(Harper; 367 pages; $26.99)

Who's your favorite Zodiac suspect?

Perhaps you've concluded that a paroled child molester from Vallejo who wore a "Zodiac" brand diver's watch was responsible for California's most baffling unsolved murder spree.

Or perhaps you're focused on Ted Kaczynski, the confessed Unabomber. He's still the favorite of some Zodiac aficionados.

Other Zodiac hunters have zeroed in on a millionaire sportsman who lived in Presidio Heights, near where the Zodiac killed cabdriver Paul Stine in 1969.

Still others prefer a Cal professor, or a onetime Martinez newspaper editor, or a Vallejo businessman accused in a 2012 book by a former highway patrolman, or a mysterious longshoreman who supposedly confessed to a local lawyer and then disappeared.

If you don't like those suspects, there's a list of hundreds of other people from around the world - ex-husbands, estranged relatives, former co-workers, neighbors, criminals, cops, politicians and weird guys on the next barstool.

Over the years, every one of them has been identified as the Zodiac - fingered by members of an army of amateur sleuths who continue to try to solve this enduring murder mystery long after the chance of actually cracking the case seems lost.

Now, 45 years after the Zodiac's last known murder, another name has been added to the list: the late Earl Van Best, a San Francisco rare-book dealer who resembled the police composite sketch of the killer.

He's been nominated by his son, Gary L. Stewart, a Louisiana business executive. With co-author Susan Mustafa, Stewart has written "The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father ... and Finding the Zodiac Killer." The book attracted a flurry of cable-television publicity when it was published last month.

But Stewart's book is short on proof that his father killed anybody, let alone the six Zodiac victims. Instead, embedded in a slow-moving narrative about an adoptee's search for his birth parents, the book offers some interesting local color and odd interpersonal connections from 1960s San Francisco, along with some investigative leads that Stewart thinks need to be pursued.

The real Zodiac was a publicity-mad gunman who between 1966 and 1969 killed four young women, a teenage boy and the cabdriver in unprovoked attacks in Riverside, Vallejo and finally, San Francisco. During the crime spree, the killer sent letters to The Chronicle - "This is the Zodiac speaking," he sometimes wrote - taunting the police and vowing to kill again. Some of the letters include material written in code. He hasn't been heard from since the 1970s.

Interest in the case never really died down. In recent years, it's been propelled by former Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith's true-crime book and the 2007 film "Zodiac" that featured Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery, The Chronicle reporter who broke story after story about the case. (Years later, Avery handed off the story to me.)

Stewart's Zodiac story goes like this: Best, the alienated son of a Methodist minister, graduated from Lowell High School in the 1950s and studied criminology at City College of San Francisco. In 1961, at age 28, Best fell in love with a 14-year-old girl he met in a Sunset District ice cream shop and ran away with her to New Orleans.

The scandal was covered for The Chronicle by Avery, then the newspaper's police reporter.

After abandoning his newborn son (Stewart) in an apartment building in Baton Rouge and splitting up with his teen-age bride, Best was arrested and imprisoned for statutory rape.

Paroled, he returned to the city, where he hung out with Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan (" 'Evil' spelled backward is 'live.' ") and jammed in a rock band with guitarist Bobby Beausoleil, who was later convicted in the Charles Manson murders in Los Angeles.

Along the way, Stewart maintains that Best also committed all the Zodiac murders, driven, Stewart supposes, by rage at his ex-wife. Best died in Mexico City in 1984.

Meanwhile, Best'sex, Judy Chandler, married Rotea Gilford, San Francisco's first African American homicide detective and later a deputy mayor. Gilford died in 1998.

In 2002, Stewart was reunited with his birth mother. Two years later, he saw a police sketch of the Zodiac and decided it was his birth father.

In the years that followed, Stewart gathered some evidence. A Louisiana handwriting analyst opined that Best wrote the Zodiac letters. A Best fingerprint shows a scar that looks quite a bit like a scar on what is supposed to be the Zodiac's print, according to an expert Stewart consulted. Stewart also says he deciphered Zodiac cryptograms and found Best's name.

Stewart says his birth mother has no insight on the murders. Despite her police connections, Stewart didn't get very far with SFPD. Then-Police Chief Earl Sanders, Gilford's former partner on the homicide team, wouldn't help. Another officer refused to let Stewart look at Best's police file, saying its content was too disturbing. Lt. John Hennessey, then the head of the homicide division, promised to order DNA testing, but retired before he got around to it.

If only the authorities would compare Stewart's DNA to a DNA sample that is thought to be from the Zodiac, the case against his birth father would be cinched, Stewart writes.

Of course, that's the plea of every amateur Zodiac hunter who thinks he's found the killer. For only a renewed police investigation can sort out the countless, elaborate tips and hunches and proposed solutions that have been offered for the Zodiac mystery - and, in the end, track the Zodiac down.

The odds against it are long, but it still might happen, even after all these years. Until it does, who's your favorite Zodiac suspect?

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'The Most Dangerous Animal of All,' by Gary L. Stewart

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Perhaps you've concluded that a paroled child molester from Vallejo who wore a "Zodiac" brand diver's watch was responsible for California's most baffling unsolved murder spree. [...] others prefer a Cal professor, or a onetime Martinez newspaper editor, or a Vallejo businessman accused in a 2012 book by a former highway patrolman, or a mysterious longshoreman who supposedly confessed to a local lawyer and then disappeared.

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The Most Dangerous Animal of All has 2,400 ratings and 361 reviews. Melissa said: The author, although I feel for his plight wastes 40% or more of the bo...

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Newsweek Article on the Secrecy of the Book

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Newsweek Article on the Secrecy of the Book

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Newsweek

HarperCollins' publicity campaign for The Most Dangerous Animal of All, a book published this month by Gary L. Stewart, has been one of the most elaborate in recent memory: near total silence. The book was kept entirely a secret until last week, when word leaked out to the Daily Intelligencer.

By then, Stewart's book was due in stores the following day.

The reason for the secrecy, of course, is the sensitive nature of the book's subject. Twelve years of research led Stewart, a cleaning company executive in Louisiana, to believe that his dead biological father was the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized Northern California and taunted its newspapers with cryptic messages in the late 1960s.

Subscribe to Newsweek from $1 per week

Zodiac murdered at least five confirmed victims in 1968 and 1969, though in correspondence he claimed a victim count of more than 30. His unknown identity has obsessed both police and amateur sleuths in the nearly five decades since and was the mystery at the heart of a David Fincher thriller in 2007. Stewart now says he's solved it.

The individual tasked with keeping that revelation from leaving HarperCollins's premises was Kate D'Esmond, the publishing house's director of publicity. Daily Intel's Elon Green identified the broader contours of those efforts last week:

The Most Dangerous Animal of All, by Gary L. Stewart, is being published tomorrow but still has no cover art on the publisher's website. It hasn't gotten any press. As of 1:30 p.m. today, its Amazon sales rank was #140,113.

Setting aside for a moment the details of Stewart's claim-and the skepticism it will duly encounter, given how many times Zodiac has been "identified" before-D'Esmond spoke with Newsweek about how, precisely, you keep a newsy, high-stakes memoir a secret at one of the world's largest publishing houses.

The process was set in motion a little more than a year ago, when the B.G. Dilworth Agency first approached HarperCollins, successfully, with the book proposal, a " standard acquisition procedure " that came with a less-than-standard nondisclosure agreement.

"When we acquired the book, everybody knew that we had it in-house. So it wasn't a secret in that sense," D'Esmond told Newsweek. "But as far as out-of-house, we did pull the jacket back from Amazon." Instead, there was no cover art and a vague summary that hinted at a "notorious and still at large serial killer," but gave no further identifying characteristics.

Nor were galleys made, the preliminary mock-ups of a completed book that are typically sent to media outlets ahead of time.

"A lot of the time when we have galleys, someone will steal one from my office," D'Esmond said. "We were definitely more vigilant than we would normally be. Even the manuscripts that we have in my office, I made sure that they were under a stack of something else."

And instead of galleys, the publishing house bound up printouts of the book itself, "maybe a dozen or so," and closely selected which writers to let in on the secret. They were sent to about six media outlets.

"We had to whet their appetite," D'Esmond said. "So we would send them an email that said, 'We have a book about a man who was adopted as an infant. His search for his biological father led him to discover that his father was one of the most notorious serial killers of all time.' They were obviously curious."

If they wanted in, those writers were asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement, which would legally cover not only themselves but the entire media outlet in question. It's not uncommon for HarperCollins to publish books-political memoirs, say-under some sort of media embargo, but it is rare for the book's entire basic premise to be kept under wraps.

As the publication date drew nearer, the publishing house had some media outlets set to go live that day-but instead it got a call from Daily Intel's Green.

"He had gotten wind of it somewhere, we don't know where," D'Esmond said. "He seemed to have some information about it. We didn't know when the story would run."

But instead of unraveling a yearlong campaign of slyly preserved secrecy, the story ran the night before publication and only bolstered it.

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How HarperCollins Kept a Book Claiming to Out the Zodiac Killer Secret for an Entire Year

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HarperCollins' publicity campaign for The Most Dangerous Animal of All, a book published this month by Gary L. Stewart, has been one of the most elaborate in recent memory: near total silence. The book was kept entirely a secret until last week, when word leaked out to the Daily Intelligencer.

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For months, dozens of HarperCollins staff - sales, marketing, publicity, and legal - have managed to keep a potentially explosive new book almost entirely quiet. The Most Dangerous Animal of All, by Gary L. Stewart, is being published Tuesday but still has no cover art on the publisher's website. It hasn't gotten any press. As of 1:30 p.m. Monday, its Amazon sales rank was #140,113.

The book's official plot summary is intriguing, but lacksspecifics:

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An explosive and historic book of true crime and an emotionally powerful and revelatory memoir of a man whose ten-year search for his biological father leads to a chilling discovery: His father is one of the most notorious-and still at large-serial killers inAmerica.

Not mentioned in the summary: Stewart, a vice-president at a cleaning company in Baton Rouge, alleges that his father was the Zodiac Kille r, who is believed to have killed at least five people in Northern California, and famously sent letters and cryptograms to Bay Area newspapers. The murders were neversolved.

Stewart reached the conclusion that his father was the serial killer after twelve years of research, Tina Andreadis, a publicist at HarperCollins, told meyesterday.

Approximately fifteen months ago, Dilworth Agency brought a proposal for the book to HarperCollins's Michael Signorelli (an editor who has since left for Henry Holt). It was acquired within a week or two, for an amount HarperCollins declined to disclose. "It was a standard acquisition process," another publicist told me, "except for the ." Stewart was paired with writer Susan Mustafa, a veteran of the true crimegenre.

The book - 367 pages, including the index - was vetted by HarperCollins lawyers, including Fabio Bertoni, who is now general counsel at The New Yorker. "Our lawyers felt it was legally sound," saidAndreadis.

I asked if HarperCollins had reached out to the San Francisco Police Department, which investigated the cases. Andreadis said they had not. According to the book, she said, the department "knew more than they're willing toadmit."

Andreadis didn't share many details of The Most Dangerous Animal of All, but did say that Stewart's father had a criminal record in San Francisco ("forgeries, bad checks"), and there was a strong resemblance between his father's mug shot and the police sketch. "If you look at Gary's photo next to the sketch of the Zodiac next to his father's mug shot, you can see that there is very clearly more than just a passing resemblance," she said. "They lookalike."

He didn't want to believe," she said. "I don't think most people want to know that their father is a notorious serialkiller."

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A Man Claims the Zodiac Killer Is His Father in a New Book That's Been Kept Secret for Months [Updated]

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For months, dozens of HarperCollins staff - sales, marketing, publicity, and legal - have managed to keep a potentially explosive new book almost entirely quiet. The Most Dangerous Animal of All, by Gary L. Stewart, is being published Tuesday but still has no cover art on the publisher's website.

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This is a handwriting comparison of the letter "J" between the Zodiac letters and the author's father.

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The 340 cipher contains the name of the author's father, Earl Van Best, Jr.

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The 408 Cipher is the first time Gary spotted his father's name in the encryption.

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San Fransisco Chronicle             - 1963

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San Fransisco Chronicle             - 1963

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Van and Judy ran away with each other several times until they were caught by police.

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Description of how Judy and Van were finally caught.

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The Most Dangerous Animal of All | Official Book Trailer

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Order Today: http://goo.gl/qCkhBk Watch the trailer about THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL OF ALL, the explosive and historic book of true crime and an emotionally powerful and revelatory memoir of a man whose ten-year search for his biological father leads to a chilling discovery: His father is one of the most notorious-and still at large-serial killers in America.

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He is the author of The Most Dangerous Animal of All and claims that his biological father is the Zodiac Killer.

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She is an award winning author and journalists who loves working with crime novels.

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This is the link to the official website of the book. It contains photos, evidence and many other resources for the viewers disposal.

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Los Angeles publicist Chris Harris thinks Gary Stewart is on to something ... see the report here.

Soon after his birth mother contacted him for the first time at the age of thirty-nine, adoptee Gary L. Stewart decided to search for his biological father. His quest would lead him to a horrifying truth, and force him to reconsider everything he thought he knew about himself and his world.

Written with award-winning author and journalist Susan Mustafa, The Most Dangerous Animal of All tells the story of Stewart's decade-long hunt. While combing through government records and news reports and tracking down relatives and friends, Stewart turns up a host of clues-including forensic evidence-that conclusively identify his father as the Zodiac Killer, one of the most notorious and elusive serial murderers in history.

For decades, the Zodiac Killer has captivated America's imagination. His ability to evade capture while taunting authorities made him infamous. The vicious specificity of his crimes terrified Californians before the Manson murders and after, and shocked a culture enamored with the ideals of the dawning Age of Aquarius. To this day, his ciphers have baffled detectives and amateur sleuths, and his identity remains one of the twentieth century's great unsolved mysteries.

The Most Dangerous Animal of All reveals the name of the Zodiac Killer for the very first time. Stewart and Mustafa construct a chilling psychological profile of Stewart's father: as a boy with disturbing fixations, a frustrated intellectual with pretensions to high culture, and an inappropriate suitor who turned into a jilted lover unable to process his rage. At last, all the questions that have surrounded the case for almost fifty years are answered in this riveting narrative. The result is a singular work of true crime at its finest-a compelling, unbelievable true story told with the pacing of a page-turning novel-as well as a sensational and powerful memoir.

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Los Angeles publicist Chris Harris thinks Gary Stewart is on to something ... see the report here. Soon after his birth mother contacted him for the first time at the age of thirty-nine, adoptee Gary L. Stewart decided to search for his biological father.

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The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father...and Finding the Zodiac Killer

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When Gary L. Stewart decided to search for his biological father at the age of thirty-nine, he never imagined his quest would lead him to a horrifying truth and...

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The first three pictures are fingerprints of Van's right index finger and the third picture is the fingerprint that was captured from one of the murder scenes.

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Gary Stewart when he was found abandoned.