The Most Dangerous Animal of All (32 page)

Hennessey seemed to be carefully choosing his words.

“And just like you suspected,” he continued, “your father was confined in an institution for the criminally insane for psychological evaluation and treatment. It was Atascadero, just as you said. But, Gary, there’s so much circumstantial evidence stuff here, we’re just going to get to the bottom of this once and for all. We’re going to run your DNA sample and see what the results are. That way we’ll know for sure.”

Still trying to absorb what the lieutenant had said, I thanked him and told him I would be back in San Francisco in a few weeks.

“We’ll get together when you get here and discuss the rest of the information and the DNA analysis,” Hennessey promised.

“Lieutenant, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help.”

“It’s my pleasure, Gare. I want you to be able to get your answers and deal with them and get on with your life. Anything I can do to help with that is just part of my job.”

“I hope you and your family have a wonderful Thanksgiving,” I said. “I’ll see you in December.”

I couldn’t sleep that night. I tossed and turned, my mind spinning a web of questions I couldn’t answer. What if the DNA came back a match? What if Earl Van Best Jr. really was the Zodiac? How did someone deal with the fact that his father was one of the most infamous serial killers in American history? What would it do to Zach, to Judy? How would I live with this knowledge? Would all of this change me? And what if my father was still out there somewhere? What would happen when I found him? How would he react? The thought was unsettling, but I resolved not to let it deter me from uncovering the truth.

Lieutenant Hennessey seemed happy to see me when I walked into Room 450 on December 9. He waved as I moved to sit down in a chair near the receptionist’s desk.

“Don’t sit there. Come in here,” he said, rising to shake my hand. “I wanted to let you know how much I appreciated the package you sent, but you shouldn’t have done that.”

The week before Thanksgiving, I had sent the lieutenant a care package filled with Cajun treats from the Deep South. He and his wife were caring for his terminally ill father after work each day, and I had thought it would be a nice gesture.

“I figured you might appreciate some goodies from Louisiana.”

Hennessey smiled and then got right to the point. “As I said on the phone, Cydne Holt just got the top job over at the crime lab, and she is completely swamped with work, current forensic cases. They have a three-year backlog for more recent and pressing crimes. I feel sorry for her in a way, because she’s starting behind the eight ball already, so I didn’t have the heart to ask her to run your DNA. Especially right now. Only being in her new job two weeks and with all the national publicity going on with the BTK Strangler case.”

Hennessey got up from his chair and walked over to the answering machine on top of his bookshelf. “Listen to this,” he said as he pressed the Play button.

“Yeah, I’m calling to report the identity of the BTK Strangler. His name is ___________. He lives at 129 __________ Street in Wichita, Kansas. He is also the Zodiac Killer. Again, his name is ____________ and he lives at 129 __________ Street in Wichita, Kansas. He is the BTK Strangler and the Zodiac Killer. He cut off his cleaning lady’s head and has it in the freezer. Thank you.”

Hennessey sat down, grinning. “You see why I have chosen not to approach Cydne just yet on your case? I just don’t want to get a big fat no, and with all the publicity with the Scott Peterson trial in the sentencing phase and now the BTK Strangler, my gut tells me to hold off.”

“That makes sense,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “When do you think it will get done? Sometime after the holidays?”

“I think after the first of the year things will have settled down a bit, and she will have gotten more acclimated to her new role. Then would probably be the best time to approach her. Either way, we will get it done. We need to do that for you, but we also need to do it because it smells of a cover-up. It always has. But now, with all of your information—Rotea, Butler—we have to do it.”

“Are you ready, Lieutenant? I mean, have you actually thought about what it’s going to be like when you announce you’ve solved the Zodiac case?”

Hennessy rubbed his forehead. “Oh, my God. The media will be in an absolute frenzy. I don’t think you can ever prepare for that. I’m not certain I’m up for it right now,” he said with a laugh. “By the way, I have your father’s information off of CLETS, if you would like to go over it.”

My pulse accelerated. “Sure,” I said.

Shuffling through the papers on his desk, the lieutenant pulled out a stack. It was my father’s rap sheet. “I could not get the original SFPD file, because Butler refused to give it to me,” Hennessey continued, handing me the papers. “So I went around him.”

I felt a chill run through my body as I looked at the top sheet. In the upper-right corner were two photos. One was the picture Harold Butler had given me from the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the other was a profile shot, complete with the SFPD arrest number 175639, dated February 22, 1962, a year before I was born.

As I looked at the photos, I realized that the picture Butler had given me was not from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

It was my father’s mug shot.

The crime: G-11284—Sec. 261.1 of the California Penal Code. “Rape, acts contributing where female is under 18 years of age.”

The lieutenant allowed me to take the stack of papers from his hand and leaned forward, quietly watching me absorb the information contained in the file. Hennessey noticed the tears that began to build in my eyes.

Turning the page, I saw my father’s fingerprints, along with his signature on the booking report. The address listed was 765 Haight Street. I stared at that for a moment. Butler had led me to believe that was my father’s address in the mid- to late sixties, not in 1962.

The second shock was that my father had blue eyes. Based on the black-and-white photo Butler had given me, I had believed my father’s eyes were brown. It hit me that I had my father’s eyes.

I flipped through page after page—rape, child stealing, enticing minor from home, fugitive, fraudulent documents, fraud by wire, criminal conspiracy, fraud by wire, drunk driving, drunk driving, drunk driving.

I could clearly envision my father’s life through the progression of his crimes.

Hennessey pointed out to me where it had been noted that Van had been sentenced to Atascadero State Hospital.

Almost any crime I could think of was in those pages.

Except murder.

“I made you a copy,” the lieutenant said as I got up to leave. I needed to digest all of this. “You can take it with you, but please keep this between you and me. I’m not supposed to do this.”

I read and reread it on the plane ride home, looking for clues, memorizing the timeline. When I got back to Baton Rouge, I compared my father’s prison stays with the Zodiac murders. Van had been out of prison when each murder occurred.

I wondered what could make a man do the things my father had done. Looking at it on paper made it seem so much more real. I thought about what Judy must have gone through. It was no wonder she didn’t want to remember him.

At night, as I lay awake in bed, I fought with myself. This man was my father. Loyd and Leona had raised me to believe that family was family, no matter what. Even as I was aware of the possibility that my father was the Zodiac, I could not help but feel some compassion for him. He must have been a very sick man. I wondered what had brought him to the life of crime he had known. What had possessed him to kidnap and marry a fourteen-year-old girl?

Judy had said my father gave me to a church. That had to mean that on some level he had cared about me. He had brought me to a safe place where he knew someone would find me a home. But why? Why had my father wanted to get rid of me? What had happened to make Van turn to a life of crime?

And what did Butler and Sanders know that I didn’t? Hennessey had told me that Butler refused to let him see my father’s criminal file. Why?

I surmised it had something to do with Rotea.

I became more determined than ever to find out.

48

In early February 2005, I received an unexpected e-mail from Linda Woods, one of the ladies in the adoption search group that had helped Judy find me. She asked if I could meet with her in New Orleans, because she had some records from my adoption that she wanted to give me.

“It’s so good to meet you,” she said, standing up to hug me when I entered her office a few days later. “You are one of our success stories. How’s your mother?”

“She’s doing well,” I said.

We chatted for a few minutes, and then she handed me a manila folder that contained the file of correspondence she had received from Judy three years before.

“It’s been almost three years since your mother found you, and I feel comfortable giving you this now. I don’t know if you are aware, but someone gave your mother information from your sealed record and got into trouble for it. But now that all of that’s over, I felt it was time for you to have some of the remaining information I had on you.”

I hoped it was my birth certificate. I had been fighting with the state of Louisiana to get my adoption records unsealed so that I could have my birth certificate, but I had not been successful.

I was disappointed to discover that it wasn’t in the folder.

The file did, however, include my actual adoption decree, signed by Judge Sartain, granting my adoption to Harry Loyd and Leona Stewart. In the document, my name was legally changed from Earl Van Dorne Best to Gary Loyd Stewart.

There it was in black and white.

My full given name. Judy had told me I was named after my father, but she had not mentioned the name Dorne. I wondered why that name had been added.

I smiled as I sifted through the rest of the file.

One letter in particular caught my attention when I recognized Judy’s handwriting. In the letter, she had stated that she thought her “story or her son’s story would certainly have been newsworthy.” She had written the letter at a Search Finders of California meeting when someone had recommended she do a search of the obituaries to find out whether her child was still alive. (Search Finders of California is a nonprofit organization that helps people search for adult family members who have been adopted and for birth parents.) Judy wrote that she thought the report of finding “an abandoned child, as Van had abandoned her baby in Baton Rouge,” would have been front-page material.

I stared at the letter, rereading it to make sure I had read it right.

Abandoned?

Judy had never said anything about me being abandoned. She said I had been turned in to a church.

And newsworthy?

What had been newsworthy about my story? Children were adopted every day.

The letter, written the year before she met me, also contained my father’s full name. Judy had told me she remembered my father only as “Van,” although I had asked her repeatedly to try to remember his full name.

She had lied to me.

What the hell was going on?

Had my mother lied to me about everything?

It hit me then that
of
course
she had known my father’s full name. How else had Butler been able to track him down?

On February 6, I went to visit the two people in the world I knew I could always count on: Loyd and Leona.

“Do you think it’s possible that a woman could forget having a baby?” I asked Leona. “Judy told me that once.”

“I’m not sure. I know we forget the pain of childbirth, but I don’t see how anyone could forget having a baby.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

“But you need to try to understand what she was going through at the time,” Leona quickly added. “She was a traumatized young girl, a child, really, who was living in an abusive environment. Maybe forgetting about everything was the only way she could cope with the trauma she experienced.”

Loyd agreed. “You should listen to your mama. Give her the benefit of the doubt. She went through a lot.”

“But she does remember things,” I said, sharing with them what I had learned.

“Well, maybe she couldn’t bring herself to tell you,” Leona said. “It was a painful situation. Maybe she thought you would be hurt.”

“I
am
hurt,” I said. “It would have been better to have been told in the beginning than to find out like this.”

“What are you going to do?” Loyd asked.

“I’m going to find out what really happened.”

When I left, I drove to the East Baton Rouge Parish Library to see if I could find the “newsworthy” story. Relying on the only information I had—my birth date and the date of my adoption—I knew that whatever happened had to have occurred somewhere between February and May of 1963.

Back then, Baton Rouge had two newspapers: the
Morning Advocate
and, in the evening, the
State Times
. I started looking at newspaper articles dated February 12, 1963, and worked my way forward. I expected to find an article, some black-and-white text, about a baby and a church buried somewhere in the back of either or both papers.

What I found in the
Morning Advocate
broke my heart—a picture of a baby held in the arms of a Baton Rouge police officer. The headline, on March 16, read, “Tot Abandoned Here Is Put in Hospital for Observation.”

I could barely breathe as I looked at my picture plastered on the front page of the newspaper. The caption underneath the photo stated, “ABANDONED BABY BOY—Mrs. Essie Bruce of the city Juvenile division holds a blond, blue-eyed baby boy after he was found abandoned on a stairway landing in an apartment house on North Boulevard. Police are attempting to find a new home for the child and to determine the identity of his parents.”

I stared at the article in disbelief. There was no mention of a church. I had been found unexpectedly by a lady named Mary Bonnette, on the stairs in her apartment building.

Stunned, I searched for more articles and found a headline on April 19 that read, “Teenager may be the mother of abandoned tot.” This article indicated that a fifteen-year-old had been picked up for vagrancy in New Orleans and may be the mother of the abandoned infant.