The Zodiac Killer’s Actual Identity
Does everyone know that the Zodiac killer thing is almost certainly solved? I know there’s this Ted Cruz Zodiac thing floating around right now, but this is not a joke post. I read the most recent big Zodiac book and I’m 99.9% convinced that the author has really solved the case.
The book is The Most Dangerous Animal Of All. I read it when it first came out, and I actually hated it. The first half of the book is more or less a recap of the Zodiac killings, and then the second half goes into the actual proof of the authors theory. I got a few chapters in, and it felt so speculative that I actually returned the Kindle edition. There were things in it that I really didn’t like, for instance conversations that seemed dramatized. A week later, I got curious again though, and I bought it again, read the whole thing, and realized I had been way too hasty.
Gary L. Stewart wrote the book, with Susan Mustafa as co-author. Stewart is a guy who was adopted as a kid, and then re-united with his biological mother at 39. At that point, he began researching his biological father, Earl Van Best Jr., and slowly decided that he was the Zodiac killer.
The evidence is pretty compelling: There are a lot of things that point to Earl Van Best Jr. being the Zodiac killer:
- Photos of him look eerily like the police sketch (see above).
- The famous 340 Cipher that the Zodiac sent is a 17 x 20 grid, and if you go from left-to-right, you can pick out the phrase Earl Van Best Junior from the grid. Some of the letters are represented by other symbols (notable, the e characters are instead a circle with a line through the middle, as if a lowercase e was drawn but the bottom curve was completed).
- Earl Van Best Jr. had a lurid past, and was in the papers quite a lot in 1962 when he married a 14 year old and went to prison for statuatory rape. At this time, Paul Avery interviewed Best. Later, Avery was the reporter that the Zodiac killer sent all the taunting letters to. If you saw the 2007 Zodiac movie, Avery was played by Robert Downey Jr.
- A handwriting expert analyzed the writing in the Zodiac letters, and concluded that they were written by the same person as in Van Best’s marriage certificate.
- Van Best’s father was a military cryptographer reportedly instilled a huge love for codes and ciphers in Van Best.
- Van Best’s best friend said that he was obsessed with The Mikado, and in fact had it memorized. The Mikado was quoted in different pieces of the Zodiac killer’s communications.
There’s more, but it’s all pretty convincing, to me anyway.
When the book came out, immediately a lot of people were jumping to disprove the idea the killer was Earl Van Best Jr. There has been a fairly active community of people trying to discover the Zodiac’s identity for decades, and some of them were outraged that this book came out of nowhere and pinned it on this unknown guy.
I read through the main Zodiac message board quite a lot after reading the book, and to me, these people are hard to take seriously. From just a pure logic perspective, these guys were sitting there for decades, spending untold hours trying to create connections from an extremely small amount of data. It seems completely obvious that with the amount of evidence that existed up until this book came out, there simply was not enough information to ever pin the killings on anyone, and anyone who thought they could solve it are naive, or delusional.
There’s obviously also an emotional reason why the old school Zodiac researchers would recoil at being told that they’d been toiling for their whole lives trying to solve a case, and then it turns out that it’s probably a guy that they’ve never even heard of. To them, the fact that they’ve never heard of Earl Van Best Jr. was an argument against him being the Zodiac, but it’s easy to see a very high likelihood that the Zodiac was someone who had never been suspected or investigated. After all, if there really was enough evidence to finger a longtime suspect, there would be a consensus by now on that person being the Zodiac. Instead, the message board people are just guys arguing based on their own preconceived notions and opinions, no different than a bunch of middle aged guys on a guitar message board arguing Telecasters vs. Les Pauls.
Some of the main arguments against Van Best Jr. being the Zodiac are:
- One of the handwriting samples analyzed was from Earl Van Best Jr’s marriage certificate from 1962. Someone at the church where it was issued was phoned after the book came out in 2014, and said that they remembered the Minister filling out those certificates. This is interesting, but extremely tenuous.
- A lot of the early talk on the Zodiac message board was basically “Hey we’ve seen a bunch of outsiders come along and put theories forward before, and we’ve never liked those ones, so this guy is wrong”.
- You can find a lot of names in the 340 cypher if you try hard enough. However, it’s extremely hard to find a specific name that spans exactly the 17 characters from either side across the grid.
Anyhow, that’s the basic deal. I personally am quite convinced. The main reason I have written this up is just that every now and then the subject of the Zodiac comes up and I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone yet who has read this book before I mention it. Most people have seen the great David Fincher movie, but the book got a brief burst of press when it was released, but then seems to have been relegated to the “more Zodiac theories” pile.
