The Most Dangerous Animal of All

by Gary L. Stewart

  “Of course, Mom. I’ll be there.”

  There was a particular bench on the edge of Stow Lake where Frank had mentored many of the people he had sponsored in Alcoholics Anonymous, and that was the spot she had chosen. One of the things that had made Frank Velasquez so special was, as he was fond of saying, that he spent the first twenty-nine years of his life chasing happiness in a bottle and the last thirty testifying as to why that addiction had been a waste of his first twenty-nine years.

  It was on that bench that he took friends and family and taught them how to recover. More important, while he taught them how to battle addiction, he taught them how to pray.

  When I got off the phone with Judy, I called Lieutenant Hennessey, hoping we could find some time to meet while I was in San Francisco.

  “I’m available anytime after noon on the twenty-ninth,” he said.

  “I’ll see you then,” I said.

  I arrived at the Oakland airport, rented a car, and headed west on Interstate 80 toward San Francisco. After paying the toll on the Bay Bridge, I called the lieutenant and left him a message, informing him that I was on my way. The traffic on Van Ness was extra heavy for a Friday afternoon, and it took nearly an hour to make the three-mile drive through the road construction around the Embarcadero. Finally, I arrived at the Francisco Bay Inn, on Lombard Street. The red cobblestone street boasts the title of the steepest and most crooked street in the world, with its eight hairpin turns, and is beautifully lined with flowers and quaint homes.

  Relieved to finally be there, I splashed some water on my face, donned a sport coat and jeans, and headed to the Hall of Justice. I soon arrived at 850 Bryant Street, parked my car, and made my way up the steps of the immense building.

  Rich Italian marble floors greeted me at the entrance—not what one would normally expect upon entering a police station. The once government-white walls were now painted a brownish beige, an attempt by the city to cover the dingy yellow stains caused by years of nicotine exposure from officers burning the midnight oil. If only these walls could talk, I thought as I removed my watch and placed my cell phone in the basket before passing through the metal detector. From photographs of blood-soaked crime scenes to the small victories of a clue that broke a case, the mourning of the faithful fallen, and internal scandals that had weakened the faith, the grand old walls had silently stood, bearing witness to it all.

  I found the elevators and pressed the button for the fourth floor. When the door opened, I stepped into a long hallway. The first office to the right had a sign: homicide 450. Feeling surprisingly calm, I opened the door and walked in.

  From the reception area, I could see a man in his early fifties standing behind a desk in his office, talking on the phone and rummaging through a stack of papers. The man looked up, smiled, and waved. A woman I assumed was the receptionist walked into the waiting area. “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m here to see Lieutenant Hennessey,” I replied.

  She headed toward the open office, and the man behind the desk covered the receiver of the phone with his hand. “Can you give me just about five minutes? I’ll be right with you.”

  I nodded and stepped back into the hallway.

  The walls were lined with photographs of officers out in the field. I scrutinized each one, hoping to spot Rotea, but I didn’t see him.

  A half hour later, Hennessey finally came out and extended his hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  I walked behind him into his office and sat down. He stared at me for a moment, scrutinizing my facial features, and I watched as his face visibly paled. He had noticed my resemblance to the sketch.

  “No problem. I have all the time in the world,” I reassured him. For some reason, I had not realized that Hennessey was the head of the homicide division. I had assumed that he was just another detective assigned to the Zodiac case, like Dave Toschi, about whom I had read a lot recently.

  Toschi had gained such celebrity that a movie titled Bullitt, featuring a fictionalized version of the detective, was made in 1968. Steve McQueen played the role of Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, who sported an upside-down left shoulder holster for his primary weapon, a trademark of Toschi’s. In 1971, the movie Dirty Harry, also loosely based upon the Zodiac case, was released; many people believe that Toschi was the inspiration for the main character played by Clint Eastwood, Inspector Harry Callahan. By the early 1970s Toschi had become so famous that he was asked to take a second look into the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. He declined, insisting that it would take him away from the Zodiac case, the very thing that had put him on the map.

  Often, fellow detectives wondered how the press arrived at crime scenes before they did, and always on cases Toschi worked. It didn’t take long for them to figure it out. While Toschi worked the media, his partner, Bill Armstrong, worked the crime scenes. When the case went cold after Zodiac stopped writing letters in 1974, Toschi’s moments in front of the camera became fewer and fewer.

  On April 24, 1978, someone had mailed a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle bearing the name “Zodiac.” The letter had too much postage, which was a trademark of Zodiac’s. It read:

  Dear Editor

  This is the Zodiac speaking. I am back with you. Tell herb caen I am here, I have always been here. That city pig toschi is good but I am smarter and better he will get tired then leave me alone. I am waiting for a good movie about me. who will play me. I am now in control of all things.

  Yours truly:

  – guess

  SFPD – 0

  Sherwood Morrill, the handwriting specialist who had examined all of the Zodiac correspondence, quickly deemed the letter a fake. On Monday, July 17, 1978, Inspector Toschi was reassigned to robbery detail amid allegations that he had sent the letter in a failed attempt to reignite media coverage of the Zodiac case, although those allegations were never proved, and Toschi vehemently denied any involvement.

  I wondered how many times Toschi had sat in this very chair going over photographs and witness statements about the killer he would never be able to catch. While I waited for Hennessey to get settled, I looked around his office. The walls were filled with black-and-white photos depicting his thirty-five years on the force.

  He finally pulled out a pen and paper and said, “Okay, Gare, I have the letter you sent me around here somewhere, but let’s just start from the beginning. What makes you think your father was the Z-man?” His manner was not sarcastic, but I could tell this was not the first time he had said those words. His smile, though, was warm and friendly, and I didn’t take offense.

  “Well, sir, it’s like this,” I began, repeating what I had told him before while he jotted down a few notes.

  I reminded Hennessey that my mother had been married to Rotea and had enlisted the help of Harold Butler in Internal Affairs and former chief of police Earl Sanders.

  “Butler refused to share the information in my father’s file with me but hinted that what was in there was so much worse than what I know. He told my mother that the Zodiac case had been solved,” I said. “Sanders said the things in that file were so heinous, they would destroy me and my mother, and begged her to get me to just drop my investigation. I don’t understand.”

  “You know, this department has been rocked over the years with scandals that have been swept under the rug for political reasons. I mean, if your kid went to school with that kid, then you have an understanding, a fraternity of sorts, to get away with anything.”

  “Sounds just like Baton Rouge to me, sir. South Louisiana politics are known around the world for being the shadiest of them all,” I said, smiling.

  “Do you suspect a cover-up here with what Harold told you?” asked the lieutenant.

  “Why else would Chief Sanders and Harold Butler go to such great lengths to keep the truth from me and my mother? Are they trying to protect the reputation of the great Rotea Gilford? I don’t know, but imagine if it came out that Judy Gilford, the widow of
Rotea Gilford, the first San Francisco Police Department African American investigator and a well-known political figure, was once married to the Zodiac killer?”

  Hennessey thought about that for a moment.

  “Do you have any materials or personal effects from your father that might have his DNA on them, such as a hairbrush?” he asked.

  In 2002, police had obtained DNA they suspected might be the Zodiac’s. They didn’t have a full thirteen-marker profile, but they had four markers and the XY gender indicator.

  “Maybe you could call the FBI and get my profile. Two years ago in Baton Rouge, police were looking for a serial killer who was targeting young women. Witnesses described a white male in a white pickup truck at some of the scenes. Police swabbed thousands of men in the area who had white pickup trucks. I was one of them. They should have my DNA.”

  “Have they caught this guy, the killer?”

  “Yes, sir,” I nodded. “His name is Derrick Todd Lee.”

  The lieutenant put his pen in his shirt pocket and pushed his chair back away from the desk. “That will do us no good, then. Your DNA profile will be tied up in appeals courts for the next ten to fifteen years. We will never get our hands on it. Do you have anything written by your father, a sample of his handwriting?”

  “No, sir. I don’t think so,” I said.

  Hennessey stared at me for a moment and then said, “Oh, what the hell.” He picked up the phone and while dialing a number said, “Do you have a few more minutes, or do you have to be somewhere?”

  “I have time.”

  Hennessey spoke with someone for a moment and then hung up the phone. “A forensics analyst will be here within the hour,” he said.

  For the next thirty minutes, the lieutenant and I got to know each other. As we talked, I got the feeling that he realized I was sincerely trying to learn about my father and was not some Zodiac groupie. But then again, he had been here before, listening to the stories of people who really believed they were somehow related to Zodiac. Subtly, he changed the conversation back to that subject.

  “You know, the only solid suspect the SFPD ever named in the Zodiac case was a guy in Vallejo named Arthur Leigh Allen. He died about ten years ago, but we watched him for years. We even issued a search warrant once and confiscated some things from his home, but there was no smoking gun to be found. In fact, when he died, we had the coroner preserve a portion of his brain material for future use, and in 2002 we ran a DNA analysis to compare to the Zodiac killer.”

  “I read about him,” I said. “I recall reading in a police report online and in some other literature that the police actually saw some coded letters that Allen said he had gotten from some crazy man at Atascadero. He said the man called himself Zodiac. I’m telling you, Lieutenant, I am certain that when you check out my father’s file, you’re going to find that he spent some time in Atascadero.”

  Hennessey looked a little surprised, but he took his pen from his shirt pocket and jotted down another note. Before he could put his pen down, the phone rang.

  “Can you bring a DNA kit down here?” he said.

  A few minutes later, an officer walked in, the sound of his clanking handcuffs preceding him. At five feet eleven inches, the man was slender and graying but handsome, with strong Irish features.

  “First of all, he hasn’t done anything wrong, so we’re safe,” Hennessey joked as the man nodded toward me.

  “So what are we doing here?” the forensic analyst asked, his accent distinct.

  “Well, you see, Gary here, um, well, he is voluntarily submitting a DNA sample,” Hennessey said.

  “What for, then?” the analyst persisted. This was very unusual, and he wasn’t going to let it slide. “Do you have a case number for him?”

  Hennessey didn’t want to say that this was to be charged to case number 696314, the Zodiac case, because it was officially closed at the time. But testing my DNA would cost the department about fifteen hundred dollars, and the forensic lab needed a case number to justify the expense.

  “Come with me,” Hennessey told the man, leading him from the room. A few minutes later they came back.

  “We have a case number,” Hennessey said, obviously pleased.

  “We’ll just need your information here, and then you sign here stating that you voluntarily offered a sample of your bodily fluids for DNA analysis,” the analyst said, pointing to the items on the form I needed to sign.

  I filled in the information and signed it without reading anything, excited by the fact that Hennessey seemed to believe me sufficiently to spend the money for the expensive DNA test.

  The analyst put on a pair of latex gloves and pulled a buccal swab kit out of his shirt pocket. “Now, just open your mouth,” he instructed.

  He swabbed the inside of my cheek twice and placed the swabs in a bag, sealed it, thanked me, and left the room.

  “We will have to be patient,” Hennessey said. “Our backlog of DNA samples waiting on analysis is extremely long, due to underfunding and so many new crimes.”

  “I understand,” I said, getting up and shaking the lieutenant’s hand.

  “I’m going to visit Butler and try to get your father’s file for review,” Hennessey promised.

  “Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to my story.”

  “If I didn’t believe you and what you’ve told me, I would not have taken your DNA,” Hennessey assured me. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. I hope for your sake that your father was not the Zodiac.”

  “So do I, sir.”

  The next day I sat on a park bench with Judy and held her hand as we said our final good-byes to Frank and watched the wind carry him away.

  47

  When I returned home to Baton Rouge, I felt very relieved. Hennessey had seemed as though he genuinely wanted to get to the bottom of this. I had hope of finding out where my father was and what he had done. Now it was just a matter of waiting. I would know the truth and would deal with it, one way or another.

  Hennessey had asked me to call him back in three weeks. On November 23, I had several meetings scheduled in Tarpon Springs, Florida. After a hectic day, I dialed Hennessey’s office as I drove toward Tampa International Airport. True to his word, he had been following up on his promise to help me.

  “I’m swamped right now, but I have some information for you,” he said. “We have been waiting for a certain young lady here to be installed as the new head of the crime lab, and she just got the job. Remember Cydne Holt, the gal I told you would be helping us with the DNA?”

  “Yes, sir. I remember.”

  “Well, she has the top job in forensics now, and that’s good, because she will work with me. We intentionally held on to your DNA waiting for this announcement, and now we’re set. She’s on vacation this week for Thanksgiving, but she’ll be back next week and we’ll get right on the profiling then.”

  I knew that Dr. Holt had developed the only partial DNA profile of the Zodiac, so this was good news.

  “That’s great, sir. What about my father’s file? Did you manage to get your hands on it?”

  “You know, I’m pissed at Butler,” Hennessey announced. “Harold worked for me for years. When I asked him about your father’s file, he had it sitting right on his desk, but he refused to let me look at it. I mean, he wouldn’t let me touch it. This is not like the Harold Butler I’ve known for twenty-some-odd years. I stormed out of his office.”

  I cringed at his words.

  “I had to go through CLETS [California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System] to get your father’s rap sheet. The original records were destroyed years ago, but there’s some stuff in there . . . pedophilia and other things. The FBI has files on your father, too, but I don’t have them in front of me.”

  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 an
d 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.”