The Most Dangerous Animal of All

by Gary L. Stewart

  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 w
as 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.

  An article on April 20 stated, “Nab Father of Child left here.” It reported that Earl Van Best Jr., twenty-eight, of San Francisco, had been arrested for abandoning his two-month-old son in Baton Rouge.

  I realized the newspaper had it wrong. I had not been two months old.

  I had been only four weeks old when my father abandoned me.

  Slowly, I got up from the microfiche machine, collected the articles I had printed, and made my way to my truck. I got in, started the engine, and steered it toward downtown Baton Rouge. I knew North Boulevard well. I had driven on that street many times.

  I had not been left in a safe haven by people who had loved me but simply couldn’t care for me. I had been thrown out like the trash, left there to be found or not.

  An intense feeling of rejection washed over me as I looked for the address the paper had listed: 736.

  Within a few minutes I was there. Just across the street stood an old Anglican church, almost hidden by the beards of Spanish moss draped on the sloping limbs of the oak trees that shaded it. I parked the truck and got out.

  Looking around, I walked to the back of the building and entered a parking area with a courtyard, retracing what must have been my father’s steps so many years before. I peeked inside, hoping to see the stairwell that led to Apartment 8. The newspaper had said that was where I had been left.

  As I stood there, I realized that the last time I had seen my father was in that spot. With tears streaming down my face, I turned and walked back to North Boulevard and across to the First Presbyterian Church. The old building stood just as it had in 1963, when my father had passed it.

  Maybe he had tried to turn me in to this church, I rationalized, hoping to ease the pain I was feeling. Maybe the church’s doors had been locked. Maybe the clergy had gone home for the day.

  I stood on the steps of the church, trying to convince myself that this was what my father’s plan had been. Something had gone wrong, and my father had been forced to leave me in the apartment building.

  Consoled somewhat, I walked back to my truck. It was too dark to see anything more.

  By the time I got home, I didn’t know what to feel—anger, humiliation, betrayal, hurt.

  Judy had promised that she would always be honest with me, and she had lied.

  About so many things.

  The next few days were rough. I felt abandoned all over again. I remembered the time when Loyd and my sister Cindy had taken me to my first visit to the barbershop. Cindy had noticed a scar on my head when the barber cropped my hair too short. Loyd and Leona could remember no fall, no injury, that would have left such a scar on my scalp. A doctor had told me that my nose had once been broken, but Loyd and Leona said that had never happened either. I wondered now if it had.

  I read the articles again, realizing that my father had been arrested. The next morning, I went to Baton Rouge Police headquarters and filled out the paperwork to obtain a copy of the police report about the incident.

  When the clerk asked for my name, I said, “Earl Van Dorne Best.” I thought that if I used that name, I would have a better chance of getting the report. For the first time ever, I signed my birth name on a piece of paper. It took about an hour, but the clerk, Regina, finally gave me the reports. The names had been blacked out, and I asked her for a copy without the omissions. “That’s protected information,” she said.

  “But these files are about me,” I persisted. “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  On Valentine’s Day, I drove to New Orleans, hoping to obtain two things: the police reports from Van’s arrest there and any news articles I could find in the Times-Picayune. I had been informed the day before that criminal records from that far back had been placed on microfiche at the library.

  I had not talked to Judy about any of this. My anger and hurt were still too close to the surface.

  In the police reports, I finally learned the whole story. I read about how
Judy had run away with my father to New Orleans and given birth at Southern Baptist Hospital.

  “Earl could not stand to be around the baby,” she had said in her police statement. “There was no food in the house and the baby needed formula, so I went to work as a bar maid. It was about the middle of March when I was working, and when I came home from work the baby would usually be in the footlocker with the lid closed. I asked Earl why he closed the locker, and he said he was tired of hearing the baby cry.”

  I couldn’t read any more.

  I printed the report, walked outside, and vomited.

  49

  Taking a deep breath, I typed Judy’s e-mail address into my computer. First I sent her the police report, then an article from the Times-Picayune, dated April 20, 1963, which stated that my father had been arrested and had admitted to abandoning his son. The article also mentioned that Judy had been arrested for vagrancy and that she was being held in jail for criminal neglect of the child.

  “I just want to know why you said that you left him as soon as he returned from Baton Rouge without me. You stayed with him for over a month before you left him. I just want the truth, enough of the lies,” I wrote. Before I had time to change my mind, I hit Send.

  Later that night, I sent the last arrest report. “I hope you can remember better now” was all I wrote. She responded the next morning.

  I am so sad that you think I’m lying to you. Why would I do that, Gary? I did not go to all the trouble to find you in order to ruin your life, Gary. Please believe that.

  I was not living with him and had not been living with him. I don’t absolutely know for sure that I left him the same day he came back without you (I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I did), but I know absolutely for sure I had not been living with him for some time when I was arrested.

  Gary, I was fifteen years old. It was a shock to me that I knew you had been left in an apartment house. I have absolutely no recollection of that. It was a shock to learn that I was already working as a barmaid before he took you to Baton Rouge—that I had gone to work because he couldn’t find work. Gary, I am not a liar, and I would never lie to you.