As I read through them and got to the quotes from The Mikado, I could hear William’s voice in my head. “We knew every word of that opera.”
When I read about Zodiac’s “slaves for the afterlife,” I remembered William’s slave box. “Your father was obsessed with it,” he had said.
All of my father’s obsessions ran through those letters—his Anglophile pretentions and British way of speaking, his admiration for LaVey, his knowledge of weapons and military training.
But when I got to the letter postmarked April, 20, 1970, my heart began pounding. In that letter, Zodiac had written, “My name is” and included a cipher with thirteen characters. I wrote down my father’s name—Earl Van Best Jr.
It had thirteen characters.
Excited, I did some more research and discovered that none of the prime suspects in the Zodiac killings had ever had thirteen characters in their names. I began to review the 408 cipher, the one that had been sent in sections to three different newspapers (see following).
Zodiac had said that if this cipher were solved, the police would have him.
I found a version on the Internet where the decoded message had been typed above the Zodiac’s cipher. I approached the three sections of the cipher as if they were a seek-a-word puzzle, looking at a particular letter and then looking vertically, diagonally, and across for my father’s name.
I saw it right away, plain as day. It was in the section of the cipher that had been sent to the San Francisco Examiner: EV Best Jr.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Detectives—professional and amateur—had spent years searching for the killer’s name in those ciphers.
But they had not been armed with the Zodiac’s real name.
When they had a suspect, such as Arthur Leigh Allen, they had not been able to find the name of the suspect hidden among the symbols and letters.
As the sun disappeared into the horizon outside my window, the magnitude of what I had just discovered slowly sank in.
My father really was the Zodiac.
I remembered when I had first seen the “Wanted” poster on A&E three years earlier. I had set out to disprove my suspicions to myself. Back then, everyone, including Judy, had thought I was crazy.
I had thought I was crazy.
But there it was in black and white. “In this cipher is my identity,” Zodiac had written.
DNA or no DNA, I finally had something tangible that proved my father was the Zodiac.
54
It had now been five years since Judy found me. Throughout that time, we had experienced many ups and downs in our relationship as I tried to understand her role in all of this. I had spent a lifetime wondering about my identity. In her own fashion, Judy had helped me discover who I was, but I had learned that she was not always a reliable source of information relating to my past, and that she wanted to protect my brother, Chance, and the life she had led with Rotea.
She was my mother. I loved her. And she loved me, even though I drove her crazy forcing her to remember things she wanted to forget. She had made it clear that she wanted to put her past behind her. I couldn’t do that. Not long after I had discovered my great-grandfather’s name on the Horry County Historical Society website, I had written letters to everyone I could find named Best living in Horry County, explaining that I had been adopted and asking if anyone knew Earl Van Best Sr. or his son. I received a response from a man named Robert Armstrong, who said he was the executor of the estate of my grandfather’s wife, Eleanor. He wrote to tell me that my grandfather had been the pastor of the small Christian church he had once attended. “He was my mother’s pastor, and I became quite friendly with him. He passed away several years ago (sorry I don’t know the date),” Armstrong wrote, explaining that he had been asked to be executor because he worked in a bank.
He said that my grandfather had attended Asbury Theological Seminary, in Wilmore, Kentucky, and did have a son, although they had been estranged. “My poor memory suggests he was an alcoholic,” he wrote, referring to Van. “He apparently died in Mexico and is buried there with apparently not even a marker on his grave. He had remarried to a lady in Austria and left 3 children in Austria, who, if we are on the right track for you, would be half-sister and half-brothers to you.”
Armstrong listed the name Guenevere Obregon, Van’s daughter, along with her address and e-mail address. “She had or has two brothers, Oliver and Urban. She apparently had been a judge in Austria,” he continued.
I read the rest of the letter barely comprehending what I was reading.
My father was dead, buried in Mexico in an unmarked grave?
My grandfather was dead?
I read the letter over and over, letting feelings of loss, of sorrow, wash over me. In the beginning, I had fantasized about meeting my father. I had imagined sharing a cup of coffee with him, going out to dinner, telling stories, as I had done with Judy.
Laughing together.
For my whole life I had imagined the kind of man he would be.
That could never happen now.
According to Armstrong, my grandfather had been a military man, an honorable man. I felt a sense of pride rising up through my grief.
I sat there for a while, my thoughts jumbled. Why had the woman at the Social Security Administration hinted that my father was alive? Why hadn’t Butler told me he was dead? Did he know?
And then it hit me—“He remarried to a lady in Austria and left 3 children . . .”
I had a sister and two brothers.
I had to find them.
I called Judy immediately, thinking she should know that Van was dead. Instead of saying the words, I read the letter to her.
She laughed.
She laughed even harder when I got to the part about my siblings in Austria.
“Sounds just like your father to go off to Vienna and have children, then wind up being buried in Mexico,” she commented sarcastically.
I hung up the phone, disturbed by Judy’s reaction. She had sounded relieved, almost happy, that my father was dead. I could hear it in her voice, in her laughter.
I went to my computer and wrote a short e-mail to Guenevere Obregon, explaining that I had been adopted and reciting what Armstrong had told me.
I got no response.
Thinking that maybe she no longer used the e-mail address Armstrong had given me, I wrote her a letter and mailed it the old-fashioned way. I included photographs of myself and expressed how excited I would be to meet her.
A month passed by.
Nothing.
Losing hope that I had the right address, I typed her name into my search engine. A document titled “Republic of Austria, Independent Federal Asylum Review Board Activity Report” appeared on my screen. I clicked on it.
Jackpot.
Guenevere was a judge, a magistère on the board. I was impressed. I couldn’t wait to talk to her, to ask her about her memories of our father. I wondered if she had been motivated to help criminals seek asylum because of Van’s criminal past.
Three hours later, I found the phone number for the board.
I dialed the number over and over, my inability to speak German hampering my progress.
Finally, I reached a woman who recognized the words “Guenevere” and “magistère.”
“Yes, yes, but no, she is not here. She is on, how do you say, maternity?” she managed.
I gleaned from the woman that Guenevere had been on maternity leave for two years.
“Do you have a telephone number for her?” I asked, crossing my fingers.
“No. Call back Monday. Maybe someone can help you then.”
I called back the following Monday and reached a woman who said, “You are looking for Guenevere, yes?” before informing me that she was her secretary.
“Yes,” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice.
“She is on maternal leave and is at home expecting a baby.”
“Can you get a message to her?”
“Sure,” the woman replied.
“Ask her to telephone Gary Stewart. Tell her that I am her brother in the United States.” I gave her my office number.
She giggled in surprise. “Oh, her brother. Okay, Gary, I will tell her, and I hope that she will call you back. Good-bye.”
I hung up the phone feeling like I had just exhausted my last chance, but excited that Guenevere would get my message.
My change of mood was obvious when I walked into my office that morning. Phillip Schmidt, a close friend and co-worker, noticed immediately. “What’s got you in so early this morning, sunshine?”
I had not yet told anyone in the office about my father. Everyone knew about Judy, but I had not mentioned that I was looking for Van. I told Phillip that I had learned I had two brothers and a sister in Austria. The phone, which usually rang nonstop, had been strangely quiet while we chatted. We were still discussing what I should do next when the phone rang. It was 9:30.
Phillip reached for it. “Delta Tech, this is Phillip. May I help you?”
I could hear a female voice and saw Phillip’s confused look. He was having trouble understanding what the woman was saying. Finally, he heard “Gary” and covered the mouthpiece with his hand.
“I think it’s your sister,” he said.
I just stood there, suddenly petrified.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Phillip said, handing me the phone. As the door closed behind him, I said, “Hello,” much too cheerfully, my voice shaking.
“Hallo, I’m looking for Gary Stewart,” a heavily German-accented voice said in perfect English.
Gripping the handset, I said, “This is Gary speaking.”
“This is Guenevere. What’s this about you being my brother?” I could tell she was smiling by the sound of her voice, and I let go of the breath I had been holding.
Our conversation lasted forty minutes. Guenevere asked why I thought we were brother and sister. I explained that I had been adopted and what Armstrong had told me.
Guenevere told me that she had a baby, Karl, who was two, and her second child was due in March. She explained that she had moved from the address where I had sent the letter because she and her husband needed a larger home for their growing family. She had not received the e-mails because she had not been to her office.
My heart soared. She had not been ignoring me.
I told her about my family, both families, and repeated the information I had sent her in the letters.
“Can you tell me about our father?” I asked.
“I didn’t know our father,” she said. “He abandoned us when I was a baby.”
Her words shot through me. Van had done the same thing to my siblings that he had done to me. I knew well the sadness she must have experienced when she learned that.
“So is our father’s criminal past the reason why you devoted your life to helping those like our father seek asylum?” I asked, my voice full of empathy.
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
“What do you mean, ‘our father’s criminal past’?” Guenevere said, the tone of her voice no longer cheerful.
I knew I had just misstepped. “I just assumed, if you worked for the asylum board, that our father might have been running from something in the U.S.”
“My career has nothing to do with my father,” Guenevere said coldly. “It’s just what I went to university for, that’s all.”
As we said our good-byes and exchanged contact information, I knew I had stuck my foot in my mouth. I hoped I had not done too much damage, but the Guenevere who said good-bye was not the friendly Guenevere who had greeted me.
That evening I wrote a letter apologizing for springing such a surprise on her and sharing with her everything I had learned about Van to date, including all of the misinformation my friend at the Department of Justice and Harold Butler had provided.
She wrote back, disputing my facts. She said that her father had never been arrested in the United States. “You wrote that the police officer told you my father was arrested again in 1996 in California. This is totally absurd because my father died in the year 1984 in Mexico.” She went on to say that after suffering so much hardship, she, her brothers, and her mother had closed the chapter on her father and his family in the States for good. “We do not want to have anymore ties to my father’s side of the family and so we do not want you or anyone to interfere in mine, my brothers, or my mother’s lives. We all ask you to respect our wish. Of course we wish you and your family all the best for the future.”
I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. Of course no one would want to find out that they had a brother and then be immediately told that their father was a criminal. I had assumed that, because she was my sister, she would automatically relate.
I wrote Guenevere another letter, trying to explain myself, and received a response that was more amicable.
“Imagine how I felt,” she wrote, “when you told me on the phone: I am your brother, your father had a relationship with a minor and he was a criminal too . . . I felt and still feel like I’ve been run over by a truck without any warning!”
She asked to see my birth certificate so she could be one hundred percent sure that I was her brother, and she asked for time to absorb everything. “If all of this is true, it would be a shock for my mother, who is not in good health.”
She said that my father had “suffocated” in Mexico and her mother had traveled there to say good-bye for all of them. “He is buried in an unmarked grave because the wife of my grandfather did not want to fly him over to the States to give him a proper funeral.”
She went on to say that she had never met my grandfather. “We never got one small toy from him, and when I was 11 years old I was sent to an international camp in the States where he could have visited me, but he did not want to see me. Or when I finished law school and was chosen by the dean of the Rutgers Law School to work as a university assistant there for a year, I wanted to visit his wife, Eleanor, but she did not want to see me either.”
Guenevere concluded that she did not understand why it was so important that I have contact with her, but that she would need proof and she would need time.
She signed the letter “Gueny.”
That gave me hope.
I gave her the time she needed. Over the next few months, I tried repeatedly to get my original birth certificate from the state of Louisiana and eventually took my case to court, but to no avail. My birth records were sealed, and that was that.
As the months went by, I began to lose hope that I would ever hear back from Guenevere, although I had written and explained that I was doing my best to get my birth certificate from the state.
Finally, after seven months, I retrieved from my mailbox a letter with a stamp marked ÖSTERREICH. My heart skipped a beat as I tore open the envelope.
The letter wasn’t from Guenevere.
It was from Edith, her mother.
With a feeling of foreboding, I went inside and sat down to read the letter.
My father’s third wife wrote that it was natural for children who have been adopted to want to find their birth parents, but that few can deal with the reality of what they find. She pointed out that the things Harold Butler had told me about Van had been wrong, that her husband could not have been in prison in 1996, because he had died in 1984. “This is for me a fact, or you telling me I was standing on the wrong grave. If my children are missing some small detail about their father, they can ask me,” she wrote. “Stop stressing my children and upset me. Just STOP IT, since you are not the only one, who wants after 30 years, to be related to me (how practical fly to Europe and have a stay in Vienna).” She then informed me that people can choose their friends, but not their relatives, and wished me “the great fatherly family” her children never had.
I sat there, stunned, a thousand thoughts running through my head. Guenevere must have told her mother everything about me. Gueny had sounded so lighthe
arted in her last letter. Edith clearly didn’t want to hear anything about a child from a former marriage.
Tears streamed down my face as I realized that I had to let this go.
55
As 2008 began, my efforts to get my birth certificate were ongoing, but I had not been successful. I had even brought Judy with me to the Office of Vital Statistics with proof that I knew who my real mother was, and my request was still turned down.
As soon as I received the letter from Edith, I realized why the Social Security Administration had no indication that my father was dead: Edith had gone back to Austria without reporting his death. Although I did not have the exact date, I decided to file a report so there would be a record in the United States. I guessed he had died in August 1984. I was wrong.
I was finally able to get my father’s official report of death through the U.S. Department of State. According to the report, my father had died in a hotel—Hotel Corinto—in Mexico City. “Asphyxiation by blockage of major air passages by passing gastric matter.”
I knew what that meant. He had choked to death on his own vomit.
Dr. Aurelio Núñez Salas had performed the autopsy.
Van had died on May 20, 1984, and had been interred at the Panteón San Lorenzo Tezonco, in Mexico City.
I hopped on a plane. I had to go see the man who had haunted my thoughts and dreams for the past five years.
As I sat in the Hotel Corinto, in downtown Mexico City, I felt as if I was experiencing déjà vu. It was here in this very hotel that my mother and father had stayed in 1962. I knew that because Judy had described a nine-story hotel with a swimming pool on top. This tall structure, near the Monumento a la Revolución in Plaza de la República, was the only hotel that had a swimming pool on the ninth floor. Here was where my mother and father had shared the most romantic time in their relationship.
Here their honeymoon had begun.
And here, in the same hotel, their story had ended.
The Most Dangerous Animal of All Page 27