The Most Dangerous Animal of All (39 page)

Soon after, I went to visit Tania to offer my condolences. While I was there, the conversation turned to my father.

“You know, I didn’t like him,” she said. “I didn’t ever want to say this in front of Vsevé, but your father dropped by unexpectedly in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Vsevé was away on a business trip, and I didn’t want to invite Van in, because he looked very disheveled, dirty even. Anyway, he looked bad. I think he wanted money, but his pride wouldn’t let him ask me. Finally I let him in, and he began to brag like he always did about the things he had done in his life. Then he suggested that I should leave Vsevé and run off with him. Your father was a sick man.”

Harold Butler passed away on June 21, 2012. Any lingering hope I had of discovering everything he knew about my father died with him. Butler, like so many others, took his secrets to his grave.

To this day, I have never seen my original birth certificate. After I went to court, Judge Pamela Johnson ordered the Office of Vital Statistics to give me a copy. When I went to pick it up, the clerk looked at the judgment and shook her head. “That’s not how we do things here in Louisiana.” Ignoring the court order, she refused to give me the document. I’m still fighting to get it.

On May 19, 2011, I sent a letter to all of Louisiana’s state senators, urging them to support Louisiana Senate Bill 155, which would have allowed adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates. The bill did not pass.

In a last, desperate attempt, I copied Guenevere on the letter. I added a note that simply said, “I’m still trying.”

I received an e-mail from her the same day. It read:

“Hi. You have misunderstood something: in respect to us we do not care about your birth certificate because we have already made it clear that we do not wish to meet you or have contact with you. Gueny.”

Despite that disappointment, I am blessed with the family I have. I had lived most of my life beleaguered by an identity crisis—my inability to cope with not knowing who I was. Just as He did with Loyd, God knew that it would take a very special person to be able to understand me and love me unconditionally, and He gave me my beautiful wife, Kristy, in 2007. She has patiently supported me while I’ve gone through this journey to find my father and myself. She has been my rock, and, together with the rest of my family, we will help Leona get through this trying time. After sixty years of marriage, the loss of her Loyd has been tremendous, and she doesn’t really know how to live without him. Her faith is strong, but I know she is now patiently waiting for God to reunite her with the love of her life.

About the time that Judy and I reunited, I began keeping a journal, hoping to be able to express my feelings on paper so that one day Zach would be able to tell his children his father’s story. At the time, I didn’t know where the narrative would lead, but I documented every step of the journey.

Over the years, I had shared the story of the Ice Cream Romance and my discoveries about my father’s past, including the possibility that he was the Zodiac, with my close friends. They seemed fascinated by my story and suggested that I write a book. But I’m not a writer; my journal was filled with ten years of research and all the emotion I experienced during that time. I began looking for someone to help me. Since I could not count on the SFPD to test my DNA, I thought maybe a book containing all of the evidence I had gathered would push the stalled wheels of justice forward.

One morning in March 2012, I was sitting in the office of a friend and business associate, Earl Heard, publisher of
BIC
business magazine, telling him a little about this story and explaining that I was looking for someone who could help me write a book. I knew that Earl had published several books and thought he might be able to point me in the right direction. At that moment, his receptionist informed him that Susan Mustafa was on the phone. Earl got a big grin on his face and said, “Man, do I have the writer for you. This must be a sign.”

When I spoke with Susan on the phone, I could tell that she thought my story was interesting, but she became skeptical when I got to the part about the Zodiac. “I would have to see your evidence,” she said firmly. “I’m not willing to put my reputation on the line unless I believe what I’m writing.”

That weekend, she went to the beach in Biloxi, Mississippi, and read my journal, filled with all the evidence I had accumulated through the years.

When she came back, we met at Hebert’s Coffeehouse, in Baton Rouge, and she agreed to help me write my book. She informed me that we would have to figure out a way to get my DNA compared with the Zodiac’s.

Susan called George Schiro, a forensic scientist at the Acadiana Crime Lab, and explained what we wanted to do.

“Is it possible to get a definitive match with only four markers?” she asked.

“Yes, but it will be easier if we have the son’s and the mother’s DNA.”

“Can you do the profiles?”

“No,” George said. “Our work has to come through the police.”

George recommended that Susan speak with Dr. R. W. “Bo” Scales, director of Scales Biological Laboratory, in Brandon, Mississippi. “Tell him you’re a friend of mine,” he said.

Susan called Dr. Scales the following day. She left him a message telling him that George had suggested she call. The doctor called her back that afternoon.

“Any friend of George’s is a friend of mine,” Scales announced, in his jovial voice.

“Well, I don’t know,” Susan said. “You haven’t heard my crazy request.”

“I’ve been doing this for more than twenty years. I’ve heard it all,” he said.

“Okay, then. I need you to compare a DNA profile from a mother and a son to extract the father’s profile.”

“How old is the child?” Scales asked.

“Forty-nine,” Susan said, and laughed.

“And where’s the father?”

“He’s dead.”

Dr. Scales started laughing and suggested that maybe they start the conversation over.

“Here’s the deal,” Susan said. “I need this profile to compare against the profile of a serial killer. Police only have four of the killer’s markers in evidence. The San Francisco Police Department swabbed the son for DNA eight years ago, and we have not received any results. We’d like to get the father’s profile so that it won’t cost a law enforcement agency to run the tests. All they would have to do is look at it and compare.”

“Who’s the serial killer?”

“Um . . . the Zodiac.”

“Really?” the doctor said, incredulous.

“Really,” Susan said.

Dr. Scales explained to Susan the process of obtaining DNA and arranged to have the samples submitted. In a matter of weeks, Judy and I had been swabbed, and Dr. Scales had generated my father’s DNA profile.

In the meantime, Susan began doing her own research.

She sent a request for Van’s criminal records, complete with dates, charges, and case numbers, to the SFPD. Ten days later, she got a letter in the mail informing her that all of Earl Van Best Jr.’s files had been destroyed.

That same month, Susan began discussing this book with her New York literary agent, B. G. Dilworth. B. G., who was not very familiar with the Zodiac case, began reading about it online. He knew from Susan that I had found my father’s name in the 408 cipher, and he was curious to see the other Zodiac ciphers that had not been decoded. He pulled up some images of the ciphers on his computer and at random began studying the 340 cipher, looking for my father’s name.

He began by looking for the name Best. He located a backward
B
in the middle of the cipher and then looked for a neighboring
E
. There was an
E
below the
B
, but no
S
beneath it. It was a dead end. He spotted another
E
in the column to the left, but it wasn’t adjacent to the
B
. Looking in the next column, he found an
S
, and then a
T
in the next. He realized that he had found Van’s last name spelled backwards and wondered if his full name would be there. He looked in the column on the far right and found an
E
. Working his way from right to left backwards across the cipher, he found the name, Earl Van Best Junior. Van had put one letter of his name in each column.

To assure himself this was not a coincidence, B. G. used the same method to try to find his own name. It wasn’t there. He then looked for names of friends and relatives and then for more common names like Jane Brown and Mary Smith. He couldn’t find any first and last names in the same sequence, let alone a name that consisted of four words.

For more than forty years, the 340 cipher had stumped the best cryptologists in the world. In hindsight, it seems so simple—a child’s word-search game—but the main reason B. G. was able to solve it was because he knew the Zodiac’s name.

Susan called me as soon as she got the news. “B. G. found your father’s name in the 340 cipher,” she said, excitement ringing in her voice as she explained how he had discovered it.

I hurried to my computer to pull up the cipher. I had not paid much attention to it before. I had found my father’s name in the 408, and that had been enough for me. With the cipher on my screen, I followed her instructions about how to find it.

“Oh, my God! It’s there!” I said, trying to grasp the magnitude of what I was seeing. The backward
B
stood out to me. My father had always insisted his name was in the ciphers. I realized that was a clue, his arrogant way of telling the world his name was in the 340 backwards.

“Hang on a minute and let me print it.” As soon as the page came through my printer, I grabbed a pen and began circling the letters. “That’s incredible,” I said when I was finished.

“The odds that your father’s name could be in two different ciphers must be astronomical,” Susan said.

“I know,” I said, sinking back into my chair, still staring at the cipher. His name in the 408 had not been a fluke.

58

“Hey, Gary, do you have any handwriting from your father?” Susan asked me one day. “A letter he wrote to your grandfather or something like that?” By this time we had been working on the book for more than a year.

“I wish I did,” I replied.

Her question bothered me, as though I was forgetting something I should have remembered. A nagging feeling persisted throughout the day, until finally I went into my office and began pulling out boxes filled with papers, letters, and other memorabilia, spreading them across my desk and floor.

Hours later, I pulled a document from one of the boxes. It was Judy and Van’s marriage certificate.

“Van filled out all the paperwork when we got married and hired witnesses to sign the certificate so that he could marry me when I was fourteen,” Judy had told me. “He lied to the minister about my age.”

I could not believe what I had found: my father’s handwriting from 1962.

My heart almost stopped as I stared at the document. I had studied the Zodiac letters enough to immediately recognize that my father’s handwriting was very similar to the Zodiac’s.

And there was more. Beneath that document, I discovered the licenses from my father’s marriages to Edith Kos and Mary Annette Player. Each had my father’s signature.

R O I N U J T S E B N A V L R A E

E A R L V A N B E S T J U N I O R

I called Susan to tell her what I had discovered. “We need to find an expert to compare the handwriting,” I said.

After a few weeks spent researching forensic document examiners, Susan and I decided that Michael N. Wakshull of Q9 Consulting, author of
Line By Line: Forensic Document Examination—A Strategy for Legal Professionals
—had the necessary experience and credentials to fulfill our request.

Susan called him. “I’m a true crime writer, and I’m researching a cold case,” she said after she introduced herself on the phone. “I need a handwriting expert to determine whether a fifty-year-old marriage certificate matches the handwriting of a serial killer.”

“Which serial killer?” Wakshull asked.

He was surprised when Susan replied, “The Zodiac.” Wakshull lives near Riverside, where Cheri Jo Bates was killed, and remembered the Zodiac case very well.

Wakshull was intrigued, but leery.

“All we have is a marriage certificate and three signatures on a marriage license. Will that be enough?” Susan asked.

“I don’t know. I’m at a seminar this weekend,” he said. “Can I call you on Monday so we can discuss the case? E-mail me the samples so I can look at them, but I have to tell you it’s highly unlikely that I will agree to take this case. I’m not going to put my reputation on the line unless I’m certain.”

The following Monday, after reviewing what Susan had sent him, Wakshull called and agreed to compare my father’s handwriting with the Zodiac’s.

For almost two months we waited anxiously for the results.

Finally, on December 9, 2012, we got our answer.

Wakshull had generated a sixty-five-page report, complete with comparative exhibits and analysis, and had concluded that he was virtually certain that the person who filled out the marriage certificate was the writer of the Zodiac letters. He explained that he couldn’t say he was absolutely certain, because the rules of his profession do not allow him to make that determination without original documents. “Strong probability” and “virtually certain” were the strongest words he could use to encapsulate his professional opinion.