The Most Dangerous Animal Of All: Searching For My Father... And Finding The Zodiac Killer
Author: Gary L Stewart and Susan Mustafa
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: 384
THE Most Dangerous Animal Of All carries a good premise at face value. Written by Gary Stewart and co-authored by journalist Susan Mustafa, the book’s description alone was enough to entice me into reading it. Sadly, it falls short both in content and storytelling.
Stewart sets the stage by sharing how his reunion with his biological mother Judy Chandler leads him on a search for his real father, prompting a realisation that perhaps his father was the Zodiac Killer — a ruthless serial murderer that terrorised California in the late 1960s.
While Mustafa might have helped with the prose, the book takes weird tangents and makes the reader trudge through facts that they didn’t sign up for. Having been abandoned and then adopted as a baby, Stewart’s first few chapters recall how his biological mother got in touch with his adoptive family. After that, the reader has to wade through 200 pages of text before the story resumes.
Stewart channels his non-fiction account via the storybook narrative, which is fine at first but he also melds it with his personal point of view, which conflicts with the omniscient properties of the narrator’s voice. For instance, the scene where Van (his biological father) abandons him, which reads as if he was there to witness everything.
“Van stood up, pulled me close to him, and exited the train on the west side of the station. My father could not help but notice the Old State Capitol, a neo-Gothic structure located on a hill.”
The second part of the narrative was truly unnecessary. Granted, Stewart wrote a disclaimer stating his re-creation of some parts of the book but this weird blend of writing voices killed my involvement in the story.
The next hurdle I had to power through was Stewart’s over-descriptive text, which really was the proverbial spanner in the works. The reader is subjected to random facts such as Stewart’s great-grandfather’s details, or how many siblings he has, doing nothing to carry the story forward.
Many scenes in the book could be summarised into one sentence or be omitted entirely without losing the plot, hinting to me that perhaps Stewart had a word count to reach. The number of characters in the book rivals the Game Of Thrones, without the character development that accompanies the latter. I find myself needing to keep track of names of people I don’t care about, such as distant relatives from the Best family.
Stewart’s moment of epiphany comes from watching the crime investigation channel after acquiring his father’s mugshot from the police. This sparks his desire to put the pieces together, and Stewart begins a journey not only to uncover the mystery but also drive everyone in his life away as well.
Then the book takes the reader through a historical recap of the Zodiac killings. It would strike the appeal of Zodiac newbies, but this section short-changes readers who are capable of Google-ing “the Zodiac Killer”, because nothing new is presented apart from the summary of events.
Pertaining to his wordiness, Stewart fluffs this portion of the book with the Manson murders, the birth of a Satanist cult, and the hippie movement with no specific reason other than to throw the overwhelming backdrop into further disarray.
As a reader with an outsider’s point of view, I don’t think Stewart realises his overzealous actions as the catalyst to the negative reactions he’s been getting. He admitted that his constant questioning strained his relationship with Chandler. His half-sister, Guenevere, was excited at first to learn that she had a brother but later requested that Stewart stop all contact with her.
The police were ignoring his calls and mails. Stewart chalks it down to them disliking the idea of discussing about a serial killer but I have a nagging suspicion that it boils down to the interactions Stewart imposes upon them.
Finally, we come to the main reason of this book, which is how Stewart links his father to the Zodiac Killer. Stewart isn’t the first person to come forth with such a claim and so I was expecting a lot from the book’s resolution to set him apart from the rest.
Let’s start with Stewart’s assumption that all the Zodiac’s victims looked like his biological mother. Other than being pretty women with short hairstyles, I see no shared resemblance between the victims. Another troubling thought is how Stewart assumes the Zodiac Killer was killing out of spite for Chandler and writes the murder scenes as such. I find it hard to share his certainty.
Throughout the book, these three factors were the only ones that struck me as substantial: Similar handwriting between Stewart’s parents’ wedding certificate (filled by Van) and the Zodiac letters, similar scar on their fingerprints, and a potential DNA match. There are many more crumbs of evidence listed within which sound circumstantial to me. Perhaps other readers would be more accommodating of Stewart’s flimsy tokens of proof.
Also displayed in the books are the letters and ciphers that the killer sent to newspapers for publishing. The thing about ciphers is that they cannot be decoded without a key and until then, anybody can make something out of the ciphers, though I suspect that delving into this topic will warrant another book in itself.
I could go on about how unconvinced I am about the whole thing but I suggest people read the book and arrive at their own conclusions, albeit risking the fact that they might come out of the experience learning more about the Best family than the Zodiac Killer.
The book’s ending did not provide me with the closure I needed. Being a slow reader, I feel that the couple of weeks spent poring over this book has left me with nothing but a slight twang of disappointment.