In 'The Most Dangerous Animal of All', FX's first entrant into the docuseries landscape, a man suspects his father to have been the Zodiac Killer
"There's a primal wound that adoptees have," proclaims memoirist Gary Stewart at the start of the documentary. "If you weren't loved enough to be kept, how can you expect someone else to love you?" This self-mythologization via self-pity is the approach that Stewart takes to presenting his near-fantastical claim: that he believes his father to be the Zodiac Killer.
The identity of the Zodiac Killer, who murdered five victims in the late 1960s and early 1970s while taunting the San Francisco police and populace through the media , has long been a true-crime holy grail. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Stewart received significant blowback from "Zodiac-ologists" when he published his theory in a 2014 bestseller . Still, he has been steadfast that he, and he alone, has solved a mystery that has eluded decades of official and amateur sleuths.
Even if Stewart had never come to the conclusion that he did about his paternity, his parentage would've made for a wild, if tragic, yarn. The first installment offocuses on the circumstances of Stewart's abandonment by his parents, then a 27-year-old con man named Earl Van Best, Jr., and a 14-year-old schoolgirl named Judy Chandler.
Van Best and Chandler's legal troubles kept them in the San Francisco newspapers, which prove an invaluable resource to a man like Stewart, who clearly wants not only the truth behind his provenance, but an interesting story about it. But he soon speculates that his birth mother is either hiding other details about his father or in possession of an unreliable memory, that she only remembers what she chooses to remember.
The second episode details Stewart's exhaustive search for evidence that Earl Van Best, Jr., was the Zodiac Killer. Even as a viewer who generally finds the true-crime genre ghoulish and morally objectionable, I found the wide-ranging methods that Stewart used to learn more about his father — and connect him to the Zodiac Killer's crimes — fascinating, if not entirely convincing.
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