A man has claimed that he able to finally identify the notorious Zodiac Killer of northern California.
The Zodiac serial killer is believed to have killed five people in 1968-69 and gained notoriety by writing several letters to police boasting of the slayings, with swatches of bloody clothing as proof of his claims. The serial killer claimed to have killed as many as 37 people and has never been caught.
Now, a memoir includes claims that the author is the son of the infamous serial killer.
Gary L Stewart's "The Most Dangerous Animal of All," has received little attention thus far - and even lacks an official book cover. - suggesting that publishers are trying to employ an element of surprise.
Stewart, a vice president at the cleaning company Delta Tech Service in Baton Rouge, recounts his decade-long search for his biological father and has concluded that man - Earl Van Best, Jr, who's now dead - was the Zodiac Killer, the publisher said.
The author "constructs a chilling psychological profile of Stewart's father: as a boy with disturbing fixations, as a frustrated intellectual with pretensions to high culture, and as an inappropriate suitor and then jilted lover unable to process his rage," the publisher said.
HarperCollins publicist Tina Andreadis told New York Magazine that "Stewart's father had a criminal record in San Francisco ('forgeries, bad checks'), and there was a strong resemblance between his father's mug shot and the police sketch," the magazine said.
"If you look at Gary's photo next to the sketch of the Zodiac (killer) next to his father's mug shot, you can see that there is very clearly more than just a passing resemblance," Andreadis told the magazine. "They look alike."