“I like killing people because it’s so much fun.”
In July of 1969, a letter arrived at The San Francisco Examiner newspaper containing those chilling words in a coded message.
The sender: the soon-to-be-notorious Zodiac, killer terrorized Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s
That identity has stymied law-enforcement officials, professional code breakers and armchair criminologists for nearly five decades
In this episode, Sherry and I review a book written by Gary Stewart entitled Zodiac in which he lays out a case that his father, Earl Van Best, Jr. is the Zodiac killer.
He was adopted when he was just a few months old and never knew anyting about his birth parents until he was 39 and his birth mother contacted him.
He got to know her, but she would never talk about his father, so he started to research his father and at one point got freaked out when he was watching an old episode of Cold Case about the Zodiac killer and the police sketches looked exactly like his father. This started his finding more and more about his father that matched the Zodiac killer. Then the more research he did the more he found that convinced him his father was the Zodiac killer.
His case was so convincing that he got a well-known true crime writer to co-write a book with him that became a best seller and a TV series.
At the end of this episode we will poke holes in the case and let you decide if you think that Earl Van Best, Jr. is the Zodiac killer.