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. 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. (Forensic science remains closer to an art than a science. ) But these sections, devoted mostly to Stewart’s point of view, leave out the documentary’s most essential question: What does it mean to the memoirist to be the Zodiac Killer’s son? We get more of an answer in The Most Dangerous Animal of All‘s latter half, which finally relieve us from Stewart’s purple prose (“Did he ever think about me?… Did I ever matter?”), as well as his determination to center himself in the Zodiac Killer’s story. Stewart’s eventual rifts with his birth mother, whom he had sought to meet for years, and with his collaborator Mustafa, who is floored by the discoveries that the documentary team reveal to her, suggest that the memoirist is - Zodiac or no Zodiac - indeed his father’s son.
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