\u201cThere\u2019s a primal wound that adoptees have,\u201d proclaims memoirist Gary Stewart at the start of the documentary The Most Dangerous Animal of All. \u201cIf you weren\u2019t loved enough to be kept, how can you expect someone else to love you?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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 (as recounted in David Fincher\u2019s 2007 film Zodiac), has long been a true-crime holy grail. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Stewart received significant blowback from \u201cZodiac-ologists\u201d when he published his theory in a 2014 best-seller (co-authored by Susan Mustafa). Still, he has been steadfast that he, and he alone, has solved a mystery that has eluded decades of official and amateur sleuths.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, The Most Dangerous Animal of All \u2014 the first in FX\u2019s docuseries slate \u2014 is hardly a credulous retelling of Stewart\u2019s story. Director Kief Davidson allows the author to have his say and add new evidence that he\u2019s uncovered since the book\u2019s publication, but his team also does what Stewart\u2019s publisher, Harper Collins, apparently never did: fact-check his assertions. (To be fair, a fact-checked nonfiction book is an anomaly; writers bear the responsibility to commit the truth to paper.) It\u2019s in those verifications that the documentary justifies its existence (though it never justifies its four-hour run time, which is stuffed with corny close-ups and re-creations).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThere\u2019s a primal wound that adoptees have,\u201d proclaims memoirist Gary Stewart at the start of the documentary The Most Dangerous Animal of All. \u201cIf you weren\u2019t loved enough to be kept, how can you expect someone else to love you?\u201d This self-mythologization via self-pity is the approach that Stewart takes to presenting his near-fantastical claim: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":363,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n