Like many adopted children, Gary Stewart grew up with abandonment issues, and as a result he eventually sought out his biological parents. What he found was much more than he expected. His mother Jude Gilford had made headlines as a 14-year-old fugitive alongside her 27-year-old husband Earl Van Best, Jr. When Gilford gave birth to Stewart, Best was uninterested in his newfound parental responsibilities, and ditched his tyke in a Louisiana apartment complex stairwell. That alone indicated the guy wasn\u2019t exactly top-notch dad material. Stewart\u2019s later sleuthing, however, made him think Best was more than just a creepy pedophilic deadbeat\u2014he was actually San Francisco\u2019s notorious, and never apprehended, Zodiac Killer.<\/p>\n
Based on Stewart\u2019s New York Times bestseller of the same name (co-authored by Susan Mustafa), The Most Dangerous Animal of All is the story of Stewart\u2019s search for his original parents, and his quest to prove that Best was, in fact, the Zodiac, who terrorized the Bay Area in the 1970s via a string of gruesome murders that were accompanied by chilling letters to the press and police. Stewart\u2019s theory quickly transformed into conviction, and then into obsession of a self-destructive and deranged sort, and Ross M. Dinerstein and Kief Davidson\u2019s four-part docuseries (debuting March 6 on FX) is as much a portrait of its subject\u2019s psyche as it is his investigation, which would send Stewart down a rabbit hole of circumstantial evidence and questionable connect-the-dots reasoning that led to dark truths about his own motives.<\/p>\n
To be sure, Stewart\u2019s discovery that his mom and dad had been media stars for their \u201cIce Cream Romance\u201d\u2014the moniker reporters gave to their cross-country getaway\u2014was a bombshell. As a teen, Gilford was wooed by Best and then took off with him, which begat kidnapping charges against him and incarceration in juvenile hall for her. Ensuing breakouts and flights from justice made them front-page fodder. Their odyssey concluded with Best dumping his newborn son in a stairwell and being apprehended and confined to a California state mental hospital, and Gilford legally putting her baby boy up for adoption. As far as backstories go, Stewart\u2019s was a whopper.<\/p>\n
Yet for a man desperate to understand his father, Stewart didn\u2019t find this explanation satisfactory enough. Watching TV years later, he saw the police sketch of the Zodiac, and immediately determined\u2014on the basis of Best\u2019s mugshot\u2014that his father and the mysterious serial killer were one and the same. Teaming with Mustafa, he soon uncovered various things that strengthened his suspicion. His dad\u2019s traumatic upbringing with a prostitute mother fit an archetypal serial-killer profile. Best and the Zodiac\u2019s fingerprints and handwriting seemingly matched, as did their DNA. Both loved ciphers and The Mikado, and shared deep connections to school buses. His dad had lived right around the corner from where the Zodiac hailed cabbie Paul Stine (whom he shot dead) in 1969. And furthermore, his mom had subsequently married San Francisco detective Rotea Gilford\u2014thus suggesting, to Stewart, that the SFPD had covered up Best\u2019s identity as the Zodiac in order to protect Rotea Gilford, since he was now the husband of Zodiac\u2019s first wife.<\/p>\n