The Accused [bonus]

help broke this. I don't know. The gunman, most likely a skilled marksman, fired six times in the courts of sixteen hours. They killed the five people on one day and then went on the rampage for the next month. The police say they have never had a crime quite like this. It is quite a mystery. It was scary to go to the grocery store or fill up your car with gas, and as the DC Sniper case unfolded, that terror only group from My Heart Radio and tender

Foot TV. This is Monster DC Sniper. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not necessarily represent those of I Heeart Media Stuff Media for its employees. In the spring of the Valeo Police Department announced it had submitted two pieces of evidence for DNA testing, two envelopes that once contained letters sent from

the Zodiac Killer to local newspapers. Although similar DNA tests had been performed in this case with no results, this attempt was different. The testing method was more advanced, and if a via DNA sample was produced this time, it would be used to create a genetic profile for forensic genealogy. In its simplest form, forensic genealogy maps and individual's DNA profile and then compares it to other previously existing profiles.

It's a way to build family trees, and it's what companies like twenty three and me, Ancestry and jed match do. Forensic genealogy is the method that caught the Golden State Killer, the man who murdered at least thirteen people and committed more than fifty rapes. After more than forty years, Joseph

James de'angelo was charged and convicted of his crimes. While DNA and forensic genealogy was able to close the Golden State Killer case, it's so far has not been able to identify the Zodiac Killer, and unfortunately, there hasn't been an official update from the Valeo Police Department since that spring of While we hope forensic genealogy will eventually unmask the Zodiac, for now the trail seems cold. The best evidence were left with remains circumstantial. Throughout the season, we

examined the people we considered the most likely suspects. Since then, we've had many listeners calling in with questions about other individuals that we haven't fully investigated. Today, we're going to take a closer look at some of those people. A man in a mask robbed, tied, and stabbed them, leaving them for dad. Subjects stated, I want to report a murder, no a double murder. I did it. A man who wore an evil style executioner's hood, carried a knife and

gun and intended to use them. They have an arrestipe because they can't cove a m I'm not damn Zodiac. Who is the Zodiac and where is he? From my Heart radio and under Foot TV, this is Monster, the Zodiac Killer. According to an estimate by the Los Angeles Times, more than twelve hundred people have claimed to know the Zodiac's identity, but only a few of those claims seem viable.

In two thousand nine, Deborah Perez held a sidewalk conference claiming that her father, guy Ward Hendrickson, was the Zodiac. Perez claimed she helped write some of the letters the Zodiac sent to the media. She also claimed to possess the glasses of Paul Stein, the Zodiac's last confirmed victim. However, after inspection, police determined that the glasses were not Paul Stein's and that guy Ward Hendrickson was not the Zodiac. Another accusation came from Jack Kaufman, a man who believed

his stepfather, Jack Torrence, was the Zodiac. Kaufman gave police a black hood similar to the one the Zodiac war when he attacked the couple at Lake Berryessa. Kaufman also gave police a bloody knife resembling the weapon from the same attack. He claimed that both of these items were his stepfather's. Additionally, Kaufman provided stamps his stepfather had licked for DNA testing in hopes the police could finally prove

his suspicions. While both of these accusations caught the attention of the police and the media, there is one claim that overshadows the rest, the claim of Gary Stewart. In May of fourteen, Gary Stewart's book debuted across the United States. It was called the Most Dangerous Animal of All Searching for My Father and Finding the Zodiac Killer. The book was a New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. It follows Stuart's decade long journey to find his biological father.

It began when Stewart's biological mother reached out to him when he was thirty nine years old. Their reunion was successful, and Stewart decided he also wanted to meet his father, Earl Van Best Jr. But he would soon learned that Earl had a police record for some very serious crimes. In fact, according to Stewart, the San Francisco Police Department

told him to stop looking for his dad. It wasn't long after this that Stewart would turn over the first stone, leading him to believe that Earl Van Best Jr. His father, was the Zodiac Killer. The clips you're about to hear are from an interview with Gary Stewart on the I Heart radio show Rover's Morning Glory, in talking about his story and his book. One day, I'm watching an Ante

Coal case file special on the Zodiac Killer. The wanted poster from San Francisco nineteen sixty nine of the Zodiac Killer pops up on the screen and I can't breathe. My son, here's whatever noise I make. And he runs into the room and he looks at the television. He says, Dad, it's you. I went in my office and got this old d m V photo that I've been given by the FFPD, which turns out it was his actual mug shot. And I said, no, Zach's not me, it's my father.

The likeness between Van Best and the police sketch of the Zodiac suspect was only what started Stuart's theory. Gary also believes that his father's name appears in the cipher's the Killer sent to Bay Area newspapers. My father signed his name E. V. Best Jr. In particular, in the four oh eight cipher that was mailed to the San Francisco Examiner. I just looked at it one day to see if I could see anything, and out off the page popped E. V. Best Junior altogether in a row backward,

forward and up. After the police did not pick that up. He later came back and sent the infamous three forty cipher, which the amateur sleuths in the Zodiac community around the world say is still unsolved. He insisted that his identity was in that cipher and my father's name complete name is in that ciphering. Michael Butterfield, the creator of the website Zodiac Killer Facts, doesn't agree. These ciphers were constructed in blocks of seventeen symbols. Gary Stewart found each letter

in his father's name in one of the lines. Now, normally a cipher is a series of symbols which are deciphered into other texts, but Gary believed that the actual text of the cipher was the message that it didn't need to be deciphered, that you could just read his father's name by finding the letters in his father's name

in each one of these lines. Now, of course some people might find that compelling, but as David ran Shacking, Zodiac cipher expert, pointed out, you can use the same method to find many other names, which means that that

cannot be the only solution. Gary also claimed that handwriting from the zodiac matched his father's handwriting, and this was based on the notion that several marriage certificates and documents from a certain church bore the handwriting of Earl vand Best, And Gary Stewart hired an expert who came in and he even wrote a book about how this was the end of the Zodiac mystery because he had matched the

handwriting to Gary Stewart's father. Now, after that happened, a Zodiac theorist named micro Delli contacted that church and found out that the handwriting on those documents does not belong to Earl band Best. The handwriting was apparently that of the reverend at this church, So that cast doubt not only on Gary Stuart's claims, but on the credibility of his handwriting expert, who had apparently concluded that the handwriting

of three different individuals was all earlband Best. And then, of course there's the fingerprint pulled from the crime scene of the Zodiac's last confirmed kill, the murder of Paul Stein.

He basically claims that there's a fingerprint from one of the Zodiac crime scenes which he claims looks like his father's fingerprint when it's reversed, Apparently his father had a scar out of finger and there's some sort of line on the fingerprint which he believes go insides to the scar, but of course the police don't think this is a valid theory. The likeness, the fingerprint, the ciphers, all of these are common threads throughout many zodiac theories. But there

is one detail that sets Gary Stewart's claims apart. His biological parents had several connections to the case. The first connection is to journalist Paul Avery, through a series of articles published in the San Francisco Chronicle called The ice Cream Romance. These articles detailed how his parents met and

focused on their significant age difference. In nineteen sixty one nineteen sixty two, When you're twenty seven and you're running off with a fourteen year old and the cops catch you and you just happened in eating in an ice cream parlor, good journalists are gonna say something like he found love in an ice cream parlor. Ice cream romances bitter in. The problem was he was twenty seven and

his young bride was only fourteen. I found out through contacting the Chronicle and the archivist at the San Francisco Library that Paul Avery was the author of the ice Cream romance, the Zodiac Killer came back and targeted Paul Avery as part of his taunting the media Paul Avery specifically. Basically, Stewart is claiming that his father, Earl Van Bess Jr. Wrote the Zodiac letters to Paul Avery because he was angry with him for writing the ice cream romance articles.

There is currently no evidence that's been made public that directly links Earl Van Best Jr. To those Zodiac letters. The second connection to the case is through his mother's second sent After her marriage with Earl Van Best Jr. Was annulled, Gary Stewart's mother, Judy Chandler, remarried a man named Rotea Guildford. He was an inspector with the San Francisco Police Department and worked on the Zodiac case. Gary Stewart wanted law enforcement to take his DNA for comparison

against a Zodiac sample. He hoped a partial match would confirm his theory about his father. However, the San Francisco Police Department declined to run this test. Stewart believes this is because of a conflict of interest. My mother believes that it's because of her late husband's involvement in the Zodiac case. You know, they're allegedly suspects in the Zodiac case. If my father happened to be interviewed and cleared because he was a very intelligent, smooth talking salesman, maybe even

by Rotea Guildford, how would that look. I don't know. I'm just speculating. Stewart believes that the police refused to test his DNA because if there was a match, it would mean the police had made a mistake if they had previously cleared Earl Van Best Jr. If true, that scenario would certainly be embarrassing to the whole department. But we have to ask ourselves would embarrassment be enough to stop law enforcement from running those tests and possibly confirming

the Zodiac's identity. It's also important to note that, according to Butterfield, Judy did not believe her ex husband was the Zodiac. According to the Zodiac Killer Facts website, Judy reportedly referred to Stuart's Zodiac claims as fiction. Again, this is all speculation, but if the evidence didn't match up,

then how did this book gain so much traction. Normally a book is presented up for review, but this book was withheld until the day was released, so it came out to a lot of fanfare, and of course most media outlets simply pick up the publicity information put out by the publishers, so they will just repeat what the book jacket says the most compelling evidence, you know, that kind of thing. He went on a media tour, I believe he was on Fox News and ABC This Morning

and things like that. He was asked a lot of questions, but of course no one asked the pertinent questions about the handwriting, about the fingerprint and other things. But if you look at the way the book was released, in the way it was received, it's kind of a harbon copy of what's happened with other books in the past. People see the book, they assume it's nonfiction. Then they repeat what's in the book as if it's fact. And if you only go by that, Gary Stuart's theory seems

very compelling. It's not until you start to ask some serious questions and get into the nitty gritty details that you'll find that there is some serious problems. I think that one of the reasons people accepted it so quickly and why it became so popular, it's because it's a story that a lot of people like to hear. A man in search of truth about his own life finds his father, and then he finds out horrible secrets about his father. It's very compelling family drama, but it doesn't

necessarily translate into an actual true crime story. Days after this book was released, the theory was already being unraveled by another theorist, Mike Rodelli. He was the guy who contacted the church about Van Best's handwriting. He didn't believe Gary Stewart's claim about Earl van Best, Jr. Because he already had his own suspect, a man who ran a car dealership in San Francisco. If you're well acquainted with luxury cars, you may be familiar with this next suspect.

He's responsible for introducing brands like Jaguar and Rolls Royce

to the United States. Although his name now circulates across zodiac forms, when the book The Hunt for Zodiac was released, he was simply referred to as Mr. X. More than twenty years ago, a theorist named Microdelli came up with the idea that the Zodiac may have written letters to the editor at several local newspapers using his real name or an assumed name, so, Mike Rodelli and others began checking on the files of the local newspapers in the Bay area and they came across one letter from a

man named Shell Caballi. This letter apparently referred to children lying in the streets and was written sometime before the first Zodiac murders on Lake Herman Road. Prodeli thought this sounded compelling and he decided to check into this individual. Very quickly, he discovered that this man lived approximately one block north of the scene of the Zodiac's last murder

in San Francisco. For people who are familiar with the case, they'll know that the killer walked away from the crime scene and headed off in a direction and was seen in the vicinity of this man's house. There was the theory that this man was the killer and that he had simply gone into his own residence after the murder.

Microdelli became convinced that this might be a serious lead and began investigating this individual, and over the years he came up with some points of interest which he believed implicate this man in the Zodiac crimes. Now, Microdelli has found some other people, including some investigators, who believed that

he may be onto something. He apparently resembled the composite sketch of the Zodiac, but then again, there are thousands of men who matched that description, especially in the nineteen sixties, and Microdelli had some other interesting tidbits of what you might called trivia. Cavali was a car dealer, and the Zodiac crimes revolved around cars, Prodelli believed that there was

some sort of link there. Cavally also participated in a race in Riverside, California, where there was a suspected Zodiac murder, so there was some belief that this might be a link as well. But at the end of the day, when you look at the information that Rodelli has presented, there's not a whole lot there. But let's go back to the point about Cavalli having lived a block from where Paul Stein was murdered, because that's the main link

Rodelli's theory hinges on. One of the things that has been a major problem with this story over the years is that Microdelli contacted Armand Pelissetti, the police officer who was the first to arrive at the crime scene in San Francisco, and he was telling Armand Pellistti about his suspect, and apparently Pellisetti was not impressed, and he was looking for a quick and easy way to make Microdelli go away.

He appears to have told Microdelli that he stopped Cavalli near the crime scene on the night of the murder, that he spoke to him and cleared him as a suspect, and therefore he had nothing to do with it and Microdelli could just move on now. Cavali himself has denied being that individual. Cavalli said, I was not stopped that night. I was not spoken to by the police. I had nothing to do with that. And he wasn't even sure

that he was in San Francisco that night. He was being asked about this some decades later, so it's possible that he could have been mistaken. But when I interviewed armand Pealisetti myself, I asked him point blank, how did you know that this was the individual in question that you talked to that night? He had no recollection of that specific name, He had no records, and he said, at best, I think I told the instigators about it

that night. So there's no credible evidence that Cavalli was at the crime scene that night, or that he was seen or spoken to by anyone near the crime scene. And if he was, the timing doesn't seem to support

the version of events as him being the murderer. In order for him to have been out on the sidewalk and talking to armand Pealisetti shortly after the murder, he would have to have run inside his home, changed his clothes, wipe the blood off his hands and his clothes or whatever else, and then dashed back outside to beyond the street in time to meet armand Pealisetti. There's no evidence to support that claim, and there are many reasons to

doubt it. I interviewed shell Cavali several years before he died, and he was very friendly. He was very polite, and he was very happy to talk to me about this. He made it clear to me that he was not the Zodiac, that he didn't even understand and why he was suspected in the first place. And then he said, you know, if I could talk to this person who's accusing me, I have no doubt that I could disabuse him of this idea if we could just sit down and he could get to know me. Here's a clip

of Michael Butterfield's interview with Cavali. Hen he thinks is me? He does. Unfortunately, it's so silly and so ridiculous. It's if it wasn't so insulting, it would be laughable, you know. Christ So my idea, what would you say to him if you did have him on the off? I don't know where you get touch goofy idea? Why don't you come out here and spend a few days with me and see what kind of a person I am. You know, I've been in business here for fifty five years. I've

been busy as hell the whole time. I haven't got time. The only thing I've ever heard of a fly. I contacted Mike Rohdelli and I said, Hey, your suspect wants to talk to you, and they apparently arranged a meeting and Microdelli went out to San Francisco to talk to Cavalli. But that's when things went wrong. Cavally denied being the man who was stopped on the street that night. According to Microdelli, at least through his perception of things, that

was just proof that Cavali was lying there. So he didn't listen to anything that Cavali said. Really after that, the evidence indicates that Cavally was probably telling the truth that he wasn't there that night, but through the eyes of his accuser, that was just another reason to cast suspicion on him. In two thousand two, Cavally voluntarily gave a sample of his DNA to be compared to suspected

Zodiac data, and that DNA did not match. I just did the DNA test and the police, my guy, who was a friend of mine, a retired guy, said it's negative. Forget it, and that's the end of it. That's all I ever heard. The whole thing. Negative. You can forget it, and a ship police forgot about me, and and that's it. Now there are people who claim that that is not really Zodiac DNA, and therefore the fact that it didn't

match a suspect doesn't mean much. But on the other hand, you have to look at the fact that this was the nineteen sixties. People didn't even know about DNA, and they certainly didn't know the extent to which they might have possibly left some evidence behind. There is a thing called touch DNA where they can find DNA and something just because you've touched it. So the fact that cavally

offered up a sample of his DNA for comparison. Can be viewed as exculpatory and if you believe that, you know, an innocent person would just say here's my d n A, but a guilty person might have more reservations about handing over that DNA if he knew that he was guilty. In the end, Rudeli couldn't present any significant evidence to implicate Cavalli. This is what Butterfield has to say about him. Well, he isn't an incredibly interesting person if you look at

his background. He had an amazing life. He sent me a copy of his memoir and I read it. It was an incredible story. But he was also very happy to talk to people about this and say, hey, I'm not the zodiac. After this one all over the internet for several years, I think he was maybe a little more reluctant to talk about it because he didn't want to add Field of the fire. But when he talked to me, he was very open and he was very surprised that someone could think he was a murderer. I

couldn't be any more innotentive. Newborn baby died, but speculation about him continues. However, just a year before his death, another theorist published a book that contained a different, unnamed suspect. This time, the cover up in scandal was focused on the Valleo Police Department. The next suspect comes from Lyndon Lafferty, a longtime Valleo resident who took interest in the case. His story, unlike many others, implicated the police. His suspect

was never named. Still, Lafferty wrote a book about his findings. Butterfield explains the main reasons that Lyndon Lafferty thought this individual could be the Zodiac was number one, of course, that he looked like the infamous composite sketch of the Zodiac. He apparently had some military background and some training in codes, and there was the theory that he had known one

of the Zodiac victims, Darlene Barren. Darlene Barren had been stalked by a mysterious stranger in the weeks and months before she was killed, and some of Darlene's sisters identified Grant as that individual. Darlene's sisters also have a long and documented history of telling some pretty tall tales about this, and they have identified at least five or six different

individuals as being the same individual stalker. There's not a lot of reason to believe that this man did know Darling Baron, but that was one of the reasons that was presented to the police in the nineteen seventies when they were examining this suspect, and there were some other things like Lyndon Lafferty believed that some of the Zodiac letters contained clues to Grant's identity. There was a Zodiac letter in which he mentioned something about a basement and

being swamped out. Grant had a basement which was apparently flooded. This individual owned a nineteen one white Chevrolet, which was said to be similar to the car used by the Zodiac at the Valeo attack, and this individual apparently hung around a rest stop in the Valo area. At one time he had some to face off with a highway patrol officer and this was one of the reasons that

he came to the attention of Lyndon Lafferty. The Valeo Police Department investigated this suspect in the late nineteen seventies and did not find any evidence to implicate him in the Zodiac crimes. Lyndon Lafferty and others who believed that

Grant was the Zodiac were not satisfied. They claimed that there was some sort of cover up or interference from a local judge, and that's why the title of Lyndon Lafferty's book is The Silenced Badge, the notion that they had identified the Zodiac but were somehow silenced by this cover up in conspiracy. So it doesn't appear to be any evidence to support that claim. It's understandable why people

become captivated with the Zodiac case. After fifty years, it still hasn't been solved and continues to puzzle the police and public alike. But what exactly separates police investigations and theories. It's important to note that many Zodiac theorists who are confronted with the fact that they really don't have any credible evidence to implicate their suspects, are often asked, well, if you're right, how come the police haven't arrested this person.

The familiar refrain seems to be, well, there was a cover up. You see this with Gary Stewart and so many other people who have accused their fathers. At the end of the day, there's really no evidence there, but they can't explain that away without having some sort of conspiracy from the police department. Essentially, what they're saying is, I'm right, my suspect was the Zodiac, but the police refused to investigate. That becomes a handy excuse when you're

being criticized for the lack of evidence. Monster the Zodiac Killer is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by Matt Frederick and produced by iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of I Heart Radio alongside producers Miranda Hawkins, Josh Thane, ben Kybrick, and Trevor Young. Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Steadman

and Christina Dana. Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. Make sure to catch the new season Monster DC Sniper. New episodes are available every Thursday. Search for and subscribed Monster DC Sniper on the i Heeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.