TSB Pride, Stroud

I hope it's not just lip service.
I hope I'm not just being cynical.

I finished reading 'The most dangerous animal of all, by Gary Stewart. Wow!

Gary Stewart, who is about my age, was abandoned by his father in Baton Rouge shortly after his birth, and subsequently placed for adoption. Meeting with his birth mother for the first time in 2002, he became curious about his biological father. A chance viewing of a cold case crime documentary left him stunned as a face flashed up on his TV screen. A face uncannily similar to his own, and to the only photo he posessed of his father.

The screen image was of the 'wanted' poster for the Zodiac killer, a dangerous woman-hater who terrorised San Francisco and Riverside in the 1960s and 70s.

Gary Stewart carried out some research, then went to the police. His dealings with the San Francisco police department didn't get him far enough (the book was published in 2014) because:
DNA profiling was extremely expensive in the early noughties;
regularly, people with an over-active imagination presented themselves to the police claiming to have the answer to the killer's identity;
and, most bizarrely of all, the detective in charge of homicide in SFPD met an attractive woman, many years his junior in 1970, and they married in 1974. He knew she'd had a difficult past, but she never spoke much about it. ...

This woman, Judy, had been a runaway teenage bride, married in Reno at the age of fifteen (she lied about her age) and the man she married and whose child she bore, was Gary Stewart's biological father.

Judy left him shortly after he had taken the baby and abandoned it in an apartment block. She lived as a vagrant until she returned to SF and turned her life around. Those events took place in 1962 and 1963. She was known as the ice cream bride, because her first husband, Earl Van Best Jr, spotted her as she steeped off a school bus, aged 14, and took her out for ice cream. He was 27.

This woman, Judy, then went on, seven years later, to date and marry the cop in charge of hunting the Zodiac killer, the man closest to the case.

Her former husband then left the area and divided his time between Austria, where he had a new family and Mexico, where he had some forged book and document dealings. The Zodiac killer stopped killing. Coincidence?

The book is written in a sensationalist True Crime fashion, but I felt compelled to read it, because it all adds to my collection of Dodgy Dads memoirs. Personally, whether Earl Van Best Jr was the Zodiac killer is not the issue for me. It's a story of love, loss, and self-discovery.

Saddest of all, Gary discovered that his father, who'd become an alcoholic, died in his favourite hotel hangout in Mexico city, the hotel where he'd brought his child bride some twenty years earlier.
He choked on his own vomit.

Earl Van Best Jr was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in the poorest part of Mexico city. What a disappointment for Gary Stewart. No one wants their father to die like that, no matter what he has done or might have done.

My own father died in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, in 2001. He'd been walking home from church when he either fell into a river and had a stroke, or the other way round, and was rescued by a passing man. Refusing all medical attention, he was cared for by the older children of his common law wife, who were not his own children (they were younger) because his common law wife was already ill. Eventually he died.

His Mexican death certificate gives him a Mexican name, nationality, a different date of birth, Mexican parents, and a Mexican state of birth (Quintana Roo).

Legally, my father is not dead in UK law, because he changed identity so completely. I don't think he was a serial killer, but I cannot be sure of anything and would not rule out criminal activity of various types. He was prone to telling tall tales, and it was difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction in his retelling of events. My own siblings and I had only one sighting or meeting with him since 1974. Essentially I grew up without him from the age of ten, but even before then his presence was never taken for granted.

(Most of this later-life information was only revealed to me on 1st January 2018, when I met my Mexican half brother on Facebook).

I apologise if I've bored you, of you've heard some of this before. Maybe I'm just trying to justify spending a whole day reading a True Crime book.

Sometimes the Truth is uncomfortably close to home. Other times, it is buried in Mexico.