Original subtitles

WOMAN: The problem with the people that run tech companies

is that they become fanatics,

end up thinking they're messiahs.

GARY: I have come to the conclusion that my father

might have been the Zodiac Killer.

REPORTER: The psychotic killer has already murdered five.

SUSAN: What are the odds that Gary Stewart thinks

his father was the Zodiac Killer

and they've got the same handwriting?

And they've got the same scar,

and the police sketch, it's like it's the same person,

and they are in the same places.

GARY: I discovered that my father

was sentenced to 90 days

in Atascadero State Mental Hospital.

My father married Edith Kos,

his social worker from prison.

That relationship ended with Edith

leaving to go live with her father

back in Styria, Austria.

We have more evidence now then we had

when we released the book.

REPORTER: You're looking at the Zodiac Killer's

genetic identity.

SUSAN: That would tell us the odds

of The Zodiac being Gary's father.

GARY: Lieutenant Hennessey asked if he could gather

a voluntary sample of my DNA.

That was the last time I ever heard from Hennessey.

Based on the DNA results,

there is a 99.8 percent probability

that my father was the Zodiac Killer.

I hadn't heard from Hennessey in years,

so I contacted the San Francisco Police Department,

and they put me in touch with the current inspector

who is handling the Zodiac cold case.

Gianrico Pierucci.

GIANRICO PIERUCCI: When I met with Gary Stewart,

he wanted to make sure that his DNA

was actually...

done, it was actually analyzed.

So I contacted the lab,

and I told him that the DNA had been analyzed.

GARY: And what Pierucci was about to tell me

was going to be huge news.

I told him that his father

wasn't going to be excluded.

GARY: Pierucci confirmed it.

And then he said,

"By the way, this is gonna do wonders for your book."

[theme music playing]

This is a photo of Earl Van Best,

with a sketch of the Zodiac,

superimposed over his face.

ZACH FECHHEIMER: When I read the book,

I was skeptical at first,

but I kept coming across names

and writing them down on a notebook

next to my bedside table.

Then when I'd go and run them through the system,

seems like Gary did a lot of pretty accurate

genealogical research about Earl Van Best.

And Gary's project was sparked initially

off of a quest of a son trying

to find his father.

And that sparked my interest.

[indistinct chatter]

My father's been a PI in San Francisco

for the past 50 years,

and during that time he's come into contact

with lots of the people who've been involved

with the Zodiac case.

He knew Paul Avery, he knew Toschi.

Here's this FBI report.

DAVID FECHHEIMER: There's the driver's license number.

You know, you could probably get a transcript

of this driving record.

When you wanna dig for a criminal record

in San Francisco,

there is no easy way to do it,

other than to go down to the Hall of Justice

and to dig through handwritten volumes.

So that's what I did.

So what I have to rely on

are the historical documents

that exist in the public record

that we could then use to piece together

a chronology.

Earl Van Best Jr. bounced around

all over the country.

Yes, so a big challenge here is trying to figure out

was there overlap

with where Earl was

during the time the Zodiac crimes were committed.

And if there was, is there a connection with SFPD

and is there anything there that would suggest a cover-up,

as Gary's put out in his book?

I've never really believed

that the San Francisco Police Department

was a corrupt organization.

But it wouldn't surprise me in the least

if through carelessness, sloppiness,

or foolishness,

they had failed to...

figure out who the Zodiac was.

REPORTER: San Francisco Police displayed a blackboard

with excerpts of the latest Zodiac letter

at a news conference last night.

Police said, it's the first since 1974.

For the last nine years, the Zodiac investigation

has been headed by homicide inspector

David Toschi.

I have always felt, uh,

a gut feeling that, that he was not dead

and that he was out there somewhere

and that he would communicate.

JENNINGS: When the letter came in

we did a big story and Zodiac is back

and he's claiming new victimsand making new threats.

TOSCHI: It's a boasting-type letter.

He, he takes a little slam at me because, uh,

I've been one of the policemen

that's been working on the case for, uh,

almost nine years.

JENNINGS: The letter itself said,

"Tell that city pig Toschi I'm still here."

Shortly thereafter, a writer

atThe Chronicle mentioned that

he'd gotten fan mail from Dave Toschi.

REPORTER: Toschi is under fire for writing phony fan letters

about himself to a newspaper feature writer.

I received the bogus fan lettersin the fall of 1976.

I chose to turn the matter over to police

only when I noticed certain similarities

between the tone of the letters

and the tone of the last Zodiac letter.

JENNINGS: Dave Toschi had written

this latest Zodiac letter himself,

to reignite interest in the case.

REPORTER: Inspector Dave Toschi is out of it.

He had been officially reprimanded by being transferred

from the homicide detail to the pawn shop detail.

I, I don't know what his thinking was.

I never asked him or remember his--

He, he was a broken man.

It was all ego.

CARROLL: Zodiac is the kind of thing

that people just crawl into

and lose themselves in terms of the rabbit hole.

CRAIG SILVERMAN: The Zodiac Killer is a story

that gets people completely wrapped into it.

And this case has created obsession for people

that really has taken over their lives.

And this book is, I think, also an example

of how the Zodiac Killer once again

has taken over somebody's life.

But this is about more than a book,

it's actually about identity.

JUDE: When you're adopted,

you spend your whole life making up stories

of who you are.

They're never right, of course.

But you have to have a story.

You can't just not have an identity.

So the only thing you can do is make it up.

LYN OVERTON: One of the reasons I wanted to read the book

was because I thought at last

I'm gonna find out what really happened.

But it starts off right away with

things that are, are inaccurate

and fabricated.

I think my hair was on fire,

the first read-through of the book.

And there was a lot of talk about

getting off a school bus.

There were no school buses

We didn't get off a school bus.

School buses were for elementary school children.

GARY: I'll tell you, my first manuscript

says street car.

One day, my mother told me

honey, I was wrong about the street car.

I got off the school bus.

I didn't, I didn't create that,

I didn't create that having known that,

the Zodiac Killer, uh,

taunted the policethreatening to shoot kiddies

as they come bouncing off a school bus.

My mother corrected me.

SUSAN: Jude told me specifically

that I used to think it was a street car,

but now I remember that it was a school bus.

I have it in my notes.

And memory is subjective.

When I look at my childhood

I remember things a certain way,

my older brothers and sistersremember it a different way.

It's hard to know who's rightand who's wrong.

JUDE: In the book, they talked about

Van driving up and down the state of California,

on his way to or from Mexico

so that he'd be in the places

where these crimes occurred

But when I knew Van,

he wasn't driving to Mexico,

he was always flying.

And so, for me, that was right from the beginning

that was preposterous.

After the book was published,

Susan called me

and I said to her,

why did you have to make the dialogues

so preposterous.

And she said,

well, those were all right from the police reports.

We took the police reports and changed the name

to my father or Van.

And I said, if that was your investigation,

then I rest my case.

SUSAN: Sometimes you do have to use the techniques

of fiction in true crime.

Use things like foreshadowing and description.

But every single thing that we did in that book

was based on...

what we were told by relatives,

by friends, police reports,

every single thingin that book was based on fact.

JUDE: I believe that many things changed

from Gary's original book

when they bought in his co-author.

There is a possibility that Gary wants to protect Susan

because she did bring this to the point

where a publisher like Harper Collins

would be interested in it.

As a publisher, we embrace the sensational

in a measured way, um...

because it sells books.

In a narrative presentation,

the language in the book, it's imagined,

but we weren't making factual claims.

We were sort of setting a scene

of how this would have played out

given the evidence we have.

I don't think it was done to mislead anyone.

It was more...

you, you know, it was, it was

a sort of a narrative touch-up,

I'd say.

SILVERMAN: When I was reading the book,

there were kinda two things going on.

One is Gary's pain in Gary's search,

and that is real and that is,

uh, I think without question.

Then there's other element of claiming to have solved

one of the most legendary cold cases

really of anywhere in the world.

And it's a huge selling point for book publishers.

And that's important to keep in mind because

the vast majority of non-fiction books

are not fact checked.

You would think that a big publisher like Harper Collins has

a budget for fact checking, but they don't.

The book publishing industry, they don't require it.

They need to sell books that are as compelling

and maybe sensational as they could possibly be.

And so all of the responsibility

for making sure that the work is true

and accurate and not copied or other things

is actually put on the author.

Gary and Susan wanted to make

the most compelling book possible.

Of coursethere's gonna be times

where maybe you downplay certain things,

where maybe you speculatein a certain way.

It's very hard to kinda look up one day

and say, wait a second have we,

have we taken a few steps too far.

And your editor's not gonna say that

because they wanna sell the book too.

Everybody is invested

in this guy being the Zodiac Killer.

ZACH: Many of the claims that are made in Gary's book

largely come from human sources

who've all since passed on.

But Gary had made freedomof information act requests

for Earl Van Best Jr.'sFBI file

and he was also able to obtain a CLETS criminal history.

So Gary used addresses that were contained,

uh, in those documents

to put together his address history

for Earl Van Best.

So I was able to take that and cross reference it

with the Polk City Directories.

After digging through the records

at the public library,

I felt like we had a pretty complete

address history for Earl Van Best.

So in the book, Gary says that

Earl lived at 797 Bush Street in 1969.

The story goes that Paul Stine picked up his fare

two blocks from 797 Bush,

but I don't see any evidence that he lived there in 1969.

He did live there in 1967,

which is two years prior to the murder of Paul Stine.

Another claim that Gary makes in his book

is that Earl Van Best did some time at San Quentin,

but Earl Van Best Jr. was convicted of a federal crime,

and San Quentin

is a state prison.

So there was no reason why he would have gone to San Quentin.

But in my research, I, I didn't come across any evidence

to suggest that he ever did any time in San Quentin.

The only thing I'vecome across was that

he did time at FCI Lompoc.

ZACH: I was able to assemble

a pretty complete chronology for Earl Van Best.

And we've laid that out on this side

and on this side

we put together the key events

of the Zodiac case.

And what we see in this timeline is that

we have a pretty complete chronology for Earl Van Best

starting in 1957 and going through to 1968,

roughly 1968, 1969.

And then there is a gap.

Earl Van Best seems to have fallen off the radar

between 1969 and 1974.

And most of the Zodiac murdersseem to have taken place

during that gap in his timeline.

So what I'd like to figure out

is where was Earl Van Best during 1969 and 1974?

GARY: My original draft

ofThe Most Dangerous Animal Of All was

about my emotional journey.

When it came to the Zodiac,

it was, this happened, this happened, this happened.

That's as far as I went

with the whole Zodiac murders.

Susan took that and made

you know, a whole book section out of it.

She put pieces together based upon

my father's behavior and stories from the family

and William that fit perfectly.

SUSAN: There are parts of the story

that just sound unbelievable.

There are things that seem like

they were made to fit into the story.

But every time I had a doubt,

Gary could produce a document

that verified it.

Especially his conversations with William Lohmus.

Each time I was like, uh, did that really happen?

Then, I would have an email that said

here's William saying it right here.

There were certain things

where I did have to take a small leap of faith,

but I got to a point where when Gary told me something

I didn't doubt him because he always had evidence

to back it up.

GARY: I take my own flak from the critics,

and I don't blame Susan for any of it.

It would've never happened if I hadn't told her

with a hundred percent certainty

that my father was the Zodiac Killer.

And she just told the story in a way that...

I wasn't trained to do.

One of the things I never considered doing

was a handwriting analysis.

But Susan took that one step further.

MICHAEL WAKSHULL: Well, I'm convinced that whoever wrote

the marriage certificate also wrote the letters.

But when I was presented with the marriage certificate,

I was told by Susan

that Judy saw Earl Van Best Jr.

write on the marriage certificate.

But when I read the book, I realized that

Judy was in a dressing room and came out

and the marriage certificate was completed.

Which meant that what I was told earlier,

it was not true.

It raises a question to me, did the minister write

the text on the marriage certificate?

GARY: All I have is what my mother told me.

You know,

your father filled this out,

and this is how we were married.

WAKSHULL: As part of my due diligence and follow-on,

I contacted the church where they got married.

I wanted to find outdo they have examples

of the preacher's writing?

And they did.

I did a comparison...

which caused me to come to the virtually certain opinion

the minister Edward Flagir wrote the marriage certificate.

Because we know that the police sketch

of the eyewitnesses of the Zodiac

matches Earl Van Best Jr.,

It raises the question...

Did the minister andEarl Van Best Jr. work together,

one writing the letters, one doing the killing?

GARY: That's quite a theory.

I thought we had picked a stable guy.

But I didn't go looking for a handwriting expert,

that was Susan's idea,

and I didn't get involved in that whatsoever.

SUSAN: I thoroughly disagree with Mike Wakshull.

He gave me a report,

and he gave me examples.

And I'm looking at the examples and I can see...

you know, here's a J and that's exactly the way

that the J's are in Van's handwriting.

I'm looking at the examples he gave me,

and they seem conclusive.

PATRICIA FISHER: I was asked to take a look at a report...

to see if it met the ASTM standards

uh, for handwriting examinations,

starting with one of the most important standards

which is having a reliable comparison.

And we scan in the writings

and then when I am finished,

I can take and see

what the letters don't have in common with each other.

And what's important here isonly till we get down

to the S-A-N and the O-F

where there aresimilar words.

Otherwise, there were no wordsthat were similar.

An additional step that he tookwas to make comparisons

of certain letters.

It's really important when a document examiner,

especially working on anonymous writings,

does not simply pick and choose letters.

For example, he illustrates capital J.

They are standard ways that persons make a J.

There is nothing individualizing

or significant about this letter.

So what he did is he selected these

and I guess two or three other characteristics

that didn't have really much value.

The biggest problem is

there are so many absent characters

and words...

the examination was flawedfrom the very start.

Michael should have saidI need more writings.

He did not do that.

And that's why it's really critical

for the document examiner to have very good judgment

and not sacrificethe principles

or the standards

just to satisfy somebody else.

GARY: If Wakshull has been proven...

to be wrong,

okay.

That's handwriting.

That doesn't change Earl Van Best's standing

as a suspect in the Zodiac case.

People in the virtual world say,

they just didn't have enough proof, right?

The handwriting didn't match,the fingerprints didn't match.

But here is that one last smoking gun.

If you look to the DNA,

there's one guy left.

And that DNA has been confirmed

with Sergeant Pierucci.

SUSAN: Pierucci said Gary's father could not be excluded.

That Earl Van Best Jr. is the only person in history

who cannot be excluded

as being the Zodiac.

That's a pretty damning piece of evidence.

CARROLL: In the late '90s,

the Zodiac case was essentially

in an inactive status.

And so I made a suggestion

to police administration regarding

establishing a cold case squad.

One of the reasons I'd made the proposal

was because of advances in technology,

specifically the advent of DNA

and so I'd submitted the envelopes

and the result of the publicity that attended the case,

the news media was interested.

And ABC contacted us

through a producer named Harry Phillips.

HARRY PHILLIPS: I produced a documentary

on the Zodiac investigation in 2001.

DNA technology had gotten to a point

where they could begin testingsome of the Zodiac evidence

We get an adrenaline rush knowing that

part of this puzzle has been revealed to you.

REPORTER: You're looking at the Zodiac Killer's

genetic identity...

PHILLIPS: The San Francisco Police Department found

five of a potential nine genetic markers.

These notes are what we use to create

a computer-generated graphic to show

what the partial DNA profileof the Zodiac

would've looked like.

And I can tell youI put instructions

on how to fill inthe numbers,

what color to, to put in.

and then instructions to obliterate

the actual numbers that are there.

But these numbers don't represent

the actual numbers from the Zodiac profile.

The actual resultsnever left the lab

and were never broadcast.

There's no way that Gary Stewart's DNA

would match the values that we put

in the DNA profile that we broadcast

because we did not broadcast the specific values

of each of those five markers because that was evidence.

And they didn't want us to release that.

CARROLL: The DNA profile that you saw

on television was not provided

by the San Francisco Police Department.

That would be reckless.

So... only one of...

the allele values for one of the STR loci,

based on my father's genetic profile

matches what this producer,

uh, gave you as being a blurred value.

That's fair.

That's fair.

And that had...

You know, we, we, um...

We looked at it thinkingwe were gonna,

um, either identify or eliminate...

uh, the possibility that any of my father's match

but what we saw we saw the same thing...

and it, it was blurred so it doesn't matter.

It's, it's, it, it's irrelevant

because that's not even the markers

of the Zodiac Killer.

Okay, so-- But what I'll tell you is

we didn't do anything...

with those values.

We didn't get anybody to do anything for us.

We didn't get Scales Lab to do anything for us

based on what we thought we saw.

So, on the Special,um,

they show a whole 16 marker profile,

and some of them are blank.

But what ABC did is they highlighted

the five markers

that they extracted, okay,

and then they put values in there.

I don't care if they put thewrong values or blurred them,

but what's very clear is what values,

what, what STR loci they had.

We told Scales

which five of the 16

that the San Francisco Police Department, ABC

had looked at-- had, had discovered.

That's all we gave them.We didn't give them any numbers.

Their statistical basis for this new analysis

is the fact that Pierucci saidmy markers match.

It has nothing to do with the ABC show

The value of the allele may have been changed,

may have been blurred, it doesn't matter.

The values that we got--

Susan and I got excited about,

were never presented to the Scales Lab.

Pierucci said he can't eliminate Van.

So Schiro made the assumptionbased upon what

Pierucci told me.

The fact that my father can't be eliminated

as Zodiac suspect means,

means all five of these match,

so they've got the single valuenot a double value

of the, the, the loci.

They've got at least one of the two for--

that, that are the Zodiac Killer's.

Because they match Van, right?

If they don't match Van,

they can be eliminated.

So D8, D3, D5, vWA,

match these values.

If one doesn't match,

then it's out.

I still don't have anything

that says Susan sent blurred values.

INTERVIEWER: Susan told us that you sent

those blurred numbers to the lab.

I don't believe that. I don't believe it.

INTERVIEWER: That's what she told us.

I don't believe that. I don't, I don't.

I don't believe she did that.

INTERVIEWER:We can ask her.

We will ask her because

I can't believe that,that Susan would have told him,

here's what we think we saw.

Susan's a better researcher than that.

I didn't say, I didn't say that.

SUSAN: That makes absolutely no sense.

Gary sent the email asking Schiro to compare

the blurred numbers that we came up with

when we watched the Primetime Special.

But Pierucci... told Gary

his father could not be excluded.

If Pierucci told me, hey, we ran that DNA

and Van's markers didn't match

I would be like, oh my God,I have so screwed up.

Until I hear Pierucci tell me that,

I'm gonna stick with my story.

INTERVIEWER: So, in Gary's manuscript

he retypes the police report,

and it showed that Van actually went to Atascadero.

When we review the actual report

from the SFPD,

everything was the same except that

Atascadero was added.

-So in the manuscript... -What?

he put in Atascadero.

[exclaims]

I can't speak to that.

The CLETS reportthat I saw

had Atascadero in it.

Could you give me a minute?

[exhales heavily]

Motherfucker.

Since I discovered that

some of the things in the book weren't true,

I was devastated.

My integrity means a whole lot to me,

and it really sent me into a tailspin.

I wrote a book

that there were discrepancies in,

and I felt like I had not done my job.

And so I began to search for the truth.

I went back through newspaper articles,

through police reports,

through all of the communication

Gary and I had about this.

He was my source for this book,

and I trusted what he told me.

One of the things Gary told me was that

Earl Van Best Jr. was in Atascadero

and when I read his original manuscript

one of this sentences for fraud by wire

the sentences was 90 days Atascadero State Hospital.

But if you look at the original CLETS report,

Atascadero isn't there.

Gary told me that when Hennessey handed him

that report, Hennessey said,

your father was in Atascadero.

In Gary's original manuscript,

he duplicated the CLETS report

and added Atascadero.

I wrote a lot about that.

That played a significant role

in determining that Earl Van Best Jr.

had the psychosis necessary

to be the Zodiac Killer.

It's really been difficult for me

trying to figure out

did Gary deliberately tell me things

that were not true, or does he really believe?

After the book came out,

the one thing I had that I knew

that nobody else knew

was that Detective Pierucci had said

that DNA could not be excluded

Detective Pierucci has agreedto meet with me

and talk with me about what happened

when he met with Gary Stewart.

When you were talking to Gary,

you told him

that Gary's fathercould not be excluded

as a suspectin the Zodiac case.

-Is that correct? -Right. Because we'd have to do

more investigating on his father.

I, I can't just take the bookand say this is perfect.

We've got all the information here.

Uh, but the terminology"could not be excluded"

is typically reserved for DNA.

I, I wasn't referring to the DNAwhen I excluded, you know,

when I told him that he couldn't be excluded.

Okay? What I was trying to tell him was

and, you know, I think he didmisinterpret me telling him,

no, you know, I can't exclude your father.

I can't exclude your father as, as the Zodiac,

only because we don't have

the knowledge that the Zodiac actually touched

or licked the stamp.

Gary's DNA was checked by our lab,

and that's all I can tell you.

Okay. So I, I wouldn't give him

any DNA information.

Gary also told me that

you told him the informationthat you gave him

should do wonders for the book.

Was that accurate?

Information that I gave him would do wonders for the book?

I, I just told him that I liked the book.

-Ah. -I don't know, I--

-[laughs] -Did you tell him that

Earl Van Best Jr. wasyour number one suspect now?

No, I did not.

-You did not say that? -No.

And you were not convinced that...

Gary had solved the casefor the SFPD?

No, I wasn't convinced.

But I did like the book.

Gotcha.

I sure do appreciate

you taking the time to talk to me.

Detective Pierucci had no reason

to lie to me.

In my effort to discover what was true,

I reached out to a private investigator

in San Francisco

who's been...

researching Gary's claims in the book.

I sent him Gary's original manuscript,

other evidence that I've uncovered

over the past few weeks.

We have an abundance of great one-liners

and colorful descriptors and so on,

but we have a lack of sources.

I wasn't able to interview Lieutenant Hennessey back then

because Gary told me SFPD had shut him down.

So two weeks ago, I called him.

And he didn't want to talk about it,

but what he did say to me

-when I told him who I was...-Mm-hmm.

...he said, I don't want to talk about that.

I don't want to talk to anybody about that,

but I will say I was so disappointed

that he wasn't honest with me when I dealt with him.

-Hmm. -That's what he had to say.

Gary Stewart was not honest with him

when he dealt with him.

Which makes me wonder

is how much of what I wrote about Hennessey,

about the San Francisco Police Department

in that book, how much of that was true?

In going through the book,

there are other piecesof evidence that didn't...

hold up to scrutiny,

um, and one of themwas The Mikado.

What I've been able to tell, the Japanese Empire

had banned The Mikado,

and it only became,

released publicly after the end of World War II

in 1945.

But the Van Best family leaves Japan in 1941.

What Gary told me

was that he sent playbills back

to his best family members

and that Van became obsessed

with The Mikado because of

seeing it in Japan.

And now you're telling me it was banned.

Wow.

So, big part of whatI've been working on

is trying to establisha timeline for Earl Van Best.

There is a blank periodbetween 1969 and 1974

where he, he, he doesn't appear to have

much of a footprint in San Francisco.

So after I didall my research,

you know, seeing this letter that you are able

to share with methat comes from Guinevere,

who is one of Earl Van Best's daughters

who was born in Austria,

I mean, it really helped close the gap

on... on this sort of missing piece

of his US address history.

"They all moved back to Austriawhere I was born in 1970.

"A year later,my father left my mother

and went backto the States."

We've initiated some requestsfor his immigration records

but, unfortunately,

records prior to 1980don't exist.

Gary told me that

his father took his family

to Austria and immediately abandoned them there

and that Guinevere's version of events was not true

because Edith had motive to...

not make her children feel

like their father just broughtthem there and left them.

And instead of doing my job,

I believed him.

I saw those letters

early on

when I first met Gary.

They were in his original manuscript.

At that time, I didn't understand

the significance of that

because I didn't even really know much more

about the Zodiac than the average American does.

And by the time I got into the Zodiac Killer part of it,

Gary explained it away

like he explained...

a lot of what I asked him away.

If Earl Van Best Jr. was notin the country in 1970,

he, he couldn't have beenthe Zodiac Killer.

Case closed.

PREACHER: Danger in our day.

There's the danger that others would deceive us.

False prophets.

There's another danger.

It's not that someone else would deceive you

but that you would

be deceived by yourself.

Today is the day when you can make ready

to be golden.

Let's stand again.

Every head bow...

VAN NUYS: Human beings that we are,

we're very good at constructing stories.

There are people out there who have belief systems

that are absolute delusions,

and they're unshakeable.

They may build their whole lifearound this story

to the point thatit becomes an obsession,

and they get so attached to them

that there's no way of arguing them out of them.

PREACHER: Pray in Jesus' name...

CARROLL: I don't know that I've run across

too many con men.

The greater number of folksthat are devoted to this case

actually do believe.

Some aspect of their ego has them invested

such that it becomes self-identifying.

Their identity is now related to this case

and once that's fused,

it's essentially impossible

to uncouple that.

VAN NUYS: It may confer on them a sense of self-importance

so that even though it's a ugly story,

it makes them important nonetheless.

It's feeding something in them.

However, people are capable

of fooling people...

particularly if there's

hope for monetary gain...

or for fame.

Thank you.

Thank you.

VAN NUYS: But it's pretty hard to know for sure

whether it's a con or not.

[indistinct chatter]

JUDE: I believe to this day

that he believes

he is the son of the Zodiac.

It goes back to that adoption idea that

any identity may be better than no identity.

GARY: People who love you

can't know...

what it feels like.

This sense of...

inferiority...

not being good enough.

So...

SUSAN: I think he had a need to create

the worst possible person

in the world to be able to explain

to himself

how a father who's supposed to love his son

could just leave him like that on a stairwell

to be, you know, found by whoever or not found.

JUDE: When Gary called me,

he said that he doesn't not want

the book to be his legacy.

He wants...

a beautiful family that doesn't have

these kinds of skeletons in the closet.

GARY: So...

I wanna show you where it happened.

So my heart wants to think

that he put me in the corner.

So...

when he walked away...

[sniffles]

This entire...

journey to find my father,

and then deal with it...

has taken

an undetermined toll...

on me...

and my family...

but I would sit here and have to say that

I would have to do it all over again.

And, and I think

I can continue this journey for another ten years...

and never...

never...

f...

never feel any better about me.

[birds chirping]

[rock music playing]

[engine starts]

SUSAN: Today is Friday the 13th?

So I think tonight I'm justgonna get drunk as shit

and sit outsideon that nice little lanai

overlooking San Francisco

and burn the fuck out of that book.

Is that what you're going to put on film?

[rock music continues]

Do I just knock, or what? What do you think?

I feel like they're not ever gonna...

Why are you wearing your sunglasses inside?

Bro, you know I gotta drip, bro.We're goin' to the studioright now.

Snack Time. I didn't--

Okay. You're welcome.

I feel like that did nothing for my career.

♪ Hi, I'm Dave ♪

-Mom. -Yes?

-Okay. I want a big party this year. -Serious?

-I want a quinceañera. -Quinceañera?

We can't do that. We're too white for that. We're not allowed.

Do me a favor?Never look me in the eye again.

Okay? 'Cause your stare is way too intense.

It's starting to make my hair fall out.

-[operatic singing] -[chattering]

MAN: Check!

Check.