Another week, another person crawling out of the shadows of anonymity to claim intimate knowledge of San Francisco’s Zodiac killings. In fact, the flavour of the last ten years has been to implicate a deceased family member. It’s easier that way. You don’t get community service for wasting police time, and uncle Mike who dropped his trousers in your parent’s garage gets to be the bad guy for once. Drop in a couple of unsolved sexual assaults and the guy’s feathers start to look real tarnished.

This week it’s the turn of Gary L Stewart, (possibly) the father of John Stewart.

Before you try to shush me; let me just say the guy is WHITE; this story already stacks up.

He is, however, the 15th guy this year.

That’s the thing about the Zodiac now: the Zeitgeist absorbed his murdering ass and now he belongs to us all. Forget his victims, the families of his victims, or the reality of the crimes, themselves; Graysmith wrote that book, Fincher made the (ok) film, and now he’s the round, cuddly guy you say was your brother when the chips are down or you need to run in a debt.

Why do all these Zodiacs exist at once?

It’s a question I’ve wrestled with for the entirety of six minutes, and the sole reason I devised the test.

Like any test I’ve ever created – the How Many Friends of Colour test, the Why Are Your Children Killing Cats test – it’s fucking rigorous, and I will not – cannot – apologise for that. Do you want that Harper Collins book deal or not?

So let’s cut to the chase –

• Do you have a dead family member who is still, at the time of writing, dead?
• Were they white?
• Will you stop telling people about what you think you saw me doing when you were out walking your dog?

Before you decide to be a jerkstore about it and say the test isn’t thorough enough or you didn’t answer question 3 because you “have witnesses”, I’d like to go on record saying the test has caught me out seventeen times. That’s a lot of times to be caught out by a test you made! It’s also a lot of times to take a test, any test.

Anyway, for posterity’s sake, I also ran it by my Aunt Christine

This is a woman who wore sandals in the middle of winter and complained about the price of yam.

How’s that relevant you ask, (cos that’s the kind of person you are)?

I’m getting to that –  wait for it –

YAMDALS.

I know you were thinking it. I’m thinking it, too.

Anyway, yeah, also turns out she’s not the Zodiac, so there’s that.

I know what you’re thinking now; why not run her by How Many Friends of Colour and see if she fits into that in some way to make amends. I’m thinking about it but if i do do that – and I’m not saying I will – it’s because I wanted to.

So, anyway, look, stop drawing this out, the Zodiac probably isn’t a relation of mine, but he’s probably definitely one of yours.