If Looks Could Kill (14 page)

Over the course of the first week of the investigation, there were more suspects than witnesses; more open-ended questions than answers. At times, Ed Moriarty was overwhelmed by the scope of the potential suspect pool. Yet when he sat down and thought about it, some suspects seemed more important than others. Between June 20 and June 23, for example, detectives interviewed nearly a dozen more potential suspects. Many were brought in and immediately released, for one reason or another. One seventeen-year-old girl called and thought maybe her father had shot Jeff because Jeff had harassed her. She had worked at BJ’s. One day, Jeff came in to buy a cell phone and introduced himself. When she brushed him off, he followed her around the store and ended up with her phone number after watching her throw a receipt in the garbage for something she bought on her break. According to her, the next day Jeff called seven times, trying to get her to go out with him. The eighth time he called, the girl’s father answered the telephone and told Jeff she was only seventeen, raging, “Do not ever call her back again.”

Jeff called a couple more times—and saw her at BJ’s on another day—and then left her alone. It was the first week of June, she explained to detectives.

But that lead, like many of them, turned up nothing. A father wasn’t going to shoot a guy in the head because he had called his daughter a few times. It seemed possible, but not all that practical.

Other suspects, reportedly seen driving lime-green-and-black Ninja-style motorcycles, were still being brought in, questioned and, quite quickly, released. The APD crime scene unit (CSU) had lifted a sample of rubber from the motorcycle in question at the scene. The murderer had driven over a curb and cut through a parking lot, but had to slow down to miss a car, before he or she then took off at a high rate of speed, leaving a rubber mark behind. The CAPU had a sample of the tire. Although it was a very common rubber, it was still possible to rule out several brands of tires.

So it was back to good old-fashioned police work—and learning all they could about Jeff Zack. Many of Jeff’s problems later in life, according to one of his brothers that Detective Mike Shaeffer interviewed, were manifestations of his upbringing. Marc Zack basically repeated what Elayne Zack had been saying all along: Jeff couldn’t take rejection. As far as Jeff’s other brother not attending Jeff’s wake or funeral, investigators learned that Jeff and his other brother often got physical with each other throughout their relationship and never really got along, “but not to the point of fighting,” Marc said. Even so, the reason he hadn’t attended Jeff’s funeral turned out to be a clash of circumstances. He was out of town camping and wasn’t notified until late on Sunday night. He couldn’t get into town in time.

“Jeff always lived on the edge,” said a source. “He was a risk taker. He always seemed to seek others’ approval.”

Rejection was such a major issue for Jeff that when a girlfriend once broke up with him—it was right after high school, shortly before he left for Israel (he and the girl had planned on getting married)—he went over to the house she lived in and moved all of her belongings into the apartment they had rented together.

David Zack had initiated Jeff into the scrap-metal-recycling business when Jeff returned from Israel. They worked together, but it didn’t last long. David found out Jeff was going back into the scrap metal yard at night, stealing metals and selling them. When David realized what Jeff was doing, he “threw him out of the business.”

Few in the family trusted Jeff. There were times, Marc Zack said, when years would go by without Marc and Jeff talking, solely based on the way Jeff had treated Marc and his wife. Jeff was rude and offensive when he didn’t get his way. Often verbally abusive, Marc said, to his wife over the telephone. That’s why it seemed so strange to Marc and the rest of the family when Jeff showed up in Arizona for Mother’s Day and began apologizing to everyone in the family for the problems he had caused, even going so far as mentioning specific episodes where Jeff admitted he was out of line. “He acted strange and had a peculiar look in his eyes [that weekend],” Marc told Shaeffer. “He looked as if he was afraid of something…extra nervous. I felt he was hiding something and running from someone.”

It wasn’t only Marc who noticed this. Elayne and David also saw a different Jeff Zack that week. “He knew something was going to happen to him,” Elayne said later.

Whereas Jeff never mentioned his affair with Cynthia to friends and coworkers, Marc claimed Jeff had no trouble bragging about it to him. “Jeff was hurt by the end of the affair, I could tell that.” While Jeff was in Arizona, he pulled Marc aside one day and told him, “It’s over now.” Verbalizing it upset Jeff.

“How come?” Marc asked.

“Ah…her husband wants it to end. He told me not to come around there anymore, to ‘get out of the scenario.’”

Jeff had spoken to Cynthia while he was in Arizona. Marc was sure of it. Add to that the opinion that Ed George had put his foot down about the affair and demanded it come to an end, it seemed Ed had good reason to want Jeff out of the picture. Maybe Jeff and Cynthia didn’t end the affair, after all, but only acted like they did to fool Ed and Bonnie?

During that Mother’s Day trip, Jeff went out to dinner with Marc, his wife, their new baby, Elayne and David Zack. It was a pleasant time. Yet Jeff seemed to want to hold the small child all throughout the dinner, bouncing the child on his leg, making baby talk, smiling, just having a grand time enjoying the bond between them.

For the family, this was “unusual” behavior on Jeff’s part. Marc and his wife, when they got home that night, discussed it. “Maybe Jeff has a baby with Cindy,” Marc told his wife. “Maybe…”

“And maybe he’s unable to see it…that’s why he was so excited tonight.”

Shaeffer asked Marc why he thought Jeff had been murdered. It was the same question detectives had put to everyone. It was important to keep asking. Going over scenarios a second and third time with the same witness could yield new leads.

“It wasn’t road rage,” insisted Marc. Instead, Marc was with those who believed Seth and Carl were behind it. Covering up for monies stolen from an insurance company, he said, was good motivation for murder. Jeff was determined to get Seth and Carl back for what he believed they did to him. The situation had escalated.

“Nothing else?” Shaeffer wondered. “You don’t see any other possibility?”

“Well,” Marc said, “it could have occurred due to Jeff’s involvement with Cindy.”

Marc seemed to know Jeff’s last words to Ashton, which, looking back, were quite emblematic of Jeff’s life leading up to that final moment. After a “heated” argument with Bonnie and Ashton, Jeff went for the door, according to Marc, turned and, directing his words straight to Ashton, said, “See what’s it’s like when I’m not here.”

Earlier in his career, while working undercover, Ed Moriarty got into a bit of a jam. Looking back now, he figured it had somewhat of a connection to Jeff Zack’s murder, if only in the substance of what happened. Moriarty was working drug detail, initiating buys and busting drug dealers in the Akron area. The FBI had called the APD one day and warned Moriarty they had information that a “hit” had been put on his life. The hit, claimed the FBI, was sanctioned by a group of Arabs.

“That report,” Moriarty recalled, “had come in through [a source connected to Ed George].”

Moriarty was called into his lieutenant’s office, who told him about the hit. When the Ed George connection was made and Moriarty later heard that there could be an Arab connection involved in Jeff Zack’s murder, he said, “We couldn’t rule that out, especially knowing what I knew about [that Arab connection] and the hit that was supposedly put on me years before.”

As the second week of the investigation got under way, Moriarty and the CAPU ruled out the possibility that Jeff was murdered by an Arab group. “There were just so many possibilities in this, that the Arab connection didn’t fit,” Moriarty said. “I mean, at about the same time we found out that Jeff was also involved in [some very shady business] in Phoenix when he was younger…. The stock market scams he was involved in. The scams with his various businesses. He was even involved with a credit card scam at some point right before his death. He had his fingers in so many different things. He spoke fluent Russian. We got a tip that the Russian mafia was behind it all because, reportedly, Jeff had somehow scammed them while overseas in Israel. We also had word that he was running drugs in Israel.”

None of it, however, as far as Moriarty and the CAPU could tell, turned out to be true. Jeff had bragged about being part of an Israeli intelligence team for Israeli airline El Al. But the APD couldn’t confirm or disprove it. To add more seasoning to a melting pot of suspects, it was common knowledge that Jeff and his neighbors didn’t get along. Jeff had hit on a neighbor’s wife and gotten into several altercations with her husband. But again, the idea that one of Jeff Zack’s neighbors had murdered him in an act of revenge or anger—well, it just didn’t fit.

When members of the CAPU sat down, compared notes and looked at all the possibilities, the investigation turned to four specific suspects. And so, when they scratched all those potential suspects off the list, one by one, the CAPU found themselves focused on Bonnie Zack, Ed George, and Seth and Carl, the two men Jeff had a gripe with regarding an aluminum-siding job. “When you look at murder,” Moriarty observed, “and you’ve been around murder investigations all your life, you know that it usually comes down to two things—love or money.”

When Detective Melissa Williams returned with information from her interview with Lisa, Jeff Zack’s mistress from Arizona, the woman with whom he had spent the week in Las Vegas before his murder, at first it cleared up a few inconsistencies that had been left hanging. However, it also invited more questions that the CAPU really didn’t need at this point.

It appeared as if Jeff had told Lisa about several threats Ed George had made to him. “But I don’t think they happened recently,” she had explained to Williams. In any event, the reason Jeff gave Lisa for the end of his relationship with Cynthia, detectives knew, was another lie. Jeff explained to Lisa that Cynthia had been “too controlling.” Because of her obsession with having power over the relationship, Jeff claimed, he couldn’t “go anywhere—not even on a family vacation—without Cindy following [him] around.”

According to many other sources, it was Cynthia who had ended the affair, not Jeff. And it was Cynthia who couldn’t go anywhere without Jeff badgering her and following her and begging her to take him back. Jeff had become, in effect, a nuisance in Cynthia’s life.

By the same token, Jeff told Lisa he owned several horses. Taking it further, when Lisa asked him where he kept the horses, Jeff stated, “At home. I have a large barn…. I have black guys working for me obtaining semen from the horses for breeding.” Jeff also told Lisa his vending business was “connected to the mafia.”

At one point while they were in Vegas, Jeff wanted to call Ashton and have Lisa speak to him. “We talked about something more permanent,” she explained. Jeff wanted Lisa to get to know his son. When she resisted, feeling as though talking to the boy would be crossing a line, Jeff changed the subject and showed her photographs of his time in the Israeli Army.

During what Lisa described as an “intimate moment” one night, Lisa and Jeff started talking about safe sex. “Great,” Jeff said when she asked him about his sexual history, “does this mean I’ll have to get tested again?”

“What do you mean by that?” Lisa wanted to know.

“I just upped my life insurance to one million dollars,” Jeff said, “and they made me get tested.”

Williams wrote in her report of the interview that she had asked Lisa if Bonnie knew about the life insurance. It was critical, perhaps one of the most vital questions to date. If Bonnie knew, it certainly pushed her to the front of what was becoming a smaller pool of suspects.

“I assumed Bonnie knew,” Lisa told Williams.

As the interview concluded, Williams realized that as much as Lisa knew about Jeff, most of it was based on fabrications or embellishments. Lisa never knew, for example, that David Zack wasn’t Jeff’s biological father. Lisa thought he was. Yet, according to Lisa, the most telling portion of their time in Vegas had come during their final night together. Jeff had “concerns,” she said, that something was about to happen to him. “He was very intuitive,” she added, “and had premonitions that something was wrong.” Most of Jeff’s worries focused on Ashton. Jeff believed the child was in danger. When they parted ways at the airport, Jeff kissed Lisa and whispered, “I’m afraid that I’ll never see you again.” He didn’t mean that Bonnie was going to find out about the relationship; Lisa felt it was more of a feeling that he knew something bad was about to happen. In fact, on the plane ride back home to Ohio, Jeff had called Ashton from the plane to make sure he was okay.

When Jeff returned, he and Lisa began talking “three to four times a day,” she said, and e-mailed each other daily. Jeff set up a special e-mail account that only he could access with a secret password. They communicated right up until that Friday before Jeff was murdered. During one conversation over the telephone, Jeff said, “This is how I got caught with Cindy. Bonnie’s coming in the house right now. I have to go.”

Jeff called Lisa back sometime later and apologized, saying, “Happy anniversary, it’s been one week since Vegas.” He was cheerful, upbeat. “I’ll e-mail you before I go to bed.”

“Just e-mail me in the morning if you’re too tired,” Lisa told him.

Later that night, Jeff sent Lisa a quick note, signing off, I love you until my death.

When Lisa didn’t receive an e-mail the following morning, Saturday, the day of Jeff’s death, she said she grew “concerned.” At around one o’clock that afternoon, Lisa tried calling Jeff on his cell phone. When a man whose voice she didn’t recognize answered—it was one of the detectives at the hospital with Jeff’s body—she hung up.

After having a friend call around all day and the next, finally getting through to someone at Bonnie’s work, Lisa said she found out Jeff had been murdered.