If Looks Could Kill (22 page)

Forty-year-old Christine Todaro had grown up on a farm and lived in and around Akron her entire life. It was back in the mid-1990s when Christine worked as a receptionist for North Canton (Ohio) Transfer, a fuel and oil tanker company. She was beautiful and outgoing, and had been married once, but it hadn’t worked out. Through that marriage, however, Christine had two children, a boy, Tony, and a girl, whom she loved and adored more than anything. “They are my life,” Christine told me later.

One day, while shuffling paperwork at North Canton Transfer, in walked John Zaffino. Christine saw a spark. He was quite good-looking. He had a rough edge about him, but she liked that. Zaffino drove his own truck and did subcontract work for NCT. He would stop in the office at certain times and pick up and drop off paperwork. For a year, Christine said, Zaffino tried to get her to go out with him, but she brushed off his advances. Finally, after Zaffino kept persisting, she agreed, which was, she knew, against her better judgment. “I knew he was unstable, but I said, what the hell.”

What Zaffino saw in Christine is rather obvious: a sweet, phone-sex-type voice, sexy lips and a streetwise pulse about her that spoke of a sociable, “not afraid to tell you how she feels” woman. Christine was tough. Her own person. Zaffino fit the protector role; he wasn’t afraid of anyone, that much was rather obvious to Christine right away. He loved her long, flowing, curly blond hair and perfect model figure. She was a catch, for sure, especially for a brute like Zaffino.

They dated for eighteen months before settling on marriage. During that time, Christine saw a different man emerge. Zaffino could turn violent, she claimed, with the drop of a hairpin. One of those guys who, even if you thought you were saying the right thing, would twist it into something that offended him. Their marriage, from its earliest days, was filled with violent outbursts by Zaffino, generally brought on by an overwhelming, uncontrollable jealousy he couldn’t shake, mixed with a large appetite for, Christine said, booze.

Lots of alcohol.

The marriage ended, for the most part, one night when Christine saw Zaffino knock her son down and bloody the boy’s mouth. As she told it, Christine and her son were eating with Zaffino and his parents one afternoon. “John and his father had a very violent relationship,” she insisted. “It’s like a love-hate type of thing, but that doesn’t even begin to describe it well enough.”

Christine’s son, Tony, was thirteen at the time. A good kid. Well behaved. Adored his mother and considered himself her protector. At the time, Tony was around the age where he was starting to worry about his appearance. Before they left for the restaurant, Tony decided to wear a hat. He didn’t feel like combing his hair or tidying up. He wanted to roll out of bed and go to lunch. Typical teenager. As they sat down at the restaurant, however, Zaffino’s father told the boy, “Take that hat off.” He thought it disrespectful for the kid to be wearing a hat at the dinner table, especially out in public.

Christine rolled her eyes. She knew the family.
Here we go.

Tony didn’t want to remove the ball cap. “My hair’s all screwed up, Ma. I don’t want to do it.” The kid had worn his hat at the dinner table plenty of times around Zaffino and Christine. All of a sudden, because Zaffino’s father was present, it turned into what Christine later described as some sort of “big issue.”

“John had this thing about his father…. He was always trying to impress him and seemed to act different around him.”

Because she knew Zaffino could go from “zero to Mach ten in seconds and was likely to blow a gasket,” Christine encouraged the boy to take the hat off. “For me,” she said softly to Tony as they sat waiting for their lunch. “Come on.”

Albeit begrudgingly, Tony obliged when Christine snatched the hat from his head and put it on her knee.

Although Tony acquiesced, the incident ignited a set of circumstances that would have grave consequences for Christine as the night wore on.

Zaffino looked at Tony after he took the hat off and said, “Nancy boy.” Teasing him. Taunting.
Nancy boy
. It had always been a joke between them. Zaffino had said it before and nothing ever came of it. On this night, however, the boy didn’t want to hear it.

“Shut up,” Tony said.

When they got back to the house, Zaffino’s mother used the downstairs bathroom while Christine went upstairs. This, of course, left Zaffino, his dad and Tony alone in the kitchen.

When Christine returned, Tony was on the floor, his mouth, she said, “full of blood.” Zaffino had whacked him good. The boy was moaning, calling out.

“What the
f
- - - happened?” she screamed, getting nose to nose with her husband. “What did you do?” When her child’s welfare was at stake, Christine said, she didn’t care how big Zaffino was, or what he could do to her. “I was going to defend my child no matter what.”

What shocked Christine more than anything else was that Zaffino’s father stood by and not only watched his son strike the boy, but even egged Zaffino on. “You gonna let your wife talk to you like that, boy?”

Christine told Tony to clean himself up and get in the car. “We’re leaving.”

That same night, Christine found an apartment and moved in, but she had nothing. No clothes. Blankets. Furniture. She needed to get back into her house and get some things so she and Tony could begin a new life. She was finished being pushed around, hit and, at one time, “strangled by Zaffino,” she said, so hard that she “saw stars and couldn’t talk or swallow for a week.”

It was over. Enough was enough.

So Christine let the situation settle for a few weeks, living off things her friends and family had given her. But there came a time when she needed to go back to her house and pick up all the personal belongings she could. Zaffino was calling the entire time, obsessively telling her he was sorry, it wouldn’t happen again, just come home and everything would be all right.

She had heard it all before. It was over.

Christine showed up and Zaffino was waiting. Greeting her at the door, he seemed calm. “Come on in.”

She walked across the threshold and entered without a problem. But when she got farther into the house, Zaffino closed the door, twisted the lock and dead bolt in place, then leaned against the back of it.

Shoot,
she thought.
I’m in big trouble.

“I want your e-mail address,” Zaffino said.

Christine looked at him strangely. “What?”

“I want your account password so I can look at it.”

Zaffino had been accusing Christine of cheating on him with a man she knew (her boss). He believed they’d communicated through e-mail, simply because she had locked him out of her account and wouldn’t give him the password. It became more suspect to Zaffino after she moved out of the house, and he was, in his blatant insecurity, convinced she had been carrying on an affair. His jealousy was so profound that Christine said she had quit jobs in the past just to “protect my bosses, because I knew John would do something to them.”

“I f- - -ing knew it,” he said. “You bitch.” He was still blocking the door.

“I am not giving you the e-mail address, John. I just want to get some things and I’m out of here.”

Zaffino was composed. He had a sort of bashful smirk on his face that told Christine he believed he was in control of the situation. And that’s what it came down to: control. Zaffino wanted to and tried, according to Christine, to control every aspect of her life, same as any wife beater.

“You’re not leaving,” he said, “until I get that e-mail account.”

Christine took a look around. She saw several shot-guns in the corner of the kitchen—one of which was a double-barrel and sawed-off. Zaffino was a gun freak. Loved to embrace the cold chill of the wooden grips, admire the long channel of steel. “An expert shot—he liked to shoot things,” Christine recalled. She said she was with him once at a shooting range on a piece of her father’s property; being the braggart he was, Zaffino put a nickel on the top of a target and walked about seventy-five feet away. “Watch this s- - -,” he said.
Pow!
He hit that nickel square in the center. No problem.

The guns, insisted Christine, were a means of intimidation for John Zaffino. He picked one up one day and “threatened to shoot one of my old boyfriends because he
thought
we were
talking
.”

Now she was standing in her former home, staring at several guns, scared shitless that her husband wasn’t going to allow her to leave, thinking,
He’s going to kill me.

“OK,” she finally said. “I’ll give it to you. Let’s go sign on.”

They walked over to the computer.

Zaffino then looked at her. “What is it?”

After signing on and checking Christine’s e-mail inbox, Zaffino realized there was no mail. He had been proven wrong, which was not a good thing. One of Zaffino’s sayings, Christine later said, had always been, “I’ll always”—never, ever forget this—“be proven right, no matter what.”

Christine went for the door. She wanted to leave. Now.

“No,” he said, getting up from the computer and blocking the door.

“Come on, John,” she pleaded.

He grabbed her, then put her arm behind her back, much like a cop might do when subduing a suspect. He held her there by the door. She couldn’t move.

“You’re gonna break my arm,” she said.
“You’re gonna break my arm.”
Each word rose in pitch as Zaffino pushed her arm up her back toward her head, tighter, and tighter, as she could feel that her arm wasn’t going to bend any farther.

Zaffino then placed one of his hands on Christine’s elbow and the other on her wrist and began pushing them in opposite directions until he heard a sharp snap.

Christine not only heard her arm break like a piece of peanut brittle, she felt the shock of it, electric, shoot up her arm into her shoulder. “Ow, John, you broke my arm,” she cried.

With that, he stopped and let her go.

Standing, contemplating the situation, Christine thought,
I’m dead…. What does he have to lose now…he’s going to kill me.

As she sat in a chair at the dining table, Zaffino, now the caring, worried husband, ran into the kitchen and got her some ice to put on her swelling arm, saying, “You cannot tell anyone about this. You can’t tell anyone I did this.” He looked outside. It was snowing. There was plenty of ice on the ground. “Just tell people you fell on the ice.”

“OK, John. I will.” She wanted to leave.

“You can’t tell Tony. I don’t want him to know.”

“Yes. I know.”

Zaffino allowed her to leave at that point. She had been there about two hours. Christine drove home. In the meantime, Zaffino called Tony and explained that his mother had fallen on an ice patch and twisted her arm pretty badly.

When Christine got out of her car, Tony was waiting. He was crying. “What happened? Did you fall on the ice?”

“No…John broke my arm.”

From there, Christine tried driving to the emergency room. Along the way, she pulled into a Hardee’s restaurant, thinking it was the hospital entrance. She was going into shock. “You’re going to have to drive,” she told Tony. “Can you do it?”

He jumped in the driver’s seat and got her to the hospital. Scared, she told hospital officials she slipped and fell on the ice outside her apartment. Back home later that night, Christine called her father. She was terrified Zaffino was on the move, on his way over to her apartment.

He’s coming to kill me.

While talking to her father, Christine Todaro, in a cast, nursing what doctors diagnosed as a “major fracture” to her elbow, explained what had happened. Christine’s father, rather fed up with his abusive son-in-law’s aggressive outbursts, drove his daughter to the sheriff’s office the following day and she filed a complaint against Zaffino, who was ultimately charged with felonious assault, aggravated kidnapping and domestic violence.

That was the end of Christine’s marriage to John Zaffino. But filing divorce papers, which Zaffino refused to sign for upward of a year, failed to get rid of him. He continued to bother Christine, calling at a ridiculous rate, following her, dropping by her apartment unannounced. Perhaps in the same manner Jeff Zack had treated Cynthia George, he was unable to take rejection. Christine had to quit one job she had at the time because Zaffino would show up and threaten people. He sat in the parking lot and waited for her. The company even changed the locks, giving everyone a special “key card” to get in. They had security personnel keep an eye on him. But when all that failed, Christine thought it better she move on to other employment, instead of constantly worrying what her soon-to-be ex would do to an innocent coworker who might haphazardly end up in his way.

At the time she met John Zaffino, Christine had been dating a guy named Frank Roppolo. She noticed early into her marriage that Zaffino would become incredibly jealous of Roppolo, because Christine and Roppolo had remained somewhat close friends after she got married to Zaffino. Inside that circle—Tim Gardner, Fred Abers, Marcus Dooby and Roppolo—it became known that Christine had possible information about the Jeff Zack murder, which ultimately got the ball rolling for the CAPU. According to Christine, however, Tim Gardner’s true motivation in coming forward wasn’t that he was a concerned citizen in pursuit of justice. Gardner, Christine later claimed, “thought there was a reward being offered. He wasn’t giving up the information for any honorable motivation—it was
all
about money….”

As Zaffino and Christine went about their lives as a married couple, she began to notice Zaffino’s penchant for blowing up at the slightest whim over, well, just about anything. Where Frank Roppolo was concerned, Zaffino held a particular bloodthirstiness for the guy. He yearned to
hurt
Roppolo. Months into their marriage, Zaffino told his new wife he wanted to buy a shotgun so he could do some target shooting. There was just one little problem, however. “You know I’m not from Ohio, Christine.” Zaffino had grown up in Pennsylvania. By law, an interloper to the state couldn’t purchase a gun legally. “Can you buy the gun for me?”

Christine bought him the gun, thinking,
What harm could it do?
He wanted to target shoot with her dad, who had acreage in the country.
Maybe it’ll keep the guy busy and help him burn some of that negative energy
. She admitted later that she really didn’t know Zaffino well enough at that time to consider the gun would make him even more dangerous than he was already. It was a mistake, she said. But she did it—and eventually had to live with it.

Within a few weeks after Christine bought Zaffino the gun, he decided he’d heard enough from her ex-boyfriend Frank Roppolo. “He just told me one day that he wanted to beat the hell out of him,” Christine recalled. “I guess it would have made him feel good. I don’t know. He’s nuts. But I didn’t know that then. John was a major fighter. He fought everybody. Any reason he could find to fight, he fought.”

Zaffino was thirty-six years old then and just a hair under five feet five inches. Somewhat jokingly and somewhat seriously, Christine said later that she believed he, like some short people, “suffered from Napoleon syndrome.” Zaffino had a complex about being short and tried to compensate for it by being a bruiser, always looking to defend his honor. Add that to his insatiable appetite for booze—“He once,” she added, “drank a thirty-pack of beer in front of me and it didn’t affect him”—and a recipe for a madman percolated inside him, Christine believed as the first months of her marriage blossomed. “He put fear into people—especially me,” Christine said.

On the other hand, Christine said, Frank Roppolo wasn’t in any position to defend himself against Zaffino, a relentless fighter who would keep coming at you until he succeeded. Roppolo, she said, wasn’t the toughest guy around. If Zaffino had set his mind on giving Roppolo a good beating, it would happen. Zaffino would squash him like an irritating fly.

Zaffino and Christine were sitting at the dinner table one night. “I think,” Zaffino said, lifting a fork filled with food into his mouth, “Frank wants to f- - - you.”

“Oh, John, you’re nuts.” Christine wanted nothing to do with her ex-boyfriend. She was married. “There’s a reason,” she remarked later, “that Frank’s an ex-boyfriend.”

“What do you think?” Zaffino asked.

“John, I don’t think so. He’s not like that.”

Before she realized what was going on, Christine recalled, Zaffino had given her a quick backhand to the face and knocked her off her chair. “I never even saw him swing. It happened that fast. I guess I gave him the wrong answer.”

Roppolo, though, did want Christine back. And he had been trying to get her to leave Zaffino, whom he believed to be abusive and verbally insulting.

After Zaffino struck Christine, he said, “Give me Frank’s phone number.”

It’s going to look real bad,
she thought, collecting herself, rubbing her red face,
if I don’t give him the number.

“Call him,” Zaffino ordered. He was, by this point, “really drunk.” Slurring his words. Getting that drunken look about him she had seen many times before. When John Zaffino made up his mind to do something, no one was going to stop him from doing it. “Call him right now,” Zaffino said again. He raised his hand. By then, he had taken one of his shotguns and placed it on the counter in the kitchen, chest level with Christine, as she sat by the telephone and debated in her head what to do.

With a shotgun basically pointed at her, Christine dialed the number. With Roppolo on the line, Christine told him that Zaffino wanted to meet him. Roppolo started talking loudly, calling Zaffino out, she remembered later.

This was a bad idea.

As Christine talked, Zaffino swung the barrel end of the gun around and pointed it—although it was still on the counter—at her face. He was staring at her, she felt, thinking…
Don’t say the wrong thing.
Mocking her. Acting like the tough guy he thought he was pointing a shotgun at a female’s head.

Zaffino then got on the telephone with Roppolo and set up a meeting between them, acting as if he wanted to be his friend.

Later that night, as Zaffino got drunker, he opened up to Christine. She admitted later that she had no idea if he was telling the truth, he could just have been telling a story to improve on his tough-guy image. But at some point that night, he asked her, “If I tell you something bad about me, will you think different of me?”

“No, John, of course not. What is it?”

Zaffino, in a drunken slur Christine had become all too familiar with, said he had killed two men in Florida a few years before they were married. He was working for a fence company, he explained, and two guys had ripped his boss off over a botched drug deal. So he went and shot the guys.

Christine didn’t know what to say. She changed the subject.

As the sun was about to rise on a new day, Zaffino left the house to get more beer. As soon as he left, Christine called Frank Roppolo. “What are you doing?” she said huffily. “Don’t meet with him. He’s not your friend. He’s got a f- - - - ing shotgun here. What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t talk to him anymore. Don’t meet him.” She was hysterical. “His intentions are to hurt you.”

Frank Roppolo said, “OK, Christine, I get it.”