If Looks Could Kill (28 page)

After Russ McFarland and Mike Shaeffer finished interviewing Nancy Bonadio and Russell Forrest, McFarland grabbed the cell phone from his waist, snapped it open and dialed his boss, Dave Whiddon. McFarland had some great news to share. They had all been waiting for this for quite some time. Shaeffer and McFarland had seemingly cracked the case, not only locating the bike, but what Bonadio and Forrest had to say regarding how Zaffino had dropped it off was significant.

Dave Whiddon wasn’t at the office. He was with his wife and son at a Little League game. Whiddon was a dedicated cop, but family, some of his colleagues suggested later, came first. It was one of the reasons why he had taken the lieutenant’s job in the first place; he could delegate the work instead of going out there and doing it himself. It would keep him closer to home and, as much as he could bear it, off the street.

Near 6:30, or perhaps it was closer to 6:45
P.M
., he couldn’t remember exactly what time, Dave Whiddon was standing in the third base coach’s box out on the field in the middle of a game, cheering on his son’s Little League team—when his cell phone rang. Although Whiddon is not one of those fathers who argues with the umpires and lets the game get the best of him, he does, he said, “get pretty intense when [he’s] coaching.” So the call, although expected, startled him.

At the time, the game had taken the case temporarily off Whiddon’s mind. He knew McFarland was going to call; he just didn’t know when. Standing, coaching third base, with his back to the bench of his son’s team, Whiddon could almost feel the parents sitting in the gallery just beyond the dugout breathing down his back. So when his cell phone rang, the entire bench and bleachers of parents could hear it. It was right in the middle of an inning; there were two kids on base.

Looking back toward his wife, shrugging, Whiddon picked up the phone.

McFarland was barely able to contain his excitement. “Lieutenant, we got the bike. The Pennsylvania State Troopers were wonderful,” he said.

“Great, Russ. That’s great.” Whiddon punched the air.

One of his players was up at bat.

Pitch.

Hit.

The ball went into the outfield.

Whiddon, trying to watch the game and talk to McFarland, kept his eye on the ball.

“Hold on,” McFarland said over Whiddon’s excitement, “I’ve got even better news.” McFarland could tell there was a commotion going on in the background.

“What is it?” Whiddon had zoned out of the game and lost track of what was happening on the field.

“Me and Mike interviewed Nancy Bonadio and Russell Forrest. Zaffino brought the bike over to Pennsylvania in the middle of the night…. [He put]
duct tape
over the paint to cover the colors.” Whiddon was stunned. The play in the field was still going on. He didn’t know it, but the parents and players in back of him were staring at him. “They gave us their word,” McFarland added, “that they would not say anything to Zaffino.”

As McFarland continued talking, one of Whiddon’s base runners had made it past second base and was heading toward third—coming right at Whiddon, and looking for direction. Still on the phone talking to McFarland, Whiddon waved the kid home. “Go, run…run.”

“What?” McFarland asked. He thought Whiddon was talking to him.

“Nothing.”

Later, Whiddon said, “Needless to say, I was overjoyed, so much so that I was now screaming very loudly into the phone. I was very relieved that we finally had a great stroke of luck in this case and everything turned out better than I could have imagined.”

When the conversation was over, Whiddon turned around to see all of the parents and kids on the bench staring directly at him. He didn’t realize how loud he had been talking and how much the excitement of the moment had inspired him. Whiddon’s wife knew he was expecting to hear from McFarland, and she was now focused on him—half embarrassed, half thrilled that the case, obviously, was moving in the right direction.

Whiddon was overjoyed. After the inning, he called Captain Daugherty and told her the good news. After all, it was Daugherty who broke the motorcycle lead to begin with. “That’s great, Dave,” she said. “That’s wonderful.”

The interviews of Nancy Bonadio and Russell Forrest that Russ McFarland and Mike Shaeffer recorded cleared up some loose ends in the case, as much as they interjected several new questions into the mix. The CAPU had always wondered how and where the motorcycle had fit into the murder of Jeff Zack. Now they felt they knew. According to Bonadio, it was back on June 17, 2001, the day after Zack’s murder, when she first heard about the bike. Bonadio was generally in bed by nine o’clock on most nights, and considered any telephone call to her house after that hour “late.” While she was nestling herself in bed next to her fiancé, the telephone startled her at about 10:00
P.M
., she said. Her heart pounded. Any call at that hour generally meant bad news. “Hello?” she said, groggy, worried.

“It’s John.”

He sounded “very upset,” Bonadio told McFarland. She could hear it in his voice.

Bonadio hesitated briefly.
Great, it’s John.
The guy was a damn nuisance. She couldn’t get rid of him. “What do you want? It’s late. What’s the matter?”

“I know. I know. I gotta get rid of this bike. I’m going to get into trouble with it someday.”

“A bike?”

“I need to get rid of it. I want to trade it for a vehicle Russell has on the lot.”

“Why do you need to get rid of a bike, John?”

Zaffino sounded hurried. Frantic. Even manic. “I was chased by the cops…a few times for speeding. I need to get rid of it or I’ll lose my CDL license, or worse, kill myself.” Zaffino claimed he had never ridden a high-performance motorcycle with such road supremacy, Bonadio explained. It wasn’t what he was used to. She had no idea why he bought the bike to begin with if it wasn’t what he was used to or wanted.

“OK,” Bonadio said, “sure, you can bring the bike to me. I don’t know if Russ will work with you on it, but we can ask him. We can talk to Russ and see what he thinks.”

Bonadio assumed that the conversation would end there. Her ex-husband had gotten what he wanted. Maybe he could cut a deal with Forrest and dump the bike. But then, “I’m coming tonight,” Zaffino said.

This startled Bonadio.
Why now
?
Why the urgency
?

“Maybe two in the morning or something,” Zaffino said next. “I want to leave when no one is out on the road.”

On Monday morning, June 18, 2001, two days after Jeff Zack’s murder, John Zaffino called his ex-wife again. They had spoken during the morning on Sunday as Zaffino traveled into Pennsylvania. But later that morning, he called to say he was at a local Super 8 Motel, right up the road from Russell Forrest’s used-car lot. He wanted to stop by with the bike as soon as possible and get rid of it.

Bonadio said she was too busy.

The next day, Tuesday, Zaffino called back. It was 7:00
A.M
. “What time can I come out? I need directions.” Zaffino hadn’t been to Bonadio and Forrest’s house before. Whenever they exchanged their child, they met halfway between Ohio and Pennsylvania. He wanted to drop the bike off at her house, not the used-car lot.

At about 10:00
A.M
., Zaffino showed up with the bike. Bonadio later described the bike as being “gray with green neon striping on it…a high-performance motorcycle.” But when Zaffino first arrived, she couldn’t see any green on the bike. “John had covered the green stripes up with gray duct tape.”

Standing, looking at the bike, Bonadio asked, “Why’d you cover up the stripes?” It seemed strange, over the top, even for Zaffino.

“Because I didn’t want the green stripes to catch anybody’s attention.”

But he had traveled in the middle of the night. All this for a speeding ticket?

After Zaffino peeled the duct tape off the bike—“He didn’t want me to scratch the paint,” Bonadio said—he asked his ex-wife for a ride back to Ohio, or the keys to a Jeep in Forrest’s lot. Bonadio called her fiancé and told him what was going on. “He wants to exchange the bike for a Jeep. Would you be interested in doing that?”

“No.” Bonadio discussed the situation with Forrest and hung up shortly.

“John,” she said, “we can’t help you out. We can’t take the bike in on a trade. We can’t trust you to take on a car payment when you haven’t been able to pay me child support for years.” Bonadio expected Zaffino, knowing his temperament and history of anger, to snap. Go off on some tangent, screaming that the deal was over.
Forget it. I’m keeping my bike.
But, “Actually,” Bonadio said later, “he was OK with it. He didn’t give me a hard time.”

“I just need to get rid of that bike,” Zaffino said. “Now I need a ride home.”

“I’ll take the bike for the back child support, since it’s worth what you owe me,” Bonadio said. “I’ll call Domestic Relations in Warren County and clear up your account and tell them you paid me and we can start all over again.”

To her utter amazement, Zaffino agreed. (“He was OK with it.”) Suddenly, Mr. Disagreeable, someone who, in the past, hardly ever wanted to work with Bonadio on anything that didn’t benefit him directly, was willing to go along with whatever she said.

I need to get rid of the bike.

Bonadio agreed to drive Zaffino halfway. Maybe somebody could meet him. Zaffino pulled out his cell phone and dialed up a number while Bonadio stood by, waiting. “I’m calling Cindy, my girlfriend,” Zaffino made a point of saying.

As they drove, Bonadio questioned her ex-husband about how he could have possibly come up with the five thousand to buy the bike to begin with. “Where’d you get
that
kind of money, John?”

Zaffino smiled. “Cindy bought it for me.”

John Zaffino grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania. According to a few of his former friends, as soon as Zaffino got a couple of drinks in him, he became vicious and violent. Quite stocky—his weight was proportioned well—he had brown eyes and brown hair. Zaffino generally kept to himself, but wasn’t afraid to step into a situation and voice his rather stern opinions. One of the things that made Zaffino angry was when people didn’t conform to his wishes. It might be at a fast-food restaurant. Something simple, as when the restaurant failed to make his meal to his liking. He’d go off on a rip. There was one time, an acquaintance later said, when Zaffino didn’t like a hamburger Burger King had given him and he screamed at the clerk for
fifteen
minutes before leaving the restaurant and ranting about the hamburger during the entire thirty-minute drive home. It was those little things that flipped a switch in Zaffino and turned him from a quiet guy into a loaded gun. His son, when he was two years old, squirted him in the face with some water one night. Zaffino snapped, put the boy in his room and screamed at his wife, throwing her against the refrigerator before striking her in the face with an open hand. All because the kid, having a little fun, splashed some water in his face.

Nancy Bonadio met Zaffino at a bar in the Kinzua Dam area of Pennsylvania in 1987; they married two years later. She was twenty-eight; Zaffino, born on September 22, 1966, twenty-two. Later, she would tell police, “Well, he was rather angry all the time. Anything would set him off. Sometimes he was the nicest guy in the world and then he would just turn around and just be the meanest guy.” According to both of his ex-wives, Zaffino liked to verbally abuse women: he loved to shoot obscenities and nasty remarks at not only them, but anyone who pissed him off. Bonadio, from the early months of the marriage, lived in fear of what type of guy she would come home to at night.

A week after Bonadio was interviewed by McFarland and Shaeffer, she picked her son up from Zaffino after a scheduled visitation. There was no mention of her talking to police. He never asked about the bike or the helmets. That night, she called the CAPU to fill them in. “I saw him,” she explained. “He told me he had hired an attorney, but had not talked to police yet. He said he wasn’t going to talk to you guys without an attorney. He denied being involved in the murder. I told him he had nothing to worry about then.”

Bonadio feared that if she failed to allow Zaffino to see his son, he would “become suspicious”—it was the only reason she agreed to let him take the boy after she learned about the bike and his possible involvement in Zack’s murder. She told McFarland she was going to continue to allow Zaffino to visit the boy. She was convinced, she said, that he would never harm the child and promised to call the CAPU every time she dropped her son off in Ohio. Yet, she was worried about something: “What if he asks me about the motorcycle?” Bonadio wondered.

“Have Russell generate a pseudoreceipt of sale on the bike and keep a copy of it,” Detective McFarland suggested. “If John ever brings up the bike, say you guys sold it. If he challenges you guys on it, show him the receipt.”

Bonadio sounded scared of the prospect, but agreed.

“One more thing,” McFarland warned. “Show him the receipt
only
if he expresses doubts about you guys selling the bike.”

“OK.”

“Never,” McFarland concluded, “volunteer the receipt.”

Vince Felber and Dave Whiddon were certain the mysterious blonde in the Suburban who showed up at Zaffino’s apartment at various intervals was, in fact, Cynthia George. By Zaffino putting Cynthia down on his rental agreement as a “friend” to call in case of an emergency, it convinced the two detectives that Cynthia and John had an ongoing relationship. Were they friends, however, or lovers?

McFarland got a bead on a woman who lived one house away from Zaffino when he resided at the upscale complex. Two CAPU detectives had already spoken to her, but McFarland wanted to follow up and lock down a statement.

Meanwhile, several other detectives scoped out Zaffino’s Rittman, Ohio, apartment, where he now lived, but saw no sign of him. He was obviously onto what the CAPU detectives were up to and stayed away from the apartment as much as he could. While the CAPU had never conducted twenty-four-hour surveillance, they were about to begin watching the place more than they had in the past. There was no chance the CAPU was going to approach Zaffino at this point. It was still too early. They needed more evidence against him. If he had killed Jeff Zack, someone had sold him a gun. They needed to find that source.

Zaffino’s former neighbor was certain the woman who had been over to his apartment on occasion was Cynthia George. The time frame was between May and June 2001. McFarland pulled out a photograph of Cynthia. “That woman in the photo has the last name George and her family owns the Tangier,” the woman said. “She was often out there to see John Zaffino. I know it was her. She had Medina plates on her Suburban.”

“How do you know for certain who she was?” McFarland asked.

“Well, John told me during a conversation I had with him one day. He called her Cindy, and he said she was a model. I remember because my daughter used to be into modeling.”

In late June, Christine Todaro called Zaffino one night to try to get him to talk about the murder. Christine didn’t want to record any more of her calls, though. As each day passed, she grew more scared that Zaffino would find out what she was doing. “It was that simple for me,” Christine said later. “I thought he would kill me.”

After some small talk, Christine and Zaffino got into a bit of minutia about the case the CAPU was building against him. Zaffino knew they had something and were working on it. He could sense the net closing. Christine was desperate to get him to say anything substantial. Zaffino carried on about what she should say and do when the cops questioned her, adding, “Don’t say anything. Tell them to f- - - off.”

Christine repeatedly said she couldn’t do that.

Zaffino was worried she would say the wrong thing without realizing it. “I don’t want them to know about Nancy [Bonadio],” he said. “She’d turn me inside out, whether she knew anything or not.”

Unbeknownst to Zaffino, however, it was too late for that. The CAPU had the bike, which Zaffino was undoubtedly referring to when he mentioned Nancy Bonadio to Christine.

“All right,” she said.

“If she could, she would.”

After a laugh, Christine said, “You haven’t heard anything from her yet? Did you call?”

“No, not yet. I was supposed to go in and see my lawyer yesterday, but I couldn’t make it.”

A while later, Christine brought up the CAPU and asked Zaffino if he was going to call them. “That’s why you wanted their cards, right?”

“No. I’m not calling them.”

They talked a little more regarding how Christine was going to pay her bills. She was out of money. Wasn’t working. And was having a tough time making ends meet. She blamed it all on Zaffino, saying that she had gotten herself mixed up in his life and it was destroying hers. But Zaffino didn’t seem to care much about what Christine said. “Whatever you do, if you get panicked, don’t say nothing on the phone. I mean, if you sound panicked and they are listening to you, they’ll…there’s a reason for all of this….”

“All right,” Christine agreed.

As June ended and the scorching heat of July began, Zaffino kicked up his communication with Christine. Whenever he brought up the idea that she might be turning on him, Christine smartly mentioned Cynthia George. Christine had admitted to Zaffino that CAPU officers were still showing up at her house and asking questions about him. But she insisted she was playing it cool and not telling them anything. “You need to be concerned about trusting
her,
” Christine said once. “Not me. You don’t even know Cindy. You don’t even know what she’s like. Who is she, John? Do you even know?”

Whenever Christine brought up Cynthia’s name, it rattled Zaffino and pushed him into changing the subject. But on this particular call, Zaffino broke into a rage centered on Christine and her “friends” talking to the police. He had heard the cops were moving in on her friends and interviewing them. He felt they would crack sooner or later and say something to hurt him.

Christine said, “Why don’t you just go in and talk to them yourself?”

“No f- - -ing way.”

“Well, if you didn’t do anything, as you say, then go talk to them. I’m sick and tired of them coming to my house talking to me about you.”

“F- - - them. I’m not saying nothing to them. I’ll get my lawyers.”

“Fine, then, John. I’m going to get me a lawyer, too.”

Once she said that, it was important Christine follow through, she said, because she knew Zaffino would check it out.

“That’s good,” Zaffino said. “Them cops will have to go through your attorney, not you.”