If Looks Could Kill (29 page)

Dave Whiddon and Vince Felber took a ride out to Christine’s house one day and asked her if she had a minute to listen to a tape. It was that threatening message somebody had left on Jeff Zack’s answering machine a few days before the murder. Whiddon and Felber believed it was Zaffino, but had a feeling it could be Seth, the guy in Florida Jeff Zack had quarreled with over that aluminum-siding project. Seth had passed a polygraph, but if the case against Zaffino ever made it to court, the CAPU had better be prepared to show it had investigated every potential suspect thoroughly. Zaffino had hired Larry Whitney, an attorney the CAPU had a long relationship with. Whitney was meticulous. He would attack the CAPU’s case on all sides.

Standing inside Christine’s kitchen, Whiddon put the tape into a recorder and pressed play: “All right, buddy, you’ve got one more out. You need to start carrying your cell phone, OK? I’ll be talking to you.”

Whiddon then looked at Christine for her immediate reaction. “So what do you think?”

Whiddon later wrote in his report, Christine stood and “immediately” said, “That’s definitely John. I cannot believe he was that stupid enough to leave a message on Jeff Zack’s machine before he killed him.” (Later, Whiddon told me, “There was no doubt in Christine’s mind that the voice was Zaffino’s. And, after we started recording his conversations with Christine, I, too, was convinced by listening to his voice on those tapes.”)

At about the same time, Russ McFarland drove over to the apartment complex and played the message for one of Zaffino’s neighbors. “It sounds like him,” she said, “but I cannot be sure.”

“Thanks,” McFarland said.

By the Fourth of July holiday, Whiddon had contacted Herbert Joe, a voice analysis expert. Out of his Texas laboratory, Joe’s firm did comparative examinations. Whiddon felt that since he had a few conversations recorded between Zaffino and Christine, Joe could take those samples, along with the voice mail message, and make a comparison.

Joe said it would take some time. He told Whiddon to send the tapes, along with the actual answering machine. Whiddon packaged everything up—including a sample of Seth’s voice—and sent it to Texas. (“I was told it was going take a long time for Herbert Joe to come up with an opinion.”)

CAPU officers were looking for a connection between Ed George and John Zaffino. The idea that Ed could have hired Zaffino couldn’t be ruled out. They believed the common denominator was Cynthia; however, there was, at this juncture, no proof that Cynthia George was anything more than Zaffino’s friend. To the CAPU, Cynthia was a bona fide—albeit, promiscuous—wife of a well-respected Akron businessman. They had to be careful. On paper, however, Cynthia looked more like the conduit through which a connection could be made between Ed George and Jeff Zack’s murder.

Captain Daugherty wanted more than speculation and theories, though. She knew there was something out there. During her career, Daugherty said later, she had always been attracted to the document side of investigating. She loved the tedious repetition of rummaging through scores of documents looking for a needle. For most investigators, the process of combing through thousands of pages of mind-numbing text is a part of the job they loathe. Yet Daugherty was from the school that believed documents, providing they hadn’t been tampered with, told a fairly truthful story. They could reveal parts of a case no other piece of evidence could. That being said, the best documents, Daugherty asserted, are bank and telephone records taken directly from the source. If you subpoena a bank or phone company and get those documents directly from them, no one has had a chance to manipulate them.

With that, Daugherty took out hundreds of pages of bank and telephone records connected to the Zack case that were stacked in several large boxes, sitting near her desk, and started to go through them, looking for, of course, any connection between Zaffino and Cynthia, or Zaffino and Ed George. “Generally speaking,” Daugherty explained to me later, “when you get bank records straight from a bank, the bank could care less about them, so we know they’re not altered.”

The CAPU had subpoenaed Cynthia George’s bank. The was no real plan as Daugherty sat down and started sifting through the records. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular, more like she was searching for something that stood out. But while looking at the day Zaffino had purchased the motorcycle, Daugherty noticed Cynthia had withdrawn $5,300 in cash. When she matched up the withdrawal with the price Zaffino paid for the bike, the amounts matched almost identically. More than that, within a five-hour window, Daugherty noticed as she checked the times, Cynthia had withdrawn the money and Zaffino had purchased the bike.

It could be a coincidence, sure. But if nothing else, it was enough to look deeper. In fact, the one glitch in the paperwork, Daugherty soon realized, at first seemed like a major hurdle to get around. When Daugherty noticed the close proximity in which the time of the withdrawal matched the sale of the bike, she called the bank to find out which branch, exactly, Cynthia had withdrawn the money from. She was trying to time the purchase against the sale of the bike: the location where Cynthia had taken out the cash as compared to the location where Zaffino had purchased the bike.

The bank representative told Daugherty the withdrawal was made in Michigan.

Michigan?
Daugherty wondered. It didn’t make sense. Why in the heck would Cynthia drive to Michigan to withdraw money when she could do it right in town?

Then again, Daugherty thought, maybe the trip was part of the plan? But after further analyzing it,
There’s no way,
Daugherty thought,
Cindy could have withdrawn the money in Michigan and made it to the bike shop in five hours.

Maybe she wired Zaffino the money?

After going through it over and over, Daugherty learned that she had given the bank rep the wrong set of routing numbers. The actual physical withdrawal, she found out after calling back and giving the woman the right numbers, was in Montrose, Ohio, a town that, centrally speaking, is in between Akron and Medina, where Cynthia lived with Ed and the kids. This, of course, made more sense. Yet, what further piqued Daugherty’s interest was that the bike shop was a twenty-minute drive from the bank. “I ended up,” Daugherty said later, laughing at her own mistake, “making several unnecessary phone calls and talking to a bunch of unnecessary people for unnecessary reasons because of a couple numbers I transposed.”

“It certainly started to look like Ed [George] was involved, once we found that connection between John Zaffino and Cindy George,” said one of the detectives. “We just had to prove it.”

On July 14, 2002, Christine Todaro decided to tighten the noose around John Zaffino’s neck with the hope of stirring a reaction. Her days of undercover work and sleuthing for the CAPU needed to end. It was excruciatingly nerve-racking, not to mention dangerous. Thus far, all those telephone calls and meetings between her and Zaffino hadn’t yielded what the CAPU could classify as a smoking-gun admission. Zaffino had been smart in one way, not giving Christine too much in the form of relative information regarding Jeff Zack’s murder and his possible connection to it.

“Hey,” Christine said when Zaffino picked up his telephone that night, “you really actually may be a suspect, you know that?” During their few previous conversations, they had talked about how much of a suspect the CAPU considered Zaffino. He would ask Christine what they had spoken to her about and, through her answer, try to gauge where the CAPU’s focus was heading.

“How the
f---
could I even be a suspect?” Zaffino said in a fit of aggression. “They just threaten.”

“Yeah, well…gotta check it out, I guess. There’s a lot of ins and outs—”

“Like what?”

“What you gave me.”

“Do
what?
” Zaffino misunderstood her.

“
Something
that you gave me.”

“What’d I give you?”

“You gave me those [bullets].”

“No,” Zaffino yelled. He was screaming mad that Christine had mentioned such a thing over the telephone.

“I mean, I don’t know what for.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, uh, why would you even talk like that, talk about stuff like that.” He started mumbling under his breath. Huffing and puffing.
Why would you talk about guns over the telephone?

“Because I want to make sure I don’t go to jail for any reason.”

“Well…”

“You have to tell me everything.”

“Well…,” Zaffino said. Christine could almost hear him laughing.

“Cause if I go there, then I don’t look like an idiot. That’s going to make me look bad in front of them, you know?” She was trying to convince him to give her something to feed to the CAPU. If he did that, they might get off her back.

“Well, who knows that other than you?” Zaffino asked.

“Nobody,” Christine responded.

“All right, then.”

Christine started talking about Cynthia, referring to her as “that chick.” How much did
she
know? Was Zaffino being careful?

“No, no, no,” he said smartly. “You know me better than that. That s- - -’s pissing me off.” Zaffino then broke into a tirade about the CAPU recording all of his telephone calls. He said he knew they were. And it didn’t matter what she told them in person, because now she was spouting off at the mouth over the telephone and perhaps giving them all they needed. He told Christine she needed to stop. “I told you they listen. They’re recording all my conversations right now.”

“You know that for a fact?” Christine asked. “He [Chris’s attorney] said he doubted that very much. They don’t even have that kind of technology over there.”

“He said that?” Zaffino seemed to calm down. It gave him a sense comfort to hear that Christine’s lawyer had disagreed.

“Yeah, he deals with them all the time.”

“He said they wouldn’t be listening to my calls?” He paused, then added, “Well, before you dig yourself a hole you can’t get out of, I would assume that they can.”

They decided to meet the following day. “But remember,” Zaffino warned, “you don’t talk to
anybody
…not even the pope.” He managed to sneak out a quick laugh. “
Anything
you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

The following morning, Christine called Zaffino and, being guided by Whiddon and Felber, tried the angry ex-wife approach, to see if she could get a rise out of him. “Hey, it’s me.”

“What?”

“I talked to my attorney. Now I
know
that you have been f- - - - - - lying to me for a long-ass time.”

There was a pause. Christine sounded angry.

“What are you talking about?” Zaffino wondered.

“Oh, how ’bout Cindy George?”

“What about her?”

“That you and her f- - - - - - ass were dating and I asked you about that specifically and you denied it.”

“Why would you say that?” he fumed.

“Because I asked you that when it started.”

“No, why would your attorney say that?”

Christine realized she had better think of something fast. She didn’t expect such a comment. “Because they’re…they’re checking things out. They know that you lived on [his former address]. They know that you, that she’s been over there and she knows and they know a lot more than that too, which I’ll get into later on today. But that’s one thing that I wanted to say to you over the phone. That’s f- - -ed up and—”

Zaffino cut her off. “Shut up…”

“And let me tell you something else while I’m talking to you and you’re going to listen to me.” Christine knew how to turn the tables. “That chick has f- - -ed around on him (Ed George) for years…”

“You gonna come meet me?”

“…and years and years and—”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yeah, I heard you.”

“Uh, meet me over where we meet up at—”

“What time?”

“Now.” Zaffino was livid. Christine could feel his negative, furious energy channeling through the telephone. But after he calmed down a bit, Christine explained that she had just gotten out of the shower and it would take her some time to get ready and drive to Fairlawn.

“An hour?” Zaffino wondered. He wanted a time. He was upset that it was going to take so long.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m pissed at you for that. I don’t appreciate it. That’s f- - -ed up and I’m telling you right now that she’s a whore and I hope you didn’t waste your whole life on that bitch, OK?”

It was the perfect statement. Get Zaffino to feel like he was taking the fall for someone else. Still, covering himself, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Cause I don’t, if you believe everything you hear, then you’re f- - -ed up.”

They both started yelling back and forth. Christine, to her credit, held tough. She said she didn’t appreciate being lied to. They had built their relationship since the cops started coming around on trust and she was put off that Zaffino had broken that agreement in some way. But it was all, of course, nonsense—a well-scripted, intelligent argument on Christine’s part.

“Well,” continued Christine, “I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

“Well, you can’t believe what you hear, I don’t want—”

“I do believe that…. Why else would she be at your house?”

“Well, who said that, first of all?”

“Huh?”

“Who in the hell said that?”

“I don’t know. There were people talking over there where you used to live. They know what you used to drive. They know everything about you, John…. That pisses me off. I sure hope it was worth it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Christine needed some time before they met, she said.

“Hurry up,” Zaffino urged.

A while later, Christine called him back to let him know she was on her way, further playing up her role, saying, “I’m so pissed at you. You have no idea how pissed off I am.”

“You have no idea how pissed off I am at
you
.”

“I don’t care how pissed you are at me. I really don’t care at this moment. I’m leaving here in fifteen minutes.”

“OK.”