If Looks Could Kill (3 page)

During the early-afternoon hours of June 16, 2001, Sergeant Ed Moriarty was sitting at his desk doing what most cops hated: paperwork. Mounds of reports in front of him that needed his attention. In charge of a unit that investigated everything from homicide to home invasions, Moriarty had been at the office on a weekend because it was, as he called it, “
his
Saturday.” He and the other sergeants rotated weekends.

The detective’s bureau of the APD is on the sixth floor of the Harold K. Stubbs Justice Building in downtown Akron, just across the block from the university. The sixth floor is a rather plain-looking office space, stretched along the entire distance of the building, with whitewashed walls on one side and police blue on the other. Standing, looking beyond the desk that greets you as you walk off the elevator, it seems like nothing more than another cubicle farm. Detectives sit in four-by-four-feet areas in front of computers and wait for cases.

After a rather calm morning of normal calls, a “SIG 33”—white-male shooting victim—came in. There was a problem with a middle-aged man with white hair at the BJ’s Wholesale Club warehouse fuel pumps over at Home Avenue in North Akron. A white male, in his forties, had been found slumped over in his SUV, but nurses and doctors on scene at the time of the crime had pulled him out of his vehicle and were now working on him by the fuel pumps.

When the call came in, dispatch asked one of the 911 callers (there would be several), “Where is the victim?”

A man at the scene said, “He is in his car at the gas station. A motorcycle [driver] drove up and shot him apparently, I did not witness this….”

A few more questions aside, the man continued—“I don’t know,” he said frantically, “here, talk to this lady.” He handed the telephone off to a woman standing near him.

She said, “Hi.”

Details were important at this tenuous stage. They were fresh in each witness’s mind. The astute dispatcher knew what questions to ask in order to pull imperative information out of each caller. “What color was the motorcycle?” the dispatcher asked the lady. When she didn’t get an answer right away, she asked again, slower: “What.
Color.
Was. The.
Motorcycle
?”

“Green and black, hon,” the woman said with a bit of Southern hospitality in her voice, adding, “that new limey green color.” Listening, one could almost see the woman waving her hands in the air as she talked.

“Lime green and black?” Dispatch wanted to pin her down.

“Yeah.”

“One driver and a passenger? Or just
one
driver?”

This was important. Good question.

“Just a driver, hon. It was one of those hot rod crotches, you know those—”

Dispatch cut her off. “Like those Ninja type?”

“Yeah,” the lady said excitedly, “those Ninja-type ones, hon.”

Then they discussed the driver. He or she was wearing a helmet with a face shield. Dressed all in black. He or she shot the guy and took right off. It was quick. Everyone in the area ran toward the sound of the gunshot.

Three more calls came in within the next two minutes. Each described the same set of circumstances. One said nurses and doctors had pulled the victim out of his vehicle and was giving him CPR.

When Ed Moriarty heard what had happened, he sent several detectives to the scene immediately. Police officers from the neighboring town of Cuyahoga Falls were already arriving.

After being notified of what had taken place at BJ’s, monitoring the situation and assigning units, Moriarty thought,
Son of a bitch
.
Not BJ’s.
A Saturday afternoon at BJ’s was as busy as a flea market on Sunday morning.
Damn. All those people.

Moriarty, a commanding, thin figure at six-two, in solid shape, was Irish to the core. Flushed-red complexion. Straight hair, parted in the middle, cut conservatively around his ears and neckline. He exuded authority and handled situations in a calm manner.

“You didn’t want to piss off Ed Moriarty,” said one former underling. “Great detective. Awesome person. One of the best people I know. But damn, he could snap—it’s that Irish temper, you know—at any moment. And you didn’t want to be near Ed when he lost his temper.”

After sending several units to the scene, Moriarty grabbed his radio and car keys and ran into the elevator himself. A routine Saturday morning of paperwork had turned into a possible homicide investigation. There weren’t many in Akron. But when they came in, a flush of excitement enveloped detectives like Ed Moriarty and on came that bursting adrenaline rush.

A killer was on the loose. It was time to get out there and begin the hunt.

Somewhere between fate and self-fulfilling prophecy, destiny—that sometimes shallow, if not horrific, place some say is paved with self-interest—waits patiently for its next victim. When forty-four-year-old Jeffrey Zack left his house that Saturday morning, he was dressed in a white T-shirt, checkered shorts, a black leather belt. Jeff, along with his wife and son, lived in an unassuming raised-ranch-style home in Stow, Ohio. Tan siding with cranberry shutters and a redbrick face, the Zacks had a nice little comfortable piece of suburbia. From the outside, the only thing missing was the white picket fence and a barking dog.

Before leaving his home in the Temple Trail neighborhood just outside downtown Stow, about six miles north of Akron, Jeff and his wife of many years, Bonnie, got into a bit of an argument on the morning of June 16. For Bonnie and Jeff, the arguments had become more frequent lately. Jeff was “on edge,” Bonnie later told police, “all the time.” He and Bonnie had a thirteen-year-old son,
Ashton,
but their life together had become a tangled mess of alleged affairs, fights and threats of divorce.

Jeff’s mom, Elayne Zack, had called. It was the morning before Father’s Day. Jeff had been gone for a few days and had just gotten home the day before. Bonnie had a list of things for him to do around the house. Ashton was on the couch, just waking up. It was around 9:00
A.M
.

Jeff was “agitated,” Bonnie recalled to police later, from the moment he opened his eyes. He asked Ashton to help him move the kitchen table. He needed to get at a light fixture above it and make a quick repair.

When Ashton didn’t move on Jeff’s cue, Jeff started yelling at the boy. When that didn’t work, Jeff yelled some more. Ashton, upset, went up into his room.

With no one around to fight with, Jeff screamed at Bonnie. “I don’t know what your problem is,” she quipped back. “Geez, Jeff.”

Bonnie went upstairs and started cleaning. Jeff went downstairs and jumped on the computer.

Sometime later, Jeff came back upstairs and, as Bonnie later put it, “started stomping around” nervously.

Something was going on with the guy. He hadn’t been home but for a few days and here he was yelling and screaming at everyone the first chance he got.

“You know, just…let’s not have a fight,” Bonnie pleaded. “Let’s just settle down. Let’s go shopping or something. I want to get some stuff done because everybody’s coming over tomorrow. Let’s just have a
nice
day, because you’ve been out of town.”

Jeff walked toward Bonnie. “Get out of my way! I found something better,” he said sharply, as if he meant it this time.

Bonnie walked out of the room in a huff.

“I got to go take care of my vending stuff,” Jeff said grumpily.

“Fine, Jeff. You go do that, then.”

By now, it was about 11:30
A.M
.

Besides a vending machine business, which included about one hundred machines Jeff had scattered throughout the Akron region, which he generally serviced on weekends, he had any number of different jobs. Construction work. Landscaping. Sales. Helping illegal aliens obtain visas. A recycling company. Brick mason. Anything, it seemed, where he could earn a buck. On Saturdays, though, Jeff always took Ashton with him to help restock his vending machines. Jeff loved his son, no doubt about it. His pride and joy.

This day was different, however. As Jeff prepared to leave, he decided against taking Ashton with him.

Before Jeff left, he started in with Bonnie one more time. As they fought, Ashton, who was still in his room, heard his father scream, “I’m leaving and moving out and not coming back!”

“Settle down,” Bonnie said.

“I’m outta here and getting a divorce.”

Ashton knew his father would never go through with it. The kid had heard it for years. “My dad always said things like that,” Ashton told police later, “when he was mad, but I knew he would never leave us.”

“Be calm, Jeff,” Bonnie said, trying to talk some sense into her husband.

“You’ll see what it’s like when I’m gone. You won’t know
what
to do without me. You need me to…do
everything
around here.” Jeff was animated, waving his hands in the air. Huffing and puffing. Pacing. Nervous. Agitated.

In any event, after arguing with Bonnie and “shoving” her out of his way a second time, Jeff grabbed his sandals, “stomped” down the stairs, and walked out of the house. Bonnie was watching him get into his SUV from the upstairs bedroom window. “I saw him throw his shoes in the back of [his SUV] and speed away,” Bonnie reported later. It was unlike Jeff to not wear shoes out of the house. “He was very much definitely in a hurry.”

Before heading down to the Akron BJ’s to gas up his Ford Explorer and purchase supplies for his vending machines, Jeff stopped at a neighborhood yard sale right around the corner from his Temple Trail house. Later, the APD’s crimes against persons unit (CAPU), fronted by Ed Moriarty, speculated that a man or woman on a black-and-green Ninja-style motorcycle was waiting down the street from Jeff’s house, possibly by the yard sale, waiting for him to leave his house.

As Ed Moriarty and his team headed to BJ’s, Jeff Zack lay on the ground by the fuel pumps, fighting for his life. He had a single bullet wound through his head, which had entered his left cheek and exited just underneath his right earlobe. It was a good shot. Perfect placement. As Moriarty was about to learn, Jeff was not the most likeable victim the APD had come in contact with. In fact, in many ways, Jeff’s dark blue Ford Explorer SUV was a symbol of the type of person some later said he had become: overbearing, arrogant, pushy, guarded. Such a big truck, with its oversized tires, high bumpers and gas-guzzling engine. Jeff was a hulking six-five, 232 pounds. Fluent in several languages, he had brown eyes, concrete gray-white hair, and dark black eyebrows. Many said he was a pain in the ass, always making accusations against people he did business with. Someone was always ripping Jeff off, or giving him a problem. He was paranoid. Jumpy. Vulgar toward people. Bullying some, while threatening others.

Did one of those disgruntled friends or colleagues (former or current) finally have enough of Jeff’s foul mouth and tough-guy tactics? Apparently, from the look of things at BJ’s, someone surely had it in for Jeff Zack and had followed through on a desire to see him dead.

Pulling in, Moriarty realized his earlier instincts were going to be his first problem. BJ’s was packed with cars. But the crowd gathered now wasn’t preparing to make a run on some special sale; people were curious about the guy on the ground—still breathing, according to the doctor and nurses treating him—who had blood all over his shirt and a bullet wound in his head.

“What the hell happened?” asked one guy standing by, looking on. The local Cuyahoga Falls Police Department (CFPD), which had sent a series of officers to the scene, had managed to fend off curious bystanders and rubber-neckers. It wasn’t every day a man was shot on a Saturday afternoon in the parking lot of BJ’s in Akron.

“Is he alive?” asked another.

“Dunno,” said a guy standing by, looking on.

“Did someone shoot him?”

No one knew.

Moriarty got out of his car and approached a few uniformed officers who had gotten there within seven minutes of receiving the first 911 call at 12:09
P.M
. By now, they had secured the scene with yellow crime-scene tape, keeping onlookers at a distance. There were a lot of witnesses, Moriarty was informed right away. Officers separated everyone and explained that detectives would soon be asking questions.

“No one leaves,” Moriarty barked at the officers circling around the scene, “until they have given us a statement.”

Uniformed officers said they understood.

“Good,” Moriarty told one of his detectives when he heard how many witnesses were willing to talk. “We need every statement we can get.”

Insofar as a homicide investigation is concerned, one statement can make all the difference, sometimes even months or years down the road. Moriarty knew this. He didn’t want to miss the opportunity. “It’s amazing how witnesses can be so contradictory,” Moriarty recalled. “You still need that, however. It’s incredibly important. Some like to embellish. Some want to withhold. Some just talk to hear themselves talk. And you have to be able to sort through that kind of thing. But every single statement is relevant. And most people try their best to give accurate accounts.”

Walking around the scene, Moriarty lit a cigarette and began thinking about what the CAPU had. What struck him first was the accuracy of the shooter. Jeff Zack’s attacker had taken one shot, apparently, and that one bullet—a money shot if there ever was one—had hit Jeff in the head.
It was a well-placed shot,
the veteran cop thought, standing to the driver’s side of Jeff’s truck, looking at the path of the bullet.

Moriarty noticed next that both windows of Jeff’s truck had been shattered by the bullet, which meant they had a potential piece of evidence on the scene if they could locate it.

“There’s a bullet fragment out there somewhere,” Moriarty mentioned to one of the detectives standing by his side. “Let’s find it.” He threw his cigarette butt on the ground and twisted it out with the sole of his shoe.

“That’s one of the things I knew I wanted to have right away,” Moriarty commented later, “that projectile. No matter what.”

As detectives combed the area looking for any type of evidence, Moriarty began to consider what kind of crime they were dealing with. Many different scenarios ran through his mind as he talked it over with detectives. The crime scene itself, for example, might make the attack appear to be a random act. You have a large SUV and, according to the 911 calls, a Ninja-style motorcycle involved. Perhaps Jeff Zack pissed off some young kid on the road, cut him off or something, and the biker decided to get back at him.

The key to it all was the fact that there was only one shot fired.

The other possibility, Moriarty surmised, was: “Did they know each other and was this an ongoing feud of some sort?”

Moriarty had worked in the organized crime unit for years. He, along with several undercover officers from Akron and Cleveland, were responsible for one of the largest organized crime busts of the past twenty years in Ohio. Standing, sizing up the scene, the thought occurred to him—and how could it not have—that someone had perhaps sanctioned a professional hit on Jeff Zack.

But then the question became “why?”

As members of the CAPU continued questioning witnesses and collecting evidence, having been involved in over one hundred homicide cases throughout his career, Ed Moriarty knew for certain that what had started out as an otherwise peaceful Saturday afternoon of pencil-pushing and bean-counting had been interrupted by one of the more intriguing whodunits the APD had been involved with in quite some time. And as witness statements began to roll in and the APD started to unravel Jeff Zack’s life, the case would only become that much more disturbing and unique. As the CAPU would soon learn, it wasn’t going to be a matter of finding out who killed Jeff Zack, but rather how many different people had a motive.

Or, as Ed Moriarty later put it, learning “who
didn’t
kill Jeff Zack.”