If Looks Could Kill (31 page)

The CAPU knew its days of using Christine Todaro as an informant were finished. They agreed she should never meet Zaffino again; but she shouldn’t necessarily cut off all ties with him. It would look too suspicious. “Just keep making excuses not to meet him until we can figure out what to do next,” Whiddon explained to her.

Christine wanted more than ever for the CAPU to arrest her ex-husband. Why couldn’t they drag Zaffino in now and get him behind bars so she could stop looking over her shoulder? Didn’t they have enough?

The short answer was no. They needed more—much more.

With that, the investigation into Zaffino’s whereabouts during the time period of the murder became a priority. Also, where was the murder weapon? It had to be somewhere—yet, in theory, it could be anywhere. Felber and Whiddon held out hope they’d eventually find it, but knew it was a long shot.

The next telephone call between Zaffino and Christine failed to yield much in the form of any evidence the CAPU could use. Christine had moved again. Zaffino had no idea where she lived. But on July 24, Zaffino called, saying he wanted to stop by. “I bought a new Ford Expedition. It’s green with a mocha bottom panel.” He seemed to be bragging, like a new truck would impress her.

“John, what are you going to do?” Christine asked. Then she said something about the cops showing up at her door, pressuring her to talk.
You can’t just ignore the situation and call and talk about a truck like your life is going fine.

“I’m going in to talk to them next week,” Zaffino promised.

She didn’t believe him. When they hung up, she called Felber right away to tell him what was going on. “Thanks,” Felber said. “Keep us informed.”

Later that same day, a reporter from the
Akron Beacon Journal
called the CAPU. Whiddon took the call. “I heard that the hit man’s ex-wife was working with you guys?” the reporter asked.

Son of a gun.
“No comment,” Whiddon said. “I have to go.”

With this new development, the CAPU needed to keep the pressure on Zaffino by interviewing everyone it could to find out how deeply involved he actually was. Cynthia, too, had become a suspect. The more Whiddon and Felber looked into the relationship Cynthia had with Zaffino, they more they realized that they needed to talk to her. But arresting Zaffino was the CAPU’s main focus—and on August 8, 2002, things finally began to move in that direction. Whiddon and Felber, who had basically taken over the investigation as a team, spoke to
Albert Stevens,
an inmate at the North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility in Grafton, Ohio. Stevens said he knew a woman, Mary Ann Brewer, who had worked for the George family as a nanny for the better part of thirteen years. Mary Ann had essentially lived in the George mansion, or spent enough time there—from 8:00
A.M
. to generally 10:00
P.M
.—to claim she had.

A convicted thief, Stevens lived next door to Brewer, and, through that relationship, had been hired by Ed George as a handyman and carpenter to do some work around the house. “I remember,” Stevens said after Whiddon read him his rights, “being there the day of the murder and Ed speaking to Mary Ann.”

“What’d Ed say?” Whiddon asked.

“He told her that if the police approached her, she was not to say anything and tell them to speak to his attorney.”

“What about [Ruby]?”

“I knew she was Jeff Zack’s daughter.”

“How?”

“Just by watching the way she was treated…. I also knew Cindy and Zack were lovers. One of the girls, I heard, had caught them kissing in an upstairs bedroom. I also saw them myself holding hands and acting as if they were more than just friends.”

“Why did Mary Ann stop working for them?”

“She told me it was too much work.”

“You know anything about Jeff Zack?”

“Mary Ann told me Zack came and went at will and she asked Ed why he allowed it.” But Stevens said Mary Ann never told him what Ed had said about it.

When Whiddon and Felber left the prison, it was rather obvious where they needed to go next. “Let’s put in a call to Mary Ann Brewer,” Whiddon suggested.

Mary Ann Brewer was a hardworking sixty-seven-year-old woman, who probably knew more about Cynthia and Ed George than they knew about themselves. She had, for the most part, raised all of the George children. Cynthia was rarely ever home, Mary Ann later said in court. She was always out and about, working out at the gym, bike riding, or just gallivanting around town, doing God knows what. Ed, on the other hand, was a dedicated father, she testified. He dropped the kids off at school every day, took the kids to dance classes and sporting events, and did all he could as their father.

When Whiddon and Felber caught up with Mary Ann a few days after speaking to Stevens, she seemed at first a bit apprehensive about talking, but soon warmed up to them. She had felt slighted by then, Whiddon told me later. She had raised the children and Cynthia had not only turned her back on her, but, in her opinion, she also believed Cynthia was beginning to turn the children against her, too.

Mary Ann told detectives one of the kids had just been over to visit her. Cynthia’s daughter told Mary Ann that her father, Ed George, had been “kicked out of the bedroom and was sleeping on the couch.” Cynthia and Ed were having serious problems. Cynthia had retreated inward. Closed up. She wasn’t talking to many of her friends. Once a woman who would go out on the town to clubs and frequent bars in Cleveland, Cynthia hadn’t been hanging around with anyone lately.

“Did Cindy ever talk to you about Jeff Zack?” Whiddon asked.

She hesitated. “Yeah, well, she said she was afraid of him, that’s why she wouldn’t break up with him…. Cindy had a black eye once and told me that Zack had hit her and that’s how she got it.” In the coming days, two more of Cynthia’s friends, on separate occasions, would tell detectives the same thing about the black eye Cynthia once had.

Mary Ann talked about the children, who were, Whiddon and Felber could easily tell, an important part of her life. She missed them dearly. It pained Mary Ann to speak of them in the past tense. Taking care of them had been more than a job; she loved them.

Whiddon took out a photograph of John Zaffino and asked Mary Ann if she had ever seen him.

She thought about it. “He definitely looks familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen him, but I just don’t know where.”

After giving Whiddon and Felber the address and telephone number of a family who had lived on the George property in a farmhouse for about ten years, Whiddon promised they’d be back. He asked Mary Ann to call them if she thought of anything else, no matter how insignificant.

Mary Ann said she understood.

Over the next several weeks, Whiddon and Felber spoke to several of Cynthia George’s close friends, all of whom were, according to the reports filed by Whiddon, “sneaky” in some aspect of their responses to questions. One woman hired an attorney, saying she wanted to “protect her friend.” Throughout it all, they got nowhere. Time and again, they heard that Cynthia was an upstanding citizen who had a “great marriage.”

Meanwhile, John Zaffino found out where Christine had moved and began to harass her in his own self-indulgent way. One night, while he was drunk, Zaffino called to say he was coming over. It was close to 2:30
A.M
.

“You know what time it is?” Christine lashed out. “No, you’re not coming over here.”

“Go buy some beer,” he said, “I’m bringing a friend.”

“Go get your beer somewhere else—you’re
not
coming over here.”

Christine hung up.

Zaffino called back.

“Go get some beer. I’m coming over to have sex with you.” Zaffino sounded belligerent and crude, laughing.

“Where’s your
girlfriend,
John? Call
her.
”

“What girlfriend?”

Christine hung up.

Zaffino kept calling. So Christine, after several more calls, stopped answering the telephone. Zaffino left a threatening message, saying he was on his way over.

Christine left and went over to a friend’s house for the night with her son.

A few days later, Zaffino called and asked her to meet him behind the Tangier. “I need to talk to you,” he said.

“No way.”

Christine was terrified by this point. She wanted nothing to do with Zaffino and felt she needed protection. The CAPU had cops from the town Christine lived in keep an eye on her apartment best they could—just in case Zaffino decided to show up. When she spoke to Zaffino again a day later, he said he was going to “kill” her and Fred Abers “with a handgun.”

“I need you to arrest him,” Christine told Felber after receiving the message from Zaffino.

“We’re working on it,” Felber told her.

With that, Christine told Whiddon and Felber that she remembered something. “John told me [a while back] that he got Cindy pregnant once and she ended up getting an abortion.” Later, Christine told me, “He [also] said that she had a miscarriage. He told me that for two reasons. I would not have a child by him—he thought it would hurt me, I guess—and just to try to hurt my feelings.”

Neither of which worked, Christine added.

As the end of August approached, Christine went out to her car one morning to find it had been keyed. She knew it was Zaffino trying to send her a message. Things were escalating quickly. Something needed to be done—quickly—about John Zaffino.

On September 20, Detective Mike Shaeffer was sitting at his desk, studying an unrelated case, when his telephone rang. “Persons unit,” Shaeffer said in his soft, comforting voice.

“Detective, this is Russell Forrest.”

“How have you been, Russell?”

Forrest explained that Zaffino’s son had just celebrated a birthday and his father had given him some money, with which the boy went out and purchased a BB gun. While they were eating dinner one night a few days ago, Forrest explained, the subject of guns came up as table talk. “He told us,” Forrest said, “that his dad previously had a gun. He described it to us as a .45 pistol revolver with a large wooden handgrip, a large barrel, and chrome-plated. He said his dad kept it in a plastic case.”

“No kidding. Did he mention anything else about that?”

“He told us that someone named ‘Cindy’ had bought the gun for his dad,” Forrest continued.

“Anything else?”

“No. But I thought that was important.”

“It is. Thanks. If the boy says anything else, let us know.”

Forrest’s information was helpful, but it didn’t prove anything. The break the CAPU needed to arrest John Zaffino finally came on September 24, at 11:03
A.M
., when Whiddon and Felber took a chance and drove over to North Canton Transfer, the company Zaffino had worked for. They spoke to a guy who had worked with Zaffino and knew him fairly well. He said he had talked to Zaffino just two weeks ago. Zaffino had stopped by looking for work. “I don’t like him much,” the guy added. “We didn’t get along well. But I know Mike Frasher and Bob and Randy Cole do like him.”

When Felber and Whiddon left, they had a feeling the guy was leaving something out. He seemed to be hiding information, like he didn’t want to get involved. Sure enough, later that day, the head of security for North Canton Transfer called Felber and told him that the guy they had spoken to earlier had come up to him after they left.

“What did he say?” Felber wondered.

“He said Bob Cole told him that he was sure Zaffino was going to do something like a homicide and that he had tried to talk him out of it.”

Whiddon and Felber had spoken to Bob Cole the previous day, but he hadn’t mentioned this. So Felber called his connection at North Canton Transfer after receiving the information from the security guard. “Look,” he said, “Bob told me that he knew John was going to do something to his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend and Bob Cole had tried to talk him out of it.”

For Felber and Whiddon, it all seemed to lead back to Mike Frasher.

Whiddon and Felber pulled into Mike Frasher’s Canal Fulton, Ohio, residence at 8:32
P.M
. on September 24. Frasher, they believed, was the key to getting an arrest warrant signed for John Zaffino. What would become an important part of the investigation later on, Frasher’s Leaver Road address in Canal Fulton was a 19.5-mile, twenty-minute ride from Home Avenue in Akron, where Jeff Zack had been shot in the head—even a shorter ride on a Ninja-style motorcycle.

“Bob Cole called me earlier today,” Frasher said. “He told me you guys were around, asking questions about John Zaffino and a murder.” Then Frasher explained that Zaffino used to live up the street from him, adding, “John used to come up to my house last winter a lot for dinner. We became close. He doesn’t have many friends, you know. I was probably closer to him than anyone.” Continuing, as Whiddon and Felber listened, Frasher said he knew Zaffino was “dating a woman who owned the Tangier. I met her at John’s on more than one occasion.”

For Whiddon and Felber, Zaffino’s relationship with Cynthia George, as they talked to Frasher, took on an entirely new arrangement. It appeared that Zaffino, at least from what Frasher believed, was a kept man. It wasn’t a simple work-related relationship, as Zaffino had said. “She would stop at John’s daily. She drove a Jeep Wrangler and a Ford Expedition. She pursued John. She even convinced him to quit his job so they could get together anytime she wanted.” As Frasher spoke, he shifted his language: from using the pronouns “her” and “she” to “Cindy,” without being told by the detectives that they knew he was talking about Cynthia George. “Cindy was paying his bills. He told me that the motorcycle he had, Cindy bought it.” (Mike Frasher would later testify in court to this same allegation.)

It was important to Felber and Whiddon that Frasher referred to the woman as “Cindy,” because they had never mentioned her name.

Suddenly, Frasher explained, Cynthia ran out of money for Zaffino. So he had to get a job anodizing machine parts.

“Did John ever mention any problems
she
was having with an ex-boyfriend?”

“No.”

They asked Frasher when he last spoke to Zaffino. Frasher said it was the previous day—and the telephone call scared him. “He told me to keep my mouth shut. He said, ‘I’m being set up and now you’re involved.’”

This comment was quite alarming to Frasher. He thought he was good friends with Zaffino. For crying out loud, Frasher’s wife used to cook the guy dinner and invite him to the house to eat over because she knew he was broke and had little money for food.

Is this the way you treat a friend?

Above all else, when Frasher spoke to Zaffino the last time, Zaffino made a point to talk about “the day” of the murder. He reminded Frasher—
listen carefully
—that he was “sitting” on his “porch” on the day of the murder.

“Was he at your house that day?” Whiddon wanted to know.

“Yeah. It was the day of the Massillon Car Show. We did talk on my porch. My wife and I had to go to a wedding that day, that’s how I remember it so well. John came over and asked me to go to the car show with him.”

“What time was the wedding?”

“Around five o’clock.” Whiddon looked at Felber. “I spoke to John on the porch until my wife was ready and then I got ready.”

“Did he leave?”

“Yes. He said he was going to hook up with the Cole brothers and go to the [car] show.”

The wedding was at 3:00
P.M
., Whiddon later found out. But either way, it didn’t matter. The timing worked. It was vital information. Frasher was certain it was well after noon, which gave Zaffino enough time to commit the murder and head over to Canal Fulton, meet with Frasher, develop a timeline and then possibly meet the Cole brothers and head out to the car show.

“My nephew got married that day,” Frasher later recalled in court, “and that’s the only reason I really remember that day, that car show…. I had originally told them (Whiddon and Felber) the wedding was at five o’clock and come to find out the wedding was at three. The
reception
was at five….”

A crucial point Frasher later made was that Zaffino was likely at his house on June 16, 2001, between 12:40 and 12:45
P.M
. He was wearing, Frasher later explained, jeans and a T-shirt. He was acting “normal.” Even more important, Zaffino wasn’t driving his green-and-black motorcycle; he was driving a Ford Contour.

What did this mean? Well, Zaffino lived six houses away from Frasher—which allowed him plenty of time to stop at home, change, park the bike and make it to Frasher’s by 12:40
P.M
.

Leaving Frasher’s, Whiddon was convinced that they had enough to present an arrest warrant to the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office.

John Zaffino called Christine Todaro early the next morning. She was getting ready for the day, drying her hair, putting on makeup. As soon as the telephone rang, she knew who it was.

Damn it all.
“What do you want? I’m busy.”

“Hold on, hold on,” Zaffino said. He sounded different. Worried. In a rush. “Have the cops been to see you? Have you
talked
to them this morning?”

What else could she say? “No.” This time it was an honest answer. (“I could hear the panic in his voice,” Christine later recalled. “I tried to question him, but he wasn’t going to answer me. So we hung up.”)

Christine immediately telephoned Felber. He wasn’t around. Then she tried Whiddon. He, too, was gone.