If Looks Could Kill (32 page)

At about 2:30
P.M
., Dave Whiddon met with Summit County prosecutors Sherri Bevan Walsh and Mary Ann Kovach, as legal advisor Tom Dicaudo sat in on the meeting, listening to the conversation. Whiddon explained the case in full, detailing how thirty-six-year-old John Zaffino had become the CAPU’s prime suspect in the murder of Jeff Zack. The prosecutor’s office had been briefed about the case as the investigation continued over the course of the past year, but Whiddon was conducting a formal briefing that morning to assure everyone that he believed they finally had enough to bring Zaffino in.

Walsh, Dicaudo and Kovach, after several pertinent questions, unanimously agreed. And so an arrest warrant for John Zaffino was put into action.

At 3:30
P.M
., detectives from the APD’s narcotics unit drove over to Zaffino’s Rittman, Ohio, residence and knocked on the door.

Zaffino, it appeared, had been expecting them. He put up no fight and calmly agreed to be handcuffed and brought into the CAPU.

Inside interview room number three on the sixth floor of the APD, where the investigation had started so long ago, Whiddon and Felber waited, discussing how they were going to question Zaffino. Would he admit his role in Jeff Zack’s murder, or prove defiant and say he had nothing to do with it?

Felber read Zaffino his Miranda rights as the alleged murderer sat down. He looked tired, stressed, a bit beaten down, as if he’d been on the run, which, in a way, he had. “You can stop this interview,” Felber said a few times, just to make sure Zaffino understood, “anytime you want, and ask for your attorney. You understand that?”

“I spoke to Larry Whitney earlier today,” Zaffino said. “I told him I wanted to come down and talk to you guys. He told me not to come down. You guys would come to me.”

“Are you saying that you
want
to talk to your attorney?” Felber asked.

“I’ll answer your questions…. I have no idea what you’re going to ask.”

“You can stop this anytime you want and call Mr. Whitney, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Let’s go. I’ll answer your questions.”

Zaffino was playing it off as if he had nothing to hide. Still, he had been arrested on charges of aggravated murder. At the least, he had to offer some explanation.

Whiddon asked about the day of June 16, 2001. It was important to lock Zaffino down to an alibi. Get him to put a story on the table immediately.

“I was at Mike Frasher’s house that day…I don’t know, about ten
A.M
. And then I spent the rest of the day at the car show. Mike, Randy and Bob [Cole] all went to the car show with me. We spent the entire day there.”

Whiddon and Felber knew he was lying. They had several witnesses by then committed to a far different timeline.

“Do you know what time the murder of Jeff Zack occurred?” Felber asked.

“No. I didn’t even know about the Zack murder until…I read about it.”

“Two months ago, you mean?” Felber was referring to the anniversary article in the
Akron Beacon Journal
.

Zaffino nodded his head. “Yeah.”

After a while of back-and-forth chitchat, with Zaffino unwilling to answer questions in any detail, Felber threw Cynthia George’s name on the table and asked Zaffino about his relationship with her.

“She’s an acquaintance…someone I ride bikes with.”

“When did you last see Cindy?”

“Last week at Staples in Montrose. She asked me about going for a bike ride.” At some point after this, Zaffino said, he had spoken to Cynthia about the murder only because the police were asking several people he knew about his possible involvement.

Whiddon stepped up and asked Zaffino when he first heard about the murder. Repetition. Ask the same questions two, three, even four times—see how he reacted.

“My ex-wife told me about it when you guys came around asking her about it.”

And there it was: the first discrepancy. Two different stories regarding how he had heard about Jeff Zack’s murder.

“Did you know Jeff Zack?”

“I never met him. Never talked to him. I know nothing about him.”

“Did you know he had a relationship with Cindy?”

“No.”

Then the subject of motorcycles came up. Zaffino said “hell yeah” he had owned motorcycles. “All you have to do is check the motorcycle endorsement I have on my driver’s license.”

“What kind?”

“Honda,” he answered smartly. “What other kind is there? You should know, I still have it in my garage.”

As Whiddon started to ask another question, Zaffino hesitated and said, “I’d like to talk to Larry. I feel like you guys have one up on me.”

They concluded the interview and put him in a holding cell.

When Felber returned to his desk after interviewing Zaffino, he put in a telephone call to Christine Todaro. She deserved to hear, Felber knew, that they had finally arrested her ex-husband; her days of sneaking around, lying to the guy, looking over her shoulder, were over—at least for the time being. She could breathe a sigh of relief. On top of that, Felber had become close to Todaro. He genuinely cared for her and her children and worried about them.

“I was happy to finally have him off the streets,” Christine recalled later, “because I didn’t want him to find me and hurt my son or my dad like he claimed he would. But at the same time, I was sad for him, because he decided to throw his life down the toilet…. He was too stupid to realize that he was totally used by [a woman] for one purpose and one purpose only—to get rid of a problem that looked like it would never go away and that problem was Jeff Zack and his claim to his daughter. I cried for him. Then my next thought was, ‘Is he going to get out on bail? He knows for sure that I am working with the detectives now.’ I was frantic.”

The day before John Zaffino was arrested, Whiddon and Felber interviewed Robert “Bob” Cole, one of the three men the CAPU knew John Zaffino was using as an alibi for the day of Jeff Zack’s murder. What neither detective mentioned to Zaffino when they interviewed him was that Bob Cole had sold Zaffino out—in a big way.

Bob Cole was forty-eight years old. He still worked for North Canton Transfer, just coming up on his eighth year. He had known Zaffino for about two years. At times, Zaffino and Cole had spent ten, even twelve hours together in a truck, driving loads of goods all over the Ohio region. Bob Cole said Zaffino had told him that Cynthia had bought him the motorcycle, but beyond that, he said he really didn’t know much about her. Zaffino had kept his personal life “pretty vague,” Bob Cole added.

Whiddon wondered if there was anything else.

Bob Cole thought about it. He said Zaffino told him that Cynthia was having problems with an “old boyfriend who was bothering her, calling and going over to her place, harassing her, basically.”

“So this guy was going over to [Cindy’s] place?” Whiddon asked, pushing him to be more specific.

“Yeah…and, uh, apparently she must have said something to John and, and, ah, John took it upon himself to, you know, do something, or whatever.”

Bob Cole explained that he had spoken to Zaffino over the telephone about Jeff Zack. Zaffino told him he was “tired” of Zack bothering Cynthia and said he was going to do something about it.

“Did John ever talk to you about firearms, any weapons, anything like that?” Whiddon queried. It was worth a shot to ask. Felber and Whiddon had already heard Bob Cole sold Zaffino some guns, but they obviously wanted to hear it from him.

The witness said, “Yes. He bought, uh, two, two…handguns off me.”

Whiddon asked for a description of each.

“The first one I sold him was a Davis .32 caliber, chrome-plated with wooden handles. It was semiautomatic…. The second was a, uh, Smith and Wesson revolver. It was chrome-plated, model 66, with a four-inch barrel. It had wooden grips on it, too.”

Whiddon was intrigued by the statement.

After a pause, Bob Cole said, “It was a .357.”

Jeff Zack was murdered with a .357-caliber, copper-jacketed bullet. That much was known.

To the best of his recollection, Bob Cole said he had sold the .357 to Zaffino in March 2001.

Interestingly enough, at no time during the conversation did Bob Cole say Zaffino admitted that Cynthia George had specifically asked him to murder Jeff Zack. To the contrary, based on Bob Cole’s recollection, it would seem that Zaffino had come up with the plan himself and acted on his own behalf, perhaps with the thought that he was protecting his “girlfriend.”

On October 2, Vince Felber received a call from the Summit County Jail, where John Zaffino was being held. The sergeant on the other end of the line said that an inmate had walked up to him and claimed to have information about the Jeff Zack homicide. Felber made arrangements with the jail to have the inmate transported to the APD.

A few hours later, the guy was brought into an interview room. Whiddon asked him what he wanted to say. It wasn’t all that uncommon for prisoners to have sudden epiphanies regarding other inmates. Convicts wanted deals. Good investigators know this and even expect it. Whiddon and Felber weren’t inclined to cut anyone a deal; they had done well for themselves thus far and were building a strong circumstantial case against John Zaffino on their own.

This new source claimed he met Zaffino a few days before. They had both been to court and were put in the same holding cell. Zaffino’s court appearance was formal: he was officially charged and held on a whopping ten-million-dollar bond.

“He seemed lost,” the guy told Whiddon and Felber, “so I walked up to him and started talking. I asked him what he was in for.” According to the inmate, Zaffino said, “I’m being accused of shooting a guy at a gas station.” Further explaining the conversation, the informant added, “I could see he was uncomfortable with his surroundings, so I said, ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be OK. I’ve been in jail before. It’s no big deal.’”

This seemed to relax Zaffino, so he started talking more openly. “It has something to do with this girl I was f---ing all the time,” Zaffino explained to the guy. “[Her ex-boyfriend] owed me some money for some drugs and the girl wanted to get some insurance money.”

Was it a confession?

Hardly.

Was it from a reliable source?

Probably not.

Nonetheless, it told Whiddon and Felber something about John Zaffino—when put under enough stress, he might crack.

Heading into the first week of October, Dave Whiddon took a call from a detective in the narcotics unit who had spoken to Cuyahoga Valley National Park ranger Beverly Haywood. Apparently, Haywood had some information regarding a run in with John Zaffino. With Zaffino’s name now on the front page of the newspapers, Haywood recognized it.

The Cuyahoga Valley National Park is located in an isolated part of Cuyahoga Falls, between Stow and Akron. It spans several miles of woods, with glistening streams and nature trails coexisting against the backdrop of spectacular views of Ohio’s brilliant natural game and wildlife. A drive by the park during certain times of the year yields stunning views of herds—hundreds—of deer grazing in open fields. Coyote have been spotted in recent years, and sightings of bald eagles are not uncommon. According to the National Park Service, Cuyahoga Valley National is “a short distance from the urban environments of Cleveland and Akron…. [The] winding Cuyahoga—the ‘crooked river,’ as named by American Indians—gives way to deep forests, rolling hills, and open farmlands. The park is a refuge for flora and fauna, gives a sense of times past, and provides recreation and solitude for Ohio’s residents and visitors.”

More important to Whiddon, he knew that the bike trail running through the park was a popular meeting place for Cynthia George and Jeff Zack, when they used to ride bikes together. Speaking to Whiddon over the telephone, the ranger explained that her office, located in a whitewashed building no larger than a utility shed, situated right on the bike trail by a marvelous wooden bridge, had “contact” with John Zaffino on May 8, 2001.

After receiving the tip, Whiddon and Felber headed out to the ranger’s headquarters on Riverview Road. Just down the way from the office, maybe a mile or so, was one of several parking lots, this one angled perfectly adjacent to the beautiful red covered Everett Bridge, projected over the Crooked River on one side, and a very thickly settled wooded area going uphill across the street from the parking lot. Standing on the foothill, going up the beaten path, one had a clear view of the parking lot.

As Felber and Whiddon were about to learn, this was important.

When they arrived, Whiddon and Felber learned that Ranger Lois Neff was the first cop to have made contact with John Zaffino on the night of May 8. It was about 9:25
P.M
., according to Neff’s report. She had pulled into the Everett Bridge parking lot after noticing a green Ford Contour parked by itself. It was unusual to see a car at that time of the night.

With a feeling that something was wrong, Neff approached the car. She parked her cruiser in front of it so she could shine her headlights on it. Then she got out and started looking inside with a flashlight. Walking around the car slowly, Neff saw a “triangular-shaped gun case on the passenger floorboard” inside the vehicle.

It was empty.

Right away, Neff called for assistance. Then she got hold of the APD to run a check on the license plate. It was cool outside and quiet, just the chirp of crickets passing the night away. A foggy mist hung in the air just above the fields as Neff waited for a return call and wondered where the driver of the car was.

One of the things Neff had asked the APD to do was a “welfare check” regarding the owner of the car, whom she now knew to be John Zaffino. She was worried, albeit seeing a gun case without a gun, that the driver of the car had parked, taken his or her gun, then walked out into the woods to commit suicide.

Very soon, backup arrived. As the two rangers sat together and waited, Zaffino came out of the woods across the street—the foothill—and walked slowly into the parking lot. Both rangers approached Zaffino, shining a flashlight in his face. “What are you doing out here?”

Zaffino seemed spooked. He didn’t speak at first.

“What’s going on with the empty gun case?” one of the rangers asked.

“Oh, shit, my gun is at home,” Zaffino said.

“We’re going to have to pat you down, sir.”

“I’m a truck driver, you know, I have to carry a gun sometimes.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Well,” Zaffino started to say with a look of embarrassment on his face, “I’ve been out here about three hours waiting for my…my girlfriend. She’s married. She just called me and told me she’s not coming.”

“Look, before you leave, put that gun case in your trunk. OK?”

“Sure,” Zaffino said.

With nothing to hold him on, the rangers let him go.

Whiddon and Felber were amazed by the story; however, what did it mean in the scope of the investigation? The date was close to the day Jeff Zack was murdered. Why was Zaffino in the woods that night? Who was he meeting? Was it Cynthia George?

Ranger Beverly Haywood then explained what happened on her shift eight days later. It was May 16. A quiet night. Not much going on. After receiving a call to go check something out in the park, Haywood ran into a man named David Amstutz. “Hey, Ranger,” he said as she approached, “I found a loaded handgun out in the woods.”

“Can you show me where?”

They walked from the Everett Bridge parking lot, across the street from the woods—the same parking lot where the rangers had questioned Zaffino—and up Furnace Run Trail, where Zaffino had come walking out on the night of May 8. Amstutz explained that he had been out in the woods, about five feet off the main trail, sixty paces from the trail entrance, looking for wild mushrooms, when he came upon the gun just lying there on the ground underneath some brush. It appeared to be placed there and covered over, not so much dropped. The gun was fully loaded—six rounds. It was a semiautomatic, chrome-plated Davis Industries .32 caliber, with a 2½-inch barrel—the exact type of weapon, in fact, Robert Cole had claimed he sold Zaffino.

“The parking lot where Zaffino’s car was parked,” Whiddon said later, “and the trail where the man found the gun were directly adjacent to each other. Vince [Felber] and I walked up the trail at night and stood where the gun was found and we could clearly see the parking lot. We believe John Zaffino was going to kill Jeff Zack in the woods that night after Cynthia George called Zack and asked him to meet her there. But something happened and they ended up calling it off.”

The park rangers gave Whiddon and Felber a Polaroid of the gun and told them they had sent the gun itself to the Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BCI) for fingerprinting and ballistics, as well as a sample of Zaffino’s prints.