If Looks Could Kill (35 page)

Four days after Christine Todaro lit up the courtroom with her story, perhaps sinking Zaffino’s ship in the process, after a total of twenty-seven witnesses—five of whom were called by Larry Whitney on Zaffino’s behalf—the jury heard closing arguments.

Whitney argued that the evidence against his client was strictly circumstantial, that Zaffino had maintained his innocence since the day the CAPU had him on its radar, and there was nothing the state provided that should convince them he had murdered Jeff Zack. A white-haired Israeli and some tape-recorded conversations, an ID of a voice mail and a roll of duct tape, weren’t enough to convict a man of murder and condemn him to a life behind bars.

The jury had obviously been sold on the notion that there could be no other person responsible for Jeff Zack’s murder than John Zaffino. Because after fewer than four hours of deliberations—one of which they spent breaking for lunch—John Zaffino was found guilty of aggravated murder.

While Zaffino was being led out of the courtroom in utter amazement that he had been convicted on such shoddy, circumstantial evidence, security later reported that he cried his way to jail.

One of Zaffino’s relatives, who was in attendance every day of the trial, bolted from the courtroom after hearing the verdict, running into the street in tears.

During Zaffino’s sentencing on March 17, 2003, Bonnie Zack finally got her chance to address the man who had killed the father of her son. Here was another victim of this tragedy, a woman who had sat through rigorous questioning by the CAPU, a polygraph test, and heard detectives describe a husband who had cheated on her time and again. Yet Bonnie was an empathetic human being if there ever was one; she had accepted Jeff Zack’s flaws, raised their child and, by middle age, been through more emotional pain than most see in a lifetime. Now it was Bonnie’s turn to express
her
feelings. To speak out. To tell the man who had killed her husband
exactly
what she felt. She had seen and heard enough.

Through the first few words of her impact statement, Bonnie Zack pointed to the white elephant that had been sitting in the courtroom during the entire trial. “If it wasn’t for Cindy George,” Bonnie said in open court, “my husband wouldn’t have been shot, my son wouldn’t have lost his father and you (John Zaffino) wouldn’t be looking forward to spending the rest of your life in jail. You are just the fall guy. Do you think [Cindy] cares about you now? Are you willing to take all the heat for this and let her continue to live her extravagant lifestyle?”

Bonnie held Ashton’s hand as she spoke. But she had gotten it out of her system. There, she had said it:
Cynthia George
. Where was her head? People wanted Cynthia to be next in line. Even jurors later said they wondered throughout the trial why Cynthia hadn’t been sitting next to Zaffino as a codefendant? Why wasn’t she being charged?

When it came time for Ashton Zack to speak, he explained how sorry he was that he had argued with his dad on the morning of the murder. He was upset, he said, that he never got a chance to say good-bye. The child felt guilty. What a boy Bonnie had raised. Incredible. He sounded like the man he was destined to become.

Then, looking at Zaffino, who sat totally stiff and unemotional, with some sort of “I can’t believe this is happening” look on his face, Ashton asked him, “Was it worth not seeing
your
own son again?”

What an astute observation for a young boy to make. If there was any consolation, Ashton knew Zaffino would never spend a day with his son again; they would have to see each other now amid the confines of barbed wire and steel bars.

“Was it worth killing my dad for Cindy?” Ashton asked next. “I know my dad did not always do the right thing, but he did not
deserve
to be killed.”

Another incredible encounter.

Christine Todaro was unnerved by the entire process of the trial and Zaffino’s subsequent sentencing. In a way, she still felt guilty about helping the CAPU nail him. As his sentencing went forward, Christine stood in the back of the courtroom (on the victim’s side) next to her best friend, Sharon George (no relation to Ed George). As the judge read Zaffino’s sentence, Christine, thinking about what Ashton had said, cried. Sharon, who had been there for Christine throughout the entire ordeal, consoled her. “It’s OK, Christine. You’ll be all right.”

The judge gave Zaffino life in prison. He would spend at least twenty-three years behind bars before he could consider sitting in front of the parole board to plead his case for early release. When the judge finished, Christine ran out of the courtroom toward the back stairs, Sharon right behind her. Before they entered the stairway, reporters rushed Christine for a comment. “Are those tears of joy, or tears of sadness?”

What a cliché,
she thought.
Could they not think of anything more original?

“Both,” Christine mumbled. “I cannot believe John didn’t think of his own son.” As Christine spoke, she started fumbling with her words. The tears were too much. The emotion of the day. So Sharon grabbed her by the hand and dragged her down the stairs.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs and turned the corner to walk out of the building, Ashton Zack was standing in front of them. Christine was startled. The boy was crying. She didn’t know what to say.

Ashton looked at her. “Did you know my dad?” he confusingly whispered through tears. “Why did John kill my dad? Do you know why John killed my dad?”

Christine felt terrible. She was at a loss for words. So she instead hugged him. “No,” she finally said, “I didn’t know your dad. I don’t know why John killed your dad.”

After that, Christine and Sharon ran out the door and made it to Christine’s car without being accosted by another reporter.

As the media, family members, detectives, interlopers and townspeople gathered outside the courtroom, shaking their heads in disbelief, the question loomed: would Zaffino open up and sell Cynthia George out now that, one could argue, he had nothing left to lose?

After the proceedings ended, reporters tracked down Mike Carroll: “What are you going to do about Cynthia George? Is she going to be arrested? What’s next?”

Cynthia and Ed were still married and living together. Cynthia’s affairs had done little to destroy the marriage, at least from an outsider’s perspective. In fact, there was word that the Georges had retained two of Akron’s most high-powered attorneys to protect Cynthia. By this time, the CAPU and Mike Carroll were convinced that Ed George had had nothing to do with Jeff Zack’s murder. The focus was specifically on one person—Cynthia. “We suspected Ed George for the first year on the investigation,” one detective later told me, “but by the time of Zaffino’s trial, we were confident Ed had had nothing whatsoever to do with the conspiracy to kill Jeff Zack.”

Mike Carroll took a long pause while standing in front of a throng of reporters after Zaffino’s sentencing. After all, Carroll and his team had done one hell of a job in getting a conviction. Couldn’t he just let that verdict and sentence sit for a while before thinking about whether to go after Cynthia?

“So, Mike,” one reporter asked, “what are you doing about Cindy George?”

Whiddon was standing beside him.

“The case is still open,” Mike Carroll said softly before walking away.

Kimberly Cefalu, one of the jurors the
Akron Beacon Journal
tracked down after the Zaffino case was over, told a reporter, “There was an overwhelming amount of evidence, a lot of it circumstantial, but a mountain of evidence against John Zaffino.” The article went on to explain that the juror “cited the importance of the cell phone records, which showed calls between Zaffino and [Cynthia] George before and after Zack was murdered.”

Moreover, during the trial Mike Carroll proved that on the night when the two park rangers at Cuyahoga Falls came upon Zaffino as he emerged from the woods, there could have been a more sinister plot in play. Telephone records from Cynthia and John’s cell phones proved that they had spoken on that night for hours. Mike Carroll and Dave Whiddon later told me that they theorized Cynthia was trying to lure Jeff Zack down to the park so Zaffino could kill him in the woods. But the plan was botched, they claimed, when those park rangers showed up. And that was when John Zaffino, in a panic, tossed the gun into the woods and covered it up with leaves, believing no one would ever find it.

“After we convicted Zaffino,” Mike Carroll told me later, “we took a deep breath—and began to zero in on Cindy George.”

In July, Dave Whiddon, Vince Felber and Russ McFarland took off on a trip to the East Coast. They had been listening to John Zaffino’s telephone calls from prison. Through those calls, some rather shocking developments emerged. “[Someone close to Zaffino] had fabricated some of our police reports, sent letters to some of our witnesses,” Whiddon explained to me later, “and we ended up serving a search warrant partly because of that.”

During that search, Whiddon said, the CAPU found a number of e-mails between this person and Larry Whitney. In one, Whitney wrote back, Your letters created quite a stir. Those letters he was referring to had been sent to witnesses by a Zaffino relative. In some of the letters, Whiddon claimed, police reports were misquoted and even, he insisted, fabricated to some extent, thus turning two of the state’s witnesses against the CAPU. It became a huge problem for the CAPU to gain back the credibility it had spent months shaping.

The conversations the CAPU recorded between Zaffino and family members painted a pretty clear picture for Mike Carroll. It was obvious to him, he said, that money had changed hands between Cynthia George and John Zaffino’s attorney, which offered an explanation as to why Zaffino had never fingered Cynthia in the murder of Jeff Zack. In theory, the prosecution believed that Cynthia was helping Zaffino pay for his attorney—or, as Carroll put it, “financing his defense.”

How did Mike Carroll and the CAPU know this? During one conversation, Zaffino was recorded telling a family member to get “a message to the George family.” He said the Georges needed to hire him a “big-time lawyer like Johnnie Cochran” to represent him on his appeal. “[The Georges] are either going to help me,” Zaffino said jarringly, “or
else
.”

That “else,” Carroll maintained, was Zaffino dropping a dime on Cynthia.

Later on during the call, Zaffino upped the ante, saying sharply, “Because if I start making calls, shit’s going to happen.”

About nine weeks after that, Mike Carroll confirmed to me, he believed Cynthia George “funneled” a check for ten thousand dollars to Mike Bowler, her attorney, for the sole purpose of financing Zaffino’s appeal. Bowler, Carroll claimed, then gave that money to Larry Whitney. Even more disturbing was that the CAPU uncovered a deposit of five hundred dollars into Zaffino’s commissary fund at the prison where he was serving his sentence. They wondered where he got the money and traced it back to a relative, who had gotten it from Larry Whitney, who had gotten it from Mike Bowler, who had gotten it from Cynthia George.

Their heads were spinning after exposing the trail of “hush money,” the prosecution later told me and several reporters.

Any hope John Zaffino had that the appeals court would find a reason to force another trial diminished by the first of the year 2004, when the court ruled Zaffino had lost his appeal. Larry Whitney had argued that because Cynthia had invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, she somehow prejudiced the jury against Zaffino. Hindsight doesn’t work, however, with the appeals judges: since Larry Whitney didn’t object to it during Zaffino’s trial, the appeals court ruled, it made little difference now.

In a way, the court’s decision cleared the path for Mike Carroll to focus exclusively on Cynthia George—and for the next year, that’s what he and the CAPU did. Piece by painstaking piece, they built a case against the former Mrs. Ohio America runner-up. By Monday, January 10, 2005, a little over a year after Zaffino lost his bid for a new trial, Carroll thought he had enough. After stealthily watching the Akron socialite for a better part of the day, the Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task Force cornered Cynthia at the Bath & Body Works inside the West Market Plaza not far from her mansion in Medina. Cynthia knew why they were there. She put up little resistance when cops slapped the cuffs on her at 7:59
P.M
. and walked her to an APD patrol car.

Once they got Cynthia down to the APD, she refused to answer any questions—big surprise—and asked for Mike Bowler and Bob Meeker, her attorneys.

On the day she was arrested, Cynthia was fifty years old. Her oldest child was nineteen; her youngest was ten. At the APD, she was charged formally with complicity to commit aggravated murder before being processed into Summit County Jail.

Cynthia George was now part of the judicial system, just another female inmate wearing the scrubs the state of Ohio provided. Appearing in Akron Municipal Court via a video satellite hookup the next morning, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, a sad, defeated look about her face, Cynthia said nothing while sitting stoically in a chair staring into the camera. It was hard for some to believe she was facing her demons for the first time. It had been almost four years since her lover was murdered. For the CAPU detectives working the case all along, it was comforting to see that Cynthia was finally going to have to answer to her involvement (if any).

Mike Bowler asked Judge Carla Moore to lower Cynthia’s enormous bond, insisting that she wasn’t a flight risk. After all, Bowler argued, she knew the CAPU had been after her since the day Zack was murdered. She had never left the state. Never hid from them. Why should she be forced to sit in jail until her trial under a bond that was, in truth, extreme?

Ultimately, Judge Moore sided with Mike Carroll, who had urged the court to slap Cynthia with a $10 million cash bond, the same amount John Zaffino had when he was arrested two years earlier. Why should the two be any different?

Bowler was upset with the decision and said there was no good reason why his client’s bond should be so “unnecessarily high.”

During a hearing before Summit County judge Mary Spicer a day later, Bowler, standing alongside longtime George family attorney Bob Meeker, once again argued that Cynthia was being treated unfairly with a bond that was ridiculously high.

On the other hand, Mike Carroll’s office was saying it had “new information” regarding Cynthia’s guilt. He believed a $2.5 million bond, if not $10 million, was appropriate for the situation, still insisting Cynthia was a “risk” to flee.

Judge Spicer, however, didn’t agree. She said George had known of her “pending arrest for three years and has made no effort” to leave town. The fact of the matter was, Meeker and Bowler were right: compared to other murder suspects, Cynthia’s ten-million-dollar bond was exceptionally outrageous.

So Spicer set Cynthia’s bond at ten percent of two million dollars. She could walk out of jail with a cash payment of $200,000, an amount Ed George could certainly afford. The question was, would he do it? Was he still supporting a wife who had cheated on him repeatedly and was now suspected of participating in the murder of one of her ex-lovers?

Ed was in the courtroom with his and Cynthia’s nineteen-year-old daughter. In his late 60s, Ed was showing his age. His once curly black hair had turned gray and wiry. He appeared tired, sullen, withdrawn. He wanted this over with. Still, to the shock of many, he was determined to support his wife. No matter what.

Within an hour, Ed arranged for the $200,000 cash payment. That night, he left the jail at five-thirty. with Cynthia on his arm. She had been in custody a total of four days. One could say Cynthia was a free woman, but the court permitted her to travel only in Summit, Stark or Medina Counties. She was told to report once a week to the county probation office.

Mike Carroll was disappointed, but respected Spicer’s judgment. “In order to be a flight risk,” Carroll commented later, “Cynthia would have to have been streetwise in order to survive, and I somewhat doubted then that she was. She had the means, obviously, and the money, which, if you want to flee, can be helpful. So although we lost that battle, if you will, we knew it was a long shot and accepted the judge’s order. I kept my focus on the trial.”

Cynthia’s case was then formally assigned to Judge Patricia Cosgrove and scheduled to get under way immediately.