If Looks Could Kill (38 page)

Primarily, appeals take months, if not years. Courts are continually hampered by convicted murderers and criminals alike pointing to the mistakes they believed were made during their trials. It hadn’t worked for John Zaffino. His appeal was denied. Yet, on March 21, 2007, a little over two months after Cynthia George argued her case in front of the Ninth District Court of Appeals, two of the three judges agreed to reverse Cynthia’s conviction on complicity to murder, writing that the prosecution had failed to prove Cynthia convinced John Zaffino to murder Jeff Zack.

In short, Cynthia George had won her appeal. She would be set free as soon as the paperwork was submitted by the court to the prison in Marysville, Ohio, where she had spent the past year and four months.

A collective gasp could be heard from Akron as the ruling—which meant Cynthia George was going to walk out of prison a free woman—was made public. It was what the prosecution, not to mention members of the CAPU who had worked so doggedly to build a case against Cynthia, feared most: a ruling that, in the way it was written, would not allow the state to pursue charges against Cynthia ever again.

“Money buys you freedom in this town,” one person close to the case told me after the appeal decision was released.

This sentiment—that a rich woman was walking away from prison as a poor man lost his appeal and was forced to serve life behind bars—rang throughout the community like a church bell on Sunday morning. People in the community were upset. They felt slighted. They couldn’t understand how it could have happened. The evidence seemed so clear-cut. So perfect.

According to two of the three judges, however, the evidence—or lack thereof—was the one component setting Cynthia free. “The evidence is insufficient to sustain a finding of guilt,” Judge William Baird wrote, “and, as a result, the federal Constitution and the Ohio Constitution require the conviction to be reversed with prejudice to further prosecution.

“As will be explained…,” Baird continued, “there was very little evidence to connect Rohr-George to this murder in any way.” The main crux of the court’s decision hinged on the idea that circumstantial evidence alone was not enough to find Cynthia guilty. “Extramarital love affairs” were not a motivation or proof of a murder plot. Two of the three judges—Baird and Judge Beth Whitmore—agreed that “much of the state’s evidence…focused on Rohr-George’s possible motive,” which the court decided wasn’t enough to sustain a conviction. “Assuming, without deciding, that this evidence was sufficient to establish that Rohr-George may have had a motive to kill Zack, motive alone was not sufficient to prove that Rohr-George committed a crime.” Baird cited a prior case,
State
v.
Nichols
, in which it was written into the record that “proof of motive does not establish guilt.”

Quite shockingly, Baird made an assumption in his decision, writing that, “If Zaffino had been a stranger having no motive to kill Zack, it could be argued that an inference arises that Rohr-George must have solicited him to do it, because she was the only one of the two having a motive to kill Zack. As a lover newly coming upon the scene, however, Zaffino had a motive to want his competition out of that scene.”

Thus, in effect, Baird was implying a motive on Zaffino’s part; yet, in the same breath, he was saying that the state could not impart a motive on Cynthia’s part. For many, this made little sense.

Further along, Baird suggested that a relationship between Zaffino and Cynthia was not enough to prove she was involved in the murder plan. Moreover, the telephone calls between them, which were a major part of the state’s case (or, as Baird wrote, “The state placed a great emphasis on the many cellular telephone calls…”), did not imply that a murder plan was being hashed out during those said calls. “Even if it inferred from the gap in the phone calls,” Baird wrote, “that Rohr-George knew about the murder beforehand, prior knowledge of a crime does not make one an accomplice.”

As for the fact established during her trial that Cynthia financed the hit, supplying Zaffino with the money to buy the gun and the infamous Ninja-style motorcycle, Baird, writing on behalf of the court, wasn’t buying that argument, either. “Although the state attempted to prove that Rohr-George gave Zaffino the money that he used to purchase the murder weapon, the record is devoid of any evidence to support such an inference.”

It seemed, as the decision went on for twenty-four pages, that the state’s one great failure was that it hadn’t produced Zaffino as a witness. It was as if Cynthia’s entire conviction hung on Zaffino’s lack of participation in the state’s case.

Judge Lynn Slaby disagreed with her colleagues, writing separately that, “I would overrule the Defendant…because the State presented sufficient evidence to establish that Defendant procured Zack’s murder…. The State presented evidence to prove that Defendant did several things that brought about Zack’s murder or motivated Zaffino to commit it.” Citing all the reasons why her colleagues decided to overturn the conviction, Slaby agreed with the state’s version of events. “I would,” she concluded, “affirm the judgment of the trial court.”

Judge Patricia Cosgrove must have felt snubbed. Here were two of her counterparts saying that she should have found Cynthia George not guilty. It was an unprecedented decision, hardly ever written into Ohio judicial history.

All that the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office could say was that it was a “shocking” turn of events. With that, they asked the appellate court to “reconsider” its decision, and vowed to fight Cynthia’s release, at least until they could write an argument and take it to the supreme court.

Part of the prosecution’s new argument claimed the appeals judges failed to take into account that in the text of the letters between Zaffino and Cynthia, there was evidence that he had not spoken to the CAPU because Cynthia had promised to take care of him. According to the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office, Zaffino had indicated clearly during these correspondences that there was some sort of agreement between him and Cynthia to kill Jeff Zack and that his silence regarding her involvement would be compensated. “[Zaffino] is in prison for George and did exactly what he said he would do,”’ the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. “They had an agreement that George would use all of her financial resources, even selling her house [which she never did], to set him free if anything went wrong and he went to prison.”

Meanwhile, Ohio could no longer hold fifty-two-year-old Cynthia George. During the evening of March 22, 2007, near seven o’clock, just a day after the decision was released, Cynthia walked out of the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, about 140 miles from her Medina home, stepped into a gray Ford SUV driven by her oldest daughter and headed for home. Later that night, at about nine-thirty, as all her children, Ed George—the irrefutably faithful husband—alongside about thirty family members and friends, stood outside the Georges’ massive estate waiting for her. Inside the house was a
WELCOME HOME
banner above a celebratory cake.

Cynthia cried and smiled and held her hands over her mouth to the cheers and shouts of “Hi, Mom” as local news cameras captured her return. As Cynthia hugged her kids and said hello to friends and family, reported the
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
Ed George said, “Oh, God. Oh, this is great.”

He was beside himself with joy.

Cynthia’s brother handed her some sort of trinket, an angel pin. He told her to keep it forever. It was Helen Rohr’s, Cynthia’s mother, who had passed away in September 2006.

Cynthia looked thin in her blue sweat suit, her once porcelain skin hung in wrinkles off her tired face. For the first time in her life, perhaps, Cynthia was showing her age. Prison had sped up the process. It had been hard on her, certainly. She hadn’t accepted the time, but instead sat in prison praying for her release. In total, she had spent a year and four months behind bars. But now, here she was: home. She couldn’t believe it. A nightmare finally over.

Or was it?

Ed and Cynthia George, along with their attorneys, had several opportunities to speak with me; they chose not to. Cynthia George, I will say, spoke to NBC’s
Dateline
and the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
. I didn’t include the
Dealer
’s interview in this book because, to be honest, I felt Cynthia was not being totally honest. In that interview, she tells a story of Jeff Zack breaking into her home, raping her, beating her, truly making Jeff out to be a monster. This was the first time Cynthia had ever told this story. It seemed to come out of nowhere. She said she was terrified of Jeff Zack. The story ran during the middle of her appeal process. I believe she was speaking directly to the appeals court judges, looking to further bolster her case for freedom. During her
Dateline
appearance, Cynthia basically said the same things.

My point here is this: Cynthia George, her husband and family chose to speak to those people who would rally around them. If there was a chance that any sense of objectivity could be injected into an interview Cynthia gave, she wouldn’t do it.

What does this mean?

In the grand scope of things: nothing. Cynthia George played her hand perfectly and, as of this writing, is sitting at home a free woman.

John Zaffino and his family wrote to me with their theories of police corruption, witness tampering and alleged perjury by witnesses, but when I asked for evidence to back up such outrageous claims, I never heard from them again.

I conducted over one hundred hours of interviews for this book, studied thousands of pages of documents—police reports, witness interviews and statements, transcripts of recorded interviews, transcripts of the meetings and telephone calls between Zaffino and Christine Todaro, over one thousand pages of trial transcripts from Zaffino and Cynthia’s trials—and exchanged hundreds of e-mails with many of the players involved. I would also like to note that beyond the interviews I conducted with several of Cynthia George’s former neighbors, on top of the family background research I did myself, articles published in the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
and
Akron Beacon Journal
helped me draw the brief biography of Cynthia’s childhood and high-school days found in Chapter 36. In Chapter 43, where I describe Cynthia and Ed George’s courtship and wedding ceremony, along with Ed George’s history, several sources were helpful to me, including interviews I conducted with former George family friends, neighbors, people who wish to remain anonymous and former employees of Ed George, as well as Ed George’s court testimony and articles published in the
Akron Beacon Journal
and
Cleveland Plain Dealer
. In addition, I think it’s important to note that every phone call between Christine Todaro and John Zaffino I re-created in this book was recorded, and the dialogue during these sections of the book was taken verbatim from those recordings and the transcripts accompanying them. As an added authentication, the interviews I conducted with Miss Todaro helped me understand the context and nature of each call, along with re-creating what she was going through and feeling at the time. Furthermore, Lieutenant Dave Whiddon, who I also interviewed, listened to each phone call and provided me with his exclusive insight.

Why wouldn’t John Zaffino, after his appeal was denied or before he was sentenced, come forward and talk about Cynthia’s role—if any—in the murder of Jeff Zack? The first answer is, Cynthia was never involved (which the appeals court obviously believed); the second answer, some told me, is that Zaffino was bamboozled by Cynthia George and led to believe that he would be taken care of. One person close to Zaffino later told me, “He is nothing but a simple country boy from Pennsylvania. He should have never messed with the Georges, because they were never going to do anything for him. Cynthia, I told him, would toss him out with the rest of the day’s trash—and she did.” In reviewing the new twist in the case when Cynthia was set free, that same person added, “I think that John’s anger will override his denial. I would imagine that he has tried to contact her [since her release] and that she has rejected him. Rejection fuels his madness.”

Will John Zaffino now talk? That seems to be the question on everyone’s mind. A source close to the case told me that several investigators went to see Zaffino in prison after it was announced that Cynthia won her appeal, yet Zaffino didn’t have anything of importance, I was told, to say—and remains tight-lipped. Weeks later, the Court of Appeals refused to overturn its decision.

On August 29, 2007, the Ohio Supreme Court weighed in. It ruled 5–2 not to hear the Summit County prosecutor’s case to overturn the appeal.

Thus, Cynthia George is, officially, a free woman.

This ruling closes the case.

She can never be tried for this crime again, and the Summit County prosecutor’s office said she never will be.

The Akron, Ohio, BJ’s Wholesale Club fuel station where 44-year-old Jeff Zack was murdered on June 16, 2001.