If Looks Could Kill (6 page)

While Ed Moriarty, Captain Daugherty, Bertina King and Paul Callahan continued questioning Cynthia George, Detectives John Bell and Vince Felber were busy tracking down BJ’s employees that possibly had more information about Jeff Zack. One woman claimed she had met Jeff several times, not by her own volition, mind you, but by Jeff’s pushy, sexually explicit talk and behavior. “I helped him find stuff in the store, or return things. He always asked for me. It was about two months or so ago that he started making sexual advances.”

Within a day, detectives learned that Jeff Zack had quite the reputation. There was one time when Jeff walked into BJ’s, one of the clerks reported, and “teased” her about “running away” with him. “Come on, baby,” Jeff had said. “I’ll take you to Lima.” After that, he described all of the “
things
he wanted to do to [her] sexually.”

The woman was disgusted by it and felt threatened.

“After that day, whenever I saw him come into the store, I would take off for the office and hide.”

A second cashier came forward and told detectives basically the same story. Being a bit young and naïve, the girl had given Jeff her telephone number. But one of her coworkers, when she heard what her friend had done, told the girl’s parents and the relationship ended before it ever got started.

Back at the APD, detectives brought in potential suspects who had been seen or stopped riding motorcycles similar to the one described by BJ witnesses. After questioning several, even subjecting one man to a gunshot residue (GSR) test, all were cleared and released.

The first full day of investigating Jeff Zack’s murder had ended. Moriarty and the CAPU were a bit closer to a major lead (they could sense it), but still hadn’t turned over the stone with a golden ticket under it. The ebb and flow of any investigation is a seesaw of ups and downs; yet the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours, any experienced detective will say, are crucial. It is within that time period when the most valuable leads make themselves available. Good police work involves carefully combing through the litany of interviews and the physical, circumstantial and forensic evidence to locate a common denominator. Yet in the case of Jeff Zack, it appeared as though his murderer had done quite a professional job. As the hours went by, Moriarty, for one, knew the case was going to hinge on, perhaps, a mistake. Maybe not by the killer, but by someone who possibly held on to that one important piece of the puzzle.

The key was finding it.

By Monday morning, June 18, Bonnie Zack had a little over a day to collect her thoughts and begin to mourn the loss of her husband. That said, there was an intense homicide investigation under way and any information Bonnie could provide was going to help further facilitate that probe. From the APD’s perspective, thus far there was nothing definitive to prove Bonnie could be checked off the APD’s list of potential suspects. A Realtor by trade, Bonnie didn’t have a solid alibi for the time period in question. And when a guy with Jeff Zack’s extramarital history was murdered, his wife was, of course, one of the first people at whom detectives took a look. “Every homicide,” Ed Moriarty recalled later, “is worked from the inside out—you go to those closest to the victim and work your way through.” In other words, a homicide investigation is the target (the bull’s-eye) and each family member, friend, lover and spouse is a latent suspect (a ring around that bull’s-eye).

Moriarty, Bertina King and two colleagues drove back over to Bonnie Zack’s house that morning to ask Bonnie several follow-up questions. King and Moriarty sat down with Bonnie and started at the beginning. “How long have you two been together?”

Bonnie had a gaze about her, Moriarty said later, one that made them feel as though she could get lost in space, daydreaming or ruminating. She was a thinker. Not someone to just rattle off answers. Bonnie analyzed what she said before she said it.

Moriarty wondered about this odd characteristic he had rarely seen.
Is Bonnie hiding something
?

“Fifteen years,” Bonnie said, as if it were ten too long. She dropped her head. She couldn’t believe it. After all she and Jeff had been through, he was gone. They had problems, sure. They fought and threatened each other with divorce. But somewhere inside all that impaired marital bliss was the Jeff Zack of long ago that Bonnie had fallen in love with. She had met Jeff back in 1986 in Phoenix, Arizona. They were married two years later. From Phoenix they moved to Colorado. (“We just got sick of the heat,” Bonnie said.)

In many ways, Bonnie was her own person; she had never depended on Jeff to be the breadwinner. For the past six years, Bonnie had worked as a real estate agent. She enjoyed the work. It got her out of the house. She was always meeting new people, traveling to new places. She worked hard. With shiny red hair, a nice shape and a pretty face, Bonnie could have had any number of men herself. But she had made a promise to Jeff and kept it. Their son, Ashton, was the bond between them.

“Tell me about yesterday morning,” Bertina King asked in her gentle manner. King was Moriarty’s ace in the hole, he later said. He knew King’s calming demeanor and garrulous way of getting people to open up would be an asset to the case as it began to unfold. King had been with the CAPU since 1997. She had questioned hundreds of witnesses and suspects throughout her career.

“We were all at home,” Bonnie explained. “Jeff had a brief argument with Ashton about moving a table. He left the house [after that].”

“Where was Jeff going?”

“He usually checks his vending machines on the weekends. He doesn’t have a particular schedule, but checks them regularly—I can’t believe this. I don’t know where his accounts are exactly, but Ashton would.”

“Do you have any idea who would want your husband dead?”

Bonnie winced. She seemed taken aback by the question. But it was fair, considering the circumstances. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure if he had any enemies, but I don’t think he did.”

Moriarty knew the statement was either a stretch, pure naïveté, or a flat-out lie. By now, Moriarty and King knew enough about Jeff Zack to know that Bonnie wasn’t being completely forthcoming.

They talked about the strange voice mail Jeff had received, the one King had recorded. Bonnie said it was odd that someone would call Jeff on
his
telephone number—they had two separate lines in the house, one being Jeff’s private “business” line.

“Ashton or me never answer that line.” It rolled over, Bonnie explained, to Jeff’s cell phone whenever he left the house. “He was constantly using his cell phone.”

Moriarty and King needed to know what Bonnie was doing on the morning—specifically the time—her husband was murdered. It was a tough question, but one that needed an answer. Bonnie had no trouble answering. “I was at the house most of the morning,” she said. “Then I dropped Ashton off at the Putt-Putt Golf and returned here. I cleaned up a little. I then went over to [a friend’s] for about fifteen minutes. Ashton called me for a ride. I took him and his friend to the pool at Maplewood Park. I then stopped back at home and then went to my office.” She never hesitated. Never backed up and said, “Wait, no, I think I…” Instead, Bonnie whipped off her morning as if she had written it down and memorized it. This was important to Moriarty as he listened. It told him that Bonnie was telling the truth. People who lie, Moriarty knew from experience, stumble, vacillate and have trouble locking themselves down to a story. Bonnie had to know they’d go back and check out every step she took and she didn’t seem to care one way or another as she spouted details.

When she returned home to retrieve a telephone number for a client she had been dealing with, Bonnie added, she ran into Bertina King as she walked from around the backyard toward the garage. Bonnie said that was the first she’d heard of Jeff having been murdered.

Again, without maybe realizing it, Bonnie created a time frame for herself. But, as Moriarty put the times together and added things up while sitting there, it occurred to him that, following along the window Bonnie gave, aside from the fact that she was on the road for a good part of the morning, it allowed her enough time to zip over to the Chapel Hill Mall and plug Jeff herself. But then, where did the motorcycle fit in? And, could Bonnie have actually straddled a motorcycle and shot her husband? It seemed unlikely. (“But it still didn’t mean she didn’t hire someone to do it,” Moriarty said later.)

Bertina King asked, “How was your relationship with Jeff?”

“Everything was fine. Jeff had just returned from a bike trip to West Virginia on June thirteenth. He went with a friend. He was also in Arizona for a time near Mother’s Day. Look, I need more time…. I can’t do this.”

Bonnie got up and walked toward the kitchen. In not so many words, she was asking King and Moriarty to leave. It was all too much. She needed space.

Moriarty and King weren’t satisfied with what Bonnie had given them. They needed some background, maybe a few names to go on. They weren’t leaving. “Start when you met Jeff,” King pressed. “How did you guys meet?”

As Bonnie explained it to Bertina King and Ed Moriarty, her life with Jeff Zack had not always been a cacophony of arguments and extramarital affairs, as others would tell the CAPU in the coming weeks. There had been good times. There was a time when they were young and in love. For Bonnie, it was her second marriage; she had wedded a guy in 1980 and divorced him three years later. Three years after that, she met (and fell in love with) Jeff. As a young and attractive woman, Bonnie was working for a cable television company in Phoenix at the time. Jeff was a headhunter then, someone who put together résumés and found jobs for people. Bonnie was tired of her job, so she hired the company Jeff worked for with the hope of finding something new. By the time they were married, they had settled in Boulder, Colorado.

“We liked Boulder,” Bonnie recalled.

Jeff was able to get a transfer to Denver within the company he worked for, so they moved again. Denver offered more opportunities. It was a bigger city. More action. Soon after, Jeff managed to get his Series 7 stockbroker’s license. Fulfilling a dream, he was now a licensed stockbroker. For the next few years, he learned the ins and outs of the stock market and seemed to have found his calling. Then, Bonnie announced she was pregnant.

“Jeff, at about this time, got an offer to work with L. F. Thompson, a brokerage firm in San Diego, so we moved,” Bonnie recalled as Moriarty and King listened.

Whether Bonnie realized it then or not, Jeff had initiated a precedent into their lives: whatever Jeff wanted, Bonnie was seemingly forced to go along with. Life for Bonnie became, quickly, all about Jeff’s dreams, aspirations, feelings,
his
goals. Jeff was, others said later, focused on that one “big” score to set him up for the rest of his life. He worked hard, but his energy centered on hitting it big.

“Bonnie was difficult,” Moriarty remembered later. “When we were finding all sorts of things in Jeff’s background, we couldn’t rule her out because Jeff was so blatantly mean to her….”

After they uncovered it, one of the things that stood out to Moriarty and King was how at one time Jeff had threatened to take Ashton away from Bonnie. He hung it over her head, teased her with it in a threatening manner. He used the threat, Moriarty believed, as a means to control her.

“I want a divorce,” Bonnie had shouted during one of her many arguments with Jeff shortly before his murder.

“You do that,” Jeff warned, “and I’ll take Ashton and move to Israel.” Jeff had spent some time in Israel when he was young. He had told friends he dreamed of returning one day.

This, Moriarty assumed during the early days of the investigation, was a motive for Bonnie to kill her husband. It had to be taken seriously. What’s more, before Jeff and Bonnie were married, Bonnie’s father hired a private investigator to conduct a background check on his future son-in-law. It seemed that Jeff had been involved in a little more than finding new jobs for people. With a simple background search, the investigator—a cop Bonnie’s dad knew—found out Jeff had been arrested and charged with pandering, which, legally speaking, in Jeff’s case, turned out to be basically acting as a middleman between a prostitute and a john. In his defense, Jeff had told several people the CAPU later interviewed that he didn’t know what he had been involved in.

As Bonnie continued to talk to Moriarty and King about her life with Jeff, she explained that as they lived in San Diego during the late 1980s, she and Jeff started to make trips a few times a year out to Ohio to visit her mother. Around 1991, Bonnie’s mother became “very sick.” So, “Me, Jeff and Ashton moved to Ohio because of my mother’s illness.”

Stow, Ohio, didn’t present quite the exciting, exotic atmosphere Denver and San Diego had offered Jeff’s manic, boisterous personality; in downtown Akron, however, he soon found the action he craved.

Jeff became a fixture at Ed George’s Tangier nightclub and other hot spots around town. The environment catered to Jeff’s talkative, free-spirited attitude; he loved being around the clinking of the glasses, the lights, loud music, cabaret-style décor—and, of course, the women. All those luscious, adorable, single (and married) women. He adored their company and fell victim to it—which summed up Jeff’s character fairly well: he was outside himself and didn’t really care what anyone thought, obviously, including his own wife. But still, according to others, Cynthia was Jeff’s ultimate catch, the woman he had fallen in love with. How they met showed Jeff’s deep, indigenous attitude toward life and how he had perhaps took advantage of every opportunity, even when it meant hurting the people who loved him. According to what Bonnie later told police, one night Jeff brought her out to the Tangier for dinner. They were sitting, enjoying what should have been a peaceful, romantic night together. Ashton, three years old then, was at home with a babysitter. As they ate, Jeff noticed a woman sitting at the bar. His eyes were fixed on her hourglass figure, blond hair, apple red lipstick, long, painted fingernails and seductive smirk. Bonnie later described the woman to Moriarty and King as “looking really flashy.”

“Boy, she looks good,” Jeff said to Bonnie as they sat and ate. He was totally taken in by the woman. He had a hard time focusing on his meal—or Bonnie.

Bonnie was curious, so she turned and looked. “Huh,” she said smartly, sipping her water, “that woman wouldn’t have
anything
to do with you, Jeff.”

It was said in jest, not as a challenge, so to speak. Here was Bonnie’s husband checking out the blonde hanging off the bar. It was not only disrespectful, but it seemed to Bonnie that nothing else mattered to Jeff after the moment he laid eyes on this woman. Bonnie became a prop, a fixture, someone there to keep Jeff company while he looked for something better.

“Oh, yeah,” Jeff said, responding to Bonnie’s chiding remark. “Watch this.”

Jeff got up, walked toward the bar and approached the woman.

“And started talking to her,” Bonnie recalled with a touch of remorse and disgust in her voice. King and Moriarty were surprised by the anecdote. It told them a lot about Jeff’s personality, and who they were dealing with as a victim.

The woman Jeff became mesmerized with was Cynthia Rohr-George. She looked dazzling that night, a gorgeous thirty-seven-year-old mother. Just by looking at her, Cynthia embodied status and affluence, understanding perfectly how the wife of a wealthy, celebrity restaurateur should act. Cynthia was an ornament, a piece of eye candy for patrons to stare at while they spent money inside Ed’s establishment. Some beautiful blond bombshell to hang on Ed’s arm when he attended social events. The Tangier was booming at the time. Money was rolling in as if printed in the basement. Cynthia played the part of rich wife well, wearing long gowns, expensive jewelry, hanging around the nightclub like Rita Hayworth or Kim Novak.

“From that day on,” Bonnie told King and Moriarty, speaking about the moment Jeff saw Cynthia for the first time, “I was
nothing
.”