If Looks Could Kill (8 page)

When Jeff Zack played back that ominous message left on his answering machine on Wednesday, June 13, he became irritated and squirrelly. It had obviously unnerved him greatly. Somebody was, in a not-so-subtle way, intimidating Jeff. But he didn’t want his wife to know how bothered he was by it.

When Bonnie sat with Moriarty and King and described the message for a second time, Moriarty later said, “She became really upset.” Bonnie had approached Jeff that day about the message and asked him what the hell was going on. In her view, things were escalating. Routine threats had turned into recorded messages that seemed fairly serious in nature. Should she be worried? What about Ashton?
Talk to me, Jeffrey…tell me what’s going on here.

“Don’t you worry about it,” Jeff raged. “I have it taken
care
of.”

Just a few weeks ago, Bonnie said, Jeff told her he was taking off for Arizona to visit family. It was near Mother’s Day. Worried later about the message, thinking about his trip, Bonnie asked Jeff how things went out in Arizona, demanding to know if he had actually gone to Arizona to begin with. She sensed something wasn’t right. He was acting strange. Anxious. Worried. Had something happened during the trip?

“I drove up to the Grand Canyon,” Jeff shot back angrily. “I slept in my car for the night.”

“Did he go there?” asked Moriarty. He was watching Bonnie carefully as she spoke. He studied her body language, which spoke of a woman who never believed for one minute her husband had gone where he said he was going.

Bonnie dropped her head and started shaking it. “I couldn’t be sure he was
ever
telling the truth anymore.”

On June 8, Jeff and a friend had allegedly taken off to West Virginia on a bicycling trip, which Jeff enjoyed immensely. Bicycling kept his large frame in somewhat good shape. When they were together, he and Cynthia had gone biking probably three times a week; Cynthia nearly every day.

“When did he return?” Bertina King asked.

“June thirteenth.” It was the day, Bonnie remembered, Jeff received that threatening message. “But who knows…,” Bonnie said next. “I couldn’t be sure if Jeff did what he said he was doing.”

“How so?” Moriarty wanted to know, chiming in. He asked Bonnie for an example. One scenario, even if Bonnie believed it was insignificant, could break the case. Everything mattered now. Where Jeff stopped to get his morning coffee. Where he traveled throughout his day. Who it was he spoke to on a regular basis. But Bonnie was being pushed away from Jeff further and further as their marriage went into a dramatic decline over the years.

“Well,” Bonnie said, “I received a call from Las Vegas recently from a friend of ours who spotted Jeff in Vegas.” She stopped and “rhetorically,” Moriarty explained in his report of the conversation, looked at him and Bertina King and asked herself what was an extremely pertinent question: “What in the
hell
was Jeff doing in Las Vegas?”

Bonnie said she had no idea he had even gone.

After a short spell, while fidgeting with a tissue in her hand, Bonnie said, looking at Moriarty, “See, I never knew
what
he was doing. He kept
everything
from me.”

There was a part of her husband’s life Bonnie Zack had a hard time discussing. Ed Moriarty and Bertina King knew from observing Bonnie’s mannerisms, and listening to her voice crack as she spoke, that Jeff’s relationship with Cynthia George was probably going to be off-limits. Yet, as Moriarty and King pressed, Bonnie opened up about it.

Moriarty asked Bonnie if Jeff knew the George family as well as he knew Cynthia.

Bonnie replied, “Yes.”

Moriarty wasn’t satisfied. “What do you mean by that?” he asked. He could sense there was more to it, but also, he recalled later, the bitterness oozing out of Bonnie’s pores as she began to step back in time. There was so much more to talk about. Patience, Moriarty understood, was essential when dealing with a witness or suspect like Bonnie. Don’t push too hard. Let her sort things out and come to terms with how she feels. What was surprising, however, especially as Moriarty and King started to put pressure on Bonnie, was that she never once pulled out the lawyer card and said she was done talking. And she could have, at any moment, asked them to leave and work through her attorney from that moment on.

“That told us,” one of the detectives working the case later recalled, “that Bonnie wasn’t worried about getting caught up in having to explain herself. She was guarded, sure. But she was also forthcoming with information.”

Bonnie explained how Jeff met Cynthia that night at the Tangier while they were having dinner. “From then on,” she added, “Jeff and Cindy started doing all kinds of things together. They were calling each other several times a day. Jeff made no secret about their relationship, and did a lot of things right in front of me.”

Incredible,
thought Moriarty.
The guy was shameless
.

Bonnie was furious about Jeff’s lack of respect for their marriage, not to mention the values he was teaching their child. “How dare you!” Bonnie said one night after Jeff got off the telephone with Cynthia. Bonnie had been standing on the opposite side of the wall, adjacent to the room Jeff was in. “Right in front of me?”

“We’re just friends, Bonnie,” Jeff swore. “She’s my confidante. My counselor.”

A while later, Bonnie said, she heard Jeff “on the phone making a date with Cindy.” This time she was standing around the corner. It was as if he didn’t care. He must have known Bonnie was in the house, yet he still carried on. “Let’s meet at the Sheraton,” Bonnie heard Jeff tell Cynthia. “The one in Cuyahoga Falls [a suburb of Akron and Stow].”

Bonnie decided, even though she was terribly upset by the call, she wasn’t going to say anything. Instead, she arranged for a babysitter on the night Cynthia and Jeff were rendezvousing and headed out to Cuyahoga Falls herself.

As Cynthia and Jeff walked into the hotel lobby, Bonnie followed them from behind, like a spy. Then she slipped behind a picture in the lobby and waited for the right moment.

As Cynthia and Jeff smiled and stared into each other’s eyes like young lovers on a first date, frolicking right there in the lobby, Bonnie stepped out from behind the picture and, she explained to Moriarty and King, “surprised them.”

“What happened next?” Moriarty asked.

Taking the high road, Bonnie didn’t say anything. She stared them down for a moment and just walked away. This told Cynthia and Jeff that Bonnie knew what was going on. She was not some ignorant, naïve wife, overlooking the obvious because it made her life less complicated. She was in their face.

As Bonnie exited the lobby and walked out into the parking lot, she started to break down in tears because Jeff didn’t even get up and try to talk to her. He kept on doing his business with Cynthia. He never even acknowledged that Bonnie had caught the two of them. No Hollywood moment of running after his wife and apologizing. No telephone call later on that night. Just coldhearted silence.

“What was it like at home after that?” Moriarty wanted to know.

“He didn’t come home until four
A.M
. the next day.”

“While she was relaying this information to us,” Moriarty recalled later, “Bonnie would at some points cry, and at others get a faraway look about her.” Moriarty knew that reliving the experiences crushed her.

After getting through the hotel story, Bonnie took a deep breath, held up her index finger and, through a multitude of tears, said, “I have another story, much worse.”

She remembered the year as 1998. It was a vivid memory. She was in the master bathroom getting ready for bed. As she was doing her business, Jeff walked into the room—obviously not realizing she was in the next room—and called Cynthia. “Cindy, that you?”

Bonnie recoiled and got a bit closer so she could hear. After a brief pause, Cynthia got on the line. They talked for a bit. Then Bonnie heard Jeff say, “I can’t get enough of being inside of you.”

After that, she went “blank.”

Collecting herself, Bonnie walked into the bedroom and confronted Jeff. Enough was enough. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She was crying hysterically. It was one thing to understand that an affair was going on behind her back. But for Jeff to throw it around so freely in her face, adding insult to injury by saying hurtful things, was too much. He’d taken it too far.

“What do you mean?” Jeff shot back.

“I heard you.”

“I didn’t say anything like that. You didn’t hear me say that.”

“Yes, I did, Jeffrey.”

“It wasn’t Cindy, anyway.”

Jeff never admitted talking to Cynthia and certainly not to saying anything sexual. So he and Bonnie walked away from each other in a huff and tabled the subject.

Moriarty asked Bonnie about Jeff and Cynthia’s relationship over the past few months. Was there something significant she could offer? Ashton had mentioned the relationship was over.

“I would hear him on the phone with Cindy recently,” said Bonnie, “but things were different. He would yell at her and use foul language. He was very abusive toward her.”

“What can you tell us about the Georges?”

“Over the years, me and Jeff have been to the Georges’ house in Medina. Numerous occasions…. We were even at the house before they finished building it.”

“How was Cindy?” Meaning, was she cordial to you? Had she always been pleasant and polite?

“She was always nice to me.”

What a strange world the Zacks lived in, Moriarty and King thought as they sat listening to Bonnie talk about this bizarre relationship the two families had. The guy had apparently carried on an affair with Ed George’s wife for years—and through it all, they remained friends.

It was getting late. Bonnie looked over toward the clock on the wall and told Moriarty and King she needed to get ready for Jeff’s funeral. She was still “very upset,” Moriarty wrote in his report of the interview. She needed some time by herself to prepare for the burial. “I have to get ready to leave,” Bonnie said.

“We understand. I’ll be back, though, likely tomorrow, to continue this conversation. OK?”

Bonnie shook her head.

Driving away, Moriarty looked at Bertina King with a bit of amazement. “Can you believe what we just heard?” he said as they pulled around the corner of Bonnie’s house.

“Incredible.”

“We were collecting all of this information,” recalled Moriarty, “and Jeff Zack’s family is trying to push us down the Ed George road—that Ed had had something to do with this murder. That’s their major contention. And it’s sort of playing out as possibly true, because there
is
a connection.” Moriarty, as he often would when he explained something, stopped for a moment to catch up with his thoughts, then added, “We understood that
clearly
.”

That connection, however, still didn’t defuse the situation Jeff and Bonnie Zack lived in. And Bertina King and Ed Moriarty, as they headed back to the sixth floor of the APD, couldn’t get it out of their minds that for months leading up to Jeff’s murder, Bonnie had been put through so much turmoil in her marriage, they wondered if it all just got too much for her to take. Had she snapped? Hearing Jeff talk to Cynthia about how good it felt to be “inside of her” had really stirred Bonnie up. King and Moriarty could see that from the way she reacted when telling the story. It could have been, they considered, a reason for Bonnie Zack, pushing her to go out and hire someone to kill her husband.

“Let’s keep an eye on her,” suggested Moriarty as they headed up the elevator. “Let’s allow her to bury her husband and then turn up the pressure.”

Detective Mike Shaeffer was busy tracking down people who could further explain Jeff Zack’s complicated life. Shaeffer wanted a better understanding of the negative information coming in about the guy. Bonnie’s father, Bob Boucher, had hired what the APD thought at first was a private detective to investigate Jeff before he and Bonnie were married. But it turned out that the guy was an Arizona police officer, a friend of Boucher’s.

Shaeffer was the type of detective that allowed information to resonate inside him for a time before he made any judgments. He treated everyone he spoke to (witnesses and suspects) on a level playing field. His job—and he did it well—was to gather information, study it and make determinations (based on evidence) that further facilitated the investigation. Follow the evidence and see where it led. Law enforcement hadn’t always been in Shaeffer’s blood. He wasn’t born into it, like a lot of cops. After high school and some college, Shaeffer got a job working for Ohio Bell, a telephone company, as a sales representative. Eight years into that, he was bored beyond belief and yearned for a change. Instead of simply switching jobs within the company, though, at twenty-seven years old, Shaeffer, a husband and father, decided to join the U.S. Marine Corps. But several years into his military career, he ended up hurting his back and was discharged. Back at Ohio Bell, feeling as though he had gone in a complete circle, he spotted an ad one day in the local paper: the Akron Police Department was looking for recruits. Out of five thousand applicants who took the test, Shaeffer scored in the top two hundred, and a future in law enforcement presented itself. It had always been hard for Shaeffer to sit still; he embraced vocational challenges. Although he didn’t know it then, police work would offer him that perfect mixture of excitement and ambiguity, never knowing what the job was going to bring from day to day. (“Don’t limit yourself,” Shaeffer told me later, speaking about life in general.)

Indeed, he spent two years as a patrol officer. Then, in the early 1990s, as the crack cocaine boom infested the streets of Akron and many other cities across the United States in epidemic proportions, he was offered a job with a new fifteen-person uniformed unit designed to frustrate crack dealers hanging around street corners. “Our job was to go out there and be proactive instead of reactive,” Shaeffer said. In the chief’s words, Shaeffer added with a laugh, “Get out there and legally harass those dope dealers.”

Shaeffer spent nine years working that detail, along with becoming a member of the swat team as a sniper and, in 2000, landed a job as a detective with the CAPU. He learned the ropes and felt comfortable in his new role as an investigator. When Shaeffer said not to limit yourself, he drew those conclusions from experience. Never, he said, assume the obvious, because the obvious is often the least likely conclusion to come out of a homicide investigation.

Bonnie’s dad, Bob Boucher, lived in a nondescript apartment building in Barberton, about a thirty-minute drive south of Stow. A rather pleasant man, well-groomed and seemingly peaceful, he had misgivings about his deceased son-in-law, which were obvious the moment Shaeffer knocked on the door and introduced himself. For all the CAPU knew, Bob Boucher could have hired someone to kill his son-in-law after watching the guy mistreat his daughter for the past ten years. What father didn’t want to protect his daughter? What was clear to Shaeffer from the get-go was that Bonnie and other members of her family were stuck on the notion that Ed George had had something to do with Jeff’s death.

As Shaeffer walked into the senior Boucher’s apartment, he asked, “Can we talk a little bit about Jeff Zack?”

“Sure, come on in and have a seat.”

Mr. Boucher seemed more than willing to help. Right off the bat, his description of Jeff was no different than most others: “pushy, outspoken, ballsy,” he said. “He pissed people off. People in the family. So I assume he pissed off
other
people outside the family, as well.”

Shaeffer learned that it wasn’t a private investigator, after all, that Bob Boucher had hired to look into Jeff’s background when he and Bonnie became engaged. Mr. Boucher admitted he had a friend who was a Mesa, Arizona, cop at the time. As for the prostitution and pimping charge Jeff had on his record, Mr. Boucher confronted his son-in-law with the allegations when he found out. Jeff denied knowing anything about what was going on, saying, “All I did was drive the girls around.”

“We tried talking Bonnie out of marrying him,” Mr. Boucher explained to Shaeffer, shaking his head. “But she obviously didn’t listen.”

Shaeffer wasn’t all that surprised by what he heard. Every rock he and his colleagues had turned over thus far exposed another level of Jeff Zack’s corrupted character. Depending upon whom they spoke to, Jeff was a brute. Charlatan. A filthy liar who seemed to take what he wanted when he wanted it. There was one time, Mr. Boucher explained, when Jeff followed one of Bonnie’s sisters into the bathroom during a family gathering. Once he was alone with her, he, purportedly, exposed himself while he urinated.

Incredible,
thought Shaeffer, shaking his head, taking notes.

Jeff had always talked about his time in the Israeli Army as a rather secretive, sensitive security matter. He had routinely bragged about the level of importance he played in the Israeli government’s military. Stories circulated about him being involved in covert, undercover operations for the Israeli government that made him out to be some sort of Jewish James Bond. On that note, Mr. Boucher had his own theory. “His status,” Bob Boucher said, “was that of an equivalent to our Navy SEALS.”

“No kidding,” remarked Shaeffer. A jarhead himself, Shaeffer felt a connection, but based on all the information he had collected about Jeff Zack, he didn’t quite believe Jeff had been involved in the Israeli military.

“Yeah,” continued Bob Boucher a bit confused, “he also worked for Air Israeli, I believe, as a security officer. He’d board planes with a briefcase dressed as a passenger. Inside the brief case was an Uzi. His responsibility was to intercept terrorists on the plane.”

Were these campfire stories Jeff was telling family members, or actual facts? Shaeffer made a note to have Jeff’s military background checked out thoroughly. If he had been in the Israeli equivalent to the CIA, the job increased the suspect pool substantially.

Apparently, according to what Jeff had told his father-in-law, he was given a lifetime membership into the local Jewish Community Center for his service in the Israeli Army. “But Jeff was not an active member of the synagogue.”

In Mr. Boucher’s view, Bonnie didn’t find out about Jeff’s affair with Cynthia George until 1998, when she heard him on the telephone. Before that, she believed Jeff was
friends
with Cynthia and had worked for Ed George at times. “I’ve seen Jeff out with other women,” the elder Boucher said. “Ed George and Jeff used to be tight. But they had a big falling-out over Cindy. Two weeks ago, Jeff told Bonnie that he and Ed were no longer friends.”

Jeff had told his father-in-law that Ed said the “Tangier was starving…and [another company] was making all the money.” Ed seemed disturbed and upset by this. The other company, for the most part, provided jukebox entertainment and other music services to restaurants, bars and nightclubs throughout Ohio. One of Ed George’s brothers owned the company. Moriarty later said that through his years of working in the organized crime unit of the APD, it was well established that the company had “a reputation.” But that was a long time ago. The company was certainly legit and no one connected to the company on a management level had ever been charged or prosecuted.

Bonnie’s father seemed to be a wealth of information, opening up several new avenues for investigators. And then, near the end of the conversation, Shaeffer heard something that further piqued his interest. “Three weeks ago,” Mr. Boucher said as Shaeffer prepared to leave, “Jeff took Bonnie to the basement of their house and showed her something.”

“What was that?” Shaeffer asked.

“He had all these cabinets with records inside. He called them his personal files.” Apparently, while showing Bonnie the files, Mr. Boucher indicated, Jeff looked into her eyes, as if he were a character in a Hollywood thriller, and said quite stoically, “If anything ever happens to me, here are all the records.”

If anything even happens to me…

Shaeffer noted Mr. Boucher’s concern with that conversation, asking, “So what’s your opinion of why this happened to Jeff?” It was obvious the older man had a theory that he wanted to express.

Mr. Boucher thought about it momentarily. “It might be an insurance deal, or something with Cindy and Ed George. I don’t believe it had
anything
”—he shook his head—“to do with his vending machine business, or even any of his former employees.” Then, in a theory lending itself more to Ed Moriarty’s hypothesis after studying the crime scene, Mr. Boucher mentioned that it could have been a simple, random act of road rage violence. “Jeff drove like hell. Very fast. He may have cut someone off and then pissed them off, you know. He had a knack for doing that. Your road rage theory”—he said he had seen the newspaper article about it—“might not be too far off.”

“You’ll call me, Mr. Boucher, if you think of anything else?”

“Sure. But I think I covered everything.”

Shaeffer turned to leave.

“One more thing,” Bonnie’s father said as they walked toward the door. “That rabbi, um, um…Sasonkin, that’s his name, the one who was talking to Bonnie and [Ashton]. He…he told her that Jeff had come to him five years ago with ‘a problem.’”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. I never heard what it was.”

“Well, thank you for your help,” Shaeffer said, shaking Mr. Boucher’s hand. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

“Will do.”