If Looks Could Kill (9 page)

Late Sunday afternoon, June 17, an episode that was going to propel the investigation into yet another tail-spin took place inside the Akron Police Department. It was a little over twenty-four hours into the case. If Ed Moriarty and his colleagues didn’t have enough to contend with already, the murder of Jeff Zack was about to get even more complicated.

Moriarty and Bertina King wanted to speak to Ed and Cynthia George. The George name had been popping up all over the place. Cynthia had made it clear when Moriarty, King, Daugherty and Callahan showed up at the George mansion earlier that day that she wasn’t about to talk to police without her husband present, and all but kicked them out of her house. That was fine. They understood. But a telephone call Ed George had made to the APD in early 2001 seemed extremely vital to the current situation the Georges now found themselves in. Deputy Chief Paul Callahan had taken Ed’s call that day. “Can you give me some advice in dealing with a problem my wife, Cindy, is having?” Ed George asked Callahan.

“What is it, Ed?” They weren’t friends, but like many public officials in town, Callahan knew Ed George.

“She’s being harassed by some man. He’s following her and bothering her.” Ed sounded genuinely worried about his wife. In his report of the call, Callahan said he could sense the concern in Ed’s voice. There were plenty of nutcases around. Add a wealthy family to the mix and those types of people seem to come out of the woodwork and cause problems.

“Has Cindy made a complaint report with us?”

“No, she hasn’t,” Ed replied.

“Listen, Ed, the first thing she should do is file an incident report so we can begin to establish a paper trail, in case the suspect continues to harass her,” Callahan suggested. It was good advice. “Have you confronted the guy? Do you know him?”

“I have not confronted him,” Ed said. “Yes, I
do
know him.” Ed wouldn’t give Callahan the man’s name.

“Since you know him, Ed, you can confront him and tell him to stay away from Cindy.”

Ed didn’t say anything.

“Do you want to file an incident report?” Callahan asked a second time. “We’d need that before we can investigate the allegations.”

“I’ll think about it and get back to you.”

A week before Jeff Zack was murdered, Ed George left Callahan a voice mail: “Can you get back to me, Paul? I want to talk about the man harassing my wife. He’s still bothering her. Maybe you can come out to the restaurant for lunch one day and tell me about my options.”

Callahan, for one reason or another, never called Ed back.

Now that random telephone call, together with the voice mail Ed left, could possibly play into the APD’s current investigation. It had stuck with Callahan. He was thinking about it as Ed and Cynthia George were being discussed around the department as possible suspects and potential witnesses. Ed George’s wife had an affair—a very
long
affair—with the victim, which, on paper, had given Ed George a motive. It was clear Ed George was unhappy about the affair, as any dedicated father and husband might be. When Moriarty and King interviewed Cynthia briefly that Sunday morning, according to them, she remained evasive and didn’t want to talk. While they were in the house, Cynthia pulled Bertina King aside and asked if she could speak to her alone. King said sure. “Let’s go over there.”

They walked into the dining-room area of the house, away from everyone else. “How did you hear about Jeff Zack’s murder?” King asked, trying to break the ice between them and get Cynthia talking.

“Ed read me the article earlier this morning.”

According to Moriarty and King, Cynthia said Ed hadn’t read the newspaper to her as they romantically sat by the window and had eggs Benedict and coffee, but had rushed into the bedroom as she was getting up and threw it on the bed. “You see that,” he ranted while pointing at the front-page article detailing Jeff Zack’s murder. It was obvious to Cynthia, at least she expressed as much talking to King, that Ed was being facetious and patronizing.

“I’m confused about what happened,” Cynthia explained to King that Sunday, “and I don’t know what to do.”

King was confused, too. What was Cynthia trying to say? So she asked, “Was Jeff Zack the man who was harassing you?” It seemed obvious.

“Yes, he was.”

“Why would he be harassing you?”

Cynthia shrugged her shoulders and mumbled.

“Was Jeff Zack a lover, Mrs. George, or someone from the restaurant who started bothering you?”

She wouldn’t answer. Then, “He was just harassing me. I can’t get any more specific than that.”

The CAPU began to wonder why Ed George would run upstairs in a huff and throw the newspaper on the bed, announcing Jeff’s murder. There was some obvious animosity there between the three of them. Ed’s actions spoke to that clearly. Now, just a few weeks ago, Ed had called in a
second
report of his wife being harassed. In lieu of this information, the pieces, if not entirely juxtaposing, were beginning to fit. “We had gone out to the George house once already,” Moriarty recalled, “and Cynthia was
very
elusive. We thought there was something to the information we had, but she wouldn’t talk without her husband there.” Moriarty had even sent King and another female, the captain of the unit, Elizabeth “Beth” Daugherty, in to talk with Cynthia that same day. Because the situation was so volatile, possibly opening up an ugly vein of her marriage, Moriarty hoped Cynthia might feel more comfortable speaking with female officers. “But she was no more forthcoming with them—besides describing that newspaper incident to Tina—than she was with us,” Moriarty added. “That told us something. Why was she being evasive? What purpose would it serve her unless she and Ed had something to hide?”

Moriarty had broadcast a “road rage” theory on Saturday so the press would get off his back for a while, or at least until detectives could come up with something tangible to feed them. The road rage ruse, however, quickly turned into a “fiasco,” Moriarty later said. “Once big names come out, you have a problem. The press wants to know. They’ll keep hounding you. They make it pretty difficult for us to investigate leads and theories.”

On the following Monday morning, June 18, Paul Callahan, thinking back to the telephone calls from Ed George, called Ed George in an attempt to set up a meeting with members of the CAPU. It was time Ed and Cynthia came down to the APD and made themselves available for questioning. Ed was concerned that bad publicity would fall on him and Cynthia regarding meeting with police. If the press found out they were being questioned with regard to the death of Jeff Zack, people would speculate, not knowing the truth, and it could mean trouble for the Tangier. The restaurant hadn’t been doing all that great to begin with over the past few years. Negative publicity could have a detrimental effect on business. Ed didn’t need any of that right now. He had seven kids to feed, a wife, a mansion on the hill, bills piled on top of bills, a reputation that was, for the most part, pretty damn good around town. Why get involved in a homicide he’d had nothing to do with?

As soon as Ed got on the telephone, he said, “Can you believe this?”

“Was Jeff Zack the man harassing Cindy?” Callahan asked, referring to their previous conversations.

“Yes.”

“We need you to come in for an interview—you and Cindy.”

“I understand,” Ed said. He seemed more than willing. “Let me check with Cindy and I’ll call you back later this morning.”

Callahan felt Ed and Cynthia were going to meet with detectives at the police department at some point that afternoon. This way, they could get in and out without anyone knowing what was going on—especially the
Akron Beacon Journal,
located only a few blocks down the road from the APD.

Callahan understood the predicament Ed found himself in. He wanted to help him through it. In fact, keeping his word, Callahan didn’t tell Moriarty about the potential meeting. He, like his colleagues, would find out when Ed and Cynthia showed up.

According to an
Akron Beacon Journal
source, a court reporter for the newspaper received “a tip” at some point during the afternoon that Ed and Cynthia George were going to be interviewed at the APD in relation to the Jeff Zack murder. That source claimed the
Journal
had no idea who had called in the tip, but it seemed sensible to send a reporter down there to check it out, anyway.

The
Journal
had published an article about the Jeff Zack murder that morning, basically establishing the case as a whodunit. Cops were baffled. A hit man, maybe? Had a disgruntled neighbor, the article suggested, perhaps taken out Jeff Zack because he had threatened one of his neighbors, the guy’s kids and wife? Any and all possibilities existed. “Police are looking for the driver of a tri-colored, Ninja-styled motorcycle,” part of the
Journal
’s article read.

As the
Journal
’s reporter wandered around the lobby area of the APD down on the first floor, he or she saw Ed and Cynthia George walk into the building. Something was up. The anonymous tip was accurate. Why else would Akron’s golden couple be heading into the APD accompanied by Ed George’s flashy lawyer?

Indeed, walking alongside Ed and Cynthia was the highly touted, much respected and hugely expensive Akron attorney Robert “Bob” Meeker, who had been Ed George’s personal and business legal representative for years. Meeker was a tough lawyer to tangle with, many of the detectives working the Zack case agreed. He had been with Ed George through thick and thin and protected his interests. He was respected. Detectives knew that Meeker was going to advise Ed and Cynthia to keep quiet.

According to what detectives found out later, when Meeker spotted the reporter, he became incensed and steamed upstairs to the sixth floor with Ed and Cynthia in tow. When a person exits the elevator on the sixth floor, where the CAPU is located, there’s a long, chest-high front desk, to the right, with a waist-level saloon-style swinging door into the cubicle farm that makes up the unit off to the side. Meeker and the Georges, according to sources there on the day they arrived, had a “major hissy fit” standing by the front desk.

Moriarty, who was down at his desk, walked out into the foyer near the front reception area; as soon as Meeker saw him, he got an earful. “You set the Georges up,” Meeker said, referring to the reporter downstairs. “This is ridiculous.” He threw up his hands and walked around in circles for a moment.

That one variable, which happened to be nothing more than a rare happenstance (or was it?), Moriarty later concluded, set a precedent for the relationship Ed and Cynthia George were now going to have with the APD. Robert Meeker would see to it that if the APD wanted to speak to Cynthia or Ed, they were going to have to go through Meeker and his rather powerful team of lawyers at Blakemore, Meeker & Bowler Co., a staple in the Akron legal community since the late 1960s. No more, Meeker warned, could Moriarty and his investigators just pop up unannounced at Ed’s restaurant or home. If they did, they had better have a warrant or court order.

“This is disgraceful!” Meeker said as he, Ed and Cynthia walked into the elevator and headed back downstairs to leave.

For the CAPU, they had no motivation whatsoever to telephone in the tip to the
Journal
. In fact, they had every reason
not
to. Their goal was to speak with Ed and Cynthia George. Why would a cop tip off the local newspaper, letting them know that the Georges were on their way down to the department? It didn’t make sense. With only the lieutenant, Ed, Cynthia and Ed’s attorney knowing, it wasn’t such a far-fetched theory to come up with the source of the leak. They thought they knew who did it—and better yet, why.

“The Georges could appear to us like they wanted to talk,” said a source from the APD, “but, by the same token, get out of it.”

As a practical matter, regardless who called in the tip, CAPU detectives now knew the cat was out of the bag. With that, they had other business to tend to at the present time—before it was reported that Ed and Cynthia George were being questioned about the death of Jeff Zack. More important, a suspect could be at Jeff’s wake, which was set to take place later that same night. So Moriarty sent several detectives to the funeral home to scope it out, advising, “See what you can come up with and get back to me as soon as possible.”

As Ed Moriarty woke up the following morning, he sat and thought about the case.
It’s going to be a productive day,
Moriarty thought as he got ready to head into the office. Cops sometimes get a sense that the next lead they uncover will be that inevitable smoking gun. One superficial or seemingly insignificant piece of information can turn a complicated murder case into one that is easily solvable, even during those crucial early days of the investigation when information is coming in so fast it’s hard to keep up with.

While Moriarty drove into work, sipping from his cup of coffee, it occurred to him that finding Jeff Zack’s killer was going to come down to checking people—a
lot
of people—off the APD’s growing pool of suspects. However subtle it may have seemed, the weather, Moriarty noticed as he pulled into his parking space along the street in front of the APD, was certainly going to help on this day. It was clear in town, the sky as blue as Caribbean seawater, with comfortable, moderate temperatures in the high 60s, a dew point hovering around 54 percent by 8:00
A.M
. Those numbers wouldn’t change too much throughout the day, forecasters promised, which would, in turn, keep detectives and potential witnesses rather calm and at ease. There was nothing worse than heading out into the day with humidity levels hovering at 90 percent and the mercury capping out at 100. It made people miserable and uncooperative, certainly less willing to be accommodating to invasive questioning.

The CAPU didn’t have staff meetings every morning, but when the situation warranted it, they all got together so everyone could compare notes and sketch out the days ahead. “You have to understand,” Moriarty recalled, “inside the unit, everything else didn’t stop when Jeff Zack turned up dead. We still had to work other cases as they came in.”

With the Zack case now branching out in so many different directions, however, Moriarty put up a large board on the wall in one of the conference rooms and scribed Jeff Zack’s name in the middle, with each possible suspect flanked out around him. Time and again, the George name was coming up, Moriarty considered as he stood and he looked at the board. Neither Ed nor Cynthia could be eliminated. Not because they were acting suspicious, but because Bob Meeker was making contact between the APD and the Georges nearly impossible. Every time Moriarty and his colleagues stopped to talk to Ed George, somehow Meeker knew about it and called to break up the meeting, ripping into Moriarty over the telephone. Moriarty had even stopped at the Tangier a few times, as did other detectives, but Ed would only say, “Look, my attorney says I shouldn’t be talking to you.” A comment, incidentally, that by itself alarmed Moriarty. “When somebody tells me that their attorney won’t let me talk to you, that signifies to me that you have something that you want to say.”

After the morning meeting, Moriarty walked over to his desk, sat down and took out a copy of the
Akron Beacon Journal
. And there was the headline staring back at him:
SHOOTING AT BJ’S STILL A MYSTERY, DETECTIVES SUSPECT ROAD RAGE IN STOW MAN’S DEATH
.

At least they’re still buying it,
thought Moriarty, sitting, looking at the newspaper. Reading the accompanying article, Moriarty realized the CAPU still had time before the press totally caught on to what the investigation was fleshing out. There was a saying around the unit about Moriarty that he could talk to reporters for fifteen minutes and not say anything. He had a knack for spinning. This morning’s article proved as much.

“Moriarty said investigators are considering whether road rage prompted the incident,”
Beacon Journal
reporter Dave Ghose’s article read in part, “but have no proof yet of such a cause.”

Moriarty took a pull from his coffee and snapped the fold of the newspaper to see it more clearly.
Here it comes,
he thought,
let’s see what I said:
“‘It’s probably the most obvious thing that stands out,’” Ghose quoted Moriarty. “‘But we are looking at all possibilities. We really don’t know the motive at this point.’ Moriarty said Zack was shot after he pulled up to the pump. He had yet to purchase any gas. ‘To our knowledge, he never got out of the car.’”

Not bad. I’ll take it.

By midmorning, scores of new tips came in. After getting together and discussing the case briefly, Callahan and Moriarty considered it might take weeks, if not months, to check out every man or woman who had owned and operated a Ninja-style motorcycle in the Akron-Cleveland area. Every neighbor, disgruntled lover, family member, friend, stranger and so on, who had ever come in contact with or been annoyed by the chainsaw-like whine of a Ninja-style motorcycle had called in to report it. Moriarty and Callahan were forced to utilize dozens of officers to check out every tip. They knew 99 percent of the leads were going to yield nothing, but integrity drove them to have it done, nonetheless. Even so, how could they know, without checking each tip, that one of those Ninja owners
wasn’t
the shooter?