If Looks Could Kill, page 27
Standing, looking at the bike, Bonadio asked, “Why’d you cover up the stripes?” It seemed strange, over the top, even for Zaffino.
“Because I didn’t want the green stripes to catch anybody’s attention.”
But he had traveled in the middle of the night. All this for a speeding ticket?
After Zaffino peeled the duct tape off the bike—“He didn’t want me to scratch the paint,” Bonadio said—he asked his ex-wife for a ride back to Ohio, or the keys to a Jeep in Forrest’s lot. Bonadio called her fiancé and told him what was going on. “He wants to exchange the bike for a Jeep. Would you be interested in doing that?”
“No.” Bonadio discussed the situation with Forrest and hung up shortly.
“John,” she said, “we can’t help you out. We can’t take the bike in on a trade. We can’t trust you to take on a car payment when you haven’t been able to pay me child support for years.” Bonadio expected Zaffino, knowing his temperament and history of anger, to snap. Go off on some tangent, screaming that the deal was over. Forget it. I’m keeping my bike. But, “Actually,” Bonadio said later, “he was OK with it. He didn’t give me a hard time.”
“I just need to get rid of that bike,” Zaffino said. “Now I need a ride home.”
“I’ll take the bike for the back child support, since it’s worth what you owe me,” Bonadio said. “I’ll call Domestic Relations in Warren County and clear up your account and tell them you paid me and we can start all over again.”
To her utter amazement, Zaffino agreed. (“He was OK with it.”) Suddenly, Mr. Disagreeable, someone who, in the past, hardly ever wanted to work with Bonadio on anything that didn’t benefit him directly, was willing to go along with whatever she said.
I need to get rid of the bike.
Bonadio agreed to drive Zaffino halfway. Maybe somebody could meet him. Zaffino pulled out his cell phone and dialed up a number while Bonadio stood by, waiting. “I’m calling Cindy, my girlfriend,” Zaffino made a point of saying.
As they drove, Bonadio questioned her ex-husband about how he could have possibly come up with the five thousand to buy the bike to begin with. “Where’d you get that kind of money, John?”
Zaffino smiled. “Cindy bought it for me.”
69
John Zaffino grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania. According to a few of his former friends, as soon as Zaffino got a couple of drinks in him, he became vicious and violent. Quite stocky—his weight was proportioned well—he had brown eyes and brown hair. Zaffino generally kept to himself, but wasn’t afraid to step into a situation and voice his rather stern opinions. One of the things that made Zaffino angry was when people didn’t conform to his wishes. It might be at a fast-food restaurant. Something simple, as when the restaurant failed to make his meal to his liking. He’d go off on a rip. There was one time, an acquaintance later said, when Zaffino didn’t like a hamburger Burger King had given him and he screamed at the clerk for fifteen minutes before leaving the restaurant and ranting about the hamburger during the entire thirty-minute drive home. It was those little things that flipped a switch in Zaffino and turned him from a quiet guy into a loaded gun. His son, when he was two years old, squirted him in the face with some water one night. Zaffino snapped, put the boy in his room and screamed at his wife, throwing her against the refrigerator before striking her in the face with an open hand. All because the kid, having a little fun, splashed some water in his face.
Nancy Bonadio met Zaffino at a bar in the Kinzua Dam area of Pennsylvania in 1987; they married two years later. She was twenty-eight; Zaffino, born on September 22, 1966, twenty-two. Later, she would tell police, “Well, he was rather angry all the time. Anything would set him off. Sometimes he was the nicest guy in the world and then he would just turn around and just be the meanest guy.” According to both of his ex-wives, Zaffino liked to verbally abuse women: he loved to shoot obscenities and nasty remarks at not only them, but anyone who pissed him off. Bonadio, from the early months of the marriage, lived in fear of what type of guy she would come home to at night.
A week after Bonadio was interviewed by McFarland and Shaeffer, she picked her son up from Zaffino after a scheduled visitation. There was no mention of her talking to police. He never asked about the bike or the helmets. That night, she called the CAPU to fill them in. “I saw him,” she explained. “He told me he had hired an attorney, but had not talked to police yet. He said he wasn’t going to talk to you guys without an attorney. He denied being involved in the murder. I told him he had nothing to worry about then.”
Bonadio feared that if she failed to allow Zaffino to see his son, he would “become suspicious”—it was the only reason she agreed to let him take the boy after she learned about the bike and his possible involvement in Zack’s murder. She told McFarland she was going to continue to allow Zaffino to visit the boy. She was convinced, she said, that he would never harm the child and promised to call the CAPU every time she dropped her son off in Ohio. Yet, she was worried about something: “What if he asks me about the motorcycle?” Bonadio wondered.
“Have Russell generate a pseudoreceipt of sale on the bike and keep a copy of it,” Detective McFarland suggested. “If John ever brings up the bike, say you guys sold it. If he challenges you guys on it, show him the receipt.”
Bonadio sounded scared of the prospect, but agreed.
“One more thing,” McFarland warned. “Show him the receipt only if he expresses doubts about you guys selling the bike.”
“OK.”
“Never,” McFarland concluded, “volunteer the receipt.”
70
Vince Felber and Dave Whiddon were certain the mysterious blonde in the Suburban who showed up at Zaffino’s apartment at various intervals was, in fact, Cynthia George. By Zaffino putting Cynthia down on his rental agreement as a “friend” to call in case of an emergency, it convinced the two detectives that Cynthia and John had an ongoing relationship. Were they friends, however, or lovers?
McFarland got a bead on a woman who lived one house away from Zaffino when he resided at the upscale complex. Two CAPU detectives had already spoken to her, but McFarland wanted to follow up and lock down a statement.
Meanwhile, several other detectives scoped out Zaffino’s Rittman, Ohio, apartment, where he now lived, but saw no sign of him. He was obviously onto what the CAPU detectives were up to and stayed away from the apartment as much as he could. While the CAPU had never conducted twenty-four-hour surveillance, they were about to begin watching the place more than they had in the past. There was no chance the CAPU was going to approach Zaffino at this point. It was still too early. They needed more evidence against him. If he had killed Jeff Zack, someone had sold him a gun. They needed to find that source.
Zaffino’s former neighbor was certain the woman who had been over to his apartment on occasion was Cynthia George. The time frame was between May and June 2001. McFarland pulled out a photograph of Cynthia. “That woman in the photo has the last name George and her family owns the Tangier,” the woman said. “She was often out there to see John Zaffino. I know it was her. She had Medina plates on her Suburban.”
“How do you know for certain who she was?” McFarland asked.
“Well, John told me during a conversation I had with him one day. He called her Cindy, and he said she was a model. I remember because my daughter used to be into modeling.”
In late June, Christine Todaro called Zaffino one night to try to get him to talk about the murder. Christine didn’t want to record any more of her calls, though. As each day passed, she grew more scared that Zaffino would find out what she was doing. “It was that simple for me,” Christine said later. “I thought he would kill me.”
After some small talk, Christine and Zaffino got into a bit of minutia about the case the CAPU was building against him. Zaffino knew they had something and were working on it. He could sense the net closing. Christine was desperate to get him to say anything substantial. Zaffino carried on about what she should say and do when the cops questioned her, adding, “Don’t say anything. Tell them to f- - - off.”
Christine repeatedly said she couldn’t do that.
Zaffino was worried she would say the wrong thing without realizing it. “I don’t want them to know about Nancy [Bonadio],” he said. “She’d turn me inside out, whether she knew anything or not.”
Unbeknownst to Zaffino, however, it was too late for that. The CAPU had the bike, which Zaffino was undoubtedly referring to when he mentioned Nancy Bonadio to Christine.
“All right,” she said.
“If she could, she would.”
After a laugh, Christine said, “You haven’t heard anything from her yet? Did you call?”
“No, not yet. I was supposed to go in and see my lawyer yesterday, but I couldn’t make it.”
A while later, Christine brought up the CAPU and asked Zaffino if he was going to call them. “That’s why you wanted their cards, right?”
“No. I’m not calling them.”
They talked a little more regarding how Christine was going to pay her bills. She was out of money. Wasn’t working. And was having a tough time making ends meet. She blamed it all on Zaffino, saying that she had gotten herself mixed up in his life and it was destroying hers. But Zaffino didn’t seem to care much about what Christine said. “Whatever you do, if you get panicked, don’t say nothing on the phone. I mean, if you sound panicked and they are listening to you, they’ll…there’s a reason for all of this….”
“All right,” Christine agreed.
As June ended and the scorching heat of July began, Zaffino kicked up his communication with Christine. Whenever he brought up the idea that she might be turning on him, Christine smartly mentioned Cynthia George. Christine had admitted to Zaffino that CAPU officers were still showing up at her house and asking questions about him. But she insisted she was playing it cool and not telling them anything. “You need to be concerned about trusting her,” Christine said once. “Not me. You don’t even know Cindy. You don’t even know what she’s like. Who is she, John? Do you even know?”
Whenever Christine brought up Cynthia’s name, it rattled Zaffino and pushed him into changing the subject. But on this particular call, Zaffino broke into a rage centered on Christine and her “friends” talking to the police. He had heard the cops were moving in on her friends and interviewing them. He felt they would crack sooner or later and say something to hurt him.
Christine said, “Why don’t you just go in and talk to them yourself?”
“No f- - -ing way.”
“Well, if you didn’t do anything, as you say, then go talk to them. I’m sick and tired of them coming to my house talking to me about you.”
“F- - - them. I’m not saying nothing to them. I’ll get my lawyers.”
“Fine, then, John. I’m going to get me a lawyer, too.”
Once she said that, it was important Christine follow through, she said, because she knew Zaffino would check it out.
“That’s good,” Zaffino said. “Them cops will have to go through your attorney, not you.”
71
Dave Whiddon and Vince Felber took a ride out to Christine’s house one day and asked her if she had a minute to listen to a tape. It was that threatening message somebody had left on Jeff Zack’s answering machine a few days before the murder. Whiddon and Felber believed it was Zaffino, but had a feeling it could be Seth, the guy in Florida Jeff Zack had quarreled with over that aluminum-siding project. Seth had passed a polygraph, but if the case against Zaffino ever made it to court, the CAPU had better be prepared to show it had investigated every potential suspect thoroughly. Zaffino had hired Larry Whitney, an attorney the CAPU had a long relationship with. Whitney was meticulous. He would attack the CAPU’s case on all sides.
Standing inside Christine’s kitchen, Whiddon put the tape into a recorder and pressed play: “All right, buddy, you’ve got one more out. You need to start carrying your cell phone, OK? I’ll be talking to you.”
Whiddon then looked at Christine for her immediate reaction. “So what do you think?”
Whiddon later wrote in his report, Christine stood and “immediately” said, “That’s definitely John. I cannot believe he was that stupid enough to leave a message on Jeff Zack’s machine before he killed him.” (Later, Whiddon told me, “There was no doubt in Christine’s mind that the voice was Zaffino’s. And, after we started recording his conversations with Christine, I, too, was convinced by listening to his voice on those tapes.”)
At about the same time, Russ McFarland drove over to the apartment complex and played the message for one of Zaffino’s neighbors. “It sounds like him,” she said, “but I cannot be sure.”
“Thanks,” McFarland said.
By the Fourth of July holiday, Whiddon had contacted Herbert Joe, a voice analysis expert. Out of his Texas laboratory, Joe’s firm did comparative examinations. Whiddon felt that since he had a few conversations recorded between Zaffino and Christine, Joe could take those samples, along with the voice mail message, and make a comparison.
Joe said it would take some time. He told Whiddon to send the tapes, along with the actual answering machine. Whiddon packaged everything up—including a sample of Seth’s voice—and sent it to Texas. (“I was told it was going take a long time for Herbert Joe to come up with an opinion.”)
72
CAPU officers were looking for a connection between Ed George and John Zaffino. The idea that Ed could have hired Zaffino couldn’t be ruled out. They believed the common denominator was Cynthia; however, there was, at this juncture, no proof that Cynthia George was anything more than Zaffino’s friend. To the CAPU, Cynthia was a bona fide—albeit, promiscuous—wife of a well-respected Akron businessman. They had to be careful. On paper, however, Cynthia looked more like the conduit through which a connection could be made between Ed George and Jeff Zack’s murder.
Captain Daugherty wanted more than speculation and theories, though. She knew there was something out there. During her career, Daugherty said later, she had always been attracted to the document side of investigating. She loved the tedious repetition of rummaging through scores of documents looking for a needle. For most investigators, the process of combing through thousands of pages of mind-numbing text is a part of the job they loathe. Yet Daugherty was from the school that believed documents, providing they hadn’t been tampered with, told a fairly truthful story. They could reveal parts of a case no other piece of evidence could. That being said, the best documents, Daugherty asserted, are bank and telephone records taken directly from the source. If you subpoena a bank or phone company and get those documents directly from them, no one has had a chance to manipulate them.
With that, Daugherty took out hundreds of pages of bank and telephone records connected to the Zack case that were stacked in several large boxes, sitting near her desk, and started to go through them, looking for, of course, any connection between Zaffino and Cynthia, or Zaffino and Ed George. “Generally speaking,” Daugherty explained to me later, “when you get bank records straight from a bank, the bank could care less about them, so we know they’re not altered.”
The CAPU had subpoenaed Cynthia George’s bank. The was no real plan as Daugherty sat down and started sifting through the records. She wasn’t looking for anything in particular, more like she was searching for something that stood out. But while looking at the day Zaffino had purchased the motorcycle, Daugherty noticed Cynthia had withdrawn $5,300 in cash. When she matched up the withdrawal with the price Zaffino paid for the bike, the amounts matched almost identically. More than that, within a five-hour window, Daugherty noticed as she checked the times, Cynthia had withdrawn the money and Zaffino had purchased the bike.
It could be a coincidence, sure. But if nothing else, it was enough to look deeper. In fact, the one glitch in the paperwork, Daugherty soon realized, at first seemed like a major hurdle to get around. When Daugherty noticed the close proximity in which the time of the withdrawal matched the sale of the bike, she called the bank to find out which branch, exactly, Cynthia had withdrawn the money from. She was trying to time the purchase against the sale of the bike: the location where Cynthia had taken out the cash as compared to the location where Zaffino had purchased the bike.
The bank representative told Daugherty the withdrawal was made in Michigan.
Michigan? Daugherty wondered. It didn’t make sense. Why in the heck would Cynthia drive to Michigan to withdraw money when she could do it right in town?
Then again, Daugherty thought, maybe the trip was part of the plan? But after further analyzing it, There’s no way, Daugherty thought, Cindy could have withdrawn the money in Michigan and made it to the bike shop in five hours.
Maybe she wired Zaffino the money?
After going through it over and over, Daugherty learned that she had given the bank rep the wrong set of routing numbers. The actual physical withdrawal, she found out after calling back and giving the woman the right numbers, was in Montrose, Ohio, a town that, centrally speaking, is in between Akron and Medina, where Cynthia lived with Ed and the kids. This, of course, made more sense. Yet, what further piqued Daugherty’s interest was that the bike shop was a twenty-minute drive from the bank. “I ended up,” Daugherty said later, laughing at her own mistake, “making several unnecessary phone calls and talking to a bunch of unnecessary people for unnecessary reasons because of a couple numbers I transposed.”
“It certainly started to look like Ed [George] was involved, once we found that connection between John Zaffino and Cindy George,” said one of the detectives. “We just had to prove it.”
