When Detective Melissa Williams returned with information from her interview with Lisa, Jeff Zack’s mistress from Arizona, the woman with whom he had spent the week in Las Vegas before his murder, at first it cleared up a few inconsistencies that had been left hanging. However, it also invited more questions that the CAPU really didn’t need at this point.

  It appeared as if Jeff had told Lisa about several threats Ed George had made to him. “But I don’t think they happened recently,” she had explained to Williams. In any event, the reason Jeff gave Lisa for the end of his relationship with Cynthia, detectives knew, was another lie. Jeff explained to Lisa that Cynthia had been “too controlling.” Because of her obsession with having power over the relationship, Jeff claimed, he couldn’t “go anywhere—not even on a family vacation—without Cindy following [him] around.”

  According to many other sources, it was Cynthia who had ended the affair, not Jeff. And it was Cynthia who couldn’t go anywhere without Jeff badgering her and following her and begging her to take him back. Jeff had become, in effect, a nuisance in Cynthia’s life.

  By the same token, Jeff told Lisa he owned several horses. Taking it further, when Lisa asked him where he kept the horses, Jeff stated, “At home. I have a large barn…. I have black guys working for me obtaining semen from the horses for breeding.” Jeff also told Lisa his vending business was “connected to the mafia.”

  At one point while they were in Vegas, Jeff wanted to call Ashton and have Lisa speak to him. “We talked about something more permanent,” she explained. Jeff wanted Lisa to get to know his son. When she resisted, feeling as though talking to the boy would be crossing a line, Jeff changed the subject and showed her photographs of his time in the Israeli Army.

  During what Lisa described as an “intimate moment” one night, Lisa and Jeff started talking about safe sex. “Great,” Jeff said when she asked him about his sexual history, “does this mean I’ll have to get tested again?”

  “What do you mean by that?” Lisa wanted to know.

  “I just upped my life insurance to one million dollars,” Jeff said, “and they made me get tested.”

  Williams wrote in her report of the interview that she had asked Lisa if Bonnie knew about the life insurance. It was critical, perhaps one of the most vital questions to date. If Bonnie knew, it certainly pushed her to the front of what was becoming a smaller pool of suspects.

  “I assumed Bonnie knew,” Lisa told Williams.

  As the interview concluded, Williams realized that as much as Lisa knew about Jeff, most of it was based on fabrications or embellishments. Lisa never knew, for example, that David Zack wasn’t Jeff’s biological father. Lisa thought he was. Yet, according to Lisa, the most telling portion of their time in Vegas had come during their final night together. Jeff had “concerns,” she said, that something was about to happen to him. “He was very intuitive,” she added, “and had premonitions that something was wrong.” Most of Jeff’s worries focused on Ashton. Jeff believed the child was in danger. When they parted ways at the airport, Jeff kissed Lisa and whispered, “I’m afraid that I’ll never see you again.” He didn’t mean that Bonnie was going to find out about the relationship; Lisa felt it was more of a feeling that he knew something bad was about to happen. In fact, on the plane ride back home to Ohio, Jeff had called Ashton from the plane to make sure he was okay.

  When Jeff returned, he and Lisa began talking “three to four times a day,” she said, and e-mailed each other daily. Jeff set up a special e-mail account that only he could access with a secret password. They communicated right up until that Friday before Jeff was murdered. During one conversation over the telephone, Jeff said, “This is how I got caught with Cindy. Bonnie’s coming in the house right now. I have to go.”

  Jeff called Lisa back sometime later and apologized, saying, “Happy anniversary, it’s been one week since Vegas.” He was cheerful, upbeat. “I’ll e-mail you before I go to bed.”

  “Just e-mail me in the morning if you’re too tired,” Lisa told him.

  Later that night, Jeff sent Lisa a quick note, signing off, I love you until my death.

  When Lisa didn’t receive an e-mail the following morning, Saturday, the day of Jeff’s death, she said she grew “concerned.” At around one o’clock that afternoon, Lisa tried calling Jeff on his cell phone. When a man whose voice she didn’t recognize answered—it was one of the detectives at the hospital with Jeff’s body—she hung up.

  After having a friend call around all day and the next, finally getting through to someone at Bonnie’s work, Lisa said she found out Jeff had been murdered.

  30

  Captain Beth Daugherty was able to obtain a subpoena by Thursday, June 21, for a look into the bank accounts of Ed and Cynthia George. The period the CAPU was most interested in, according to the subpoena, was January 1, 2001, to the end of June that same year. One aspect of digging into Ed and Cynthia’s bank accounts was to see if a large withdrawal had been made at some point near the time Jeff was murdered. Another was to try to make any connection they could between Ed and Jeff. “We were looking for moving money,” Ed Moriarty recalled. “Before the advent of the Internet and before drugs were really a part of it, murder was more personal, intimate. The first motivator is emotion. The second is money. When in doing a homicide investigation, the money trail can get you to where you want to go. We were looking for the money trail, a personal connection.” Anything that could connect Jeff Zack with Ed George. “If someone had been hired to kill Jeff,” Moriarty added, “we believed then that it probably would have come through Ed George.”

  A bit apprehensive and standoffish at first, after the bank got a look at the subpoena, the accounts manager said it would take at least five to six days before they could fulfill the request.

  That was fine. There was plenty of work to do. After an intense search for Seth and Carl, two CAPU detectives finally tracked down where they believed Seth lived. If Ed George wasn’t behind Jeff’s murder, it was a good bet that Seth and/or Carl had some sort of link, perhaps for the simple reason that, beyond Bonnie and Ed, Seth and Carl had a textbook motive to want Jeff dead: to shut him up.

  The residential neighborhood in which Seth lived contained four houses flanked in a cul-de-sac. Detective Russ McFarland and Lieutenant Dave Whiddon went up to Seth’s door and knocked. It appeared that no one was home, or, rather, no one had been home in quite a while. Still, Whiddon thought as he approached the door, it was worth knocking.

  After several minutes, no one answered.

  “Let’s spread out and go door-to-door,” Whiddon suggested.

  After knocking on the doors of Seth’s three neighbors, no one seemed to be around. So the detectives left their business cards at each house, hoping someone would call.

  By the time they got back into the car, Mike Shaeffer had come up with the name of Seth’s neighbor. The guy was a firefighter. He worked up the road at a local firehouse.

  “Great, we’ll head right over there,” McFarland told Shaeffer.

  Hopefully, the neighbor could offer some insight into Seth’s comings and goings.

  “That guy [Seth],” the firefighter said after Whiddon and McFarland introduced themselves, “has a problem with everyone in the neighborhood. He’s very arrogant. Likes to flash his money around in front of people.”

  It was obvious from the firefighter’s terse, emotional response that Seth was not the type of neighbor people invited over for cookouts and parties.

  Further along into the conversation, the firefighter said Seth was in the landscaping/home repair business and had a reputation for hiring contractors to do work on new homes and then ripping them off. He said he had seen a moving truck in Seth’s driveway “about four weeks ago” and believed Seth moved to Florida with his wife and kids. “But he came back a few weeks later by himself and then left again.”

  McFarland and Whiddon looked at each other.

  “Have you seen him since?”

  “Nope.”

  Whiddon took out a Kawasaki motorcycle brochure with a photograph of a green-and-black Ninja on the cover. “You ever seen one of these at Seth’s house?”

  The firefighter thought about it. “I’ve never seen that type of motorcycle over there, no.”

  Whiddon showed him a photograph of Seth.

  “Yup, that’s definitely him.”

  Then a photograph of Carl.

  “Don’t recognize that guy.”

  The time frame worked. Seth had split to Florida with his family a month ago, then returned at or near the time of Jeff’s murder. It was possible he came back to Akron to commit the murder and then bolted back to Florida.

  Another guy at the firehouse who knew Seth came forward next. The guy’s brother-in-law had lived across the street from Seth in the same neighborhood. “Scum of the earth,” he said of Seth. “Someone that never kept a real job. I know he just purchased a car wash, but I guess it flopped and he never made any money and never made any payments on the business.”

  “What about his house?”

  “Several people were interested in buying it, but the thing had so many liens against it that it wasn’t worth it.”

  Leaving the fire department, McFarland and Whiddon headed back over to Seth’s neighborhood to see if anyone had made it home. By pure luck, they saw the second fireman’s brother-in-law working in his yard. “You got a few minutes?” Whiddon asked.

  “No problem.” He invited them in. “Sit down, please.”

  “How long have you lived here?” Whiddon asked.

  “Oh, about five years.”

  “What about your neighbor”—pointing to Seth’s house—“over there?”

  “He’s been there about two or three years.”

  A homicide detective’s life can become cyclical. Many homicide investigations move in a circle, leading investigators back to the same set of suspects and circumstances. A seasoned homicide detective never looks at the obvious. Most of the time, when someone looks too good as a suspect, he or she turns out to be innocent. With Seth and Carl, on paper their guilt seemed like a perfect fit—which was why Whiddon and McFarland were so interested in dragging one of them in for questioning. Whenever you have a potential pair of murderers, it was easier to get one to drop a dime on the other. Human nature and a bit of police ingenuity could work wonders. But the key was getting them downtown together and then quickly splitting them up.

  Seth’s neighbor said he was known as a “high roller…but most of his money was made through questionable business deals.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He tried to lure me into some of these deals and often asked me personal questions about my finances.”

  The man said he and his wife used to be friends with Seth and his wife, but they had a falling-out after Seth went nuts one day, yelling and screaming at some kids playing out in front of his house.

  “That was it?”

  “He also made sexual advances toward my wife when I wasn’t around one day. When I found out, I confronted him. We haven’t spoken since.”

  More interesting to Whiddon and McFarland, the man said Seth routinely argued out in the open with his employees and contractors who worked for him.

  “He liked to talk about The Sopranos. It was his favorite show.”

  Whiddon took out the brochure of the Ninja. The man shook his head. Said he had never seen a bike like it at Seth’s.

  31

  Dave Whiddon was able to get Carl’s address from another source. He and McFarland headed straight over to his house after leaving Seth’s neighborhood that second time. Pulling in, it appeared as if no one was home. Whiddon got out. As he was walking up to the door to leave his card, a gold Ford Explorer pulled into the driveway. From the photograph he and McFarland had, Whiddon could tell Carl was driving. The female next to him, he surmised, was his wife. There were three children in the backseat. “Carl, I’m Lieutenant Dave Whiddon,” he said, pulling out his badge, “this is Detective McFarland.”

  Carl didn’t say anything.

  “Can we talk to you for a few minutes?”

  “Come on into the house,” Carl said. He seemed calm. Not scared at all.

  Carl lived pretty well. Nice house. New furniture. Big SUV in the driveway, with three kids and a wife. Was the guy going to risk losing all that by murdering Jeff Zack for seven thousand dollars?

  Carl’s wife took the kids into another section of the house while Carl sat down in the living room with Whiddon and McFarland. They asked about Seth first. “I’ve been working with him for about the past five months,” Carl said. He explained how he answered an ad in the newspaper Seth had placed for an experienced floor tile person. “He asked me about working insurance claim jobs. He wanted me to move to Florida with him to continue the same type of work. We went down there in March for spring break. We looked for a house and checked out the school system. I grew up in Florida. So did my wife. We went out to dinner a few times. When we left, my wife said she didn’t want to move down there because she didn’t trust Seth.”

  After Carl described how he moved away from Seth weeks ago, after he found out he was “cheating customers out of money,” Whiddon brought up Jeff Zack.

  Carl said he met Jeff four years ago. “I helped coach Jeff’s son’s youth football team.”

  Through that relationship, Carl and Jeff became friends and started hanging out. It was clear that as he began to talk about Jeff, Carl became, Whiddon wrote in his report, “visibly upset” because of what he said was a “close relationship” he had with Jeff and Ashton.

  The seven thousand dollars in question was all Seth’s doing, Carl claimed. He was sick over it. Seth had even managed to burn him out of the money he got from Jeff’s insurance company. “I tried to explain to Jeff that I wasn’t involved with it, but he didn’t want to hear it. He said he was turning the situation over to the insurance company’s investigative unit and then going to the police. I told him to get an attorney and sue Seth.” But Jeff didn’t respond too well to the conversation, saying, “Don’t come over to my house anymore.”

  “What happened between Jeff and Seth?”

  “He said he talked to Seth three times and threatened him verbally,” Carl explained. “It got really heated. Jeff told Seth one day, ‘I’m going to f---your wife and your family if you don’t leave my family alone.’ This happened about two weeks ago.”

  “What was your first reaction when you heard about Jeff’s death?”

  “I was in the shower. My wife came in and told me she saw it in the newspaper. My first thought was that Seth had something to do with it. I feel terrible. I introduced Seth to Jeff. Seth was always talking about The Sopranos and ‘burning all of his bridges’ here in Ohio before moving to Florida.”

  After checking out the alibi Carl had given Whiddon and McFarland, the CAPU felt confident there was no way Carl could have been involved in Jeff’s murder.

  32

  Late Thursday afternoon, CAPU detective Vince Felber called the Silver Lake Police Department, (SLPD) in Silver Lake, Ohio, a little town about ten miles north of Akron, regarding an anonymous tip a Silver Lake police officer had received earlier that day. “The caller said,” the officer told Felber, “the motorcycle you guys are looking for was in the Myrtle-Curtis part of Cuyahoga Falls.”

  “Any idea who the caller is?” Felber asked.

  “I recognized his voice—he’s a local cabbie.”

  After the Silver Lake Police Department gave Felber the name of the cab company, he made a call and found out the cabbie was out on the road. “Let him know I’m on my way over there to speak with him.”

  The drive took about forty minutes. For Felber, investigating Jeff Zack’s murder was different from his normal work. For the most part, Felber spent his days (and sometimes nights) working burglary detail. Homicide wasn’t his thing. He had gotten involved in the Zack case by the sheer process of elimination. He was working the weekend that the Zack murder took place. Ed Moriarty had brought Felber in because he knew Felber had, at one time, worked as a bartender at Ed George’s Tangier. Felber knew some of the people who worked at the restaurant. His knowledge of Ed George alone, Moriarty knew, would help the case immensely.

  Felber met the cabbie in the parking lot. “He was very eager to talk to me,” Felber wrote in his report.

  The cabbie said he heard “two men” discussing Jeff Zack’s murder. One of the men, the cabbie claimed, was driving a green-and-black Ninja motorcycle.

  Felber said, “Tell me what happened.”

  “I was taking a nap on a small dock that sits on the river by a tackle shop where I work part-time. It was last Sunday afternoon, about eleven in the morning.” While taking a nap on the dock, he said, he was awoken by the sound of an aluminum boat trolling by. “There were two men inside, they looked Lebanese or Greek. They were talking about ‘whacking’ some guy, blowing him away. They mentioned road rage and laughed about it.”

  It all seemed to fit.

  “Can you identify these men?” Felber asked. It seemed too convenient. Too good to be true. But what the hell, what else did the CAPU have at this point?

  “Sure. They were talking about heading down to the store to get a six-pack of beer.”

  “What about the bike? You said you saw a motorcycle?”

  “That was the next day. I was down at the same store where those guys said they were heading. I was Dumpster diving. I saw a white-green-and-black motorcycle parked near the store. I think the bike belonged to one of the guys in the boat.”

  Felber asked the cabbie if he would mind taking a drive. He wanted to check it out for himself—see the dock, the store, take a look around. Maybe the cabbie was a crackpot? During any high-profile homicide investigation, there is no shortage of people who want desperately to be part of solving the crime. Since the advent of crime television and Court TV’s wide variety of forensic shows, armchair detectives come out of the woodwork. Beyond that, the Silver Lake cop Felber had spoken to warned Felber about the guy, telling him that he was a local big mouth, a guy who liked to “be involved” in police work, but someone whose information rarely checked out.