If Looks Could Kill (20 page)

When the CAPU contacted Bonnie Zack after the dust of September 11 cleared, and life had gotten back to as normal as it would ever be, she agreed to take a polygraph. Bonnie wanted to clear her name and help the CAPU keep its focus on, she and many of her family members were certain, Jeff’s real killer, Ed George. Anything she could do to further facilitate the investigation, she assured Ed Moriarty, she’d be happy to help. Strap that armband on, set those dials, start asking questions.

“I’m ready.”

Overall, “I’m pretty upset,” Bonnie told polygraph examiner Sean Methany, over “my husband’s death.” It hadn’t been as easy as people might have thought. Despite Jeff’s infidelity and loathsome behavior, she had loved the man. Bonnie explained that she tried keeping herself busy around the house, hoping to lessen the pain, but some days were harder than others. The day before the polygraph, she explained, she had spent building a rock garden in her yard. She was exhausted.

Before the test started, Bonnie was questioned about her potential role in Jeff’s murder, but she “denied any involvement,” Methany wrote in his report, “in the death of her husband…[adding that she] strongly believed Ed George was behind her husband’s murder because of a long-term affair Jeff was having with Ed George’s wife, Cindy.” After that, Bonnie said, “Jeff told me that he fathered Cindy’s youngest child, [Ruby]. My son, [Ashton], told me that Jeff told him that ‘if anything ever happened to him, tell the police to go after Ed George.’”

Whiddon and Moriarty questioned Bonnie during the polygraph. She felt most comfortable with them.

“Do you know for sure why Jeff Zack was killed?”

“No.”

“Do you know for sure who killed Jeff Zack?”

“No.”

“Take it easy, Bonnie,” Moriarty suggested at one point. She was yawning and moving around. She seemed entirely uncomfortable, agitated, tired. It wasn’t the test, Moriarty knew, but more the idea of having to do it.

“Did you conspire with anyone to have Jeff Zack killed?”

“No.”

After a careful review of the polygrams, Methany concluded, Bonnie’s answers were “inconclusive.” Yet Methany wrote the results off as being due to Bonnie’s exhaustion on that day and suggested Moriarty and Whiddon wait awhile and polygraph her again.

Near the end of September, Bonnie showed up at the APD for a second test. She put her initials by the waiver she had signed previously while Whiddon reread Bonnie her Miranda rights. She seemed more relaxed than the previous time.

Bonnie answered the questions in the same manner. When the test was over, Methany called Moriarty and Whiddon into another room and went through the results. “It is my opinion,” Methany said, “that there’s deception on three of the four questions.”

Whiddon and Moriarty were surprised. Moriarty dropped his head.
Could this investigation get any more puzzling?
Suppose Bonnie had had something to do with Jeff’s murder: where would they start? It didn’t fit. They had checked out her entire background thoroughly. Her family. Her bank accounts. Where would she get the money? How could she have hired someone without anyone else knowing about it? It was as if just when their investigation was gathering steam again, suspects being crossed off, new suspects being questioned, old theories quashed, here comes this anomaly.

Nevertheless, Moriarty and Whiddon headed into the room where Bonnie was waiting. Beforehand, they had decided to confront her with the allegations the lie detector suggested. There was more, however. Russ McFarland had just returned from interviewing an inmate at a local jail, a lowlife who was making some pretty shocking accusations against Jeff. Another deviation had been thrown into the mix, seemingly making Bonnie appear as though she had some things to hide. When Whiddon and Moriarty finished talking to McFarland, they were more determined than ever to get to the bottom of Bonnie’s possible involvement.

“You think she could have done it, Ed?” Whiddon asked.

Moriarty shrugged. “Shit, I guess at this point anything’s possible.”

Jonas Little
had known Jeff Zack for a few years. They had worked together for a temp agency. Jonas, who said he knew Bonnie well, was a forty-two-year-old hard-looking drifter, with salt-and-pepper hair, a scruffy mustache, bulgy eyes, pronounced chin and the wrinkly face of a guy who had done his share of time in the clinker. Right off, he admitted some of the rotten things he had done in the past. But Jeff Zack, he insisted, was no damn better.

Little claimed to have reached out to a cop friend after he heard Jeff had been murdered, and told him he believed Jeff was murdered by an “Iranian businessman” who worked at one of the malls where Jeff had several vending machines. McFarland, who picked Little up at the jail and drove him to the APD, was curious, of course, as to a motive. Why Iranians? How did
they
fit in? Little was claiming Jeff’s vending machine business was a façade for something else—something entirely illegal.

“Its main purpose was a front for gunrunning,” Little told the CAPU. “Jeff sold guns to [various people].”

Not one or two pistols he bought at a Wal-Mart or off the street, Little insisted. But crates of automatic weapons. Jeff Zack, Little said, was a major gun trafficker in Akron.

If true, here was another layer of Jeff Zack’s character the CAPU had no idea existed. Could the guy’s past be any more complex?

Little was scared of talking to the CAPU, but, McFarland reported, he opened up mighty quick once he knew the stakes. Little said he had been with Jeff on several occasions when Jeff delivered the guns. “Whenever Jeff would make a [vending machine] delivery,” Little told McFarland, “he would pull into a receiving area behind these stores. He would enter the rear of [one] store first. The back door was always unlocked.” Little was shaky, speaking with a hurried distress, yet sounded sure of himself. “Once inside the back of the store, he would go down a long and narrow hallway to get into the business area of the store.” He drew a map. Sketched out the entire area of the mall he said Jeff had routinely visited.

Right there was the door. He drew an X. There, that Dumpster, that’s where Little said he saw the motorcycle parked.

Motorcycle?

Entering the mall from the back, Little said, allowed Jeff to go from store to store and deliver the guns to several customers he had in the same section of the mall.

McFarland was confused. How could a guy have walked through the back of a mall with all these guns and no one noticed?

“The longer weapons, such as rifles and AK-47s,” said Little, “would be brought in green-and-black fiberglass cases. The handguns, such as 9 millimeters, .357s, and .44s—never anything smaller than a .38—would be brought…inside twelve-pack soda pop cartons.”

At first, Little’s details impressed McFarland. It made his story sound credible—however over the top it may have seemed. “Whenever Jeff dealt with the Iranians, he would speak with them in a foreign language, like Arabic. I never knew what they were talking about. The gun transactions were usually once every two weeks—but there were times when he made two deliveries in one week.”

Little said he had been over to Jeff’s house about fifteen times. He told McFarland exactly where Jeff stored most of his automatic weapons. “Under the steps to his basement and behind his furnace.”

Gun-trafficking allegations obviously opened up a new door into the investigation. If Jeff was a gunrunner, there was a chance someone from that crowd could have put a hit out on him to silence him for some reason. Maybe Jeff had gotten into a jam he couldn’t get out of? If, for example, Jeff mouthed off to one of those gun buyers, threatening to expose him, it wasn’t hard to believe the guy paid for a hit.

Little said Jeff usually carried ten grand inside his SUV; he kept it in a gray plastic box. He remembered this precisely because he was shocked by the “carelessness” Jeff displayed by keeping so much money lying around his SUV.

McFarland wanted names and addresses, so Little gave him several, along with a few of the stores to which Jeff had sold guns. The Iranians, Little added, had asked Jeff at one time to “find men that would do arranged marriages for two Iranian girls in their twenties so they could get their green cards.” Little said he offered himself up, but the Iranians took one look at him, laughed and shot him down, saying he was “too old, had a criminal record, and wasn’t suitable.”

At this point, Little began to shed tears. He was a wreck, totally overwhelmed and ashamed of himself. But then he relayed a bit of information that seemed, well, too good to be true, fitting too perfectly into the context of the case. “In the receiving area [of that one store],” Little said, “where Jeff always parked when doing business…there was a motorcycle often parked next to the Dumpster.”

“What kind of motorcycle?” McFarland asked.

“One of those crotch rocket types,” Little insisted. “It was green, white and black in color. I’m certain of it. The rear end of the bike was black.”

“Why do you think Jeff was murdered?”

“Blackmail. A white employee [at this one store] had gotten married during this time when Jeff was gunrunning and Jeff had gone to the wedding. A short time later, the guy’s wife had a baby.” Was Little saying Jeff Zack had fathered the child? McFarland was curious.

McFarland dropped Little back off at the jail and drove away shaking his head at this new twist in the case. It was incredible. If Jeff was dealing guns and going back to his old habits, anything was possible.

McFarland, along with a colleague, set out to check into the information Little had given the CAPU. It all had to be corroborated to make any difference in the investigation. If there was one common theme running through the entire investigation, it was that everyone who knew Jeff Zack had a story to tell that smacked down his credibility, if not morality. Jeff had been involved in so many illegal activities, according to many of the people who knew him, it seemed that any one of them—even a pack of Iranians snuffing him out over a bad gun deal—could have had him murdered. The problem the CAPU faced, however, was separating fact from fiction.

Armed with the information Russ McFarland had gotten out of Jonas Little, Ed Moriarty and Dave Whiddon confronted Bonnie Zack. They felt she had not been all that forthcoming with them. Now, with the results of the polygraph indicative of “deception,” they needed Bonnie to open up. For example, if Jeff was selling weapons, and hiding those weapons in the house, there wasn’t a chance Bonnie didn’t know about it.

Bonnie laughed at Little’s accusations. “That’s funny,” she said, rolling her eyes. “
Really
funny.” She knew Little was nothing more than a convict lowlife looking to make himself look good in front of the cops, probably trying to get himself a deal on any charges he was facing.

“Funny?” Moriarty asked condescendingly. “You think this is
funny
?”

Bonnie smiled, then denied having anything to do with Jeff’s murder. It didn’t matter what the polygraph results reported, or what Little had said. “No,” she kept repeating when Moriarty and Whiddon questioned her about Jeff’s murder. “No. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Nothing.” (“She was evasive and non-committal in her responses,” a report of the interview noted.)

“I don’t think it meant that Bonnie had anything to do with her husband’s murder,” Ed Moriarty told me later. “But I think in her heart, Bonnie believed she knew who had killed Jeff. That’s why the answers she gave during the polygraph came back positive.”

The role of the investigator can sometimes be sidetracked by the most tedious tasks, thus setting a fast-paced investigation back a few steps. The information Jonas Little had injected into the mix, along with Bonnie’s failed polygraph, only made CAPU investigators work harder to corroborate the information or write it off. This took time, however. A lot of legwork, coupled with knocking on new doors and working old sources. Russ McFarland had zeroed in on the possible owner of a black-white-and-green motorcycle Little had claimed he saw parked in back of the mall where, he seemed certain, Jeff was not only delivering soda pop, but guns.

On Tuesday, October 16, the CAPU held a morning meeting to discuss these new developments, if they could be called such. Most of the talk focused on Little’s accusations and how much of what he said could be considered credible. What gave Jonas Little’s allegations a bit more weight among the CAPU was that it was firsthand information. Little had said he was there with Jeff, in his truck, alongside him during the alleged gun buys. What reason would he have to lie about such an allegation? He said he didn’t want anything. He even said he’d wear a wire and make a gun buy himself if the CAPU didn’t believe him.

McFarland found out that one of the stores Little had remembered as being a major gun buyer had not even existed during the period in which Little had claimed Jeff laundered guns through it. So the guy’s memory, right away, had to be taken into consideration. One guy,
Burt Lance,
who, Little said he was certain, drove a Ninja motorcycle and parked it in back of the mall near the Dumpster, seemed to be a suspect the CAPU needed to speak with quickly. For the CAPU, Little’s description of the bike was particularly informative, seeing that the color scheme—green, white, black—was almost an exact description witnesses at BJ’s had given, especially Little’s mention of the rear end of the bike: “all black.” Other witnesses later described a black-green-and-white bike, a black bike with green stripes and various other combinations of the same three colors. But Little hit it spot on.

A coincidence? Luck? Whatever it was, the CAPU was obligated to check it out thoroughly. “[Jonas Little],” McFarland explained to his colleagues during the meeting, “was only the second person in the investigation to put those colors in that exact pattern.” Furthermore, a Kawasaki dealership in the Akron area said that if the killer’s bike had those exact colors in that specific pattern, the paint job must have been customized. The factory didn’t ship those types of bikes with the same pattern.

After the meeting, McFarland and a colleague drove to the mall and started asking questions. They needed to find that bike and question Burt Lance.

McFarland found one of Lance’s old partners. Lance ran a telephone store in the mall, which Little had claimed Jeff sifted guns through. Lance’s partner, however, said he never, in all the years he knew Lance, had heard that Lance owned a motorcycle. The guy drove an SUV. McFarland steered clear from the gun issue, saving it, he wrote later in his report, “for a follow-up interview.”

After showing a photograph of Little to the managers of all the stores with entrances from the back of the mall, not one person recognized Jonas Little. Even more telling, not one person could say that he or she ever saw a motorcycle parked by the Dumpster.

Another high-five opportunity deflated.