If Looks Could Kill (15 page)

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.

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.

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.

After a short drive, Felber verified there was a dock positioned where the cabbie had claimed. But when it came to pointing out the house near the store where he said he saw the motorcycle, the guy had trouble recalling exactly where it was.

As they drove around, Felber noticed the guy was “overly eager to please” him, often rambling on and on, saying how much he liked to help the police. Felber had a keen sense; he knew how to read witnesses. He had worked the streets of Akron for years, using confidential informant (CI) sources as a means to solve burglaries. When Felber first joined the APD, he was a greenhorn kid working in the private sector for a marketing firm. Marketing and journalism were his majors in college. He grew up in what he described as a “lower-middle-class” section of the city and, before hitting the streets in a blue uniform, had never even been to the hardscrabble sections of the city he later patrolled.

In any event, it was not a good sign that this particular witness was overly enthusiastic about helping him. The guy didn’t even seem nervous, which was another indication that his information was likely overexaggerated or entirely bogus.

Dropping him off back at the cab company, Felber said, “Listen, if you think of anything else, call me.”

“I will. I will. Thank you, sir. Good luck to you.”

It was worth following up. So Felber drove immediately back to the store and started asking questions. A young kid who was working that day told Felber he didn’t know of anyone in the neighborhood who owned a green-and-black Ninja motorcycle. But he did know of “one Middle Eastern man with a Caucasian wife” who lived in the area and stopped at the store once in a while.

Cindy and Ed George?

The owner of the store said basically the same thing, adding, “I lived next door to Jeff Zack for about three months. But I didn’t get to know Jeff too well. I wasn’t there long enough. A friend of mine did know Jeff pretty well and was also his neighbor.”

Felber left the store, shaking his head, wondering if the case could get any more complicated. If the CAPU had uncovered in just a week’s time a dozen or more people Jeff Zack had infuriated throughout his life, how many more were out there they didn’t know about?

The following day, Felber got in touch with a man he had arrested a year prior for stealing upward of forty thousand dollars from his then-employer, who happened to be Ed George’s brother. He asked the guy about the business of vending machines in general. There was still a lingering notion that Jeff Zack had gotten into an altercation over a long-running dispute with someone messing with his vending machines.

The guy said the vending business was on the “up and up” these days. Fifty years ago, people in the business got their legs broken regularly, he added, for violating the mafia’s control of the industry. But it wasn’t like that anymore. “Problems today are fixed by the court system.”

“Do you know any of the Georges?” Felber asked.

“I don’t know much about Ed or his brother’s personal life, only what I’ve been told.”

“From whom?”

“This guy Red, who worked security for Ed George at the Tangier for almost twenty years.”

“What’d you hear?”

“He said Cindy, Ed’s wife, was involved in a number of affairs and that Ed knew about them all. Cindy runs that household. Ed is a doting father who has a very low opinion of just about everyone.”

“Tell me about Cindy, specifically.”

The guy seemed restless, like he was willing to talk, but unwilling to give details he had heard from someone else.

Because he had worked at the Tangier, Felber knew Ed and Cynthia George when they were first married. Cynthia was an airline employee when she met Ed. Many saw her as a hot-looking blonde with cheerleader legs, dolled-up, shiny
Charlie’s Angels
hair, with the perfect mixture of eyeliner and cherry red lipstick, serving up cocktails and little finger foods, while wearing a miniskirt, inside a major airline’s Gold Club at the airport.

Throughout the time they sat and talked inside the guy’s apartment, Felber felt the guy was “guarded,” holding things back. He seemed antsy and nervous. When Felber asked him about Ed and Cynthia’s children, he reluctantly said, “I know one of them is adopted…and one is, well…I don’t know.”

As Felber was leaving, he couldn’t help but notice how close the guy’s apartment was to the store near Silver Lake where the cabbie had said he saw the Ninja motorcycle and heard two guys talking about whacking someone.

Coincidence?