by Ann Rule
Shortly before five, Detective Hillen phoned Adam and asked if he was still willing to take the test. Adam said he wanted to speak to his brother, Jonah, about it, and Hillen said that was fine—he would call him back in a few minutes.
Hillen did so.
“I have nothing to hide,” Adam said. “I’m willing to take the test.”
It was 5:30 when Adam Shacknai arrived at the San Diego County homicide offices to meet with polygrapher Paul Redden. Once again, Hillen reminded him that he was not compelled to take the test, and that he was present of his own free will. Adam nodded.
And then his cell phone rang. He said he didn’t recognize the number and let it go to his text mailbox. But it rang again a few minutes later. Adam checked the caller ID and saw that it was a message from an attorney’s office.
“My brother must have called a lawyer for me,” Adam said. “What do you think he wants to say to me?”
“I think,” Hillen said truthfully, “that he would tell you not to take the polygraph test.”
Adam Shacknai mulled that over, but he didn’t change his mind and said he had no reason to talk to an attorney. Four times Detective Hillen explained to Adam that he was in the sheriff’s office voluntarily and he didn’t have to take a lie detector test.
And four times Adam said he had nothing to hide.
He grew nervous only when Redden began to hook him up to the leads for the polygraph: blood pressure, breathing patterns, galvanic skin response, and heart rate. He asked about what the lie detector test could say—even when the leads were attached to an innocent person.
Redden assured him that it didn’t matter how nervous a subject might be: if he was telling the truth, the polygraph would show that.
Redden began the test at 6:40 and continued for two hours. At first he asked only innocuous general questions. He noted his subject’s response to deliberate “lie questions.”
Finally, he began to question Adam Shacknai about the past few days’ events.
Paul Redden gave Adam Shacknai four polygraph tests. He asked the following relevant questions:
1. Regarding the death of Rebecca, do you know for sure if anyone did anything to her that resulted in her death?
(SUBJECT answered “No.”)
2. Regarding the death of Rebecca, did you, yourself, do anything to her that resulted in her death?
(SUBJECT answered “No.”)
3. Regarding the death of Rebecca, were you in the guest room that she was found hanging from at anytime during the night?
(SUBJECT answered “No.”)
Redden charted two more tests with similar questions.
4. Did you, yourself, do anything to Rebecca that resulted in her death?
(SUBJECT answered “No.”)
5. Did you physically do anything to Rebecca that resulted in her death?
(SUBJECT answered “No.”)
RESULTS
At the conclusion of the polygraph examination, a careful evaluation of all the subject’s polygraph charts revealed insufficient physiological responses necessary to make a determination. It is my opinion, as the Examiner, based on careful analysis of all the subject’s polygraph charts that the subject was inconclusive when he answered “No” to the above relevant questions.
Respectfully,
Paul Redden
Polygraph Examiner
Adam Shacknai elaborated next to Redden, Hillen, and Lebitski on the statement he had given earlier in this endless day. He said he had received a phone call from his father in New York on Tuesday, telling him that his nephew Max had fallen and hit his head. His father said Max was in a coma, in serious condition.
“I called Rebecca, my brother’s girlfriend,” he said. “I told her I would fly out here from Memphis to give whatever help and support I could. I told her I would rent a car at the airport, but she said she would pick me up—since she was dropping her sister off at the airport anyway.”
Becky had picked him up, and they drove to Rady Children’s Hospital, where they picked up Jonah and his best friend, Dr. Howard Luber. Then they drove back to the airport, Adam recalled. Adam said he believed that Dr. Luber was in San Diego to support Jonah after Max fell.
“We dropped him off so he could fly home to Arizona,” Adam said. “Then we drove to the Fish Market restaurant where the three of us—Jonah, Becky, and myself—had dinner.”
After they ate, Becky drove back once again to the hospital. “Jonah showed me his room at the Ronald McDonald House.”
Finally, Adam said, he and Rebecca had driven to Jonah’s mansion on Ocean Boulevard. He estimated they arrived there between 7:30 and 8 P.M. That would have been 9:30 to 10 on Adam’s Central time.
“Rebecca told me to stay in the guesthouse, and she went into the main house,” Adam recalled. “I’ve stayed there four or five times before when I visited Jonah.”
Asked how well he knew Rebecca, Adam replied that he didn’t know her well and didn’t even know her last name—but he had met her occasionally over the last year.
“Did you see Rebecca again last night?” Redden asked. “After you went to your room in the guesthouse?”
“No. I didn’t see her or talk to her. I went to the guesthouse, drank a Diet 7Up, and called my girlfriend.”
Adam said he’d taken an Ambien sleeping pill and gone to bed. He recalled getting up during the night to go to the bathroom, and falling back to sleep until a quarter after six in the morning.
Evincing no embarrassment, he said he’d begun his day by pulling up a porn site on his iPhone.
“I wanted some breakfast,” he told Redden, “and I showered and got dressed. I was going to go to the main residence and ask Rebecca if she wanted to go out to breakfast with me.”
But he had opened his door and seen a red rope hanging off the balcony of the big house with a body suspended from it. At first he thought it was a prank and that some kids were “messing around”—but then he’d recognized that it was Rebecca, so he’d run inside the main residence and grabbed a knife so he could get her down.
“I had to pull the patio table over to her body so I could reach her,” Adam said. “I stood on the table, cut the rope, and put her on the ground. I called 911, and started CPR on Rebecca—after I pulled a blue scarf out of her mouth. The dispatcher asked me for the address, and I ran around to the front of the house so I could tell the location. Then I went back to Rebecca, and the police were there within a couple of minutes.”
Adam Shacknai said he hadn’t heard anything during the night. In fact, he had noted how very quiet it was.
The detectives asked more probing questions, but Adam denied any knowledge or involvement in Rebecca’s hanging, and he said he had never been in the room next to the balcony where Rebecca had hung herself.
* * *
Adam Shacknai had neither “passed” nor “failed” on the four lie detector charts.
And so the San Diego County sheriff’s investigators were back to square one. Adam’s frank admission about his early-morning porn session was a little startling, but not an admission of any guilt.
Adam had taken Ambien the night before. Recent studies have shown that many people have proven to react strangely to this sleeping pill. Without being aware of it, they walked or drove in their sleep. Sometimes they ate, drank, swam, made phone calls, did all manner of activities when they were actually sound asleep and had no memory at all of any of it. Indeed, one man who was charged with the drowning murder of his wife had used the “Ambien defense” at his trial, insisting he had no memory at all of attacking her in the middle of the night.
But Adam wasn’t claiming he had had a somnambulant misadventure during the previous night. Not at all. He was sure he had gotten out of bed only once, and that was to use the bathroom.
Chapter Five
The probe into Rebecca Zahau’s mysterious death had barely begun. Dozens of investigators were working on one aspect or another of the case. It was near dusk at 7:18 P.M. on Ju
ly 13 when medical examiner Dr. Jonathan Lucas and Investigator Dana Gary arrived to remove her body. Lucas was scheduled to perform the autopsy the next morning—Thursday, July 14.
There was nothing new for curious neighbors and bystanders to see and it would soon be too dark to work the crime scene effectively. Uniformed officers would guard the Spreckels Mansion until morning.
The detectives who were looking for witnesses weren’t ready to pack it in yet. They were prepared to canvass as many homes and businesses as they could even if it took far into the night.
Adam Shacknai was only the first person of possible interest that detectives had talked to. He was not without experienced legal representation. Even in his despair, Jonah Shacknai was trying to help his brother, and he had a coterie of attorneys to call upon, as any wealthy businessman has.
It was probably Jonah who had retained Paul Pfingst, the lawyer who had texted Adam just before he took the polygraph tests. Unable to reach Adam, Pfingst knew the private number to call at the sheriff’s office where he could get a message to Adam as soon as possible. His intent had indeed been to advise Adam, as Detective Hillen had predicted, that he should avoid the polygraph machine—at least at this point in the investigation.
Since the results were inconclusive, it didn’t really matter.
Earlier in the day, Paul Pfingst had gone to the Spreckels Mansion before Rebecca Zahau’s body was removed. He was one of the few people besides the EMTs and law enforcement personnel to be allowed onto the property. Pfingst was photographed talking with the detectives on the other side of the CRIME SCENE tape. In one shot, a detective has an arm around Pfingst’s shoulder.
Although he was currently in private practice as a criminal defense attorney, Paul Pfingst was familiar to many of the investigators. He had served two terms as district attorney of San Diego County, and he had forged friendships with law enforcement and forensic pathologists then.
Even so, it was almost unheard-of for a defense attorney to be allowed inside a possible crime scene so early in an investigation.
And it was troubling to some.
* * *
July 13 was the longest day any of the participants and investigators remembered. Detectives Norton and Palmer had been assigned to speak with Jonah Shacknai. They were not insensitive men, and they winced inwardly as they looked into the misery-filled eyes of this man who probably was a billionaire and could have anything money could buy. But there are things money can never buy. Now Jonah Shacknai was in the midst of losing two people he reportedly loved a great deal. Becky was gone, and his son Max was clinging to life by a thread.
Nevertheless, Jonah was willing to answer any questions the detectives might have for him. He said that his brother, Adam, had called him at 6:58 that Wednesday morning and told him that Becky had taken her life. “I was shocked,” Jonah said slowly. “I couldn’t talk. And then I called him back and he said that she had hung herself.”
Jonah Shacknai’s world was crumbling rapidly. Not even forty-eight hours had passed since Max had fallen. “I was at the gym Monday—at the Hollywood Athletic Club at the del Coronado—when I got a call from Rebecca. She was crying and saying something about Max. I wasn’t sure what she was telling me, but it sounded bad. I just ran home the few blocks . . .”
Jonah recalled that he got there in time to see his son being loaded into an ambulance, and he’d noted the still-wet splotch of blood on the foyer’s carpet. A patrol officer from the Coronado Police Department had driven him to Sharp Coronado Hospital right behind the ambulance. Once there, an ER team found Max in such critical condition that he was moved quickly to Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego.
Jonah said he’d never left Max’s side all that day, not until the doctors told him Monday evening that Max would be having tests for an hour, and sent him home. His best friend, Dr. Howard Luber, drove him there, where he took a quick shower, made some sandwiches, and packed a few personal items. “I drove myself back.”
Jonah said he had hoped to stay at the Ronald McDonald House across the street from the hospital, but there were no vacancies Monday night, so he checked into a nearby hotel. He didn’t want to be more than a few minutes away from Max’s hospital room. He got a few hours’ sleep but spent most of his time beside his son’s bed.
Jonah said he had attempted to locate his ex-wife Dina, but he’d gotten no answers when he called her phones. He was able to reach her twin sister, Nina Romano, in San Francisco. Dina had finally responded to police knocking on her door early Tuesday and spelled Jonah in the hospital.
Jonah verified that Becky had put a shaken Zaré on the plane for St. Joseph, Missouri. Not long after, she picked Adam up on his flight from Memphis. He appreciated that she was doing everything she could to help him, taking care of details that he was too distraught to attend to. He knew that she longed to talk with him, to be updated about how Max was doing—but she had tried not to bother him.
“I called her when I could,” Jonah said.
Jonah’s memory of late Tuesday evening differed slightly from Adam’s. He recalled that he, Adam, Dr. Luber, and Becky ate a quick dinner together. And then Becky drove Luber to the airport in time for his flight before she and Adam headed for the mansion.
“I called Becky at midnight—last night,” Jonah said. “She didn’t answer.”
He hadn’t really been concerned. He figured she could have been asleep, or taking a bath. She had planned to stay alone in the big house, and Adam had a room in the guesthouse. As far as Jonah knew, there was no one else on the estate on Tuesday night. Even Ocean, their dog, had been left with friends.
Becky Zahau may already have been dead at midnight. She was certainly dead by the time seven more hours had passed.
Jonah told the two investigators that he was trying to piece together what could have happened—both with his little boy’s devastating fall and his girlfriend’s shocking death.
“Max was an extremely good athlete—he was great at soccer, even at his age,” Jonah said. “We played ‘hall soccer’ inside the front door.”
“Did he slide down the banisters?” Norton asked. “Or try to climb that chandelier? Was he a daredevil?”
“No—he climbed trees, but—”
“Was Rebecca depressed?”
“No, no.” Jonah was adamant that Rebecca would not have chosen suicide.
“Was she on meds?”
“No. She took care of herself,” he said, explaining that she was very health-conscious, being careful to eat proper foods and to exercise regularly. “And she wasn’t unhappy. Of course she felt terrible about Max.”
Jonah Shacknai occasionally broke into tears, which seemed genuine. And certainly understandable.
He was positive that Becky hadn’t been depressed, nor had she evinced any suicidal ideation. Naturally, she was sad and worried—they all were—about Max. But Becky was not a woman easily disheartened or given to moods.
“Things are suspicious—” Detective Palmer began, and Jonah Shacknai looked up suddenly.
“Are they?” he asked, startled.
“Do you think that she would kill herself?”
“She might have felt responsible—for Max,” Jonah said slowly. “But no—no! She would not have added to my troubles—unless she was so overwhelmed with guilt. No.”
Once again, Jonah asked what seemed suspicious. Palmer hadn’t answered him before.
“We can’t really answer that right now as we’re in the midst of an investigation,” Todd Norton said. “That’s why the Coronado police called us in—to find out what happened.”
Jonah Shacknai himself was never a suspect in Becky’s death. The Ronald McDonald House had security cameras at all its entrances and exits, and even in the hallways that led to rooms. The investigators were able to obtain images of Jonah at the entrance doors to the McDonald House, and in the corridors, arriving and leaving his room. They could absolutely place the times Jonah had gone to his room and then left to s
it with Max, and his return to the McDonald House to catch a few hours’ sleep. They had videotape of where he was on Tuesday night.
Jonah told Norton and Palmer that Becky’s relatives were on their way from Missouri and wanted to stay at his estate.
“Probably they can’t. We haven’t released the scene yet,” Norton said. “But we do need you to sign a permission form that allows us to search your property.”
Jonah had no objection to that. At this point he still had very little information about how and where Becky perished. He asked where she had been found, and Todd Norton told him she was lying on the grass courtyard below the balcony outside the bedroom where her computer was when the first police arrived.
Asked if he could think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Becky, or might be obsessed with her, Jonah pondered that.
“She was an extremely beautiful woman,” Palmer said. “Was there anyone who stalked her?”
“Her ex-husband contacted her almost every day,” Jonah said. “His name is Evan Solanev.* He lives in Arizona. He texts her and they’re not creepy but kind of strange. Like, ‘Can we have lunch?’ and ‘I’ll do anything.’ He’s very religious, but he seems to be well on the other side of wanting her back. She showed me his messages. They were married for three and a half years. He was studying to be a nurse, and Rebecca is—was—a nurse.”
Asked about Becky’s friends, Jonah said her older sister, Mary Loehner, was her best friend, and that Becky didn’t have close friends in Coronado.
“She took our Weimaraner, Ocean, to the park often. He’s protective—but not aggressive. We had a guard dog but it died last year, and we’re looking for another.”
“Any particular reason?”
“No. No threats or anything like that. We tried one out two weeks ago, but it didn’t work out.”
Once again, Jonah Shacknai looked up sharply. “Do I need protection?”
“No—not at this point. We’ll let you know if you ever do.”
The San Diego detectives learned that Becky had arranged for Ocean to be at the Camp Diggity Dogs kennel for a few days after Max’s fall because she felt that was better with “people coming and going.”