Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  “Dr. Jonathan Lucas noted four separate subgaleal hemorrhages on Ms. Zahau—in the area beneath her scalp but over her skull, I confirmed them on Rebecca’s second autopsy,” Wecht noted. “But nobody has provided an explanation as to how the top of her head got those bright red, fresh injuries, which only could have come from something hitting her on the head—or her head hitting something—four times.”

  Wecht said that no one knew just what object had struck her. “It could have been a fist, or anything with a reasonable amount of firmness that would not perforate, lacerate, or abrade the scalp [itself] in any way. Crime scene photos show a plastic red toy dog bone in the room by the balcony; that could have easily been the weapon.”

  Dr. Wecht pointed out that there is no soft tissue between the scalp and the bony skull. Although the four injuries were not strong enough to fracture Becky’s skull, they definitely had occurred very shortly before her death. How had these wounds happened?

  “In order to get four separate, distinct hemorrhages,” Wecht wrote, “you have to have four points of impact—not so hard as to fracture the skull or lacerate the scalp, or cause death on their own—but sufficient to produce the hemorrhages. And the bright red color of these injuries shows they were acute—meaning immediate to her demise, not from bumping her head on something days—or even hours—earlier.”

  Had Becky’s head hit some tree branches as she dropped from the balcony? The San Diego detectives thought so. Or could she have struck her head on some outcropping from the balcony? No—there was no outcropping of stucco, wood, or metal.

  Becky had allegedly been hanging from a taut, nautical rope, not something like a bungee cord that would have made it possible for her body to bounce upward several times and cause the four impact injuries.

  Dr. Wecht also wondered about the many scratches, punctures, and bruises on her back. “If they came from her dangling on the rope and coming into contact with foliage, as investigators assert, why weren’t there similar abrasions to her arms, which were tied behind her back? Her arms should have been the first point of contact if those abrasions came from hitting foliage while swinging on a rope, and her arms should have shown more abrasions than were on her back.”

  The renowned forensic pathologist felt if there had been enough momentum for Becky to rotate while hanging, or to allow her to hit the balcony on her way down, one should expect to find injuries to her nose and the front of her face.

  There were none.

  Dr. Lucas’s autopsy summation had attributed the four mystery red areas as something that had happened when Adam Shacknai cut her down. Dr. Wecht didn’t concur.

  “Without knowing how she got those marks, we cannot eliminate the possibility that someone assaulted her and caused her to have a cerebral concussion and become momentarily unconscious—and that suggests the application of some degree of force against her and a possible murder scenario. Authorities maintain that there was no evidence of a struggle—but when someone has had a cerebral contusion and unconsciousness [however brief], he or she is not going to struggle.”

  Dr. Lucas had noted three rectangles of what appeared to be tape residue on Becky’s lower right leg but hadn’t found this particularly relevant.

  “Are we to think,” Dr. Wecht asked, “she first bound her legs with duct tape, but took it off and used rope instead? If so, where is the roll of tape from which the tape was cut, and the wadded up bits she decided not to use?”

  All in all, Cyril Wecht found the mystery of Becky’s death inexplicable. “I have never experienced the same set of circumstances that I see in this case. Any scenario I try to come up with to explain the physical circumstances in which Rebecca was found defies my imagination.

  “The knots around Ms. Zahau’s wrists enabled her, apparently to put her hands in and out of the bindings.”

  Dr. Wecht wrote that he had appeared on a television show with a “well-respected” rope knot expert and discussed the way Becky was bound up with him.

  “He stated that he didn’t see how anybody could have accomplished what Rebecca was alleged to have done.”

  Even though the San Diego investigators had re-created the hanging of Becky to counter criticism from the public, showing that “Rebecca fastened the bindings in front of her, then pulled her right hand out of a sophisticated slipknot, repositioned the rope behind her back, and put her right hand back in the binding,” Wecht wrote, “I contend that it is no great surprise that they could instruct someone to do the act for a re-creation. Harry Houdini did this 70 years ago. What I want to know is how Ms. Zahau learned to fashion these kinds of knots that were around her neck, wrists, and ankles, and tied to the bed leg. Where did she acquire this special skill?”

  Cyril Wecht is at an age and with enough experience under his belt that he doesn’t soften his conclusions. He criticized the investigators for failing do a “proper and meaningful” re-creation. Rather than use a newly hired policewoman as a subject to represent Becky, he felt the sheriff’s investigators should have used a dummy of exactly the same weight and size of Becky, and videotaped how her fall might have occurred. It wasn’t enough in his opinion to re-create the “hanging” with a female police officer who was only approximately Becky’s size.

  Wecht wondered just how Becky had suffered the marks on her body that were apparent on autopsy. And why was the bed frame in her office/bedroom moved so little? He felt that the iron bed should have moved more when the sudden weight of a plunging body pulled it. In the photos of the floor in Becky’s office/bedroom, there were no drag marks—no furrows on the rug. Indeed, it looked more as if it had been lifted and then moved to the position in which it was found.

  Dr. Wecht also determined that there should have been acoustic tests in the mansion. Had the screams neighbors heard come from inside the Spreckels Mansion?

  Or from outside?

  Dr. Cyril Wecht believed that Becky Zahau had not perished from hanging herself. He, Anne Bremner, Paul Ciolino, and Becky’s sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Doug Loehner, appeared on the Dr. Phil show and presented their conclusions on the manner of her death.

  Although Sheriff Bill Gore, a former FBI special agent, was a good friend of Adam Shacknai’s attorney, Paul Pfingst, there was no ulterior reason that Gore had opted to close the death investigation prematurely. There seemed to be just as much circumstantial evidence on either side of the dilemma, and there was no question that everyone involved sincerely wanted to find the manner of Becky Zahau’s death. Of course, her demise garnered more headlines than if she had been the girlfriend of an average “Joe the Plumber” type of man. Instead she had been the love of a world-famous pharmaceutical billionaire.

  And the fact that Becky and Maxie had allegedly plunged to their deaths within forty-eight hours could not be ignored.

  Was there any way to winnow out what really happened?

  * * *

  Private investigator Paul Ciolino flew to California and looked around the grounds of the Shacknai estate, studying the balcony where Becky Zahau had reportedly hung herself and estimating the distance from Ocean Boulevard to the front door, where Hank Bowden, the bicycling tourist, still insisted he had seen Dina—not Nina—on the night before Becky died. He knocked on doors along the street, and reinterviewed many of Jonah and Becky’s neighbors.

  Ciolino located a second resident who had heard a woman’s frightened screams in the night.

  “That’s ‘Homicide 101,’ ” Ciolino would later state on the Dr. Phil show. He’d read the Zahau case files, talked to witnesses, and visited the death scene and the surrounding area for himself. He was not allowed to go inside the mansion or the guesthouse. (Nor was Seattle attorney Anne Bremner when she sought permission to go inside.) Ciolino wondered why the case had been closed so prematurely. Something wasn’t right.

  “It didn’t pass the ‘smell test,’ ” he said bluntly. “It stinks.”

  Ciolino went to Dr. Mark Kalish, a board-certified psychiatrist, and lai
d the troubling case out for him. At length, Dr. Kalish shook his head. “This was no suicide,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  Sometime later, when Dr. Phil asked him why someone would tie a victim up so elaborately to make it look like suicide, the PI from Chicago flatly replied, “Killers are stupid.”

  Paul Ciolino criticized the San Diego investigators. “I’ve seen it before,” he said. “I call it ‘confirmation bias.’ The detectives draw their original conclusions—and then they look for clues and evidence to support them. When they do that, they miss details that might point in an entirely different direction.”

  Jonah had put the Coronado mansion up for sale—not surprising. There were too many memories of despair and loss there now. But Paul Ciolino worried about the dozens of prospective buyers who were “constantly contaminating” the scene more and more. If there was evidence there—and there probably was—visitors were probably taking some of it away with them—no matter how small—and they were tracking in stuff from wherever they had been, leaving their fingerprints as they moved from room to room.

  Moreover, Anne Bremner, California attorneys David Fleck and Martin Rudoy, who also represented the Zahau family, along with Ciolino, were convinced the sheriff’s department still had possible vital evidence that had never been tested, statements that had never been followed up. Jonah Shacknai joined them in asking that more investigation be done. Although not as vociferous in his plea as the others were, he seemed to feel that not enough had been done to find out what really happened to Becky.

  Seven weeks just hadn’t been long enough to thoroughly work such a tangled case—actually two tangled cases.

  Chapter Twelve

  But when 2012 arrived, nothing had changed. Rebecca Zahau’s family mourned the daughter and sister they loved so much, but there were no answers to their questions. The investigation into her death was closed. The world went on without Becky and without Maxie. For the thousands of people who had followed their cases avidly, it seemed impossible to let go of wondering. The websites were still filled with queries, opinions, theories—both from those who were highly educated in medicine, psychology, and criminal justice and those whose gut instincts and empathy drove them to keep tabs on what was now a closed murder probe.

  On January 6, 2012, the Zahau family’s legal team—law partners David Fleck and Marty Rudoy in California, along with Anne Bremner in Seattle—drafted an eighteen-page-letter to Julie Garland, the senior supervising deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice. The department’s office had earlier declined to review the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and Coronado Police Department’s handling of the Rebecca Zahau case.

  There were very narrow criteria for such a review. The state of California had scarce financial resources and their policy was that they could only review cases where a clear conflict of interest existed, where local authorities’ resources had been exhausted and they had asked for help from the state, or when there were allegations of gross malfeasance by a local law enforcement agency or agencies.

  The Zahaus’ attorneys felt they had a case that fit within the DOJ’s requirements. The letter was a bold move—and quite probably the final chance to see Becky’s death satisfactorily investigated.

  Fleck, Rudoy, and Bremner mentioned the “blue ribbon” panel of experts who had joined them in their disbelief that Becky had been a suicide: forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht; retired Los Angeles homicide detective Steven Fisk, with five hundred homicide, suicide, and suspicious death investigations under his belt; private investigator Paul Ciolino; and several expert instructors from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.

  They felt there was a clear conflict of interest in the close relationship between Sheriff Gore’s office and Adam Shacknai’s attorney, Paul Pfingst, the former two-time district attorney of San Diego County. Attached to this letter was the photograph of Pfingst at Becky’s death site inside the yellow crime scene tape even before the arrival of the deputy medical examiner. One of the detectives clearly had his arm around the former DA’s shoulder.

  “Paul Pfingst used a non-published phone number to reach the police,” the legal trio noted, “to tell them not to give his client (Adam) a polygraph. In this recorded call, Pfingst referred to the incident as a ‘homicide.’ ”

  “We know from experience,” David Fleck wrote, “that homicide detectives do not hobnob with a prime suspect’s defense attorney during an active investigation, and it is highly unusual for a defense attorney to be at a [working] crime scene. At a minimum, it creates a disconcerting appearance of impropriety.”

  Fleck, Rudoy, and Bremner listed again the circumstances when Becky Zahau perished. They could, of course, recite the details in their sleep—but they wanted to be sure the California Department of Justice was fully aware of them.

  “According to Adam Shacknai, a tugboat captain from Memphis, he found Rebecca hanging and he cut her down. She was naked. Her feet were filthy with dried mud. Her hands were bound behind her with sophisticated knots. Her ankles were bound with sophisticated knots. The noose around her neck was applied over her hair. There was a T-shirt wrapped around her neck three times and stuffed into her mouth as a gag. The blood had pooled in her back—not in her feet or legs. Painted on the door to the bedroom where the rope was anchored to a bedpost was the message: ‘She saved him. Can you save her.’ It was not a suicide note; she left no suicide note.

  “Detectives concluded that Rebecca tied herself up, made her way onto the balcony [with feet bound] and threw herself over, leaving minimal footprints. They admitted there was no suicide note, and made no attempt to explain the message on the door.”

  The orange-red towropes that bound Becky Zahau’s ankles and wrists, twisting her into what everyday people might call a “hog-tied” position, were fashioned in a complicated pattern. Her family’s attorneys had conferred with rope experts, and they’d learned about a Japanese “art” and/or “sexual sadomasochistic” practice of tying ropes around human beings. It is called Shibari.

  Sometimes, Shibari can be as innocuous as a delicate art of wrapping perfect packages. At other times, it is a sexual practice or fetish, one that few have heard of. Currently trendy in the Orient and Europe, the intricate machinations of what can only be termed “rope sex” demand the winding, knotting, and rewinding of ropes around the limbs and other body parts of sexual partners or those who pose in bondage positions. It can be very, very, dangerous, particularly when precise balance must be maintained between more than one person. One wrong tilt and participants can—and have—died. An Italian case involved three people, all balanced precariously. One woman, new to Shibari, fainted and her full weight shifted. It is just one instance where this extreme fetish, which requires total control, ended in the fatal strangulations of two of the participants.

  “These were nautical knots, likely tied by someone right-handed, according to our experts’ reports,” David Fleck’s letter to Garland continued as he spoke of those that bound Becky Zahau. “They are not the safe knots used in conventional bondage. There are two styles of knots [employed;] some are utilitarian and nautical—others are reminiscent of Shibari-type bondage. It would have been unlikely for Rebecca to have tied these knots because of their complexity. Less sophisticated knots would have done the trick. Unless there was an intent to make a display, there’s no reason to use such an elaborate knot.”

  Dr. Cyril Wecht had come to the same conclusion. Becky Zahau simply didn’t have the knowledge or even the dexterity to bind herself in the position in which she was found, much less be able to get to the balcony railing in one hop and plunge over.

  There had been one set of her tiptoe footprints, hampered by being tightly bound, and a half print of one of a man’s boots in the dust—which was believed to have been left by a police officer. These, admittedly, were some of the most troubling pieces of physical evidence that seemed to indicate she had committed suicide.

  Where and how, t
hen, had Becky’s feet been caked with mud?

  Step by step, the all-encompassing letter asked Julie Garland for further investigation and brought up things that they felt had not been efficiently explored: the four hemorrhages on Becky’s skull; the multiple abrasions; the unexplained duct tape residue on her ankles, when detectives had found no such tape in the mansion; the injuries to her neck, throat, and back, with no broken vertebrae, and no damage to the back of her neck, making it look as if the manner of death was manual strangulation—not hanging.

  Retired homicide detective Steve Fisk was concerned by the substantial percentage of the fingerprints that were dusted and lifted only to be termed “unusable.”

  “They might not have been clear enough for use in a court of law—but they could have been used to see if there were points that matched known persons of interest,” he commented.

  Some DNA had been collected and evaluated, but there were no DNA exemplars from Dina Shacknai, and no fingerprints from her, either.

  Just as they had wondered about why Becky’s long hair had been tucked under the blue shirt and the orange-red noose, Anne Bremner and her assistant, Misty Scott, also noted that hanging is an unusual way for females to kill themselves. Sometimes only women understand what women are likely to do. Bremner and Scott have sensitive antennas that catch subtleties males might not recognize.

  The National Institute of Mental Health did a study on the most common methods women use in suicides, and number one, by far, was poisoning (including sleeping pills). Number two is a gun—although women rarely shoot themselves in the head or face.

  Detective Fisk, with all his many years of experience, had never seen—or heard—of a woman who hung herself naked. Becky Zahau would have been aware that her nude and twisted body would be visible to the public—including her neighbors on Ocean Boulevard. One cannot be “embarrassed” after they are dead, but Fisk knew the vast majority of female suicides attempt to look attractive—even in death.