Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (24 page)

7/12/2011, 4:08
P.M
.: “Bye miss Zaré, I love u very much let me know when y r on the plane ok . . . remember u r gate 4.”

4:14
P.M.
.: “Do I just wait here until my flight?”

4:37
P.M.
.: “Ugh!!! I have to wait an hour!!! A whole full hour!!!”

It was 8:39
P.M.
when Rebecca could call Zaré back, and she learned Zaré was waiting in another city for her connecting flight. “So sorry, my dear. Please call Mary when u land ok I miss u so much already and I am so very sorry that u had to leave. Max is doing much better now but please keep praying . . . ok love u very much.”

“Yeah . . . don’t be sorry. Just make sure that u and Jonah get at least a little bit of sleep.”

That was the last communication between Rebecca and Zaré. Rebecca’s family knew by noon the next day that their beloved daughter, sister, and aunt Becky was dead.

At 3:17 the next afternoon, thirteen-year-old Zaré wrote a text message, even though she knew that Rebecca would never read it. She knew her beloved big sister was dead, but she was pretending it was all a bad nightmare.

“becky I don’t believe it com back!!!!! Im not gonna live without u!!!! I love u becky. Come back nothing is your fault.”

What did Zaré mean by that? Probably she knew that Becky would be feeling guilty because she had taken her eyes off Maxie long enough for him to fall.

*   *   *

Although Rebecca Zahau and Jonah Shacknai might have seemed a mismatched couple in terms of age and ethnic background, they were probably happier together than most couples experts would assume. Jonah was brilliant, an entrepreneur who had maintained his huge success for many years. Rebecca was also extremely intelligent, and her surgical assistant training let her understand the intricacies of Medicis, Jonah’s corporation.

None of Jonah’s and Rebecca’s differences concerned them. They were attracted to each other from the beginning when they met in 2009 in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the offices of the laser surgeon where Rebecca worked as an assistant.

Becky was married, but estranged from her first and only husband. Jonah and Dina’s marriage was nearing an end.

On September 13, 2008, Jonah Shacknai’s marriage to Dina Romano Shacknai imploded. They were living in Paradise Valley, Arizona, when Jonah went to the local police station to report that Dina and he had had an argument. He said she had become very angry and abusive with him. Jonah had an attack-trained German shepherd at the time and the dog became agitated to see his master threatened. According to Jonah, he quickly got between his dog and Dina, and that had given Jonah a chance to leave before the situation grew worse. He didn’t want to make a formal police complaint, but he did want to have the incident on record.

A short time later, Dina, too, filed a complaint. She phoned the police station to report that she had been bitten by Jonah’s dog during an argument. Asked if she needed medical help, she said that wasn’t necessary—but she, too, wanted a record of the situation on file.

Dina, however, did not let the incident go; she came into the Paradise Valley Police Department the next day, bringing with her a computer disc containing sixteen photographs of bruises on her body that she said had been caused by the dog.

While Dina Shacknai would not say that Jonah had ordered their dog to attack her, she said he was in no hurry to call the dog off. She insisted she had never tried to hurt Jonah; she had only raised her arm to get some space between them when he came at her “nose-to-nose.”

No charges of domestic violence were brought. Paradise Valley investigators did talk to a marriage counselor who Dina said would vouch for her fear that she would lose custody of her son with Jonah if she fought back. The therapist confirmed that, but he said Dina had never said Jonah was physically aggressive toward her.

They were divorced shortly thereafter and agreed to share custody of Maxie.

So when Jonah Shacknai met Rebecca Zahau Solanev, they were both essentially alone, perhaps hoping for a new relationship. Not only was Rebecca astoundingly beautiful and intelligent, but she had a cool head and was not easily upset or angered. After his two somewhat hectic marriages, Jonah Shacknai wasn’t eager to marry for a third time. But he was entranced with Becky, and comfortable in what quickly became a completely loving and noncombative relationship.

One thing the two had in common was a need for close family connections.

Chapter Seven

Even with major advances in forensic technology, some of the oldest methods in crime solving cannot be duplicated by electronic devices. Detectives call it “hitting the bricks,” or “heel-and-toeing.” Those San Diego sheriff’s investigators who weren’t on the Shacknai property gathering evidence or diagramming the crime scene set out in two-person teams to question the neighbors along Ocean Boulevard.

Most of those residents dwelling along the beach road were at least millionaires, and their homes were far grander than the ones where detectives usually knocked on doors, and showed their badges and ID.

But that was the only difference. All of the people who came to the door were both curious and frightened.

Detectives Todd Norton of San Diego County and Angel Sadanjo of the Coronado Police Department, and Special Agent Sonia Ramos of the California Department of Justice moved along the street.

Two doors northwest of the Spreckels Mansion, a middle-aged woman welcomed them and introduced her daughter, her niece, and several children, all of whom looked to be under six years old. The adults remembered the police and ambulance coming to get Max Monday morning.

“We saw him being brought out on a stretcher and then the ambulance took off,” the homeowner recalled.

“Do you know the woman who lived there?”

“We know Jonah Shacknai—he bought the mansion in 2009,” the older woman said. “And I saw him at the sports club at the Hotel del Coronado. He was with a voluptuous, young Asian woman. That would have been the day after the Fourth of July. But I don’t really know her.”

During the forty-eight hours between Max being carried out and the second arrival of emergency vehicles, however, none of these possible witnesses had seen or heard anything worrisome.

“You might ask at the house that’s two doors on the other side of the Shacknai place,” the woman offered. “I know the couple who live there have teenagers who seem to be friends of the teenage girl who often visits at the mansion. I think she’s Jonah’s daughter. They’re likely to know a lot more than we do.”

Although all the estates along Ocean Boulevard were “next door” to each other, they weren’t nearly as close as in middle-class neighborhoods. It wouldn’t be at all unusual for neighbors to fail to hear cries for help or sounds of a struggle.

In the aftermath of double tragedies, a number of the nearby residents had gone to their balconies, roofs, or upper stories of their huge homes, or found another viewpoint from which they could see Becky Zahau’s body and the police and fire EMTs’ activity below.

Next door to the first estate, the residents were an older couple who lived on Ocean Boulevard year-round. They said that the Spreckels Mansion was very quiet and dark when they got home around 8
P.M.
on Tuesday. That was probably within an hour, give or take, of when Becky and Adam Shacknai had driven home after dropping Jonah off at the Ronald McDonald House.

“There were no lights on at Jonah’s house, and I saw just one light in the guesthouse. I’m quite sure there was no body lying there then,” the woman told the investigative trio. “I saw the woman’s body at about a quarter to nine this morning—she looked like a mannequin. And I remember seeing a woman who looked similar getting out of a taxi about a month ago.”

“Have you seen people coming or going to the Shacknai estate?” Sonia Ramos asked.

The wife shook her head. “No, there weren’t many people there. The ones who visited were mostly younger—kids from about eight to sixteen. Usually, there’s a young couple who live there in an apartment over the garage—but I haven’t seen them lately. They were caretakers of the estate, I think. I know the husband is a chef. I can’t think of their names right now.”

“How well do you know Jonah Shacknai?”

“We don’t know him well—just well enough to say ‘Hi’ when we ran into each other. We’d meet him at City Hall when there were meetings about changes in the building codes. He owned a few other homes in Coronado that he was fixing up for resale.

“At Easter, I saw Jonah playing football with his kids on the lawn.”

There were parts of the case that the detectives didn’t want revealed to the general public yet, and they asked all the neighbors not to tell anyone that the victim was naked—and not to say if it was a male or female—not yet. They wouldn’t be able to keep this information secret for long, but perhaps they could keep it on the down-low for a few hours.

The husband said they had been away from home all day on Tuesday. “We left about ten
A.M.,
and got home at eight thirty
P.M.
.,” he said. “We didn’t hear anything unusual during the night.”

The husband rose as usual at 5
A.M.,
and his wife said she had heard a dog barking next door around seven.

The next homeowners had more to say, giving the detectives a glimmer of hope that there might be witnesses who could help them determine what had happened to Becky Zahau.

The husband had gone to his room before 11
P.M.,
but his wife was in the other part of their mansion where she was watching a favorite television show that came on at 11:30. She rarely missed it.

“It was a warm night and our front windows were open,” she said. “I heard kids—teenagers—hollering from the beach side of the street. We’re used to that. But it was ten minutes later—about twenty minutes to twelve—when I heard a woman screaming. It came from the direction of Jonah’s house.”

“It wasn’t the kids yelling again?”

“No.” She shook her head sharply. “This was a grown woman—maybe in her late twenties or early thirties. There’s a difference. I heard a scream, and then another scream, and then ‘Help! Help!’ I turned the TV down to listen.”

“Was it from the beach?”

“No. She was screaming from this side of the street.”

While the neighbor listened, the cries for help subsided and then stopped. The witness said she couldn’t decide what to do: wake her husband or perhaps call the police. She waited to see if there were more cries in the night.

But she had heard only the teenagers again. They were definitely down on the beach, and those shouts and laughter were not what she had heard a few minutes earlier. The woman’s screams had come from the witness’s own front yard or possibly over in Jonah Shacknai’s yard.

And then there were no sounds at all. In the end, the woman hadn’t told anyone about the screams. Not her husband. Not the police.

Another neighbor told the detectives that she had met Jonah Shacknai’s girlfriend—but only briefly. Becky, wearing a bikini bathing suit, was riding a bicycle on Ocean Boulevard and stopped to introduce herself, saying she and Jonah would be living in his estate for the summer.

But that was weeks before Rebecca died.

Becky Zahau loved Jonah Shacknai and was happy to live wherever he lived, but she didn’t seem to have any friends in the posh California neighborhood on Ocean Boulevard and she was probably lonesome. Women as beautiful as Becky was often have a difficult time finding female friends.

If someone had called 911 during the shadowy hours of Tuesday night, was it possible that Becky Zahau could have been saved? It didn’t seem likely that a would-be suicide would scream for help—or could scream at all if she had a noose around her neck. But a woman in peril might well call out desperately if she was running from an attacker. If she had cried out for help from someone who overpowered her, strangled her, and then hung her from a rope to make her death look like a suicide, no one else had heard her.

Hank Bowden,* who was vacationing in Coronado with his family, contacted the San Diego County and Coronado detectives, saying he might have information that would help their probe.

The Web designer said that he and his family were riding bicycles from a grocery store back to their vacation home shortly before 10
P.M.
on July 12.

His children had spotted a possum waddling beside the road and stopped to watch it. He happened to stop his bike right in front of the Spreckels Mansion, where he waited for them to catch up with him. He had glanced up at the Shacknai residence and noticed some movement at the front door. He could see that it was a woman, and he watched her. She checked the door but didn’t go in. She was nervously turning around, and walking back and forth—as if she was “trying to decide whether to go in.”

Then she came down from the porch, walked back and forth some more, hesitated, and started pacing again. Finally she walked along some grass that adjoined the driveway and disappeared.

The informant told detectives he thought she was behaving in a peculiar way, but at that point his kids and wife had caught up with him. His wife had also seen the indecisive woman walking toward the back of Shacknai’s estate on the driveway and then into the shadows beyond. They both wondered about her, but she didn’t exactly look like a home invasion robbery suspect, so they rode on home, arriving at about 11:25
P.M.
.

The bicyclist said he’d wakened to the sound of sirens early the next morning, and he followed them to the Spreckels Mansion, where he learned a woman had been found dead.

Two detectives took him into the mobile crime scene office. He described the woman he’d seen. They nodded but gave him no information about who it could have been.

Curious, he’d checked the name “Shacknai” on his computer and come across a photograph of Dina Shacknai. He was positive that
she
was the woman he had seen at 1043 Ocean Boulevard, so he returned to the mobile office and told the detectives. They interviewed him again, and showed him a lay-down of six photographs. One woman looked like the mystery woman, but she had light hair.