Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (27 page)

In the meantime, Becky stayed in Austria. She had no citizenship rights at all yet in America. Evan returned to the United States and got a job in security on Long Island.

After immigrating to America, several members of the Zahau family had settled near St. Joseph, Missouri. Becky’s older sister, Mary, stayed in Missouri and married a police officer on the St. Joseph force. Her sister Snowem married her husband, David,* and they chose to live in Germany.

Becky’s other two siblings were much younger than she was. Besides Zaré, she had a younger brother, James.* Mary and her husband, Doug, were raising the two younger children since her father was quite elderly and her mother middle-aged when they were born.

At Evan Solanev’s urging, Becky came to America in April 2002, and she married him very soon after. She felt sometimes that she had been caught up in a whirlwind without time to ponder whether she really wanted to be Evan’s bride. Evan explained that there were pragmatic reasons for the rush.

“We had to be married by May 1 because Becky only had a temporary permit to be in America,” he explained.

Was she rushed into marriage? Probably. She had known Evan for about nine months but had spent precious little actual time with him. Most of their communication had continued to be through email. Still, Becky wanted to make their marriage work.

They both remained heavily involved with their church, and they left New York on May 6, headed for Temecula, California, a baking hot desert town. Evan was to be the youth pastor at the Calvary Chapel Bible College in nearby Murrieta. They were soon working hard to help build the congregation, and especially in overseeing youth groups.

The church was mission focused, and, according to Evan, they had high hopes.

But there were roadblocks that quashed much of their enthusiasm. Apparently the main pastor at the Murrieta church and Evan didn’t see eye to eye. Evan resigned and he and Becky moved to Portland, Oregon, where his brother, an agent in the Drug Enforcement Administration, lived.

“We always thought we could start over,” Evan said to detectives who interviewed him years later. They noted that he spoke as if his ex-wife had been of the same mind he was. In fact, she wasn’t. She believed in her church, but she wondered why it was so difficult for Evan to get along with people.

Things didn’t get better in Portland. Becky suffered a miscarriage, and the couple continued to grow apart. She was so young when she married and everything had happened too fast. Becky never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings and everyone around her had seemed to be urging her to marry Evan. Although it wasn’t easy, she tried her best to keep believing in him as he hopped from job to job.

Although Becky lost her baby, her sister Mary delivered a boy, Matthew,* in April 2005. Becky told Evan that she needed to go to Missouri to help with the new baby, and he insisted he would drive her there. She demurred at first, but finally agreed that they would drive back east together. He left her with Mary and Doug Loehner and her parents and drove back to Oregon.

It wasn’t long before Becky called Evan, and she was crying. She told him that they should just “let their marriage be.”

But Evan wasn’t ready to let her go. He got another low-wage security job, this time at a retirement residence in Oregon. He told Becky he was hoping to become a police officer. With his brother an often-promoted DEA agent, the idea of a job in law enforcement appealed to him.

Evan managed to persuade Becky to come home and try again. He even drove all the way back to St. Joseph and picked her up. They returned to Oregon but stayed only a short time. They moved next to Philadelphia.

No one can ask Becky Zahau how she felt about their frequent moves because she is gone forever. Her sister Mary knew that Becky didn’t want to hurt Evan, but that she wasn’t happy with him.

Six years later, Evan told detectives he thought that things were “okay” between Becky and himself, but that he’d suspected Becky had begun seeing another man.

“After a month,” Solanev said, “I said I was done. I moved to Colorado Springs, got a job at the Air Force Academy, and I started dating a girl there.”

When California investigators asked him how Becky had felt about that, Evan Solanev said that she found out he was with another woman and phoned him. “She said she knew how I must have felt when I found out she was dating someone else. She asked me if she could come back to me and we’d try one more time,” he recalled.

Perhaps she did. He may have been the one who suggested a reconciliation. At any rate, she did come to Colorado Springs, and they stayed together for another two and a half years.

In March 2008, the couple moved once more—this time to Scottsdale, Arizona. Becky got her job working as a nurse/surgery assistant for a laser eye surgeon there. Evan applied to become a police officer in Phoenix, but he wasn’t hired. He decided to go back to school and aim for a career in health care. He thought he might become a registered nurse.

Becky bought a modest house in October 2009 in her own name. Solanev would recall that he believed his wife was again seeing someone else. She may have been. Becky had stayed with Evan for seven years, a period where they lived a peripatetic lifestyle across America. She was a trained surgical assistant, but his career goals changed continually, and their frequent moves gave them no sense of roots at all.

She was also far away from her family in Missouri.

Some people who knew them whispered that she had married Evan to obtain her citizenship papers, although her family doesn’t believe that. It did not, however, seem to be a happy union. Becky had given in to Evan’s pleas to come back to him so many times, but things had never changed. They were still unsettled. Evan had suggested that they buy the house, but she paid for it. He wanted to give her a reason to believe they had finally made a permanent commitment.

But it wasn’t enough. And it was too late. Becky was the one with the steady job and the one who had to make the mortgage payments.

As much as she had tried to keep her marriage together, Becky
was
attracted to other men—older men, more exciting men who seemed to have their lives in order and were actively achieving their goals. She was still very young, and very beautiful. As he turned thirty, Evan was a perpetual student, working at mostly minimum wage jobs.

As he talked to the San Diego detectives, Evan recalled becoming “a Christian” in April 2009, and giving up alcohol, cigarettes, and any drug use. Since he had been so connected to the church more than five years earlier and even a “youth minister,” his acceptance of Christianity in 2009 seemed strangely after the fact.

It was inevitable that Becky and Evan Solanev would separate. That happened in Arizona. He began nursing school in January 2010, and they no longer lived together.

“She didn’t file for divorce,” he said, “so I did—in 2010.”

Nevertheless, Evan said that he and Becky stayed in close contact. Their divorce was final in February 2011. Becky took Ocean, their Weimaraner, with her.

“Ocean was really my dog,” Evan said.

After they were divorced, Becky lived for a short time with a man she met in Scottsdale. But then she met Jonah Shacknai. He was everything that her ex-husband was not. Jonah Shacknai was handsome, rich, and dynamic.

Evan recalled one incident where he encountered another man at Becky’s Arizona home and the police were called. He did not give the man’s name. It might have been Jonah; it could have been the man Becky dated before Jonah. Evan wasn’t sure.

“She came outside and told them [the police] there was some contention between us, but it was only yelling—no physical assaults or anything like that,” Evan said calmly.

“Do you know Jonah?” a San Diego investigator asked in the summer of 2011.

It was clear that Becky’s ex-husband didn’t like Jonah.

“I know him,” Evan said evenly. “My stepmother worked for him in Scottsdale. He’s rich. I suspected when Becky went out on her ‘girls’ night out’ evenings, she was really with him. She just didn’t want to tell me. It made me angry.”

“Do you
hate
Jonah?”

“No,” Evan said. “But I read where his ex-wife sold their house in Arizona for the highest price in Scottsdale history. I wanted to know how rich he was. I knew then I could never get her back. She wouldn’t give me her address. I knew she’d quit work, so how could she get by and pay for her place?”

Evan Solanev was just shy of becoming “a person of interest.” He had lost Becky to Jonah Shacknai and he certainly sounded jealous of Jonah. But Evan insisted he had never been to Coronado, and he had witnesses who saw him at his gym in Arizona on the early morning of July 13, 2011.

“I didn’t even know Becky was dead until somebody from CBS called me on Thursday—July 14. Then the media called me all day. They even called my father and my aunt. When I heard, I basically had a panic attack.”

Solanev said he had no idea where Becky and Jonah lived in California; when CBS called him with the news of her death, he said he thought that she’d died in Scottsdale.

“What do you think happened to Becky?” San Diego sheriff’s detective Todd Norton asked.

“I’ve heard the news. Adrian from CBS told me that she was found in a common area—that she was bound and hanging—”

He hadn’t really answered the question, and Norton pressed further. Was it possible that Becky had committed suicide, he asked?

“No!” Solanev said that there no way his ex-wife would have taken her own life. “We’ve been through a lot—and she’s had a lot of pain in her life. She dealt with it. She loved life. She would never commit suicide. I’ve always felt she would come back to me if she needed to.”

“Was she too naïve for this world—too trusting? What if she lost everything, the money—whatever—?”

“She’d dust herself off and get a job. She had family! She always had me!”

The investigators told Solanev straight out that he was on the “suspect board” of six people. They had already cleared other possible suspects, and they reminded him that he had had an eight-hour “window to commit murder” between his classes at Scottsdale Community College and the time he was seen in the gym the next morning. It was
possible
for him to have caught a flight, confronted Becky, strangled her, and managed to be back in Scottsdale by early the next morning.

But not likely.

“Any reason you’d want to hurt Rebecca?”

Evan shook his head and began to sob at the possibility that she would have killed herself.

“Do you think you were obsessed with her?”

Evan shook his head. “I don’t think so. Yeah, I know I put her on a pedestal. She was the greatest thing there ever was. Even with the divorce, I didn’t think she’d
never
come back to me.”

In the end, although Evan Solanev may well have been obsessed with Becky Zahau, further investigation strained credulity to find him jealous enough to have flown to Coronado to kill her, and then manage to get back to Arizona in time to work out at his gym at 5
A.M.
.

Every connection would have had to mesh like clockwork. A flight delay. Bad weather. Headwinds. Tailwinds.
Anything
could have messed up such a plan.

*   *   *

All of the likely suspects were being eliminated. Or
almost
eliminated. San Diego area newspapers, television news shows, radio talk shows, and online outlets continued to be peppered with comments from the general public who demanded answers. Some of the calls, letters to the editors, and posts sounded ridiculous, as if they emanated from “crime experts” who hadn’t thought things out. Some were comments from citizens heartsick at the tragedy of two deaths. There were also views from people who seemed to be on the “inside,” either because they knew the principals or because they were employed as psychiatrists, psychologists, or law enforcement professionals, comments obviously written by experts in forensic science, murder, suicide, and human behavior.

No one seemed disinterested in what had happened to Max Shacknai and Rebecca Zahau.

Some were sympathetic to Becky, some to Jonah, and some were full of the kind of heedless sarcasm employed by those who hide behind anonymous screen names.

Most Internet posters doubted that Becky Zahau was a suicide. Many of their posts and questions were similar. One wrote:

Three criteria: motive, opportunity, and ability, are considered about suspects in any criminal investigation.

Who had the desire to injure or kill Ms. Zahau?

Who had the opportunity to get close enough to actually cause her harm?

Who had the ability [physical] to actually cause her harm and hang her?

The truth was that no one, except an actual killer—if, indeed, there was one—knew what had happened. But the eager Internet posters of San Diego County were consumed by the possibilities.

One thing was certain: everyone in the San Diego area had questions and opinions. Ironically, the sheriff’s investigators were asking themselves the same questions.

Nothing fit.

Several citizens commented on how hard the San Diego detectives were working. And that was true. They were losing sleep and time with their families, only to find themselves at yet another dead end.

And then, on September 2, just seven weeks after Becky died, Sheriff Bill Gore announced a press conference. He told the mass of reporters who gathered that his department was closing the Rebecca Zahau investigation because they had determined she was, indeed, a suicide.

Many people were shocked, the Zahau family most of all. Giving several interviews to the media, they made it clear that they would not stop in their quest to find out the manner of Becky’s death. A few weeks later, on September 16, 2011, Jonah Shacknai publicly agreed that the case was nowhere near over, and he, too, called for further investigation. He was still reeling over the loss of his “golden son,” and concerned about his girlfriend’s death.

Chapter Eleven