THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF REBECCA ZAHAU
DID THE YOUNG WOMAN REALLY KILL HERSELF – OR WAS SHE MURDERED?
Rebecca Zahau, a vibrant young woman with a close family and a wealthy boyfriend who she adored, seemingly had everything to live for.
The 32-year-old surgical technician was devoted to her older boyfriend, mogul Jonah Shacknai, who was more than 20 years her senior.
She’d first met Jonah, then 54, when he’d been a patient at the eye clinic where she worked.
Two years into the relationship, she’d quit her job to spend more time with the pharmaceutical magnate.
Rebecca also got on famously with Jonah’s 6-year-old son Max, from a previous marriage.
It seemed the couple had a long and happy future.
But on July 11, 2011, while they were holidaying at Jonah’s mansion in coastal Coronado, California, tragedy struck.
While Jonah was at the gym having his daily workout he received a panicked phone call from Rebecca; there’d been a terrible accident.
While she’d been in the bathroom, she heard a loud noise in the foyer. Young Max lay on the floor, his scooter beside him, horrifically wounded after falling down the stairs. Rebecca gave him CPR while her young sister Xena, who’d been visiting, called an ambulance.
For the rest of the week, Jonah and his former wife
Dina spent a bedside vigil at the hospital beside their dying son.
“At first, Dina made it clear she blamed Rebecca,” US crime reporter Diane Dimond tells New Idea. “She wondered, how could this have happened to her little boy under her ex husband’s girlfriend’s watch?”
Rebecca, meanwhile, waited miserably back at the mansion. She was later joined by Jonah’s brother Adam, then 48, who had flown in from Tennessee to offer his support.
“The two brothers are chalk and cheese. While Jonah is a super-wealthy businessman, Adam was way less ambitious, a tugboat captain,” says Diane.
Then, two days after Max’s tragic fall, another unthinkable tragedy took place. At 6.30am, police received a call from Adam saying “I got a girl, hung herself…”
He said he’d just found
Rebecca hanging, bound and gagged, from a balcony. Police raced to the scene to find Rebecca’s naked body, her hands and feet bound with red rope.
Paint was splattered on Rebecca’s nipples. On a nearby wall, a cryptic sentence had been scrawled in paint: “She saved him. Can you save her.”
“It was all very weird. Police of course, found it all very suspicious,” says Diane.
“Rebecca was a diminutive, tiny woman and the writing was quite high up on the wall.
“The big question was, did she commit suicide, or was she murdered? If so, by whom?”
With Rebecca’s horrific death following Max’s shocking accident, the story made headlines across America.
“It is possible Rebecca felt so terrible about what had happened to Max that she decided to take her own life?” Diane reflects. “But in all my years of covering bizarre and eerie cases in America, I’ve never known of a woman to commit suicide naked.”
Just hours before Rebecca died, Jonah had left her a voice message, saying Max’s condition was grim. He died later that week.
Could Jonah’s devastating news have been enough to cause Rebecca to kill herself ? “She’d never do that, never cause our parents so much pain,” insists her sister Mary.
With Adam the last person to have seen Rebecca alive, detectives later conducted a lie detector test on him, asking him outright if he’d killed Rebecca. He denied doing so, but the results were ‘inconclusive’.
Eventually, detectives concluded Max’s was a tragic accident, and that Rebecca had killed herself. Despite the complicated way her hands were tied, there was no other DNA found near her body.
Refusing to accept the police findings, her outraged family then hired forensic experts.
Rebecca’s body was exhumed and re-examined by a pathologist. He concluded her throat wounds were due to strangulation, not suicide. Further, she’d been sexually assaulted. Rebecca, he declared, had been murdered.
While Jonah, who dislikes the publicity, has maintained his brother had nothing to do with her death – saying he believes she killed herself – the Zahau family filed a lawsuit against Adam for unlawful killing. A possible motive, argued their lawyer, was retaliation for Max’s fall under her watch.
Experts claimed Adam had written the odd message on the wall, too. In 2018, the jury concluded the tugboat owner was responsible, awarding the family $US5 million.
“Did he cause her death? The answer is yes,” said Mary, who’d hoped police would charge Adam. Detectives have refused to do so.
While delighted at the verdict, the family will forever be heartbroken they lost their beautiful Rebecca.
“I think we do know little Max’s death was a terrible accident,” says Diane. “Even his mother Dina accepted that. At first she had doubts, but she later said she recognised Rebecca was not involved in anything sinister. Did she do it to herself ? Or did somebody do it? We may never know. Someone may have got away with murder.”