Farewell to the criminal of our nightmares
We hated Johnny Zinn. We hated him because we feared him. We feared him because he was the man of our nightmares, the stumbling, stuttering, slimy symbol of the seedy side of Albuquerque that we had, for the most part, been able to ignore until then.
We feared him because he took away our complacency.
Because he took away Linda Lee Daniels.
She was the blondhaired, blue-eyed all-American girl, a 22-year-old University of New Mexico anthropology student engaged to be married and insulated from Zinn’s dark world until Jan. 12, 1986, when she became the unlikely target of an ill-conceived, inexplicable plan purportedly devised by Zinn and carried out by this sociopath and his three hapless cohorts to put her in a porno film.
The plan ended with a bullet to her brain in the Jemez Mountains a day later.
Twenty-nine years later, Zinn is dead, too, his passing last week in the long-term care unit of the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas coming quietly, coincidentally days after that day long ago when authorities were led to Daniels’ violated body in the snow under a small mountain bridge.
Department of Corrections officials offered little detail about how he died and how he had lived the last decades of his life behind bars. He was 74, old especially for someone in
lockup so long. Had he made it to 108, he would have been eligible for parole.
Zinn was sentenced to life plus 96 years for orchestrating the murder, rape and abduction of Daniels.
He had faced the death penalty, but jurors, who split 8-4 in favor of execution, said they could not come to a unanimous decision when his three lackeys had received lesser sentences — or no sentence at all in the case of James Scartaccini, then 17 and the youngest of the four.
Scartaccini and his then-20-year-old cousin, Sidney Sliger, were offered immunity deals in exchange for their cooperation. Sliger, however, was later sentenced to three years in prison after admitting that he had participated in raping Daniels.
Wallace Randolph Pierce is serving a 66-year sentence at the Lea County Correctional Facility near Hobbs. Pierce, 53, is accused of firing the fatal round into Daniels’ forehead.
Most of us do not remember those names, those faces.
But we remember Johnny Zinn.
At his sentencing October 1986, state District Judge William Deaton condemned Zinn for leaving a “legacy of fear and rage that hovers like a curse over this community.”
So notorious was the Zinn name that it doomed Zinn’s Bakery, a once-successful business opened in 1965 by his stepfather, Ed Zinn.
“Evidently, the public chose to make the name identification between Johnny Zinn and Ed Zinn, a stepfather who hadn’t seen the kid for years,” an attorney for the family told reporters in June 1989, when both bakery locations — the original at 5420 Kathryn SE, the other at 10895 Montgomery NE — declared bankruptcy and closed.
Johnny Zinn had been bad news for most of his life, though he was more bluster than bloodthirsty, a smalltime con man who liked to brag he had Mafia ties and connections to a lucrative pornography ring.
Records show his first arrest came when he was 13 and stole a vehicle. His record includes other charges of auto theft, armed robbery and forgery. He was 22 in October 1962 when he was shot in the groin by an Albuquerque police officer who saw him casing cars parked along a lovers’ lane in the Northeast Heights. The gunshot left him with a limp.
He was skinny and wore shabby clothes. He stuttered. He smoked incessantly. He liked whiskey in his morning coffee. Bartenders and prostitutes in the Central Avenue dives he frequented called him Lucky John.
But his luck ran out with Linda Lee Daniels. And so did hers.
According to testimony, Zinn had made several attempts to persuade women to star in pornographic films. He claimed he knew people in Farmington who would pay the women thousands of dollars and all the drugs they could snort or shoot. He got no takers. To help find willing women, Zinn enlisted Pierce, who was living with him at the time. Pierce brought Scartaccini and Sliger, both high school dropouts, into the scheme. Zinn promised the three of them $1,500 apiece in finder’s fees. But when the three also failed to secure a woman, Zinn began to threaten them.
So they found Daniels, following her from an Albertsons on Menaul and Juan Tabo NE to her fiancé’s apartment nearby and snatching her as she exited her car, scattering her groceries on the sidewalk, her can of Mace rolling out of reach.
For hours, the four men took turns raping her in a room at the Canyon Motel on East Central, taking Polaroid photos of their exploits but later burning the photos. The next day, Pierce, Scartaccini and Sliger drove Daniels to Farmington but stopped midway at a convenience store in San Ysidro, where they waited for Zinn to provide further instructions. Instead, Zinn told the men that news of Daniels’ disappearance was too “hot,” her photo on the front pages of newspapers and on the nightly news.
He told them to get rid of her.
The men were arrested days later. But in the years before DNA evidence and with no fingerprints or murder weapon or independent witnesses, then-District Attorney Steve Schiff told reporters he had no choice but to offer immunity deals to the younger suspects in exchange for their testimony.
Both Scartaccini and Sliger implicated Zinn as the ringleader who threatened to kill them if they didn’t obey him.
Years later in a prison interview, Zinn took no responsibility for the crime. The instigator, he told a reporter, was Scartaccini, the teenager. But because of the immunity deals and the high-profile nature of the case, Schiff — and the community — needed a scapegoat, he said.
“If the pope would have been sitting in my chair, he would have been convicted,” Zinn said.
No one can ask Scartaccini about that. He hanged himself in 1990.
“There’s probably so much about this thing we’ll never know,” Zinn told the reporter that year. “I imagine Mr. Scartaccini took it to the grave with him.”
And now, Zinn has also gone to the grave.
His death closes a horrific chapter in Albuquerque’s history, but the legacy of fear and rage lingers and the membrane between the darkness and the light, the good and the bad, remains irreparably broken.
His death, at age 74, feels more like the final chapter to a horrific time in the city’s history when women feared they would be the next to be plucked off the street like Daniels had been, our groceries strewn on the sidewalk, our can of Mace rolling out of our reach.
In 1986, I was also a UNM student, recently returned to Albuquerque to finish my academic career. Albuquerque, compared with the other cities I had lived in, seemed like a sprawling small town, still safe and comfortably unsophisticated.
That changed with Johnny Zinn.
His name rhymed with “sin.”