True-crime author’s latest: Coronado Mansion Case
SAN DIEGO — Caitlin Rother did not set out to become a true-crime writer. But if you look back at the author’s life, the clues were there all along.
When she was a general assignment reporter for the Berkshire Eagle and the Springfield UnionNews in western Massachusetts in the late 1980s, Rother spent her spare time reading about sensational murder cases and devious criminals in New York magazine.
From 1993 to 2006, Rother was a reporter at the San Diego UnionTribune, where she ended up writing some memorable stories involving bizarre deaths.
“I am interested in why people act the way they do. I am always wondering, ‘Why do people do this?’ ” Rother, 58, said.
Since 2004, Rother has written or co-written 14 books, most of them nonfiction accounts of real-life crimes. On the surface, Rother’s new book looks like another truecrime saga. Except for the fact that the death Rother writes about may not have been the result of a criminal act.
The book is “Death on Ocean Boulevard: Inside the Coronado Mansion Case.” The case concerns the mysterious death of Rebecca Zahau, whose body was found hanging from a balcony at the historic Spreckels Mansion in Coronado in July 2011. Her body was naked, and her hands and feet were bound.
Zahau’s death happened just two days after 6-yearold Max Shacknai, the son of her boyfriend, Jonah Shacknai, took what turned out to be a fatal fall while Max was in the house with her.
Investigators from the San Diego County Sheriff ’s Department ruled that Zahau’s death was a suicide. Her family believes she was killed.
In 2018, a San Diego Superior Court jury found Jonah Shacknai’s brother, Adam Shacknai, responsible for Zahau’s death. Later that year, the Sheriff ’s Department reviewed the investigation and concluded once again that Zahau’s death was a suicide.
Recently, a San Diego Superior Court judge agreed to hear arguments from Zahau’s family that they should be allowed to see investigative materials that the Sheriff ’s Department did not make public.
A death that doesn’t seem to make sense as a suicide or a murder makes for a puzzle that people can’t stop trying to solve. The Coronado mansion story has been covered by CNN Headline News and the Oxygen and Investigation Discovery cable networks. It has also become a breeding ground for a wealth of conspiracy theories.
And even after her years of research and many hours of interviews — including eight hours of Skype interviews with Jonah Shacknai that didn’t come through until the book was being edited — Rother herself can’t say for sure what happened.
“My agent pressed me to take a position, and I just wasn’t comfortable with doing that,” said Rother, who is working on a sequel to her first (and only) novel, “Naked Addiction.” “I went back and forth and I did a lot of investigating, and I don’t know what happened. I can see both sides of it, and I have never been convinced either way. There are big holes in the investigation that will never be filled.”
For Rother, there was another way in which “Death on Ocean Boulevard” was more than another true-crime story.
In 1999, after years struggling with alcoholism and mental illness, Rother’s husband, Rich Rose, hung himself in a motel room in Mexico. Rose’s death, which Rother wrote about in her frank 2018 memoir, “Secrets, Lies, and Shoelaces,” gave her firsthand insights into the mysteries of being human — including the mystery of why people go to such great lengths to hide their pain from the ones they love most.
You can’t always know why people do what they do, but in “Death on Ocean Boulevard,” Rother reminds us of how much you can learn by doing your best to find out.
“This is not a parlor game. It isn’t about judging,” said Rother, who dedicated the book to Max and Rebecca. “Rebecca’s family still cannot let go of this case, and they are not going to until they get the death certificate changed. And the Shacknais lost a little boy. This is a tragedy, no matter how you look at it.”