Post by Graveyardbride on Nov 6, 2015 18:18:26 GMT -5
Unsolved: 1976 Abduction and Murder of John Zera
Mark Zera and his father made their way down the deserted rural road from their home to Franklin High School and back again. As his father drove slowly through the darkness, Mark ran back and forth behind the car, scanning the roadside ditches for some sign of his brother. John (above), 14, hadn’t come home from school that day. Maybe he had been hit by a car and was lying there, hurt, needing help. Mark and his father searched for a glimpse of John’s green jacket until the unseasonably warm February evening surrendered to a chilly winter night and rain started to fall, soon mixing with snow. Back at home, the boys’ mother dialed number after number, the rotary phone impossibly slow. “Have you seen Johnny?” she asked her son’s classmates, his friends, their parents, the neighbors. No. No. No. No.
The year was 1976. The Zera family had moved to Franklin just nine months earlier. Back then, Franklin was less a town than a number of farms, with small pockets of development creeping in. In the high school cafeteria, rural kids who had known each other all their lives banded together, while newcomers, whose families had sought peace in the expanding suburb, ate in exile. Nearby, construction workers building an addition to the school pulled their sandwiches from brown paper bags.
John – named for his father and called “Johnny” by his family – had a hard time adjusting to his new school and leaving his friends behind in their old Milwaukee neighborhood. So did Mark, 15. They’d lived just a block from their south side middle school, Sholes, where their mother worked as a teacher. Still, Mark, John and the youngest Zera brother, 13-year-old Phil, liked their new house, where each had his own room. Even more, they loved the surrounding woods filled with deer, coyotes and squirrels. The never-ending yard offered plenty of room for the brothers to roam and play their own version of football, which almost always involved the older two tackling Phil. After school, if John wasn’t in his room building model cars, he could often be found looking for pheasants or slogging through the swampy mud near his family’s property. He wasn’t the type kid to take off without leaving a note.
By Saturday morning, the day after John disappeared, the newly fallen snow covered everything: the tire tracks on the route his father and brother had traveled, the footprints they left in the dirt, every trace of their dark foray the night before. Perhaps the snow also covered vital clues about what happened to John.
John’s mom waited at the house in case he showed up. Mark and his dad headed for the school, where the principal had agreed to meet them. Mark led his dad and the principal to his brother’s locker, just inside the main hallway. Mark knew the combination; he often stowed his stuff there if he was running late for class. He spun the lock, and the door swung open. John’s books were piled inside. Mark felt a stab in his gut as he recognized the coat hanging on its hook: John’s olive green parka. The principal called the police and a sergeant showed up right away, soon summoning firefighters to help search the school grounds.
Throughout the weekend, the Zera home teemed with law enforcement officers, volunteer searchers from a snowmobile club, distant relatives, even a psychic. To the ever-present media, they handed out photos of a smiling, buck-toothed boy with dark blond bangs that swept just above his blue eyes.
The only thing the police knew for certain was that after lunch on Friday, February 20, 1976, John got a pass, walked out of study hall and vanished. Officers collected conflicting accounts about where and when he was last seen: He headed for the parking lot and a waiting Ford Torino. He wandered through the school lobby, but didn’t go outside. He lingered in the hallway near his drafting classroom but never went in.
Police questioned John’s older brother repeatedly – at least once in a tiny room down at the station, with his father on the other side of the heavy door. Mark spoke in a monotone, his curt replies peppered with “I don’t know” and shoulder shrugs. “He knows what happened,” one of the detectives told Mark’s parents. “He’s hiding something.” But Mark didn’t know anything. He wished he did. He would never put his parents through this suffering.
On Tuesday, four days after John went missing, more than 50 volunteers joined his family in combing the school. Mark peered under the bleachers, then followed the psychic through piles of construction debris and mounds of dirt in the hard hat area, choking on dust as he called his brother’s name. No one answered.
On Friday, a week after John’s disappearance, a part-time swim coach for a nearby recreation district led a group of young teenage boys through Whitnall Park, 630 acres that stretch through parts of Franklin and Hales Corners. The closest entrance to the park was five miles from the school and eight miles from the Zera home. No one else had thought to search there. “Look for clothes in the bushes,” instructed the coach, whose name was Daniel Acker. “Look for anything odd.” The amateur detectives came up empty.
The body. On the morning of February 28, eight days after John disappeared, two teenagers went exploring in Whitnall Park, making their way through a dense thicket of brush and trees. As they parted the last of the branches and entered the clearing, they saw the nude body of a boy, face-down, his head resting on a log. Dozens of large, mossy rocks littered the area, as if some long-ago ranger had started building a shed or landscaping a garden, then lost interest. One rock seemed out of place, separate from an indentation in the ground the same shape and size. The watery remains of melting snow revealed no sign of a struggle and no indication the body had been dragged to the clearing. When police arrived, they found a pile of clothing about 20 feet from the body: jeans, a checked flannel shirt, a white T-shirt, a pair of white boxer shorts and two brown shoes, with blue socks tucked neatly inside. Officers also found a pencil, a pen and a Franklin High School hall pass, made out to John Zera and dated February 20. One of the officers also spotted some block letters inked onto the dead boy’s wrist with a ballpoint pen. They spelled the word “Hell.” Later, an autopsy revealed evidence of sexual assault and traces of semen.
The case quickly overwhelmed the police, as well as agents from the state Department of Justice and the FBI. They put in countless hours questioning more than 1,000 potential witnesses and dozens of suspects, but the challenges of the case far outstripped their abilities, their training and the technology of the time. Crime scene analysis was more art than science. Fingerprint matches relied on human interpretation – not computers. Scientists had yet to solve the mysteries of DNA or uncover its potential for solving crimes.
Daniel Acker (above) stopped by the Zera home to offer his condolences. Though he’d never met Johnny, “Mr. Dan” told the family he felt compelled to solve their son’s murder. He said he had been planning to take a bike ride in Whitnall Park the day the boy disappeared, but instead took a nap. He said he was grief-stricken because had he not chosen to sleep, he might have been in the park and could have saved Johnny’s life. Mrs. Zera was cordial to Acker, allowing him to view John’s room and inviting him to have dinner with the family. But Mark Zera sensed something sinister about the helpful coach. “I didn’t like the guy from the get-go,” he told a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reporter. “I thought he was a creep.” Though Acker invited him to various sporting events, Mark politely declined the invitations.
Acker’s attempts to solve the crime included convincing a patient at an adolescent treatment facility to confess to the murder and implicate two Franklin High School employees. Authorities eventually established the confessor’s allegations were false.
Six months following John Zera’s murder, new tenants moved into a vacant house on Milwaukee’s east side and discovered the entire homicide file on the case in the basement, complete with witness statements and crime scene photos. The file was eventually traced to the office of the district attorney, but no one was ever able to figure out how it ended up in the basement. If misplacing an entire file wasn’t bad enough, a concerned citizen, Christine Wiedemann, came forward, claiming Sgt. Harold Hingiss had been derelict in his duties while investigating the John Zera case because he was more interested in wooing her into a romantic relationship than doing his job. Hingiss, who was 20 years older than Ms. Wiedemann, was charged with “indiscreet conduct” and suspended for 60 days without pay. The Zera family was convinced police had botched the investigation. It seemed Dan Acker and his team of “lost boys” were as likely to solve the crime as were law enforcement officers.
Even after the case went cold, Acker continued making pilgrimages to Whitnall Park and sent the Zeras a greeting card each year on the date of their son’s death. However, it later became evident that instead of searching for clues, Acker was engaging in sexual romps with his young charges. Finally, one of the boys whom he violated started sending Acker subscriptions to gay porn magazines under the name “John Zera,” presumably to unnerve the man who molested him.
Connections to an earlier murder. The John Zera case has a tenuous connection to the murder of another Milwaukee boy. On December 8, 1972, Marvin Allen Bruton, 17, disappeared, and five months later, a plastic bag containing his torso was discovered in Hustisford. Examination revealed the body part contained three stab wounds in the chest and six in the back. Around a month later, the youth’s head was found floating in a plastic bag in Wild Cat Creek and in August, a leg and the upper portion of an arm turned up at the water’s edge. Marvin’s mother worked at a bar owned by John Zera’s grandfather, but the two boys did not know each other and attended different schools.
It was later discovered that Dan Acker maintained a “murder memorial,” featuring photos of John Zera and a 10-year-old boy named Brad Allen “Peanut” Machett. Oddly, Machett’s grandparents – like the parents of Johnny Zera – owned a tavern. On the evening of October 25, 1980, Brad disappeared after leaving St. Casimir Church en route to meet his grandmother at the family business located at 833 East Burleigh Street. It was just five blocks from the church to the tavern, but he never arrived. It was on Halloween that Brad’s body was discovered in a cornfield in Grafton, 20 miles from Milwaukee. Autopsy revealed the 10-year-old had been beaten and strangled and his pants were unfastened. Because the corpse could be seen from the road, it was assumed the body had only recently been placed there. There were also footprints and tire tracks at the scene and a hair with root intact was recovered from Brad’s chest. Later in an interview with a Milwaukee Journal reporter, Mrs. Morrical (Brad’s grandmother) said, “Whoever had him must have been feeding him because there was food in his stomach.”
So far as is known, the Machett family never received a visit from Daniel Acker, but Raymond Matzker, a known pedophile, was suspected of committing the murder. Matzker, who had faced charges of child molestation in New York, was hired as director of the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. He was ultimately eliminated as a suspect.
As the years dragged on, investigators retired, suspects moved away, witnesses died, evidence disappeared and decades passed. In the early days, John’s family hoped for his safe return. Later, they prayed that whoever was responsible for his disappearance would be brought to justice. Finally, they clung to the hope that advances in technology or someone with a guilty conscience might someday offer an explanation of what happened to their Johnny. And why.
‘A predator pedophile.’ Because of his “strange infatuation with child murders” and the presence of Brad Machett and John Zera in Daniel Acker’s shrine, more than 30 years after the deaths of the two boys, investigators reexamined the coach’s ties to these murders as well as those of other boys in the area. However, there was never enough evidence to charge him. But police were able to charge him with child molestation and in 2009, Acker pled no contest to two counts of second-degree sexual assault on a child and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The statutes of limitation had expired in most of his crimes and many of his victims refused to cooperate with authorities. “He’s basically a predator pedophile, but Acker did not kill John Zera,” Detective Kent Schoonover of the Hales Corners Police Department told the Journal-Sentinel. He did not explain how Acker was eliminated as s suspect.
Although the moon had fulled four days prior to February 20, 1976, and was waning at the time of John Zera’s murder, some say that to this day, on cold, moonlit nights, strange cries echo through Whitnall Park.
Sources: Gina Barton, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, November 4, 2015; “Wisconsin Death Trip: Somethin’ in the Curd Ain’t Clean”; IdiditforJodie, June 1, 2015; and Weird Wisconsin.