All in the Family

New Jersey, 1999.

It all started with the mail.

A missing bank statement from his Vanguard Group mutual fund. December '98. Where was it? For the last three years his niece had forwarded the annual statement to him like clockwork. That was their deal, but today - nothing. The postman had simply walked on by. His first reaction was confusion; then...rage. No. Something was definitely not right here, and worse, there was nothing he could do. He couldn't call his niece. He had to wait a few days just to use the telephone. Write her a letter? How long would that take? Maybe he'd make his nephew look into it for him?

He wanted to know what happened to his bank statement and he wanted to know now!

He finally called his niece. Once. Twice. Left a message, no reply. Then he called his sister, Judith Sapsa. She told him something like...yeah...it got lost...we can't find it, but...you know...as soon as we do...we'll send it right away. But she was a liar, she couldn't be trusted! She was always jealous of him, hateful. If he could get his hands on her...well...she'd find that letter real quick.

This is how things went down.

Their mother, Veronica Zarinsky, had died four years before, and left nearly everything she had to him, her son, 59-year-old Robert Zarinsky. The $121,000 Vanguard mutual fund account, which she had established in his name. A plot of land in Clinton Township. The family home on Bower Street in Linden. And to Judith...she had left a mere $30,000, and not a penny more. And as far as Zarinsky was concerned...that's all she deserved.

He gave her until March; then called the Vanguard Group. The taxes were due on the house and he wanted answers. He loved that house. It was sacred to him. The only home he had ever known. The keeper of all his secrets. He had never even listed it for rent or sale. He had left it precisely the way it was - abandoned and unoccupied. He had paid the taxes and upkeep right from his cell at Northern State Prison in Newark, where he held the infamous distinction of being the first person in New Jersey state history to be convicted of murder without a corpse.