February 6, 2011

Section: News
Page: A4

Murder unsolved 20 years later

Much has changed since Jill Holzbach was shot in parking lot of police station
Tim Botos
tim.botos@cantonrep.com

JACKSON TWP. Before cell phone cameras, parking lot videos and global positioning gadgets, a
woman named Jill Holzbach drove a 1973 Mercury Comet to the township police station in a
frantic cry for help.
She honked the horn.

'Get out of the car' the man who'd followed her in a second car hollered.

The 29-year-old wife and mother didn't budge. Her windows were up. The doors locked. It was
10:20 p.m., raining, very dark, and she was alone. Inside the police station, a front desk clerk
heard some commotion. However, a handful of officers, seated farther away inside, didn't hear a
thing.

'Get out of the car' the man commanded.

That man is the only one who knows if Jill Holzbach said anything in response to his demand.

Only he could have seen the look on her face when he pointed a.380-caliber handgun at the
driver's window and pulled the trigger.

Only he heard what it sounded like when the first bullet ripped a hole in the window. The force
shoved pieces of glass into her hair and the fabric of her jeans. A second shot followed.

One bullet struck her chin, the other her neck. Her body fell across the car, partially on to the
passenger's seat. It was an ugly scene. Pieces of her shattered upper false teeth landed on the
seats and floor. Blood instantly pooled beneath her. The killer climbed into his car and sped away.

The only forensic evidence left was a pair of shell casings.

It was Feb. 6, 1991.

The first day in a still unsolved murder mystery.



So much has changed in two decades.

David Zink, the young patrol officer who discovered her body that night, now has the title of
police chief. The county's prosecutor, Robert Horowitz, became a judge, then died a short time
later.

Jill Holzbach's husband, Jimmy, makes ends meet until he can retire at age 62. Jimmy's longtime
attorney, Donald George, is dead, too. Jill and Jimmy's daughter, Jenna, is a grown woman with a
child of her own.

The police headquarters on Fulton Drive NW isn't even a police station anymore; it's a restaurant,
91 Wood Fired Oven.

Tonight 20 years to the day since Jill died while that restaurant is closed, Jimmy and Jenna
Holzbach will pay respects. Together, they'll place carnations in the parking lot, near where Jill was
slain. Carnations were her favorites.

'From this time of year, say Christmas until Feb. 6, is not a happy time for me,' Jimmy Holzbach
said from the living room of his southwest Canton rental home, where a framed photo of Jill hangs
above the couch.

For many years, he knew he was a suspect. He still may be. At one point in the 1990s, he sued
Jackson Township, claiming that a detective slandered him at a public meeting by accusing him of
the murder.

'The husband killed her,' people would say.

He heard whispers behind his back.

'I'm not the greatest person in the world,' Jimmy said, acknowledging run-ins with the law since,
which include arrests for theft, passing bad checks and receiving stolen property. 'But I don't have
no murder on my rap sheet.'

Jenna Holzbach, now 24 years old, lives with her dad. Once an accomplished local swimmer at
McKinley High School, she works as an assistant manager at a drive-thru. She wants to see justice
for her mom.

'I'm my mini-her,' she said, looking up at the photo of her mom on the wall.

The resemblance is uncanny.

Brown hair, slightly long face, similar smiles.

Jenna said she has made mistakes, including scrapes with the law, too. Her dad wonders if it's
not at least partially due to growing up without a mom in the house.

On the couch, Jenna hugged and wrestled with her 2-year-old daughter, Jillanna, named after her
late mom. Never did Jenna entertain the possibility that she was being raised by her mom's killer.

'I know my dad didn't do it,' she said.

She struggles to remember that night. She was only 4 years old.'My dad was (at home). I
remember there was a basketball game on,' she said.

Jimmy Holzbach is now 60. A recent stint in a temporary job at a local manufacturer didn't turn
into full-time work. He plans to collect unemployment and hang on until he's eligible for Social
Security.

On the night of the murder, 20 years ago, evidence seemed to point at him.

For starters, he was the husband.

Crime statistics show one of four female homicide victims is killed by a husband or boyfriend.

Police also found out about Jimmy's domestic violence arrest two years prior.

Then there was the car. There was some indication in the hours after the murder that one of the
cars in the police station parking lot appeared to be a late model Pontiac Grand Prix. Jimmy owned
a 1978 Grand Prix. To top it off, Jill's mom, Nedra Johnson, described Jimmy to police as 'off the
wall and kind a crazy.'

In 1991, Jimmy, Jill and young Jenna Holzbach lived on Massachusetts Avenue SE in Massillon, a
few blocks from Paul Brown Tiger Stadium.
 An Army veteran of Vietnam, he'd been married before. By this time, he and Jill had been
together for eight years. Jimmy is highstrung. In size, stature and demeanor, he's a wound-up
Barney Fife.

As a family, they took rides in the car. They went to see Santa Claus. They shopped together at
Gold Circle and Mellett Mall. They watched football games and ate birthday cakes. They feasted on
Thanksgiving dinners and watched the New Year's Eve ball drop.

They enjoyed a family vacation in Niagara Falls. Jenna said 'daddy' before she was 4 months old,
a full two months before 'mama.' The marriage, though, had problems.

A friend told investigators that Jill told her a few months before her death that she was unhappy.

In her car, Jill kept a suitcase containing black nylons, a teddy, panties, a garter, jeans, a blouse,
cosmetics, personal hygiene items and a dozen-count box of condoms, with two missing. No big
deal, Jimmy explained on the night of the murder. He rattled off the contents of the suitcase to
police.

He said it was hardly a hidden stash. He said Jill kept those things in the car because Jenna had
gotten into them before.

Still, it was odd.

Condoms?

Jill was unable to get pregnant because she'd had her tubes tied.

And it wasn't much of a secret that Jill had sometimes visited a former boyfriend. In fact, within
hours of her murder, that exboyfriend told police he'd had sex with Jill less than two hours before
she was shot to death.

To this day, Jimmy doesn't believe that.

He believes that she was breaking it off with the ex-boyfriend once and for all.

At 11:45 p.m. on Feb. 6, more than two hours after Jill's murder, Jackson detectives asked
Massillon officers to go to the Holzbach house. Jimmy said they showed up with weapons drawn.
Inside, they handcuffed him. They sent Jenna with a Massillon officer, Vickie Thornsberry, who
happened to be a cousin of Jill's.

'It's my wife, isn't it?' Jimmy asked officers.

He paced back and forth, asking questions about Jill.

They declined to answer.

Jimmy heard ramblings on one officer's radio, something about looking for Jimmy's Pontiac. He
piped up and told them it was at Perry High School, getting fixed by the auto mechanic student
class. That's one reason Jill drove the Mercury Comet that night. The car belonged to her mom.

At midnight, Jackson detectives Chris Rudy and Glenn Goe picked up Jimmy at his house. They
took off the handcuffs and drove him back to their station on the south side of Fulton. Jimmy still
didn't know what had happened to his wife. Along the way, they told him there had been an
accident.

'Is my wife dead?' he asked over and over.

'Is she hurt seriously?' he asked again and again.

All they said was that she had been taken to the hospital.

During a three-and-a-half hour interview with Jimmy that followed, he sat for only a couple of
moments. Most of the time, he paced. He confided then that he'd had problems with stress.

When they told him his wife had been shot, he lost it. He screamed wildly. He said he wanted this
person caught. He then allowed Rudy to perform a firearms residue test on his hands, to
determine if he'd recently fired a gun, and later the next morning, he gave them the rest of the
clothes he'd worn the night before.

Detectives asked Jimmy what he'd done on the night of the murder, his alibi. He told them he
and Jill had finished delivering newspapers in the afternoon. It was their primary source of income
at the time. They put Jenna down for a nap, unfolded the sofa bed and had sex.

After dinner, she left for a girls night out, something Jimmy told detectives was key to a happy
marriage. He watched a couple of basketball games, spoke to a friend on the phone about a youth
softball league, and phoned another friend's house.
 During the interview, Perry Township police went to the high school, located Jimmy's Grand Prix,
and touched the hood to see if it was warm. It wasn't. It was inside a garage and completely dry
on this rainy night.

The first 48 hours in the investigation eventually gave way to weeks, months, then years. In the
first few days, though, Police Chief Phil Paar conducted an investigation to determine if his officers
did something wrong that night. It's not every day someone gets away with murder in a police
station parking lot.

He found that a series of miscommunications and bad coincidences all came together at the
same time during Jill's murder.

Consider:
Patrol officer John Angelo actually drove west on Fulton Drive, past the police station parking
lot, at 10:21 p.m. and noted two cars, one behind the other. He heard a loud noise, possibly a
gunshot. By the time he turned around at the nearby Church of the Lakes and came back to
investigate, the suspect's car was gone.
Marlyce Hammen, the clerk who heard yelling outside, walked into the station to notify Sgt.
Barry Lyons and Sgt. Rick Seifer. She told them something to the effect that there was a
'domestic out front.'
Lyons, in turn, took that to mean someone had walked into the police station lobby to fill out a
domestic violence complaint, which wouldn't be uncommon.

Not sensing urgency, Lyons contacted the Regional Emergency Dispatch Center at 10:25 p.m.
He asked them to dispatch one of his road officers to take a domestic report in the police station.

Patrol officer David Zink heard the message from the RED Center and interpreted it to mean
there was a domestic fight going on inside the station. He was near Lake Cable and arrived in
seconds.

He parked about 20 feet from Jill's Mercury Comet. He jumped out and ran into the station. He
spoke to two other officers and Lyons, who told him the domestic complaint was up front. Zink
went outside and noticed a 5-inch hole in the driver's window of the Comet. A bullet hole in the
trunk would be discovered later. He told another officer to get a flashlight.

He broke away the rest of the window, opened the door, and found her dead body.

Zink, now the township's police chief, declined to speak of that night or add details about the
status of the investigation. And on the recommendation of the Stark County Prosecutor's Office,
he would not provide any records from the case file, because it is classified as an open
investigation.

However, The Repository previously had obtained some records, and Jimmy Holzbach himself
maintains a number of reports.

In a perfect world, she would have got help that night,' said former Jackson Police Lt. Chris
Rudy. 'But the timing. nothing would have prevented Jill from getting shot. It was a chase to the
death.' After 25 years of service, Rudy retired from the department in 2007. For many of those
years, as a detective, he investigated Jill Holzbach's murder.

First, he conducted interviews following the murder, then again years later when he worked it as
a cold case.

Rudy is the officer whom Jimmy Holzbach had accused of slander.

The township won the civil case in court.

In extreme efforts to solve the case, the agency had placed officers and the clerk on duty the
night of the murder under hypnosis. They also contacted the military, looking into available
satellite images.

Neither provided much help.

In late 1993, Jimmy voluntarily took a polygraph test, which indicated he wasn't telling the whole
truth. Jimmy denied killing his wife, then and now. And he maintains the lie detector result was an
anomaly.

Today, does Rudy know who killed Jill Holzbach?

'Absolutely, no doubt in my mind,' he said, declining to provide a name.

Proving it, though, always was another matter. Over the years, he ran questions past seasoned
homicide detectives in Akron and Canton. He took the case file with him to the FBI Academy in
Quantico, Va. In 1998, Rudy and other Jackson detectives even worked with Bill O' Connor, an
agent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, which specialized in cold
cases.
 The following year, they twice met with Horowitz, the county prosecutor, and his assistant,
Dennis Barr.

On both occasions, the prosecutor's office told police more evidence was needed to present a
case to a grand jury, the first step in what ultimately could lead to a criminal trial. Rudy said it was
during that period that some of the people interviewed in 1991 admitted that they had lied.

"Nobody was forthcoming, nobody was forthright," he said.

However, police never did provide enough evidence to satisfy prosecutors.

"Whether this case will ever be solved. no one can answer that question," said Barr, now the
chief criminal prosecutor for current Prosecutor John Ferrero.

At some point, authorities had focused clearly on at least one other suspect besides Jimmy
Holzbach.

In 1991, a man named Michael Bednarz admitted having sex with Jill Holzbach on the night she
was killed, but he said they parted ways at 9 p.m. He told investigators he had known Jill since
both were teenagers, and that she'd come to visit him at his house in southwest Massillon on Feb.
6.

Today, Bednarz is in state prison, for nothing to do with Jill Holzbach. He was convicted of felony
domestic violence against an ex-wife.

He was sentenced in December to three years in prison.

Zink, the Jackson Township police chief, acknowledged the recent arrest of Bednarz and other
developments have brought renewed attention to the Holzbach murder. However, Zink declined to
provide specifics.

Bednarz is at Lorain Correctional Institute waiting for assignment to another prison. While at
Lorain, prisoners are unavailable for media interviews, said JoEllen Smith, a spokesman for the
state prison system.

"I know Michael didn't do it," said his mom, Delores Bednarz, who lives in the same Massillon
house Jill visited that night. "Knowing God the way I do, my conscience wouldn't allow it. If I
thought he did, I would have to turn him in." She said it's unfair for him to live under a cloud of
suspicion.

"He was home on the couch that night. my word against whoever," she said.

She said her now 53-yearold son is trying to put his life back together.

"I still think he's a suspect," she said.

About this story: Information came from multiple interviews, as well as from information
contained in some police records obtained by The Repository, an early diary kept by Jill for her
daughter, and a school project about her family that Jenna completed when she was 16 years old.

Copyright 2011, The Repository, All Rights Reserved.