As damning new evidence comes to light, the assumption that Rebecca Zahau committed suicide looks more and more tenuous. The freshly revealed details about the state of the deceased woman’s body ought to lead to a reopening of the case, the woman’s family claims.
Rebecca Zahau, 32, was discovered dead by hanging at the famous Coronado mansion Spreckels on July 13. She was naked and tied up, and the impression the scene produced made the Medical Examiner and the San Diego Sheriff’s department decide on a suicide by hanging. But an autopsy, as reported by News 8 in San Diego, showed traces of sticky tape on her legs and indications that she may have been gagged with a T-shirt.
The report written out by Deputy Medical Examiner Jonathan Lucas states that Zahau had rope ligature around her neck with bits of blue fabric that looked like coming from a T-shirt sticking to the outside of the ligature. It was strongly indicated that some of the shirt may have been stuffed into the decedent’s mouth.
The report also mentions sticky tape residue found on both legs of the hanging woman.
That is too much, shared Seattle-based lawyer Anne Bremner with RadarOnline. Gagging and taping legs together makes it look too much like foul play. “There hasn’t been a suicide in known history by a woman with these elements,” she affirms.
Therefore Bremner and the woman’s family believe that the new evidence points away from the suicide verdict. “This explosive new information confirms our position,” the lawyer accentuated.
Spreckels is the property of 54-year-old millionaire, Jonah Shacknai, who was Zahau’s boyfriend. His son, Max Shacknai, fell down the stairs two days before the hanging incident occurred and sustained heavy injuries that resulted in the boy’s death on the 16th, three days after Zahau died. The boy was 6.
The boy’s misfortune, as was indicated last Friday at an hour-and-half news conference by San Diego Sheriff William Gore, upset the woman and caused her great consternation.
The hints at Zahau’s possible anger, anxiety or causes for depression are again gainsaid by high-profile lawyer Bremner in her summing up of the case to RadarOnline. The woman had absolutely no history of any psychological disorders nor evinced suicidal inclinations. The statements that she may have been in an unsettled frame of mind on the tragic day are not corroborated by evidence. The evening before went off perfectly normally, points out Bremner, there was a dinner in the company of her boyfriend and his brother, she had a conversation with her sister and meant to call her back the following morning as well as habitually prepare breakfast for Shacknai.
There was some evidence related to her condition based on something she wrote, but the texts went back six months or even more prior to the tragedy. There was no physical corroboration that Zahau had lost weight and cut out her workouts.
Bremner, who believes that the Friday official verdict on Zahau’s death ought to have started the investigation and not to have rounded it off, voiced her plans to submit a formal request to the Sheriff’s Department to that effect.
Source of the image: Radaronline.
