A Boy and His Dad's Girlfriend Were Found Dead at Calif. Mansion Days Apart. Was Her Death a Suicide or Murder?

On the morning of July 13, 2011, Rebecca Zahau, 32, was found hanging naked from the second-story balcony of her boyfriend’s mansion in Coronado, Calif.

Zahau, a certified ophthalmic technician who’d been dating pharmaceutical tycoon Jonah Shacknai, was gagged. Her hands and feet had been bound.

She was discovered by Shacknai’s brother Adam, who cut her down and called 911.

Police soon learned that hours earlier, Zahau had checked her voicemail, on which was a message about the grave condition of Shacknai’s 6-year-old son Max, who was in the hospital after falling down a staircase in his father’s 27-bedroom historic mansion.

Zahau was the only adult present at the home during the accident.

The prognosis for the boy wasn’t good. He died of his injuries days later, on July 17.

When Zahau died, the quiet, picturesque, and wealthy island community of Coronado — just across the San Diego Bay from downtown San Diego — was confronted with its most mysterious, high-profile police investigation.

Since then, the case has spawned a book and an Oxygen TV special. It has also attracted a multitude of internet sleuths.

Zahau and Shacknai began dating shortly after he divorced his second wife, who was Max’s mother.

As their relationship grew more serious, she quit her job at Horizon Eye Specialists & Lasik Center in Scottsdale, Ariz., to spend more time with Shacknai and his children, according to reports from her former boss.

Shacknai moved into the mansion, known as the Spreckels Mansion — an Italian Renaissance and Beaux-Arts-decorated residence built in 1908 for a member of the Spreckels sugar dynasty — in 2007, using it primarily as a summer residence.

Zahau’s death initially confounded local police.

At first, her death was thought to be a homicide. Shortly after she was found, authorities discovered a message written in black paint on the door of the guest bedroom, reading, “She saved him can he save her.”

But after a lengthy investigation, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department concluded that she killed herself, theorizing that she felt responsible for Max’s death.

As evidence, investigators showed reporters a video reenactment of how they believed she was able to bind her hands and feet and then hang herself.

Investigators said they also found her fingerprints on a knife that was used to cut the rope as well as her toe impressions on the balcony floor, where they believe she fell from.

However, Zahau’s mother and sister never accepted the police version of events. The pair filed a wrongful death suit, claiming that Shacknai’s brother Adam, who had flown to California after hearing the news about Max’s accident and was staying in the estate’s guesthouse, was responsible for her death.

In 2018, a civil jury in San Diego awarded her family $5 million in damages after they found Adam, who denied he had anything to do with her death, responsible, according to ABC News.

Zahau family’s lawyer argued Adam had sexually assaulted her and then killed her before staging her death to look like a suicide, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Adam’s attorney Dan Webb said he was “absolutely astonished” at the decision.

“It is clear the Zahau family desperately wanted to place blame after such an inexplicable tragedy,” he said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE at the time. “But falsely accusing an innocent man of murder, without a shred of credible evidence, did nothing to advance the pursuit of justice, nor to honor the memory of Max and Rebecca. Instead, the fabricated allegations against Adam, and the emotional jury response they provoked, only add another appalling human tragedy to this already horrible situation.”

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After the civil jury verdict, the family’s attorney told reporters they were planning to petition the sheriff’s department to reopen the case.  

The department assigned new investigators to reexamine the evidence, but those investigators came to the same conclusion as the ones before.

“We conducted an objective and thorough investigation into Miss Zahau’s death,” the sheriff’s department wrote in a statement to PEOPLE at the time. “The facts of that investigation have led to the conclusion that Miss Zahau took her own life.”

In 2022, Zahau’s family sent a petition to the San Diego Department of the Medical Examiner asking to reclassify her manner of death from suicide to homicide.

In a letter to Zahau’s attorney in September 2023 obtained by PEOPLE, Chief Medical Examiner Steven C. Campman wrote he “considered the arguments set forth in your letter and the information in the accompanying documents.”

Campman said he also discussed their arguments with other members of his office as well as the pathologist who came up with the initial ruling.

“However, after reviewing the totality of the evidence, the conclusion of this office has not changed,” he wrote.