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Christina's Story
- Newspaper Articles
The following links take you to various articles in Christina's story
as it appeared in the South Florida media.
PLEASE DO NOT COPY THE INFORMATION ON THIS SITE BEFORE ASKING.
Thank you!
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In Loving Memory Of May 23, 1987 - September 16, 1994 "Beautiful Child who has found love from the angels...RIP..." |
 (Not her actual headstone) |
These
pages contain all of the articles from the Palm Beach Post and The
Sun-Sentinel throughout the years. |
|
What They Say (10/30/94)
Dead Girl's Stepdad In Solitary Confinement (10/30/94)
No Bond For Stepdad In Girl's Slaying (10/30/94)
From A Loving Home To A Terrifying Death (10/30/94)
Slain Girl's Mom Talks To Tabloid TV Reporter (10/31/94)
Christina Case Heads To Grand Jury (10/31/94)
Missing Child Case Spurs Worried Parents To Fingerprint
Youths (10/31/94)
Police Worry About Missing 9-Year-Old Boy (10/31/94)
A Sad Parade of Strangers in Mourning (10/31/94)
Is There Any Excuse? (11/1/94)
WHAT THEY SAY
Sun-Sentinel
October 30, 1994
Author: Staff Writers Marego Athans, Lisa Ocker, Marjorie Lambert and
Angela Bradbery contributed to this report.
Christina Holt's death by beating has sickened many South Florida residents.
A few reactions:
-- "All the people I see and do business
with, there are two things on their mind: Nobody paid attention. The
kid wasn't taken out of the environment that got her hurt. She's only
7 years old. That's pretty small."
- Bob MacMillan, Jupiter Farms, 52, a parent
-- "It think it was pretty sad. It was pretty mean. She was only 7. She didn't even get to do anything [in her life). Somebody should have done something."
- Kim MacMillan, 12, seventh-grader at Duncan Middle
-- "It made me sick. I couldn't believe it. It's devastating. How can you trust anyone with your kids? I was so sick when I woke up that morning and the tractor was digging up her body [on TV)."
- Karen Smith, 38, a mother of two from Jupiter Farms
-- "There's an incredible outrage that anything lenient might happen to either one of these people, especially the mother. ... [It's) angry stuff. They want to do bodily harm to the couple."
- Al Rantel, host of a talk show on WFTL (1400 AM)
-- "I think [John Zile) should be shot. ... It's the sickest thing I've ever seen. She knew the kid was dead and she made up a story. I'll never forget it."
- William Martin, 28, who runs the merry-go-round at the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop and was working on the day Pauline Zile reported that her daughter had disappeared from a bathroom
-- "Why didn't they just send [Christina) home, back to her grandmother? If they didn't want her, there are other ways, other things [Pauline Zile) could have done."
- Hetty Hensel, management assistant in the Coral Springs city clerk's office
-- "I think he [John Zile) ought to be strung up. Actually, I think he should be put in a parking lot with about 100 angry mothers with bricks. I don't understand a person that could kill a child because they depend on you for everything. He should get the electric chair. Definitely."
- North Lauderdale resident David Allan, 28
-- "That lady ought to get an Oscar award for what she did, crying that her child was abducted, clinging to that doll, tears running down her face, when apparently she already knew what had happened. They ought to string him up and stretch him out."
- Bob Jones, Davie
-- "I think the man needs the electric chair. And the mother should be in jail for the rest of her life. I think these kind of people, society does not need them. I think the courts should have no sympathy, just like they gave that little girl."
-- "I think that both should be locked up for life. If I could have gotten my hands on them I would have done the job myself."
- Davie resident Bessie Evans
Caption:
Staff photo/JILL GUTTMAN
Ian Starr, 6, and his father, Cody, of Jupiter, came to the site where
Christina Holt's body was buried in Tequesta. "It's hard to believe
people would do this to their own flesh and blood," Cody Starr
said.
DEAD GIRL'S STEPDAD IN SOLITARY
CONFINEMENT
Miami Herald, The (FL)
October 30, 1994
Author: DAVID KIDWELL Herald Staff Writer
Walter John Zile -- confessed killer, unemployed cook, the predawn gravedigger
who buried 7-year-old Christina Holt behind a Kmart -- made it into
a crowded courtroom for one minute Saturday, then got a little privacy.
Palm Beach jailers, afraid other prisoners might get to him, put him
in isolation.
"Inmates read the newspapers, too," said his new lawyer, Iona Mosley, a public defender.
"The public perception is that he is some kind of monster," she said. "Right now, he's just devastated. He's really withdrawn. I think it's starting to hit him. He's really a wreck, mentally and physically."
Zile, 32, is charged with the first-degree murder of Christina Holt and two counts of aggravated child abuse, both unrelated to the homicide.
He appeared before Palm Beach Circuit Judge Richard I. Wennet shortly after 9 a.m. in a jail courtroom wearing the traditional green inmate's uniform. The judge asked three questions:
"Do you have an attorney?"
"No," Zile answered.
"Do you have funds to hire an attorney?"
"No."
"Do you want the court to appoint one?"
"Yes, sir."
Almost at the same time that Zile appeared in the courtroom, divers from Palm Beach Gardens recovered the shovel he used to dig the grave. They found it in the Intracoastal Waterway in Riviera Beach.
"We located it very near the burnt bridge in MacArthur State Park on A1A, very near where he told us he threw it," said Sgt. Ed Brochu, a Riviera Beach homicide detective.
Zile bought it from a Home Depot, he said, the night he buried the little girl.
Zile and his wife, Pauline, 24, catapulted South Florida into a desperate search for Christina a week ago Saturday, claiming their little girl had disappeared mysteriously from outside a restroom at the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop that day.
Pauline's anguished plea for the return of her daughter, taped even for America's Most Wanted, became nightly fodder on television newscasts.
In truth, Christina had been dead and buried for more than a month. From confessions from both mother and stepfather, Riviera Beach detectives said Zile berated Christina for playing "doctor" with other children, went into a fit of rage when she soiled herself, beat her repeatedly, covered her mouth with his hand and wrapped her head in a towel to muffle her screams, then panicked when she went into convulsions and died. The mother watched.
Zile killed her, police said, in the couple's Singer Island motel apartment around midnight Sept. 15.
Zile stashed the child's body in a bedroom closet for four days while he searched for a place to bury her.
Early Friday morning, Zile led investigators to a 5 1/2- foot-deep grave he had dug behind a Kmart in Tequesta, about five miles north of their apartment.
The Palm Beach state attorney's office gave the mother limited immunity. She cannot be prosecuted based on the information she gave police Thursday night.
The mother has not been charged. But a special session of the grand jury will hear the case Monday to determine whether police have enough evidence acquired independently from her confession.
Under an ancient Florida law passed in 1868, anyone who "gives the offender any other aid, knowing that he had committed a felony," is guilty of a crime called accessory.
The law doesn't apply when a family member helps the offender. The law is believed to have been designed, in part, to protect the wives and mothers of escaped convicts who fled back to their homes.
In the courtroom Saturday, defense attorney Mosley asked that Zile continue to be isolated from other prisoners.
"I don't know what the threats are specifically, just a lot of comments and asides overheard by personnel at the jail," Mosley told reporters after the hearing.
The woman who lives in the apartment next door to the Ziles said Saturday that she is haunted by the image of the dead girl lying just inches away in a closet that backs up to hers.
"All last night, every time I closed my eyes, I saw her in that closet," said Linda Kauppinen, mother of a 4-year-old.
"I just kept getting that picture." The body of Christina Holt remains at the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner's Office. No one has made funeral arrangements.
Herald staff writer Ronnie Greene contributed to this report.
NO BOND FOR STEPDAD IN GIRL'S
SLAYING
Miami Herald, The (FL)
October 30, 1994
Author: DAVID KIDWELL Herald Staff Writer
Walter John Zile, the unemployed chef charged with the brutal murder
of 7-year-old Christina Holt, was ordered held without bond Saturday
on charges of murder and two counts of aggravated child abuse.
Zile was brought to a hearing room in the Palm Beach County Jail where
the judge questioned Zile about whether he had enough money for an attorney.
The battered body of the girl was recovered Friday by police after Zile led them to a six-foot-deep grave he had dug behind a Kmart shopping complex in Tequesta.
Zile and his wife Pauline, the girl's mother, concocted an elaborate ruse to convince police the child had been kidnapped. They reported her missing Oct. 22. A tearful Pauline Zile appeared on television pleading for the return of her child. She claimed that the youngster had been kidnapped during a visit to the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop.
But the story began to fall apart almost immediately.
Investigators noticed that Pauline Zile always referred to her daughter in the past tense.
It would later turn out the child had been dead more than a month.
In a confession, John Zile said he beat the child to death in a rage when she wouldn't stop crying.
Pauline Zile, who witnessed the murder, was granted limited immunity by police in exchange for her testimony.
Christina, who was Pauline Zile's child by a previous marriage, came to live with the couple in June.
The little girl, whose smiling face haunted the television screens of millions of South Floridians for a week, spent her last days at the Sea Nymph apartments, a two-story white building with powder blue shutters not far from the Atlantic Ocean on Singer Island.
The place attracts working-class couples trying to make ends meet and to build lives in a home that's close to the water.
Off-season, apartments at the Sea Nymph go for about $550 a month, neighbors said, though the rent skyrockets during the winter.
The child's last terrifying moments came in apartment No. 3.
Michael Boettcher, a construction worker, lives directly above the Ziles'. He has a young daughter of his own, just 14 months old. His wife Mishelle recently talked with Pauline about the Ziles' decision to put another child, a newborn, up for adoption.
" 'I'm sorry to hear that,' " Mishelle Boettcher told Pauline Zile about the adoption.
Friday morning, as word of Christina Holt's death made its way through the apartments and the Ziles' fraud was exposed, Mishelle Boettcher had a different sentiment, her husband said.
"She thinks they need to hang 'em," he said.
FROM A LOVING HOME TO A TERRIFYING
DEATH
CHRISTINA'S LIFE WITH MOM BRUTAL
Miami Herald, The (FL)
October 30, 1994
Author: FABIOLA SANTIAGO And PAUL ANDERSON Herald Staff Writers
Christina Holt was a little girl anyone could love: big brown eyes,
thin pig tails, a spunky smile and a sweetheart's personality to match.
But few of the 7-year-old's closest relatives loved her enough to want
to raise her.
In the end, she died unloved by her stepfather -- with her pregnant mother watching him beat her to death. Then they contrived together an elaborate tale of abduction.
"I can't understand why people would want to do this to their own little kid," said Don Farr in Poolesville, Md. Christina and his daughter Kim played together in an after- school program. "It tears me up inside."
For the first years of her young life -- from the time she was five months old to her fifth birthday -- Christina lived in Poolesville with an elderly woman who loved her dearly.
Dorothy Money took custody of Christina when neither her parents or grandmothers wanted to keep her.
By most accounts, Money, the stepmother of Christina's grandmother, gave baby Christina a happy beginning.
They lived in a tidy, tan house in the middle-class Maryland neighborhood 40 miles north of Washington D.C.
Tiny Poolesville sits in rolling countryside near the Potomac River. The town was "settled" in 1760 but not incorporated until nearly a century later; a somewhat famous Civil War skirmish took place nearby.
Farms and horse ranches once dominated the countryside. But now large estate homes and townhouses are homes to the high-tech industrial workers along Interstate 270.
Old-timers marvel that townhouses, sold for $20,900 just over a decade ago, are being sold at $80,000. Farms, though, still advertise "you pick" apples, pumpkins and vegetables -- along with $1 hay rides to the fields.
Christina lived in a newer subdivision on the east side of town, a comfortable middle-class neighborhood of ranch-style and split-level houses with pastel siding and brick fronts. Dried leaves from colorful oaks and maples blow across large yards and houses are decorated for Halloween with pumpkins, scarecrows and bedsheet ghosts.
Friends and neighbors described Christina as "a real sweetheart" and "very outgoing."
Darlyne McEleney, principal of Poolesville Elementary School, where Christina attended kindergarten and first grade, said she was "was a sweet little thing, a lovely child who appeared very happy and well adjusted. We didn't have worries about her. She was a good student."
A remarkable thing it was, neighbors say, given the troubled parents she seldom saw -- and the shuttling between Money's and her grandmother's house a few blocks away.
Christina Diane Holt was born in Maryland on May 23, 1987 to teenage parents with drug and alcohol problems. Her parents, Pauline Yingling and Franklin Delano Holt, married five months before Christina was born.
Their marriage ended a year later.
Franklin Holt filed for divorce on June 14, 1988, asking for custody, afraid the mother would take the child out of state. A judge granted custody to Money, already caring for Christina.
Pauline seldom used her visitation rights.
"Neither one of the parents was interested in that child," Money said.
By 1988, Pauline was seeing Walter John Zile, a convicted burglar. She wrote a letter to a Maryland judge from Jensen Beach asking for leniency after he violated his probation. "Please give him the benefit of the doubt. He really is a terrific guy."
Last year, Money, 70, suffering from arthritis, agreed to transfer her guardianship to her stepdaughter, Christina's grandmother Judy Holt.
Money kept Christina's room intact, giving
up the child
because Holt "said she wanted to raise her and do right by her."
Christina lived with her for 22 months.
But the little girl wanted to live with her real mother and younger half-brothers in Riviera Beach.
"She definitely was excited to go," said Dawn Harcum, assistant director at the Poolesville Day Care Center Christina attended. "She was all bubbly to get down there and meet her two stepbrothers."
In June, grandmother Holt delivered Christina to her mother -- and a starkly different lifestyle.
Pauline, at 24 pregnant with her fourth child, worked as a waitress. Husband Zile, 32, was a restaurant cook. They lived with sons Daniel, 5 and Chad, 3, at the Sea Nymph, a pay-by-the- week motel/apartment complex.
The family rented one-bedroom unit No. 3 on the ground floor of a two-story white building with powder blue shutters not far from the Atlantic Ocean on Singer Island. It's home to working-class couples looking to make ends meet, not too close to the high-crime stretch of Riviera Beach west of the Intracoastal Waterway.
Once, Zile beat Christina in the bedroom in front of a family friend, Chad Brannon.
Zile picked up Christina by the shirt, threw her on the bed, hit her five times with a belt, then pulled her pants down and showed Brannon the welts.
Christina started school at Juniper Farms Elementary on Aug. 22. But she was repeatedly absent. She went to school only five days. Her last was Sept. 12.
Four days later, homicide detectives now believe, she was murdered.
In an affidavit filed Friday, police recounted the last moments of Christina's life, based on statements from both her mother and stepfather.
The little girl stood in front of Zile in the living room. Close by was Pauline, her stomach bulging in her last month of pregnancy, and one of the boys, who was asleep.
Zile harshly scolded Christina for playing doctor with other kids. She soiled her pants. He hit her with an open hand several times in the face, smacked her lips and buttocks.
Christina started bleeding, swayed back and went into seizures. She couldn't stop crying. He put his hand and a towel over her face to keep the neighbors from hearing her. She died within minutes.
Zile tried to revive her with mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation, then dunked her in a tub of cold water. Unable to revive
her, he
put her body in a closet, cover it with blankets, and left it there
for four days while he looked for a place to bury her.
Then he wrapped Christina's body in a child's play tent, sheets and blue tarp and carried it to the trunk of his white 1985 Cadillac. He drove off to bury her in a five-foot grave behind a Kmart store in Tequesta, about 20 miles north of West Palm Beach.
A few days later, Oct. 4, Pauline gave birth to a boy at St. Mary's Hospital -- and gave up the baby for adoption.
Three days after the birth, Pauline went to Juniper Farms Elementary and formally withdrew Christina from school. She didn't ask for any records as parents usually do for enrollment in another school.
Christina's teacher called the apartment wanting to know how she was. Money, the woman who raised Christina, wanted to hear from her, too. And grandmother Holt called.
Pauline drove to the crowded Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop and reported Christina abducted from a bathroom stall -- a tale that took investigators nearly a week to crack.
The loveless life of the little girl with the generous smile, baby teeth intact, stunned the Maryland countryside.
In Poolesville, pink ribbons encircle the twin columns on the front of the tiny, two-story town hall.
Again and again, parents of children at Christina's old school wrote in black ink on the ribbons, "Prayers for Christina."
Some time soon they will conduct a memorial service and plant a tree in Christina's honor. Most likely, a beautiful dogwood that blossoms snow white in spring, and come fall, turns crimson.
Herald staff writers Ronnie Greene, David Kidwell, Phil Long, Judy Plunkett, Trish Power and Stephen Smith contributed to this report.
SLAIN GIRL'S MOM TALKS TO TABLOID
TV REPORTER
The Palm Beach Post
October 31, 1994
Author: CHRISTINE STAPLETON
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Pauline Zile spent Sunday morning telling the story of her daughter's
murder to a tabloid television reporter and Sunday afternoon talking
with flamboyant Miami lawyer Ellis Rubin.
``I've put word out that I have her exclusive
interview,'' said Robert Calvert, a cameraman who free-lances for Hard
Copy and A Current Affair. ``I feel she needs to get her story out before
they take her down.''
Zile, who could not be reached Sunday, has not been charged with the
Sept. 16 death of her 7-year-old daughter Christina Holt. Walter John
Zile confessed to beating the child and burying her body behind a shopping
plaza in Tequesta.
Pauline Zile said she witnessed the fatal beating, then reported that the girl had disappeared from a Fort Lauderdale flea market. Her husband has been charged with child abuse and first-degree murder.
Calvert made headlines in 1991 when he was charged with trespassing at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach during the William Kennedy Smith case. Rubin represented Calvert in that case.
Patricia Bowman, the woman who accused Smith of rape, later got an injunction against Calvert, claiming he was harassing her.
Recently, Burt Reynolds also asked a judge to order Calvert to stay away, saying that Calvert had been following him. A judge refused to issue the
order. Calvert said he spent Saturday night parked outside the Jensen Beach home of Pauline Zile's mother. Calvert said he interviewed Zile for five hours and told her he hoped to get $2,000 for her story but had not yet found a
buyer. ``I'm considering putting her in a hotel somewhere to keep her away from other reporters and investigators,'' Calvert said.
Rubin's office confirmed that he met with Zile Sunday and would likely represent her.
CHRISTINA CASE HEADS TO GRAND
JURY
MOURNERS FLOCK TO CHILD'S BURIAL SITE AS MOTHER SEEKS ATTORNEY
Sun-Sentinel
October 31, 1994
Author: NICOLE STERGHOS, LUISA YANEZ and ROBIN FIELDS Staff Writers
Prosecutors plan to present evidence of first-degree murder to a grand
jury today against Walter John Zile, accused of killing stepdaughter
Christina Holt and burying her behind a Tequesta shopping center.
A steady stream of mourners continued to wear a path on Sunday to the burial site, a growing shrine of flowers, signs and stuffed animals left on the former grave, now just a sandy mound.
Also on Sunday, Christina's mother, Pauline Zile, went to Miami to meet with flamboyant South Florida attorney Ellis Rubin. The meeting apparently was arranged by a freelance tabloid TV producer who said he was trying to sell her story.
Rubin, known for taking on high-profile cases such as the Kathy Willets nymphomaniac defense, spoke with Zile for more than two hours. As Zile and her mother, Paula Yingling of Jensen Beach, left the meeting on Sunday afternoon, Rubin said he had not yet agreed to be Pauline Zile's attorney. He said the meeting was only a consultation.
Pauline Zile, 24, and her mother drove off without comment.
No charges have been filed against Pauline Zile, who told police she watched as her husband beat and smothered her 7-year-old daughter on Sept. 16.
John Zile, 32, told police he hid Christina's body in a bedroom closet for four days until he found a suitable burial spot behind a Kmart in Tequesta.
On Friday, six weeks after Christina died and less than a week after her mother and stepfather concocted a story that she was abducted from the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop, the girl's 44-pound body was unearthed from the Kmart site.
From the day of Christina's death until the Swap Shop abduction hoax, the couple acted as if their lives were normal.
"I worked side-by-side with him for three weeks after [the murder), and I saw no signs of emotion, no sign of stress," said Al Rosen, the Ziles' boss at the Oceans 11 restaurant on Singer Island, where John Zile worked as a cook and Pauline as a waitress.
"It just blows my mind," Rosen said on Sunday.
Mike Edmondson, spokesman for Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer, said on Sunday that Pauline Zile has not been granted immunity from prosecution and could still be charged.
Riviera Beach police had said on Friday that she was granted limited immunity.
Edmondson said she was subpoenaed to compel a statement that broke the case open and led to John Zile showing police where Christina's body was buried.
And while Pauline Zile's statement, by law, cannot be used against her, he said she was not promised immunity.
Pauline Zile is expected to to testify before the grand jury this week. Prosecutors begin presenting their case to grand jurors today. The first scheduled witnesses will be investigators from the Broward County Sheriff's Office.
MISSING CHILD CASES SPUR WORRIED
PARENTS TO FINGERPRINT YOUTHS
Sun-Sentinel
October 31, 1994
Author: BATTINTO BATTS JR. Staff Writer
Parents, with news reports of missing children in mind, lined up at
a department store on Sunday to have their children fingerprinted and
photographed.
The recent disappearances of Christina
Holt, Amanda Dougherty and two brothers in South Carolina "made
me want to get current photographs of my children," said Toni DeAngelis
of Sunrise. DeAngelis had her sons, Chris, 9, and Joey, 5, and their
friend Cesare Casamasa, 9, fingerprinted and photographed. Each child's
picture was pasted to a sheet with the child's address, age, blood type
and home phone number.
The free service was offered by Community Support Center, a not-for-profit
group based in Clearwater that promotes child safety.
Even though all the recent cases didn't turn out to be child abductions, they occurred close enough together to scare parents.
On Sept. 22, Amanda Dougherty, 5, was reported missing from her North Lauderdale home. She was later found dead in Palm Beach County.
Then on Oct. 22, Christina Holt, 7, was reported missing at the Swap Shop west of Fort Lauderdale. Four days later, her stepfather admitted beating her to death and burying her body in Palm Beach County.
And last week, a mother in Union County, S.C., reported that a man drove off in her car while her two sons were in the back seat. Authorities are searching for the boys.
Carol Plante, of Sunrise, was thinking about those incidents when she stopped by during a day of shopping to have her son, Christopher, fingerprinted and photographed.
Christopher, 4, could only guess why his mother decided that she needed a picture and information sheet on him. "For a lollipop," Christopher said, holding the green sucker he received afterward.
Plante said she recently told Christopher that he needs to stay close by and not talk to strangers.
"I was always conscious of this, but I've been sort of lenient," she said. "That has changed now. I don't let him out of my sight."
Young children should be fingerprinted and photographed at least twice a year to keep identification records current, said David Stark Folkertsma, director of program development for Community Support Center.
Folkertsma said he will be at other locations in South Florida through Nov. 13.
"A child can disappear at any time," Folkerstma said. "When they do, the police need information to identify them. It's too late to wait until it happens to wish you had done this."
POLICE WORRY ABOUT MISSING 9-YEAR-OLD
BOY
Miami Herald, The (FL)
October 31, 1994
Author: JOAN FLEISCHMAN Herald Columnist
Unlike the high-profile case of Christina Holt, a missing child before
she was found murdered, the case of another missing child remains a
mystery.
Marco Cadenas, age 9, vanished five months ago. On May 11, his mother
said, he ran away from the family's home in a Northwest Dade trailer
park.
"He hasn't been seen since," says Detective Candy Wisotsky.
Marco's mom, Livia Cadenas, 34, is in drug rehab. She says her son took off after she threatened to punish him. "I told him to take a shower. He went out without shoes."
He was also upset, she said, because she hit her husband, Alfredo, 32, over the head with a bottle. She said the boy left a note: "I'm leaving you because you hit my daddy."
Alfredo is Marco's stepfather. The child's biological father is dead -- killed by Ohio police in July during a shootout after a grocery store holdup.
"The longer it goes without anybody hearing from the child, the worse it looks," Wisotsky says. "It's not a good sign."
A ticket to Vizcaya costs $8. But the price of its new air-conditioned ticket booth, budgeted two years ago at $14,000, is now $35,000 and climbing.
The price for the entire entrance project, including 16 cast columns -- replicas of the originals -- and cypress trellises, could exceed $70,000.
Metro-Dade Parks assistant director Silvia Unzueta blames asbestos and lead removal for the overrun.
Oh, well. "There's only one Vizcaya," says Unzueta.
A Miami couple tells a tale of honeymoon hell on today's Gordon Elliot show. Beverly Cafiero, 29, a union stagehand, and husband, Joel, 31, an insulator, expected five romantic days in Cancun after their Sept. 9, 1988, wedding.
Instead, they got Hurricane Gilbert -- one of the most vicious storms recorded in the Western hemisphere. Winds demolished their hotel. "I was hiding under a mattress in the bathroom," says Beverly. Afterward, they dined on beer and crackers for two days.
The Cafieros beat out four other honeymoon-disaster couples. Their prize: a second honeymoon, all expenses paid, in Jamaica. This time, they'll check the weather report.
The show airs at 10 a.m. on WCIX-Channel 6.
Florida Trend scrutinizes the finances of Jorge Mas Canosa, chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation, calling him "the second most powerful Cuban in the world."
The piece dissects the recent telecommunications merger of Burnup & Sims and Mas Canosa's Church & Tower. Mas Canosa and his family, it reports, got an $11.5 million bonus before the deal went through -- in addition to his '93 salary of $3 million. Son Jorge Jr., 31, earned $1.7 million last year.
Another disclosure: the Mas enterprises are reporting unusually high pre-tax profit margins -- 25 percent or more -- when industry standards run about 12 percent.
"Is Mas a better operator or is he simply better connected?" the piece asks. Mas Canosa's response? "We run . . . a very tight ship."
A SAD PARADE OF STRANGERS IN MOURNING
TOYS, NOTES COVER CHRISTINA'S GRAVE
Miami Herald, The (FL)
October 31, 1994
Author: JUDY PLUNKETT EVANS Herald Staff Writer
They come by the dozens from sunrise to sunset, a somber and angry procession.
They offer roses and teddy bears, dolls
and notes, setting them gently in front of the sugar-sand grave where
little Christina Holt was buried for a month, swaddled in a play tent
and tarp by the disciplining stepfather who says he killed her in a
rage.
They come by the hundreds, strangers all, to pay their respects and
vent their anger.
Many are children, like Kaleigh Martin, a first-grader at Jupiter Farms Elementary who didn't know Christina, even though they were schoolmates. Now, it is too late.
Kaleigh's mother, Candy, speaking for so many: "How could this happen to a little girl?"
Christina Corson of Jupiter, kneeling before the grave Sunday, speaking to her two daughters, 4 and 5, consoling them with the only comfort available: "She's up in heaven, with God."
Then, Corson, who is a mother, turned to a stranger and said: "She was a defenseless little girl and someone she should have been able to trust with her own life -- her mother -- didn't help her."
All weekend they came steadily, many bearing gifts.
A splash of flowers -- still in the pots or transparent wrapping from the Kmart or Winn-Dixie nearby -- covered the ground. There were Mylar balloons on sticks with oddly festive images -- Simba the Lion King mugging on one, Dino the Flintstones' pet dinosaur gladdening another.
And a menagerie of baby dolls, and stuffed
animals -- clearly not fresh from the store, their frayed fur worn soft
from years of tender service, now serving another.
The visitors found the spot easily, parking behind the modern Tequesta Kmart and walking to the grave site about 50 yards away. They walked up silently, then read the signs and deposited their own offerings.
They usually stayed about 10 minutes, standing quietly at first, then talking to other strangers before leaving, the conversation following narrow lines.
They can't understand why John Zile did it. They couldn't believe that Pauline Zile -- swollen from her pregnancy -- watched her daughter die so savagely. They couldn't believe she hasn't been charged yet in the slaying.
A plastic angel hung from a white cross with Christina's picture on it and the words, "Your memory shall forever be enshrined in our hearts."
Said one cardboard sign: "Zile should pay for his crime with his pathetic life."
It was John Zile who led police to the grave early Friday after admitting he killed the stepdaughter on Sept. 16. He said it was an accident. He had been admonishing her for playing doctor with other kids, a rite of childhood familiar to nearly every parent. The scolding was intense; she soiled her pants in fright.
This angered him more, and he began hitting her on the face and buttocks, drawing blood. To stifle her shrieks from the neighbors, he stuffed a towel over her face, a practice he had employed before. But this time Christina went into convulsions and quit breathing.
With the girl's mother, nine months pregnant, assisting him, Zile tried CPR to bring Christina back. Then he put the 7- year-old's body in a tub of cold water. She wouldn't revive. He hid her body in a closet of their small motel apartment and spent four days searching for an appropriate place to bury her.
He selected one about a half-hour's drive from the Riviera Beach motel, a spot down a grassy hill behind the last shopping center in northern Palm Beach County.
He found an area of soft sand, dug a 5 1/2-foot hole and buried the girl there.
To cover Christina's disappearance from relatives and her teacher, Pauline Zile claimed the girl was abducted from the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop, a story that never rang right with investigators and fell apart after a few days of her initially convincing emotional TV appeals for Christina's return.
Zile is in the Palm Beach County Jail. Because child molesters and their like are so low on the jail-house pecking order, Zile was in solitary confinement for his own protection. Pauline Zile remained free, but the grand jury is to hear testimony in the case today and she may yet be charged.
When Riviera Beach police finally announced the confessions of the Ziles, Lt. David Harris sought to explain her behavior by noting, "In my opinion, he's got one heck of a psychological grip on her."
How could a mother cover up for the man who killed her child?
"He would either have to have some hold over her, or she would have to be fully in control of her own decision-making process and go along with it," said West Palm Beach psychologist Stephen Alexander. "She participated in making an effort to cover it up and side with him.
"You see this in abusive families all the time," Alexander continued, "where a child is sexually abused and the mother said it couldn't happen and sides with the alleged offender.
"A lot of times it is an indication of the degree of dependence the mother has on the alleged perpetrator. There are often multiple children in the home, dependent financially on this individual. She cannot financially exist without him."
An autopsy was completed over the weekend
and results will be announced this week after test results arrive. No
burial
plans have been made.
Betsy Williams, operations manager at the Kmart, said some of their employees have bought cards and balloons in the store and taken them out to the site. Once interest in the memorial dies down, she'll probably clean it all up and try to send it to Christina's grandmother in Maryland, she said.
Leonard Moser of Jupiter brought his wife and 9-year-old daughter, Shauna, to the site on their way to another grave. Moser lost a daughter to heart disease in 1990.
Every Sunday, his family takes roses to the cemetery. This past Sunday, he dropped a few pink ones at Christina's grave.
"We came to pay our respects to a little girl who has been brutally murdered for no reason," Moser said. "I can't believe anybody would do this."
Herald staff writer Ronnie Greene contributed to this report.
IS THERE ANY EXCUSE?
The Palm Beach Post
November 1, 1994
Author: RON WIGGINS
I speed-read child abuse stories. If possible, I avoid them altogether.
I'm only doing this one at the suggestion of a phalanx of editors. Don't
read any farther is my advice.
I was asked to visit the Singer Island apartment complex where 7-year-old
Christina Holt drew her last tortured breath, then drive to the sandy
field in Tequesta where she was buried behind a Kmart by her stepfather.
Surely you have heard of the Ziles, Pauline and John, the victim's mother and stepfather. John Zile, according to his police statement, beat Christina for soiling her pants and beat her some more to stop her crying, stuffed a towel in her mouth to stifle her sobs and kept hitting her until she went into spasms, threw up blood and died.
Pauline Zile did not interfere. When she did act, it was to collaborate on a story for police, to try to cover up the crime.
So here I am on Halloween driving to the sites of these horrific events to . . . what? Explain monsters?
Apartment No. 3 is on the first floor of a two story eight-plex, unremarkable except for the red cellophane crime scene tape.
I thought about a Sherlock Holmes story in which the detective and Dr. Watson are traveling by train through the countryside as Watson speaks rhapsodically about its peace and tranquillity. Holmes reproves Watson for lacking the wit to imagine the murders that could be committed with impunity in those cheery cottages, miles from help.
Only in the city, with neighbors to hear your cries, are you safe, Holmes told his companion.
Or not. Had you lived upstairs from the Ziles - or next door - could you have heard a child in distress if her mouth was gagged by a towel?
With three children in a small apartment, and the usual bumps and thumps and noises that accompany everyday life, how might a neighbor tell the difference between normal activity, even a normal family quarrel, and something very, very wrong?
And how many times might a neighbor wonder, in days to come, if they could have paid better attention, been nosier, wondered more, questioned more?
As I drove to the field of sugar sand in Tequesta, I wondered whether John Zile had traveled the same route with his pathetic cargo - and what he was
thinking. I read that he prayed. What do you say to God after you've killed a child you're supposed to protect? What will be his defense on Judgment Day? ``Go easy on me, God, I bought her a Happy Meal once?''
And what about the little girl's mother, who apparently stood by, doing nothing until it was time to plan the alibi? What might her excuse be? Could any excuse be good enough?
I had no trouble finding the grave site, by now covered with dozens upon dozens of gifts, flowers, cards, notes. There were angels and madonnas and psalms sealed in plastic, a stick of Wrigley's spearmint gum, teddy bears, bunny rabbits, balloons and a bottle of peach Snapple.
ANGUISH TURNS TO ANGER
But mostly, there were people, a steady stream of mourners, most of whom never knew Christina, who came, I suppose, hoping to assuage their anguish in some way. And who found, it seemed, that the visit only served to turn that anguish to anger. Vicious, ugly anger that at times might actually recall the rage Zile himself may have felt the night he beat a small child to death.
But Zile could at least attempt to defend himself if someone were to turn such anger toward him. Poor Christina, we know, never had a chance.
``Bring those two here and I will cast the first stone,'' cried out Rochelle Armstrong, 46, of Tequesta. ``Who can speak for this baby? I'm sure she's with the Lord, but. . . . Where were the neighbors when all of this was going on?''
``I'm sick of it!'' yelled her husband Earl, clenching a hammer he had brought to fix a sign.
After these outbursts, Lisa Nurkowski, 26, of Jupiter said: ``I feel the same. The mother should rot in hell the same as the stepfather.''
``This is my third trip here,'' said Francine Cavallo, 42, of Jupiter, ``and if that couple were here, I'd want to kill them.''
Leanne Hutchinson, 40, of Tequesta, witnessed the Armstrongs' fury.
``I didn't come here out of anger - I was just drawn. But I understand the anger. History shows that conflict brings change. Hopefully something positive can come out of this.''
`THIS IS HEINOUS'
Others were just drawn, too.
``I couldn't hardly work, thinking about it,'' said Debra Myslakowski, 34, of Port St. Lucie. ``I had to come by. This is heinous.''
After visiting the grave site to pray, Gloria Bober and Mary Benkobic of Jupiter sat in their pickup for a minute to dry their eyes before venturing back into traffic. ``You just wonder what goes through anybody's mind,'' Bober said, gesturing helplessly toward the grave.
``That's not how you punish a child,'' added Benkobic. ``You stand them in a corner or take a toy away. Maybe a spank on the bottom, but you don't hit a
child.'' Rick Branstrom, 37, and Jim Birdsong, 50, Royal Palm Beach construction workers, said they had just stopped to pay their respects. ``It's unbelievable,'' said Branstrom. ``Those people - those people should be . . .'' He couldn't finish the sentence.
And still others were hoping, perhaps, to make some sense of it all.
AN ANONYMOUS GIFT
Carrie Manske, 19, a student at Palm Beach Community College, said she asked her psychology teacher to explain the mentality of people such as the
Ziles. ``She said that she couldn't.''
While we were talking, a woman hurried down to the grave site, left flowers and hurried away before I could talk to her. I went down to see what she'd
left. I counted more than 18 roses, beautiful, nursery-grown blooms of deep red, nestled in sprays of baby's breath.
There was no card, no poem, no printed prayer. Just the flowers.
Maybe they can be from all of
us.
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