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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.

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In Loving Memory Of
Christina Diane Holt

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.

Zile Is Not a Monster, Attorney Tells Court (11/16/96)
In Closing, Lawyers Paint Different Images of Zile (11/16/96)
John Zile Guilty Of Murder (11/19/96)
Guilty (11/19/96)
Zile Expects Conviction To Be Overturned On Appeal (11/19/96)
Zile Found Guilty of Murder in Death of Stepdaughter (11/19/96)
Forget What I Used To Believe, Zile Should Die (11/20/96)
Zile Reporter Faces More Court Battles (11/20/96)
Zile Verdict Fails To Bring Closure (11/20/96)
Zile Verdict Doesn't Change Reporter's Sentence (11/20/96)


ZILE IS NOT A MONSTER, ATTORNEY TELLS COURT
DEFENSE RESTS; JURY TO BEGIN DELIBERATIONS MONDAY
Sun-Sentinel
November 16, 1996
Author: STEPHANIE SMITH Staff Writer

John Zile is a simple, working-class man who tried to cope the best he could with his stepdaughter's problems when it all got horribly out of hand, his attorney Ed O'Hara said in closing arguments on Friday.
In a new tactic from Zile's first trial that ended in a hung jury, the defense conceded he is guilty of manslaughter as well as illegal burial and filing a false police report to hide the death of Christina Holt, 7.

But, Zile's attorneys said, prosecutors are unfairly using the moral outrage about the coverup by trying to get a first-degree murder conviction. Zile is also charged with three counts of aggravated child abuse.

Jury deliberations will begin on Monday.

O'Hara on Friday dispensed with the legal-lecture like approach used by his co-counsel Craig Wilson in a companion argument and that the defense used at Zile's previous trial in May.

He admitted straight out that Zile, a cook with a ninth-grade education, made one bad decision after another.

How Zile handled the Sept. 16, 1994, death of his stepdaughter was revolting, O'Hara said.

"The most offensive part of this whole scenerio is what John did afterwards. John explained: `I panicked. I didn't know what to do,'" O'Hara told the jury of nine men and three women.

Zile hid the body from his two sons by putting the girl in a closet for four days, then secretly buried her behind a Kmart store in Tequesta. He then staged a kidnapping hoax at the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop a month later.

Assistant State Attorney Scott Cupp said the defense is the one trying to play up emotion by portraying Zile as an uneducated, blue-collar worker.

"When did we ever beat up on the defendant because he's a cook, because he has a ninth-grade education?" Cupp asked the jury.

The prosecutor said Zile is guilty of first-degree murder in two ways: He let the girl die for fear his past abuse would be discovered, and she suffocated when he covered her mouth to quiet her cries during the spanking.

"Christina could have lingered for hours, and the defendant would not have gotten help for her to save her life," Cupp said.

And he is guilty of aggravated child abuse because his punishment of Christina the night she died was unjustified, Cupp said.

"The defendant admits Christina was doing nothing wrong when she was fatally beaten and suffocated. He admitted she had already been punished," Cupp said.

O'Hara conceded to the jury that Zile completely mishandled the situation after he found his stepdaughter in a closet with his 3-year-old son, who was partially undressed.

It was an innocuous act of a sexually curious little girl, but Zile saw something more sinister, O'Hara said.

"In John's mind, his little boy is being molested. Why? Why is this going on?" O'Hara said of Zile's reasoning.

Zile testified he spanked the girl for the closet incident and questioned her on where she had learned such things. In the two weeks before her death, she told shifting stories of sexual abuse by various relatives, and he spanked her for lying, he said.

Then Zile told a jury for the first time that he didn't call 911 when the child had a seizure because he didn't think it was life-threatening, and he was worried about the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.

A year before Christina's death, he and his wife were investigated for child abuse when one of their sons hurt himself and had to be taken to an emergency room, Zile said.

While the allegations were unfounded, social workers had threatened to take their children away if they ever showed up in an emergency room again, he testified.

O'Hara said outside of court that the HRS issue was not brought up in the first trial because a juror on that panel worked for HRS. The defense also worried that Zile would be suspected of abusing his other children, he said.

Cupp argued Zile not only didn't call paramedics when the girl was dying to protect himself, he dealt with the sexual abuse problem by punishing the girl instead of getting her treated.

Despite Zile's cries of poverty, the couple received more than $6,000 during the three months Christina lived with them before her death, Cupp said. The money came from a couple who adopted their unborn child and from Christina's paternal grandparents.

"Why wasn't at least a little bit of that money spent getting Christina to a doctor if she was having all these problems," Cupp said. "Why were they continuing to sell off Christina's property?" Instead of using any of the money to help Christina, Cupp said, Zile tried to profit from his stepdaughter by pawning her pink bicycle while she was alive and selling her "Hooked on Phonics" tapes a day after her death.

And Zile lied to the jury by tailoring his testimony to avoid any implication he suffocated his daughter, Cupp said.

In his October 1994 police statement, Zile said he covered Christina's mouth during the spanking to avoid waking up his sons. She immediately collapsed into a seizure. The child was vomiting, and she died while he was trying to save her, Zile said.

But he changed the sequence of events during his trial testimony, Cupp said, to support his defense that the child had undiagnosed epilepsy. Zile claimed the seizure, or his bungling attempts to save her, was the cause of death.

"It was deliberate, and it was calculated," Cupp said. "You've heard a lot about seizures. Death is the ultimate seizure."

Zile's capacity for deception has been proven, Cupp said, by the abduction hoax and a letter to his own mother claiming Christina was alive a month after he buried her.

O'Hara said Zile has been honest and took police to the body once the hoax fell apart. Yet, the prosecution has tried every tactic to portray Zile as a "monster," including race baiting, he said.

He pointed out the state's final witness was a pawnshop owner who testified Zile used a racial slur while threatening Christina in his store.

"He's the last witness. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's going on here," O'Hara said. "He uses the n-word with three African-Americans on the jury panel."

Cupp said the pawnshop owner testified to dispute Zile's contention he only took Christina to Tamarind Avenue to discourage her from running away.

And Zile's racism was demonstrated when he drove 60 miles a day to send his children to school in Jupiter, rather than the Riviera Beach school district where they lived, he said.

Deliberations will begin after Palm Beach County Circuit Court Judge Roger B. Colton gives the jury a 29-page set of instructions with a wider selection of charges than the first jury that heard the case.

This jury will have to pick from three categories of child abuse and five choices of murder. Punishment under the murder section ranges from the death penalty for first-degree murder to a year in jail and a fine for misdemeanor culpable negligence.

O'Hara said out of court that the defense's fight against a first-degree murder conviction greatly improved in the retrial, but "it's still an uphill battle."

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IN CLOSING, LAWYERS PAINT DIFFERENT IMAGES OF ZILE
Miami Herald, The (FL)
November 16, 1996
Author: Associated Press

John Zile, accused of killing his stepdaughter and then faking her abduction, had plenty of time to help the 7-year-old live or allow her to die, a prosecutor said Friday, urging jurors to find him guilty of murder.

``Her death was not instantaneous. The evidence showed she was dying slowly, five to ten minutes,'' Assistant State Attorney Scott Cupp said in closing arguments.
``This shows premeditation. The defendant had time to choose what to do. He did not call 911.''

The jury is expected to begin deliberating Monday morning.

Zile is charged with first-degree murder in the 1994 death of second-grader Christina Holt. Prosecutors say that after burying her, he and his wife tried to hide the crime by concocting a story about her being abducted from a Fort Lauderdale flea market.

The child's body eventually was uncovered in a field near a Kmart in the Palm Beach County town of Tequesta.

Zile told police the girl had a seizure while he was spanking her. He testified he did not call 911 because she was already dead and he was afraid his family would be broken up by authorities.

``John accepts responsibility. He lied as to the coverup,'' defense lawyer Craig Wilson told jurors in his closing statement.

But he said Zile is innocent of first-degree murder because he did not intend to kill the girl.

``A case stands and falls on its evidence'' he said. ``If you have reasonable doubt, you should find the defendant not guilty.''

Zile's wife, Pauline, was convicted last year and sentenced to life in prison.

His first trial ended in a mistrial after a Palm Beach County jury split 11-1 for a first-degree murder conviction. The second trial was moved to Polk County because of publicity in South Florida.

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JOHN ZILE GUILTY OF MURDER
The Palm Beach Post
November 19, 1996
Author: VAL ELLICOTT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

The two-year case against John Zile ended Monday when jurors convicted him of murdering his stepdaughter during a beating that one juror said marked the final, violent episode in a pattern of escalating abuse.

Zile, 34, showed no reaction as a court clerk announced the jury's verdict - guilty of first-degree murder and three counts of aggravated child abuse - after about 5 1/2 hours of deliberation.
Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Roger Colton must now decide whether to sentence Zile to execution in the electric chair or life in prison.

One juror, Jeffrey Parker of Lakeland, said the jury had little trouble agreeing that Zile beat and killed 7-year-old Christina Holt around midnight on Sept. 16, 1994, in their Singer Island apartment.

A major portion of the jury's discussion, he said, focused on whether Zile planned the killing or whether, as prosecutors also argued, Christina died while Zile was committing aggravated child abuse, a felony.

Jurors ultimately rejected the premeditation theory and decided Zile was guilty of felony murder, Parker said.

"If you look at the whole case, right from the beginning, she (Christina) had been punished over and over for the same thing," Parker said. "I don't think he set out to kill her, but whatever he did put her in that position."

Parker said Zile inflicted Christina's final, fatal punishment after "pulling her out of a bedroom, where I guess she was minding her own business, for no reason, late at night."

Prosecutor Scott Cupp said one key to convicting Zile was exposing the shifting details between his Oct. 28, 1994, state- ment to police and his testimony on the witness stand.

"He'll lie about little things, he'll lie about medium things and he'll lie about big things," Cupp said.

Zile's attorneys, Craig Wilson and Ed O'Hara, said they had felt encouraged when jurors sent Colton a question at about 3:15 p.m. asking the judge to clarify the time frame associated with each count of aggravated child abuse against Zile. They also asked whether the overlapping time frames might be double jeopardy, to which the judge responded: use your own best judgment.

The question suggested to the defense that jurors were considering ruling differently on different counts or were at least undecided on key issues, but they deliberated only 10 minutes more after returning to the jury room.

"I think after that question we were all shocked by how quickly they came back," O'Hara said.

Jurors also asked for a replay of Zile's statement to police. They specifically said they did not want to hear the portion of the tape dealing with the ruse that Zile and his wife concocted to cover up Christina's death - that the girl had disappeared from a Broward County swap shop.

That also seemed to be good news for the defense. Zile's attorneys had worried jurors might be tempted to convict Zile based on the hoax.

Zile's jurors will not play an advisory role in his sentencing because Zile has decided to leave the question of his punishment completely up to Colton.

Colton told attorneys he will begin the sentencing proceeding in 10 days and will pass sentence within 30 days. The sentencing hearing will be held in West Palm Beach. The case was moved from West Palm Beach to Bartow because of extensive publicity in South Florida after a first trial ended with a hung jury in May.

Wilson and O'Hara said that 10 days is not enough time to prepare and they may ask for a delay.

The lawyers have labored to establish an exhaustive record of judicial missteps in Zile's case that they hope will reverse his conviction on appeal.

In appealing John Zile's conviction, they will argue that prosecutors connected testimony with charges one way in the case of Pauline Zile, John's wife and Christina's mother, and another way in the case against her husband, which they said is improper.

Pauline Zile was convicted of first-degree murder last year in the girl's death. She is serving life in prison.

Wilson and O'Hara also represented Zile at his first trial.

The case has seemed unusually susceptible to delays and near-mistrials almost from the start. Jury selection at the first trial in West Palm Beach was hampered by out-of-court comments by would-be jurors vilifying Zile. And the first attempt to choose a jury in Polk County in August was called off when a court official made possibly prejudicial comments to jury candidates.

After the trial was under way in Bartow, Zile tried to fire Wilson after a freelance television camera woman reported to prosecutors that Wilson had told her Zile would be convicted.

"It's been a long, long journey," Brenda Money, Christina's aunt said from Maryland on Monday. "We're glad about the verdict. We've been praying for that. It's given us some relief, but not much because we're still missing the little baby."

Wilson and O'Hara had never said Zile was not responsible for Christina's death. But they had argued that what prosecutors termed "beatings" were actually only moderate spankings that Zile inflicted on his stepdaughter after trying other, nonphysical ways of controlling her bad behavior.

The juror Parker, however, referred to "beatings" and "abuse" in describing his impression of Zile's conduct towards his stepdaughter.

Zile's attorneys also had implored jurors to consciously avoid an emotional reaction to the evidence against Zile, particularly to evidence of his "offensive" actions after Christina died.

But Parker singled out a few of those actions as major factors in his own decision to convict, saying they showed the extent of Zile's lack of regard for his stepdaughter.

The day after Christina died, Zile and his wife, Pauline, Christina's mother, sold some of the girl's videotapes to pay for the shovel Zile later used to dig the girl's grave, Parker noted.

And he recalled testimony that Zile "had a high old time" drinking with a friend in Fort Lauderdale a month after he had buried his stepdaughter behind a Kmart in Tequesta.

"I knew the kid wasn't important to him," Parker said.

He said he made up his mind Zile was guilty after watching Zile's performance under crossexamination by prosecutor Jill Estey.

"That really narrowed it down for me," he said."I had no doubt after that."

"He was just thinking of himself," Parker said. "There are neighbors. There's an apartment next door. There was a way to get help."

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GUILTY
JURY TAKES FIVE HOURS TO CONVICT JOHN ZILE OF STEPDAUGHTER'S MURDER
Sun-Sentinel
November 19, 1996
Author: STEPHANIE SMITH Staff Writer
Staff Writer Sarah Lundy contributed to this report.

After two years and three trials, it was John Zile's own inconsistent account of the death of his stepdaughter that led to his conviction Monday on charges of first-degree murder.

A jury of nine men and three women convicted the short-order cook of murder and three counts of aggravated child abuse after just five hours of deliberation.

The verdict came 10 minutes after the jury played back Zile's taped statement to police in which he described how Christina Holt, 7, died the night he spanked her for lying about being sexually abused by her relatives in Maryland.

"I think he was just trying to save his skin because most of what he said contradicted his police statement," said juror Drew Thomas of Zile's trial testimony.
Assistant State Attorney Scott Cupp agreed Zile's testimony was the prosecution's best evidence against him. In closing arguments, Cupp reminded the jury that Zile lied to police and his mother that Christina was still alive when he had secretly buried her a month before.

"He couldn't tell the same thing twice," said Cupp, who was at the Riviera Beach police station on Oct. 28, 1994, when Zile admitted Christina was dead instead of kidnapped as he first reported. "There were at least eight lies in his testimony."laced his hand over her mouth to stifle her cries as he spanked her. But when he took the stand last week, Zile said there was a longer lapse between the time he muffled her cries and her collapse.

The defense tried to explain the contradictions by saying Zile had not slept for nearly four days when police taped his statement at 3:30 a.m., and his trial testimony was more accurate.

Thomas said he didn't believe it. Five other jurors declined to comment or return telephone calls to their homes.

"Yeah, he was up for 60 hours when he talked to the police, but he had a month and half to think up his story," the juror said.

The defense contention that Zile was an uneducated man who panicked when his makeshift measures to save Christina's life failed would have been more credible had Zile tried to call paramedics, Thomas said.

"A kid you loved so much, you'd get some help for her," the juror said.

Zile, 34, shook his head disapprovingly when the clerk announced the verdict, but he said nothing.

Christina's relatives and others who knew her in Maryland were not so taciturn.

"I'm so glad they came to a decision," said Dorothy Money, Christina's great-grandmother on her father's side. "We have gone through enough. We don't need to keep going through this."

Money cared for Christina most of the seven years she lived in Maryland before coming to South Florida to be reunited with her mother, Pauline Zile, in June 1994.

Three months after she joined the Zile household, Christina was dead.

Christina died on Sept. 16 after John Zile spanked her. But rather than report the death, the couple hid the body in a closet for four days, and then John Zile secretly buried her behind a Tequesta Kmart.

A month later, a tearful Pauline Zile appeared before TV cameras to claim that her daughter had been kidnapped from a rest room at the Swap Shop west of Fort Lauderdale. Four days later, after a fumbled dual suicide attempt, the couple confessed that Christina had died.

Pauline Zile was convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse in April 1995, five months after she was charged in Christina's death. She is appealing the life sentence she received for failing to protect Christina.

The conviction of John Zile, by contrast, has taken two years and three trials. Zile's first trial in May ended when a jury split 11-1 for a first-degree murder conviction. An attempt to pick a jury for a second trial in Bartow in August had to be scrapped because the jury was tainted by remarks made by a Polk County court official. Zile's third trial began Oct. 15.

As Christina's death was replayed over and over in the court system, it was like torture for her family in Maryland, said Brenda Money, Christina's aunt.

"We are relieved the trial is over with, but we still don't have our baby. That's the sad thing about it," Brenda Money said. "Now, we are waiting until someone says `death penalty.' I have just three questions: Where, when and what time?"

At the defense's request, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Roger Colton will decide the sentence. A hearing to decide Zile's sentence is scheduled to be held within 10 days.

The only two penalities for a first-degree murder conviction are death or life in prison without chance for parole for 25 years. Colton, who has been on the bench for two years, has never had to make such a call.

Ed O'Hara, one of Zile's attorneys, said he was impressed with the intelligent questions that the jury - which included two biologists - asked during deliberations, despite the verdict.

"Our hopes were up and they were down. We're disappointed obviously, but we're also realists," O'Hara said.

To demonstrate that they were not allowing the Ziles' cover-up to color their deliberations, jurors limited their review of John Zile's police statement to details of Christina's death. "That wasn't why we were there," Thomas said of the cover-up.

The only person to openly cry in the courtroom on Monday as the verdict was read was Tony Ross, an investigator for the State Attorney's Office. Ross was among the officers interviewing Zile on the police tape the jury heard.

"Two years, it's been going around and around for two years," Ross said after the trial ended.

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ZILE EXPECTS CONVICTION TO BE OVERTURNED ON APPEAL
Sun-Sentinel
November 19, 1996
Author: STEPHANIE SMITH Staff Writer

As John Zile was led out of the courtroom on Monday after his first-degree murder conviction, he told a bailiff to expect him back in 18 months.

Zile, 34, was referring to his expectations that his convictions, which include three counts of aggravated child abuse, will be thrown out by a higher court.

His court-appointed attorneys, Craig Wilson and Ed O'Hara, spent about a third of their time in the three-week trial laying groundwork to get a conviction overturned. The motions and testimony were never heard by the jury that convicted Zile on Monday. "I don't think it'll go away for a long, long time," Wilson said of the Zile case, which took two years from arrest to conviction.

Because the sentencing will be held in Palm Beach County, the appeal will be decided by the 4th District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach instead of the appeals court in Lakeland, which has a reputation of favoring the prosecution, Wilson said.
An appeals court looks at whether trial procedures were correct.

The best chance for a reversal of the conviction is that the prosecution was not forced to specify which counts of aggravated child abuse applied to which act, Wilson said.

"They never itemized the date and time and witnesses to the incidents," he said.

One of the three child-abuse counts stemmed from Zile's admission that he spanked his stepdaughter, Christina Holt, 7, the night she died.

But for the other two counts, Wilson said the prosecution purposely left them vague with a time period that stretched from before Christina's arrival in Riviera Beach to live with her mother to a week after her death.

Jurors were confused by the overlapping dates and asked for specifics during deliberations. The judge told them to rely on their memory of trial testimony, and they came back with a guilty verdict on all three abuse charges.

"To me, the way I looked at it, if you thought she was abused three times, then that's that," juror Drew Thomas said.

Assistant State Attorney Scott Cupp said the prosecution doesn't have to show when a crime happened, only that it occurred, and the defendant is the one who committed it.

"Dates are not elements the state must prove," Cupp said.

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ZILE FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER IN DEATH OF STEPDAUGHTER
Miami Herald, The (FL)
November 19, 1996
Author: LORI ROZSA Herald Staff Writer

Two years after the bruised and decomposing body of 7-year-old Christina Holt was discovered in a makeshift grave behind the Tequesta Kmart, a jury across the state found her stepfather, John Zile, guilty of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse.

The jury of nine men and three women in this mostly rural Central Florida county took less than six hours Monday to do what a Palm Beach County jury failed to do seven months ago -- convict Zile. He faces the death penalty.
``I'm satisfied that the truth is finally resolved. Christina Holt was murdered,'' prosecutor Scott Cupp said. Zile looked angry as the court clerk read the four guilty verdicts -- one for first-degree murder, and three for separate counts of aggravated child abuse. He shook his head, and looked straight ahead.

Asked if the verdict gives some kind of emotional satisfaction to a community heart-torn over Christina's death, a weary looking Cupp said, ``I don't think anything can do that.''

For seven days in October of 1994, South Florida was gripped with panic when Zile and his wife, Pauline, told the world that Christina had disappeared from the Swap Shop in Fort Lauderdale. Photos of the smiling, pig-tailed girl were broadcast nationwide.

The Ziles went on TV pleading for her return. Her mother even clutched one of the little girl's teddy bears as she cried for the cameras. But after police looked at the Zile's Singer Island apartment, the couple's story began to unravel. Investigators found blood stains. They confronted the Ziles. Pauline confessed. Then John confessed.

He led Riviera Beach police to the vacant lot in Tequesta where he buried Christina, after he wrapped her in a tarp and sealed it with duct tape. He'd kept her body in the bedroom closet of their tiny, two-room apartment for four days, burning incense to cover the smell.

Cupp said the most compelling argument for guilt against Zile was Zile himself. In two confessions to police -- one of them taped and played to the jury -- and on the witness stand last week, Zile methodically and dispassionately explained how he killed Christina, a petite 7-year-old who had only lived with the Ziles for four months.

Her mother, Pauline Zile, was convicted in West Palm Beach last year of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse. She is serving a life sentence.

Zile, 34, and his attorneys maintained that her death was an accident. She suffered some kind of seizure, they said, while her stepfather was disciplining her.

Jury request

On Monday, jurors asked to have part of the taped confession played back to them. They listened intently, some leaning far out of their seats to hear the sometimes muffled tape, as Zile's disembodied voice went over what happened the night of Sept. 17, 1994.

Christina had been misbehaving at home and in school, Zile said. She was telling lies. He said he'd caught her with his young son, Chad, 2, late at night in the closet, ``messing around.'' Christina, raised for the first 6-1/2 years of her life by her maternal grandmother in Maryland, was disrupting his family.

No 911 call

That night, he confronted her again about lying, he said. He ``smacked her butt,'' a few times, and ``flicked'' her lips. She defecated in her pajamas, and he got angrier. His wife, Pauline, then eight months pregnant with a child they were handing over to an adoption agency, stood by while John punished Christina. The girl fell to the floor in some kind of seizure, Zile told police. He said he tried a Heimlich maneuver on her, and CPR. His wife got smelling salts. Nothing worked, but nobody called 911 -- a fact prosecutor Cupp hammered home to the jury.

Timely verdict

Fifteen minutes after again hearing the confession, jurors announced they had reached a verdict.

Zile's Palm Beach County trial in April ended in a mistrial, when one juror held out for second-degree murder, after hours of acrimonious deliberations. On Monday, jurors refused to comment as they filed out of the courtroom in Bartow. Alternate juror Karen DeMichaels stayed all day after being excused to find out what her peers would do.

``I agree with them,'' she said after the verdicts were read. Defense attorney Ed O'Hara said he was hoping jurors would come back with a verdict of manslaughter or second-degree murder -- he and co-counsel Craig Wilson never denied that Christina died at Zile's hands.

The jury won't recommend whether Zile should be sentenced to death -- Zile requested that the judge make that decision without the jury's input.

Cupp and fellow prosecutor Jill Estey said one thing bothered them above all. They were not permitted to show the jury a picture of Christina taken when she was alive.

``She was an adorable little child, and just a little girl,'' Estey said. ``They never saw how she was in life.''

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FORGET ABOUT WHAT I USED TO BELIEVE, ZILE SHOULD DIE
The Palm Beach Post
November 20, 1996
Author: FRANK CERABINO

It takes a case like the murder trial of John Zile to make me realize what a hypocrite I've become.

That's because if you stopped me on the street and asked me about the death penalty, I'd tell you I'm against it.
It's arbitrary and expensive, and it doesn't deter other murders. And I'm sure that politicians who say they support the death penalty are just charlatans pandering to the worst instincts in us all.

That's because I'm convinced that people who support the death penalty haven't given it much thought. They're just being emotional, falling back on the primal, nonsensical impulse of revenge rather than using their brains to reason out the obvious.

The death penalty doesn't make sense.

Now, here's where the hypocrite part comes in.

I want Zile to get the electric chair.

He really deserves it.

Zile got convicted Monday of killing his 7-year-old stepdaughter, Christina Holt.

Most of us know the revolting details by now.

The way she defecated in her pants in fear of him, and the way she died choking on vomit while he beat her. The way he stuffed her body in a closet until it stunk too bad. The way he sold her videotapes so he could buy the shovel to bury her behind the Kmart in Tequesta. The way he concocted an abduction story to hide the murder.

Killing anybody is awful. But killing a child you're supposed to nurture, and doing it the way he did it, is beyond awful.

It's electric-chair awful.

He's not the first guy to make me feel that way, either. When I used to cover the courthouse as a reporter, I'd sometimes sit through a murder trial that was so revolting, I'd find myself silently rooting for a death sentence as the judge announced his or her decision.

I've learned one thing from these infrequent experiences. It's a lot easier being against the death penalty as a concept than it is being against it in individual cases.

I realize this is an embarrassing position to find myself in - to have such a gaping hole in my mental armor.

If not a hypocrite, perhaps a conservative?

And it's cases like Zile's that make me wonder whether, over the years, something has happened to me. Whether my lefty ways are shifting - oh no, it can't be - and whether one day, when stopped on the street, I'd say, `Come to think about it, I'm really not against the death penalty anymore."

I'm not surprised that Zile's lawyers aren't interested in finding out whether the jury that convicted him believes he should die in the electric chair.

Usually, jurors in murder cases are brought back to recommend death or a life sentence.

Their ruling is just an advisory opinion, something done to help the judge make up his or her mind. And the jury's recommendation doesn't have to be unanimous.

But judges almost always go along with the jury's recommendation.

I can remember only one local case when a judge went against the jury's recommendation. Nine years ago, Michael Canady was convicted of murdering Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Fred Groves to avoid being arrested during a highway traffic stop.

The jury recommended death by a 7-5 vote. Judge William Owen overruled the jury, saying death was inappropriate for Canady because the murder wasn't premeditated, Canady was only 21 years old and his judgment was impaired by alcohol and marijuana.

The judge caught hell for his decision.

"I think the jury spoke for the community," the prosecutor was quoted as saying in the next day's newspaper.

The jury's recommendation "should have been given greater weight than the judge gave it," the prosecutor said.

Judge Owen retired two months later.

Matter of life or death is all up to the judge

Zile's fate will be left in the hands of Palm Beach Circuit Judge Roger Colton, who will decide between life in prison or death.

But there won't be a jury recommendation this time. John Zile's lawyers opted to skip that phase of the trial. Smart move.

I'll bet that if the jurors in the Zile case had been allowed to recommend whether Zile should get life in prison or death, the vote would be death, and by a wider margin than the 7-5 in the Canady case.

And Judge Colton would have felt some pressure to go along with their recommendation.

In my mind, Zile probably shouldn't get death for the primary reason that Canady didn't. That the murder wasn't premeditated.

But in my hypocrite heart, I know he deserves the electric chair. And I hope he gets it.

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ZILE REPORTER FACES MORE COURT BATTLES
The Palm Beach Post
November 20, 1996
Author: VAL ELLICOTT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

John Zile's murder trial is over, but the case of the newspaper reporter who went to jail to avoid testifying in the case continues to move through the courts.

And it's still possible that Miami Herald reporter David Kidwell, who served only part of his 70-day sentence for contempt of court, could return to jail if he loses on appeal.
Kidwell's attorney believes it's unlikely, though, that he will be returned to jail.

"It seems to me that somewhere along the way some court is going to say that you can't put a reporter in jail under these circumstances," attorney Sandy Bohrer said Tuesday.

Kidwell, 35, spent 15 days in jail in October for violating Circuit Judge Roger Colton's order to answer questions about his 1994 jailhouse interview with Zile, who was convicted Monday of first-degree murder in the death of his 7-year-old stepdaughter, Christina Holt.

Kidwell was freed on Oct. 21 by order of U.S. District Judge Wilkie Ferguson Jr. and he has returned to work at the Herald. The judge said Kidwell will remain free until he rules otherwise.

Florida's 4th District Court of Appeal, where Kidwell's case is currently under review, has scheduled oral arguments for Dec. 11. If Kidwell loses there, he can try to appeal to the state's Supreme Court.

If that fails, his case could end up back before Ferguson. He already has said that federal court rulings support Kidwell's argument that reporters are constitutionally protected from having to testify about the stories they cover even when they are not protecting a confidential source.

But Don Rogers, an assistant attorney general, said Ferguson hasn't formally endorsed Kidwell's reasoning and still hasn't heard all of the state's arguments that Kidwell is wrong. State court rulings, Rogers noted, say reporters are protected from subpoenas only when they are shielding a confidential source or confidential information.

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ZILE VERDICT FAILS TO BRING CLOSURE
Sun-Sentinel
November 20, 1996
Author: JOHN GROGAN

Finally, it is over.

Finally, the long-awaited verdict of guilt against the stepfather South Florida has come to revile as the very worst that parenthood can dish up.
Two years, three trials and several hundred thousand dollars of public expense later, John Zile is guilty as charged of murdering his stepdaughter, Christina Holt, during an explosion of abusive rage.

He beat the 7-year-old he was supposed to protect, the jury found, and when she screamed out, cupped his hand over her mouth until she could breathe no more. She suffered a seizure, nothing more, he claimed. But when she finally lay still he did not call 911. Instead, he sold off her bicycle and videotapes, and took his wife and two young sons with him to buy a tarp and shovel.

On a rainy night he buried her 44-pound body in a sand pit behind a K mart store. And then came the most notorious hoax South Florida ever fell for.

Who can forget that baby doll?

Who can forget the way Christina's mother, Pauline Zile, clutched it so convincingly as she stood red-eyed at the Swap Shop west of Fort Lauderdale, pleading before the television cameras for whoever snatched her little girl to please, please let her go?

She fooled us all. Only later did police find the blood spatters. Only later did we learn how low a parent could sink.

The monsters among us

And now the brown-eyed girl's nightmare has finally been avenged.

The mother is a year into her life prison sentence. The stepfather faces the death penalty.

I waited for this day, thought it would bring closure. But somehow it all seems so unsatisfying.

I wanted to believe John and Pauline Zile were monsters. I needed to believe it to separate them from me, and those like me, parents struggling each day in our own imperfect ways to raise children.

It was so easy to demonize them, especially the mother for not protecting her daughter.

When I suggested her life sentence might be too harsh, a friend of mine, herself a young mother, shot back, "Pauline Zile deserves to burn at the stake for not defending that little girl. Even a mother dog would have done more for her pups."

But as their cases plodded through the courts, these monsters began to look alarming familiar - immature and unprepared parents who snapped under the overwhelming strain every parent knows.

He was a short-order cook with a ninth-grade education; she was a waitress pregnant with their third child. Home was a cramped motel room. And when Christina landed on their doorstep two months before her death, the bomb began to tick.

Listening to the testimony, you could almost hear the unbearable buzz roaring in their ears.

Families that fall apart

John and Pauline Zile are murderers, no doubt. But above all else they are two of life's losers, weak and pitiful, who failed at nearly everything they tried in life, even their own fumbled suicide attempt.

The lesson they leave us with is about the fragility of the nuclear family and how quickly it can break apart. It is about overwhelmed parents and unwanted children and mothers who do nothing to protect the babies they once carried in their wombs.

At last, it is over. A girl is dead, a family dismantled, two parents imprisoned. And the rest of us are left to ponder our own stumble through parenthood, and the next ticking bomb out there.

If only John and Pauline Zile were monsters, unrecognizable to you and me, perhaps then sleep would come soundly tonight.

John Grogan's column appears every Sunday and Wednesday. Write him at 200 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale 33301, or by e-mail: jgrogn(AT)aol.com.

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ZILE VERDICT DOESN'T CHANGE REPORTER'S SENTENCE
Sun-Sentinel
November 20, 1996
Author: STEPHANIE SMITH Staff Writer

John Zile's conviction of first-degree murder on Monday won't make a 70-day jail sentence go away for a newspaper reporter who refused to testify about his jail-house interview with Zile.

"We'd never backed out of that," Assistant State Attorney Scott Cupp said on Tuesday. Cupp demanded that David Kidwell, a reporter with The Miami Herald, be held in contempt of court for his refusal to testify at Zile's three-week trial.
Although Kidwell's testimony is now irrelevant, Cupp said the prosecution still has a stake in the issue of witnesses who refuse to testify when the state needs them.

Zile was not a confidential source for the story, and Kidwell did not have special privileges exempting him from testifying because of his job as a reporter, Cupp said.

Kidwell chose jail rather than help the prosecution prove that Zile killed his stepdaughter, Christina Holt, 7, during a spanking. Kidwell said at his contempt of court hearing on Oct. 7 that it would be unethical for him to testify against someone he interviewed for a news story.

Kidwell's attorney, Sandy Bohrer of Miami, acknowledged on Tuesday that the end of Zile's trial doesn't change his client's status.

"It's at the same place," Bohrer said. "It doesn't matter."

Kidwell is still waiting for the 4th District Court of Appeal in West Palm Beach to decide whether the trial judge in the Zile case acted properly by finding the reporter guilty of contempt of court.

Kidwell spent 15 days in jail before a federal judge in Miami ordered that he be released while waiting for a decision on his appeal.

Cupp said Kidwell's testimony would have given the prosecution ammunition to show how Zile tailors his explanation of what happened the night Christina died to suit the situation.

In Kidwell's story, Zile was quoted as saying he was "furious" with Christina when he spanked her for making false allegations about sexual abuse by other relatives. But, in his police statement, Zile said he was "upset."

When Zile took the witness stand at the trial, he said he was merely "concerned," Cupp said.

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