Case 343: John Zera

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It was 10 o'clock on the night of Monday, March 23, 2009, when a team of police officers gathered outside a two-storey off-white condominium in Waukesha, a small suburban community in the Midwest American state of Wisconsin. Earlier that day, their department had received a phone call from a local recreation center, asking them to investigate one of their longtime swim instructors after he'd been accused of acting inappropriately with some of his underage students. An outwardly calm, mild-mannered individual, the man agreed to let investigators search his home. As the officers made their way through the condo's first floor, they were struck by how immaculate it was. Not a stick of furniture was out of place, and each room had been meticulously cleaned and organized. One thing did strike them as odd though. All of the windows were covered in sheets and tarps. Heading down into the basement, the officers discovered an array of toys and games, things one would expect to find in the home of devoted parents or grandparents. Not a lifelong bachelor with no children. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. As investigators began digging through sealed boxes beneath the stairs, they unearthed something that unsettled even the most seasoned among them. Two highly detailed models handcrafted from balsa wood and built to scale. The first was a police station, the second a firehouse. Investigators lifted the roofs off the models to reveal more than a dozen photographs of children glued to the walls. Above each one was a tiny LED light that illuminated the child's face like a painting in a museum. One of the detectives recognised some of the faces from milk cartons and nightly news reports. They were children who had either been murdered or gone missing from across the country, stretching back decades. But one face in particular stood out. A 14-year-old boy with a bucktoothed smile and sandy blonde hair swept over blue eyes. His name was John Zera.
On Friday, February 20, 1976, John Zera failed to come home from school without so much as a note or a phone call. Initially, his parents suspected he might have stayed late to catch a ride with his older brother, Mark, who had wrestling practice after school. But when Mark arrived home alone, the Zeras knew something was wrong. The family of five were relative newcomers to the quaint community of Franklin, which was about a 20-minute drive southwest from their previous home on Milwaukee's bustling south side. They had moved to Franklin the previous year after John Senior, a blue-collar worker, and his wife Janice, a middle school teacher, fell in love with the area's peaceful, close-knit community. A small suburb made up of farmland and new housing developments, it seemed like the perfect place to raise their three sons. John and his brothers, 15-year-old Mark and 13-year-old Phil, loved their new home. A two-storey colonial big enough for each boy to have his own room. They also loved their wooded backyard, which was often filled with white-tailed deer, raccoons, squirrels and other wildlife. John, in particular, enjoyed trawling the muddy wetlands that surrounded the property in search of frogs and crayfish. But the move hadn't been entirely smooth sailing for John. Although he enjoyed spending time at home with his family and neighbours, he had a difficult time adjusting to his new life at Franklin High School, where most of his classmates had known one another since childhood. He did his best to make friends, carving out a quiet place for himself amongst Franklin's student body, but he missed his old friends in Milwaukee. Sometimes he visited them after school or on the weekends, but he always made sure to get permission from his parents. John Sr. and Janice knew he'd never take off on a whim to see his old friends without asking first.
Janice called the Franklin Police Department to report her son missing. The officer on duty reassured her that John was probably just out with friends and there was nothing to worry about. Knowing her son too well to agree with this assessment, Janice began calling everyone she could think of who might know where he was, repeatedly asking, Have you seen Johnny? With each no she received, Janice became increasingly convinced that John had been hit by a car on his way home from school and was lying in a ditch somewhere, dead or dying. She waited by the phone while her husband slowly drove the route from their house to Franklin High School. Mark Zera ran back and forth behind the car, frantically checking roadside ditches for any sign of John's distinctive olive green parka. There was nothing. After more than two hours, an icy rain began to fall, making it impossible for the father and son to continue their search. As they made their way home, snow mixed with the rain, blanketing Franklin in an eerie silence and erasing everything in its path.