Woman found naked, bound and hanging from boyfriend's paradise balcony

Irish Daily Mirror

27-05-2025

On the morning of 13 July 2011, Rebecca Zahau, a 32 year old mum, was found hanging naked from the second-floor balcony of her boyfriend's mansion in Coronado, California.
Rebecca, a certified ophthalmic technician who was dating pharmaceutical tycoon Jonah Shacknai, was discovered gagged, with her hands and feet bound. The grim discovery was made by Shacknai's brother Adam, who cut her down and rang emergency services.
Investigators soon revealed that Rebecca had received a voicemail just hours before her death, informing her about the critical condition of Shacknai's six year old son Max. The boy had suffered a fall down a staircase at his father's 27-bedroom historic mansion, with Rebecca being the only adult present during the incident.
Max's prognosis was bleak, and he tragically passed away due to his injuries on 17 July. Rebecca's death sent shockwaves through the tranquil, affluent island community of Coronado, located across the San Diego Bay from downtown San Diego, sparking its most high-profile and mysterious police investigation.
The case has since inspired a book and an Oxygen TV special, drawing the attention of numerous internet detectives. Rebecca and Shacknai started dating shortly after his divorce from his second wife, Max's mother, reports the Mirror US.
As their relationship deepened, Rebecca left her job at Horizon Eye Specialists and Lasik Center in Scottsdale, Arizona, to devote more time to Shacknai and his children, claims her former employer.
In 2007, Shacknai took up residence in the lavish Spreckels Mansion, a grand Italian Renaissance and Beaux-Arts-styled property built in 1908 for an heir to the Spreckels sugar fortune, mainly using it as a summer getaway.
The enigma wrapped around Rebecca's demise initially left local police baffled. They initially suspected murder until they discoveredscrawl in black paint on a guest bedroom door that read, "she saved him can he save her."
Nonetheless, following a thorough investigation, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department asserted that she'd ended her own life, hinting she might have felt responsible for Max's accident. To buttress their case, the officers showcased a video demonstration for journalists, showing their theory on how Rebecca could've tied herself up before hanging.
Police also cited her fingerprints on a blade used to slice the rope and her toe prints on the balcony decking as evidence she mounted herself from that location.
However, spurning the constabulary's version of events, Rebecca's mother and sister fiercely contested the findings, launching off a wrongful death legal claim, contending that Shacknai's brother Adam, who was staying at the mansion, was responsible.
In a surprising development in 2018, a civil jury in San Diego ruled in favour of the family, granting them $5 million in damages after determining Adam was responsible for her death, despite his claims of innocence, as per ABC News.
The Zahau family's attorney argued that Adam had sexually assaulted Rebecca before murdering her and staging the scene to resemble a suicide, according to the Los Angeles Times. Dan Webb, Adam's lawyer, expressed his astonishment at the verdict, stating he was "absolutely astonished".
"It is clear the Zahau family desperately wanted to place blame after such an inexplicable tragedy," Webb said in a statement provided to PEOPLE. "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."
Following the civil jury's verdict, the family's lawyer announced their intention to request that the sheriff's department reopen the investigation. The sheriff's department assigned new detectives to reassess the case, but these investigators reached the same conclusion as their predecessors.
"We conducted an objective and thorough investigation into Miss Zahau's death," the sheriff's department told PEOPLE. "The facts of that investigation have led to the conclusion that Miss Zahau took her own life."
In 2022, Zahau's family submitted a petition to the San Diego Department of the Medical Examiner, urging them to change the official classification of her death from suicide to homicide.
In a recent letter addressed to Rebecca's attorney, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Steven C. Campman communicated his office's unwavering stance on the case, which was disclosed in documents obtained by PEOPLE magazine.
Campman shared in his September 2023 correspondence that he had "considered the arguments set forth in your letter and the information in the accompanying documents."
He noted that his considerations included discussions with colleagues and the pathologist who determined the initial ruling.
Concluding his communication, Campman firmly stated: "However, after reviewing the totality of the evidence, the conclusion of this office has not changed," indicating that their original findings remain intact.