George Vizard was shot on the morning of Sunday, July 23, 1967, while working as the attendant at the Town and Country Store in north Austin. His manager saw him shortly before seven. During the hour that followed, customers came in and some were served by a man who was not Vizard, and others left because nobody was on duty. At about eight a customer found his body in the store's cold-room storage locker. He had been shot twice.
George Vizard IV was a student activist, president of the Students for a Democratic Society chapter at the University of Texas, a staff member of the underground paper The Rag, and an anti-war organizer, and the killing carried a political charge in Austin for years afterward because of it. His wife, Mariann, was twenty. The case went unsolved for fourteen years.
Robert Joseph Zani was born in 1944 and was living in Austin in 1967. He had worked at that store until five or six weeks before the murder. He knew the combination of the floor safe, the routine of the shop and how much cash was usually on hand on a Sunday morning. On June 27, 1967 he had married Irma Serano, a Mexican citizen, in Mexico, and had come back without her. On July 5 he enlisted in the Marine Corps for induction that fall. His only income was a job at the Baker Center, and two nights before the killing he tried to recruit two other University of Texas students; they turned him down, and reported him once word of the murder spread. On August 1 he took two weeks' leave and went to Mexico, and though he had had less than two hundred dollars he brought back his pregnant wife and two children, left his job and backed out of the Marines.
On July 22, 1966, a year and a day before Vizard died, he bought a .357 Ruger Blackhawk from a sporting goods store in Austin. The records survived.
Vizard had been shot with a .38 Special or .357 Magnum copper-coated bullet, fired from a barrel with eight lands and grooves inclining to the right. A right eight, as the trial called it. In 1967 that configuration accounted for something between three and five percent of firearms in circulation.
In 1979 Mexican police seized a .357 Ruger Blackhawk from Zani, serial number 78283. It was the pistol he had bought in 1966 and it was a right eight. The barrel was so leaded that the state's ballistics expert would not say it was the murder weapon, only that it could have been.
He was arrested on March 28, 1980. It was his wife's account to investigators that connected him to the Vizard killing.
Two witnesses had reported at the time that someone other than Vizard served them in the store that morning, and had described a man resembling Zani. They were Jerry Mogoyne and his son. In 1980, thirteen years later, the son's memory was refreshed under hypnosis.
The state's case rested primarily on circumstantial evidence placing Zani in the store between seven and eight that morning. A jury convicted him and set his punishment at ninety-nine years. The prosecutors were Ronald Earle and Andrew Forsythe.
The hypnosis is the reason lawyers still read this case. The Texarkana Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in 1984, rejecting every ground including the sufficiency of the evidence and the admissibility of the hypnotically refreshed testimony. The Court of Criminal Appeals then granted review for one purpose: to answer a question it had expressly left open two years earlier, whether hypnotically induced testimony is admissible in Texas at all. Zani v. State is the answer, and it is cited in Texas courts to this day. The conviction was affirmed again.
His mother was Gladys Zani, and she was killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was convicted of second-degree murder for it.
That conviction did not stand as first returned. One account says it was overturned because the state had failed to give him a speedy trial and that he could not be tried again; a case timeline instead records a retrial in which a second jury again convicted him of second-degree murder, after which he was returned to Texas to serve the Vizard sentence. Gladys Zani disappeared from her Tulsa home in 1974 by one account; another dates her death to July 7, 1979.
On December 4, 1979, in Corpus Christi, Texas, a seventy-three-year-old real estate agent, Julius Alfred Dess, was robbed and shot while showing a property to a married couple. Zani was indicted for his murder. Killings in Oklahoma and Arkansas were also attributed to him, and none of them was proved in court. He never confessed to any of it.
Zani died on February 22, 2011, four days short of his sixty-seventh birthday. Death indexes record a Robert Joseph Zani born February 26, 1944, the same date as his birth, and one published profile gives the cause as natural and the place as Huntsville, Texas, the headquarters of the state prison system.
What the prosecution established in Austin was a robbery committed by a man who had worked the till and knew where the money was. Theories about the death of a left-wing organizer in 1967 had circulated for a decade and a half, and the answer, when it came, was the former employee.