Zarinsky was born in 1940 in Linden, New Jersey. He had a record of arson and vandalism from his teens and was a suspect in the disappearances of several young women in Monmouth and Union counties in the 1960s and 1970s.
He was convicted in 1975 of the murder of Rosemary Calandriello, seventeen, who disappeared from Atlantic Highlands in 1969. Her body was never found, the conviction was one of the first in New Jersey obtained without a body, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Two other matters were pursued against him for decades. In 1999 he was tried for the 1968 killing of Linda Balabanow, seventeen, and acquitted. In 2001 he was tried for the 1958 shooting of Charles Bernoskie, a Rahway police officer; his sister and a cousin testified that he had come home wounded that night and that the family had covered it up. He was acquitted, and the officer's widow's separate civil action against him succeeded and was then reversed on appeal. A different man, Theodore Schiffer, had confessed to the Bernoskie shooting years earlier and had been convicted.
He died in prison on November 29, 2008.
This is a case with one conviction and a long list of attributions, several of them tested in court and rejected. The range of two to six or more is a fair statement of it, and the entry does not treat the acquittals as convictions.