*Robert Joseph Zani
Oklahoma and Texas
Body Count: Three (formally charged, convicted)
The University of Texas during the 'sixties was a crucible of political tension - a state of unrest that was obscured but briefly by the Charles Whitman episode (see card Nos. 45-46). This confrontational atmosphere errupted soon thereafter in a seemingly routine shopkeeper slaying that proved many years later to have been the start of a slow-burn campaign of serial murder by Robert Joseph Zani. In 1967, Zani was involved with the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom. His antagonism toward George Vizard, a prominent left-wing activist on campus, led Zani to gun down Vizard while the latter was beginning a day's work as a convenience-store clerk. That case went unsolved until 1980, by which time Zani and his wife, Irma (pictured), an immagrant from Mexico, had thoroughly ranged the Southwest as drifters and performed yet two more grislier slayings. The Zanis developed a practice of posing as homebuyers and then threatening real-estate agents while touring vacant houses. They carried this act to a deadly finale with San Antonio Realtor Julian Dess, 73, who was last seen among the living while preparing to meet two clients and whose body turned up in December of 1979. Charged in the Dess murder after Zani's at-long-last conviction in the 1967 case, the Zanis were awaiting trial in 1981 when Irma, then 34, dictated a statement that her husband, 37, had killed his mother in Tulsa in 1974, dismembered the body, and forced Irma to scatter the pieces along a highway. Her cooperation with the authorities enabled Irma to return to Mexico. Robert Zani's ninety-nine-year prison sentence has been reinforced as recently as 1984 by an appellate court.
*Source: Back of card.