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Eric Hoffman visits the grave most every weekend.
He places fresh flowers there to honor his mother, a spray of color amid the darkness that haunts him.
Carol Ann Zastudil died in a brutal and bloody slaying when he was only 12. She was stabbed in the face, neck, chest and back. Her throat was cut, her head nearly severed. Her murder remains unsolved more than four decades later.
“I’m tired of it,” Eric said, standing beside his mother’s grave in Akron, Ohio, one recent chilly Sunday morning. “It’s got to be closed.”
Eric, now 54, and his stepfather found Carol, then 36, slain in a bedroom in their Perry Township home when Eric went home from school early because he was sick. In addition to the stab wounds, authorities later noted, her skull was fractured, possibly from being struck by a blunt object or a fall.
Police initially investigated Carol’s slaying on Dec. 21, 1983, as a robbery-murder because her husband Richard reported cash had been taken from the home.
At the request of Eric, police took a fresh look at the case in 2020, teaming up with the Ohio Attorney General’s Cold Case Unit. New DNA testing was done, but there were no conclusive results.
Still, detective Danielle Paciorek, who has been with the Perry Township police for nine years, hasn’t given up hope. She said she’d like to give Eric the closure he deserves.
“What needs to happen has to be something substantial there — whether it be someone said something to somebody, someone put something in writing, or we have some piece of physical evidence that comes back and points us in the right direction,” she said during a recent interview.
Paciorek said she’d love to get a confession or to hear from someone who has information that they’ve long withheld.
“If the killer would like to come tell me what happened, I’m all ears. Anytime. Any place,” she said. “Well, not necessarily the killer, but somebody that knows what happened. I would think, as a human, we have a hard time keeping things to ourselves, especially if it’s bothering us. So, maybe that person said something to someone else. That would be helpful — very helpful.”
'Things weren’t quite right'
Carol Ann Zastudil was born in Akron and graduated from Green High School in 1968.
Her first marriage to James Hoffman ended in divorce but gave her two children, Wendy and Eric. She dated several men, but fell for Richard Zastudil, who, like her, had two children — a boy and a girl — from his first marriage.
The couple married in 1982, and the blended family moved into a new brick ranch on a quiet cul-de-sac in Perry Township. The kids split their time between this house and their other parents' homes.
Eric described his mother as “absolutely amazing” and a hard worker. He said she was his best friend.
“Everybody she came in contact with just loved her,” he said during a recent interview in his Canton home.
Carol worked as a secretary for Dr. Rajnikant Kothari, a psychiatrist in Jackson Township, and sold home furnishings through a popular direct sales company called Home Interiors.
She made time for her family members, who enjoyed camping, roller skating in the basement and going to the drive-in.
In the weeks leading up to her murder, though, Eric said his mother seemed upset. He sensed a strain between her and Richard.
“You could kind of tell some things weren’t quite right,” he said. “I did see Mom cry a little bit more than she used to. She was a pretty soft-hearted person, so things did get to her pretty easy. I picked up that trait from her.”
Eric and his stepdad find Carol slain in their home
In late December 1983, the family was busy getting ready for the holidays.
Their home was decorated inside and out, and some presents had been bought, while others still needed to be purchased. This meant Carol had extra cash stashed in her dresser.
On Dec. 21, Eric woke up with a fever, but, because it was the last day before the holiday break, his mother encouraged him to go to school anyway.
Eric and Wendy walked to the bus stop at their neighbor’s house about 7:45 a.m. and Richard left for his job at Perry Rubber Co. That left Carol with enough time to get ready before leaving for work about 8:45 a.m.
Eric went to school but began feeling worse and went to the nurse’s office. The school called Carol but couldn’t reach her. They called Richard and he picked Eric up and took him home about noon.
Eric and Richard saw his mother’s car in the garage and realized she hadn’t gone to work. As they walked through the house, they yelled for her but got no response. They found her lying bloody on the floor of Wendy’s room, where she kept her work clothes in the closet.
“The room was a wreck,” Eric recalled. “Drawers were pulled out. There was obviously a struggle. Things were thrown. My sister had a poster bed. The post was broken off.”
Carol was fully dressed like she was ready to go to work. She wore a beige wool coat with a brown scarf beneath the collar, a beige skirt with a brown belt, a white blouse, and panty hose. She had stab wounds and cuts from her head to her feet, as well as defensive wounds to her hands and arms, according to the coroner’s report.
Eric and Richard tried a couple of phones and realized all the line cords had been cut, including to a phone that Eric kept hidden under his bed. Richard told Eric to run to a neighbor’s house and call the police.
Eric watched from his neighbor’s window as police, paramedics and then the coroner arrived. That’s when it hit him.
“All this time, I still did not believe she was dead,” he said. “I thought maybe there was hope. And then I saw a coroner vehicle show up. And that pretty much told me: This was it.”
Carol knew her killer, behavioral assessment finds
Detectives initially thought they were dealing with a robbery that turned into a brutal murder.
Richard told them hundreds of dollars had been stolen.
Detectives interviewed 40 of Carol’s family members, friends and neighbors. They even had several people hypnotized to see if they could recall anything from the morning Carol was killed.
Detectives also interviewed Carol’s past boyfriends and patients at the psychiatrist’s office where she worked.
Neighbors reported hearing and seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Detectives found no signs of forced entry and no murder weapon, though several knives in the home were tested. None of them were the murder weapon, Paciorek said.
The coroner ruled Carol’s cause of death as hypovolemia, which is when the plasma is too low from excessive bleeding; multiple stab and incised wounds from a sharp instrument; and a blunt force injury that fractured the skull, according to the coroner’s report.
The FBI did a behavioral assessment that said Carol’s killer was male and likely had a personal relationship with her, Paciorek said.
“So, that’s the angle that the police were going on then — and now,” she said.
Carol had reportedly seen someone in their home one night about two months before her slaying, but the intruder disappeared before Richard could get a gun and load it, according to news accounts at the time of her murder. No police report was filed.
Investigators explore potential link between women’s murders
Nearly two years after Carol’s murder, investigators looked into whether her slaying could be linked to that of Kay Elaine Gulosh, who was killed Sept. 19, 1985, in her Plain Township home.
Both women were home alone in a bedroom when an intruder entered, cut their throats and stabbed them repeatedly. Gulosh was also strangled.
Eric recalled talking to two FBI agents after Gulosh’s murder. He said one of the reasons they were looking into a potential tie was because Gulosh and his mother had dated the same man before they were married.
However, the Stark County Sheriff’s Office, which investigated Gulosh’s murder, and the Perry police concluded that the women’s slayings weren’t related.
“We have no information at this time that links the two cases,” Perry police Lt. George Jordan in 1985 told the Canton Repository, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Gulosh’s murder remains unsolved. Kenneth Roth, the man suspected in her slaying as well as several other women’s murders, died of COVID-19 in prison in 2020.
Roth was released from prison in June 1985 after serving 16 years for the fatal shooting of a Topeka taxi driver. That meant he was in prison when Carol was killed.
Perry police take a new look at Carol’s slaying
After their mother’s murder, Eric and his sister, Wendy, lived with Richard for the rest of the school year, then moved in with their biological father.
As Eric grew older, his mother’s slaying — and how it remained unsolved — plagued him.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of this,” said Eric, who works at a Chevrolet dealership. “It is etched in my mind ‘til the day I die. The visions — everything I have — sometimes are uncontrollable.”
Eric reached out to former Perry Police Chief Mike Pomesky in the fall of 2020, asking him to reopen his mother’s case.
They met at a Dunkin’ and Eric shared how he thought his mother’s killer was someone close to the family. He pointed to information that few people knew, like how he had a phone hidden under his bed because he didn’t like the look of it on display.
The chief promised they’d take a new look at the case. Carol’s case was among the first examined by the new Cold Case Unit within the Ohio Attorney General's Office, which includes the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI), the state's crime lab.
Paciorek said DNA testing was conducted that hadn’t been done before but it didn’t net a profile or partial profile for the killer.
Carol’s family members hope case can be solved
By 1986, Richard Zastudil had married for a third time and moved out of Ohio. He’s now 81 and living in Tennessee.
In a recent phone interview, he said he is clueless about who killed Carol.
“I have no idea,” he said. “I don’t know who did it or why.”
Richard said detectives had him take a polygraph test.
“It went fine, I guess,” he said. “It’s been a long time ago.”
Richard said he’d like to see the case solved.
Eric and his partner, Rodney Roberts, share this sentiment.
“There just needs to be closure,” Roberts, Eric’s partner of seven years, said during a recent visit to Holy Cross Cemetery. “Let her finally rest in peace.”
Carol’s mother and sister died without knowing who killed her. Carol has grandchildren and great-grandchildren she never got to meet.
“Her life was taken too soon,” Roberts said.
The couple visit Holy Cross cemetery together each week to put flowers on their mother’s graves. Mary Roberts, Rodney’s mother, died from health problems shortly after Mother’s Day last year.
This will be Roberts first Mother’s Day without her. To mark the occasion, he and Eric plan to lay flowers on their mothers' graves. Eric is bringing red roses, which were his mother’s favorite.
“It’s the least we can do to bring them flowers and let them know they are not forgotten — and never will be,” Roberts said.
Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com. Paula Schleis can be reached at feedback@ohiomysteries.com. Nancy Molnar can be reached at nancy.molnar@cantonrep.com.
About the Unresolved series:
Since 2021, Beacon Journal reporter Stephanie Warsmith and retired reporter Paula Schleis, co-producer of the Ohio Mysteries podcast, have teamed up to shed new light on these cold cases, with the hope of uncovering new leads. The oldest case they've featured dates back to 1928.
With each case, both detectives and family members hold out hope that they will one day be solved.
To read past stories in this series, visit Beacon Journal.com. To listen to podcasts that are part of the series, visit the Ohio Mysteries' website. Send tips for future stories to Beacon Journal reporter Stephanie Warsmith at swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: 'Let her finally rest': Mother's family hopes for justice after 42 years
Reporting by Stephanie Warsmith, Paula Schleis and Nancy Molnar / Akron Beacon Journal
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