Like Susan Smith, Zile fabricated a frightening tale to conceal an ugly crime – and like Smith, she exploited the news media in a desperate attempt to keep her secret. Zile played the role of grieving mother extremely well. She said she and Christina had planned a day at the beach. In her car, she had planted a bathing suit and a half-empty fruit-drink container to support the story. She brought a doll to her press conference and told reporters it was Christina’s favorite: police suspect she bought it as a prop. In crime-plagued south Florida, the public ate it up. Volunteers searched the market where Zile said Christina had disappeared, and the news media blanketed the state with bulletins about the missing girl.
Police were less easily convinced – and over the next five days, investigators found many holes in her story. Detectives thought it odd that Pauline Zile referred to her daughter in the past tense. ““A couple hours after your little girl is missing, you don’t start saying she “was’ a nice girl,’’ says Jim Leljedal of the Broward County Sheriff’s office. And when Zile smoothly re-enacted the restroom scene for ““America’s Most Want-ed,’’ Leljedal said, it became clear ““she was a performer.''
The cops’ suspicions grew when they found a pair of bloody jeans in the cramped apartment that Pauline Zile and her husband shared with Christina and the couple’s two young sons. A neighbor reported he’d heard loud quarreling a month before. Christina hadn’t been in school for weeks. When Christina’s teacher had called to ask about the absences, Pauline offered a series of excuses.
Pauline Zile cracked after failing a lie-detector test two weeks ago – and said her husband had killed Christina. John Zile confessed to beating the girl, telling police that as he stifled her cries she went into convulsions and died. Both have been charged with murder and aggravated child abuse. In the aftermath, it seems the Ziles hoped that by posing as victims in a tabloid tale, they could shift suspicion from themselves. As it turned out, they put too much faith in the hype.
