Convicted Killer Zachs Taken Away to Prison

Kathleen O’Brien and Peter Carone met at the Prospect Café in August 1986. An introduction was provided by O’Brien’s sister, who worked with Carone. The couple was young, hard-working and brimming with 20-something dreams.

“As soon as we met,” O’Brien said, “we knew.”

In December, they were engaged to be married.

“And in March he died,” O’Brien said in a waiting area inside Hartford Superior Court.

For friends and family of Carone, the wait is over.

Adam Zachs, a fugitive for 22 years, was led to jail by state judicial marshals at 11:06 a.m. Thursday to start serving a 60-year sentence after a seven-minute appearance before Judge David P. Gold.

Gold vacated an arrest warrant for Zachs for failing to appear in court in June 1989. Zachs, who was convicted Aug. 28, 1988, of first-degree murder, had fled while on appeal. He was captured Feb. 1 in Leon, Mexico.

when he was shot in the back with one bullet from a 9-mm pistol on March 22, 1987 – at the same popular bar and restaurant where he and O’Brien fell in love at first sight 25 years ago.

Carone was 29.

“I think about that day all the time, every day, still,” O’Brien said. “It’s not the kind of thing you can get over. You can get through it. And you can get by it, and you can get around it. But you can never get over it.”

Zachs, now 48, appeared frail and dazed when he was escorted into court and was not asked to speak. He was not represented by an attorney. After Hartford State’s Attorney Gail P. Hardy summarized the case, Gold disposed of the fugitive warrant at 11:04 a.m.

Gold ruled Zachs will not be housed at a minimum security prison as originally stipulated more than two decades ago by Judge Thomas Corrigan.

“The defendant should be held in as secure a facility as necessary to make sure he serves his sentence that is long overdue,” Gold said.

The courtroom was filled with family, close friends of Carone, and neighbors and friends of Carone’s mother, Addie Carone of West Hartford.

No immediate family members of Zachs were in court. His father, , recently pleaded guilty to harboring a fugitive in federal court in New Haven and will be sentenced Aug. 26. He is not expected to serve more than six months of a possible five-year jail sentence, prosecutors said.

“Prosecuting Mr. Zachs doesn’t really change anything for me one way or the other,” O’Brien said. “Who is to say what you would do, if it was your child. I’m not trying to be gracious. You just don’t know. But you would hope you would do the right thing.”

Addie Carone, 83, was seated in the third row of the third-floor courtroom. The first two rows were cordoned.

Before the proceeding, with O'Brien near her side, Carone said, “I’m not here to see Adam Zachs. My family is not here to see Adam Zachs. I’m here to support some of the people [who captured Zachs] – the West Hartford police, the U.S. marshals. They were relentless.”

Among the investigators who were in court were West Hartford detectives and . Puglielli took Zachs into custody at a Mexico City prison Wednesday and returned on a commercial flight that landed in New York at 12:30 a.m.

Semper was at the airport and led a “mini-convoy” of law enforcement vehicles back to the Superior Court lockup early Thursday.

“The reason I don’t want to see Adam again is I’ve had enough of the Zachs family,” Carone said. “Three weeks at the trial they looked at us with hate in their eyes and their faces, anger at us, and arrogance. No words of any kindness or sympathy. Shame on the entire family. I will never, never forgive that family.”

The investigation is not over, Semper said.

When Frederick Zachs admitted his role in court, he said he provided a steady stream of financial support through third parties that allowed Zachs to grow into middle age as a computer repairman in Leon.

“We’re still looking into some odds and ends,” said Semper, who teamed with Puglielli on the case six years ago. “It’s a 24-year-old event, a fugitive of 22 years. We just have to make sure everything is squared away.”

Zachs for nearly five months before agreeing to return to Connecticut last week, said Joseph P. Faughnan, head of the U.S. Marshal Service in Connecticut.

“It is a statement,” Faughnan said. “People have to know if you flee, especially for long has he has, the pursuit never ends.”

The local, state, federal and international effort to locate Zachs heated up late last year, and Puglielli was sent to Mexico in December after investigators received a tip.

When Zachs was captured, he was running a computer repair business, law enforcement officials said. A Hall High School graduate, Zachs was living under the name of Ruben Fridman. He also has two children through a marriage to a Mexican citizen.

O’Brien said she and Peter Carone were to be married Aug. 8, 1987. “Everything was done, all the arrangements were made. We were just waiting for the calendar.”

O’Brien has not married. “I just didn’t meet that other one,” she said. “Adam had a life. And we didn’t.”

was not required by law. But it was expected to bring a measure of closure to a high-profile case that has received national attention over the years.

“I don’t how I feel exactly. I’m relieved,” O’Brien said. “I was hoping I would feel some closure. I don’t feel it just yet.”