Rampage of a Nutty Professor

June 01, 2009

Former University of Georgia marketing professor George Zinkhan, 57, was apparently in the midst of gathering information about his attorney wife, Marie Bruce, 47, who, it seems, was seeing economist Thomas Tanner, 40, and planning to divorce Zinkhan when Zinkhan went off the deep end on Saturday, April 25, 2009 and shot both of them to death, along with another person, Ben Teague, 63, outside Athens Community Theater.  Teague's involvement, it seemed, was simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
Zinkhan, Bruce, and Tanner were members of a local theater group, the Town and Gown Players, and were attending a reunion at the theater when Zinkhan and his wife became embroiled in an argument.  Zinkhan, in a fit of anger despite having attended marital counseling sessions with his wife, returned to his red Jeep Liberty, where their two children, ages 8 and 10, were waiting for him, and retrieved two handguns.  He then purportedly returned and shot and killed his wife, along with the two other men, and wounded two other people.  He then drove his kids to a neighbor's house and dropped them off there, claiming that there was an emergency that he had to deal with.

Police conducted searches of Zinkhan's home and office, and launched an international manhunt for the professor.  The cops feared that he might return to his native homeland, The Netherlands, where he had taught on a part-time basis and also owned a home.  Detectives learned that he had purchased a ticket to Amsterdam for a May 2, 2009 flight, but he never took the flight.  During a search of his office, investigators discovered a digital voice recorder that appeared to contain a surreptitious recording between Zinkhan and his wife concerning "Marie Bruce's affair with Thomas Tanner," according to search warrant affidavits that had been written by Sgt. Christopher Nichols.

The police also found a document on a computer in Zinkhan's office indicating that he knew about the affair, and another document in which Zinkhan had indicated that he wanted "to rebuild his relationship with his wife."  Nichols also stated that the killings "were the result of continued contact between Marie Bruce and Thomas Tanner."

A few days later police found Zinkhan's Jeep Liberty crashed in a ravine about 1000 yards from an elementary school, near a wooded area.  The police found Zinkhan's wallet, containing $51, inside the vehicle, along with his passport, a laptop computer, a cell phone, and $1047 cash that had been stuffed into a bag.  They also found six spent shell casings from a .38-caliber revolver, and documents with information about Thomas Tanner.  However, despite intensive search efforts, there was no sign of the professor.

His body, though, was found on Saturday, May 9, 2009 after it was sniffed out by cadaver dogs.  It was located in a heavily-wooded area about a mile from where his vehicle had been found, clothed in much the same way as when Zinkhan was last seen, and buried in a shallow grave.  Investigators concluded that Zinkhan had dug his own grave and covered himself with dirt and debris before shooting himself in the head.
 
"The body was purposely concealed," said Athens-Clark County Police Chief Jack Lumpkin. 
"The body was beneath the earth…purposely concealed in a manner not to be discovered.  A person not accustomed to the woods would not have found it."  Lumpkin also said that investigators found two handguns at the gravesite.

Photo Credit: Associated Press

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Comments

[sd]

My humble theory is that Zinkhan was a good man with intimacy difficulties and low social skills. His wife turned to friends outside of home (the theater) to look away from the challenges/problems in the marriage, and perhaps had an affair, and perhaps contemplating divorce. The marriage counseling, for some reason, did not help fix their satisfaction with each other. Zinkhan was jealous of Bruce's social outlet, because he wanted to make their relationships work (i.e. he didn't like that she could find solace there) and because he did not have any source of solace himself. Furthermore, he was so distressed that he believed he could not stand if his wife divorced from him. He could not see that he would be able to find someone else. After all, last time her married a younger woman (who was perhaps attracted to his status and income), helped her through her graduate degree, and then she grew distant from him, and as a divorce attorney she could easily leave with little loss herself. He did not have much hope for starting over... The marriage counselor should have really referred him (and maybe her too) to individual counseling first.