Professor’s neighbors, colleagues stunned

He was a father, a husband, a prodigious researcher. He was a reluctant department head, a would-be poet, an aloof neighbor. He never cut the grass at his suburban Athens home — his wife did the yard work. He never spoke of the guns he owned.

A week ago, University of Georgia marketing professor George Martin Zinkhan III allegedly walked into a festive community theater gathering and opened fire with two handguns, killing his wife and two men in front of two dozen horrified witnesses. As Zinkhan blasted away, police say, his two children, ages 10 and 8, waited in his car parked around the corner.

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Robert Lowery/Lowery Studio

A family portrait of Zinkhan and wife Marie Bruce in 2005. Neighbors say they didn’t know of any marital discord.

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Co-workers and neighbors are still dumfounded, still wrestling with the why.

“What’s most disturbing is he left these kids without a mother and pretty much without a father,” said UGA professor Warren French, a longtime friend. “He liked the recognition for his reputation, but he didn’t flaunt it. He has damaged that reputation. He can’t see his kids. This doesn’t make sense for George.”

The bloodbath outside Athens Community Theatre was “one of the ugliest scenes I’ve ever seen,” an investigator arriving at the scene radioed his fellow officers. Killed were Zinkhan’s wife, 47-year-old Marie Bruce; Ben Teague, 63, and Tom Tanner, 40 — all members of the close-knit theater group, the Town and Gown Players. Tanner’s young daughter watched the rampage.

The April 25 killings haunted Athens as the week unfolded. Police on Thursday found Zinkhan’s red Jeep in a ravine about a mile from his home. But there has been no sign of the tall, goateed professor despite a worldwide alert issued for his capture. He had earlier booked a ticket for Amsterdam, where he taught every year at Vrije Universiteit and owned a home. But his passport has not been used.

Police have not discussed a motive for the killings. But Zinkhan’s wife was seeking a divorce, the FBI agent leading the investigation said, although no divorce papers had been filed in Clarke County. Neighbors say they knew nothing of any marital discord.

“I never even heard him raise his voice to his kids or Marie, and my daughter, who baby-sat for them, said the same thing,” said Bob Covington, who lived next door to the family for nine years.

Covington said Zinkhan was an introvert who revealed little to those in his Bogart subdivision. He wasn’t terribly unfriendly, Covington said; he just seemed to be somewhere else.

“You’d have five- to seven-word conversations with him,” he said. “But Marie was very vivacious and friendly. She was the polar opposite of him. I figured he was a different person at work. I thought maybe he just vegges out when he gets home.”

Despite the perceived aloofness, Covington said the idea of a man capable of killing three people is at odds with the neighbor he knew. Covington often saw the business professor kicking a soccer ball in the yard with his son or chatting with Marie on their porch.

Covington remembered seeing Zinkhan in his driveway about

4:30 p.m. last Friday, the day before the shootings.

“I said to him, ‘My son (a UGA freshman) saw you on campus the other day.’ And he said, ‘Yeah. That’s where I hang out.’ And that was it. That was the typical conversation with him.”

Covington said the two families watched each other’s pets when the other family traveled. But those neighborly niceties were always arranged by Bruce, an attorney who cut back on her work hours after the birth of their children.

After the slayings, Zinkhan dropped off his two children at Covington’s, saying there was an emergency and asked if he could watch them for an hour or so. “He didn’t seem upset,” Covington said. “The only thing that stuck in my mind is he sort of jogged out of my garage.”

Zinkhan attended Boys Latin School in Maryland, where he was known as Martin. He got a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 1974 and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1981.

Before coming to UGA, he taught at the University of Houston where some students remember him fondly. Richard Tansey, who studied at the university in the late 1980s and early 1990s, took some of Zinkhan’s classes and went to him for advice.

“George created a nurturing environment,” Tansely told the UGA newspaper, the Red & Black. “I would have never gotten a Ph.D. in marketing without George.”

Zinkhan joined UGA in 1994 as head of the marketing department in the Terry School of Business. He was already a published academic and had left an ex-wife and three children behind in Texas.

A look at Zinkhan’s 40-page curriculum vitae from 2004 indicates he was a relentless researcher, writer and collaborator in the fields of marketing and advertising.

He said he co-authored six books, more than 100 professional journal articles, 27 chapters in books, 20 published works of poetry, 80 other publications and working papers. He said he had been an editor on 10 professional journal review boards and a journal reviewer more than 50 times.

“He was an intellectual catalyst,” said French, 67, who preceded Zinkhan as department head. “He didn’t sleep through the night. He’d get up and start working on things. Was he a workaholic? He was still doing research at 57 that others did in their 20s.”

French, who still teaches business ethics, became friends with the new arrival and introduced the divorced Zinkhan to Bruce, also divorced. Bruce later went to law school.

Zinkham had so many ideas for research that he needed to frequently collaborate. “He’s very dependent on co-authors. He could delegate as much of the grunt work as possible (on articles); I used to kid him about that,” French said.

Advertising was his forte. He was keen on what made print advertising work and was fascinated by how it was moving to the Internet. “He wasn’t afraid of change,” French said. “He was curious: Where will this take us?”

Zinkhan had judged the Peabody awards at the university for several years, French said. “He relished that. He loved to go down there and watch the shows.” The activity helped keep Zinkhan’s hand in media’s cutting edge.

The professor’s research subjects were varied — sexual roles in advertising, popular culture, ethics and, increasingly, how the Internet was changing the face of advertising and marketing. In 2004, he wrote about “The E-Mergence of E-Dating” with Angeline Close, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

“He was a good academic mentor prior to this,” Close said in a telephone interview. “I don’t really want to say much more until we get some closure on this.”

Zinkhan despised meetings and bureaucracy, co-workers say. He returned to teaching full time in 2001 as the Coca-Cola Company Professor of Marketing.

The professor dabbled in poetry, publishing a number of pieces, including a 2004 verse called “B-School.” The end reads: “the dark department head is always lurking/making the rounds with a crooked, yankee-trader smile/full of false promise for a better time to come.”

French said Zinkhan was recently preparing for the annual UGA faculty-student softball game. Zinkhan enjoyed pitching. French saw him practicing the day before the killings.

“That doesn’t sound like a guy planning to eliminate his wife the next afternoon,” he said.

— Staff writers Mark Davis, Chip Towers and Christian Boone contributed to this report.