Prof wanted in killings found dead in Ga. woods

Cadaver dogs found the body of a wanted professor "beneath the earth" in the north Georgia woods Saturday, two weeks after police say he shot his wife and two other people to death outside a community theater, then vanished.

Searchers found two guns near the body of marketing professor George Zinkhan, 57, but police wouldn't say how he died. They did say it appears he buried himself in brush and dirt.

"A person who is not accustomed to the woods would never have found the body," said Athens-Clarke County Police Chief Joseph Lumpkin.

Zinkhan disappeared after the April 25 shootings near the University of Georgia, where he'd had a spotless record since arriving to teach in the Terry College of Business in the 1990s.

Bulletins were issued nationwide and authorities kept watch on airports in case he tried to flee to Amsterdam, where he had taught part-time at a university since 2007. Federal authorities later revealed Zinkhan had a flight to Amsterdam booked before the shootings, but the professor never showed up at the airport on the May 2 departure date.

Instead, cadaver dogs found his body about 10 miles west of Athens in thick woods in Bogart, where he lived. Searchers — as many as 200 at one point — had been scouring the woods since his Jeep was found wrecked and abandoned in a ravine about a mile away a week ago. The guns found with him matched the description provided by people who witnessed the shootings.

Neighbor Bob Covington called Saturday's discovery "another sad chapter to the story." Zinkhan dropped off his children at Covington's house after the shootings, saying there was an emergency. It was the last time anyone saw him alive.

"It's been two weeks of people being on pins and needles, every time you see a police car," Covington said. "I think this will ease a lot of tension. People can get back to their lives and move on from this horrible tragedy."

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime lab confirmed later Saturday that the body was Zinkhan.

Reached by phone at her home in Baltimore, his mother, Mary, said she was aware he'd been found.

"I've heard that news," she said. "I have nothing to say about it."

via The Associated Press: Prof wanted in killings found dead in Ga. woods.

Why won't they say how he died? Perhaps it is simply to spare his kids the trauma of it. I wonder, however, having always enjoyed Sherlock Holmes stories, if this murderer killed himself in a way that makes him difficult to identify. Based on the fact that he told his class not to worry about finals, it seems like he may have been planning this for some time. As a brilliant marketing expert, he may have devised some deception with a body similar to his own. Not likely, but something I wonder if the authorities have considered.