STILL SEARCHING FOR RACHEL: Photo May Hold Clues

By JACQUELINE PRIMO | Reporter

The case of the disappearance of 11-year-old Rachel Hanna Ziselman has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. Officially classified as a “Non-Family Abduction” by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Rachel vanished from Pacific Palisades on Labor Day, 1977 while walking to her home on Monument Street.

“Over the years, I’ve heard several accusations or theories that a member of my family was involved in my sister’s disappearance – usually my father,” Rachel’s brother Sam Ziselman told the Palisadian-Post.

Sam, now 52 and happily married, with blue eyes like his sister and the bone structure of his late father John, has a matter-of-fact way of speaking and chooses his words carefully – the result of a career as a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles.

On first impression he is the kind of man who speaks only when he has something to say. When talking about his missing sister, Sam sounds both grave and loving, having balanced hope with a harsh dose of reality for the 38 years she has been missing.

“Our Rachie,” he calls her.

For as long as his sister has been missing (Rachel disappeared when Sam was 14), Sam has been fielding public accusations that his family was somehow involved.

“My parents were separated at the time Rachel went missing, not divorced,” Ziselman clarified, quelling any rumors that Rachel’s disappearance was the result of a custody dispute gone bad.

“In fact, my parents ended their separation several weeks after Rachel disappeared and lived together until my father’s death (in 2009),” he added.

Sam says his family had nothing to gain from Rachel’s disappearance, but in September of 1977, the police overturned tables in search of evidence.

“Law enforcement investigators crawled 40 yards up my parents’ rear ends when investigating my sister’s disappearance,” Ziselman told the Post. “They looked for hidden insurance policies, unpaid debts, secret lovers, stashed money and connections to criminals. The investigation was intrusive, lengthy, thorough and completely appropriate.”

Detectives came up empty-handed.

“Police and private detectives, despite considerable efforts, found no real evidence linking my sister’s disappearance to my father, mother, sister or myself,” Sam said. “As a defense lawyer, who has the experience of having handled thousands of criminal cases, I can tell you why: It doesn’t exist because that’s not what happened.”

Even though family members were ruled out as having any involvement in Rachel’s disappearance, it hasn’t brought the investigation any closer to finding answers and 38 years later, the status of the case is still “unsolved.”

“Rachel’s case file is probably sitting on a shelf with hundreds, if not thousands of others,” Sam said in an April 2015 interview with the Post.

“I wish I could have found out [what happened to her] before my dad died…It’s hard to think of my parents going to their graves not knowing what happened,” he added somberly, noting he suspects there is a “5 percent chance” of finding out before he himself dies.

When the case of a missing child goes unsolved for decades, grappling with the what ifs can be maddening.

“Somebody somewhere knows something,” Sam said, adding that even this many years later there is still a chance that people could find related evidence in their yards, attics or closets, or someone could make a deathbed confession that could bring the case some closure.

A photograph that surfaced after the Post’s first article in the series about Rachel’s disappearance may hold clues.

Lilies of the Nile

Lisa Sutton (née Kurtz) was 15 in the summer of 1977 and like most teenagers in the Palisades, she and her friend Linda Frasier (née Buffa) would spend their days wandering the Village, going to the beach, hanging out at each other’s houses and lounging on the Village Green.

The girls had recently bought photo albums and were interested in photography, Sutton told the Post.

Less than a month before Rachel Ziselman disappeared, Sutton said she and Frasier were walking on Sunset Blvd. by the Village Green when they saw a man crouching by purple flowers she identified as Lilies of the Nile.

“He was crouching in the bushes [on the Village Green] with a fancy camera, taking our picture,” Sutton said in a March 2015 interview with the Post, elaborating that the man had a camera with a “telephoto lens.”

“About a week later we were walking past the same spot again, and this guy pops up off the Village Green and says, ‘Hey, I took your picture!’ We were sort of dumbfounded. Everybody knew everybody else in town and I had never seen this guy before,” Sutton said. “I remember a baseball cap, dark curly hair and sunglasses. I swear he said his name was ‘Rod.’”

After “chatting up” the girls for a few minutes, the man offered to take more pictures of them at another location, Sutton said.

“You guys are so beautiful, you could be models,” Sutton remembered him saying before he offered to take their pictures in his van parked nearby.

Sutton said she and Linda were “young and obnoxious but also savvy” – a trio of words that could describe many teenagers – and that the girls playfully declined. The photo the man had taken of the two teens, however, remained a point of interest. They each wanted it for their scrapbooks.

“I said I wanted to keep the picture for my photo album, but Linda wanted it too. So she said to the man, ‘Would you hold up the picture and I’ll take a picture of you holding it up?’ and he refused…I don’t remember how [the conversation] broke up but he walked off at some point, and we gave up,” Sutton said.

She didn’t think much about the encounter after that.

“Rachel disappeared about three weeks later, and in my teenage mind there was no connection,” Sutton said. “[Linda and I would] hang out on the Village Green for hours at a time. People would hit on you all the time there and at the beach and it just wasn’t unusual.”

In Part 4 of this series, the Post will explore a possible connection between Lisa Sutton’s photo and an infamous serial killer and rapist who was convicted of killing seven girls and women in Southern California from 1977-1979. If you have any information or stories pertaining to Rachel’s disappearance or any memories of Rachel you would like to share, contact the writer Jacqueline@palipost.com.