House shopping can be fun for some, and for others it can be a pain. But in our story today, house shopping leads to murder.
Welcome to The Secret Sits, I’m your host John Dodson. Join us every Thursday as we uncover the Secrets behind the world’s most fascinating true crime cases. You can find all episodes of The Secret Sits for free on Apple Podcast, Spotify or where ever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you are hearing, reach out to us on Instagram and Facebook @The Secret Sits Podcast or on Twitter @SecretSitsPod. Now, on with our story.
Our story today zeros in on a woman named Lindsay Elizabeth Buziak, Lindsay was born on November 2nd, 1983 making her 24-years-old at the time of our story, in 2008. Lindsay’s parents were Jeff and Evelyn Buziak and she had one sister called Sara. Our story unfolds in January of 2008 in Victoria, British Columbia. Victoria is the southernmost major city in Western Canada. The city boasts a population of around 92K residence.
Lindsay was trying to gain traction in her job as a real estate agent, and she had made a promising start thus far, she was known as a caring person and she was remarkable to everyone who met her. Lindsay was dating Jason Zailo, who was a member of a particularly prominent family within Victoria, Jason’s family owned and operated several successful real estate businesses and they were well known throughout the province. Jason himself was a real estate broker who also had his real estate license.
One day, in late January of 2008, Lindsay’s phone rang, she did not recognize the number, but in Lindsay’s line of work, you have to take every call, just in case. Lindsay answered the call and on the other end of the phone was a woman with a strange sounding foreign accent, the woman told Lindsay that she and her husband were looking to purchase a home in Victoria and they needed to find a property urgently. The woman gave Lindsay the permitters of what they were searching for, they need to have a house that was already set up, it needed to be immediately move-in ready, it had to be within 15 to 20 minutes from town, she also wanted a separate housekeeper’s quarters within the house and they were looking at a home in the million-dollar price range. Lindsay wrote the list of requirements in her day planner, so she could begin searching.
This call struck Lindsay as strange; you see, Lindsay was in the, let’s call it, smaller real estate game, she had never sold any real estate costing a million dollars. Not to say that she was not capable, in this area of Victoria houses typically sell for around half a million dollars anyway. But she began to question if she was out of her depth and she also began to question how this mysterious woman had obtained her phone number. Lindsay asked the woman how she happened to come by her name and phone number and the woman told Lindsay that she knew one of her former clients and she had gotten her information from them.
This seemed strange, but somewhat possible to Lindsay. Lindsay did contact some of her former clients inquiring about this mysterious woman, but she did not sound familiar to anyone Lindsay spoke with.
After coping down the information about the woman’s interests when it came to the property she wanted, Lindsay immediately told her boyfriend Jason about the call, she also called her father Jeff, who was also a real estate agent, to tell him about the call as well, you can already tell, even Lindsay felt as if something was off about this situation. Jason told Lindsay that she should absolutely take on this client, this is how you get the big fish to bite, she could not pass up on this amazing commission. As an added layer of support for his girlfriend, Jason offered to also go to the house showing with Lindsay and wait outside in his car for her.
And with these assurances, Lindsay went to work finding a suitable property for the woman. Lindsay compiled a list and emailed a few suggestions to the woman on February 1st. The two women exchanged 10 more phone calls over the next few days. One of those calls lasted ten minutes. Lindsay gave the woman an address: 1702 De Sousa Place. It was in a suburb of Victoria called Saanich and was in the Gordon Head neighborhood. They set a meeting for the next day at 5:30 PM Saturday, February 2nd, 2008.
As I have said, Lindsay Buziak was the kind of person, people would gravitate toward, her boyfriend Jason was proof of this, Lindsay’s sister said, “She was with Jason at the time, and I knew that she was extremely happy”. Lindsay and Jason had been dating for a little less than a year and Jason’s mom Shirly purchased an expensive waterfront condo that the newly minted couple moved into.
Lindsay’s father Jeff said, “He adored Lindsay, but he was overprotective, over-possessive, jealous, and that really bothered Lindsay.”
Lindsay had been in the real estate business for about a year at this point and even in her short tenure she felt a bit uneasy about this situation and she expressed this to her father, she told him, there is something weird I’m sensing about this, she felt the woman on the phone sounded strange. Lindsay was also concerned because the woman had not called her company number, which is the number on her brochures, but instead had called her personal cell phone number.
The woman had given Lindsay the name of her former client who had shared her contact information, but when Lindsay attempted to confirm this story through her former client, they never answered her calls because they were out of town and unavailable. All of these strange things did not make Lindsay so suspicious that she wanted to back out of the deal, but she did ask Jason to go to the listing appointment for support. Jason is 6 foot 3 and weighs in at 240lbs, he is also an ex-semiprofessional hockey player, he could be an intimidating figure to be sure.
As Saturday arrived, it was a day like any other, Lindsay and Jason went out for a late lunch at a local restaurant called Sauce and they paid their bill at 4:24PM, just over an hour until Lindsay’s appointment. The couple had arrived separately to the restaurant and they left in their own separate vehicles as well. Lindsay ran home to change for her showing and Jason traveled to SHC Autographx auto shop. The owners had hired Jason to sell the property and he was bringing by an offer to present to them.
That evening Jason had planned to go to dinner with his friend Cohen Oatmen. Cohen met Jason while he was still at the auto shop. The two men left auto shop in Jason’s car at 5:30 PM. Jason tried using his GPS in the car to find the house; however, he could not get it to work. So, he called Lindsay for directions. While on the phone with her, the couple arrived for their showing. Lindsay told Jason, “Okay, I’ll see you in a bit. I gotta go, the Mexicans are here.” I am not quite sure what to make of this nickname, but I digress.
Jason was running just a bit behind schedule as he and his friend left the auto shop the CCTV footage at the auto shop showed Jason and Cohen leaving right at 5:30PM, the time he was suppose to already be at Lindsay’s showing. Jason text Lindsay to let her know that he was running behind, but he was on his way.
Lindsay arrived at the cul-de-sac on De Sousa Place, this small cul-de-sac had 4 homes situated in it. The house Lindsay would be showing was number 1702 and this house sat on the outer end of the four houses, the home was located at more of the intersection than the interior portion of the cul-de-sac. The road which intersected with De Sousa Place was Torquay Drive, which was a heavily traveled thoroughfare. The side of this house and the fence around the back yard ran parallel to Torquay Drive.
Now this mysterious client had told Lindsay that she would be coming to this showing alone, but when the woman arrived for her appointment at 5:30PM, two eye witnesses saw the woman along with a 6-foot-tall Caucasian man with dark hair. Now, this is Victoria in February and on this day the sunset was at 5:15PM, so by the time Lindsay is meeting this couple it is already pretty dark outside. The woman had short blond hair, almost like a bob and witnesses stated she appeared to be between 35 and 45-years-old. The witnesses said that the woman was easily rememberable because she was wearing a very distinct dress, this dress is a mid-thigh length dress with a wavey color blocking pattern of black, white and pink. As Lindsay approached the couple at the back of her car, which was parked in the driveway, she shakes their hands, but those who witnessed this introduction said they could tell Lindsay had never met these people before. After their introduction the trio turned and walked into the house and shut the door behind them.
Jason and Cohen arrived at the cul-de-sac at approximately 5:40PM, As they were driving up to the house, Jason could make out the hazy shape of a tall male figure through the glass in the front door. It seemed as if the front door was just closing as Jason and Cohen pulled up, Jason assumed that maybe they had just begun the showing. The mysterious couple were actually just about to walk out of the front door and leave, and as Jason turned into the cul-de-sac, he interrupted them leaving, if he had been five seconds later, he would have driven right past them walking out into the driveway. Jason pulled up to the front of the house and parked on the street, they sat there for about 10 minutes before Jason decided to move his truck over to Torquay Drive, just beside the home, and park there. Jason explained that he did this because he did not want to be seen as the nosey overbearing boyfriend. After moving to the side of the house, Jason waited for another 10 minutes to pass. It was now 6:00PM, 30 minutes into Lindsay’s showing, so Jason text her to make sure that everything was going ok inside of the large house. Jason could tell, by looking at his phone, that Lindsay never saw this message.
Tired of waiting, with no answers, Jason walked to the front door of the house, when he tried the door handle, he found that the door was locked. This was a big no-no in the real estate world. He could see inside of the house through the mottled glass on the front door and he could see Lindsay’s shoes there in the foyer. Jason began ringing the doorbell and knocking on the door, he could not see any movement inside of the house and no one came to the door. This is when Jason dialed 911.
At 6:05 PM, Jason called 911. He told the dispatcher that his girlfriend was meeting an out-of-town client for a real estate showing. Jason told the 911 dispatcher that Lindsay was “kind of scared” and that he “kind of followed her” for this showing. Jason was asking for police to come and do a wellness check on the empty house.
While Jason was on the phone with 911, Cohen went around the back of the house, Jason helped to boost Cohen over the fence and he entered the back yard and when he did, he could see that the back patio door to the house was wide open. He called out to Jason, and told him that he had found a way in, Jason told the 911 dispatcher that they two men were going to enter the house and he hung up. Jason ran back around to the front of the house, to the front door.
Cohen entered the home and made his way to the front door; he then unlocked the door to allow Jason to gain entry. The two men split up to search the house, Cohen took the downstairs and Jason took the upstairs. Jason immediately began calling out Lindsay’s name and he scampered up the stairs to the second floor, he entered the main bedroom, located just at the top of the stairs, and there he found Lindsay Buziak lying in a pool of blood in the main bedroom. Jason yelled for Cohen to call 911 again. Jason tried, in vain, to perform CPR but it was too late. Cohen told the 911 dispatcher about some bloody footprints in the house and about Jason finding Lindsay in a pool of blood.
As police responded to the 911 call, they saw Jason and Cohen in the upstairs window waving them down. And as soon as paramedics arrived, they pronounced Lindsay dead. Police took both Jason and Cohen into custody and transported them separately to the police station to be interviewed. Police cleared the big empty house, there was no one else there. They then brought in a K9 unit to search for the missing couple, but after leaving the house, their scent just vanished. Lindsay had multiple stab wounds, but no defensive wounds, indicating that she had probably been stabbed from behind first and taken off guard. Nothing had been taken from the house, none of Lindsay’s belongings had been taken and Lindsay had not been sexually assaulted.
This case has some unique time markers that I would like to discuss. Firstly, the lockbox on the home was computerized and attached to a server, which records the times it is opened. Because of this we know for a fact that Lindsay unlocked the lockbox at 5:29PM. Lindsay showed the couple the downstairs of the house for approximately 11 minutes and then the trio headed to the second floor. At 5:41PM Lindsay placed a call on her phone, investigators believe by accident. This phone call goes to a friend that Lindsay had not spoken to for quite some time, the person’s voicemail picks up and all that can be heard on the message is muffled sound.
Police believe that this was a pocket call, or butt dial. As Lindsay entered the main bedroom and made her way across the large room toward the in-suit bathroom, the mysterious couple followed in her wake and as she crossed the threshold of the room, they attacked. Police believe that the pocket dial was a direct result of this attack. They believe that the attackers somehow hit buttons on Lindsay’s BlackBerry and accidentally sent out a call.
Lindsay had been stabbed over 40 times, and the police had no leads on who this mysterious couple were, or how they were able to slip out of the house unnoticed. The only people at the house when law enforcement arrived had been Jason and Cohen.
The police go through Jason’s alibi for the day, looking into each detail of his day, he had met Lindsay for lunch at Sauce, then traveled to his meeting at the nearby auto shop while Lindsay ran home to get ready for the house showing. One hour after Jason had arrived at the business, surveillance video confirms that Jason and Cohen are just leaving their location at the same time it is confirmed that Lindsay first opened the door for her clients, and now her suspected murderers. The police clear Jason and Cohen or any wrong doing and they are released. According to the Saanich Police Department, Jason Zailo has been interviewed several times over the years and has always cooperated with the police. He has also passed a polygraph test.
Police detectives could find no traces of DNA, fingerprints or any other physical evidence at the scene of this horrific crime. Because of the cleanliness of this crime, police quickly developed a theory that this murder may have been a carefully-organized hit, and that this mysterious couple could have been two hired hitmen or women, as it were. Police do believe that the killers were attempting to leave through the house’s front door as Jason drove up and that after they quickly reentered the house, they fled out of the back patio door, leaving the French doors open as they escaped. Police go on to say that they believe the couple went over the fence and to a get away car, most likely parked on or near Torquay Drive. All of the cars located on the cul-de-sac were accounted for and witnesses walking on foot did not see any cars leave the cul-de-sac.
One very interesting piece of evidence in this case is the cell phone used by the mystery woman to call Lindsay Buziak. This phone was a burner phone, it had been purchased 3 months earlier in Vancouver. This phone had never been used in the whole 3 months after it was purchased, until it was used to call Lindsay Buziak and Lindsay Buziak was also the only person ever called using this phone. The phone was activated under the name Paulo Rodriguez, which the police have determined was a fake name. The phone was registered to a random address in Vancouver. This address does belong to an actual business, but police believe it was chosen at random. Not long after the murder took place, this phone was deactivated and it has never been used since. Tracing the phone through cell phone towers, we can see that it traveled from Vancouver to Victoria on the ferry boat, just one day before the murder. All of this leads investigators to believe that this phone was purchased with the sole plan of using it for this murder, further supporting their theory that this was a well-uncastrated murder. Detective Horsley stated, "The phone was only ever used for one thing and that was to phone Lindsay Buziak. It's a level of planning that clearly shows Lindsay Buziak was the target. The issue is Was she really the target or was she a scapegoat of convenience?"
Jason Zailo’s prominent family came under scrutiny and were investigated for this case as well. You see, the cul-de-sac where this house sat was named De Sousa Court, after the land developer Joe De Sousa. And who is Joe De Sousa, you ask, well he was a close friend and business associate of Sherley Zailo, Jason’s mother. Some of the homes on this street were still under construction at the time of this murder and Joe De Sousa had been on that street just one hour before the murder took place. This did not turn out to be the lead police thought it might be and the Zailo family were all dropped from the potential suspect list.
But even though the Zailo family, including Jason were no longer considered suspects, many in the public still believed that Jason could have had something to do with the murder. Could he have been involved behind the scenes, as in ordering the hit? Lindsay’s father was very vocal about Jason being overbearing and controlling and Lindsay had spoken to her father just 6 weeks before her murder and during conversations with her father, Lindsay had confided in her dad that she was considering ending her relationship with Jason. Could even a rumor of this be enough to cause Jason to order a hit on his girlfriend, I do not think so, but what do you think?
There were no big breaks in this case and in September of 2010, NBC Dateline aired an episode entitled “Dream House Murder”. In this episode Saanich Police Detectives revealed that in December of 2007, approximately 8 weeks before Lindsay’s murder, Lindsay Buzaik had attempted to contact an old friend of her ex-boyfriend’s while she was on a trip to Calgary. This person Lindsay was attempting to contact was a known drug dealer, although Lindsay was not known to use illegal drugs. It is not clear if she ever got in touch with this person or what she wanted to speak to him about in the first place. But following this out of the ordinary phone call, on January 22nd, 2008, police conducted the largest drug bust in Alberta’s history, the man Lindsay had been trying to contact was arrested in this operation and he was considered one of the major participants in the illegal drug trafficking operation.
This led police to question weather Lindsay could have been murdered by one of the drug cartels because they may have believed she was a police informant. Police detectives investigated this possibility, but quickly put it aside, the motive did not fit, because they knew that Lindsay was not an informant and the cartel’s hired kills did not fit this MO. Crime scene investigator Yolanda McClary and homicide detective Dwayne Stanton both agreed that Lindsay’s murder was not a drug cartel hit, it was a brutal and amateurish killing. What both of these professionals do believe is that Lindsay Buziak’s murder was planned out very well and that it was deeply personal, they also believe that this was done by someone close to Lindsay.
The person had to be close enough to Lindsay to have access to inside information at the Re/Max office where she worked. There was one woman who worked at the office with Lindsay and the day after Lindsay’s murder she just up and quit, out of nowhere. And this woman was found to have romantic connections with people involved in that large drug trafficking bust. Is that suspicious? You tell me. But maybe it was just bad timing. Also, once again, a name comes up we have heard before, because who was the branch manager for the Re/Max office Lindsay worked at? Shirley Zailo, Jason’s mother. Could Shirley be involved, what would be her motive?
In 2008, one of Linday’s close friends was startled awake in the middle of the night, she looked at her phone, but she did not recognize the number. Half-asleep she answered the phone, in her sleepy daze Nikki could not quite make out what the caller on the other end of the phone was saying, but she began to notice that the woman had a strange accent that she could not quite place. Nikki’s dear friend Linday Buziak popped into her head and she remembered how Lindsay had the phone call from the woman with the strange accent she could not place and she thought the accent was fake, and then she was murdered.
The phone hung up and now Nikki was fully awake, she called the number back, but no one answered. So, she called back again and again, she repeatedly called the number almost 30 times in a row until someone finally answered. And who do you think was on the other end of the line? It was someone you are already kind of familiar with, Shirley Zailo, that’s right, Jason’s mother. But the problem with this was that Nikki did not know Shirley Zailo. She asked the woman why she had called her in the middle of the night and how she had gotten her number in the first place. Shirley stated that she had meant to call a different Nikki, her secretary’s name was also Nikki. So Nikki asked why she even had her number in her contact list, to this Shirley said that she assumed Jason must have added her number. Just a side note to this portion of events, Shirley Zailo fully denies that any of these events with Nikki ever took place. Authorities have never spoken about this incident in public, so we are unsure if they have been investigated.
In August of 2017 a message was posted on a public message board at lindsaybuziakmurder.com, a website dedicated to solving this murder, we will link this site in our show notes. This message stated: “I killed Lindsay and stupid cops will never prove it, so you all got nothin’, no one gives a shit anymore anyhow except her crybaby dad. Even her fakey girlfriends have washed it away, typical loser chicks. Saanich cops dropped it cause they can’t solve shit and where told to drop it. Cut the phony investigation, it’s done. Go home losers, forget about her. The street always rules, bitches die every day.” This message, which reads like a full confession gained a lot of attention and Lindsay’s dad did try to get Saanich police to pursue this as a lead, but it never led to any new substantive leads.
In 2020 the Capital Daily obtained a public records request for this case, in the documents released they learned that police were aware of two different burner phones used in this case, not just the one. One phone was used for all calls to and from Lindsay and the other phone was only used to call the first phone to check the voicemail, sneaky sneaky. In this release they also learned that police had found what they considered strange internet activity in the time leading up to the murder including the fact that some of Lindsay’s chat messages were deleted but police could not recover any of them. They also initially felt that some of Lindsay’s Facebook friends had some very unsavory pasts and they may have played a role in her murder.
The police in Greater Victoria, British Columbia have interviewed hundreds of people and they have followed up on thousands of leads, but whoever committed this heinous murder, remains a mystery to this day. One thing that has made this case so difficult to solve is that no one could say why anyone would want Lindsay dead, she had no enemies and no one had a motive for this murder.
Lindsay Buzaik’s father, Jeff said, “I believe the people who made the decision to kill her are cowards, and cowards need to be caught, these people have to know that they're not going to get away with murdering Lindsay Buziak."
In February of each year, Jeff leads an annual walk, in remembrance of Lindsay and to keep her case in the public eye. This even is called, The Walk for Justice. Anyone with information on the case is asked to call Saanich police at 250-475-4321 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).