In February 2008, a mysterious couple lured Lindsay Buziak to a $1 million home for a viewing, where she was brutally murdered. To this day, no one knows who killed her.
Family HandoutLindsay Buziak was a Canadian real estate agent who was murdered during a home showing in 2008.
On Feb. 1, 2008, 24-year-old real estate agent Lindsay Buziak got a mysterious cold call from a woman requesting to view a $1 million home. A junior employee at her agency in Canada, Buziak thought it was odd that she’d been singled out for such a big sale. But she was excited about the opportunity, realizing that the commission would certainly be more than worth her while.
She found a property that fit this couple’s requirements and arranged to show them the home the following day at 5:30 p.m.
On the evening of Feb. 2, 2008, eyewitnesses saw Buziak meeting a pair of clients in front of the home: a six-foot-tall white man with dark hair and a long jacket, and a woman with short blonde hair and a distinctive red and black patterned dress. Buziak shook their hands and showed them into the house.
About half an hour later, Buziak’s boyfriend, Jason Zailo, entered the house to check on Buziak — and found her in an upstairs bedroom, lying in a puddle of her own blood. She had been stabbed to death.
To this day, Lindsay Buziak’s murder remains unsolved. But it was just the beginning of what would prove to be a truly bizarre investigation.
Who Was Lindsay Buziak?
Lindsay Buziak was born on Nov. 2, 1983 to Jeff Buziak and Evelyn Reitmayer. Her friends and colleagues described her as a joyful, social, and caring person.
Come 2006, Buziak was dating Jason Zailo, who came from a family of successful real estate agents. Buziak had just begun her own real estate career, and often turned to Zailo and her father, also a real estate agent, for advice.
“Getting into real estate was a big thing for her,” her sister Sara said in a 2017 True Crime Daily article. “She loved it.”
Change.orgLindsay Buziak worked in Victoria, British Columbia.
Lindsay was still just at the start of her career when she received a call on Feb. 1, 2008 from a couple claiming to be prospective buyers. The caller, a woman with a Spanish-sounding accent, was looking to buy a $1 million home for herself and her husband — and they needed it within two days.
Wondering why the couple had singled out an early-career real estate agent, Buziak asked the caller who had referred her. The woman said it had been a friend of her husband’s. Buziak agreed to meet with the couple the following evening and show them a potential home in Gordon Head, Victoria.
It seemed too good to be true, and Buziak was a bit suspicious of the couple. Still, this was the exact type of scenario any up-and-coming agent would dream of falling on their desk.
To set Buziak’s mind at ease, Zailo assured her that he would wait outside in his car during the tour, far enough away that the couple wouldn’t notice his presence.
Zailo, a six-foot-three former semipro hockey player, was, Buziak figured, as good a person as any to stand by in case something went awry. Unfortunately, he wasn’t standing close enough.
Lindsay Buziak’s Home Showing Gone Wrong
At 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 2, 2008, Buziak arrived at 1702 De Sousa Pl., the home she had found for the mysterious couple.
Zailo was running a few minutes late that day. He had just wrapped up a meeting at an auto shop, where he picked up a colleague with whom he had planned to play hockey later that evening.
Text messages between Zailo and Buziak show that he had alerted her to his tardiness, and that he also struggled to find the house. The property was so new that it reportedly didn’t even show up on Zailo’s GPS.
Google Maps1701 De Sousa Pl., the property where Lindsay Buziak was murdered.
At around 5:30 p.m., eyewitnesses saw Buziak meeting a pair of clients, a man and a woman, in front of the house. Buziak was seen shaking their hands and leading them inside.
Around 5:41, there was an outbound call from Buziak’s cell phone to a friend she hadn’t spoken to in some time. According to Saanich Police Sergeant Chris Horsley, “all you can hear is muffling on the message.” Police believe this was a pocket dial.
Zailo and his colleague arrived at the house around 5:45 p.m. True to his word, Zailo remained in the parked car outside, believing the tour was still underway.
Police suspect Buziak was attacked just 10 minutes after she and the couple entered the house — around the time Buziak’s phone made that pocket call. Zailo, sitting right outside in his car, had no clue that his girlfriend inside was dying — or already dead.
However, he did notice that there appeared to be no sign of movement within the house. He tried texting and calling Buziak to see if everything was all right. She didn’t answer.
At 6 p.m., Zailo and his colleague decided to head into the house to check on her. Finding the front door locked, Zailo dialed 911 while he and his colleague went around to the back of the house. There, they found a patio door unlocked.
As soon as Zailo got inside the house, he ran upstairs, calling for Buziak. He found her in the master bedroom, covered in blood. She was dead.
The couple was nowhere to be found.
The Investigation Into Lindsay Buziak’s Death
Saanich PoliceNotes Lindsay Buziak took from her call with the mysterious client. She never wrote down the couple’s names.
Jason Zailo and his colleague were taken into police custody for questioning. Their story was corroborated with timestamped surveillance footage from the auto shop, which indicated that they could not have killed Buziak in the given timeframe.
Police attempted to track down the woman who had called Buziak to set up the home tour. The number was traced back to a prepaid cellphone, purchased several months earlier in Vancouver under the false name “Paulo Rodriguez.” It had only ever been used to contact Buziak, and was deactivated shortly after her murder.
Police began to suspect that the murder had been carefully planned.
Some have theorized that the Zailo family, who worked for the same real estate brokerage as Buziak, may have had something to do with the murder. Indeed, De Sousa Place, the street the house was built on, was named after Joe De Sousa, a developer who had allegedly worked closely with Jason’s mother, Shirley Zailo.
Lindsay’s father Jeff Buziak has described Shirley’s presence as “overbearing” and “controlling.” He claimed she had purchased a home for Jason and Lindsay to live in, apparently suggesting Shirley was trying to isolate Lindsay away from her family. However, Lindsay’s sister and mother refuted these claims, and Shirley herself explained that while Jason and Lindsay had access to the house, it was intended as a family summer home.
As Capital Daily reported in 2023, the police made a statement that “no member of the Zailo family is considered a person of interest or a suspect in this investigation.”
The police have also hypothesized that Lindsay Buziak may have been killed by members of a drug cartel. In December 2007, Buziak had traveled to Calgary to visit her father. Just a few weeks later, police raided a Calgary house in what would become the largest cocaine bust in the city’s history. Police suspected that the cartel may have mistakenly believed Buziak to have been an informant in this bust, and plotted her murder in retaliation.
Strangely, shortly after she got home from Calgary, Buziak had attempted to get in touch with an acquaintance whose relative just so happened to be involved in the drug operation. While police don’t know why Buziak called this individual, they’ve never found evidence that she had anything to do with the drug operation or the 2008 bust.
The trail went cold.
To make matters worse, the case has been further complicated by a slew of misinformation — much of which allegedly came from Lindsay Buziak’s own father.
How Misinformation Online Is Complicating The Case
In January 2023, Capital Daily released a lengthy, detailed report with previously unreleased information in the Lindsay Buziak case. Not only did the report go into the specifics of the ongoing investigation into Buziak’s murder, it also identified a major problem with the case: misinformation.
True crime is undoubtedly a popular genre in the online sphere. But that popularity can sometimes be detrimental. For every true crime podcast that helps solve a murder, there are countless online reports that get basic details wrong.
HandoutLindsay Buziak and her boyfriend, Jason Zailo.
However, in the case of Lindsay Buziak, much of the misinformation being circulated by social media users and major media platforms alike seemed to stem from her own father.
After Lindsay died, Jeff Buziak launched the site lindsaybuziakmurder.com in order to track the details of his daughter’s murder and find new evidence. But in doing so, he also made a number of unsubstantiated claims.
In one blog post, he insisted that Lindsay had written him a letter before she died, confiding in him that she “saw something” she shouldn’t have. But Jeff reportedly never turned this letter over to the police — and later seemingly confessed in an email that the letter was “faux.”
Many of the blog posts also painted the Zailo family as suspicious. It got to the point where in 2022, Jason’s mother Shirley Zailo sued Jeff and two associates for defamation, claiming they had published posts accusing her of murder.
“You shouldn’t be able to just throw people’s names out there and call them, you know, murderers and all the awful things that they’ve said with no knowledge or with no proof,” Jason Zailo said in 2023 in response to the allegations against his family.
Lindsay’s mother and Jeff’s ex-wife, Evelyn Reitmayer, has likewise cast doubt on several of Jeff’s claims, while expressing her “disgust” with the speculation surrounding her daughter’s case.
“The internet speculation, the sensationalization, the misinformation, and the defamation linked to Lindsay’s passing are all so negative while Lindsay herself was such a bright light of positivity and joy,” she said. “It’s all so unnecessary and has made an horrific situation even worse. I am hopeful that one day soon justice will be served, which will put an end to it all.”
In 2021, police announced that advancements in DNA technology had given them new leads in Buziak’s case. However, no new information has been released so far. For all of the conjecture surrounding the case, Lindsay Buziak’s murder is still a mystery.
After reading about the ongoing investigation into Lindsay Buziak’s murder, learn about the mysterious death of Dorothy Kilgallen, the “reporter who knew too much.” Then, learn about Kathleen Peterson’s mysterious death, and the true story behind The Staircase.
