Staff photo / Ed Runyan John Zanolli, 62, of Masury, listens Wednesday as guilty verdicts were read in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court. A jury found him guilty of aggravated murder and abuse of a corpse in the shooting death of his sister, Janice Zanolli, on Feb. 26, 2025.

WARREN — A jury found John Zanolli, 62, guilty of aggravated murder and abuse of a corpse Wednesday in the Feb. 26, 2025, shooting death of his sister, and he now faces the possibility of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Also possible is that Trumbull County Common Pleas Court Judge Sean O’Brien will sentence Zanolli to 20-, 25- or 30-years-to-life in prison on the aggravated murder conviction.

The jury deliberated only 90 minutes Wednesday afternoon before finding Zanolli guilty on both counts. His trial began Monday and testimony was finished Tuesday afternoon.

John Zanolli admitted to police that he killed his sister, Janice Zanolli, 65, who lived in the same house with him on Third Street in Masury, which is in Brookfield. Trumbull County Assistant Prosecutor Chris Becker said after the verdict that defending Zanolli was going to be a tall task because Zanolli admitted that he had been planning to kill his sister for months, which satisfied the element that the killing was premeditated.

Becker also credited the Brookfield Police Department for its work on the case and the assistance Brookfield got from crime scene investigator Joshua Merrill from the Girard Police Department. He was assisting as a member of the Trumbull County Homicide Task Force, which was created to help smaller departments investigate homicides.

Zanolli admitted that he shot his sister while she was in her bed after he walked in with a rifle and saw her reading a book. He said he and his sister made a murder-suicide pact months earlier because she no longer wanted to live but could not kill herself. He was then going to kill himself after killing her, he said, but he never killed himself.

Three days after killing her, their younger brother went to their house to check on her because no one had heard from Janice for a couple of days. They saw her in bed with blood on her face and hands and notified police.

When police arrived, they discovered that John Zanolli was in the house with a long gun pointed upward toward his head. After 30 minutes of conversation, police used a stun gun to immobilize John and took him into custody. That’s when he told police about the murder-suicide pact. Becker said in opening statements in the trial that the murder-suicide story was fiction.

One of the jurors in the trial told the newspaper after the verdict that the jury did not believe the murder-suicide story either.

“We were all in agreement that we did not believe that story,” the juror said.

Once they decided that, they also concluded that John had killed his sister over her decision as executor of her parents estate to sell the house, which had belonged to their parents.

The plan was to split the money among the five siblings, but it meant John would have to find a different home, according to trial testimony. The juror said the jury had to decide whether John was guilty of aggravated murder or murder. The juror said the jury looked at the law and “read it word for word,” broke it down and discussed it. “And that is how we made our decision,” the juror said.

During the trial, the recorded interview John gave to Brookfield police was played for the jury. In it, John said the night it happened, he went to her bedroom, where she was reading. “She goes ‘What?’ And I said ‘It’s time.’ And she said ‘No. No. No.’

“I said it’s time. Then she ducked her head, and that is when I shot her,” John said. He shot her a second time, shut the door to her bedroom and left, he said.

He did not tell anyone what he had done and stayed in the house for the next three days, going out two times to a store and restaurant for food and cigarettes, he said. On the third day, his brother came to the house with his girlfriend to check on Janice.

DEFENSE POSITION

Defense attorney Sharay Lewis said during opening statements that the relationship between Janice and John worsened after he lost his job at the Circle K a week before the killing and that Janice had complained about the lost job and other things.

“What really pushed (John) over the edge, and Facebook messages will corroborate this, is she decides that she is going to evict him from the house,” Lewis said.

“And you will see messages where she is telling Jeff, their younger brother, I’m tired of him. He’s a loser. I told him to get the (expletive) out. I told him to go find one of the plethora of friends you claim that you have and go stay with them because you can’t stay in this house anymore.”

She noted that John lived in the house for 25 years, and his sister had lived there 10 years.

“Neither of them have a job. John at least had a job. He was only unemployed … like a week,” Lewis said.

“There are a lot of emotions that play into this. This is already a rocky relationship. These two adult children, who lost their father, a woman who is given a position of authority and she essentially decides she doesn’t like the way her brother is living his life. She decides she wants him out of the house. And she decides he has to leave.

“It’s February. It’s the middle of winter. John doesn’t have anywhere to go. And she decides she doesn’t care where he goes,” Lewis said.

“He does this at some time on Feb. 26 or 25, and he shuts her door, and as the state already pointed out, he stays in the house. He essentially doesn’t know what to do. He killed his sister and he didn’t have anywhere to go,” the defense attorney said.

Becker said in his opening statement that the evidence “will clearly show there was no murder-suicide pact.” In fact, “There is no evidence Janice wanted to die.”