February 8, 2023 • 33 mins
A gruesome discovery in Missouri shakes Tammy’s loved ones to their core, as Phelps uncovers a decades-old eyewitness statement that changes the course of his investigation.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Paper Ghosts is a production of I Heart Radio. For
three days now, students have been back in the classroom
at Grinnell College, but for many, concentrating on class is difficult.
One week ago, Grenelle seen your Tammy z Awiki disappeared.
Now students here are doing everything they can to help
(00:22):
locate Zwiki. That clip you just heard was from one
of nearly half a dozen news stories about Tammy Ziwiki's disappearance.
Within days of her vanishing, nearly everyone she'd met or
been close to was getting involved in what would become
a massive search effort to try and find her. And
nowhere was that more noticeable than at Grinnell College in
(00:45):
Central Iowa. You don't think much about the bad things
that happened to people. You never think, oh, well, it's
never gonna happen to me or my friends. And now
it's it's coming set my friends, And now you know,
I'm having reality hit you really hard. At the time,
I was in Michigan and Tammy was coming. She had
already left the East Coast and I think was staying
(01:08):
in Pennsylvania with relatives, and she knew that I was
going back to college at the same time, and that
I was looking for a ride because my ride had
fallen through. Stacy Pappus was a friend and classmate of
Tammy's Wikis. They had met their freshman year at Grinnell
College and each had plans to be back on campus
(01:28):
the week before classes started. Stacy says they talked about
car pooling that last leg of the drive along I
eight to Grinnell. Except this was and trying to get
in touch with someone in real time, it's far more difficult.
We spoke through answer machine messages to each other. Um,
(01:49):
you know, she left me a message, and then I
left her message because she was checking in with her
mom as she went along on the road. We're leaving
each other messages, and it just was getting too hard.
So I just found another ride, and I was like, oh,
don't worry about it. I got another ride. I'll see
you there. When I arrived on campus. Of course, you know,
whenever you arrive, you have all this stuff to unload,
and so you're dragging your stuff through the hall of
(02:13):
what they called the Loggia, which is this covered, screamed
in long porch that connects five or six storms, and
all along the Logha there was all these handmade paper
signs on the kiosks and on the doors, and they
all said, Tammy, call your mom. She's freaking out, Tammy.
(02:38):
Where are you, Tammy? Call your mom? Tammy were worried
and I ran into someone who was putting up these
fires or or something, and I was like, Hey, what's
going on with Tammy? And she's like, no one can
find her. We don't know if she even arrived on campus.
That's the moment that for me that I realized that
(03:00):
something was really not not great. Previously, on paper Ghosts,
they got a call and they said, if you heard
from Tammy, we can't find Tammy. We had a hard
time with the police. They just kept telling us from
the beginning, shella, she'll be back, She'll be back. If
(03:21):
you've been on our eight cars are just zooming down.
There is nothing there but cornfields for miles and miles
and trucks and trucks, trucks all over. It's the main part.
One of the witnesses, I saw a tractor trailer from
an orange stripe, and so we had a post drawn
up and I just starting that trying to find the trunk.
(03:41):
We knew at that point that something really bad had happened,
and we knew that whatever situation she was in was
in a really dangerous one. My name is them William Phelips.
I'm an investigative journalist an author of more than forty
two crime books. This is season three of the paper
Posts in plain Sight. Despite what Tammy's Wicki's family and
(04:12):
friends believed, law enforcement assumed that the one year old
student had taken off on her own, even after her
car was found abandoned alongside of a busy highway in Illinois.
In their defense, young people often choose to go off
the grid. Maybe Tammy wanted to leave. Maybe she had
(04:33):
a boyfriend no one knew about. But any time I
broached this idea, someone else in Tammy's life told me
there was just no way. Tammy was not someone who
would have packed it in or taken off with someone
without telling her loved ones. First. Her family knew this,
(04:53):
all her friends knew this. The police, they're wondering if
she's run away, and how do we convince them this
is not who Tammy is and she would not do that,
and we need to take it seriously. Tammy's best friend,
Jen Nelson was among many who believed the Illinois State
Police were slow to act. I was calling all of
(05:13):
the major networks in Chicago and trying to get them
to run a story on her, and I got increasingly
angry because they kept saying that it wasn't newsworthy, and
you know, for a couple of days, it wasn't newsworthy.
And a reporter actually told me that there were many
many young blonde women that went missing every year, so
(05:36):
this wasn't something that was going to make the news.
The hands on action from Grinnell's students was beyond what
anyone could have imagined. During that first week Tammy was missing,
her friends and classmates formed a sort of grassroots coalition
and spread out across the region, posting and distributing hundreds
(05:58):
of missing person flyers at truck stops, convenience stores, and airports.
They sent more than ten thousand posters to post offices
in every city and town in Iowa. They knocked on doors,
asking anyone and everyone if they had seen Tammy. Nobody
(06:18):
was giving up. We went to gas stations, we went
to restaurants, road stops, truck stops, and we asked if
we could put signs up for Tammy. And we had
a description of the truck that the witnesses saw near
Tammy's car, and I think the sign said something like,
(06:38):
have you seen this truck? Amy Joe was one of
Tammy's teammates at Grennell and the co captain of the
woman's soccer team. In she says, the notion that one
of her friends could have been abducted on the side
of a busy Midwest highway shattered the sense of safety
that so many young people felt at the time. Grnell
(06:59):
call it was a was like a bubble. We didn't
lock doors. We didn't We didn't even lock our bikes.
We just we had bikes that we just left all
over campus and they were always there when we wanted
them again or we took another bike, and we all
we just shared everything. It was a very safe community.
We walked everywhere at all hours of the day and night,
(07:22):
and they were I don't remember any security concerns ever.
And then this happened. When a loved one goes missing,
it throws off the entire natural balance of life that
mundane every day ebb and flow we all take for granted.
(07:43):
As the days add up, you question everything and wait
for what feels like will be the inevitable. But Tammy's
friends and family were relentless and hopeful, which was what
in my view made people take notice. Here's jen Nels
and again. Yeah, it became a bigger and bigger story
as the days went by, I think because the news
(08:07):
had spread beyond Illinois and Iowa and the conversations were happening.
There were questions coming up about why there weren't emergency
call boxes that she could have gone to and called
for help. By the end of the first week, everyone
including law enforcement, was working under the assumption that Tammy
(08:29):
was in trouble. After investigators released information about a white
semi truck and a person of interest, more witnesses were
calling into report what they'd seen on the highway the
afternoon Tammy's car broke down. Some even said they saw
a girl resembling Tammy running on the side of the
(08:49):
highway in Iowa. I witness testimony is very fragile, and
you're talking about an interstate at the time with people
going by and so me five or eighty miles an hour.
If you think about the last time you were on
the interstate, you know, how much did you pay attention
to a car broken down? On the side of the
road if you can even remember the last time you
saw that. Jeff Padilla is a retired lieutenant with the
(09:12):
Illinois State Police, which he first joined back in nine
He wasn't a member of the task force, but would
go on to work on Tammy's case in later years.
We did have other information out there about, you know,
the pickup truck and the white truck, the stripe truck,
and then we had information that there was another white
(09:32):
car broken down just east of her. So you know,
then we were like, okay, we're are people getting confused
between that broken down white vehicle. So um, you have
to remember that there was several days between when her
car broke down and when her family notified the State
(09:53):
Police that she was missing. However, it didn't get in
the media right away, and people weren't aware of it
until probably the week later, and so those tips began
to come in after that information came out in the media. Um.
In my opinion, witness information is great, but you really
need to back it up with some hard evidence. Tammy's
white Pontiac hatchback was the only thing resembling a crime scene,
(10:17):
and it was mostly empty. Her large brown faux alligator
skin purse, which contained her driver's license, was missing, as
well as her beloved thirty five millimeter camera. Among the
items left were an empty camera bag and a fountain
soda cup from Hardy's, which was the last known stop
Tammy made before stalling on the side of the road.
(10:41):
Tammy is a very young girl on our way to college.
Who would she willingly go with on a sunny afternoon
in the summer when her car broke down. There was
no indication that there was a struggle at all. The
car was locked, although you have to you can't roll
on the fact that the car was locked because somebody
(11:03):
at the tollyard could have locked it. Because there was luggage,
There was valuables in there. Um, there were items that
belonged to Tammy that were in there. When law enforcement
finally went through the car meticulously to see if anything
could be gleaned forensically, Padilla says, nothing was found. I
know that her car was processed by crime scene text
(11:25):
forensic wise. To my knowledge, there was nothing of any
value to us from the car. We did dust for
fingerprints along the inside of the front of the car
and the fan cowling, and all these items and that
are in the very front of the car, for example,
if somebody had leaned into the car to look to
see if there was it was a broken hose or something.
(11:45):
We tried to get prints from that and there was nothing.
We didn't get anything. By the eighth day, Tammy's parents,
including her eldest brother Todd, decided to leave Chicago and
head back home. They were not getting the re sults
they'd hoped for because nothing other than a search for
Tammy was happening. Well, I was there. I remember how
(12:08):
many days basically nothing was happening. We've done all we
could do, so um I went back to school. It
was still unresolved. At that point. We were still assuming,
or at least hoping it would be a happy ending.
When a loved one goes missing, everything is upbended, jobs
are put on hold, commitments are dropped, and life becomes
(12:30):
a series of sleepless nights waiting for that dreaded knock
on the door or the phone call you do not
want to answer, until finally it happened and everything you
thought you knew changes. I took a phone call in
the kitchen and it was one of the reporters that
(12:51):
had been covering her case for quite a while, and
he said, Jen, don't say anything. I just want you
to listen. They found a body in Missouri. Hope. It's
(13:15):
a strange concept for anyone who has been in a
similar situation to the Zowiki family. You want to believe
hope is real, even when every ounce of your soul
fights against it and tells you something different. When more
than a week passes and you have not heard from
a loved one who has gone missing and a body
has been found, worst case scenarios begin to dominate every thought,
(13:39):
day and night. Hope turns to despair. You despise hope,
and it becomes nothing more than a shallow, pointless word.
At this stage, all you can do is think about
the horror of your impending reality. It is by far
the most heartbreaking aspect of the work I do, bringing
(14:01):
the victims family members back to the moment when the
proverbial knock on the door finally comes. Well, they had
found a body alongside the head, and they they hadn't
identified it at that time yet, but they wanted us
to know. And when you heard that it was in Missouri,
(14:22):
what were you thinking? We weren't thinking. We didn't expect
it when you got that call. Did you know when
your gut or did you think I'm gonna be hopeful?
Be hopeful? We're positive people, right right, Yeah, and now
we were helpful. By day nine, the Wikis had received
(14:43):
word that the body of a female had been found
in Sarcoxi, Missouri. At first, they were skeptical. Sar Coxy
was five miles away, a seven hour drive from where
Tammy went missing in Illinois. Plus initial media reports claimed
the young woman police found had reddish hair. Tammy was blonde.
(15:07):
Here's Stacy Pappas, whom you heard at the beginning of
the episode. I had heard of rumor that a body
was found in Missouri, and a lot of people had
a very bad feeling about it. I still didn't think
that it was her because Tammy was was blonde and
never had dyed her hair to my knowledge, and um,
(15:29):
you know, I just I was like, well, it can't
be can't be Tammy because Tammy's not a redhead. Authorities
were careful not to jump to conclusions either. During the
early nineties, there were dozens of missing young women in
the Midwest, some even fitting Tammy's description. Don Laken, the
Lawrence County corner at the time, spoke to the media
(15:51):
about the discovery. There's nothing that can be said because
until we have a plaustive identification, you know, I wouldn't
put any family through that one way or the other.
Thin just no family deserves to go through that, And
this is a very hard situation, no matter whose childhood was.
Police confirmed via dental records that the body found in
(16:13):
Missouri was in fact Tammy's a Wicky. That reddish color
in her hair was the result of dye from the
clay and soil on the ground. Worst of all, it
was evident she suffered a brutal death. When does the
identification take place? When do you know for sure? It
(16:33):
wasn't too long after that. It was only a few
days after that that we knew for sure and they
called you with some information. Did you have to send
dental records or anything like that? Now they had records,
I think they had records from the college. And did
they ever ask you to come down and identify her. No,
they said we could if we wanted to, and you
(16:54):
chose not to. Moments like these become seer in your
mind forever. It's the kind of heartbreak you think cannot
get any worse. Here's Tammy's brother, Todd. I don't even
remember now whether it was my father or mother who
(17:14):
finally told me what had happened, that they had found
her to this day, I remember being in my room
just getting it on the phone and just collapsing on
the floor. I just couldn't believe it. I mean, at
that point, it just hit me like a ton of bricks.
I just had not really thought about anything to that
point except finding her. And I was so wrapped up
(17:37):
in the anxiety and the effort and doing everything we
could to try to cooperate and come to a happy ending,
that it never even really occurred to me that this
might be how it ended for Tammy's friends. The feeling
was much the same. I just remember feeling physically physically
ill when I found out that it was Tammy, like
(17:57):
sick to my stomach, and also just shock. I've never
had a death so close to me, that of someone
my age that wasn't a grandparent or a great grandparents,
so was it was just unbelievable that that could happen,
that could have been any one of us. Going back
(18:21):
to what I mentioned, in the last episode. When I
decided to look into Tammy's case, I knew I needed
to think outside the traditional box, beyond those theories and
sightings of a semi tractor trailer truck with two rust
colored stripes. And the more I heard about Tammy's character,
the more I became skeptical of the idea that she
(18:43):
would have accepted help from a trucker. Let me ask
you this. Let's say the person pulls up and there
are a cop, they have a badge, or they have
a collar, and they're a priest, or there's somebody else
in a trustworthy part of life. What would she have
done at that point? I don't think she would get
in the car with them. I guess if it were
(19:04):
a police officer offering to bring a tow truck, you know,
that might be one thing. But it's a question you
could ask every one of us when we were that
age and driving. I mean, my car broke down on
the highway a few years after Tammy died, and a
truck pulled up behind me, and the driver got out
and came to offer me help. And I opened my
(19:26):
window half an inch and he said, you know, I'm
glad you're not getting out of the car and just
stopping to let you know that I've called the police
and they're on their way to help you. A number
of people I spoke with said they bought a cell
phone in the months after Tammy's murder. What's so discouraging
about it is if this had been, you know, three
(19:49):
years later, she would have had a cell phone in
the car. It was right before widespread access to cell
phones came around, where a young girl, you know, called
subtrunck with a cell phone or a newer even right,
And you can think of all the different things that
could have been different. Tammy's friends and classmates also helped
(20:10):
found a group on campus called Fearless, which focused on
the safety of young women and fought to get emergency
call boxes installed along major highways nationwide. Everyone was desperate
to wrestle something positive from the tragedy. As for Hank
and Joanne's WICKI, they appeared on Oprah Winfrey's talk show
(20:34):
one month after their daughter's murder. It was part of
a segment about the dangerous women face driving alone. I
was asking Joe Ane Wiki during the break, who do
they suspect as Tammy's killer? Is it a serial killer
or do they have any clue? I've put it this
(20:56):
right in the authorities haven't been too free with information
with uh. All we know is there following leads and
beyond that, do you feel the killers will be found
or killer as the days go on? I'm not as
an optimistic as my wife because of over the period
of time, as we've seen how the authorities operate, and
(21:19):
they i'll call them archaic methods of even communication and
and doing their work, I do have doubt. Hope turned
to anger, then outrage. Who would do this? What happened?
(21:43):
The first of many questions began to haunt not only
investigators but those closest to Tammy. So at that point
I think we really turned to how do we catch
this this person? How do we catch this monster? Because
if it's been done to Tammy, it's going to be
done again to somebody else. During a trip I took
(22:19):
to Illinois in the summer of I met up with
Marty McCarthy, one of the officers who worked on Tammy's case.
I paid him a visit after I spent some time
earlier in the day parked near mile marker eight three
in LaSalle County, Illinois to see the spot where Tammy's
car had broken down. Yeah, yeah, glad you got down.
(22:47):
A former Illinois State Police investigator, Marty is a law
enforcement man through and through. He has been retired for
more than twenty years, but still spends much of his
free time investigating eating what happened to Tammy. Marty is
a big dude, six ft two and solid. He's also
(23:09):
a towering figure in this case. He's tenacious, driven, and
as vocal as he comes across. I found him to
be quite charming. Have a cup of coffee or a coke,
um diet coke, If you have it, thank you. I've
met many cops like Marty throughout my career, those detectives
(23:32):
who cannot let go of a case. This is that
case from Marty, the one he could never solve. It
gnaws at him, and this is pretty We discussed how
fast and ferocious tammy story gained national attention and how
that led to a bigger conversation about roadside safety for
(23:53):
young women. People were desperate to know how to get
out of a situation similar to Tammy's. The press got
involved big time, so it was a national thing. Everybody said, oh,
my god, could have been my daughter. It's college girl
going on a highway. People started buying phones. Guys and
taskforce are running out buying phone they saw whoa it's
(24:14):
could happen to my wife, got my daughter? Somebody can
breakdown on a highway, and of course interest groups for
parents college putting out things, where's Pammy got that type
of thing. Marty explained that in order to really understand
the complexity of what happened in the investigation and the
mistakes he believes were made, I needed to look at
(24:36):
how the case was handled from day one. Current law
enforcement working on Tammy's case have issues with his candor
and his public criticism about their work. All of you
don't how could how could I fight it? A retired cop.
After he retired in two thousand one, Marty continued to
(24:57):
make suggestions to the I s P his theories, things
he discovered, but he went unheard. So he began talking
to the media about those theories and the issues he
had with the investigation well before then. One of those
issues was that tip Marty previously mentioned to me, the
(25:19):
one he says was received within days of Tammy's disappearance
and went ignored. By police. It came from a woman
who said she was driving eastbound on I eighty when
she saw a blue or green pickup truck parked behind
Tammy's car along the westbound side of the highway. She
claimed it was some time between three thirty and five
(25:41):
pm that the hood of Tammy's vehicle was propped open
and Tammy was standing in front of it wearing shorts.
The woman's name actually appears on that I s P
Tip sheet a source gave me. On this sheet is
a list of eyewitness tips that are deemed credible enough
to lie. Each tip would then be assigned to an
(26:02):
officer whose job it was to run it down engage
its importance to the case. If warranted, a written statement
from the witness was taken. In this case, the woman's
tip called for just that I'm just gonna read from
this statement. The vehicle was older model and was parked
(26:25):
very close to the back bumper of the white vehicle.
The female was standing up front of the disabled vehicle.
The driver of the vehicle park behind the white vehicle
is described as white male, five ft eight six ft tall,
brown hair, in his twenties, thin build, and wearing dark
(26:46):
colored short sleeved shirt and a pair of light brown
tan pants. What she told me just add that. She says,
I'm coming back eastbound from Princeton. I see this, and
I immediately see and not recognizes this woman's car has
broken down, and she slows down and she looks over
there and she gets this and sees this guy and
(27:09):
just gets this eerie feeling there's something wrong with this
that I should stop, But I got this assignment. But
there's no doubt in her mind that was Tammy's eye
working that she saw. So she goes back home, a
doesn't doesn't do anything at that point, and then calls
in on it becomes an issue. In my view, this
tip is significant. Here's a woman who slowed down, took notice,
(27:35):
and thought about what she'd seen. Hours later, when she
saw coverage about Tammy's disappearance, she called it in and
gave specifics. On top of all that, I've learned that
this woman had impeccable credibility and wasn't someone to ignore
in the community. That all said, however, I sp Lieutenant
(27:57):
Jeff Padilla said there was a second white car that
was broken down on the same highway on the same day,
So I have to leave room for the idea that
this eyewitness could have been talking about that vehicle, and
just about every other statement the I s P collected
eyewitnesses described seeing a white tractor trailer parked in front
(28:19):
of Tammy's car, and only one description details a semi
with two rust colored stripes. That description usurped all others.
It's the one the I s P ran within the media,
the one drivers all over the country would fixate on
an eighteen wheel tractor trailer truck with two distinctive rust
(28:42):
colored diagonal stripes painted in the middle of the trailer.
I asked every investigator I spoke with, why the I
s P decided to go public with a composite drawing
of that one particular vehicle, solely based on one witness
eight Why not also release any information about the pickup truck?
(29:06):
It was truck truck, truck truck. And let me just
say this, after the body is found in Missouri, everybody
who else kills someone and drive six with a body
It kind of informed and gave racity to that that
it was a truck. I remember running down these truck leads.
There were a lot of different descriptions of the truck,
(29:28):
because there may have been several other and they may
have been a mile he had, they may have been
two mild Give me what the emphasis was so strong
on the truck that they just let everything else go.
Throughout my career, one of the things I've heard over
and over again from detectives, serial killers, and criminals is this,
(29:49):
if you are going to put out a composite of
a suspect or a vehicle, you had better be damn
sure it's the person or vehicle you are looking for,
Otherwise if you're just pointing the public in the wrong direction.
It's a point I brought up with Karen Donnelly, who
was the LaSalle County State's attorney from Hi Karen, nice
(30:14):
to meet you. As the head law enforcement official for
the jurisdiction, part of her job involved meeting with local
police to hear about their active cases. Tammy's case was
assigned a new set of investigators in recent years. It
was brought to Karen's desk. Why is it do you
(30:38):
think that they went with that drawing and put that
out there as a composite of the possible vehicle behind
her instead of the other witness statements of a nondescript
truck with nothing on it. We never questioned what the
investigators did with the cases. What they put out, that
was their purview, not mine or not anybody's that sits
(30:59):
in that state's attorney seat. So we left the investigation
to the investigators, and that was what they went with,
was that truck description. They did check around with many
local trucking companies and nationwide to see if anybody matched
that type of semi There's a lot of different ones.
I started looking on the road myself to see if
there was anything like that, and there's so many that
(31:20):
maybe somebody driving by it, you know, sixty seventy saw
something different than what it actually was. So it's hard
to say. Because the trucks go up and down that way,
it's very well traversed by semison, you know, commerce. To
the investigator's credit, the initial focus on the tractor trailer
(31:41):
did make sense. Tammy disappeared from one major interstate and
was found alongside another same as i AD. Interstate forty
four in Missouri is a heavily traffic commercial trucking route,
and while most people don't have a reason to drive
several hundred miles in the day, that type of trip
(32:02):
is common for a trucker, just asked the guy who
found Tammy's body. I pulled off an exit ramp and
started down the other side, and when I turned to
walk around in the front of the truck, I've seen
it laying there and you could actually tell it was
a body. On the next episode of Paper Ghosts and
(32:27):
they said, hey, and we're trying to verify that the
body that was found here was Tammy Zwiki And I said,
what body. I've never seen a murder like this. Ever,
It's hard for me to understand how that happened. So
did the Illinois State Police update you each day or
they were doing They were just stuff. I'll tell you
(32:47):
what what you need to know when you need to
know it. She was wearing a pair of shorts from
a soccer club that she played for, but was what
was very important to us was that the patch from
that soccer club was cut off the leg of those shorts.
Paper Ghosts is written and executive produced by Me and
(33:08):
William Phelps and I Heart executive producer Christina Everett. Additional
writing by our supervising producer Julia Weaver. Our associate producer
is Darby Masters Audio editing and mixing by Christian Bowman
and Abou zafar Our. Series theme number four four two
(33:30):
is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Paper Ghosts is a production of I Heart Radio. For
three days now, students have been back in the classroom
at Grinnell College, but for many, concentrating on class is difficult.
One week ago, Grenelle seen your Tammy z Awiki disappeared.
Now students here are doing everything they can to help
(00:22):
locate Zwiki. That clip you just heard was from one
of nearly half a dozen news stories about Tammy Ziwiki's disappearance.
Within days of her vanishing, nearly everyone she'd met or
been close to was getting involved in what would become
a massive search effort to try and find her. And
nowhere was that more noticeable than at Grinnell College in
(00:45):
Central Iowa. You don't think much about the bad things
that happened to people. You never think, oh, well, it's
never gonna happen to me or my friends. And now
it's it's coming set my friends, And now you know,
I'm having reality hit you really hard. At the time,
I was in Michigan and Tammy was coming. She had
already left the East Coast and I think was staying
(01:08):
in Pennsylvania with relatives, and she knew that I was
going back to college at the same time, and that
I was looking for a ride because my ride had
fallen through. Stacy Pappus was a friend and classmate of
Tammy's Wikis. They had met their freshman year at Grinnell
College and each had plans to be back on campus
(01:28):
the week before classes started. Stacy says they talked about
car pooling that last leg of the drive along I
eight to Grinnell. Except this was and trying to get
in touch with someone in real time, it's far more difficult.
We spoke through answer machine messages to each other. Um,
(01:49):
you know, she left me a message, and then I
left her message because she was checking in with her
mom as she went along on the road. We're leaving
each other messages, and it just was getting too hard.
So I just found another ride, and I was like, oh,
don't worry about it. I got another ride. I'll see
you there. When I arrived on campus. Of course, you know,
whenever you arrive, you have all this stuff to unload,
and so you're dragging your stuff through the hall of
(02:13):
what they called the Loggia, which is this covered, screamed
in long porch that connects five or six storms, and
all along the Logha there was all these handmade paper
signs on the kiosks and on the doors, and they
all said, Tammy, call your mom. She's freaking out, Tammy.
(02:38):
Where are you, Tammy? Call your mom? Tammy were worried
and I ran into someone who was putting up these
fires or or something, and I was like, Hey, what's
going on with Tammy? And she's like, no one can
find her. We don't know if she even arrived on campus.
That's the moment that for me that I realized that
(03:00):
something was really not not great. Previously, on paper Ghosts,
they got a call and they said, if you heard
from Tammy, we can't find Tammy. We had a hard
time with the police. They just kept telling us from
the beginning, shella, she'll be back, She'll be back. If
(03:21):
you've been on our eight cars are just zooming down.
There is nothing there but cornfields for miles and miles
and trucks and trucks, trucks all over. It's the main part.
One of the witnesses, I saw a tractor trailer from
an orange stripe, and so we had a post drawn
up and I just starting that trying to find the trunk.
(03:41):
We knew at that point that something really bad had happened,
and we knew that whatever situation she was in was
in a really dangerous one. My name is them William Phelips.
I'm an investigative journalist an author of more than forty
two crime books. This is season three of the paper
Posts in plain Sight. Despite what Tammy's Wicki's family and
(04:12):
friends believed, law enforcement assumed that the one year old
student had taken off on her own, even after her
car was found abandoned alongside of a busy highway in Illinois.
In their defense, young people often choose to go off
the grid. Maybe Tammy wanted to leave. Maybe she had
(04:33):
a boyfriend no one knew about. But any time I
broached this idea, someone else in Tammy's life told me
there was just no way. Tammy was not someone who
would have packed it in or taken off with someone
without telling her loved ones. First. Her family knew this,
(04:53):
all her friends knew this. The police, they're wondering if
she's run away, and how do we convince them this
is not who Tammy is and she would not do that,
and we need to take it seriously. Tammy's best friend,
Jen Nelson was among many who believed the Illinois State
Police were slow to act. I was calling all of
(05:13):
the major networks in Chicago and trying to get them
to run a story on her, and I got increasingly
angry because they kept saying that it wasn't newsworthy, and
you know, for a couple of days, it wasn't newsworthy.
And a reporter actually told me that there were many
many young blonde women that went missing every year, so
(05:36):
this wasn't something that was going to make the news.
The hands on action from Grinnell's students was beyond what
anyone could have imagined. During that first week Tammy was missing,
her friends and classmates formed a sort of grassroots coalition
and spread out across the region, posting and distributing hundreds
(05:58):
of missing person flyers at truck stops, convenience stores, and airports.
They sent more than ten thousand posters to post offices
in every city and town in Iowa. They knocked on doors,
asking anyone and everyone if they had seen Tammy. Nobody
(06:18):
was giving up. We went to gas stations, we went
to restaurants, road stops, truck stops, and we asked if
we could put signs up for Tammy. And we had
a description of the truck that the witnesses saw near
Tammy's car, and I think the sign said something like,
(06:38):
have you seen this truck? Amy Joe was one of
Tammy's teammates at Grennell and the co captain of the
woman's soccer team. In she says, the notion that one
of her friends could have been abducted on the side
of a busy Midwest highway shattered the sense of safety
that so many young people felt at the time. Grnell
(06:59):
call it was a was like a bubble. We didn't
lock doors. We didn't We didn't even lock our bikes.
We just we had bikes that we just left all
over campus and they were always there when we wanted
them again or we took another bike, and we all
we just shared everything. It was a very safe community.
We walked everywhere at all hours of the day and night,
(07:22):
and they were I don't remember any security concerns ever.
And then this happened. When a loved one goes missing,
it throws off the entire natural balance of life that
mundane every day ebb and flow we all take for granted.
(07:43):
As the days add up, you question everything and wait
for what feels like will be the inevitable. But Tammy's
friends and family were relentless and hopeful, which was what
in my view made people take notice. Here's jen Nels
and again. Yeah, it became a bigger and bigger story
as the days went by, I think because the news
(08:07):
had spread beyond Illinois and Iowa and the conversations were happening.
There were questions coming up about why there weren't emergency
call boxes that she could have gone to and called
for help. By the end of the first week, everyone
including law enforcement, was working under the assumption that Tammy
(08:29):
was in trouble. After investigators released information about a white
semi truck and a person of interest, more witnesses were
calling into report what they'd seen on the highway the
afternoon Tammy's car broke down. Some even said they saw
a girl resembling Tammy running on the side of the
(08:49):
highway in Iowa. I witness testimony is very fragile, and
you're talking about an interstate at the time with people
going by and so me five or eighty miles an hour.
If you think about the last time you were on
the interstate, you know, how much did you pay attention
to a car broken down? On the side of the
road if you can even remember the last time you
saw that. Jeff Padilla is a retired lieutenant with the
(09:12):
Illinois State Police, which he first joined back in nine
He wasn't a member of the task force, but would
go on to work on Tammy's case in later years.
We did have other information out there about, you know,
the pickup truck and the white truck, the stripe truck,
and then we had information that there was another white
(09:32):
car broken down just east of her. So you know,
then we were like, okay, we're are people getting confused
between that broken down white vehicle. So um, you have
to remember that there was several days between when her
car broke down and when her family notified the State
(09:53):
Police that she was missing. However, it didn't get in
the media right away, and people weren't aware of it
until probably the week later, and so those tips began
to come in after that information came out in the media. Um.
In my opinion, witness information is great, but you really
need to back it up with some hard evidence. Tammy's
white Pontiac hatchback was the only thing resembling a crime scene,
(10:17):
and it was mostly empty. Her large brown faux alligator
skin purse, which contained her driver's license, was missing, as
well as her beloved thirty five millimeter camera. Among the
items left were an empty camera bag and a fountain
soda cup from Hardy's, which was the last known stop
Tammy made before stalling on the side of the road.
(10:41):
Tammy is a very young girl on our way to college.
Who would she willingly go with on a sunny afternoon
in the summer when her car broke down. There was
no indication that there was a struggle at all. The
car was locked, although you have to you can't roll
on the fact that the car was locked because somebody
(11:03):
at the tollyard could have locked it. Because there was luggage,
There was valuables in there. Um, there were items that
belonged to Tammy that were in there. When law enforcement
finally went through the car meticulously to see if anything
could be gleaned forensically, Padilla says, nothing was found. I
know that her car was processed by crime scene text
(11:25):
forensic wise. To my knowledge, there was nothing of any
value to us from the car. We did dust for
fingerprints along the inside of the front of the car
and the fan cowling, and all these items and that
are in the very front of the car, for example,
if somebody had leaned into the car to look to
see if there was it was a broken hose or something.
(11:45):
We tried to get prints from that and there was nothing.
We didn't get anything. By the eighth day, Tammy's parents,
including her eldest brother Todd, decided to leave Chicago and
head back home. They were not getting the re sults
they'd hoped for because nothing other than a search for
Tammy was happening. Well, I was there. I remember how
(12:08):
many days basically nothing was happening. We've done all we
could do, so um I went back to school. It
was still unresolved. At that point. We were still assuming,
or at least hoping it would be a happy ending.
When a loved one goes missing, everything is upbended, jobs
are put on hold, commitments are dropped, and life becomes
(12:30):
a series of sleepless nights waiting for that dreaded knock
on the door or the phone call you do not
want to answer, until finally it happened and everything you
thought you knew changes. I took a phone call in
the kitchen and it was one of the reporters that
(12:51):
had been covering her case for quite a while, and
he said, Jen, don't say anything. I just want you
to listen. They found a body in Missouri. Hope. It's
(13:15):
a strange concept for anyone who has been in a
similar situation to the Zowiki family. You want to believe
hope is real, even when every ounce of your soul
fights against it and tells you something different. When more
than a week passes and you have not heard from
a loved one who has gone missing and a body
has been found, worst case scenarios begin to dominate every thought,
(13:39):
day and night. Hope turns to despair. You despise hope,
and it becomes nothing more than a shallow, pointless word.
At this stage, all you can do is think about
the horror of your impending reality. It is by far
the most heartbreaking aspect of the work I do, bringing
(14:01):
the victims family members back to the moment when the
proverbial knock on the door finally comes. Well, they had
found a body alongside the head, and they they hadn't
identified it at that time yet, but they wanted us
to know. And when you heard that it was in Missouri,
(14:22):
what were you thinking? We weren't thinking. We didn't expect
it when you got that call. Did you know when
your gut or did you think I'm gonna be hopeful?
Be hopeful? We're positive people, right right, Yeah, and now
we were helpful. By day nine, the Wikis had received
(14:43):
word that the body of a female had been found
in Sarcoxi, Missouri. At first, they were skeptical. Sar Coxy
was five miles away, a seven hour drive from where
Tammy went missing in Illinois. Plus initial media reports claimed
the young woman police found had reddish hair. Tammy was blonde.
(15:07):
Here's Stacy Pappas, whom you heard at the beginning of
the episode. I had heard of rumor that a body
was found in Missouri, and a lot of people had
a very bad feeling about it. I still didn't think
that it was her because Tammy was was blonde and
never had dyed her hair to my knowledge, and um,
(15:29):
you know, I just I was like, well, it can't
be can't be Tammy because Tammy's not a redhead. Authorities
were careful not to jump to conclusions either. During the
early nineties, there were dozens of missing young women in
the Midwest, some even fitting Tammy's description. Don Laken, the
Lawrence County corner at the time, spoke to the media
(15:51):
about the discovery. There's nothing that can be said because
until we have a plaustive identification, you know, I wouldn't
put any family through that one way or the other.
Thin just no family deserves to go through that, And
this is a very hard situation, no matter whose childhood was.
Police confirmed via dental records that the body found in
(16:13):
Missouri was in fact Tammy's a Wicky. That reddish color
in her hair was the result of dye from the
clay and soil on the ground. Worst of all, it
was evident she suffered a brutal death. When does the
identification take place? When do you know for sure? It
(16:33):
wasn't too long after that. It was only a few
days after that that we knew for sure and they
called you with some information. Did you have to send
dental records or anything like that? Now they had records,
I think they had records from the college. And did
they ever ask you to come down and identify her. No,
they said we could if we wanted to, and you
(16:54):
chose not to. Moments like these become seer in your
mind forever. It's the kind of heartbreak you think cannot
get any worse. Here's Tammy's brother, Todd. I don't even
remember now whether it was my father or mother who
(17:14):
finally told me what had happened, that they had found
her to this day, I remember being in my room
just getting it on the phone and just collapsing on
the floor. I just couldn't believe it. I mean, at
that point, it just hit me like a ton of bricks.
I just had not really thought about anything to that
point except finding her. And I was so wrapped up
(17:37):
in the anxiety and the effort and doing everything we
could to try to cooperate and come to a happy ending,
that it never even really occurred to me that this
might be how it ended for Tammy's friends. The feeling
was much the same. I just remember feeling physically physically
ill when I found out that it was Tammy, like
(17:57):
sick to my stomach, and also just shock. I've never
had a death so close to me, that of someone
my age that wasn't a grandparent or a great grandparents,
so was it was just unbelievable that that could happen,
that could have been any one of us. Going back
(18:21):
to what I mentioned, in the last episode. When I
decided to look into Tammy's case, I knew I needed
to think outside the traditional box, beyond those theories and
sightings of a semi tractor trailer truck with two rust
colored stripes. And the more I heard about Tammy's character,
the more I became skeptical of the idea that she
(18:43):
would have accepted help from a trucker. Let me ask
you this. Let's say the person pulls up and there
are a cop, they have a badge, or they have
a collar, and they're a priest, or there's somebody else
in a trustworthy part of life. What would she have
done at that point? I don't think she would get
in the car with them. I guess if it were
(19:04):
a police officer offering to bring a tow truck, you know,
that might be one thing. But it's a question you
could ask every one of us when we were that
age and driving. I mean, my car broke down on
the highway a few years after Tammy died, and a
truck pulled up behind me, and the driver got out
and came to offer me help. And I opened my
(19:26):
window half an inch and he said, you know, I'm
glad you're not getting out of the car and just
stopping to let you know that I've called the police
and they're on their way to help you. A number
of people I spoke with said they bought a cell
phone in the months after Tammy's murder. What's so discouraging
about it is if this had been, you know, three
(19:49):
years later, she would have had a cell phone in
the car. It was right before widespread access to cell
phones came around, where a young girl, you know, called
subtrunck with a cell phone or a newer even right,
And you can think of all the different things that
could have been different. Tammy's friends and classmates also helped
(20:10):
found a group on campus called Fearless, which focused on
the safety of young women and fought to get emergency
call boxes installed along major highways nationwide. Everyone was desperate
to wrestle something positive from the tragedy. As for Hank
and Joanne's WICKI, they appeared on Oprah Winfrey's talk show
(20:34):
one month after their daughter's murder. It was part of
a segment about the dangerous women face driving alone. I
was asking Joe Ane Wiki during the break, who do
they suspect as Tammy's killer? Is it a serial killer
or do they have any clue? I've put it this
(20:56):
right in the authorities haven't been too free with information
with uh. All we know is there following leads and
beyond that, do you feel the killers will be found
or killer as the days go on? I'm not as
an optimistic as my wife because of over the period
of time, as we've seen how the authorities operate, and
(21:19):
they i'll call them archaic methods of even communication and
and doing their work, I do have doubt. Hope turned
to anger, then outrage. Who would do this? What happened?
(21:43):
The first of many questions began to haunt not only
investigators but those closest to Tammy. So at that point
I think we really turned to how do we catch
this this person? How do we catch this monster? Because
if it's been done to Tammy, it's going to be
done again to somebody else. During a trip I took
(22:19):
to Illinois in the summer of I met up with
Marty McCarthy, one of the officers who worked on Tammy's case.
I paid him a visit after I spent some time
earlier in the day parked near mile marker eight three
in LaSalle County, Illinois to see the spot where Tammy's
car had broken down. Yeah, yeah, glad you got down.
(22:47):
A former Illinois State Police investigator, Marty is a law
enforcement man through and through. He has been retired for
more than twenty years, but still spends much of his
free time investigating eating what happened to Tammy. Marty is
a big dude, six ft two and solid. He's also
(23:09):
a towering figure in this case. He's tenacious, driven, and
as vocal as he comes across. I found him to
be quite charming. Have a cup of coffee or a coke,
um diet coke, If you have it, thank you. I've
met many cops like Marty throughout my career, those detectives
(23:32):
who cannot let go of a case. This is that
case from Marty, the one he could never solve. It
gnaws at him, and this is pretty We discussed how
fast and ferocious tammy story gained national attention and how
that led to a bigger conversation about roadside safety for
(23:53):
young women. People were desperate to know how to get
out of a situation similar to Tammy's. The press got
involved big time, so it was a national thing. Everybody said, oh,
my god, could have been my daughter. It's college girl
going on a highway. People started buying phones. Guys and
taskforce are running out buying phone they saw whoa it's
(24:14):
could happen to my wife, got my daughter? Somebody can
breakdown on a highway, and of course interest groups for
parents college putting out things, where's Pammy got that type
of thing. Marty explained that in order to really understand
the complexity of what happened in the investigation and the
mistakes he believes were made, I needed to look at
(24:36):
how the case was handled from day one. Current law
enforcement working on Tammy's case have issues with his candor
and his public criticism about their work. All of you
don't how could how could I fight it? A retired cop.
After he retired in two thousand one, Marty continued to
(24:57):
make suggestions to the I s P his theories, things
he discovered, but he went unheard. So he began talking
to the media about those theories and the issues he
had with the investigation well before then. One of those
issues was that tip Marty previously mentioned to me, the
(25:19):
one he says was received within days of Tammy's disappearance
and went ignored. By police. It came from a woman
who said she was driving eastbound on I eighty when
she saw a blue or green pickup truck parked behind
Tammy's car along the westbound side of the highway. She
claimed it was some time between three thirty and five
(25:41):
pm that the hood of Tammy's vehicle was propped open
and Tammy was standing in front of it wearing shorts.
The woman's name actually appears on that I s P
Tip sheet a source gave me. On this sheet is
a list of eyewitness tips that are deemed credible enough
to lie. Each tip would then be assigned to an
(26:02):
officer whose job it was to run it down engage
its importance to the case. If warranted, a written statement
from the witness was taken. In this case, the woman's
tip called for just that I'm just gonna read from
this statement. The vehicle was older model and was parked
(26:25):
very close to the back bumper of the white vehicle.
The female was standing up front of the disabled vehicle.
The driver of the vehicle park behind the white vehicle
is described as white male, five ft eight six ft tall,
brown hair, in his twenties, thin build, and wearing dark
(26:46):
colored short sleeved shirt and a pair of light brown
tan pants. What she told me just add that. She says,
I'm coming back eastbound from Princeton. I see this, and
I immediately see and not recognizes this woman's car has
broken down, and she slows down and she looks over
there and she gets this and sees this guy and
(27:09):
just gets this eerie feeling there's something wrong with this
that I should stop, But I got this assignment. But
there's no doubt in her mind that was Tammy's eye
working that she saw. So she goes back home, a
doesn't doesn't do anything at that point, and then calls
in on it becomes an issue. In my view, this
tip is significant. Here's a woman who slowed down, took notice,
(27:35):
and thought about what she'd seen. Hours later, when she
saw coverage about Tammy's disappearance, she called it in and
gave specifics. On top of all that, I've learned that
this woman had impeccable credibility and wasn't someone to ignore
in the community. That all said, however, I sp Lieutenant
(27:57):
Jeff Padilla said there was a second white car that
was broken down on the same highway on the same day,
So I have to leave room for the idea that
this eyewitness could have been talking about that vehicle, and
just about every other statement the I s P collected
eyewitnesses described seeing a white tractor trailer parked in front
(28:19):
of Tammy's car, and only one description details a semi
with two rust colored stripes. That description usurped all others.
It's the one the I s P ran within the media,
the one drivers all over the country would fixate on
an eighteen wheel tractor trailer truck with two distinctive rust
(28:42):
colored diagonal stripes painted in the middle of the trailer.
I asked every investigator I spoke with, why the I
s P decided to go public with a composite drawing
of that one particular vehicle, solely based on one witness
eight Why not also release any information about the pickup truck?
(29:06):
It was truck truck, truck truck. And let me just
say this, after the body is found in Missouri, everybody
who else kills someone and drive six with a body
It kind of informed and gave racity to that that
it was a truck. I remember running down these truck leads.
There were a lot of different descriptions of the truck,
(29:28):
because there may have been several other and they may
have been a mile he had, they may have been
two mild Give me what the emphasis was so strong
on the truck that they just let everything else go.
Throughout my career, one of the things I've heard over
and over again from detectives, serial killers, and criminals is this,
(29:49):
if you are going to put out a composite of
a suspect or a vehicle, you had better be damn
sure it's the person or vehicle you are looking for,
Otherwise if you're just pointing the public in the wrong direction.
It's a point I brought up with Karen Donnelly, who
was the LaSalle County State's attorney from Hi Karen, nice
(30:14):
to meet you. As the head law enforcement official for
the jurisdiction, part of her job involved meeting with local
police to hear about their active cases. Tammy's case was
assigned a new set of investigators in recent years. It
was brought to Karen's desk. Why is it do you
(30:38):
think that they went with that drawing and put that
out there as a composite of the possible vehicle behind
her instead of the other witness statements of a nondescript
truck with nothing on it. We never questioned what the
investigators did with the cases. What they put out, that
was their purview, not mine or not anybody's that sits
(30:59):
in that state's attorney seat. So we left the investigation
to the investigators, and that was what they went with,
was that truck description. They did check around with many
local trucking companies and nationwide to see if anybody matched
that type of semi There's a lot of different ones.
I started looking on the road myself to see if
there was anything like that, and there's so many that
(31:20):
maybe somebody driving by it, you know, sixty seventy saw
something different than what it actually was. So it's hard
to say. Because the trucks go up and down that way,
it's very well traversed by semison, you know, commerce. To
the investigator's credit, the initial focus on the tractor trailer
(31:41):
did make sense. Tammy disappeared from one major interstate and
was found alongside another same as i AD. Interstate forty
four in Missouri is a heavily traffic commercial trucking route,
and while most people don't have a reason to drive
several hundred miles in the day, that type of trip
(32:02):
is common for a trucker, just asked the guy who
found Tammy's body. I pulled off an exit ramp and
started down the other side, and when I turned to
walk around in the front of the truck, I've seen
it laying there and you could actually tell it was
a body. On the next episode of Paper Ghosts and
(32:27):
they said, hey, and we're trying to verify that the
body that was found here was Tammy Zwiki And I said,
what body. I've never seen a murder like this. Ever,
It's hard for me to understand how that happened. So
did the Illinois State Police update you each day or
they were doing They were just stuff. I'll tell you
(32:47):
what what you need to know when you need to
know it. She was wearing a pair of shorts from
a soccer club that she played for, but was what
was very important to us was that the patch from
that soccer club was cut off the leg of those shorts.
Paper Ghosts is written and executive produced by Me and
(33:08):
William Phelps and I Heart executive producer Christina Everett. Additional
writing by our supervising producer Julia Weaver. Our associate producer
is Darby Masters Audio editing and mixing by Christian Bowman
and Abou zafar Our. Series theme number four four two
(33:30):
is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
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