February 1, 2023 • 32 mins
It was late summer 1992, and Tammy Jo Zywicki was driving from suburban New Jersey to Grinnell College in Iowa. But what started as a routine trip took a mysterious turn when the 21-year-old’s car was found abandoned on the side of a busy highway. As a massive search effort for the college student gets underway, Tammy’s loved ones are left wondering about her fate: Where is she? What happened to Tammy Jo Zywicki?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
The destination is on your right. Hi, joy aunt. It's humid.
It's very humid. Violence, suffering, and death are never more
(00:28):
sobering than when juxtaposed with an exceptional human being, so
much life left to live. Nice to me, Let me
give you a hug. I'm a little that's okay, that's okay.
As with many unsolved Thomas sides, there is a face
attached to this case. It's one you're likely familiar with,
(00:50):
the dispensable girl next door, smiling, laughing, making those around
her feel loved, full of joy and light one day
and the next nothing more than a mention on the
nightly news or a faded memory, a piece of paper
handed out to strangers and posted in grocery store windows.
(01:14):
You need Yeah, I'm also the voice in on sold
case as well. That is a different story. Victims can
no longer speak for themselves, which leaves it up to
others to speak for them. My name is m William Phelps.
(01:38):
I'm an investigative journalist and author of more than forty
true crime books. This is season three of Paper Ghosts
in Plain Sight. Thank you. So you live on a
(02:03):
golf course? Do you play golf? Joanne Ziwiki is an outspoken,
kind hearted woman. Petite with white hair, she could be
anyone's grandmother. Quite the conversationalist, Joanne never runs out of
things to discuss, especially when it concerns her only daughter,
(02:25):
Tammy Joe's Wicki, whose murder thirty years ago still remains unsolved.
Let me just go get my case. It's the reason
why I paid Joanna visit over the summer. Uh No,
I think I got it. We spent countless hours talking
on the phone. But this would be our first time
meeting face to face, barely nine o'clock and it's not
(02:47):
ninety degrees already nine. We now get this. This is unusual.
Joanne has lived in a modest, single family home in
central Florida for the better part of twenty three years,
seven of which have been spent alone after her husband
Hank passed away in two thousand fifteen. She keeps busy,
(03:09):
often talking to neighbors, helping them with everyday chores, or
watching the golfers play on the course outside her window.
Inside family photos dot the walls, some of Joanne with
her late husband, others of her many grandchildren, and a
handful of her daughter Tammy. You see the pictures up there.
(03:32):
I do. I do see the pictures that was at
the beach, that was our that was all of us
at the beach, And there's a picture with Tammy and me.
Nearly every photo of Tammy's a wiki shows her smiling
ear to ear, her golden blonde hair always with bangs,
often fluctuated in length, her green eyes always protected by
(03:54):
a pair of round, amber wire framed glasses. There's a sentimental,
yet umbertone and Joanne's voice whenever she talks about Tammy.
You can hear the pain is still very real and
very much present. I had people saying to me, why
do you keep her picture around? Why don't I keep
(04:14):
the picture around? Yeah? Why wouldn't you want to not
remember her? People or I don't know, they don't think
in those terms. I try not to focus on things
too too strongly. I try to just live through day
to day, look for the good things in life, and
forget about the other things. What got you interested in
(04:38):
all this? Well, my brother's wife was murdered um and
she was five months pregnant. She was strangled to death.
It's an unsolved case that was would have to be terrible.
What's driven me is helping families find answers and telling
family stories. You know, with every murder there's a ripple effect,
(05:02):
and that ripple effect still keeps going to this day.
I can see it on your face. I I it's there.
I was first introduced to Joanne by a man named
Robert cut Leric. He's one of the administrators of the
Who Killed Tammy's a Wicked Facebook group. In two thousand seventeen,
(05:23):
a member of the group, familiar with my work on
cold cases, reached out to ask if I would look
into what happened to Tammy. In any given month, I
received dozens of messages from people across the country looking
for help and a loved one's missing or murder case.
There's an endless number of reasons why certain cases appeal
(05:43):
to different people. For me, it's the possibility of developing
new information, the opportunity to help a family when no
one else will. And even though it's been thirty years,
Tammy's case seems solvable to me. I wouldn't even be
here talking to you now though it wasn't for rong.
(06:05):
Robert cut Laric has been helpful and as someone who
has become a source of support for Joanne over the years.
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the case and actually
grew up one town over from where the Ziwiki has
lived in New Jersey, but says he didn't get interested
until years later. It was just bored with what I
was doing, and it popped into my head. So I
(06:27):
went to this relatively new fangled thing called the Internet.
The reason why I was looking it up was because
I wanted to see if it had been solved, and
it hadn't. He just called me and he said, you know,
he was interested in finding out more information. I mean,
he didn't know Tammy. He was grutinized by the place
and a lot of other people because he didn't know Tammy,
(06:48):
and yet he got involved in it, you know, with
the whole thing. Did you think it was weird at
the beginning when he called, Yeah, I did. I mean
I was very careful to begin with. What did you
think of him when you met him? He was easy
to talk to, and he knew a lot. He had
been following the case, and I was careful, you know,
I was. I was wondering, you know, you just you
(07:10):
don't say, Okay, this guy is really somebody I want
to really get involved with I was. I was cautious.
What was his interest in the case, Just a young girl.
Mates had seen the pictures of the paper and things
like that, and he thought it was so terrible that
it happened. And at first I don't know what he
wanted to do. He was about the same age as
(07:31):
she was, and it really just hit him part and
he was just interested in the story. And then it
just got to revolved from there. An archaeologist by trade,
it's in Robert's nature to dig and patiently uncover information.
I started collecting every scrap up newspaper article there wasn't
the case and trying to get a picture of what happened.
(07:54):
He's not alone. Thousands of people, including many who never
met Tammy, have tried for years to understand what happened
to her. As for me, my approaches to not follow
that lead to truly serve an unsolved murder case in
an investigative fashion, not to mention honor the victim respectfully.
(08:16):
Within that process, I need to think beyond the box.
What I mean is, if I were to go down
the same rabbit holes everyone else has explored for the
past thirty years, I would be doing nothing more than
spending my wheels rehashing old information. What I need to
consider is within all that law enforcement has done, and
(08:40):
within all the theories presented, there is undoubtedly a different
direction to explore in finding the answer to this mystery.
In my experience talking to detectives from around the country,
murder is not that complicated a riddle to solve. The
simplest answer often is the answer her. The key is
(09:03):
knowing where to look for it. It was nearing the
end of summer and twenty one year old Tammy Joe
Zwicki was getting ready to start her final year at
(09:24):
Grinnell College, a private liberal arts school in Iowa. She
was double majoring in art history in Spanish and spent
most of her free time doing the things she loved most,
taking pictures. Tammy spent the summer at her family's house
in Marlton, New Jersey, a relatively quiet suburb just half
an hour east of Philly. Her oldest brother, Todd, was
(09:47):
working at a law from in Atlanta, but her two
other brothers, Darren and Dean, were back home with her.
She was fresh off as semester abroad in Spain and
spent those few months back in the States, working part
time at local stores, taking photos and hanging out with friends. Well,
it was just a busy time, Tammy. She was at
(10:09):
home and she was an organizer and says she organized everything,
and she fixed her room the way she wanted to be.
When she came back, come again, don't anybody change it around.
That's my room, stay out. It was what she told
a boys. And she had visited a lot of her
friends and just really enjoyed her time there. She had
one more year left that she was heading right into
(10:31):
her senior year. Jen Nelson was Tammy's closest friend. They
first met at Grinnell College three years earlier, when Jen
was a student adviser assigned to help Tammy on her
first day of school. We had talked about the possibility
of finding a place to find jobs and be roommates together.
(10:51):
Jen says they've made plans to see each other as
much as possible. At the time, she was living in Chicago,
where Tammy would spend the false am stir studying photography
at the Art Institute. We were excited about her semester
in Chicago since I had already graduated and was back
in Chicago. I was looking forward to getting to spend
(11:12):
time with her while she was here for the semester.
On the morning of August one, Tammy and her brother
Darren packed up Tammy's white Pontiac He one thousand hatchback.
The plan was for Tammy to drive Darren back to
his college campus in Illinois, then to drive to her
own school in Iowa, where she'd visit with friends and
(11:33):
take photos for the yearbook before heading back to Chicago
to start a semester. They were excited about getting back
to school and getting back in with their friends and everything,
because you know their friends want her in college. Your
friends are all over the country. Tammy and Darren left
New Jersey and headed west to Pittsburgh, where they spent
the night with relatives. From there, the two drove roughly
(11:56):
five miles about eight hours to Evanston, Illinois, where Darren
would be dropped off to start his sophomore year at
Northwestern University. It was a route Tammy was familiar with,
having driven it with her dad once before, except this
time there were issues with the car. Her brother, Darren
would later say in an interview that they experienced engine
(12:19):
problems since leaving New Jersey, The engine would decelerate, the
oil light flicker, and when they pull over the engine
would shut up. The car stalled a few times during
the trip, but Darren said it was running fine once
he topped off the oil and water. Were they calling
along the road, Darren and Tammy? Were they checking in
(12:40):
with you? Not? Not a whole lot, but they checked
in from time to time. Do you remember anything? She said,
just that they were on the road and didn't They
didn't have much traffic and everything seemed to be going okay.
Tammy also spent that night in Evanston at the home
of a friend she had met in Spain the previous semester,
and next morning she went over to see Darren one
(13:02):
last time before heading out to Grinnell. Darren said he
checked the car and told Tammy that if it started
acting up again she should pull over and wait until
evening to let the engine cool down. There was no
reason for Darren to worry about his older sister. Tammy
was tough, she was savvy. She had this I can
take care of myself attitude he learned to find for
(13:25):
herself because her brother's they didn't give her much room.
Three brothers, three brothers. Yes, she was tough. They made
her tough. She wasn't afraid of anybody or anything. She
lived pretty well the way she wanted to. At around
one in the afternoon on Sunday, Tammy said her goodbyes
to her brother on Northwestern's campus. The drive to her
(13:47):
own school would take no more than five hours. When
do you begin to worry when I wasn't getting hold
of her Because she was pretty dependable. Her calling us
was unusual that she didn't go. She would check in,
what's the plan is she supposed to call you when
she gets there? Yeah, And she didn't call, So then
I started calling around campus because she should have been
(14:10):
there by then. It's hard for anyone to say what
exactly happened after Tammy's a wiki left her brother's school,
but here's what's been pieced together in the years that followed.
Tammy was about two hours into the drive when her
car broke down along I eighty in Lasau County, Illinois.
(14:30):
She was stranded near mile marker three on the westbound
side of the highway. Witnesses reported seeing a young woman
matching Tammy's description looking under the hood of her car.
A little after three pm. You're standing on the sideline
off the side. It's amazing how fastest cars are going
standing there. Marty McCarthy is a former Illinois State Police
(14:54):
investigator who spent years looking into the Tammy's a Wiki case.
Have you been on eighty Cars are just zooming down.
There is nothing there but cornfields for miles and miles
and trucks, trucks all over. It's a main artery. And uh,
they are less capable of stopping obviously in cars, and
(15:14):
so people may have noticed this really blonde girl, young
girl next to her car and maybe wanted to stop
and help her, but it would have been by time
making that recognition and stopping and pulling off. You know,
it just didn't happen. Many people did notice Tammy on
the side of the road that day. While I was
looking into her case, a source provided me with the
(15:36):
official tip sheet from the earliest part of the Illinois
State Police's investigation. On Sunday, August, dozens of people claimed
to have seen Tammy standing near her car for close
to an hour after three pm. By four pm, several
(15:59):
eyewitnesses accounts reported seeing just the car on the side
of the road, no signs of Tammy. Then at five
oh five PM, a state trooper found the hatchback. It
was locked, so he tagged it and marked it as
an abandoned vehicle. By Monday afternoon, it had been towed.
(16:21):
As far as the police were concerned, Tammy was an
adult who likely took off on her own. It's just
a ben car. It's not adult college girl. I think
like that, that's just not going to get on their radar,
and rightly so. And I mean, it's just At the
(16:42):
beginning of the summer, I took a trip out to
LaSalle County in Illinois to see the site myself. I
parked by mile mark eighty three around the same time
of day as Tammy had and recorded what I heard
out of every ten vehicles that passed by, at least
six or eighteen wheel tractor trailer type trucks. The shoulder
(17:04):
of the road where Tammy pulled over is so narrow
that if you stretch your arm up you can nearly
touch the cars as they whiz by. If you remove
the cars, there's not much else, just thousands of acres
of farmland. The closest Sexit ramp with a gas station
at pay phone was two miles away plus the Midwest
(17:26):
in the summer, in the middle of the day, it's hot.
On the day Tammy's car broke down, the temperature was
in the eighties at best. Passing Tammy on the side
of the road at seventy eight miles per hour, you
had seconds to assess the situation. Standing there in the
same spot as Tammy did thirty years earlier made it
(17:48):
easy for me to understand why the sight of even
one vehicle stopping to help might be a godsend. But still,
would she have just taken anyone's offer her help? Was
Tammy the type of person who would trust somebody to
help her? Or would she be standishous, very cautious, very cautious,
(18:12):
very cautious? So she wasn't naive in anyway. No, Dammy
was by no, meaning that I and she had the
three brothers. They didn't give her much more in an
inch of anything, and we moved and she had to
get to know new people all the time. She was
very cautious with people. Police frequently categorized these types of
(18:34):
situations as runaway cases, and to their credit, that often
ends up being the scenario. But Tammy's friends and family
refused to believe that she had just taken off. It
would have been out of character. What's the first indication
that you heard of that something might have been wrong.
(18:54):
I was back then in Charlottesville to get ready to
start my final year of law school, and I got
a call from either my mom or dad at the time.
That's Todd Zwicki, Tammy's eldest brother, and they said, have
you heard from Tammy. We can't find Tammy. People just
thought they just didn't know where she was, what it
might be going on. The police were not alarmed, and
(19:16):
so at that point I thought, oh, that's weird, and
they basically said, well, if you hear from her, let
us know. Not a big alarm at that point, and
then um, it was within a day or two later,
when she hadn't turned up, that things got more urgent.
A little over twenty four hours had passed before Tammy
Ziwiki was identified as the owner of the Toad Pontiac.
(19:38):
It wasn't until the car's registration was entered into a
database that word finally got back to Hank and Joanne
Ziwiki that their daughter may have been last seen in
LaSalle County, Illinois. A missing person's report was immediately filed
with the Illinois State Police, and both Hank and Joanne
packed their bags and headed in that direction. That's when
(20:00):
I hopped on a plane and flew out there. Hearing
that the Zowikis dropped everything and immediately went to Illinois
gave me a better understanding of how close knit the
family was. They were not just another family in denial
of a troubled daughter. If the Ziwikis were uprooting their
entire lives and high tailing it out to the Midwest,
(20:22):
they knew something wasn't right. We all met in Chicago.
We were staying with our friend's parents, and I joined
them pretty soon after that to try to help and
try to figure out what was going on and just
help anyway I could. We had central control in my
dining room. That's Jen Nelson, Tammy's closest friend, who you
heard earlier. The dining room table had maps out of
(20:45):
Illinois and Iowa, and we were coordinating groups that were
searching different areas and getting reports back in when people
would return from searching. For the next week, the Ziwiki's
new home base was with Jen Nelson's family in Chicago.
They'd make the ninety minute drive back and forth Lassau
County every day to meet with local law enforcement. The
(21:08):
Zawikis were not doing well, None of us were. Who
was getting worse and worse to think about what could
what could be happening to her and why we hadn't
been able to find her. And I think the longer
it goes on, the more likely you are to get
bad news. And you know that, and it weighs you down.
(21:29):
So what do you guys do next? What are you feeling?
What's going on? Well, you just you don't feel anything.
You just kind of do and hope that's the whole thing.
You hope that maybe she's just stopped someplace and just
forgot to call. I had car trouble something like that.
But then as each day went by, and you know,
(21:49):
you you lost hope. And what did you think then?
I didn't think. I didn't know what to think. I
was just blank. No. No, that feeling when you know
that her car had been abandoned on the road and
towed away, was what let go of any little hope
(22:10):
that she had walked off for help and found help,
you know, or that you know, we knew at that
point that something really bad had happened, and our hope
was that she was alive and we could find her,
but we knew that whatever situation she was in was
in a really dangerous one. By August, two days after
(22:45):
Tammy disappeared, a massive search effort was underway. The Illinois
National Guard had helicopters flying over the area where Tammy
was last seen on the side of Interstate eight. State
police canine units search acres upon acres of ground. Roadblocks
were set up on interstates. We opened the investigation because
(23:08):
the car was recovered and she was nowhere to be faring.
Tim really is a former FBI agent. It was nearly
a decade into his twenty three year career with the
Bureau when he was assigned to work the Tammy's a
wikie case. We opened a kidnapping case and not knowing
where you are what happened to her, and so we
(23:29):
worked the case as much as we could, so we
had no clue where she was, didn't know where you
begin to look at the I s P. Now they
have a special investigative Unit who are also looking into this,
and are you guys working together. What we had was
we had kind of a gentleman's agreement. They would cover
all leads in a state of Illinois, we would cover
(23:50):
the our stately. So the two meshed and that was
the general agreement we had with the state police. And
were they good about it. Very much. So they put
the cover season investigated on a case and they did
a good job in current leads, a good task force.
One of those investigators was Marty McCarthy, who became part
(24:11):
of that new task force created by the Illinois State Police.
After getting his start with the local police department, he
worked for the Illinois Bureau of Investigation, which he describes
as the state's version of the FBI. He left that
to join the FBI, but returned to the I s
p S Investigated Division because he wanted to work on
(24:33):
Tammy's case. Asked to come back to work this case,
and it was really kind of shocked to see what
the state of investigation was. This is my personal opinion,
of course, the state of investigation was at that time.
The people I've spoken to are generally split in their
views of how law enforcement handled this case. FBI agent
(24:55):
timilely gave the task force top marks. Marty's opinion is different.
It makes him a polarizing figure in the community. But
if you know nothing else about Marty, know this. He
is unafraid to speak his truth. And in his opinion,
the investigation was a mess from day one. They merged
(25:17):
under his umbrella, separate division, but the state police bureaucracy
was in charge of us as they had not been before.
They are, in my view, basically highway patrol, and they
do that and that's their emphasis. And they told me
a number of times that they just don't see investigation
(25:38):
as especially they'll tell you that they see, well, the
troopers investigate traffic accidents. It's not the same thing. They
didn't believe that, and in fact, would put guys at
lieutenant captain level in charge of investigatives who had never
worked the case in their life. Marty's assessment of how
the Illinois State Police operated at the time echoes what
I've heard from Tammy's own family. As her brother Todd
(26:02):
explained to me, the Ziwikis had to fight to convince
law enforcement that Tammy wasn't a runaway. My parents spent
a lot of time talking to the press but also
talking to the police to kind of keep the pressure
on them not to give up right, number one, but
number two also frankly, to be a little more aggressive
about what they were doing. For quite some time, they
(26:25):
defaulted to the proposition that this wasn't missing person's type thing, right,
or that maybe she had runoff with a boy or
something like that, and so there was less of a
degree of urgency, and my parents kept kind of saying, look,
that's not who she is, we know her, she didn't
do that. She's missing. They had a lot of those
interactions with the police, but I think that was something
(26:47):
that added to their anxiety and frustration as well. They
just kept telling us from the beginning, shella, she'll be back,
she'll be back. What are the police telling you about
what happened at this point? Early on? They don't know,
they don't know, They have no clue. They give you
no information. I had a lot of problems with the
Illinois tape place, what kind of problems, communication problems. They
(27:10):
just didn't want to talk to you. We'll tell you
what you need to know when you need to know it.
It took over a week before the Ziwikis were told
anything of substance. A lead from one of the eyewitnesses
that finally pushed the investigation forward. I one of the
witnesses say a tractor trailer with an orange stripe, and
so we had a poster drawn up and the share
(27:33):
that trying to find the truck. On day eight, investigators
announced they were looking for a white five axel semi
tractor trailer with two brownish orange rust colored diagonal stripes
on both the truck and trailer. We felt we at
least had something to work with in terms of a truck,
(27:54):
and because if you've been on the Interstate eight you
they're just a man trucks for different different logos and
names and attractive trailers whatnot. A drawing of the truck
in question was released to the public within our students
at Grinnell and Tammy's friends from around the country rushed
to get new flyers with the image printed and distributed
(28:14):
to the public. Were connected about a few miles down
the road, there's a gas station and service thing. We
interviewed people there, We interviewed there's a town of pru Illinois.
There's a truck stop for the restaurant. We interviewed truck
drivers at the truck stop, and we did the best
we could of what we had where, but we didn't
have much to work with and stating all I believe
(28:36):
I'm correct us. The scales are closed on Sundays, so
we had no record trucks being on the Interstate authorities
also announced that they had a person of interest based
on tips from eyewitnesses. They were looking for a white
male about six ft tall with dark, bushy hair who
(28:59):
appeared to be talking to a young, blond woman resembling
Tammy on the side of I e ight on the
date and time in question. Local police said the man
may have been the last person to talk to Tammy,
but we're adamant he wasn't a suspect, just someone they
wanted to speak with. It was the biggest lead today,
(29:20):
a solid description of both the vehicle and a person
of interest. It gave Tammy's friends and family a much
needed boost of hope and gave law enforcement a flood
of new tips. Everybody's looking at the semi truck with
his unusual pattern. Now the phones are ringing off the hook.
They can't even get out of the office. I'm following
the truck right now. I'm in North Carolina, dead, I
(29:42):
got I know where it is. I know, yeah, and
so the emphasis came on semi trucks, on my trucks,
on my trucks, on my truck. From that point forward,
the investigation developed blinders, blinders that obstructed any law enforcements
for you beyond chasing this truck tip, and more importantly,
any possibility that maybe, just maybe there was more than
(30:06):
one solid lead to chase the major lead, the only
human being ever seen with her by the best witness
who slows down and is positive that that's is WICKI
on the side of the road, recognizes the car. The
best was blown off. From day one. That tip, which
today lives just on an old, crumbled piece of paper,
(30:30):
completely changed how I approached this investigation, which made me
a firm believer that the answer to Tammy's murder has
been staring at law enforcement all along. The lead is
blown right there. This is my view. This is the kilt.
(30:51):
This season on Paper Ghosts, it felt like if anybody
had a chance of surviving, that it would have been
Tammy and she didn't. It all always got me that
that they never did call me or anything you know,
ever had founder. It was never clear at the time
why they completely ruled him out as a suspect. It's
disturbing to me that the police we're not able to
(31:16):
get more information early on. I don't think at this
point in time, for as long as this has been
an unsolved case, that anything can be discounted or should
be discounted. It's a needle in a haste. It's a
who done it? You know that that's what we got here,
So who done it? If you are enjoying Paper Ghosts,
please listen to my other podcast, Crossing the Line with
(31:37):
em William Phelps, where I use the same storytelling elements
you've heard in Paper Ghosts and cover missing person and
murder cases. Paper Ghosts is written and executive produced by
me and William Phelps and I Heart executive producer Christina Everett.
Additional writing by our supervising producer Julia Weaver. Our associate
(32:02):
producer is Darby Masters, Audio editing and mixing by Christian
Bowman and Abu Zafar. Our series theme number four four
two is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(32:25):
your favorite shows.
The destination is on your right. Hi, joy aunt. It's humid.
It's very humid. Violence, suffering, and death are never more
(00:28):
sobering than when juxtaposed with an exceptional human being, so
much life left to live. Nice to me, Let me
give you a hug. I'm a little that's okay, that's okay.
As with many unsolved Thomas sides, there is a face
attached to this case. It's one you're likely familiar with,
(00:50):
the dispensable girl next door, smiling, laughing, making those around
her feel loved, full of joy and light one day
and the next nothing more than a mention on the
nightly news or a faded memory, a piece of paper
handed out to strangers and posted in grocery store windows.
(01:14):
You need Yeah, I'm also the voice in on sold
case as well. That is a different story. Victims can
no longer speak for themselves, which leaves it up to
others to speak for them. My name is m William Phelps.
(01:38):
I'm an investigative journalist and author of more than forty
true crime books. This is season three of Paper Ghosts
in Plain Sight. Thank you. So you live on a
(02:03):
golf course? Do you play golf? Joanne Ziwiki is an outspoken,
kind hearted woman. Petite with white hair, she could be
anyone's grandmother. Quite the conversationalist, Joanne never runs out of
things to discuss, especially when it concerns her only daughter,
(02:25):
Tammy Joe's Wicki, whose murder thirty years ago still remains unsolved.
Let me just go get my case. It's the reason
why I paid Joanna visit over the summer. Uh No,
I think I got it. We spent countless hours talking
on the phone. But this would be our first time
meeting face to face, barely nine o'clock and it's not
(02:47):
ninety degrees already nine. We now get this. This is unusual.
Joanne has lived in a modest, single family home in
central Florida for the better part of twenty three years,
seven of which have been spent alone after her husband
Hank passed away in two thousand fifteen. She keeps busy,
(03:09):
often talking to neighbors, helping them with everyday chores, or
watching the golfers play on the course outside her window.
Inside family photos dot the walls, some of Joanne with
her late husband, others of her many grandchildren, and a
handful of her daughter Tammy. You see the pictures up there.
(03:32):
I do. I do see the pictures that was at
the beach, that was our that was all of us
at the beach, And there's a picture with Tammy and me.
Nearly every photo of Tammy's a wiki shows her smiling
ear to ear, her golden blonde hair always with bangs,
often fluctuated in length, her green eyes always protected by
(03:54):
a pair of round, amber wire framed glasses. There's a sentimental,
yet umbertone and Joanne's voice whenever she talks about Tammy.
You can hear the pain is still very real and
very much present. I had people saying to me, why
do you keep her picture around? Why don't I keep
(04:14):
the picture around? Yeah? Why wouldn't you want to not
remember her? People or I don't know, they don't think
in those terms. I try not to focus on things
too too strongly. I try to just live through day
to day, look for the good things in life, and
forget about the other things. What got you interested in
(04:38):
all this? Well, my brother's wife was murdered um and
she was five months pregnant. She was strangled to death.
It's an unsolved case that was would have to be terrible.
What's driven me is helping families find answers and telling
family stories. You know, with every murder there's a ripple effect,
(05:02):
and that ripple effect still keeps going to this day.
I can see it on your face. I I it's there.
I was first introduced to Joanne by a man named
Robert cut Leric. He's one of the administrators of the
Who Killed Tammy's a Wicked Facebook group. In two thousand seventeen,
(05:23):
a member of the group, familiar with my work on
cold cases, reached out to ask if I would look
into what happened to Tammy. In any given month, I
received dozens of messages from people across the country looking
for help and a loved one's missing or murder case.
There's an endless number of reasons why certain cases appeal
(05:43):
to different people. For me, it's the possibility of developing
new information, the opportunity to help a family when no
one else will. And even though it's been thirty years,
Tammy's case seems solvable to me. I wouldn't even be
here talking to you now though it wasn't for rong.
(06:05):
Robert cut Laric has been helpful and as someone who
has become a source of support for Joanne over the years.
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the case and actually
grew up one town over from where the Ziwiki has
lived in New Jersey, but says he didn't get interested
until years later. It was just bored with what I
was doing, and it popped into my head. So I
(06:27):
went to this relatively new fangled thing called the Internet.
The reason why I was looking it up was because
I wanted to see if it had been solved, and
it hadn't. He just called me and he said, you know,
he was interested in finding out more information. I mean,
he didn't know Tammy. He was grutinized by the place
and a lot of other people because he didn't know Tammy,
(06:48):
and yet he got involved in it, you know, with
the whole thing. Did you think it was weird at
the beginning when he called, Yeah, I did. I mean
I was very careful to begin with. What did you
think of him when you met him? He was easy
to talk to, and he knew a lot. He had
been following the case, and I was careful, you know,
I was. I was wondering, you know, you just you
(07:10):
don't say, Okay, this guy is really somebody I want
to really get involved with I was. I was cautious.
What was his interest in the case, Just a young girl.
Mates had seen the pictures of the paper and things
like that, and he thought it was so terrible that
it happened. And at first I don't know what he
wanted to do. He was about the same age as
(07:31):
she was, and it really just hit him part and
he was just interested in the story. And then it
just got to revolved from there. An archaeologist by trade,
it's in Robert's nature to dig and patiently uncover information.
I started collecting every scrap up newspaper article there wasn't
the case and trying to get a picture of what happened.
(07:54):
He's not alone. Thousands of people, including many who never
met Tammy, have tried for years to understand what happened
to her. As for me, my approaches to not follow
that lead to truly serve an unsolved murder case in
an investigative fashion, not to mention honor the victim respectfully.
(08:16):
Within that process, I need to think beyond the box.
What I mean is, if I were to go down
the same rabbit holes everyone else has explored for the
past thirty years, I would be doing nothing more than
spending my wheels rehashing old information. What I need to
consider is within all that law enforcement has done, and
(08:40):
within all the theories presented, there is undoubtedly a different
direction to explore in finding the answer to this mystery.
In my experience talking to detectives from around the country,
murder is not that complicated a riddle to solve. The
simplest answer often is the answer her. The key is
(09:03):
knowing where to look for it. It was nearing the
end of summer and twenty one year old Tammy Joe
Zwicki was getting ready to start her final year at
(09:24):
Grinnell College, a private liberal arts school in Iowa. She
was double majoring in art history in Spanish and spent
most of her free time doing the things she loved most,
taking pictures. Tammy spent the summer at her family's house
in Marlton, New Jersey, a relatively quiet suburb just half
an hour east of Philly. Her oldest brother, Todd, was
(09:47):
working at a law from in Atlanta, but her two
other brothers, Darren and Dean, were back home with her.
She was fresh off as semester abroad in Spain and
spent those few months back in the States, working part
time at local stores, taking photos and hanging out with friends. Well,
it was just a busy time, Tammy. She was at
(10:09):
home and she was an organizer and says she organized everything,
and she fixed her room the way she wanted to be.
When she came back, come again, don't anybody change it around.
That's my room, stay out. It was what she told
a boys. And she had visited a lot of her
friends and just really enjoyed her time there. She had
one more year left that she was heading right into
(10:31):
her senior year. Jen Nelson was Tammy's closest friend. They
first met at Grinnell College three years earlier, when Jen
was a student adviser assigned to help Tammy on her
first day of school. We had talked about the possibility
of finding a place to find jobs and be roommates together.
(10:51):
Jen says they've made plans to see each other as
much as possible. At the time, she was living in Chicago,
where Tammy would spend the false am stir studying photography
at the Art Institute. We were excited about her semester
in Chicago since I had already graduated and was back
in Chicago. I was looking forward to getting to spend
(11:12):
time with her while she was here for the semester.
On the morning of August one, Tammy and her brother
Darren packed up Tammy's white Pontiac He one thousand hatchback.
The plan was for Tammy to drive Darren back to
his college campus in Illinois, then to drive to her
own school in Iowa, where she'd visit with friends and
(11:33):
take photos for the yearbook before heading back to Chicago
to start a semester. They were excited about getting back
to school and getting back in with their friends and everything,
because you know their friends want her in college. Your
friends are all over the country. Tammy and Darren left
New Jersey and headed west to Pittsburgh, where they spent
the night with relatives. From there, the two drove roughly
(11:56):
five miles about eight hours to Evanston, Illinois, where Darren
would be dropped off to start his sophomore year at
Northwestern University. It was a route Tammy was familiar with,
having driven it with her dad once before, except this
time there were issues with the car. Her brother, Darren
would later say in an interview that they experienced engine
(12:19):
problems since leaving New Jersey, The engine would decelerate, the
oil light flicker, and when they pull over the engine
would shut up. The car stalled a few times during
the trip, but Darren said it was running fine once
he topped off the oil and water. Were they calling
along the road, Darren and Tammy? Were they checking in
(12:40):
with you? Not? Not a whole lot, but they checked
in from time to time. Do you remember anything? She said,
just that they were on the road and didn't They
didn't have much traffic and everything seemed to be going okay.
Tammy also spent that night in Evanston at the home
of a friend she had met in Spain the previous semester,
and next morning she went over to see Darren one
(13:02):
last time before heading out to Grinnell. Darren said he
checked the car and told Tammy that if it started
acting up again she should pull over and wait until
evening to let the engine cool down. There was no
reason for Darren to worry about his older sister. Tammy
was tough, she was savvy. She had this I can
take care of myself attitude he learned to find for
(13:25):
herself because her brother's they didn't give her much room.
Three brothers, three brothers. Yes, she was tough. They made
her tough. She wasn't afraid of anybody or anything. She
lived pretty well the way she wanted to. At around
one in the afternoon on Sunday, Tammy said her goodbyes
to her brother on Northwestern's campus. The drive to her
(13:47):
own school would take no more than five hours. When
do you begin to worry when I wasn't getting hold
of her Because she was pretty dependable. Her calling us
was unusual that she didn't go. She would check in,
what's the plan is she supposed to call you when
she gets there? Yeah, And she didn't call, So then
I started calling around campus because she should have been
(14:10):
there by then. It's hard for anyone to say what
exactly happened after Tammy's a wiki left her brother's school,
but here's what's been pieced together in the years that followed.
Tammy was about two hours into the drive when her
car broke down along I eighty in Lasau County, Illinois.
(14:30):
She was stranded near mile marker three on the westbound
side of the highway. Witnesses reported seeing a young woman
matching Tammy's description looking under the hood of her car.
A little after three pm. You're standing on the sideline
off the side. It's amazing how fastest cars are going
standing there. Marty McCarthy is a former Illinois State Police
(14:54):
investigator who spent years looking into the Tammy's a Wiki case.
Have you been on eighty Cars are just zooming down.
There is nothing there but cornfields for miles and miles
and trucks, trucks all over. It's a main artery. And uh,
they are less capable of stopping obviously in cars, and
(15:14):
so people may have noticed this really blonde girl, young
girl next to her car and maybe wanted to stop
and help her, but it would have been by time
making that recognition and stopping and pulling off. You know,
it just didn't happen. Many people did notice Tammy on
the side of the road that day. While I was
looking into her case, a source provided me with the
(15:36):
official tip sheet from the earliest part of the Illinois
State Police's investigation. On Sunday, August, dozens of people claimed
to have seen Tammy standing near her car for close
to an hour after three pm. By four pm, several
(15:59):
eyewitnesses accounts reported seeing just the car on the side
of the road, no signs of Tammy. Then at five
oh five PM, a state trooper found the hatchback. It
was locked, so he tagged it and marked it as
an abandoned vehicle. By Monday afternoon, it had been towed.
(16:21):
As far as the police were concerned, Tammy was an
adult who likely took off on her own. It's just
a ben car. It's not adult college girl. I think
like that, that's just not going to get on their radar,
and rightly so. And I mean, it's just At the
(16:42):
beginning of the summer, I took a trip out to
LaSalle County in Illinois to see the site myself. I
parked by mile mark eighty three around the same time
of day as Tammy had and recorded what I heard
out of every ten vehicles that passed by, at least
six or eighteen wheel tractor trailer type trucks. The shoulder
(17:04):
of the road where Tammy pulled over is so narrow
that if you stretch your arm up you can nearly
touch the cars as they whiz by. If you remove
the cars, there's not much else, just thousands of acres
of farmland. The closest Sexit ramp with a gas station
at pay phone was two miles away plus the Midwest
(17:26):
in the summer, in the middle of the day, it's hot.
On the day Tammy's car broke down, the temperature was
in the eighties at best. Passing Tammy on the side
of the road at seventy eight miles per hour, you
had seconds to assess the situation. Standing there in the
same spot as Tammy did thirty years earlier made it
(17:48):
easy for me to understand why the sight of even
one vehicle stopping to help might be a godsend. But still,
would she have just taken anyone's offer her help? Was
Tammy the type of person who would trust somebody to
help her? Or would she be standishous, very cautious, very cautious,
(18:12):
very cautious? So she wasn't naive in anyway. No, Dammy
was by no, meaning that I and she had the
three brothers. They didn't give her much more in an
inch of anything, and we moved and she had to
get to know new people all the time. She was
very cautious with people. Police frequently categorized these types of
(18:34):
situations as runaway cases, and to their credit, that often
ends up being the scenario. But Tammy's friends and family
refused to believe that she had just taken off. It
would have been out of character. What's the first indication
that you heard of that something might have been wrong.
(18:54):
I was back then in Charlottesville to get ready to
start my final year of law school, and I got
a call from either my mom or dad at the time.
That's Todd Zwicki, Tammy's eldest brother, and they said, have
you heard from Tammy. We can't find Tammy. People just
thought they just didn't know where she was, what it
might be going on. The police were not alarmed, and
(19:16):
so at that point I thought, oh, that's weird, and
they basically said, well, if you hear from her, let
us know. Not a big alarm at that point, and
then um, it was within a day or two later,
when she hadn't turned up, that things got more urgent.
A little over twenty four hours had passed before Tammy
Ziwiki was identified as the owner of the Toad Pontiac.
(19:38):
It wasn't until the car's registration was entered into a
database that word finally got back to Hank and Joanne
Ziwiki that their daughter may have been last seen in
LaSalle County, Illinois. A missing person's report was immediately filed
with the Illinois State Police, and both Hank and Joanne
packed their bags and headed in that direction. That's when
(20:00):
I hopped on a plane and flew out there. Hearing
that the Zowikis dropped everything and immediately went to Illinois
gave me a better understanding of how close knit the
family was. They were not just another family in denial
of a troubled daughter. If the Ziwikis were uprooting their
entire lives and high tailing it out to the Midwest,
(20:22):
they knew something wasn't right. We all met in Chicago.
We were staying with our friend's parents, and I joined
them pretty soon after that to try to help and
try to figure out what was going on and just
help anyway I could. We had central control in my
dining room. That's Jen Nelson, Tammy's closest friend, who you
heard earlier. The dining room table had maps out of
(20:45):
Illinois and Iowa, and we were coordinating groups that were
searching different areas and getting reports back in when people
would return from searching. For the next week, the Ziwiki's
new home base was with Jen Nelson's family in Chicago.
They'd make the ninety minute drive back and forth Lassau
County every day to meet with local law enforcement. The
(21:08):
Zawikis were not doing well, None of us were. Who
was getting worse and worse to think about what could
what could be happening to her and why we hadn't
been able to find her. And I think the longer
it goes on, the more likely you are to get
bad news. And you know that, and it weighs you down.
(21:29):
So what do you guys do next? What are you feeling?
What's going on? Well, you just you don't feel anything.
You just kind of do and hope that's the whole thing.
You hope that maybe she's just stopped someplace and just
forgot to call. I had car trouble something like that.
But then as each day went by, and you know,
(21:49):
you you lost hope. And what did you think then?
I didn't think. I didn't know what to think. I
was just blank. No. No, that feeling when you know
that her car had been abandoned on the road and
towed away, was what let go of any little hope
(22:10):
that she had walked off for help and found help,
you know, or that you know, we knew at that
point that something really bad had happened, and our hope
was that she was alive and we could find her,
but we knew that whatever situation she was in was
in a really dangerous one. By August, two days after
(22:45):
Tammy disappeared, a massive search effort was underway. The Illinois
National Guard had helicopters flying over the area where Tammy
was last seen on the side of Interstate eight. State
police canine units search acres upon acres of ground. Roadblocks
were set up on interstates. We opened the investigation because
(23:08):
the car was recovered and she was nowhere to be faring.
Tim really is a former FBI agent. It was nearly
a decade into his twenty three year career with the
Bureau when he was assigned to work the Tammy's a
wikie case. We opened a kidnapping case and not knowing
where you are what happened to her, and so we
(23:29):
worked the case as much as we could, so we
had no clue where she was, didn't know where you
begin to look at the I s P. Now they
have a special investigative Unit who are also looking into this,
and are you guys working together. What we had was
we had kind of a gentleman's agreement. They would cover
all leads in a state of Illinois, we would cover
(23:50):
the our stately. So the two meshed and that was
the general agreement we had with the state police. And
were they good about it. Very much. So they put
the cover season investigated on a case and they did
a good job in current leads, a good task force.
One of those investigators was Marty McCarthy, who became part
(24:11):
of that new task force created by the Illinois State Police.
After getting his start with the local police department, he
worked for the Illinois Bureau of Investigation, which he describes
as the state's version of the FBI. He left that
to join the FBI, but returned to the I s
p S Investigated Division because he wanted to work on
(24:33):
Tammy's case. Asked to come back to work this case,
and it was really kind of shocked to see what
the state of investigation was. This is my personal opinion,
of course, the state of investigation was at that time.
The people I've spoken to are generally split in their
views of how law enforcement handled this case. FBI agent
(24:55):
timilely gave the task force top marks. Marty's opinion is different.
It makes him a polarizing figure in the community. But
if you know nothing else about Marty, know this. He
is unafraid to speak his truth. And in his opinion,
the investigation was a mess from day one. They merged
(25:17):
under his umbrella, separate division, but the state police bureaucracy
was in charge of us as they had not been before.
They are, in my view, basically highway patrol, and they
do that and that's their emphasis. And they told me
a number of times that they just don't see investigation
(25:38):
as especially they'll tell you that they see, well, the
troopers investigate traffic accidents. It's not the same thing. They
didn't believe that, and in fact, would put guys at
lieutenant captain level in charge of investigatives who had never
worked the case in their life. Marty's assessment of how
the Illinois State Police operated at the time echoes what
I've heard from Tammy's own family. As her brother Todd
(26:02):
explained to me, the Ziwikis had to fight to convince
law enforcement that Tammy wasn't a runaway. My parents spent
a lot of time talking to the press but also
talking to the police to kind of keep the pressure
on them not to give up right, number one, but
number two also frankly, to be a little more aggressive
about what they were doing. For quite some time, they
(26:25):
defaulted to the proposition that this wasn't missing person's type thing, right,
or that maybe she had runoff with a boy or
something like that, and so there was less of a
degree of urgency, and my parents kept kind of saying, look,
that's not who she is, we know her, she didn't
do that. She's missing. They had a lot of those
interactions with the police, but I think that was something
(26:47):
that added to their anxiety and frustration as well. They
just kept telling us from the beginning, shella, she'll be back,
she'll be back. What are the police telling you about
what happened at this point? Early on? They don't know,
they don't know, They have no clue. They give you
no information. I had a lot of problems with the
Illinois tape place, what kind of problems, communication problems. They
(27:10):
just didn't want to talk to you. We'll tell you
what you need to know when you need to know it.
It took over a week before the Ziwikis were told
anything of substance. A lead from one of the eyewitnesses
that finally pushed the investigation forward. I one of the
witnesses say a tractor trailer with an orange stripe, and
so we had a poster drawn up and the share
(27:33):
that trying to find the truck. On day eight, investigators
announced they were looking for a white five axel semi
tractor trailer with two brownish orange rust colored diagonal stripes
on both the truck and trailer. We felt we at
least had something to work with in terms of a truck,
(27:54):
and because if you've been on the Interstate eight you
they're just a man trucks for different different logos and
names and attractive trailers whatnot. A drawing of the truck
in question was released to the public within our students
at Grinnell and Tammy's friends from around the country rushed
to get new flyers with the image printed and distributed
(28:14):
to the public. Were connected about a few miles down
the road, there's a gas station and service thing. We
interviewed people there, We interviewed there's a town of pru Illinois.
There's a truck stop for the restaurant. We interviewed truck
drivers at the truck stop, and we did the best
we could of what we had where, but we didn't
have much to work with and stating all I believe
(28:36):
I'm correct us. The scales are closed on Sundays, so
we had no record trucks being on the Interstate authorities
also announced that they had a person of interest based
on tips from eyewitnesses. They were looking for a white
male about six ft tall with dark, bushy hair who
(28:59):
appeared to be talking to a young, blond woman resembling
Tammy on the side of I e ight on the
date and time in question. Local police said the man
may have been the last person to talk to Tammy,
but we're adamant he wasn't a suspect, just someone they
wanted to speak with. It was the biggest lead today,
(29:20):
a solid description of both the vehicle and a person
of interest. It gave Tammy's friends and family a much
needed boost of hope and gave law enforcement a flood
of new tips. Everybody's looking at the semi truck with
his unusual pattern. Now the phones are ringing off the hook.
They can't even get out of the office. I'm following
the truck right now. I'm in North Carolina, dead, I
(29:42):
got I know where it is. I know, yeah, and
so the emphasis came on semi trucks, on my trucks,
on my trucks, on my truck. From that point forward,
the investigation developed blinders, blinders that obstructed any law enforcements
for you beyond chasing this truck tip, and more importantly,
any possibility that maybe, just maybe there was more than
(30:06):
one solid lead to chase the major lead, the only
human being ever seen with her by the best witness
who slows down and is positive that that's is WICKI
on the side of the road, recognizes the car. The
best was blown off. From day one. That tip, which
today lives just on an old, crumbled piece of paper,
(30:30):
completely changed how I approached this investigation, which made me
a firm believer that the answer to Tammy's murder has
been staring at law enforcement all along. The lead is
blown right there. This is my view. This is the kilt.
(30:51):
This season on Paper Ghosts, it felt like if anybody
had a chance of surviving, that it would have been
Tammy and she didn't. It all always got me that
that they never did call me or anything you know,
ever had founder. It was never clear at the time
why they completely ruled him out as a suspect. It's
disturbing to me that the police we're not able to
(31:16):
get more information early on. I don't think at this
point in time, for as long as this has been
an unsolved case, that anything can be discounted or should
be discounted. It's a needle in a haste. It's a
who done it? You know that that's what we got here,
So who done it? If you are enjoying Paper Ghosts,
please listen to my other podcast, Crossing the Line with
(31:37):
em William Phelps, where I use the same storytelling elements
you've heard in Paper Ghosts and cover missing person and
murder cases. Paper Ghosts is written and executive produced by
me and William Phelps and I Heart executive producer Christina Everett.
Additional writing by our supervising producer Julia Weaver. Our associate
(32:02):
producer is Darby Masters, Audio editing and mixing by Christian
Bowman and Abu Zafar. Our series theme number four four
two is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney.
For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(32:25):
your favorite shows.
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