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