Who killed Tammy Zywicki? Over 30 years, zero answers
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Summer 1992.
Michael Jordan and the Bulls won their second NBA championship – topping the Portland Trail Blazers four games to two. Jordan and Scottie Pippen went on to play on the storied Dream Team at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.
The Blackhawks made the Stanley Cup Finals with Jeremy Roenick and Chris Chelios, only to be swept by the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Lollapalooza was a touring event back in those days – making a stop at the World Music Theater in Tinley Park. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ministry, Ice Cube, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam were among the headliners. Meanwhile, the Grateful Dead played Soldier Field in June.
The country was gearing up for a contentious presidential election – with Democrat Bill Clinton taking on incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush, along with independent Ross Perot.
But beginning late in the month of August, what grew to be a grim and gruesome story shook the Chicago area and beyond. It started as the case of a missing young woman named Tammy Zywicki, who had been driving back to Grinnell College in Iowa after dropping her off brother at Northwestern University when she went missing. She had last been seen with her car near mile marker 83 on Interstate 80 – just a few miles outside Ottawa in LaSalle County.
Nine days later, the 21-year-old Zywicki's body was found. She had been brutally murdered.
And more than 30 years later, the story has no ending. The case remains unsolved. A killer has never been found.
A young woman vanishes on the highway
Zywicki was born in Pleasant Hill, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Greenville, South Carolina. The vivacious young woman was known as a talented photographer and soccer player, and a lover of all things James Dean.
She appeared in the headlines on CBS 2 on Tuesday, Aug. 25 – two days after her 1985 Pontiac T1000 was found abandoned on I-80. Zywicki's parents had flown in from their home in Marlton, New Jersey to help police with the investigation.
We talked with Tammy's older brother, Dean Zywicki.
"It's really just one of those surreal things when you're in it. You know, nobody expects to be in a situation like that. It's hard to recollect back that long, but it's one of those where every day would go by – it's like it's not real, essentially," Dean Zywicki told producer Dylan Van Sickle. "Like you push the reality aside just trying to focus on finding her."
More than a week passed with no sign of Tammy Zywicki.
The late Mike Parker was one of the lead reporters on the case for CBS 2.
"For over a week now, the family and friends of Tammy have had to endure a kind of heartache the rest of us can't begin to understand," Parker said in a report as August 1992 came to an end, "the agony of knowing something has happened to the young woman, but not knowing just what."
CBS 2 Investigator Brad Edwards talked late last year with Tammy Zywicki's friend, Jen Dowd Nelson. Edwards asked Nelson if she hypothesizes about what happened to Zywicki.
"I don't hypothesize if I can help it, because it's ridiculously frightening," Nelson said.
Tammy Zywicki's father, Hank Zywicki, held out hope that his daughter was still alive. Meanwhile out on I-80, state troopers looked at semi-trailer trucks that resembled a truck seen stopped alongside Tammy's disabled car the Sunday afternoon she was last seen.
An Iowa truck driver, Robert Bullington, told authorities he had seen Zywicki get into a gray Chevrolet Celebrity with a lone male driver. Bullington said he talked to the driver – who said the young woman's car had overheated. He said he advised the driver to stop at a truck stop in LaSalle.
But nobody remembered seeing Tammy Zywicki at that truck stop. And at nearby Starved Rock State Park – a heavily-wooded area that could easily conceal something gruesome – there was also no sign of anything.
"The few times that I went out driving, it was overwhelmingly scary – that as you're driving down roads in Illinois, it's wondering what's happened to my friend, because there is no way that she can be gone for this long without it being terrible," Nelson said.
A grim discovery
On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 1, the body of a young woman was found on the side of Interstate 44 near Mount Vernon, Missouri. A truck driver made the discovery.
The woman was not immediately identified, but her age, height, and weight matched that of Tammy Zywicki. Also on the body was a T-shirt with the legend, "East Side Eagles Soccer Club" – the name of Zywicki's high school soccer team.
The following day, the coroner of Lawrence County, Missouri, said it would take at least one more day for the body to be identified.
Zywicki's family held out a sliver of hope that she might still be alive – as did her classmates at Grinnell, who held candlelight vigils in hopes that she would be found alive.
We talked with Tammy Zywicki's college roommate, Amy Fort.
"We always felt safe on campus. We felt like we were almost living in a bubble, so to speak – not that bad things didn't happen, but I think we had a sense of security, a sense of camaraderie, and a community, and then when this happened, the innocence of our early 20s was just ripped from our lives," Fort said.
Yellow ribbons were tied on the Grinnell campus, and students watched TV news reports to keep up with the details. But the students, Zywicki's family, and everyone following the headlines were caught up in the anxiety of being uncertain about what happened.
"I knew that she was out there; she was in trouble," Fort said. "There was really 10 days of – I wasn't supposed to curse on this, but 10 days of hell."
Everyone hoped the body wasn't Zywicki's.
"Your imagination runs wild. You think the worst," Fort said. "You think of who might have taken her, who she might be with, what they've done to her."
As CBS 2's Jim Avila reported at the time, it was also the most difficult of waits for Jen Dowd Nelson – just Jen Dowd back then – who was spearheading an effort to find Zywicki from her family's house in Oak Park.
The Oak Park house became the base of operations for the search for Tammy Zywicki. Calls and faxes went out continuously in an effort to confirm the victim and find a suspect.
Meanwhile, an artist's rendition of a semi-trailer truck with rust-colored diagonal stripes was circulated as a possibly being connected to Zywicki's disappearance.
But the grim wait continued, and the anxiety pressed on.
A day later – on Thursday, Sept. 3 – the horrific truth was revealed.
Worst fears confirmed
That Thursday, authorities used dental records to confirm the body found by the side of the highway in Missouri was indeed Zywicki's.
Police told Zywicki's family that she may have refused help from at least two people when her car broke down. Police thought Zywicki may have been caught off guard, kidnapped, and then stabbed seven times and left in a ditch.
She had also been sexually assaulted.
The first law enforcement agency to get word that the body had been positively identified as Zywicki's was the local sheriff's department in the farming town of Mount Vernon, Missouri. As CBS 2's Parker reported at the time, the only evidence investigators had at the time were Zywicki's body, and the fitted sheet and red blanket the killer used to wrap the body before dumping it.
An ominous blood stain remained in the gravel along an access road to the highway. It was caused when police removed the body, hauling it from the brush to the shoulder of the access road for examination.
Investigators did not believe Zywicki was killed near where her body was found along I-44. Parker reported they believed that she was stabbed to death someplace else, and that the killer had been driving the body for some time across Illinois at Missouri – before dumping the body into the underbrush along the access road on I-44.
"I also didn't have any experience at 20 years old and 21 years old knowing, or understanding, how somebody could be so horrible, and hurt somebody like that," Nelson told CBS 2's Edwards.
Back in Marlton, New Jersey, Zywicki's family said their pain would not end until their killer was brought to justice.
At Grinnell, Zywicki's classmates were crestfallen as they embraced and wept – holding onto each other after days of holding onto hope.
"What happened to Tammy impacted an entire campus – not just the college students, but our college professors, our staff who worked at Grinnell College, and the community," said Fort.
Just after Zywicki's body was found, then-Grinnell College professor Irma McClaurin-Allen told a reporter interview there was fear along with the grief.
"It makes us all feel incredibly vulnerable," McClaurin-Allen said at the time. "I have to drive tomorrow to Chicago on Highway 80, and I am terrified."
For Jen Dowd Nelson's part, she stayed at the command center at her family's home in Oak Park – same place, new mission.
The mission shifted to helping police track down Zywicki's killer. As CBS 2's Jon Duncanson reported at the time, more than 2,000 people got involved in trying to help circulate the sketch of the suspect truck with the rust-colored diagonal stripes. Trucking firms from as far away as the East Coast volunteered to help in the effort.
"Command center was the right word. It was: 'Hey, somebody go pursue this. Hey, here's an opportunity to get the word out,'" said Dean Zywicki. "So I remember just everybody kind of taking pieces of it and going and making that happen."
But there was, of course, incredible grief at the command center too. Jen Dowd Nelson spoke to reporters in front of the house at the time.
"We feel as much anger as sorrow at the realization of the brutal and dehumanizing conduct that occurred. We hope that some good can come out of this – including the capture of the person that was responsible," she said at the time. "We don't want them to be able to kill again."
The case goes cold
In the days following the discovery of Zywicki's body and the confirmation of her identity, a nationwide search commenced – with everyday people joining to help in the search. The nonprofit Iowa Cold Cases noted that authorities launched a multistate task force with 14 investigators from both local forces and the FBI.
Several suspects were identified. Lonnie Bierbrodt, a trucker and a felon on parole, was questioned early in 1993 and had blood and hair samples taken. In 2014, former Illinois State Police investigator Martin McCarthy told CBS 2's Parker that Bierbrodt was placed in LaSalle County the day Zywicki disappeared, and one witness identified him as the man she saw standing alongside Zywicki on the highway.
Bierbrodt also lived near the scene where Zywicki's body was found, McCarthy noted.
Further, McCarthy told Parker, a witness said Bierbrodt gave away, as a gift, a key piece of evidence – an unusual music box wristwatch of the same kind of watch that was missing from Zywicki's suitcase.
But while McCarthy said in 2014 that he believed Bierbrodt was the killer, Bierbrodt ended up being released for a lack of evidence. The task force disbanded in February 1993, according to Iowa Cold Cases. Bierbrodt died in 2002.
Meanwhile, there were follow-up stories across the news media in the months and years after Zywicki was murdered. Other names came up as possible people of interest in the Zywicki case over the years, only to be ruled out. There was nothing to point to a killer, and the case went cold.
"I think the thing that's hard for me is that after her body was identified, and we had the funeral and the burial, I wasn't in touch with her family as much anymore. It was hard for her dad to talk to me, and I think her family wanted me to be able to move on too," Nelson told Edwards. "So there was a time where it was only on the anniversary when the media would cover it that I would be hearing about it, and know that other people were thinking about her – because I certainly was."
But it wasn't only Zywicki's own family and friends who didn't forget.
The search for answers: Never giving up
"It hits you, like this could happen to your daughter. This could happen to your niece. It could happen to your sister, you know, so people think about it that way," said Patrick Jones, administrator for the "Who Killed Tammy Zywicki" Facebook group.
In the wake of Zywicki's murder, outreach efforts were largely limited to telephones and faxes. The web as we know it was in its infancy and largely limited to chatrooms and Usenet for the average user – with the first external graphical browser having been introduced just that past April.
But the push to find Zywicki's killer remains as strong as ever, and a Facebook group is now involved in the effort. The group was created in 2009.
"I'd seen it in the paper, and it just stuck with me all those years, and then when Facebook popped up, I decided, why not? You know, give it a shot," said Jones. "We had like 60 members at one time."
As of Aug. 18, 2023, there were 5,725 members.
"After the Facebook group, 'Who Killed Tammy Zywicki,' was formed, I wasn't sure what it was all about. But then I started to see that more and more people I knew, including her mother, were part of the group. And so I joined the group, and it has grown every year," said Nelson. "There have been new people that have joined; that have wanted to help raise the story up and keep it out in public, and it's definitely – I think it's really opened my eyes to how many people knew about what happened to Tammy, and heard about that, and had it impact them in some way."
"It's really been kind of interesting that it's been so active, and it just seems to really pick up – which is the really fascinating part about it. I wouldn't even want to take a guess at the number of cases like this that just get forgotten," said Dean Zywicki. "I think this truly is a testament to the kind of person she was, and the people she touched." That's really what it comes down to for me."
Meanwhile, CBS 2 never lost track of the search for answers either – with follow-up stories 10 years later in 2002, and 20 years later in 2012 – when the late Parker was still on the story.
"Every August, about this time of year, I think back to 1992 as kids are going off to school. As my kids became college kids, and they left for school ... I would invariably think of Tammy Zywicki," FBI spokesman Ross Rice told Parker in the 2012 report. "It left a lasting impression on me as it did anyone who was associated with the case."
CBS 2's Dana Kozlov followed up five years later, talking with Tammy Zywicki's heartbroken mother, JoAnn. Tammy Zywicki's father, Hank, passed away in 2015.
Sources at the time told Kozlov that agents believed Zywicki's killer was dead – but Illinois State Police said there was no proof.
"Even if this person is dead, there's a possibility there were other people with them; there were other people who helped them," JoAnn Zywicki said in 2017. "There has to be other people that knew about it."
It is now coming up on 31 years since Tammy Zywicki was murdered.
Meanwhile, the flyer seeking information is still posted on the FBI website. It notes that the driver of a tractor-trailer was seen near Zywicki's vehicle, and described the driver as a white male between 35 and 40 years of age, over 6 feet tall, with dark, bushy hair.
The FBI also notes some of Zywicki's personal property is known to be missing, including a Canon 35mm camera and a Lorus brand musical wristwatch that played the tune, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," with a green umbrella on its face and a green band.
"Even today, if I were to hear a certain song – if I were to hear Blondie – I would think of Tammy immediately," said Fort. "I could start crying about it. It's very present."
"She left my life 30 years ago, and she's still a big part of the choices I make, and the way I react to people, and the way I think about things," added Nelson. "I have two kids who are heading off to college in the next couple years, so I'm in that other end of the perspective – thinking, what would it have been like to be her parents?"
If you have any information about Tammy Zywicki or who took her life, contact law enforcement or the Who Killed Tammy Zywicki Facebook group.
