Everyone's Daughter

Within days of her vanishing, nearly everyone she'd met or been close to was getting involved in what would become a massive search effort to try and find her. And nowhere was that more noticeable than at Grinnell College in Central Iowa. You don't think much about the bad things that happened to people. You never think, oh, well, it's never gonna happen to me or my friends. And now it's it's coming set my friends, And now you know, I'm having reality hit you really hard. At the time,

I was in Michigan and Tammy was coming. She had already left the East Coast and I think was staying in Pennsylvania with relatives, and she knew that I was going back to college at the same time, and that I was looking for a ride because my ride had fallen through. Stacy Pappus was a friend and classmate of Tammy's Wikis. They had met their freshman year at Grinnell College and each had plans to be back on campus

the week before classes started. Stacy says they talked about car pooling that last leg of the drive along I eight to Grinnell. Except this was and trying to get in touch with someone in real time, it's far more difficult. We spoke through answer machine messages to each other. Um, you know, she left me a message, and then I left her message because she was checking in with her mom as she went along on the road. We're leaving each other messages, and it just was getting too hard.

So I just found another ride, and I was like, oh, don't worry about it. I got another ride. I'll see you there. When I arrived on campus. Of course, you know, whenever you arrive, you have all this stuff to unload, and so you're dragging your stuff through the hall of what they called the Loggia, which is this covered, screamed in long porch that connects five or six storms, and all along the Logha there was all these handmade paper signs on the kiosks and on the doors, and they

all said, Tammy, call your mom. She's freaking out, Tammy. Where are you, Tammy? Call your mom? Tammy were worried and I ran into someone who was putting up these fires or or something, and I was like, Hey, what's going on with Tammy? And she's like, no one can find her. We don't know if she even arrived on campus. That's the moment that for me that I realized that something was really not not great. Previously, on paper Ghosts, they got a call and they said, if you heard

from Tammy, we can't find Tammy. We had a hard time with the police. They just kept telling us from the beginning, shella, she'll be back, She'll be back. If you've been on our eight cars are just zooming down. There is nothing there but cornfields for miles and miles and trucks and trucks, trucks all over. It's the main part. One of the witnesses, I saw a tractor trailer from an orange stripe, and so we had a post drawn up and I just starting that trying to find the trunk.

We knew at that point that something really bad had happened, and we knew that whatever situation she was in was in a really dangerous one. My name is them William Phelips. I'm an investigative journalist an author of more than forty two crime books. This is season three of the paper

Posts in plain Sight. Despite what Tammy's Wicki's family and friends believed, law enforcement assumed that the one year old student had taken off on her own, even after her car was found abandoned alongside of a busy highway in Illinois. In their defense, young people often choose to go off the grid. Maybe Tammy wanted to leave. Maybe she had a boyfriend no one knew about. But any time I broached this idea, someone else in Tammy's life told me

there was just no way. Tammy was not someone who would have packed it in or taken off with someone without telling her loved ones. First. Her family knew this, all her friends knew this. The police, they're wondering if she's run away, and how do we convince them this is not who Tammy is and she would not do that, and we need to take it seriously. Tammy's best friend, Jen Nelson was among many who believed the Illinois State

Police were slow to act. I was calling all of the major networks in Chicago and trying to get them to run a story on her, and I got increasingly angry because they kept saying that it wasn't newsworthy, and you know, for a couple of days, it wasn't newsworthy. And a reporter actually told me that there were many many young blonde women that went missing every year, so this wasn't something that was going to make the news. The hands on action from Grinnell's students was beyond what

anyone could have imagined. During that first week Tammy was missing, her friends and classmates formed a sort of grassroots coalition and spread out across the region, posting and distributing hundreds of missing person flyers at truck stops, convenience stores, and airports. They sent more than ten thousand posters to post offices in every city and town in Iowa. They knocked on doors, asking anyone and everyone if they had seen Tammy. Nobody

was giving up. We went to gas stations, we went to restaurants, road stops, truck stops, and we asked if we could put signs up for Tammy. And we had a description of the truck that the witnesses saw near Tammy's car, and I think the sign said something like, have you seen this truck? Amy Joe was one of Tammy's teammates at Grennell and the co captain of the

woman's soccer team. In she says, the notion that one of her friends could have been abducted on the side of a busy Midwest highway shattered the sense of safety that so many young people felt at the time. Grnell call it was a was like a bubble. We didn't lock doors. We didn't We didn't even lock our bikes. We just we had bikes that we just left all over campus and they were always there when we wanted them again or we took another bike, and we all

we just shared everything. It was a very safe community. We walked everywhere at all hours of the day and night, and they were I don't remember any security concerns ever. And then this happened. When a loved one goes missing, it throws off the entire natural balance of life that mundane every day ebb and flow we all take for granted. As the days add up, you question everything and wait

for what feels like will be the inevitable. But Tammy's friends and family were relentless and hopeful, which was what in my view made people take notice. Here's jen Nels and again. Yeah, it became a bigger and bigger story as the days went by, I think because the news had spread beyond Illinois and Iowa and the conversations were happening. There were questions coming up about why there weren't emergency call boxes that she could have gone to and called

for help. By the end of the first week, everyone including law enforcement, was working under the assumption that Tammy was in trouble. After investigators released information about a white semi truck and a person of interest, more witnesses were calling into report what they'd seen on the highway the afternoon Tammy's car broke down. Some even said they saw a girl resembling Tammy running on the side of the

highway in Iowa. I witness testimony is very fragile, and you're talking about an interstate at the time with people going by and so me five or eighty miles an hour. If you think about the last time you were on the interstate, you know, how much did you pay attention to a car broken down? On the side of the road if you can even remember the last time you

saw that. Jeff Padilla is a retired lieutenant with the Illinois State Police, which he first joined back in nine He wasn't a member of the task force, but would go on to work on Tammy's case in later years. We did have other information out there about, you know, the pickup truck and the white truck, the stripe truck, and then we had information that there was another white car broken down just east of her. So you know, then we were like, okay, we're are people getting confused

between that broken down white vehicle. So um, you have to remember that there was several days between when her car broke down and when her family notified the State Police that she was missing. However, it didn't get in the media right away, and people weren't aware of it until probably the week later, and so those tips began to come in after that information came out in the media. Um. In my opinion, witness information is great, but you really

need to back it up with some hard evidence. Tammy's white Pontiac hatchback was the only thing resembling a crime scene, and it was mostly empty. Her large brown faux alligator skin purse, which contained her driver's license, was missing, as well as her beloved thirty five millimeter camera. Among the items left were an empty camera bag and a fountain soda cup from Hardy's, which was the last known stop Tammy made before stalling on the side of the road.

Tammy is a very young girl on our way to college. Who would she willingly go with on a sunny afternoon in the summer when her car broke down. There was no indication that there was a struggle at all. The car was locked, although you have to you can't roll on the fact that the car was locked because somebody at the tollyard could have locked it. Because there was luggage, There was valuables in there. Um, there were items that

belonged to Tammy that were in there. When law enforcement finally went through the car meticulously to see if anything could be gleaned forensically, Padilla says, nothing was found. I know that her car was processed by crime scene text forensic wise. To my knowledge, there was nothing of any

value to us from the car. We did dust for fingerprints along the inside of the front of the car and the fan cowling, and all these items and that are in the very front of the car, for example, if somebody had leaned into the car to look to see if there was it was a broken hose or something. We tried to get prints from that and there was nothing. We didn't get anything. By the eighth day, Tammy's parents, including her eldest brother Todd, decided to leave Chicago and

head back home. They were not getting the re sults they'd hoped for because nothing other than a search for Tammy was happening. Well, I was there. I remember how many days basically nothing was happening. We've done all we could do, so um I went back to school. It was still unresolved. At that point. We were still assuming, or at least hoping it would be a happy ending.

When a loved one goes missing, everything is upbended, jobs are put on hold, commitments are dropped, and life becomes a series of sleepless nights waiting for that dreaded knock on the door or the phone call you do not want to answer, until finally it happened and everything you thought you knew changes. I took a phone call in the kitchen and it was one of the reporters that had been covering her case for quite a while, and he said, Jen, don't say anything. I just want you

to listen. They found a body in Missouri. Hope. It's a strange concept for anyone who has been in a similar situation to the Zowiki family. You want to believe hope is real, even when every ounce of your soul fights against it and tells you something different. When more than a week passes and you have not heard from a loved one who has gone missing and a body has been found, worst case scenarios begin to dominate every thought,

day and night. Hope turns to despair. You despise hope, and it becomes nothing more than a shallow, pointless word. At this stage, all you can do is think about the horror of your impending reality. It is by far the most heartbreaking aspect of the work I do, bringing the victims family members back to the moment when the proverbial knock on the door finally comes. Well, they had found a body alongside the head, and they they hadn't identified it at that time yet, but they wanted us

to know. And when you heard that it was in Missouri, what were you thinking? We weren't thinking. We didn't expect it when you got that call. Did you know when your gut or did you think I'm gonna be hopeful? Be hopeful? We're positive people, right right, Yeah, and now we were helpful. By day nine, the Wikis had received word that the body of a female had been found in Sarcoxi, Missouri. At first, they were skeptical. Sar Coxy was five miles away, a seven hour drive from where

Tammy went missing in Illinois. Plus initial media reports claimed the young woman police found had reddish hair. Tammy was blonde. Here's Stacy Pappas, whom you heard at the beginning of the episode. I had heard of rumor that a body was found in Missouri, and a lot of people had a very bad feeling about it. I still didn't think that it was her because Tammy was was blonde and never had dyed her hair to my knowledge, and um, you know, I just I was like, well, it can't

be can't be Tammy because Tammy's not a redhead. Authorities were careful not to jump to conclusions either. During the early nineties, there were dozens of missing young women in the Midwest, some even fitting Tammy's description. Don Laken, the Lawrence County corner at the time, spoke to the media about the discovery. There's nothing that can be said because until we have a plaustive identification, you know, I wouldn't put any family through that one way or the other.

Thin just no family deserves to go through that, And this is a very hard situation, no matter whose childhood was. Police confirmed via dental records that the body found in Missouri was in fact Tammy's a Wicky. That reddish color in her hair was the result of dye from the clay and soil on the ground. Worst of all, it was evident she suffered a brutal death. When does the identification take place? When do you know for sure? It

wasn't too long after that. It was only a few days after that that we knew for sure and they called you with some information. Did you have to send dental records or anything like that? Now they had records, I think they had records from the college. And did they ever ask you to come down and identify her. No, they said we could if we wanted to, and you chose not to. Moments like these become seer in your mind forever. It's the kind of heartbreak you think cannot

get any worse. Here's Tammy's brother, Todd. I don't even remember now whether it was my father or mother who finally told me what had happened, that they had found her to this day, I remember being in my room just getting it on the phone and just collapsing on the floor. I just couldn't believe it. I mean, at that point, it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I just had not really thought about anything to that

point except finding her. And I was so wrapped up in the anxiety and the effort and doing everything we could to try to cooperate and come to a happy ending, that it never even really occurred to me that this might be how it ended for Tammy's friends. The feeling was much the same. I just remember feeling physically physically ill when I found out that it was Tammy, like

sick to my stomach, and also just shock. I've never had a death so close to me, that of someone my age that wasn't a grandparent or a great grandparents, so was it was just unbelievable that that could happen, that could have been any one of us. Going back to what I mentioned, in the last episode. When I decided to look into Tammy's case, I knew I needed to think outside the traditional box, beyond those theories and sightings of a semi tractor trailer truck with two rust

colored stripes. And the more I heard about Tammy's character, the more I became skeptical of the idea that she would have accepted help from a trucker. Let me ask you this. Let's say the person pulls up and there are a cop, they have a badge, or they have a collar, and they're a priest, or there's somebody else in a trustworthy part of life. What would she have done at that point? I don't think she would get

in the car with them. I guess if it were a police officer offering to bring a tow truck, you know, that might be one thing. But it's a question you could ask every one of us when we were that age and driving. I mean, my car broke down on the highway a few years after Tammy died, and a truck pulled up behind me, and the driver got out

and came to offer me help. And I opened my window half an inch and he said, you know, I'm glad you're not getting out of the car and just stopping to let you know that I've called the police and they're on their way to help you. A number of people I spoke with said they bought a cell phone in the months after Tammy's murder. What's so discouraging about it is if this had been, you know, three years later, she would have had a cell phone in

the car. It was right before widespread access to cell phones came around, where a young girl, you know, called subtrunck with a cell phone or a newer even right, And you can think of all the different things that could have been different. Tammy's friends and classmates also helped found a group on campus called Fearless, which focused on the safety of young women and fought to get emergency call boxes installed along major highways nationwide. Everyone was desperate

to wrestle something positive from the tragedy. As for Hank and Joanne's WICKI, they appeared on Oprah Winfrey's talk show one month after their daughter's murder. It was part of a segment about the dangerous women face driving alone. I was asking Joe Ane Wiki during the break, who do they suspect as Tammy's killer? Is it a serial killer or do they have any clue? I've put it this right in the authorities haven't been too free with information

with uh. All we know is there following leads and beyond that, do you feel the killers will be found or killer as the days go on? I'm not as an optimistic as my wife because of over the period of time, as we've seen how the authorities operate, and they i'll call them archaic methods of even communication and and doing their work, I do have doubt. Hope turned to anger, then outrage. Who would do this? What happened? The first of many questions began to haunt not only

investigators but those closest to Tammy. So at that point I think we really turned to how do we catch this this person? How do we catch this monster? Because if it's been done to Tammy, it's going to be done again to somebody else. During a trip I took to Illinois in the summer of I met up with Marty McCarthy, one of the officers who worked on Tammy's case.

I paid him a visit after I spent some time earlier in the day parked near mile marker eight three in LaSalle County, Illinois to see the spot where Tammy's car had broken down. Yeah, yeah, glad you got down. A former Illinois State Police investigator, Marty is a law enforcement man through and through. He has been retired for more than twenty years, but still spends much of his free time investigating eating what happened to Tammy. Marty is a big dude, six ft two and solid. He's also

a towering figure in this case. He's tenacious, driven, and as vocal as he comes across. I found him to be quite charming. Have a cup of coffee or a coke, um diet coke, If you have it, thank you. I've met many cops like Marty throughout my career, those detectives who cannot let go of a case. This is that

case from Marty, the one he could never solve. It gnaws at him, and this is pretty We discussed how fast and ferocious tammy story gained national attention and how that led to a bigger conversation about roadside safety for young women. People were desperate to know how to get out of a situation similar to Tammy's. The press got involved big time, so it was a national thing. Everybody said, oh, my god, could have been my daughter. It's college girl

going on a highway. People started buying phones. Guys and taskforce are running out buying phone they saw whoa it's could happen to my wife, got my daughter? Somebody can breakdown on a highway, and of course interest groups for parents college putting out things, where's Pammy got that type of thing. Marty explained that in order to really understand the complexity of what happened in the investigation and the mistakes he believes were made, I needed to look at

how the case was handled from day one. Current law enforcement working on Tammy's case have issues with his candor and his public criticism about their work. All of you don't how could how could I fight it? A retired cop. After he retired in two thousand one, Marty continued to make suggestions to the I s P his theories, things he discovered, but he went unheard. So he began talking to the media about those theories and the issues he

had with the investigation well before then. One of those issues was that tip Marty previously mentioned to me, the one he says was received within days of Tammy's disappearance and went ignored. By police. It came from a woman who said she was driving eastbound on I eighty when she saw a blue or green pickup truck parked behind

Tammy's car along the westbound side of the highway. She claimed it was some time between three thirty and five pm that the hood of Tammy's vehicle was propped open and Tammy was standing in front of it wearing shorts. The woman's name actually appears on that I s P Tip sheet a source gave me. On this sheet is a list of eyewitness tips that are deemed credible enough to lie. Each tip would then be assigned to an officer whose job it was to run it down engage

its importance to the case. If warranted, a written statement from the witness was taken. In this case, the woman's tip called for just that I'm just gonna read from this statement. The vehicle was older model and was parked very close to the back bumper of the white vehicle. The female was standing up front of the disabled vehicle.

The driver of the vehicle park behind the white vehicle is described as white male, five ft eight six ft tall, brown hair, in his twenties, thin build, and wearing dark colored short sleeved shirt and a pair of light brown tan pants. What she told me just add that. She says,

I'm coming back eastbound from Princeton. I see this, and I immediately see and not recognizes this woman's car has broken down, and she slows down and she looks over there and she gets this and sees this guy and just gets this eerie feeling there's something wrong with this that I should stop, But I got this assignment. But there's no doubt in her mind that was Tammy's eye working that she saw. So she goes back home, a doesn't doesn't do anything at that point, and then calls

in on it becomes an issue. In my view, this tip is significant. Here's a woman who slowed down, took notice, and thought about what she'd seen. Hours later, when she saw coverage about Tammy's disappearance, she called it in and gave specifics. On top of all that, I've learned that this woman had impeccable credibility and wasn't someone to ignore

in the community. That all said, however, I sp Lieutenant Jeff Padilla said there was a second white car that was broken down on the same highway on the same day, So I have to leave room for the idea that this eyewitness could have been talking about that vehicle, and just about every other statement the I s P collected eyewitnesses described seeing a white tractor trailer parked in front of Tammy's car, and only one description details a semi

with two rust colored stripes. That description usurped all others. It's the one the I s P ran within the media, the one drivers all over the country would fixate on an eighteen wheel tractor trailer truck with two distinctive rust colored diagonal stripes painted in the middle of the trailer.

I asked every investigator I spoke with, why the I s P decided to go public with a composite drawing of that one particular vehicle, solely based on one witness eight Why not also release any information about the pickup truck? It was truck truck, truck truck. And let me just say this, after the body is found in Missouri, everybody who else kills someone and drive six with a body It kind of informed and gave racity to that that it was a truck. I remember running down these truck leads.

There were a lot of different descriptions of the truck, because there may have been several other and they may have been a mile he had, they may have been two mild Give me what the emphasis was so strong on the truck that they just let everything else go.

Throughout my career, one of the things I've heard over and over again from detectives, serial killers, and criminals is this, if you are going to put out a composite of a suspect or a vehicle, you had better be damn sure it's the person or vehicle you are looking for, Otherwise if you're just pointing the public in the wrong direction. It's a point I brought up with Karen Donnelly, who was the LaSalle County State's attorney from Hi Karen, nice

to meet you. As the head law enforcement official for the jurisdiction, part of her job involved meeting with local police to hear about their active cases. Tammy's case was assigned a new set of investigators in recent years. It was brought to Karen's desk. Why is it do you think that they went with that drawing and put that out there as a composite of the possible vehicle behind her instead of the other witness statements of a nondescript truck with nothing on it. We never questioned what the

investigators did with the cases. What they put out, that was their purview, not mine or not anybody's that sits in that state's attorney seat. So we left the investigation to the investigators, and that was what they went with, was that truck description. They did check around with many local trucking companies and nationwide to see if anybody matched that type of semi There's a lot of different ones.

I started looking on the road myself to see if there was anything like that, and there's so many that maybe somebody driving by it, you know, sixty seventy saw something different than what it actually was. So it's hard to say. Because the trucks go up and down that way, it's very well traversed by semison, you know, commerce. To the investigator's credit, the initial focus on the tractor trailer did make sense. Tammy disappeared from one major interstate and

was found alongside another same as i AD. Interstate forty four in Missouri is a heavily traffic commercial trucking route, and while most people don't have a reason to drive several hundred miles in the day, that type of trip is common for a trucker, just asked the guy who found Tammy's body. I pulled off an exit ramp and started down the other side, and when I turned to walk around in the front of the truck, I've seen it laying there and you could actually tell it was

a body. On the next episode of Paper Ghosts and they said, hey, and we're trying to verify that the body that was found here was Tammy Zwiki And I said, what body. I've never seen a murder like this. Ever, It's hard for me to understand how that happened. So did the Illinois State Police update you each day or they were doing They were just stuff. I'll tell you what what you need to know when you need to

know it. She was wearing a pair of shorts from a soccer club that she played for, but was what was very important to us was that the patch from that soccer club was cut off the leg of those shorts. Paper Ghosts is written and executive produced by Me and William Phelps and I Heart executive producer Christina Everett. Additional writing by our supervising producer Julia Weaver. Our associate producer is Darby Masters Audio editing and mixing by Christian Bowman

and Abou zafar Our. Series theme number four four two is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and Tom Mooney. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.