Decades after daughter’s murder, former SC mom awaits closure. Genealogy could be key

When Joann Zywicki leaves her bedroom every morning, the first thing she sees is a photo of her daughter, propped up in a glass-front bookcase.

Some friends have suggested she put the photo away.

“I don’t have to see the picture to remind me of her,” Zywicki always responds.

She has lived 28 years without her daughter, Tammy, a Greenville native who was murdered sometime during her trip back to Grinnell College in Iowa for her senior year.

Zywicki doesn’t know for sure when Tammy died, or where. And worse, she doesn’t know who killed Tammy and left her body on the side of an interstate highway 500 miles from where she was last seen.

The case has stymied nearly 50 investigators from the FBI, Illinois State Police and local law enforcement agencies.

“We don’t consider this a cold case,” said Ryan Kayney, who has handled the case for the Illinois State Police for five years. Despite chasing the leads that went nowhere, he believes one day Tammy Zywicki’s murder will be solved, perhaps through the tool that has proved so successful elsewhere over the past two years: DNA research through public ancestry databases.

Kayney would not say much about the investigation but did acknowledge that DNA ancestry research was one avenue investigators are exploring.

The crime

At 21, Tammy Zywicki hoped for a career in photography. On the day she was abducted, Aug. 23, 1992, she was returning early to her college to take photos of athletes for the yearbook.

She had grown up in Greenville, a star soccer player at Eastside High School. Her family moved to New Jersey after her high school graduation.

Tammy dropped her younger brother, Daren, off at Northwestern University in Illinois, where he was studying civil engineering. Tammy’s Pontiac T1000, 7 years old, overheated a time or two. They took it in stride.

Tammy spent the night with a friend and headed for Grinnell, Iowa, 300 miles away. At mile marker 83 on Interstate 80, the Pontiac apparently broke down again.

Passersby saw a young blond woman outside the car between 3:15 p.m. and 4:10 p.m. They said the hood was up. Others saw a tractor-trailer truck pulled up behind and a white man in his 30s, possibly mid-40s standing with a woman. He had long, dark hair and was 6 feet tall.

Another motorist saw a man walking from a pickup truck toward Tammy’s car as she stood in front of it.

At 5 p.m., Illinois State Police marked the car abandoned and towed it the next afternoon.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Joann and Hank Zywicki grew frantic after not hearing from their daughter. They called Tammy’s friends, who confirmed she had not shown up.

A full-throated search began. The state police issued an APB within two hours of the family reporting Tammy missing.

Posters went up, and news media were contacted. The Zywickis went to Illinois. Law enforcement searched by air, and K9s explored the ground.

A body

That’s where the evidence ended until eight days later, Sept. 1, when a man stopped on the side of Interstate 44 in Missouri to either relieve himself or cover tools he had in the bed of his truck because it had started raining. He told authorities both stories.

While he was outside his truck, he said, he smelled an odor and saw something resembling the form of a human body in a red blanket secured on the ends with duct tape. The man went to the closest highway patrol office and returned with an officer, who cut open the blanket and saw a leg.

Inside the blanket, the body, later identified through dental records as Tammy, was wrapped in a sheet. Tammy had been stabbed seven times in a circular pattern on her chest, piercing her lung, pericardial sac and liver. She had been sexually assaulted. She wore the clothes she was last seen in, but underneath was a lacy bra, not Tammy’s style.

The helpers

In Chicago, Patrick Jones bought a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper on his lunch break and saw a story about a young college student who was missing.

“I read the whole thing and then went and got the Chicago Tribune,” he said.

He felt sick. Mile marker 83 is less than 100 miles from his Elmhurst, Illinois, home. He had a daughter who was Tammy’s age. She had blond hair.

Years passed as Tammy’s murder remained unsolved. Jones couldn’t stop thinking about it. Through the years, he has read everything he could about the case, the discovery of the body, the stalled investigation. In 2009, Jones decided to create a Facebook page for Tammy. He called it “Who Killed Tammy Zywicki.”

In New Jersey, Robert Kotlarek was touched by the case as well. He remembered seeing Tammy in a parking lot the summer before she was killed. Every now and then, he’d think of her and do a little research. An archaeologist, he was working on a project and on the way home, stopped by Tammy’s grave in Pennsylvania, where her family is from originally.

In 2013, Kotlarek saw the Facebook page and joined. Before long, he became an administrator.

Jones and Kotlarek refuse to let anyone forget Tammy.

“If I didn’t have him, I don’t think this would be a success,” Jones said.

Each day, new members join. Some knew Tammy. Most did not.

The page has prompted leads that administrators turned over to investigators and is a source of comfort for Joann Zywicki.

“Those two are the real story,” Joann said. She thinks the prolonged attention on Tammy’s case is a result of their efforts.

Kotlarek crafted an extensive portfolio of information, detailing suspects identified by law enforcement and others who were arrested for similar crimes, as well as a thorough essay on the crime and evidence. He has updated it through the years as the Illinois State Police release more information.

They issued a press release this week — the anniversary of Tammy’s death — reminding people they are still on the case.

Kotlarek regularly talks to investigators and often visits Zywicki, who now lives in Florida.

“I consider him my fourth son,” she said.

Suspects

In all, 12 men have been considered suspects in the Zywicki murder, and seven have been ruled out. The latest considered was Clark Perry Baldwin, an Iowa trucker who was arrested in May on suspicion of murdering a pregnant woman in Tennessee in 1991. He is also suspected of killing two women in Wyoming whose bodies were found in 1992, but they have never been identified.

All the bodies were found off an interstate highway.

Baldwin’s arrest came after investigators used a commercial genealogical database to identify DNA matches of ancestors. Investigators obtained his DNA from his trash and a cart he used at Walmart. It matched DNA from the crime scenes.

In the last two years, genealogical matching has solved about 100 cases of long-ago murders. Most prominently has been the Golden State Killer case, a reign of terror in several California cities that spanned the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. In all, the Golden State Killer was responsible for 13 murders, at least 50 rapes and 120 burglaries.

DNA from Joseph DeAngelo, 74, a former policeman, was collected from his trash and helped identify him as the Golden State Killer. He was sentenced last week to life without parole.

The process

The genealogical matching process involves finding people who match DNA from a crime scene, then using traditional ancestry tracing to uncover possible suspects. That may lead to 1,000 people. An investigator rules out people based on gender, age and location. That may leave a handful of people for law enforcement to look at.

It’s a long, time-consuming process.

In Greenville, investigators have used genealogical DNA matching to identify suspects in three murder cases from the 1980s and 1990s. Robert Brashers, the suspect in the case of Genevieve Zitricki, killed himself in 1999, before he was identified. He also has been tied to the deaths of a mother and daughter in Missouri.

Well-known genetic genealogist CeCe Moore used the online service GEDmatch to identify Brashers. Moore has appeared on many television shows and is the genealogist on “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.”

Greenville police used genealogical DNA in the case of the death of an infant whose body was found inside a box in a field in 1990. Authorities did not know who the girl was and called her Julie Valentine because she was found close to Valentine’s Day.

Last year, police arrested Brook Graham, who they identified as the child’s mother. She is awaiting trial on that case and that of an infant boy found a year earlier.

Also awaiting trial is Brian Munns, who is suspect in the 1988 murder of Alice Haynsworth Ryan, a wealthy Greenville woman stabbed to death in her home. He was arrested last year.

Moore could not be reached for comment, but she said in a video from I4GG, a conference for genetic genealogists in July, that one man identified through genetic genealogy has pleaded guilty and one was convicted by a jury.n addition to identifying numerous killers and suspected killers, the technique has also freed a man who had been convicted of murder.

Good and bad days

Joann Zywicki lives in an active living community in Ocala, Florida. Her husband, Hank, died five years ago.

He never got over losing Tammy, Joann said. For years he blamed himself for not getting her a better car or a cellphone. Back then, few people had cellphones, but Tammy’s murder brought about a huge increase in the number of people with phones in their cars, Kotlarek said.

Zywicki said she has good days and bad. She likes where she lives, has nice neighbors and can walk to the store, but it’s hard living by herself.

“We’ve had three marriages and seven grandkids” in the family since Tammy died, she said.

Tammy’s brothers have photos of Tammy in their homes and their children know about their lost aunt, but the family tries not to dwell on their loss.

Recently, Zywicki found a box of T-shirts Tammy’s friends had made after Tammy died. Screen printed on them was “I have a right to be fearless.”

She thinks that remains a good message, all these years later.

This story was originally published August 28, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Decades after daughter’s murder, former SC mom awaits closure. Genealogy could be key."