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Who Killed Tammy Zywicki?
The 21-year-old college student’s family lives in hope that her 1992 murder will be solved.
In August 1992, a vivacious, ambitious student named Tammy Jo Zywicki was returning to college in Iowa from her home state of New Jersey.
She never made it. Instead, she was discovered murdered and dumped by the roadside nine days later in Illinois. Police were unable to trace the culprit and the case eventually went cold. However, nearly 30 years later, the FBI remains hopeful that DNA technology will lead to Tammy’s murderer finally being unveiled.
Car trouble and apparent abduction
Tammy Jo Zywicki had been excited to return to Grinnell College for her senior year. A keen photographer as well as soccer player, she had opted to head back on August 23rd — slightly before the beginning of classes — to take pictures of the school’s athletes for its yearbook.
She dropped her younger brother off at Northwestern University in Illinois and journeyed west on I-80, promising her parents she would call home to New Jersey when she reached her destination. That call never came and, after waiting several hours, her mother JoAnn decided to call campus police.
Meanwhile, an Illinois State Trooper had found Tammy’s 1985 Pontiac T1000 near LaSalle and flagged it up as an abandoned vehicle before getting it towed the following day.
Grinnell College campus police checked Tammy’s dorm for any sign of her and looked for her car in the parking lot. Although someone initially said they thought they had seen her, it quickly became clear Tammy had never arrived. When the authorities compared notes and realised it was her car that had been abandoned and impounded in Illinois, a frantic search ensued.
On September 1st, the search ended in tragedy. A driver on Interstate Highway 44 (I-44) in rural Lawrence County, Missouri, had found Tammy’s body wrapped and tied in a red blanket at the side of the road.
She had been raped, stabbed eight times and dumped more than 500 miles away from where she had last been seen. She was also wearing different clothes to those she had set off in, including underwear she would not…
