00:00:00
She is meeting a friend and they're meeting at the Dairy Queen and they're going to go to church.
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She's your daughter. She's your sister. She's 13 years old and she disappears. I had a birthday, cake, and nobody to blow out the candles.
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My chief threw this box on my desk. He says, this is an old file. I want you to solve it.
00:00:34
He promised me, he says, I will not give up. Do we find Cindy? I took that file home with me almost every single night and just kept rereading it.
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There was more to it. You could see that. There's the seeker card. He says, you must be the seeker.
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The person of interest at this time was Art Ream I'm not going to lie to you But I'm not going to tell you what you want to know
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When he wouldn't answer When he wouldn't elaborate We knew we were on to something
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We weren't supposed to find her that day But I'll tell you She was calling to us
00:01:07
Do you remember making mixtape cassettes for your friends? All these years later, that's something a best friend recalls about Cindy.
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Dance music. She loved to dance. Yeah. Maybe the soundtrack to your life in the middle 80s was like Cindy Zarzicki's.
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Cindy Lauper, Motley Crue, and especially hometown favorite, Madonna. The older sister she swapped clothes with still laughs about it.
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We had a song, I still remember every move to this day, Madonna's Borderline. And Cindy and I would dance that song over and over upstairs.
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In the middle 80s, a kid like Cindy didn't live in a big universe. Hers was a blue-collar Detroit suburb known back then as East Detroit.
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Neighbors mostly assembled cars or stamped out the parts for them. The borders of this teenage girl were home, school, church, and the mall for movies, meeting boys, and messing around.
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In the warm months, there were run-down ball fields for softball games, a family passion.
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And, of course, there was the friendly dairy queen down the street after softball,
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Eddie Jr.'s the kid brother. What did Cindy get? Do you remember? Vanilla, probably swirl, ice cream cone.
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We always got the twist with the chocolate and the sprinkles. Like vanilla sprinkles.
00:02:34
It was the early spring of 1986, and Cindy, 13, about to be 14, would be playing first base and batting cleanup for her church softball team.
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Just two weeks before it all happened, she was playing catch outside with Eddie Jr.
00:02:48
when Cindy piped up and asked her dad if he'd help coach the team that coming season.
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It was kind of exciting because it was something that, as a father, I could connect with her.
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It hadn't been easy for Cindy's father, raising a son and two daughters by himself after the marriage broke up.
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Ed Zarzicki was a school custodian, and what exactly to do with a young daughter, other than love her, perplexed him a bit.
00:03:12
So this new softball connection was a welcome one between father and daughter. I mean, had no problems with her.
00:03:19
It was a joy to watch her come home from school because she had so much enthusiasm in her.
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And she always had a smile. And not at all a shy kid. There was that time the summer before on a family camping trip across the river in Canada.
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The middle night, the bonfire was going. And at that time, Greenwood had that song, Proud to be an American.
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And she was just singing that song just as loud. That was the type of person. She enjoyed life.
00:03:46
And in the last couple of years, she discovered boys. All I remember is she used to come home from school and write boys' names like 50 times.
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I love Scott or I love Dave. The boys' name she was writing the most that spring, filling notebooks, was Scott.
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Teresa Olahowski, Cindy's best friend since the second grade, like sisters in their matching too cool for school white boots with buckles
00:04:11
we wore those shoes everywhere was at the mall the day Cindy's crush on 14 year old Scott began Scott had a couple of friends with him and we passed by we
00:04:20
started talking to them they started talking to us and I think they had a lot of the same interests Kathy Buford was Cindy's other great friend from school
00:04:29
and sleepovers she was really really head over heels in love with them but it wasn't anything like a long, deep relationship. This is puppy love infatuation? Yes, exactly.
00:04:40
But the place where puppy love blossomed, at the Macomb Mall, would a few weeks later get Cindy in
00:04:45
hot water with her father. The mall was about seven miles from Cindy's house, and she had
00:04:50
standing orders from her dad never to walk home. But she did. And a single dad raising a teenager
00:04:56
needed his rules followed. So I had ground to her. Which meant what? Come home right after school?
00:05:02
Right after school, and, you know, to stay at the house. Grounded. No mall, no Scott. They went to different schools.
00:05:10
I think she was probably frustrated like any 13-year-old would be when grounded.
00:05:15
But then at that time, the most important thing on her mind was Scott. You know, how am I going to talk to Scott, and how am I going to see Scott?
00:05:22
After school Friday, April 18, 1986, Cindy said goodbye to her friends Kathy and Teresa
00:05:28
and reported directly home as per her father's punishment. But the next evening, Saturday, Cindy bolted from house arrest.
00:05:36
Well, she called me and wanted to come over, and she escaped her house, came over to my house between 6 and 6.30.
00:05:45
She wasn't supposed to be there? No. The two girls talked about, what else, Scott, a boy Kathy had never met.
00:05:51
Cindy used the phone to finalize surreptitious plans She would go to the Dairy Queen and get a ride to a surprise birthday party planned for Scott the next day Sunday Kathy would be the alibi She had told Mr Zerzicki that she was going to church with me the next morning
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Come the next morning, Cindy told her kid brother she was going out for a while.
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And I'm like, we're supposed to be together, Dad's not going to be happy with us.
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And then she was like, I'm going and then just stay here. and then she started walking and then I followed her and she was like, go home, go back.
00:06:27
And then that's when she really changed her voice and like screamed at me to go back.
00:06:31
I wasn't supposed to come there. You can't be the tag along kid brother. Yeah. The infatuated 13 year old softball ace in her cool white boots and jeans purse
00:06:42
pivoted and strode to the Dairy Queen. And then she vanished. 13-year-old Cindy Zarzicki was headed to the Dairy Queen a few blocks from her home on a Sunday morning.
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That's what she told her kid brother Eddie when she wheeled and barked at him to go back home, not follow her.
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Cindy had been going to the same Dairy Queen since she was in her mother's womb.
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Alice Zarzicki had been divorced from Cindy's father, Ed, since 1981. The two of them had been getting cones and Sundays there from junior high days together.
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Married and pregnant, they still stopped by. I remember when I was expecting Cindy, I didn't have cravings.
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But Ed would have cravings. He would have to have a strawberry sundae from the Dairy Queen.
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After the marriage broke up, there was no way Alice thought that she could raise the three children.
00:07:44
She worked nights, was left with only a small house, and had little money. Ed got custody.
00:07:50
Cindy became the daughter she'd see on weekends. She was a middle child, and that's usually a child that tries really hard to please.
00:07:58
On the Saturday before she went missing, Cindy dropped in on her mom's, a visit allowed by her dad's grounding rules.
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They talked a little bit about her punishment for walking home from the distant mall.
00:08:09
She was upset, but she knew she did wrong. But a mom with an extra sense about these things had a feeling something else was agitating her teenage daughter.
00:08:19
and she had something on her mind. Maybe it involved the new love of her life, a 14-year-old named Scott.
00:08:26
It was a very early-on crush. Whatever it was, Cindy didn't let it out as she played her mixtapes and tried on her mother's clothes that Saturday afternoon.
00:08:39
She asked could she spend the night. I would have loved to have been able to say yes,
00:08:44
but I had to work, and I had to tell her no. Restless, Cindy then made that unauthorized visit to her girlfriend Kathy's house,
00:08:53
where she'd use the phone to finalize plans for what was supposed to be a surprise birthday party for Scott the following day, the Sunday.
00:09:00
Cindy hadn't said anything about a party to her mom. It's always troubled me that I didn't have her stay.
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I wondered what kind of a secret that she was trying to get around to telling me.
00:09:12
By 3 o'clock Sunday afternoon, Cindy was getting into big trouble with her father.
00:09:16
I got a phone call from Ed, and he said, would you tell Cindy to come back home now?
00:09:23
And I said, well, Cindy was over yesterday, but she's not here today. He said she isn't home.
00:09:31
When are you starting to get worried? Probably about 5, 6 o'clock. It was dinner time, and they're usually all home for dinner, and she wasn't around.
00:09:40
What'd you do? I went to the police station and they told me that I had to wait 24 hours to file a report.
00:09:49
She should have been home. She's not home. Now we're calling friends, trying to find out where she's at.
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So we went to different places looking for her. Cindy's brother, sister, mother and father divided the search.
00:10:02
Two to stay by the phones, the others driving down dark streets looking for the blonde teenager.
00:10:08
Had she run off with Scott? Was this her little rebellion against her father's grounding rules?
00:10:14
Where could Cindy be, missing now for more than 12 hours? At that point, we were still hoping that she had just spent the night at somebody's house.
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And I remember my mom coming into the room and saying, do you know where Cindy is?
00:10:27
She said, if you know anything, you better spill it. Now, your 13-year-old self, are you wondering where she is?
00:10:32
I was concerned right away, yeah. But on the bright side, this was East Detroit.
00:10:38
With the motto, a family town. Bad stuff happened in the big city nearby, not here.
00:10:43
You didn't hear about that in East Detroit. You heard about it in, you know, other states.
00:10:48
And so when you're 13, you think you're untouchable. Still, that Sunday night, the phone didn't ring.
00:10:55
Cindy's bed stayed empty. It was panic. You knew that there was something wrong.
00:11:00
Her mom wanted everyone to just take a deep breath. I mean, it's not like Jaws where you got the little music going.
00:11:07
and you know there's something. We're just making a mountain out of a molehill. It'll be over. We'll find her. Everything will be all right.
00:11:18
Monday morning, first thing, Ed Zarzycki went back down to the small town police station
00:11:23
to report his daughter officially a missing person. He says the officer taking the report told him she was probably just a runaway.
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Did it make sense to you when they suggested that? I was hoping that was it. But when someone hasn't run away and always is in contact,
00:11:42
you maybe had a feeling that there might be something wrong. Two town cops were assigned the Cindy Zarzicki case,
00:11:48
and by 10 a.m., they'd pulled Cindy's friend Kathy out of history class. They asked me some questions.
00:11:54
I told them specifically who she was going with where they were eating You told them the story about I talked to her and she said I going to the Dairy Queen Yes Teresa was interviewed by the officers at her home after school
00:12:07
Like Kathy, she told the cops about Cindy's plans to meet someone at Dairy Queen on Sunday.
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But she had the impression the officers had already locked onto a theory that Cindy was hiding out at another girlfriend's.
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They seemed to want to discuss more about who would keep her if she ran away. They just assumed she's not here. What could happen? She ran away and opened and closed.
00:12:30
On their own, family members did what they could to find Cindy. They staked out the trailer park where Cindy's boyfriend, Scott, lived, hoping she might be there.
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They printed and distributed posters of their missing daughter and sister. Her mother, Alice, asked the local papers if they'd run Cindy's picture as a news item.
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But they turned her down in that age before Amber Alerts. Cindy had just seen a movie
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Desperately Seeking Susan So I put an ad in the personals Desperately Seeking Cindy
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Nobody responded to it Six weeks after she went missing It was Cindy's birthday, June 8th
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I had a birthday, cake And nobody to blow out the candles Obsessed with finding Cindy
00:13:18
Their runaway Looking at the mall on the street, how many times did a young blonde teen with a similar build catch their eye for just a moment?
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Once late at night, the authorities in Detroit called Ed. A body had come up at the morgue and asked if I would come down and identify because it had similarities of Cindy.
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Were you relieved when you left the morgue that day and it wasn't your Cindy? Yes. Yes.
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So there was still a flicker of hope out there. Yes. Cindy's best friend from the second grade, where they won every three-legged race together, had moved on to high school.
00:13:53
Cindy's father was the school custodian. And I remember seeing him in the hallways and just the broken look on his face.
00:14:01
I can't even imagine, you know, as a parent myself, what that must have been like,
00:14:06
to watch her friends grow up around him every day and not have his daughter. And Teresa, the best friend, was as obsessed as everyone else in trying to find out what had happened to Cindy Zarzicki.
00:14:19
We'd look and hang up posters. We did that for a long time. I never forgot her. Cindy Zarzicki became one of those
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have you seen this child faces in the back of store coupons forever 13 years old
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she'd walked off to Dairy Queen on a Sunday morning in 1986 and was never seen again
00:14:48
she looked up to me I let her down why do you say that? because I wasn't there. Cindy's older sister, Connie, had been away from the house that weekend.
00:15:05
Her kid brother, Eddie, was also tortured with guilt. We should have been there and helped her out.
00:15:11
You should have tagged along. Yeah. We have seen how that the power of love has healed.
00:15:17
In 1994, eight years after her disappearance and commemorating Cindy's 21st birthday,
00:15:23
The Zarzyckis held a candlelight vigil in front of the family home. Thirteen-year-old Cindy Zarzycki was last seen...
00:15:30
The media picked it up, and interest in the fate of the missing teen was revived,
00:15:34
with Cindy's face popping up on Have You Seen Me mailings. Connie, there was a message to the police here, wasn't it?
00:15:40
We're still here, we haven't gone away. Right. And you need to get this going again, huh?
00:15:45
Right. And I had written a poem. I actually had that poem published. Do you remember a few lines of it?
00:15:51
Cindy Jo, where did you go? And it talked about looking for her. My poem was mostly that she's out there and I'll find her.
00:15:58
That's when the family recalled one of Cindy's favorite songs from the old mixtapes,
00:16:03
Cindy Lauper's Time After Time. The chorus spoke to them. If you look, you will find me time after time.
00:16:11
And if Cindy came looking for them, the family made sure that the old home phone number never got changed.
00:16:18
The house she knew stayed in the family, just in case one happy day she turned up at the front door.
00:16:25
One thing that had changed by the early 90s was the name of the town. Gritty-sounding East Detroit had been redubbed the more upscale East Point.
00:16:34
In the police station, though, nothing had much changed with the Cindy Cole case file.
00:16:38
It had been handed down from officer to officer over the years for a little defrosting,
00:16:43
mostly chasing down tips of Cindy sightings around the country that went nowhere.
00:16:48
But after the family's candlelight vigil spurred media interest, a new detective named Danielle Davis took a look at the file
00:16:54
and decided to reclassify it as a possible murder. And officially that would allow it to be opened.
00:17:03
One of Detective Davis' first questions was to find out what Cindy's teen crush back then,
00:17:08
the boy named Scott, knew about her disappearance. Scott Ream, by then 22 years old, was located
00:17:15
and agreed to a police interview right after the upcoming Fourth of July holiday.
00:17:20
It never happened. Scott Ream was killed by a drunk driver first. So there was nothing that could be done.
00:17:28
But that did start part of the ball rolling. One person reading those fresh news stories about the missing girl, it turned out,
00:17:37
was Scott Ream's mother, a woman named Linda Bronson. She was divorced from Scott's father.
00:17:42
The mother, Linda Bronson, was upset by what she read as innuendo in the news stories,
00:17:47
that her now dead son had somehow been responsible for Cindy's disappearance. And I knew that just couldn be true That was why I contacted Danielle Davis But Linda Bronson wasn calling just to clear her son name She had some information to offer and Detective Davis was listening She was very interested in it She believed me
00:18:07
She wholeheartedly believed me. At least I felt she did. Now for the first time in eight years, the East Point Police Department began looking at the Cindy case
00:18:16
as something other than a possible runaway. The detective, Danielle Davis, began piecing together a timeline of Cindy's last weekend home, chasing down old witnesses.
00:18:27
But after that flurry of fresh energy came a new setback. Detective Davis left the department.
00:18:34
Once again, the Cindy Cole case file would be passed on to a new set of investigative eyes.
00:18:40
In May of 1995, an East Point cop named Derek McLaughlin, Mack to one and all, got promoted to the detective division's youth bureau
00:18:48
and handled 40 to 50 juvenile cases a month. My chief came down and he threw this box on my desk.
00:18:55
He says, this is an old file. He says, it's still an open case. He says, I want you to solve it.
00:19:02
Solve it. Solve it. Mack stayed late that night reading the yellowing case files.
00:19:08
In Cindy's old snapshots, in her diary, she looked and sounded to him like a happy normal kid, not a potential runaway.
00:19:15
The business about the crush on Scott jumped out at him as central as to what he'd need to find out to advance the case.
00:19:22
The whole case really intrigued me. Why? Some statements. I read all the statements that Detective Davis had filled out.
00:19:29
All the interviews that she conducted. There were some things that were popping out at me that were substantial.
00:19:36
One thing really stood out. The lead that Linda Bronson, the mother of Cindy's boyfriend, had given Detective Davis.
00:19:42
It was a bombshell. After thinking about it for a short time, I realized that Art was involved in this girl's disappearance.
00:19:51
And who was Art? He was Scott Ream's father and Linda Bronson's ex-husband, a carpet installer with a warehouse business.
00:19:59
But what he also was, according to the ex, was a man who preyed on young girls. A search of the records revealed a sex crime in Art Ream's past.
00:20:08
20 years earlier, in 1975, he'd been convicted and locked up for three years for taking indecent liberties with a minor.
00:20:17
For Detective McLaughlin, the cold case was now showing signs of a pulse. The person of interest at this time was Art Ream, the father of Scott Ream.
00:20:27
The boyfriend, the father, he's got a rap sheet. That's right. But even though Ream had moved to the top of the case file,
00:20:34
Authorities had nothing to charge him with and no evidence whatsoever of a crime at the Dairy Queen or anyplace else.
00:20:41
At the same time, I was getting a whole lot of leads coming in at this time, missing exploiting children out of New York.
00:20:47
Well, you had to check it out, you know, because you just never knew. And I checked every one of them out that called in personally.
00:20:53
So dead or alive, you can't answer the basic question at this point. Right. But Cindy's family recognized this new detective on the case was different.
00:21:01
He was taking it to heart, just as they did. As I got to know him better, he wasn't going to work on the case.
00:21:08
He was going to find Cindy. And finding Cindy, or her body if it came to that, was paramount to a family frozen in uncertainty, unable to mourn and move ahead.
00:21:19
Could Mac find Connie's sister? Wasn't even a case number to him, was it? She was my sister. His sister. My dad and mom's daughter.
00:21:28
After a few years on the case, Mac got a call from Art Ream's ex-wife, Linda. she had some news.
00:21:36
Art Ream was back in prison for raping a child. This time he was convicted of criminal sexual conduct.
00:21:44
Ream was going nowhere. The detective would have time to come up with a strategy
00:21:48
for getting inside the suspect's head. I knew that he didn't like police officers.
00:21:53
He didn't like to talk to them. So I had to figure out a way how I could talk to this guy.
00:21:57
If Art Ream turned out to be a Hannibal Lecter, he was going to need a Clary Starling
00:22:02
to help bring him down. It wasn't until a few years after he'd been ordered to solve the Cindy case
00:22:17
that Detective Derek McLaughlin, Mac, actually sat down with the missing girl's father.
00:22:23
Ed Zarzicki by then had remarried a woman named Linda. She would become the family's principal contact with the police
00:22:30
because she knew it wasn't in Ed's quiet nature to even talk much anymore about Cindy.
00:22:36
When her birthday came or the anniversary of her death came or Christmas came, I could feel his pain.
00:22:53
She became my child as well. Mac, the father of three daughters and a son, asked the couple to understand his situation.
00:23:03
I said, listen, I'm going to do everything I can, but I'm kind of limited to what I can do because of my workload that I have now.
00:23:09
Linda was great. She even said, I'll do anything. I've got secretarial skills. I can help you file. I can type up things. I can do this and do that.
00:23:17
Just so I could spend more time dealing with her family's case. Linda Zarzycki, the stepmother, would go to the East Point police station on her lunch hour to pour through the case file.
00:23:29
She'd suggest theories to Mac. And he said, yep, he thought of that, too. But he kept running into brick walls.
00:23:35
He just couldn't seem to make progress. But in 2004, the brick wall was about to start crumbling because a new player, a completely unlikely partner for the veteran detective, had talked herself onto the case.
00:23:48
She wasn't even a cop. She was a 23-year-old college intern with a law enforcement consulting firm in Chicago,
00:23:57
where Mac had taken courses on how to explain it. interrogate criminals. Immediately, the young intern was fascinated by Cindy's case file.
00:24:05
She picked it off her boss's desk when he wasn't looking. I've since admitted it to my boss.
00:24:10
I read the file and it really was contagious. I took that file home with me almost every single
00:24:15
night and just kept rereading it. Jen Lebo was at the time an undergrad studying for a
00:24:21
communications degree. She quickly became obsessed with a suburban Detroit teenager who disappeared
00:24:27
when she herself was only four. And then I brought it up to my bosses, and they allowed me to call Mac and see if, you know,
00:24:36
I can be an extra set of hands for him, anything he needed. You know, as a new investigator, I could learn from him,
00:24:42
but I could also help him out. And a phone relationship had remained for the next two and a half years.
00:24:48
Mac back in East Point doing the shoe leather investigating as he had time for, And Jen Lebo in Chicago going digital, diving into stuff that was mostly a mystery to Mac.
00:24:59
Advanced computer research, searching missing persons websites, sifting MySpace pages, hunting for Cindy's old friends.
00:25:08
Along the way, she taught Mac how to use email. She's doing a lot of research, stuff that I don't have time to do, and she's helping me with that.
00:25:17
Jen's fascination with the psychology of the criminal mind brought her back time and again to some letters in the Cindy case file.
00:25:24
Particularly letters from Cindy's sister that they had written to the police department and just saying, you know, please don't forget about this case.
00:25:31
You know, this is my sister. This is a person. And there was a sense of injustice there that, you know, it looked like Art Ream was the one who did this to Cindy and has been sort of keeping the family psychologically hostage for all these years.
00:25:45
not knowing what happened to their daughter. Art Ream, the father of Cindy's long-ago teenage boyfriend, Scott,
00:25:52
was behind bars for raping a young girl. In fact, Mac had gone to Jen's consulting firm that taught interview skills
00:25:59
to ready himself for a confrontation with Art Ream. Because that had been your narrow goal when you went to them initially.
00:26:05
Give me some tips on how to approach this guy, how to crack this nut. That's correct, yeah.
00:26:10
It wasn't until 2007 that Detective McLaughlin and his long-distance partner, Jen Lebo, made a critical decision in their case.
00:26:19
They decided to reset the clock to April 1986 and start the investigation all over.
00:26:25
That meant conducting fresh interviews. It changed everything. Now two women who had been regarded as no more than bit players in the missing Cindy drama were tracked down by Mac and Jen and became star witnesses following a tedious search.
00:26:39
They had moved, their information wasn't the same, new last names, all that. Kathy and Teresa, two of Cindy's best friends in 1986,
00:26:49
each felt that the police had brushed off what they tried to tell them just hours after Cindy disappeared.
00:26:54
Both thought the investigation lackadaisical. Seriously flawed and botched from the get-go.
00:27:02
Now, two decades later, Mac asked Teresa to come down to the East Point PD and go over her story yet again.
00:27:09
This time, the police interview was a very different experience. I knew right away, walking in there, that he was listening to what I was saying very intently.
00:27:20
The story that the two friends told had for some reason never made it into the police files.
00:27:26
It had to do with a surprise birthday party for Scott and a planned meeting at the Dairy Queen.
00:27:32
Cindy had been over at Kathy's house that Saturday evening. Cindy said she was going to hook up with Scott's father in the morning.
00:27:39
And she had mentioned that she was going to go to this belated birthday party in Pontiac.
00:27:46
She was supposed to meet Art at the Dairy Queen the next day, Sunday. How'd she talk about this person, Art?
00:27:52
She was just very friendly with them. That was pretty much it. Did she talk to this Art at your house on the phone?
00:28:01
Yes. She called Art to confirm the plans of the next day. Kathy heard Cindy tell the person on the phone that she'd look for his white van between 10 and 11 the next morning.
00:28:13
Cindy told her girlfriend she had a birthday present for Scott. She asked Kathy to please come along with her.
00:28:19
Kathy said her mother wouldn't let her. When she was leaving my house, she turned around to me and she said,
00:28:25
Will you please just show up? Just say you're going to be there. Like a reassuring, like she needed someone to really truly be there.
00:28:33
And I said, I'll see what I can do. And that was it. Cindy called her other friend Teresa Sunday morning.
00:28:39
Same story, a surprise party for Scott in Pontiac, Michigan. She was getting her ride at the Dairy Queen in a few minutes.
00:28:46
She did ask me to go. And she knew right away when she asked me that I wouldn't be coming
00:28:53
because absolutely, my mother didn't let me leave and go two feet down the block
00:28:58
without someone going with me. But I think she really wanted to see Scott, and she would have done just about anything maybe.
00:29:03
It was truly amazing what they were telling me. It had taken more than 20 years, but police had finally stitched together a timeline for what was certainly Cindy's final weekend.
00:29:15
The bait, a chance to be with the puppy-loved boyfriend, Scott. The boy's father waiting in his white van at the Dairy Queen.
00:29:22
I remember him specifically saying to her on the phone, this was one of the conversations she told me about, that he didn't understand why Ed Zarzycki would ground her for walking home from the mall because it was no big deal.
00:29:35
I think he was trying to make her feel comfortable with him. The story told by both girls, now adults, absolutely floored Mac.
00:29:43
Various cops over the years, even Mac had talked to them, but somehow didn't hear it or didn't extract it, or maybe it wasn't offered in the same way.
00:29:52
Despite his excitement Mac had one nagging question Was it true I even asked them when I interviewed both Kathy and Teresa I said when was the last time you two even talked Thinking that they might have concocted some story you know
00:30:06
and they said, we haven't. I haven't talked to her since Cindy disappeared. And I go, really?
00:30:13
And she goes, yeah. They told me almost identical story. Do you believe their stories?
00:30:18
Oh, absolutely. Mac and Jen's investigation was finally gaining traction. The Dairy Queen was where the trail went cold.
00:30:38
Cindy Zarzicki's long-ago girlfriend said she'd made plans to walk there on a Sunday morning to meet her boyfriend's father, Art.
00:30:45
Together, they'd ride in his white van to an out-of-town surprise birthday party for Cindy's young flame, Scott.
00:30:51
It was obvious that he was very interested in young girls. When the detective Mack talked to Linda Bronson, one of Art Ream's four ex-wives,
00:31:01
he learned more about his primary suspect's stomach-churning history, a pedophile who'd been imprisoned in the 70s for taking indecent liberties with a minor.
00:31:11
That's tame-sounding legal language for what the victim, a hitchhiker, said he actually did,
00:31:16
abducted her, raped her in his car, and then tossed her out the door. Linda had two children with Reem, Scott and another boy.
00:31:24
Children fought the ex who were useful to Reem's appetites when the boys became young teens.
00:31:30
They attracted young girls, and Art liked having the young girls around. I think that was why he liked having Scott there, because he knew that girls would be attracted to him.
00:31:41
And, you know, he'd have his chance to do whatever he wanted to do, or whatever he thought he could get away with.
00:31:46
He'd entice him with alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, and he would be their friend.
00:31:56
And he'd be the cool dad around, you know. By 2007, with everything Mac was learning about Art Rehm,
00:32:02
the theory that Cindy was merely a teenage runaway was as outdated as her old mixtapes.
00:32:07
This was a murder investigation. And the detective's thinking followed two paths.
00:32:12
Could he make the boyfriend's father or others for the crime? and secondly, did he have any way of finding Cindy's remains?
00:32:19
As a sign of either how desperate Mac was or how wide he was willing to throw his net,
00:32:24
he paid a call on a psychic. The Mystic had a strip mall storefront, sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a chicken joint.
00:32:36
A cousin of Cindy said she was weirded out when she heard him give a reading on the missing teenager at a party.
00:32:42
Mac figured he had nothing to lose. Well at this point, I'll try anything. The psychic told the cop he didn't have time for it.
00:32:50
He had clients booked months in advance. I begged him, I said, hey listen, let me just, two minutes of your time.
00:32:57
And so he took us in the back, sat us down and he had the reading cards that flipped over.
00:33:03
He says, well she died a brutal death and she is dead. There's the seeker card. He says, you must be the seeker.
00:33:12
seeker he says you've been looking for uh for her killer for a long time i said yeah and he said well
00:33:19
his uh he's uh he's incarcerated in fact you're going to be seeing this guy in a few weeks so
00:33:27
at this point my hair is rising in the back of my neck the psychic had no way of knowing that mac was
00:33:33
indeed going to have his first meeting with ream just a few weeks hence in the muskegon prison where
00:33:38
he was serving out his second sex crime conviction. The psychic turned more cards.
00:33:44
He's telling me a lot of things. He's saying that she's buried by a river, in the banks of a river,
00:33:54
by a bridge, and by a big field of purple flowers. So where was this riverside grave?
00:34:02
The cards didn't say. If Art Ream knew, Mac was going to have to get it out of his suspect's head the old-fashioned way
00:34:09
by interrogation and gamesmanship. All right, Art. Brought a new partner with me for Detective McLaughlin.
00:34:17
Mac's first meeting with the man he suspected of abducting and murdering Cindy came in early 2007.
00:34:25
A prison interrogation of Ream had been arranged and two senior members of Jen's consulting firm,
00:34:30
interviewers skilled in psychological techniques would be working with Matt. And coming to town with them was Jen Lebo.
00:34:38
The detective and the young researcher who wanted so badly to be in on the case met for the first time after years of telephone calls and emails.
00:34:46
As soon as she walked out of the elevator, I knew that was served. It was a good meeting. It was long overdue.
00:34:51
But the business at hand was at hand. Into the prison for an eight-hour grilling of Art Ream.
00:34:57
At this point, he's 58 years old. He's been in prison for the past 10 years. You do know where she's at, Art. That's the problem here.
00:35:05
That's the whole problem of this whole investigation. The initial strategy was to deal with him as though it were a given.
00:35:11
Everyone in that interview room knew Reem had something to do with Cindy's disappearance.
00:35:16
And now is the time to explain it all. You could put closure to this thing right now, today.
00:35:22
And help a family out. You think about it right now. If you need some paper, I'll get you some paper you can write it down.
00:35:28
Why not? My spelling's not that good. In that first interview, Reem controlled the game, just as the psychological detectives had feared.
00:35:42
Max suggested he could do himself some good by giving up the location of Cindy's body.
00:35:47
I can't make any promises, but do the prosecutors, the judges, do they listen to me? Of course they do.
00:35:53
Then the accusations took a harder bull He just sits there doesn deny it doesn refute it doesn do anything
00:36:06
except sit there and nod his head saying, well, you got that right. A suspect. But no body, no witnesses, no forensics.
00:36:16
The DA's office was going to need more before moving ahead on Art Ream. If the DA was demanding better evidence, then Mack wanted to get into the warehouse where Art Ream had his carpet business
00:36:27
In 1997, when he was arrested, he was hustled off to prison so quickly that he never got a chance to return to the warehouse to tidy up
00:36:35
It had been virtually locked up for the last 10 years The DA gave Mack a green light to search the place
00:36:42
We're nearing the end of our looking around And in this bucket in the corner Was this, my partner Kelly
00:36:52
She reached out and pulled out this Longines watch box She opens it up and she goes, oh my god
00:36:58
Mac, look at this So I look at it and I'm looking at jewelry I'm looking at some cufflinks and some necklaces and stuff
00:37:05
And I go, what's the tip? And she goes, no, it's a piece of paper here The torn paper was an old direct mail sales coupon for a construction glass on one side,
00:37:15
and on the other, a have-you-seen-me notice for Cindy Zarzicki, with her picture and a 1-800-call line for leads.
00:37:23
We're ecstatic. We're sitting there going, why would this guy have this in his property?
00:37:27
Maybe because his son was involved, and it was the girlfriend, and maybe the son had put it in there.
00:37:34
We were thinking the same way. We're going, man, this is probably Scott's. You know, they're going to say, well, this is Scott stuff, you know.
00:37:39
And then we looked at the expiration date on the back of the advertisement. There it was in the small print.
00:37:46
Expires June 1995. And why is that important? Well, Scott died July 4th of 1994.
00:37:52
Scott was dead by the time this thing was put into this keepsake box. That's correct.
00:37:56
Was this the best evidence you had to date? Well, it was the only physical evidence we had.
00:38:01
Had Mack and his partner stumbled upon a pedophile killer's trophy, The DA was very interested in what they'd found.
00:38:09
Mac, he says, you've got a winner here. I think I can work with this. Cindy Zarzicki had been missing for more than 20 years.
00:38:30
The veteran detective Mac and his unlikely assistant Jen, the researcher with training in the psychology of interviewing criminals,
00:38:36
had divided the labor of making a murder case against Art Ream, the father of Cindy's boyfriend.
00:38:43
Jen interviewed Ream's ex-wives, extended family members, and the picture that came together was ugly.
00:38:49
He was a pretty prolific pedophile. He definitely had a fetish for, you know, 9 to 15-year-old girls that he got away with a lot of it,
00:38:56
and that was really surprising. By the end of 2007, Mac and Jen also had the stories from Cindy's girlfriends that Cindy had planned to meet Art Ream at the Dairy Queen the Sunday she disappeared.
00:39:08
They had the old, have you seen me, picture of Cindy recovered from Ream's keepsake box in his carpet warehouse.
00:39:14
But what they didn't have was significant, no body and no hard evidence. Ream was locked up in a prison in Muskegon 10 years into a 12-year sentence for raping a young girl.
00:39:25
Mack thought with his suspect on ICE, he'd have time to develop the circumstantial evidence the assistant DA said he needed.
00:39:32
But the detective got a jolt when he discovered that Ream was going to be getting out in the next few weeks on parole.
00:39:38
He was going to be walking free right after Christmas 2007. Well, Mack was going to need an arrest warrant immediately.
00:39:45
So he crossed his fingers and showed an assistant prosecutor named Steve Kaplan what he had.
00:39:50
Mack, he says, you've got a winner here. I think I can work with this. You got a green light?
00:39:56
Got a green light. So how do you feel? I couldn't wait to get the warrant in my hand.
00:40:01
I couldn't wait to go up there and see art. On January 8, 2008, Jen, Mack, and his regular partner drove an unmarked police car up wintry roads to Muskegon.
00:40:14
They were going to arrest Ream and bring him back to their police station for one more interview,
00:40:20
their last crack at him before he lawyered up. Reem was waiting in a prison holding cell.
00:40:26
I said, well, I have a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Sidney Zarzicki.
00:40:29
It was almost eerie that he had his lack of reaction. It was like, we just charged you with the first and second degree murder
00:40:36
of a 13-year-old girl past assault. They'd rigged up a concealed camera in the police car,
00:40:42
but it didn't capture anything useful from Reem. He was blithely shooting the breeze with his arresting officers.
00:40:48
He was actually even joking a lot with us on the way home, yelling at the truckers for not driving well and laughing with us.
00:40:56
Jen may have been the one in the car intrigued most by psychology and the criminal mind,
00:41:01
but it was Mack who had the idea for the head game they were about to play on Art Ream.
00:41:06
They'd make a stop before the police station at the cemetery where Ream's son Scott had been buried 13 years before.
00:41:13
Mack told his partner to pull over at a flower shop. He bought a dozen daisies and threw them in the back seat.
00:41:19
And so he gets out of the car. We got him in belly chains and leg irons, and he's scuffling up there to the grave site.
00:41:26
And he starts crying. I said, here, why don't you put some flowers on your kid's grave?
00:41:32
You know, make it look nice. We saw he was sort of at a weak point there. He was emotional. He was sad.
00:41:38
And, you know, we're standing over his son's grave, and I said, Art, you could bury your son.
00:41:42
You've got that closure. You laid your son to rest. can't you do the same for the Zarzickis?
00:41:49
Can't you give them that same piece? And he was quiet and I looked at him and I said Art where Cindy And he looked at me and he shook his head and he just said that a low blow Later inside the interview room at the East Point Cop Shop with another concealed camera rolling
00:42:06
Mac and Jen came at Art Ream for the next eight hours. Not confrontational, more like friends talking.
00:42:13
They had all the time in the world for him and his ramblings. I think at this point, I hope you understand.
00:42:18
I'm just trying to find sense. So far, I'm surprised you answered you. What do you mean?
00:42:23
About what? your attitudes and, you know, your treatment. Are you saying it's better or worse than you thought?
00:42:31
It can't be worse. It's got to be better. Well, we're just, we're nice people. And we know that there's another side to our ring.
00:42:41
Some of these things that people are saying about me makes me sound like a monster.
00:42:45
I don't understand it, you know. Is he giving you anything? He's telling us that he can't tell us anything
00:42:51
because it will open Pandora's box. What's that supposed to mean? Well, to us it meant there was a whole lot of bad information that he wasn't going to reveal.
00:43:02
You know, incriminating information. So I'm not going to lie to you, but I'm not going to tell you what you want to know.
00:43:08
You know, that's not something an innocent person says. An innocent person doesn't have a Pandora's box to open.
00:43:13
They took a dinner break, turkey sandwiches, and later when they resumed, the interrogation took a deeply creepy turn for the young researcher.
00:43:22
Mac had stepped out of the room, leaving Jen with Art Ream. The hidden camera had run out of juice, so Jen switched on her tape recorder.
00:43:30
And, you know, he sort of looked towards the door in a way that, you know, there was anyone there and leaned in towards me and said in a whisper,
00:43:39
you know, it didn't happen exactly the way they say it did. It wasn't, it's like nothing you'd ever believe.
00:43:46
And I got the impression that maybe, you know, Mac is a police officer. the police presence was a reminder of punishment and maybe he'll talk to me alone.
00:43:56
Let's you and me talk, huh? Yeah. So I alerted Mac to that and Mac stayed right outside the door and I proceeded to talk to
00:44:05
Art for about four more hours. A cat and mouse game. Yes. Clarice. Yes. The young investigator alone with a manipulative convict with a monstrous history.
00:44:16
Yes, she thought the same thing. She'd walked into a scene from Silence of the Lands.
00:44:21
She was playing Clary Starling to Art Rehm's Hannibal Lecter. He even said to me during that part of the interview, you know, I'm not a Hannibal Lecter.
00:44:30
I'm thinking he's been our own personal Hannibal Lecter on this case, you know, that that's exactly who he is.
00:44:36
She played along as the non-threatening young female. He'd sexually devoured young women and hadn't been close to one in years.
00:44:43
So I'm, you know, just going real easy with him, just really having a conversation.
00:44:47
I kind of feel like a idiot sitting here because I got nothing out of all this. You did.
00:44:54
You know everything, so how? No, I don't know everything. So you think you got a shot, maybe the only shot.
00:44:58
Maybe. This is the last shot we have with him. He's going to be arraigned the next day and get his lawyer the next day.
00:45:03
So we couldn't talk to him after this. Reem suggested a game of sorts, find the body.
00:45:09
He'd had a number of real estate properties linked to him over the years, and Jen pulled out a list of those locations from her case file.
00:45:16
If she'd give him an address, he'd tell her whether she was hot or cold. He says, yes, you should look there.
00:45:22
Well, no, that's not a good place to look. How are we going to start off with these places?
00:45:27
Should this be the place that I started? It's a good start, yeah. Is it really good?
00:45:32
Move all these out. No, take it from there. We are. He's playing this kind of juvenile game?
00:45:40
Yeah. What was he getting out of this little game? Oh, I think he enjoyed being in control.
00:45:44
I think he enjoyed being a manipulator. He also didn't have to sit there in a cell, you know, waiting.
00:45:50
He got to smoke and he was in a room. So he enjoyed it that way. Hey, you're opening up the damn box.
00:45:57
I'm not afraid to open my box. Because I told you that went off the slate and I shouldn't sit there.
00:46:04
Why? It's like telling me don't look in Canada. Why not? What was the best info you got out of him?
00:46:10
The fact that he sat there and could tell me where the body was or where... would entertain that thought.
00:46:14
Where it wasn't. Yeah, I mean, an innocent person can't tell you where the body is or isn't.
00:46:19
It was 2.30 in the morning. The marathon day, the arrest, the visit to the cemetery,
00:46:24
the eight-hour interview was over. Can I go sleep now? I can't. All right, I'll.
00:46:31
But Art Ream stayed buttoned up. He hadn't opened what he called his Pandora's box.
00:46:36
But he was still going to stand trial for the murder of Cindy Zarzicki. if she'd come back from the Dairy Queen and live
00:46:53
Cindy Zarzicki would have been 35 years old but she didn't and now Art Ream the father of her long ago teenage boyfriend
00:47:01
was about to stand trial for her murder even if he wouldn't admit it to his persistent interrogators
00:47:07
Cindy's sister Connie was prepared to testify it was very stressful on our family
00:47:12
I mean, we've already wondered what happened for 22 years, and then we all have to relive it on the stand.
00:47:19
We know he did it. We just need the jury to know he did it, too. Remarkably, Cindy's dad was still holding out for a miracle.
00:47:29
I was still hoping. Still hoping that she's alive? Yes. The police on the case had gotten some extra investigative oomph from the county prosecutor's office,
00:47:37
which had started a cold case unit to go after the hard-to-solve cases like Cindy's.
00:47:42
trial prosecutor steve kaplan had successfully handled every cold case gaining convictions or
00:47:48
plea bargains in all 21 of them but he knew case number 22 the cindy case was full of holes
00:47:55
we did not have a body we did not have an eyewitness to her being with Anybody kidnapped or ambushed, we had no physical evidence against anybody.
00:48:05
And in pre-trial wrangling, this wholly circumstantial case got a lot dicier. Much of Mac and Jen's marathon interrogation of Art Rehm was tossed out because he'd had no lawyer present.
00:48:16
The judge also declared inadmissible some potentially devastating evidence. First, she ruled the jury could not hear about Rehm's history as a pedophile and of his sex crimes.
00:48:26
And then she threw out a chilling statement from that hitchhiker case. when Ream had abducted and raped a young girl, then tossed her from his car.
00:48:33
The victim, it turned out, remembered a license plate number leading to Ream's arrest and conviction.
00:48:39
And that prompted Ream to allegedly declare to an accomplice, quote, if I ever do this again, I'll kill the next victim.
00:48:46
Two rulings from the bench that were two strikes against the prosecution. The case is diminished. It would be like entering a gunfight with only part of your arsenal.
00:48:56
The prosecutor began his case by knocking down the runaway theory. Older sister Connie testified that Cindy would never have done a runner without packing a bag.
00:49:06
I have a photographic memory, and I know our stuff was still there. She didn't take makeup or clothes or anything.
00:49:14
What was her state of mind, happy, unhappy? She was one of the most happy, easy-to-get-along-with people.
00:49:23
She let things slide off her back. Cindy Zarzicki is the poster child for not being a runaway.
00:49:28
She loved her family, she had no drug addiction, she had no mental illnesses. She is the last 13-year-old who would run away.
00:49:35
What had happened to her then was suggested by the testimony of two of her best friends,
00:49:40
Kathy Buford and Teresa Olahowski. They both told the jury, as they said they'd told police back in 1986, about Cindy's plans
00:49:49
to meet her boyfriend's father, Art Ream. They were making plans. They were going to go down and meet a Dairy Queen.
00:49:55
She told me that she would be meeting Arthur Rames, Scott's father, at the Dairy Queen
00:50:01
because he was going to take her to a surprise birthday party for Scott in Pontiac.
00:50:07
But the party was a ruse, later testimony would reveal. Scott's birthday had been in January, not April, when Cindy disappeared.
00:50:15
The invitation, Kaplan argued, was merely a ploy to lure Cindy to the Dairy Queen
00:50:20
and then into Ream's van, and she hadn't been seen since. I know that Cindy is in a much better place.
00:50:28
She's not on Earth right now. She didn't run away. I believe she's with the Lord.
00:50:33
And where was Cindy's boyfriend, Scott, on that Sunday in question, April 20th? Not in Michigan, according to a late-edition witness.
00:50:41
Sir, would you raise your right hand, please? Do you swear from the testimony you're about to give will be the truth?
00:50:45
Yes, I do. It was one of those TV movie moments where a witness services just before trial. The relentless lead detective, Derek McLaughlin, had recently found this man,
00:50:56
a former employee of Art Ream in the carpet business. The ex-employee testified that he'd
00:51:01
requested time off to attend to some business in Texas. He told me that the only way I'd be able
00:51:07
to get that time off was if I took Scott with me down to South Texas and he would pay the airfare
00:51:15
and expenses for Scott if I would take him with me. How long were you with Scott away?
00:51:21
We left on the Friday, which would have been the 18th, and we were back nine to ten days later.
00:51:30
So your theory is this Arthurine has been grooming his son's girlfriend and gets the son out of the way so he can carry out his molestation.
00:51:39
Yes, he gets the son out of Dodge in Texas. And the prosecutor said there was one more circumstantial sign of Art Ream's connection to Cindy.
00:51:47
And it was the only physical evidence of significance produced in the case. Exhibit number 10.
00:51:54
Exhibit 10 is a mailer coupon that has a missing picture of Cindy Zarzicki. In 2007, you remember, Detective McLaughlin had uncovered the curious item tucked away in a jewelry box in Ream's old carpet warehouse.
00:52:13
Why in the world would Ream have it there, the prosecutor asked the detective. They're like trophies. They like to save things that the normal person wouldn't.
00:52:22
In his cross-examination of the detective, defense attorney Tim Kohler argued that Art Ream hadn't been in that warehouse for years
00:52:30
and suggested the evidence could have been tainted. You don't know if anybody had been in there or not had been in there.
00:52:37
You weren't there all that time, were you? No, sir. You don't know what would have been brought in or taken out of there, do you?
00:52:42
That's correct. In his defense case, Kohler called just a couple of witnesses, none particularly useful.
00:52:48
Your general strategy to the jury in the court is what? You don't have enough evidence.
00:52:53
It's a tragic event, but you don't have enough evidence. Because I know I don't have the burden.
00:52:58
The burden is on the prosecutor. So Kohler jabbed away at the prosecution's key witnesses.
00:53:03
particularly Detective McLaughlin. Kohler, for instance, wondered if Mack had exhaustively run down all those leads on Cindy as a possible runaway.
00:53:12
They have had numerous, by their own testimony, numerous calls about her that they didn't follow up.
00:53:18
And your mission as a defense lawyer is to plant that seed of doubt. That's right. That's right.
00:53:23
And Kohler hoped he'd raise sufficient doubt as he rested his case. To the news reporters on at least one scorecard, it looked as though the defense had a good shot.
00:53:33
As you went into closing arguments, what was the betting in the courtroom about guilty or not guilty?
00:53:37
It was probably about 30-70 in favor of not guilty. In favor of not guilty? Yeah.
00:53:43
Reporter Amber Hunt, then with the Detroit Free Press, had heard a totally circumstantial case.
00:53:48
There was no body, and Reams passed as a pedophile had been excluded. It was not a slam case by any means But before the lawyers had the opportunity to give closing arguments something extraordinary was about to happen in judges chambers A hush meeting that could blow the case
00:54:07
out of the water. And I just happened to notice that the judge said nobody can overhear this.
00:54:13
And then I put two and two together. the victim, the accused killer, and the father, compassionate beyond common understanding.
00:54:38
And God told me to start praying for him. That you should pray for Art Ream? Yes.
00:54:44
This man accused of abducting and killing your daughter, the way the prosecutor described it?
00:54:48
Yes. He told me that I need to pray for him and forgive him. And Cindy's father was about to show mercy to his daughter's accused killer in court, too,
00:54:59
because of a dramatic event right before closing arguments. Art Ream was talking a plea, a courtroom top secret.
00:55:06
They cleared out the courtroom, told us all to leave, and I just happened to notice that the judge said to one of the bailiffs,
00:55:14
you need to make sure that the entire back room is cleared out. Nobody can be in my chambers or near my chambers.
00:55:19
Nobody can overhear this. And then I put two and two together. Amber Hunt figured it out and would later be the first to report that an 11th hour plea deal had been in the works.
00:55:31
Lawyers from both sides and the Zarzicki family were summoned to the judge's chambers.
00:55:35
We want to talk to you. He wants to make an agreement. Ream told his lawyer he didn't murder Cindy, but he could reveal where she was buried in exchange for a reduced charge and a lesser sentence.
00:55:48
He doesn't tell me where it is, but he tells me that he knows. Defense attorney Kohler then asked Detective Derek McLaughlin for help.
00:55:55
But I said, you've got to work the deal now. The defense lawyer needed Mack as a negotiating ally to prod the county prosecutor to make a deal.
00:56:05
Ream held one trump card, Cindy's body, and the Zarzickis wanted that above anything else, even a conviction.
00:56:12
The family found itself taking Art Ream's side in the plea talks. It was all about finding Cindy. That was the thing right from day one.
00:56:23
They'd had no chance to say goodbye and knew nothing of Cindy's whereabouts for the past 22 years.
00:56:29
At least now they could give her a proper burial if only the prosecutor would make a deal with the devil.
00:56:35
I would rather have her buried on our own terms than some killer in like the middle of the night.
00:56:42
Detective McLaughlin was also arguing for a deal. After all, he'd promised the family he'd bring Cindy home.
00:56:48
Well, at the time I got this case, I had a daughter that was 13. The same age daughter is what Cindy was when she disappeared.
00:56:57
Now it was up to the county prosecutor who agreed to reduce the charge from first-degree murder to second-degree murder
00:57:03
and downsize the sentence from mandatory life to 22 years. So, would it be a deal or no deal?
00:57:10
We couldn't get the number. It fell apart because we couldn't get the number. No deal. Ream had insisted on only a 10-year prison sentence.
00:57:19
The DA wasn't going there, and the deal was off the table. Steve Kaplan went to court for closing arguments.
00:57:25
The jury listening was totally unaware of the 11th hour plea negotiations. The prosecution went first.
00:57:32
Well, Cindy's not coming home. Cindy's dead. This man not only killed her, but he deprived the family of a burial.
00:57:40
Then closing from the defense. If you've got reasonable doubt, you can come back with a verdict.
00:57:48
That verdict is not guilty. Then the jury went behind closed doors to deliberate a first-degree murder case.
00:57:56
And to the surprise of nearly everyone, they were back after just two hours. All right, Mr. Foreman, have you reached a verdict?
00:58:02
Yes, we have, Your Honor. Would you please give it to my deputy? I remember praying and praying and praying.
00:58:07
As to count one, your verdict is? Guilty in the first degree. Guilty of first-degree murder, I felt like someone punched me right in the heart
00:58:18
because at that moment I knew I would have to admit she's gone and she's never coming back.
00:58:24
And I was glad that he'd go to jail for what he did. A mandatory life sentence. Art Ream had overplayed his hand.
00:58:33
It took us 22 years to bring justice to her. But it was a bittersweet victory for the Zarzikis.
00:58:40
They'd lost their Cindy, and now they'd lost their leverage with Ream to get her remains back for a proper burial.
00:58:46
I told my wife, I said, I'll never know now. I probably would go to my own grave not knowing where she was.
00:58:55
Except for one thing. The Zarzycki still had Detective McLaughlin on the case, and it wasn't over for him.
00:59:09
He had to keep on a-coming. There were years of frustration, but Detective Derek McLaughlin had finally taken down Cindy Zarzicki's killer.
00:59:23
How do you think the verdict? I was real happy. Is that a high-five moment? Oh, more than high-five.
00:59:31
Mac and I gave each other a big hug after that. But to Jen and Mac, this odd couple interrogation team, the conviction was only half the battle.
00:59:40
The second we're done with all the official proceedings, I mean, Mac just took off and he went to go talk to Art
00:59:47
because I think the same thing was in both of our minds. Now it's time to find the body.
00:59:52
He says Ed don have a memorial service I going to find Cindy It was a promise Mac had made to Cindy father and the rest of the family Cindy case would stay open on his desk until her body was found
01:00:07
So I went and talked to Art. Art had just been convicted. He was still in the courthouse lockup.
01:00:12
Matt tried the old buddy-buddy approach. I says, Art, you're not a killer. I says, you might have a fetish with 13, 14, 15-year-old girls, but you're not a killer.
01:00:21
I says, tell me what happened that day. He says, I panicked. He says, and it got out of control, and I killed her.
01:00:28
I said, but where'd you put her at, Art? You need to tell me where you put her. He says, Mac, I can't tell you that.
01:00:34
The detective playing Buddy Buddy was all well and good, but clearly Ream had no incentive to give up the information.
01:00:41
His murder one conviction carried with it an automatic life sentence. The first meeting he has with Art doesn't go very well.
01:00:48
So Mac's boss, Inspector John Calabrese, suggested a new ploy to sneak inside the mind of a killer.
01:00:55
Take away his control with some psychological jujitsu. Drill into Ream's head that he doesn't matter anymore.
01:01:01
No one cared about his aimless ramblings. He was yesterday's news. I said, Mac, I think you need to take a different approach with art.
01:01:10
And you need to go in there and let them know that you don't care anymore. If we find the body, fine. If not, it's over with.
01:01:16
It was nice talking to you, Art, but have a nice rest of your life in prison. So this is a whole new strategy.
01:01:22
Yeah, yeah. It went against Mac's gut to play nonchalant about what he cared for most, finding Cindy's body,
01:01:29
but he went with his boss's suggestion to try a new tack, be brusque and dismissive.
01:01:34
He hoped Ream would get flustered and produce a map, and that would direct them to Cindy.
01:01:39
A few weeks after the trial and conviction, Mack had a jailhouse meeting with Ream in a visitor's room by his cell.
01:01:49
The detective recorded the interview with a camera concealed inside a plastic bottle.
01:01:54
Right away, Mack laid down the new law. The case is done. I have closure with it. Family's got closure.
01:02:02
Do we want to send it back? Absolutely. But everybody's okay. That's all I want to do is today basically get information as to where things remain.
01:02:12
I don't want to talk about anything else today. Reem, as he had so often before, tried to change the conversation.
01:02:19
So you really don't care what happened? You're happy with the story that they told, right?
01:02:27
Right now? Yeah. At first, it seemed like Reem wasn't taking the bait. The two sparred.
01:02:33
It doesn't matter what happened. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It matters a lot.
01:02:40
Why would it matter? You know, if you don't care, the family don't care. No, we didn't say we didn't care.
01:02:45
No, we didn't say we didn't care. We just said we had closure. Max stuck to the game plan.
01:02:50
Pretend like it's all old history. I says, I'm fine with it. I'm going to move on.
01:02:55
And this guy was like hanging on to my... I'm trying to get up. I said, Art, you've got five minutes to write me on a map.
01:03:02
The ploy was working. Reem could sense the curtain was coming down, and he didn't like not being center stage anymore.
01:03:09
I don't have closure, so how the hell can they have closure? Because that's the type of people in it.
01:03:14
Do they want their daughter back? Of course they do. He took his trump card. It was perfect.
01:03:19
Art had no more control. He couldn't be the puppet master. You know, Mac took it from him.
01:03:23
Well, anyway, we're done. I don't like what you said, that nobody cares what happened.
01:03:29
I didn't say that. You drive me crazy. No, Art, Art, you're missing. Clearly, Mac's trick psychology had gotten to Reem,
01:03:37
the killer who'd kept the Zarzickis in the dark for 22 years. Now the tables were turned, and he sputtered at his loss of control.
01:03:45
They care, but they're satisfied of what they've got so far, okay? Are they driving me crazy for 22 years?
01:03:58
Mac had been shadow boxing with a psychopath, rummaging around the brain of a killer,
01:04:04
jabbing at him from a different direction. But he left without Ream coughing up a map.
01:04:09
You weren't sold on the strategy going in. No, I wasn't. So about a week goes by and his lawyer calls you.
01:04:14
And he said, my client wants to give you a map. It was the break he dreamed of since the case file thumped on his desk back in 1995.
01:04:23
Jen, you get a call? We got a map? I think I was done packing before we hung up the phone.
01:04:31
Later at the jail, the bottle cam caught Reem handing his attorney a hand-drawn map.
01:04:36
In the crudely drawn map, Reem marked Cindy's burial spot with an X near a river,
01:04:42
about 25 feet from bridge, he wrote. Why did you pick this spot? Did you ever walk in the car?
01:04:49
I did. It's nice. It is. He'd mapped out a place where he used to keep bees. How large is the area that you excavated with Gagawa for her?
01:05:03
How did you go pretty deep? Even if he was telling the truth, locating Cindy's body would be extremely difficult.
01:05:15
It had been 22 years. She'd been buried beside a river known for flooding its banks.
01:05:21
Maybe her bones had carried downstream. Even though Mac had promised her father, maybe poor Cindy was just destined to remain missing.
01:05:41
They gathered by a river behind an old farmhouse. Searchers, forensic anthropologists, guided only by a crude map drawn by the killer.
01:05:50
How surreal it was for Mac When he got to the scene He remembered back to what the psychic had said And was amazed that the area was so much As the psychic had described it One of the first things that popped in my head was when we first got out there you know the bridge the banks of the river the field of flowers
01:06:12
It was unbelievable. The tranquility of the river and woods on that July day in 2008 was in stark contrast to what the searchers hoped they'd find there,
01:06:22
the burial site of Cindy Zarzicki. Art Rehm had dug a grave site in what turned out to be a flood
01:06:29
plain. Maybe all trace of Cindy had been washed away. Cadaver dogs didn't find anything. We weren't
01:06:36
exactly sure where it was. I knew she was there. He was still trying to find a needle in a haystack,
01:06:42
you know. So Mac got permission to spring Rehm from prison to narrow down the search.
01:06:47
He lumbered in convicts' chains to the place where he thought he'd dumped the murdered 13-year-old
01:06:52
22 years before. When he came out with us, he more or less, he couldn't remember exactly
01:06:58
where he'd put Cindy. The pedophile killer poked about here and there, as though he were
01:07:06
trying to select a picnic spot. Maybe here, maybe there. Reem was then hustled back to prison,
01:07:12
but not before Mack took him to a suspicious spot that earlier the detective had had a cadaver dog
01:07:18
sniff at. He looked at the spot, and he says, Now he says, I think it's closer to the river.
01:07:24
Meanwhile, about an hour northeast in their retirement cottage by Lake Huron, Ed and Linda Zarzycki were well aware that the search for Cindy had started,
01:07:33
but Max spared them the agonies. You stay put, but I promise when we find her remains, we'll call you.
01:07:43
It was turning into a frustrating day. Four holes came up empty. She could be anywhere.
01:07:50
Still, the searchers pushed on as the July day became a scorcher. They were doing it for the girl's father and for Mac.
01:07:57
You had promised the father. You said, Ed, I'm going to get you your girl's body back.
01:08:02
And that's something that, yeah, I should have never done, but I did. That's one thing a law enforcement person shouldn't do is promise somebody that they're going to get their deceased daughter back.
01:08:12
They were genuine people who missed their daughter. If it was me, I'd want somebody to work on my case.
01:08:18
if I had a daughter that came up missing. A neighborly farmer came by with his front-end loader to pitch in.
01:08:25
Like so many others touched by Cindy's case, the farmer, a diabetic, became completely caught up in the mission and forgot to eat.
01:08:32
His wife come down worried about him. I said, why don't you just take your tractor home and call it a day?
01:08:37
I said, you look whipped. He says, no. He says, I'm out here to find this little girl.
01:08:42
By then, it was getting late in the day. And it's getting dark. It's hot. It's mosquitoes.
01:08:48
Outside the dig area, Cindy's brother and sister were waiting for any news. The shadow's getting longer.
01:08:55
What happens when it becomes dark? Are they going to bring lights out there and keep searching or whatever?
01:09:01
And I said, that's when we pray. And I prayed, my exact prayer was that if they are to find her Lord tonight, let them do it now.
01:09:08
Mack and the chief anthropologist had been ready to call it quits. But they decided to look one more time at the very spot Ream had dismissed earlier
01:09:16
because it wasn't near the river. The anthropologist was intrigued. And he says, let's give it one more shot.
01:09:22
This looks like a good area to look at. It would be hole number five. The farmer on the loader scooped out a four-by-ten-foot trench.
01:09:31
And there was a little hump in the middle of this trench. I'm looking at it, and I remember asking Art when he buried Cindy,
01:09:38
I said, did you flatten out her grave, or did you just leave it like a hump like they do in the movies?
01:09:43
He says, I just left it a hump. Mack jumped into the hole. So the first time all day long I grabbed the shovel with another trooper
01:09:50
and we're digging and my second shovel I wrenched the dirt back and up popped this bone. For the
01:09:59
anthropologist it was the moment. And he picks up it was the bone and he holds it like this and he
01:10:05
says Mack do you know what this is? I think I'm in a state of shock at this time and and I says no I
01:10:11
don't and he says well it's a bone it's a tibia bone to an adolescent child and I says uh how do
01:10:19
you know that he goes well one and I'm an anthropologist and two he says uh the bone
01:10:24
hasn't been fused yet so I said okay I said so it's not an animal bone I think I'm still in a
01:10:30
state of shock and he goes no he says Cindy's right below us you'd found Cindy yeah after all those years
01:10:41
Mack and the anthropology team were bringing up more remains, recovering personal items that maybe the girl's family could identify.
01:10:50
What he was finding was enough for Mack to make a phone call he'd always wanted to make.
01:10:54
He calls up about 5.30 and said, can you be here? More painstaking digging, still nothing unmistakably Cindy, until they found a purse.
01:11:06
As the investigators carefully removed the purse's contents, they found something that almost declared, yes, I am Cindy Zarzycki's remains.
01:11:14
It was a mixtape. The county prosecutor approached the Zarzycki family, who'd now gathered on the fringe of the dig, and told them what the investigators had found.
01:11:24
He said the word cassette tapes. And I laughed and cried all at the same time and said, that's Cindy.
01:11:32
Mac promised you results and he got them? Yes, he did. He promised me, he says, I will not give up till we find Cindy.
01:11:41
I still can't believe it. It was like we weren't supposed to find her that day, but I'll tell you, she was calling to us.
01:11:51
And we weren't going to leave that area without her letting us know where she was.
01:11:58
But there was something amiss. bones that no one could recognize, a piece of jewelry, there was one remaining mystery to solve.
01:12:18
It was a life cut short by the pedophile father of her first crush. The teenage artifacts of Cindy Zarzicki, thick with dried mud, were set out on a police station table.
01:12:29
Detective, this is really distressing to see this stuff. This is the last of Cindy that came out of the grave, huh?
01:12:34
That's correct. For Derek McLaughlin, the detective who couldn't rest until he found her,
01:12:39
the tube socks with the stripes worn by a budding athlete were what got him. And her friends always said that she wore them even in the wintertime gym, wearing jeans.
01:12:48
When I saw the socks, I said, that's Cindy. For best friend Teresa, there were the white boots with the buckle.
01:12:57
Only one was found, the other apparently swept away. Her shoes are what did it for me.
01:13:03
I had gotten a pair for Christmas, and Cindy desperately wanted them. And she nagged her grandmother for these shoes.
01:13:09
And her grandmother finally broke down and bought her the shoes. The tapes, Cindy always carried around her tapes, her music.
01:13:17
For her older sister Connie, the mixtape cassettes taken from Cindy's purse, coming months before a DNA match from the lab,
01:13:24
was all the confirmation that she would need Had the tapes just maybe been Cindy birthday present for Scott her boyfriend Connie says she and Cindy gave away mixtapes as gifts all the time
01:13:36
We would pick their favorite songs or something that had meaning to us to show how much we cared for that person.
01:13:43
But there was one item from the grave that no one in Cindy's family could remember.
01:13:47
A gold necklace with a charm on it, an anchor. We found it around her neck area.
01:13:54
And her family didn't know what to make of that. Exactly. We asked them if they could ID this, and nobody could.
01:13:59
But Linda Bronson, one of Art Rehm's ex-wives, said yes, she knew what it was. Art had worn that anchor chain all the time.
01:14:07
So what we're thinking is that what Art did is, after he put Cindy in the grave,
01:14:11
he put his necklace around her neck and then buried her. What do you make of that?
01:14:17
A possession type thing. Just as he'd kept a missing persons flyer of Cindy as a trophy.
01:14:23
It is a sentence of this court that you be incarcerated in the Michigan Department of Corrections to serve a life sentence.
01:14:30
At his sentencing, mandatory life, Ream was still trying to keep his grip on the family he devastated for more than two decades.
01:14:38
He offered to tell Cindy's dad explicit details of what happened after he and Cindy met up at the Dairy Queen.
01:14:44
I would like to ask the father if I could get his permission to write him and maybe it would help us both if he knew everything But Ed Czarzicki said no way He and his family really had moved on thanks to Detective McLaughlin after years of police failure
01:15:09
Cindy's mother, Alice, said locating her daughter's remains had given them all closure.
01:15:14
If we had not found Cindy's body, a piece of me maybe could have had one little piece of hope.
01:15:21
Maybe it's not really true. And if it wasn't really true, I'd see her again. Ed and his wife Linda accepted Mac's invitation to visit the Riverside grave with him.
01:15:43
Did you get anything from it? I think the only thing that I got from it was a very peaceful spot by the river.
01:15:51
And when we left, it almost felt like her spirit went with us. And she was with family again.
01:16:02
In November 2008, with DNA lab results finally confirming what everyone knew, Cindy's remains were returned to her family for a memorial service.
01:16:13
Hundreds of mourners filled the funeral home in East Point. Her pastor from the 1980s remembered Cindy.
01:16:21
One of Sister Connie's daughters read a poem of remembrance, speaking emotionally about someone she only learned about from pictures and family stories The next day the casket bearing Cindy remains was brought to the cemetery that would be her final resting place Cindy long
01:16:39
father welcomed her home after 22 years of paralyzing uncertainty. Ed Zarzycki had bought
01:16:46
the burial plot for her two years before. His faith told him that someday Cindy would be laid
01:16:52
to rest next to a sister lost in infancy and across the way from her beloved grandma Franny,
01:16:58
who'd spoiled her with those gotta have white shoes. Other family members and friends, old and
01:17:04
new, paid their respects, including Mac and Jen, whose nonstop dedication to finding Cindy
01:17:11
made this bittersweet day finally possible. It really puts a fire under you to realize,
01:17:18
you know, what we can do as investigators, you know, lets other perpetrators know that
01:17:23
even if you think you committed a perfect crime, you didn't leave your DNA and you didn't
01:17:27
leave any fibers or hairs behind, they're still going to get you. Max says getting justice for Cindy was not just the case of a lifetime.
01:17:37
It was a lifetime's satisfaction. This is the best thing that's ever happened to me.
01:17:42
And that's including even the birth of my kids. to be able to give something of this magnitude back to a family.