Some stories don’t fade with time.
They stay with us—unfinished, unresolved, quietly waiting.
In August of 1992, Tammy Zywicki set out on a simple road trip. Three days. A drop-off. A return to school.
She never made it.
More than 30 years later, her story is still asking the same question: what happened on that stretch of highway?
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
On August 21, 1992, Tammy and her younger brother Daren and a 1985 Pontiac T1000 packed with suitcases left Marlton, New Jersey for their three day cross country trip. Tammy would drop Daren off at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he was studying engineering. They had a couple of instances of Tammy’s car overheating along the way, but nothing major. And then it was onto Grinnell, where Tammy studied photography and starred on the soccer team.
Sometime between 3 and 4 p.m. that afternoon, numerous witnesses said they saw a young woman matching Tammy’s description standing outside her car, with the hood up, on Interstate 80 at mile marker 83, near Utica, Illinois. She was two hours outside of Chicago, and three hours from Grinnell. At 5 p.m., Illinois State police spotted the abandoned car.
There was no sign of Tammy.
The FBI took over the case, a missing person report was put out, and in the days that followed, more than 60 witnesses called police and said they had seen the young girl with the broken down car on the highway. An exhaustive search took place over the next week. Hundreds of volunteers and K-9 dogs took the ground, while police helicopters searched overhead.
JoAnn and Frank Zywicki arrived on the scene, pleading before television cameras for any information about Tammy. Back at Grinnell, as Tammy’s classmates began trickling back onto campus, word began spreading. And they went to work. One group of students began traveling up and down Interstate 80, passing out flyers with pictures of Tammy. Another group spread out to area truck stops and parks. Another group stayed back and gave their food money to the other groups for expenses. Grim days and candlelight vigil nights went by.
And on the morning of September 1, nine days after Tammy disappeared, a man driving a pickup truck pulled along the side of Interstate 44, near Mt. Vernon Missouri, some 500 miles from where Tammy was last seen, saying he thought he saw a body. Police quickly swarmed the scene. A young woman’s body was pulled from the blanket. She was wearing a shirt that said “East Side Eagles Soccer Club.”
Tammy’s team.
Dental records confirmed the body was that of Tammy Zywicki. She had been sexually assaulted, then stabbed seven times in her chest. And today, more than 30 years after her death, the case still sits.
If stories like this stay with you—the ones that don’t wrap up neatly, the ones that still linger—Bob’s book 25 Frozen, 1 Thawed explores cases just like this.
Stories that were left behind… and the rare ones that finally found their way forward.
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