Zywicki case is still alive

The horror grabbed headlines. After her car broke down along an Illinois freeway, a Burlington County college student described by her mother as an all-American "girly girl" was snatched, attacked sexually, and repeatedly stabbed, perhaps by a trucker posing as a good Samaritan.

Tammy Zywicki's body eventually turned up in a blanket wrapped with duct tape in southwestern Missouri, hundreds of miles from where she was last seen alive.

Two decades later, the killer is unknown. Federal and Illinois investigators hope a $50,000 reward changes that.

On Wednesday, the eve of the 20th anniversary of Zywicki's disappearance, the head of the Illinois State Police said investigators had not forgotten the case.

"This investigation remains a top priority, both for me personally as well as the men and women" of the agency, Director Hiram Grau said, adding that authorities "are committed to bringing justice and peace to the Zywicki family."

Robert Grant, head of the FBI's Chicago office, touted the reward from a source authorities have not disclosed.

"We remain confident that someone knows who committed this heinous act and will have the courage to help us identify this individual," Grant said.

On Aug. 23, 1992, Zywicki had dropped off her younger brother at Northwestern University and turned her 1985 Pontiac T1000 toward Iowa's Grinnell College, where she played soccer and would have been a senior. The 21-year-old, whose family had moved to Marlton from South Carolina less than six months before, was considering graduate school and aspiring perhaps to teach Spanish.

After her car broke down on I-80 near LaSalle, a passerby caught the last glimpse of her alive at Mile Marker 83. Some witnesses said a tractor-trailer was parked behind her car. Others said they saw a pickup truck.

Zywicki's body turned up nine days later just east of Joplin, Mo. The 5-foot-2-inch, 120-pound woman, who wrote in a high school journal that she did not want to suffer when she died, had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest.

A task force headed by the FBI and Illinois State Police spent months chasing hundreds of leads "without success" before disbanding, Wednesday's statement from the agencies said. Investigators looked at truckers suspected in killings and sexual attacks from North Carolina to California, but eliminated them from suspicion.

Going years without knowing who killed Tammy has tormented JoAnn Zywicki, now of Ocala, Fla.

She and her now-retired husband have endured the birthdays, holidays, and other special occasions they no longer get to share with their daughter, and "you just go into a pattern of maybe acceptance, that that's the way it is," she said last month.

On Wednesday, JoAnn Zywicki welcomed word that investigators still were pursuing the case.

"Something's better than nothing," said Zywicki, 70. "I'm confident that something could come out of this.

"Twenty years has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. We just have too many memories with her not around. It would just be nice to get some kind of closure."