A road crew began the twice yearly mowing along the rural highways of Wisconsin, a routine task on a quiet stretch of road. But the man driving the big tractor found something suspicious blocking his way. He spotted two suitcases lying on the side of the road, covered with flies and oozing the smell of death.
When the suitcases were opened, one contained a dead body. The second suitcase held another dead woman, her hand mummified. The discovery sent shockwaves through the community.
The green fields of southern Wisconsin, southwest of Milwaukee, are not the kind of place you would expect to see the handiwork of a suitcase killer. Walworth County Sheriff’s Detective Jeff Recaggle was shocked when he got the call. He came to the scene, walked over to the suitcases, and unzipped the purple one.
Inside, he could see another deceased woman, her body inside a black garbage bag. The only thing that protruded out of the garbage bag was one of her hands, and her hand was mummified. To him, it was quite obvious that these two women had been dead for a very long time.
The women were gagged and tied up, obviously the work of a terribly sadistic killer. Cops cordoned off the area with crime scene tape. An allโpoints bulletin was put out for reinforcements.
Recaggle called his boss and said they needed to have their entire team come down, seal off the area for miles, and find evidence. They checked for miles to see if there were potentially more dead bodies. They had no idea if these were going to be the only two or if there would be more.
District Attorney Mike Graveley was afraid there might be more bodies just waiting to be found. The first thing he thought of when this came to his attention was that this was a serial killer. The question was whether they would be able to positively identify the women with their bodies decomposed.
After finding the women, investigators made general descriptions of them. They tried to gather how much they weighed, how tall they were, anything that could help identify who they were. They sent out a teletype to the entire Midwest saying they had found these two deceased female people.
Police departments from all across the Midwest responded. Messages came from all over the place about missing people. The detectives had to put all that information into a chart and then eventually work through it to see if these could actually be the people involved from someplace else.
They had no idea where the women were from.
As the detectives began the difficult task of sorting through the leads, the CSI lab technicians closely examined the ropes that bound the women. The question was whether the killer’s DNA could be on those ropes. The ropes on these women were very similar.
They were similar in size, made out of the same material. The ends of the rope were lashed so that they would not become unraveled. An analyst at the crime lab who specialized in rope studied them.
These ropes had been wrapped around the victims for a long period of time.
Those reports from other police agencies paid off with critical details about the women’s identities. Both of them were extremely difficult to identify. Investigators xโrayed the mummified body in the purple suitcase to check dental records.
She was Jenny Gomez, only 19 years old. Jenny Gomez was a junior college student in Oregon. She had grown up in the foster care system there.
Her father was residing in another country and had sporadic contact with her. She described herself as a person who had no family that she was in contact with, according to her social media accounts.
Cops then identified the woman in the black suitcase. It was Laura Simson, a 37โyearโold single mom from Farmington, Minnesota. They were able to identify Laura Simson very quickly, with a high degree of certainty within 24 hours, because of the tattoos on her body.
Plus, there was a missing person’s report that had already been generated because she was reported missing. A friend had reported Laura missing. That missing person’s report had been blasted to hotels and motels in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Laura confided a lot in this man. He knew that she was going to Wisconsin. He shared this information with law enforcement.
He also knew her passwords for her different websites. Those passwords led detectives to a website that both Laura and Jenny were using. It was a Meetup website for people into the world of sadomasochism, bondage, discipline, and related activities.
This type of behavior involves inflicting pain and suffering, exercising control because that power and control is the excitement.
Laura and Jenny did not know each other, but they were bound in blood. The belief was that a lifestyle where Laura would make zero choices and be essentially under someone else’s control in an entirely different state was a place where she maybe could get away from her pain. Cops say both women had communicated with a stranger seeking a 24/7 slave for absolute ownership.
Investigators got a big break when an eagleโeyed hotel manager in Rochester, Minnesota, remembered the missing alert for Laura. It was an unbelievable chance that somebody remembered this. One of the employees who worked at the hotel remembered her being there and saved the video recording of people coming and going from the hotel.
Laura checked in, but she did not check out. Surveillance video shows that mystery man paying cash for Laura’s room. He did not want to sign himself in at the hotel and leave a record of his name.
He paid cash. Later, records showed that there were 27 guests at that hotel in Rochester, Minnesota that night. He was the only one who paid cash.
He is seen taking Laura’s suitcase out on the trolley, but no one in the hotel realized Laura was inside that suitcase. He was wheeling her to the grave.
The suitcase killer was on the loose. He had killed Jenny Gomez and Laura Simson, stuffed their bodies in suitcases, and left them on the side of the road. The bodies were in two different states of decomposition.
Jenny was mummified, her body dark in color. Investigators needed to find this killer fast.
Laura’s cyber trail led them to a man she met on a bondage website, a guy who called himself Mr. Handcuffs. There was a heartbreaking moment in their emails together where she said to him, “Boy, if you wanted to ๐๐พ๐๐ me, no one would ever find me.”
Cops traced this Mr. Handcuffs to an apartment on a busy street in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis. They began immediate surveillance on him.
They put tracking devices on his vehicle. Living in apartment number one was Steven Zelich.
Cops were waiting for Zelich after he got home from work. He invited them inside, and they recorded audio of their first encounter. The detective explained why they were there, regarding Laura’s disappearance.
Zelich said he met her online, first on a website portal to the dark world of bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism known as BDSM. He told them he had been doing this for a very long time, becoming interested in BDSM at age 19 and continuing his entire life. During BDSM sessions, they tie people up, use rope, tape, handcuffs, blindfolds, and gag balls to inflict pain, because that is the excitement the dominant person enjoys.
Zelich’s picture on that website looked like he could be just a regular Joe down the street, but his profile revealed the twisted mind of a sexual deviant. He wrote that there is nothing better than a slave tied tight, gagged, blindfolded, hooded, chained, and caged. However, he described it as fantasyโbased, just conversation, with no intention of actually meeting.
Zelich denied meeting Laura in person. He seemed amiable and cooperative, maybe too cooperative for his own good.
When asked for a sample of his DNA, he agreed without hesitation. After giving cops his DNA, Zelich let them search his computer. He had installed a software program that cleaned or removed data from it automatically, and there were tens of thousands of times that software had run and supposedly cleaned his computer.
Zelich did not know that Laura’s computer had his emails. He also did not know cops had surveillance video at the hotel where Laura had stayed. But that was not enough to prove he was the suitcase killer until the DNA results came in.
Laura had a rope wrapped around her neck. When the crime lab analyst took different samples off it, she called the detective and said she had a DNA profile hit. It was Steve Zelich’s DNA inside that knot.
Now cops got a warrant to search Zelich’s cramped and cluttered apartment. They found a lot of bleach and cleaning supplies, odd because his filthy hovel was caked with black mold. In a closet, cops found evidence of Zelich’s perverted lifestyle: another suitcase containing tools of torture, a paddle, restraints, ropes, and duct tape.
Then they found a badge, badge number 138 issued by the West Allis Police Department.
Zelich had been a police officer for many years. He worked for West Allis. His father had been a sergeant for the city of Milwaukee Police Department and worked there for 40 years.
Jamie Bates, a former roommate, told the Milwaukee affiliate WITI via Skype that she was once Zelich’s roommate. She claimed one day he revealed a sickening secret. He had said that he kept a girl for seven years in his apartment in a crate, a cage.
He would leave her in there during the day when he went to work as a police officer and come home on lunch to check on her. Jamie said she quickly moved out.
Not long after, Zelich’s coveted shield became tarnished. While on duty, Zelich was accused of harassing prostitutes and exotic dancers at local strip joints. Most guys will hit on somebody
