imprisoned in the 70s for taking indecent liberties with a minor. that s tame-sounding legal language for what the victim, a hitchhiker, said he actually did abducted her, raped her in his car and then tossed her out the door. linda had two children with ream, scott and another boy. children thought the ex who were useful to ream s appetite when the boys became young teens. 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. and you know, he d have this chance to do whatever he wanted to do or whatever he thought he could get away with. he d entice them with alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes, and he would be he d be their friend and he d be the cool dad around, you know. by 2007, with everything mac was learning about art ream, the theory that cindy was merely a teenage runaway was as outdated as her old mix tapes.
investigators don t know what caused the crash on the expressway. more news later. now, back to the disappearance at the dairy queen. it wasn t until a few years after he d been ordered to solve the cindy case that detective derek mclaughlin, mac, actually sat down with the missing girl s father. ed zarzycki by then had remarried a woman named linda. she would become the family s principal contact with the police, because she knew it wasn t in ed s quiet nature to even talk much anymore about cindy. when her birthday came or the anniversary of her death came or christmas came i could feel his pain. she became my child, as well.
you? well, you had to check it out because you just never knew. and i checked every one of them out. cindy s family recognized this new detective on the case was different. 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, 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. could mac find connie s sister? it wasn t even a case number to him. she was my sister, his sister, my dad and mom s daughter. after a few years on the case, mac got a call from art ream s ex-wife, linda. she had some news. art ream was back in prison for raping a child. this time he was convicted of criminal sexual conduct. ream was going nowhere. the detective would have time to come up with a strategy for getting inside the suspect s head. i knew that he didn t like
scott ream, by then 22 years old, was located and agreed to a police interview right after the upcoming fourth of july holiday. it never happened. scott ream was killed by a drunk driver first. so there was nothing that could be done. but that did start part of the ball rolling. one person reading those fresh news stories about the missing girl, it turned out, was scott ream s mother. a woman named linda bronson. she was divorced from scott s father. the mother, linda bronson, was upset by what she read as innuendo in the news stories that her now-dead son had somehow been responsible for cindy s disappearance. i knew that couldn t be true. that s why i was contacted daniel davis. but linda bronson wasn t calling just to clear her son s name. she had information to offer and detective davis was listening. she was very interested in it. she believed me. she whole-heartedly believed me, at least i felt she did. now, for the first time in eight years, the eastpointe police dep
mac, the father of three daughters and a son, asked the couple to understand his situation. i said, listen, i said, 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. linda was great. she even said i ll do anything. i ve got secretarial skills, i can help you file, type up things, do this and do that, just so i could spend more time dealing with her family s case. linda zarzycki, the stepmother, would go to the eastpointe police station on her lunch hour to pore through the case files. she d suggest theories to mac. and he d say, yep, he thought of that too but kept running into brick walls. he 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 on to the case. she wasn t even a cop, she was a 23-year-old college intern with a law enforcement consulting firm in chicago where mac