bye, little girl. it really puts a fire under you to realize, you know, what we can do as investigators. you know, it lets other perpetrators know if you think you committed a perfect crime, you didn t leave dna or fibers or habs behind, they re still going to get you. and yet mac hasn t entirely closed out the case file. he believes art ream may have buried more bodies by that riverbank. he s opened two investigations. pandora s box still has a few things in it, so. yeah. whatever happens in the future, mac says getting justice for cindy was not just the case of a lifetime, it was a lifetime s satisfaction. this is the best thing that s ever happened to me, and that s including even the birth of my kids. to be able to give something of this magnitude back to a family.
didn t capture anything useful from ream. he was blithely shooting the breeze with his arresting officers. 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. jen may have been the one in the car intrigued most by psychology and the criminal mind, but it was mac who had the idea for the head game they were about to play on art ream. they d make a stop before the police station at the cemetery where ream s son, scott, had been buried 13 years before. mac told his partner to pull over at a flower shop, he bought a dozen daisies, and threw them in the backseat. he gets out of the car, we ve got him in belly chains and leg irons, and he s scuffling up there to the grave site, and he starts crying. i said here, why don t you put some flowers on your kid s grave, make it look nice. we saw he was sort of at a weak point there, emotional, sad, and we re standing over his son s grave. and i said art, you could bur
family could remember a gold necklace with a charm on it, an anchor. found it around her neck area. and her family didn t know what to make of that. exactly. we asked them if they could i.d. this, and nobody could. but linda bronson, one of art ream s ex-wives, said she knew what it was. art had worn that anchor chain all the time. we re thinking after he put cindy in the grave he put his necklace around her neck. what do you make of that? a possession type of thing. just as he kept a missing persons flyer of cindy as a trophy. it is the sense of this court that you be incarcerated in the michigan department of corrections to serve a life sentence. at his sentencing, mandatory life, ream was still trying to keep his grip on the family he devastated for more than two decades. he offered to tell cindy s dad explicit details of what happened when he and cindy met up at the dairy queen.
well, from the time i got this case, i had a daughter that was 13. the same aged daughter that cindy was when she disappeared. now it was up to prosecutor smith. it was a lot of heated discussions about this. and you ve got this delicate situation of trying to broker the people s interests versus the family s passionate desire. and you can t say no. they ve lived this for more than 20 years. so with myself and the father and the family came to sort of a middle ground, and i agreed to reduce it from first-degree murder to second-degree murder. smith was also willing to downsize the sentence from mandatory life to 22 years. so would it be deal or no deal? it fell apart because he wanted a better deal. we couldn t get the number. it fell apart because we couldn t get the number. no deal. ream had insisted only a ten-year prison sentence. the d.a. wasn t going there. and when he said no, it was taken off the table immediately and steve ran in the court and did closings.
eric smith, the elected county prosecutor, to make a deal. my first inclination was, hell, no, i m going to make sure he goes to prison for the rest of his life. the idea that the defendant thinks he can take control of this process and use this poor 13-year-old girl s body as a bargaining chip, may be the lowest thing i ve ever seen in a criminal case. ream held one trump card, cindy s body. and the zarzyckis wanted that above anything else, even a conviction. 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. they d had no chance to say good-bye and knew nothing of cindy s whereabouts for the past 22 years. at least now they could give her a proper burial, if only the prosecutor would make a deal with the devil. i would rather have her buried on our own terms than some killer like in the middle of the night. detective mclaughlin was also arguing for a deal. after all, he d promised the f