True Crime Campfire - Restrained: The Crimes of Mr. Handcuffs

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

In 2012 and 2013, two women disappeared. They didn’t have a whole lot in common: One was a teenager on the west coast, the other a midwestern mom of seven. But both would fall under the spell of a poisonous man who had become a master at manipulating the vulnerable for his own twisted ends.Sources:CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-wisconsin-cop-charged-in-suitcase-murders/USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/03/police-murder-women-suitcases/12158085/JSOnline: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2017/02/03/ex-cop-pleads-guilty-2nd-murder-suitcase-bodies-killings/97459438/JSOnline: https://archive.jsonline.com/news/crime/ex-cop-in-suitcases-bodies-case-had-history-of-infractions-b99307892z1-266461201.htmlJustia: https://law.justia.com/cases/wisconsin/court-of-appeals/2020/2019ap001655-cr.htmlInvestigation Discovery's "Web of Lies," episode "In Dark Corners"Investigation Discovery's "Sex & Murder," episode "Code Name Mr. Handcuffs"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In 2012 and 2013, two women disappeared. They didn't have a whole lot in common. One was a teenager on the West Coast. The other, a male. Midwestern mom of seven, but both would fall under a spell of a poisonous man who had become a master of manipulating the vulnerable for his own twisted ends. This is restrained. The Crimes of

Mr. Handcuffs. So, campers, we're starting this one just outside the resort town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, June 5th, 2014. Just after 3 p.m., Detective Jeff Reknagel got a call to come out to Como Road just outside of town. A city worker had been mowing the side of the road on a tractor, and he'd found two suitcases in the tall grass. They were crawling with flies, and they smelled horrendous, so the worker decided this was outside his pay grade and called the police. One of the suitcases was black. The other one was purple. Most of the fly activity was on the black case, so that was the one the police opened first. Inside, a horrific sight, the partially decomposed body of a blonde woman, naked with a red ball gag in her

mouth, tied with a leather strap around her head. A rope was wrapped around her neck multiple times. Her body had been bent almost into a fetal position to fit inside the suitcase. Inside the other suitcase, the purple one, was a big heavy-duty-duty. garbage bag. A human hand stuck out from the bag. Detective Racknoggle would later describe it as almost mummified. Another woman's body was stuffed inside the garbage bag, in worse shape than the first. It looked like she had died considerably longer ago. Her skin was almost leathery. Her hands were tied behind her back. This was a hell of a thing to come across in small town Wisconsin. Investigators combed the roadways and fields all around but found no other physical evidence.

They had no idea who had dropped the suitcases off or when they had done it, and there was a real sense of urgency about getting answers. The way they found these women, it seemed like these were sexualized crimes, and the fact that there were two of them suggested that there was someone highly dangerous out there, someone who was likely to kill again. People wondered, do we have a serial killer? The suitcases were small. The black one was 35 by 20 inches, the purple one just 27 by 16.

If you've got a tape measure handy, run it out to 16 and 20 inches. It seems almost impossible that you could fit the intact body of a grown woman in there, but that's what the killer had done. Both women were petite, just a little over five feet tall and slightly built. That wasn't the only similarity. Both wore pink nail polish on their toenails and fingernails. The body from the black suitcase was in the best shape, but was still so decomposed that technicians had to get a DNA sample from inside one of

teeth. There were some other encouraging clues that could help with identification, though. A number of tattoos that were still visible on the skin. One on her ankle was especially clear, a mushroom with the name Alyssa, and she had a little heart on one of her wrists. The rope had been wrapped seven times around her neck. Interestingly enough, the ends of the rope had been meticulously wrapped with black thread to keep it from fraying. Rope is cheap, but somebody had taken special care of over this one, like it was important to them. Another detective, Gil Hernandez, of the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation, had been helping a Minnesota police department with a missing person's case

for a woman of similar bill to both bodies. Her name was Laura Simonson. She was 37 years old, and she'd been missing for about eight months. When detectives in Farmington, Minnesota saw autopsy photos of the tattoos from the woman in the black suitcase, they had the grim task of calling up Laura's ex-husband and sister, and asking them to describe any tattoos she might have had. Just imagine getting that call. I mean, it just can't even imagine how awful. And when their descriptions matched the autopsy photos, police had to tell them the worst news

imaginable that Laura's body had almost certainly been found 300 miles away in Wisconsin. Laura was bright and giving and much beloved by her friends and family. She had seven kids, five girls and two boys. That's a lot of birthday parties every year, but for every one of them, Laura would make that kid feel like the center of the world. She often gave them gifts she'd made herself. And Laura had her demons, specifically a long struggle with depression and other mental illness. Her sister Nikki told investigation discovery that when Laura was down, she could be tough to be around. And Laura had had a hell of a rough few years. Because of her struggles with mental health, she'd given up her kids to be fostered by her dad. When she and her ex-divorced,

her husband got custody of the kids. And then things got much worse. Her daughter, Alyssa, had suffered a terrible injury at a swimming pool when she was just a toddler, which left her wheelchair bound, blind, and partially brain damaged. Now Laura had to hear the awful news that her now teenage daughter, who'd been staying with a friend, had died in her sleep. Alyssa's condition had left her prone to infection, and unbeknownst to anybody, one had set in around her heart. Laura had already been hanging on by a thread, and this was just too much. One of the insidious things about depression is that it makes you less likely to seek out help and support, and Laura withdrew into herself, battling against the darkness alone.

Her friends and family described her as lost. And then, in November of 2013, she disappeared, leaving behind a heartbreaking and handwritten note. I'm sorry I'm this way, she wrote. I'm no good for the kids either. The best thing I could do is stay away. I'm going to find a place to go so no one has to deal with me again. I love you all and always will. Oh man. You know, that's one of the biggest red flags, like experts say for somebody who's contemplating suicide, when they start thinking that people would be better off without them. If somebody you love starts talking like that, they really may need to get some help because that's a big red flag. And if you feel this way, I promise you it's not true. The world is a better place because you are here. You are not the exception to this rule because I know that when you hear that, you think, oh, but not me, right? No. Right. You are not the exception.

No. We need you. Please. Yes. Absolutely. Stay here, please. The note upset Laura's family, but it wasn't until a couple of weeks later, they started to get really scared. A friend of Laura's, Jeff Madison, had come over to Laura's mom's house looking for her.

Nobody was home, but he left a note taped to the door. He said none of Laura's friends that had. heard from her in two weeks and they were worried. Especially since the last time Jeff saw her, she was acting really strange. He thought she might have gone off her medication. Call me if you hear from her, Jeff wrote. This was the last draw for Laura's mom and sister. They called the police and opened a missing person's case. And in this case, unlike so many others we've covered in the past, the police took it seriously right away. Deteka Sergeant Lee Hollitz didn't take much convincing. The nature of Laura's goodbye note and the fact that she might be off her meds,

had him seriously worried for her safety. Laura, who was staying at her mom's, had all her boxes of stuff still in her van parked outside. Also in there, detectives found a prepaid credit card in Laura's cell phone and driver's license, which didn't make them feel any better. Laura had vanished, and she hadn't taken anything with her that would connect her to her life back home.

Detective Hollets first wanted to take a look at Laura's friend, Jeff Madison. Both Laura's mom and sister knew Jeff, though not very well, and he struck Hollets as a little weird right away. That didn't necessarily mean much. It's a useful trait for detectives to be suspicious, and it doesn't always take a lot for a cop to think you're weird. Yeah, I'm pretty sure a detective would side-eye the hell out of either one of us for our bookshelves alone.

Yeah, or my Google history. But Jeff didn't help himself with Detective Hollets when he told him he had access to Laura's email account in a lot of her other online activity. It wasn't really clear from our sources just how Jeff knew all this stuff. Maybe Laura used his computer and it saved her info, and when he got worried about her, he decided to go digging around. But regardless of how he got in, Jeff had uncovered some eye-opening info for Detective Hollets. Laura's family knew she was meeting guys online and going out on dates, but they didn't know the type of guys or the type of dates.

Laura was into BDSM. She liked the submissive role, and she'd been hooking up with guys she met on Craigslist and a fetish web. website called collarme.com. Jeff was able to access her profile on the site and told Hollets that Laura had been chatting a lot with a guy in Wisconsin, a dude with the username Mr. Handcuffs, who described himself as a dominant man looking for a 24-7 slave. Their recent conversations were worrying to Jeff. They were planning on meeting in person, and Mr. Handcuffs had been telling Laura to cut all ties with her past, leave behind anything that could identify. her. She was to give up her old life completely and start her new existence as his

slave. If you've been listening to our show for a while now, you might recognize this as the M.O. of serial killer John Edward Robinson. Not the come live as my submissive thing, because we get that that's a lifestyle some people are into, and they're obviously not all serial killers, but the cut off all ties with anybody who might come looking for you thing. The don't leave a paper trail thing. It's smacked of somebody trying to do some preliminary work to avoid detection by anybody who cared about Laura. This was obviously pretty creepy, given the fact that she was missing now, but it did make a certain amount of psychological sense from Laura's point of view. Life had hit her with both barrels in recent years. Divorce, loss of custody, loss of one of her

children altogether. When she met Mr. Handcuffs, she was just about as vulnerable as a human being can get. She was beyond overwhelmed, and I mean, I can understand why. So you can kind of see the appeal in a situation like that of giving up all control, all responsibility, all decision-making to somebody else. Just, I give up. You tell me what to do. This opened up new avenues for Detective Hollets, although he remained suspicious of Jeff, thinking the guy might just be trying to distract him from the truth. But he let Jeff keep on digging and sent out a Minnesota crime alert, which was a brief summary of Laura's information along with a picture of her, sent to state agencies and local businesses. Just part of the due diligence of a missing person's case, but it paid off right

away. A desk manager at a micro-tel inn down in Rochester, about 60 miles away, recognized Laura immediately and called Hollets. Laura had stayed there for one night about three weeks ago, checking in with a tall, dark-haired man. Work in the desk at a hotel means you see a lot of people, and if you're curious, you can get pretty good at reading them. The desk manager told Hollets she thought Laura looked sad and worn out. The guy she was with looked pissed off, like he could be mean. Was this the mysterious Mr. Handcuffs? The security footage of the couple checking in had been accidentally erased, infuriating,

but the footage from the next morning was still there. It showed the guy checking out alone with no sign of Laura. As he left, he pushed out a luggage cart with a few black suitcases on it. It could be Mr. Handcuffs, but it was hard to tell because if it was, then the profile picture the guy was using on the Caller Me website was about 15 years out of date, from back when he had a lot more hair and a lot less gut. Meanwhile, Jeff had been able to uncover an email address and then a name for Mr. Handcuffs, 51-year-old Stephen Zellich from the Milwaukee suburb of West Alice.

When Detective Hollets looked Zellich up, his heart sank. Zellich was one of their own, a former cop with the West Alice PD. This meant he'd likely know how police processed evidence and leads and could be much more skilled at covering his tracks than the average killer. It also meant Hollets might meet some resistance from the West Alice police when they learned he was investigating their former colleague. That second point didn't hold, though. When Hollets called Zelich's former captain and laid out what he had,

the captain just sighed and said, I'm not surprised. Jesus, that's what you want to hear, right? Like, yeah, I was waiting for this. When Hollett sent over a still from the MicroTel security footage, the captain confirmed, yep, that was Stephen Zellich, aka Mr. Handcuffs. Stephen Zellich was a piece of shit, and he'd been god-awful as a cop. He'd go to strip clubs on duty, in uniform, and sit drinking soda at the bar and staring at the girls. When they came off stage, he'd try and pressure them into going on dates with him.

If a girl really caught his eye, he'd start stalking her, using departmental resources to get her personal information. information. He'd follow them home. I know. I hate this guy. He'd follow them home after they'd finished work at the club, sometimes stopping them in his squad car to harass them. He used this technique on any woman he liked the look of, getting their details from the department and then constantly showing up and asking for dates, stalking them and surveilling them. God help you if you were zealicious type and he showed up when you asked the police for help because he'd be making your life hell forever. Genuinely, the stuff of nightmares.

The kind of thing that every woman has in the back of her head when they're approached by a strange man. For months, he'd harassed a 22-year-old hairstylist, constantly showing up and asking for a date, blocking her car with his squad car when she tried to leave work. She told him she had a steady boyfriend and a kid, but it didn't matter. By the second month, he was coming by the salon every day. Oh, my God. A college student said that Zellich, while on duty, came up to her in a parking lot and told her she was illegally parked.

Then he asked her out. She told him she was only 19. Zellich, who at the time would have been around 40, told her that as long as she was 18, it was okay by him. Then asked for her name and number. The girl said normally she'd tell a guy like this to fuck right off, but she was intimidated, understandably, because he was a cop. So she wrote down a fake phone number and gave it to him. One dancer at a club called Heartbreakers said Zellich had called to ask her out about a thousand times over eight years, a span that included multiple addresses and phone numbers. Any time he wanted to find her, he just ran her details through the police department system.

Multiple complaints came into the West Alice PD about Stephen Zellich, and he'd been disciplined ten times in his career there. He wasn't just creepy, he was lazy too, taking long breaks where he'd ignore calls, plus he lied a lot. and managed to crash his squad car three times. But he was allowed to keep his job until 2001. Great. It reminds me of that chode we covered a while back, Joe Glynowitz, remember him, G.I. joke. Another one of our boys in blue who should have been wearing an orange jumpsuit instead. It's never the people you want to be fired quickly who are.

Like nurses, doctors, and cops seem to be fucking bulletproof until they do something real bad. And Zelich's story gets way worse. An exotic dancer who made extra money as a sex worker agreed to go back to Zellich's place one night. A little while later, she ran screaming outside and into traffic, wearing nothing but her underwear. Zelich had tried to force a pair of handcuffs onto her, and she fled in absolute terror. Oh, my God. Zelich's story was that the woman had stolen some cash from his wallet and ran away when he tried to get it back. This was obvious horseshit.

She was wearing nothing but a tiny pair of panties. where was she going to put a stack of $20 bills? Right. This incident was one too many for the West Alice PD. They finally made it clear to zealich that his time was up. Not for trying to assault this woman, but because he'd hired a sex worker. Yeah. Take a moment with that one.

Just let the rage wash over you. We're right there with you. Oh, just wait. You want to keep the rage in your heart for this one. He resigned rather than be fired. And because of that, he was able to pass a background check and find work as a security guard, because, God forbid, he face actual serious consequences, not the police. And that's what he was doing in November of 2013 when Laura Simonson went missing.

Now, West Alice officers went to talk to Zellich and look around his gross apartment. Laura could be there, either consensually or otherwise, but there was no sign of her or anything else amiss. Zellich told the officers he'd never actually met Laura in person, that their relationship had just been about online chat and fantasies, that he had no intention of actually pursuing. He was calm in matter-of-factoring that interview, but less so later when agents from the Wisconsin DCI and the FBI came for a second chat. He'd been a cop. He knew that when the FBI's in your face, shit's getting real. Zellich sweated buckets throughout his second interview and tried to dial back his online relationship with Laura. He didn't really know her at all. She wanted to meet, but he'd cooled things off. He was just having fun online. This interview really only provided one new piece of evidence, a DNA swab from Zellich's cheek.

But the conversation clearly shook him up because the former male dominance-seeking 24-7 slave right away put up a new post on a fetish site, quote, with the hope of finding an owner, male, female, or couple. no limit, no release, enslavement, imprisonment, captivity, animalization, ideally in a farm slash caged situation. Damn, dude, way to flip-flop. This guy was all over the place. What do you want? Yeah, in order to avoid one cage, he agreed to another.

Like, is he dumb? Or did he just assume his dom would treat him better than he treated his subs? Yeah, no kidding, right? But as the weeks went by and he didn't hear any more from law enforcement, I guess he got his confidence back. He got his groove back because he was on collar me.com again, once more looking for a 24-7 slave. He shouldn't have been confident, though. Police had him under constant surveillance as they continued the investigation. Now, Laura Simonson, of course, was not the only body found by that Wisconsin roadside. The second body from the purple suitcase was proving much more difficult

to identify. Her skin was leathery and tight, almost like she'd mummified. She'd clearly been kept in a much different environment to Laura. The same kind of rope that had been wrapped around Laura's neck tied this woman's hands together. Both women had their toenails and fingernails painted pink. Both had similar petite builds.

Some stellar work from an analyst at the crime lab moved the case forward when she was able to get a DNA sample from the rope used to bind the second woman's hands from the inside of the knot where it had been protected. The DNA was a match for Stephen Zellich.

A little less than three weeks after the two bodies were found, he was arrested and interviewed again. Detective Reknoggle drove Zellets to the station in the back of his car, and the two of them talked on the way. At one point, Zellich held a fist over his heart and said, I'm no longer an officer, but in my heart I feel like I'm still one of you. Oh, barf. I guess he was looking for easy treatment, but what he actually did was tell the detectives, if they needed it, just how to interview him. That first interview with Zelich

with him in this security guard uniform is some really smart detective work. It's also kind of hard to watch because the detectives are really friendly and sympathetic with him, making on like this whole situation was something bad that had happened to him, poor guy. Knowing what a nasty

little skid mark this man is on the underpants of our planet, you really want him to just go after him hard and really get in his face, but their job wasn't to provide emotionally satisfying footage for us unfortunately. It was to keep the asshole talking as long as possible, and they delivered. While Zellich was talking, other officers were searching his apartment.

They found another two suitcases, both full of BDSM gear. If you can think of it, it was probably in there. In a bedside cabinet, they found 252 photos of Zellich in BDSM situations. There looked to be six individual women involved, but none of them was Laura. There was something of hers in the apartment, though, her DNA. on a pair of handcuffs. In his police interviews, Zellich was almost entirely calm

and matter of fact. He could have been talking about his grocery list, not the deaths of two women. As police often do when they interview suspects, they'd deliberately given him the impression that they already knew all the details of the case. So when Zellich started talking about the first girl, they casually asked,

oh, which one was that? What was her name again? Her name was Jenny, Zellich told them. Jenny Gamas. Jenny was from a long way away, all the way over in Cottage Grove, Oregon. When she met Stephen Zellich, she was just 19 years old. Her dad was out of the country and out of her life, and when she was 13, her mom had gone to prison, and Jenny went into foster care.

That's never going to be easy, but it seems like she went to a good family, thank God, and quickly bonded with two other girls who were also fostered there. By 19, Jenny had a son, who lived with his dad, and she was going to college, to try and start a career in the forest service because she loved the outdoors. In 2012, her foster sisters knew she'd been talking online for months with a guy in another state,

but assumed it was just some dude she'd met on Myspace or something. We don't know when Jenny got into the BDSM scene because it's not really something people tend to share, but she was into it, and the guy she'd been talking to online was someone she'd met on collarme.com, a user by the name of Mr. Handcuffs,

who was, of course, Stephen Zellich. was good at manipulating vulnerable women. He was able to talk Jenny into coming to Wisconsin to stay with him. He made her think it was her idea. She didn't tell anybody, probably because she knew her friends would try to talk her out of going. In August of 2012, Jenny met Zellich and Kenosha, and he took her to a hotel where they stayed all weekend. They had several BDSM sessions, all consensual, as far as we know, with Jenny in the submissive role. Bzzarly enough, Zellich tried to tell the detectives there was nothing sexual about this. And although there are people who believe in platonic BDSM, which, okay, please go touch some grass,

I'm begging you, like the whole thing where a blindfolded naked girl gets tied up with ropes and leather straps and has a ball gag in her mouth, I'm finding that hard to believe, my dude. Yeah, nothing sexual about that. No, it's totally platonic. On Sunday morning, they had another session, and this time Zellich introduced breath Play. Y'all might remember we covered this in more detail in the Bob Bashara episode a while back.

There's controversy around it, even within the BDSM community, because it can be incredibly dangerous. Breathplay is where one partner controls the other one's breathing, sometimes with a rope around the neck or just by gagging them and holding their nose shut. Zellich, after initially pretending he couldn't even remember what it was called, finally explained the whole process to the investigators. He described it as a, quote, higher end activity. whatever the hell that means, and acknowledged that it was dangerous.

And then he launched into a story. He had a rope around Jenny's neck, Zellich told the detectives, which he'd repeatedly tighten and release. I had the rope around her neck and pulled it, he told them in the same matter-of-fact voice, and it, quote, resulted in her death. That's how I put it, like it just kind of happened. An accidental death during kinky sex, that was Zellich's story, and there wasn't much evidence to disprove it.

it. For the record, though, I think he's full of shit. Assuming for the moment that Jenny was the first woman he'd killed, and I think there's a big question mark about that, I think he'd been fantasizing about killing someone in this exact scenario for a long time. When he got his chance with this girl from out of state, with nobody knowing where she was, he took it. I think he meant to kill her all along. Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. Zellich had been into BDSM since he was a teenager, and he'd been upping the ante pretty steadily over the years, especially. after his first experience with breath play. This was what he liked, what really got him off. If you're already somewhere around the borders of psychopathy, that kind of exciting discovery

is exactly the kind of thing that can lead to a dangerous escalation of behavior. You want to feel that rush again, and you want to feel it more. And what he did after Jenny lost consciousness doesn't exactly paint a portrait of innocence. He didn't call 911, didn't rush her to a hospital, didn't do anything to try and revive her. What he did, was fold her small body into her little purple suitcase and leave the hotel with it. He tossed Jenny's clothes into various dumpsters and then took her back to his apartment, where he emptied his refrigerator and moved Jenny's naked body from the suitcase to the fridge. Oh, my God. It was a tight squeeze, but he managed to get her in there.

And then he just left her there. Out of sight, out of mind. Problem solved. When Jenny's body started to decompose and swell, it forced the refrigerator door. open. Zellich just duct-taped it shut. No big deal. There was already huge local interest in this case, which skyrocketed when the news aired footage of police carrying that refrigerator out. If there's one city in the world where a fridge as evidence is really going to get people's attention, it's Milwaukee, which of course is Jeffrey Dahmer's old hunting ground. Officers at the West Alice PD told reporters that their former colleague Stephen Zellich had always been considered kind of a weirdo, secretive and with no friends, no friends among the other officers, but this didn't really match what

the other residents of Zellich's apartment building said. They told reporters that even long after he'd retired, it was pretty common to see squad cars parked outside as former cop buddies came to hang out with Zellich. I guess you can't blame him for trying to establish some distance once it started becoming clear what a creepy freakie was, but also, I kind of can blame them too. Gross. Remember, he got fired after years of sexually harassing and stalking women like it was his job. Yeah. Dude misread the creed as molest and purve. And they didn't do shit about it for years, only to fire him for the least bad thing he'd done.

Yeah. If there is one rapist at a table along with 10 innocent men who know about it, there's a rapist and 10 rape apologists. Especially when they're cops, for God's sake. I mean, yeah, like you're supposed to arrest people who do this shit. Yeah. I have no doubt that they were palling around with him up until it. became too hard to protect him. Yeah. And I mean, you know, maybe not all of them, whatever, but like I'm much more likely to believe the apartment neighbors in that situation than the

like official statement of the PD. Like, why would they lie about that? They just wouldn't, right? Right. The neighbors would not be making that up that he had cops coming and visited him all the time. Zellich's neighbors provided the kind of reporting that's so common about killers now that it's become a cliche. He was quiet, a loner, kept to himself. self. His social life was mainly online, and not long after he'd killed Jenny, and with her body still in his fridge, he was pursuing another woman on the Caller Me website, Laura Simonson. And patiently, skillfully, just like he had with Jenny, Zellet started to groom her online, until she was ready to give up everything she knew to come to him, and would think it was all her

own idea. She would be his slave. He'd control her utterly, and if she was to be entirely his, she'd have to give up everything she owned and everyone she knew. She'd have to tell no one where she was going or who she was going to see. In November 2013, a little over a year after Stephen Zellich had killed Jenny Gammes and with her body still crammed into his refrigerator, Zellich met up with Laura Simonson and drove her down to the Microtel Inn in Rochester, Minnesota. He'd told her, just like he'd told Jenny Gamas, that he wanted her to paint her fingernails and toenails pink.

Both women were to make sure they had no pubic hair. He told detectives during his interviews that Jenny and Laura were kind of similar, which they really weren't, other than being short and slightly built. But, you know, that's how fetishes work, I guess. You see the thing you're into, and the rest is kind of background noise. And obviously, these things don't always follow a straight line from A to B, but if I was a woman from Stephen Zellich's past and I was petite and liked to have pink nails, I don't think I'd ever sleep well again.

Zellich told police he hadn't had any BDSM encounters between Jenny and Laura. This was his first time since he'd killed a girl, purportedly, by accident, and he recreated that deadly encounter almost exactly. Very similar to the other situation described, he told detectives in his matter-of-fact way. He bound them the same way, he used the same kind of rope. The main difference was that with Jenny, it had taken him all weekend to work up to the main event. Laura was dead just hours after first meeting him in person. Zelich's story was the same. He'd become a little too enthusiastic during breathplay and had pulled on the rope wrapped around

Laura's neck too long or too hard and she had died. At some point, I realized she was, I could tell, I could feel she went limp. He told detectives during a stretch of conversation where he kept yawning with boredom. And just like with Jenny, he folded Laura's naked body into her own suitcase and checked out of the hotel. The security footage from the micro-tel inn showed him pushing a luggage cart with some suitcases. Laura's body was inside one of them. Zellich's bondage gear was in another.

He wanted to hurry up to checkout and get out of there before 11 so he wouldn't be charged extra. This was what he was worried about, with the woman he'd just killed stuffed into the suitcase beside him. As you might know, some criminals, including some serial killers, have signature aspects to their crimes. These are things they repeat from one crime to another, things that don't actually help them in the commission of the crime,

but that satisfy some psychological need. It's rare, though, to find somebody like Stephen Zellich who engineered a carbon copy duplicate of one killing. It also made his argument that Laura's death was an innocent accident, really hard to swallow for a couple of reasons. Even if you just took him at his word, he'd already had one breathplay encounter that ended in a number, a woman's death. His very next bondage session, he repeats his actions exactly, and another woman

dies. And he's going to try to tell us this was an accident. Come on, man. Even you can't be this big of a turnip. Why don't you try and sell us a bridge, too? And then there was his insistence that Laura cut all ties to her current life until no one where she was going, that she make herself impossible to find. There were two potential reasons for that. One, Zellich meant to kill her her all along and wanted to maximize his chances of getting away with it. And two, he intended to do just what he told Laura, take her home and have her start an entirely new life as his slave. The big problem with number two was that Jenny Gammas' body was still duct tape into his refrigerator at home. He clearly had no intention whatsoever of having Laura or anybody else

come live with him. He always intended to kill her. Yeah. Pretty much the only time Zelich got agitated during his police interviews was when he was directly confronted with the notion that he planned to kill Laura. I will not go where Travis is inferring. He said getting all worked up. Travis was one of the investigators. And quick side note here. If you've ever seen that kids in the hall sketch where Bruce won't stop using the word ascertain, zealich is exactly the same but with infer. Like he says it so much, so much that you just want to smack his face off of his face. Stop saying it. Stop it. It's so annoying. You guys have to watch that interrogation. He is infuriating on multiple levels, but he uses that word so many times. With Laura's body in the back of his car, Zelis drove back home

to West Alice. There was no more room in the refrigerator for the body, but hey, it's winter in Wisconsin. The whole world is a refrigerator. He just left Laura in the trunk of his car. To reclaim his refrigerator, he moved Jenny's body down to the trunk as well. By now, Jenny's body had been in the fridge for well over a year. The fact that he'd left Jenny in the refrigerator all year should tell you that Stephen Zellich wasn't really a guy who took care of things that needed taken care of. When spring arrived and the weather started warming up, he just kept driving around with the bodies of two women in the trunk of his car. People in his apartment building and his security guard jobs started complaining about the smell coming from his car. When police asked

him what he did about that, Zellich said, oh, I may have done a little spray. You know, You know, deodorant or whatever. Two bodies are decomposing in your trunk, Steve. I don't think Axe body spray is going to cut it. God, can you imagine? Ugh. The smell in his car was a problem that wasn't going to go away. So one night he finally drove 45 minutes down to Lake Geneva

and set the two suitcases holding Jenny and Laura in the long grass at the side of the road. And look, we are always happy when criminals are morons. But just think about that. You're in Wisconsin. where practically the whole upper half of the state is woods so deep you could lose yourself in them forever. But no, you just dump two bodies right beside the road, outside of one of the most popular tourist spots in the Midwest. It's so lazy. And it shows what total disrespect he had for these two women. He might as well have been dumping a bag of used tissues for all the care

he took with them. Absolutely. Yeah, the coldness of the sky is really just, oh, it's horrifying. to me, and he wanted his fridge back. I mean, he was using that fridge after. I just can't even imagine. How? How? Like, how does a human brain get like that? I'll never understand it. The nature of zealich's two killings, the great similarities between them and his complete lack of remorse or empathy, has led to real suspicion that he's killed before.

It certainly wouldn't surprise me at all. The only thing that gives me some pause about it is that he was so completely incompetent in how he handled Jenny and Laura's bodies. it wouldn't surprise me if he'd killed somebody else, but it would kind of surprise me if he'd gotten away with it. But you never know. I mean, I don't know. Looking forward rather than back,

I don't think there's any doubt at all that Stephen Zellich would have killed again if he hadn't been caught. He'd already escalated between Jenny and Laura, killing Laura much more quickly after meeting her. When he was arrested, he was already grooming another woman on collarme.com. He was making plans to fly her in from overseas. If he's not already a serial killer, he was sure as hell going to be, in my opinion, anyway. And I guess technically he already is, because I think they changed it, didn't they?

It used to be he had to have three, and then they changed it to two as long as there's a cooling off period in between. So I guess he technically is a serial killer. And he hits all the other, you know, the ritualistic killing the... Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't buy that the first one was an accident. Police sent pictures of the six women in Zelich's BDSM photo collection to departments all over the country, but no matches to bodies or missing persons turned up. So as far as investigators

knew, all these women were still alive. If that's the case, they were damn lucky. Stephen Zelich pled guilty in two states and will have to serve his time in each consecutively. In Wisconsin, he was sentenced to 35 years for first-degree reckless homicide for Jenny Gammas's death, with another 10 years added on later for his handling of the bodies. In Minnesota, he was sentenced to 25 years for second-degree murder. And honestly, I don't think either main charge really reflects the severity of the crimes, but they were what prosecutors were able to get him to plead guilty to, and they mean he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison. And for that, I am more than grateful. You know, for better or worse, a lot of us hook up online these

days, and I'm certainly not one to judge. I met my husband on a message board in 2002, and when he flew over from Scotland, everybody thought he was going to murder me. Like, they were talking about it at our wedding. So I'm an old school internet dater and you can pick up a creep at a bar or a party too. Not just on the internet. That's the thing. You see all these shows that are like, internet murders and like it makes it seem like this doesn't happen in real life when you meet people out and about, which it does. I mean, you know, the internet, I'm not sure is any more likely to land you on a creep than just going out to a bar or a club or whatever. But nevertheless, when you're swiping right or opening up those DMs, remember Mr. Handcuffs for a

second and just be careful out there. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Melody, Jack, Christine, April, Catherine, Pam, Brandy, and Missy. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back.

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