The county highway worker was mowing tall grass along North Como Road in the town of Geneva, Wisconsin, on the afternoon of Thursday, June 5th, 2014, when he came across two suitcases sitting in the long grass of the ditch. A black one and a purple one. He didn’t open them. He just moved them to the side of the road so they would be out of his way.
Around 3:00 p. m. , a driver going by spotted the suitcases on the side of the road and called the town of Geneva police, whose station was only about a quarter mile away. When the officers got out there, they opened them up.
There was a woman inside each one. According to the criminal complaint, the woman in the black suitcase was naked except for a collar. She had a rope wrapped around her neck and a gag in her mouth. The woman in the purple suitcase was partially covered in a black plastic garbage bag, her hands tied behind her back with rope.
A Walworth County Sheriff’s Office detective named Jeff Recknagel called his boss and told him they needed the entire team out there. They sealed off the area and searched for miles around, because at that point they had no idea whether these were going to be the only two bodies. A man who owned a hay and horse farm about a mile down the road came home that afternoon to find the road barricaded by police. The grass around that ditch was so tall that he had no idea how long those suitcases might have been sitting there.
The town’s police chief would say it was a very quiet town, the kind of place where everybody knows each other. According to one of the investigators, they sent a teletype describing the two women to police departments across the entire Midwest. Messages about missing people came back from all over the place. They had to put them all into a chart and work through them.
Late that same night, hours after the suitcases were found, a Farmington, Minnesota police detective sergeant named Lee Hollatz got a call from one of his contacts saying they had a woman who matched a missing person’s description. Hollatz had been looking for that woman—Laura Simonson—since late November of the previous year. He was able to identify her by one of the tattoos on her body, and her dental records would confirm it. The woman in the black suitcase was Laura Simonson.
Laura was 37 years old, a mother of seven, with places to stay in both Farmington and St. Paul. When her family went a few days without seeing her at first, nobody really thought much of it. But by November 22nd, 2013, it had been three weeks, and her mother called the police to report her missing.
The last time anybody in her family had seen her was on November 1st. The next day she left her van parked at her mother’s house in Farmington, and somebody picked her up from the parking lot at Acton Road Elementary School. She never came back for the van. The case landed on Hollatz’s desk, and the evidence he collected pointed to Laura leaving Farmington of her own accord.
Laura’s father would say that he’d been taking care of her seven kids since 2010, and that she had struggled with mental illness. Her family was also worried that she might be going without the medication she was taking. Hollatz considered her a vulnerable adult. He would later say that Laura was a nice lady, no doubt about it.
Hollatz put her information on the Minnesota crime alert system, and within a week he got a phone call from the Microtel Inn and Suites down in Rochester. Some of the employees there had recognized Laura from the alert, and they remembered her for a pretty specific reason: somebody had been smoking in her room, which was against the hotel’s rules. The hotel still had security video. On November 2nd, Laura had checked in under her own name along with a man.
The next morning, the camera showed the man leaving by himself. Laura was never seen leaving at all. One of the prosecutors on the case would later say that he went back through the hotel’s records that night. There were 27 guests staying there.
The man with Laura was the only one who paid in cash. Hollatz had a man on video, but he didn’t have a name. In early December, somebody called in a tip saying they had spotted Laura at the Apache Mall in Rochester, but it turned out not to be credible. Then in January, another tip came in.
This one said that Laura had been seen with a man from West Allis, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, and his name was Steve Zelich. With that name, Hollatz found an email account registered to Zelich, and it was connected to online chats with Laura. The tip checked out. Hollatz would later say that from the beginning, he knew Zelich was involved, and he didn’t like it.
Hollatz tracked down an address and called the West Allis Police Department to ask for some help. That’s when he found out that Steven Zelich used to be a West Allis police officer. He had been on the force for 12 years before he resigned back in 2001. Now he was working as a security guard.
Officers in West Allis confirmed that the man on the hotel video checking in with Laura was Zelich. In January, West Allis officers went to Zelich’s apartment, talked to him about Laura, and searched the place, but didn’t get any sign of her. Hollatz wrote a letter to Zelich because, as far as he could tell, Zelich was the last person to see Laura, and he wanted to talk to him. Zelich didn’t respond.
Hollatz asked for more help, and agents from Wisconsin’s Division of Criminal Investigation and from the FBI offices in both Minneapolis and Milwaukee got involved. In March of 2014, those agents went to Zelich’s apartment in West Allis and questioned him about Laura. At first, he denied that he and Laura had been in an intimate relationship. Before the agents left, they asked him for a sample of his DNA, and he gave it to them.
Hollatz would say that even after that interview, Zelich was still the number one person on his radar. But all he really had was a missing person’s case. From March into June, investigators kept looking for Laura. Nothing turned up.
After the suitcases were found and Laura was identified, police in Rochester were brought back into the case. Crime scene investigators went through the room at the Microtel where Laura had stayed, more than seven months after she checked in. According to the investigators, the ropes that had been tied around the women were the same size and made of the same material. The ends had been lashed so they wouldn’t unravel, and the analyst at the crime scene lab who specialized in ropes identified them.
The lab also found DNA on the ropes. Investigators say it matched the sample that Steven Zelich had given those agents back in March. On the morning of Wednesday, June 25th, Zelich apparently used a mobile device to visit an S&M website under the name Mr. Handcuffs.
Later that day, detectives picked him up. He was working security at Johnson Controls in Glendale, just north of Milwaukee. When they sat him down in the interview room, he still had his work baton on his belt. Then they told him he was under arrest.
The detectives let him keep the baton. Recknagel would later say that they did it to encourage him to talk. Back in West Allis, witnesses said sheriff’s deputies used a battering ram to get into his apartment. To one of his neighbors, he was just a quiet guy who lived alone and kept to himself.
That was it. She didn’t even know his name. That day, detectives in hazmat suits carried large brown bags of evidence out of his apartment. They also carried out his refrigerator.
The next day, prosecutors in Walworth County charged Zelich with two counts of hiding a corpse. Inside the interview room, he started talking. According to the criminal complaint, he admitted that he met Laura online, that he met up with her in person in November of 2013, and that he caused her death. Then he put her in a suitcase and hid her body.
But he also told them about the other woman. He said he had met her online, too. Sometime in 2012 or early 2013, he had met up with her in Kenosha County. During that meeting, he caused her death.
Afterward, he put her in a suitcase and hid her at his home in West Allis. On Friday, he appeared in court over a video feed from the jail. He didn’t say a word, and his bond was set at 1 million dollars. His public defender said that how these women died could be anything from premeditated homicide to an accident during consensual intercourse.
The police didn’t release a name for the other woman. Instead, the town of Geneva police put out a sketch of her face along with a description. She was somewhere between 15 and 35 years old, about 5’2″ to 5’4″, with long dark hair, a pronounced overbite, and crooked lower teeth. Almost right away, some people out in Oregon saw the sketch and recognized her.
One of her friends would say that she knew it was her from the crooked bottom teeth and the big front top teeth, along with her little eyes and high cheekbones. On Friday, June 27th, the police showed up at Loraine Erickson’s door. They wanted a sample of hair, and they told her that a girl she used to foster might have been murdered. The last time Loraine had seen her was more than a year earlier, when she came by for a visit and brought her a plant.
Loraine would say that they had all been wondering what happened to her. Around the same time, police in Cottage Grove, Oregon were getting the girl’s dental records from an office in town because investigators in Wisconsin had asked for them. By that weekend, a TV station in Eugene was reporting that the woman in the sketch might be a mother from Oakridge, Oregon, and police in Kenosha were saying they didn’t believe she was from their area at all. On Monday, June 30th, 2014, the Walworth County Sheriff’s Office announced that the dental records were a match.
The woman in the purple suitcase was Jenny Gamez. She was from Cottage Grove, Oregon, and she was 19 years old when she died. That same day, sheriff’s deputies in Oregon knocked on the door of Winchester Bay to tell a woman that her granddaughter was dead. The last time Jenny talked to her grandmother, she said that she was going to travel the country with a friend from Springfield, and that when she got back, she wanted to go to either Oregon State or the University of Oregon.
Nobody had ever reported Jenny missing. When she left, she told her family that she was moving, and according to police, her family thought she’d just moved on with her life. Jenny had been in foster care since she was 5 years old, and she bounced around between a lot of different families in Oakridge and Cottage Grove. Her grandmother would say that Jenny had a very difficult life, but she always seemed to find a way to overcome it.
She came to live with Loraine Erickson, and Loraine helped her get through high school. Loraine would say that Jenny was a joy to be around, an upbeat kid who wasn’t afraid of trying new things. She even took a sculpture class. The other kids loved her.
After she won a scholarship to go to college, Jenny moved out of Cottage Grove to be closer to a community college about 20 miles north of Eugene. She lived with friends and still came back to visit. At one point she spent some time down in California with friends, too. She was described as a free spirit who was always smiling.
To one friend she was super bubbly and outgoing, like a little ray of sunshine. But eventually the texts stopped, and none of her friends could get a hold of her. Loraine was surprised that she never heard from her, and surprised that Jenny had been involved with a man that much older. Back home, she said, Jenny never ran around with kids who were more than a year or two older than her.
The DNA on the ropes was certainly incriminating. But it was nothing compared to what Zelich told the detectives himself in the interview room on June 25th, 2014. He walked them through all of it. Later at his sentencing, prosecutors would say that Zelich first met Jenny on a bondage website when she was only 16.
After about 6 months, he stopped talking to her, and he didn’t pick it back up until she turned 18. Then, in August of 2012, he convinced her to fly out to Milwaukee. He picked her up at the Mitchell International Airport and drove her south to a hotel near I-94 and Highway 50 in Kenosha. Prosecutors later argued that he chose Kenosha so that Jenny would leave behind as little of a footprint as possible.
His lawyer said he just picked a hotel he was familiar with. They stayed there for two to three days. According to what Zelich told police, he and Jenny were doing something they called breath play, which he described to the detectives as controlling somebody’s breathing. He said he blindfolded Jenny and handcuffed her, put a ball gag in her mouth, and tied a rope around her neck.
At some point, he said, he lost control. Jenny Gamez died on August 28th, 2012. Zelich told detectives that he panicked. He put her body into her own suitcase and drove her back to his apartment in West Allis.
Once he got her inside, he emptied out his refrigerator and put her body in it. At some point he had to tape the door shut just to keep her body inside. He told detectives, “I’m sure if you guys check through the refrigerator, they’ll retrieve evidence. ” Recknagel would say that after hearing all of that, he was just blown away.
That’s where Jenny stayed. In the refrigerator. In his kitchen in West Allis, for more than a year. After Jenny died, according to prosecutors, Zelich met Laura Simonson online on a similar kind of website.
Prosecutor Michael Gravely handled Jenny’s case. According to him, there had been no safe words with Jenny. And even after she died, Zelich never set them up with Laura. Gravely would say that’s when they believed Zelich intended to kill again.
And according to Gravely, before Laura ever came to meet him, Zelich had told her that she needed to do a few things to make herself disappear. He told her not to sell her van, to shut down her Facebook page, to stop paying her parking tickets, and not to renew her driver’s license. That way, nobody would be able to find her. Zelich told police that at the Microtel in Rochester, Laura had died the same way Jenny had.
The next morning, he put her in a suitcase and drove her home with him to West Allis. And once he had Laura’s body at home, that’s when he took Jenny out of the refrigerator. He put both women in suitcases. According to the first complaint against him, sometime in 2014, he moved Jenny’s body out of his home.
Zelich admitted something else. That day in March, when the agents questioned him in his apartment about Laura, both women were in the trunk of his car. They stayed in the trunk while the winter ended and the weather started to warm up. Zelich kept on driving to work at Johnson Controls.
According to Gravely, eventually his boss came up to him in the parking lot and told him that people were complaining about the smell coming from his trunk and that he needed to take care of it by tomorrow. So in the first week of June, Zelich drove out 40 miles southwest to the town of Geneva and left both suitcases in the tall grass on the side of North Como Road. This wasn’t the first time that Steven Zelich had been accused of hurting a woman. In March of 2001, back when he was still a West Allis police officer, a woman told the department that she had met Zelich at a bar and gone home with him.
She said that while he was showing her the bedroom, she heard him drop something into his back pocket that sounded like handcuffs. According to the police report, she said that he stood in the doorway, grabbed her, and threw her to the ground. She told the police that she asked him, “Are you going to kill me? ” And Zelich answered, “Are you going to help me?
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By her account, she only got away because she asked him for a drink of water, and when he went to get it, she ran. She ended up banging on the door of an apartment across the street in nothing but her underwear, saying that a man had just tried to hurt her, and the police were called. Zelich told the officers that the woman had tried to steal money from him and that the struggle was just him trying to get it back. The police arrested the woman on an open prostitution warrant.
The department never referred Zelich to prosecutors. He was never charged. Years later, the West Allis police chief would say that the people in charge back then told him that the woman didn’t want to pursue charges. The woman said that wasn’t true.
And in 2014, when she heard about the suitcases, she told a reporter that she knew right then it was him. She was the one who got away. But she wasn’t the only woman in his file. By the time Zelich left the apartment, his personal file was 3 to 4 inches thick.
A hair stylist, exotic dancers, a college student, and a bartender had all told the department that officer Zelich was bothering them and that he wouldn’t stop. They said he would show up at their jobs while he was on duty and ask them out, and that he ran their license plates to get their home addresses. One woman had moved three times and had an unpublished phone number. According to her, he still always found out where she lived.
When an investigator asked him if it was true that he had asked one dancer out possibly a hundred times over eight years, Zelich told him yes. There was a hairdresser who said that he would block her car in and wait for her in the alley even after she told him she had a fiancé and a baby. According to the records, when she said that he scared her, his response was that he was supposed to scare people. Back in 2001, the chief at the time confronted Zelich about all of it, and the department recorded the conversation.
The chief accused him of hanging around strip bars that weren’t even in his area while he was on the clock and handing out business cards with his home phone number on them. He asked Zelich if he really thought it was appropriate to put his hand around that woman’s neck and throw her out of his apartment in her underwear, and whether he didn’t really think he had done anything wrong. “No, absolutely not,” Zelich told him. When the chief told him that every woman they talked to said they felt intimidated and pressured because he was a police officer, Zelich said that his approach had always been polite, gentlemanly, and sincere.
If women felt that way, he told the chief, it may have been how they interpreted his badge, his uniform, gun, or his position, because it wasn’t created by his behavior. On August 8th, 2001, the chief put together a draft of formal disciplinary charges against him, describing what he called a very distinct pattern in which every complaint involved young women. Less than two weeks later, Zelich resigned. In his resignation letter, he wrote that he was offering to resign so the charges would not be referred.
His file already had reprimands and short suspensions in it, including a 20-day suspension after that night in May. But nobody ever charged him with a crime for any of it. By resigning, he never had to answer those charges. Resigning is what let him pass the state’s criminal background checks and get a license to work as a private security officer.
In July of 2007, he went to work for Securitas. According to the company, he passed the state’s background check every two years to renew his license. By 2014, they had him working security at Johnson Controls. According to Recknagel, Zelich was wearing a security uniform that looked a lot like a police uniform when they met.
And Zelich told him that in his heart, he still felt like he was a part of the law enforcement community. On July 3rd, 2014, at a hearing in Walworth County, Recknagel testified that Zelich had told him he killed both women by accident during encounters that were rough and included bondage. A month later, on August 5th, prosecutors in Kenosha County charged Zelich with first-degree intentional homicide and hiding a corpse for Jenny’s death. The district attorney there, Robert Zapf, would say he didn’t believe those were accidents, and so he charged him with the most serious crime he could.
His bond was set at 2 million dollars. The homicide charge carried a mandatory life sentence. His trial was set to start on January 25th, 2016. Not long before that, the judge ruled that the jury should be allowed to hear about Laura.
And on the day jury selection was supposed to begin, Zelich pleaded guilty instead—to first-degree reckless homicide with the use of a dangerous weapon and hiding a corpse. The prosecutors had spent a lot of hours getting ready for that trial, and the plea caught them by surprise. At his sentencing on March 30th, 2016, Zelich told the court, “I’m very sorry this happened and I’m very sorry Jenny was a victim and I wasn’t able to protect her the way I was supposed to. ” Gravely would say that Zelich refused to take responsibility for being the predator that he is.
The judge gave him 35 years in prison with another 10 years of extended supervision after that. He would be about 88 years old before he would be eligible for release. On February 3rd, 2017, Zelich pleaded guilty in Olmsted County, Minnesota to second-degree murder for killing Laura. He had told investigators that her death was an accident, but the count he pleaded guilty to was murder with intent, just without premeditation.
The judge there gave him 25 years, to be served after he finishes his time in Wisconsin. Then on October 13th, 2017, back in Walworth County, he got another 10 years for hiding the bodies. Gravely would say that because all of those sentences were consecutive, Steven Zelich was never going to get out of prison. Less than two months later, the authorities released the video of his interrogation on national TV.
Viewers got to see him sitting in the interview room in his security uniform, telling the detectives what he did. A few years later, Zelich tried to take back his guilty plea in Jenny’s case. He claimed that his lawyer had told him he could still appeal the judge’s ruling about Laura after he pleaded guilty. In 2020, an appeals court ruled that the judge had to give him a full hearing.
But in November of 2021, Zelich gave up on it. Not long after he was sentenced in Walworth County, Laura’s sister had a plaque made with both Laura’s and Jenny’s names engraved on it. She put it up on a tree near the spot on North Como Road where the suitcases were found.
