LA SALLE, Ill. (AP) — Authorities sought the public’s help Tuesday in solving the slaying of an Iowa college student who was abducted 25 years ago in Illinois and found dead in Missouri.
Illinois State Police and the FBI issued the appeal a day before the 25th anniversary of 21-year-old Tammy Zywicki’s disappearance, with an FBI reward of up to $50,000 offered for information leading to any suspects.
Authorities say Zywicki was driving from her New Jersey home to Iowa’s Grinnell College for her senior year when she was last seen alive on Aug. 23, 1992, near her disabled 1985 Pontiac T1000 along Interstate 80 near LaSalle in central Illinois. Her stabbed body was found more than a week later wrapped in a blanket wrapped with duct tape in southwestern Missouri east of Joplin.
A passer-by reported catching the last glimpses of Zywicki near her disabled car. Some witnesses said a tractor-trailer was seen parked behind her vehicle; others say they saw a pickup truck.
After her body was found, Illinois State Police joined forces with the FBI and other agencies in a task force, but it disbanded the next year. On Tuesday, Illinois and federal investigators called the investigation still active.
Over the past two decades, efforts to crack the case have sputtered. Investigators looked at truckers suspected in killings and sexual attacks elsewhere, from North Carolina to California, but eventually eliminated them from suspicion in Zywicki’s death.
