The First Trip: July 30-31, 2005

 

I was thinking back about how I investigated Tammy Zywicki’s case and started to remember a little more.  I actually took four separate trips in regard to the case:  2005, 2006, 2007, and 2011.  I am trying to remember everything from memory so sometimes I forget important details.  As I relate my investigation into Tammy Zywicki’s case I will try and update any missed information.

After I read the article, “The Long Road Back”, in People Magazine, I realized that while the case happened in Illinois, Grinnell College played a big part in Tammy Zywicki’s life.  She actually had not been at the college since the end of fall semester the previous year.  In spring semester 1992, Tammy had gone to Spain to study abroad so when she made that fateful trip in August 1992 she was returning to school for the first time in almost 9 months.

Being able to understand how people think is a difficult task, especially when they are a complete stranger and you have never met them or any of their friends.  But I thought it was important to try to understand Tammy Zywicki and how she may have made decisions.  From what I read, Spain has a great party nightlife scene, and it is easy to let your guard down.  If you were to expect something bad to happen it would probably be when you are living in a foreign country, not on a U.S. interstate you have traveled numerous times before. 

I cannot conclude what happened to Tammy Zywicki on the afternoon of August 23^rd, 1992.  Did she willingly get into a stranger’s car or was she abducted from the side of the road?  But I think you have to try and look at the whole picture.  I read that in the FBI it is important to know how to read and interpret people.  And I wanted to try to get to know Tammy Zywicki and her life at Grinnell College.  In order to do that I felt it best to go to Grinnell College. 

In late July 2005 I made the trip out there.  I used my own car because it was a straight shot down I-80 to Iowa.  Grinnell itself is a small town that I do not think was too far from the interstate.  When I arrived on campus, my goal was basically to go to the school library and look at as many news articles as I could find about the Tammy Zywicki case from August 1992.  As I was not a student at Grinnell College, I wanted to be careful. 

I remember walking on campus and realizing how wide open and grassy the campus was.  I remember thinking how similar it was to the campus of the school I attended.  It was easy to find the library because the building looked almost the same as the one at my own school.  I went directly to the library and the microfilm room to get as much information from old newspapers as I possibly could.  I seemed to fit right in using the Grinnell library, but I was also much younger then and looked like a college student too.

I wish I could find all the information I had written down about Tammy Zywicki’s case.  I had a case file where I kept a bunch of newspaper articles and ideas about the case, but I had to quickly abandon the house I was living in.  Some of my stuff was left behind as well as other family items.  A fire damaged a lot of paperwork and other things that I had.  The house was deemed uninhabitable and I had to go immediately.  If the fire did not damage all my Zywicki information, the water the fire department sprayed on it probably did.  But if somehow I find it, I will try and post the information. 

 What I do remember is finding one article in a local newspaper in late August, early September 1992, about a woman who had been sexually assaulted on a rural road in Poweshiek County near a town called Montezuma.  Her car had broke down when a man stopped to help.  Instead he assaulted her.  But the description of the man was that he had blond hair.  Even so I felt it might be related to Tammy Zywicki’s case.  Maybe some man was going around looking for stranded motorists who were women?  I thought there might have been more articles about Tammy Zywicki, but I did not find out too much more than I had already known about her.

 I left Grinnell College and made the trip back home again passing by MM83, this time heading eastbound.  I kept reading up on criminal behavior and LTL trucking at the library.  I examined some other cases too.  I had gone to Grinnell College, but for my next trip I wanted to go in a different direction.