Episode 71:
Two Women in Suitcases: The Cop with a Twisted Secret

After losing her parents at five, Jenny was raised in foster homes. As an adult, she struggled with depression — until a certain website drew her toward sadistic sexual acts. Then she vanished without a trace.

Another woman, 37-year-old Laura, couldn't overcome the grief of losing her child. She too found her way to that same website, and into BDSM.

On June 5, 2014, landscaping workers cutting overgrown grass along a rural Wisconsin waterway spotted something in the distance — two heavy black suitcases, swarmed with flies, leaking dark fluid. They called police rather than open them.

Two Suitcases

Inside were two women's bodies, heads wrapped in plastic bags with rope tied around their necks, hands bound behind their backs. Both had adult restraint gags in their mouths. Cause of death: strangulation by rope, roughly six months prior. No fingerprints, no physical description possible — but a lab found unidentified male DNA on the rope, which came back with no match in the criminal database.

With decomposition too severe for standard identification, investigators built a profile from dental work and got a match: 37-year-old Laura Simonson, reported missing seven months earlier. She'd been an ordinary mother of seven until a summer lake trip two and a half years prior, when her fourth daughter drowned unnoticed in deep water. Consumed by guilt, Laura withdrew entirely, lost custody of her remaining children in the divorce that followed, and eventually vanished after a final text: "I am no help to my children. It would be better for me to be away." Because she'd left as a competent adult, police treated it as low priority — until she turned up dead.

The Hotel Footage

The second victim stayed unidentified — a distinctive underbite, double ear piercings, a small heart tattoo, but no match anywhere in missing persons records, raising the unsettling possibility that no one had ever reported her missing at all. Police released a composite sketch and kept digging into Laura's case, eventually getting a tip: she'd been seen entering a hotel with a man the day she disappeared.

Seven months on, most hotel footage had been overwritten, but specialists recovered deleted files from the hard drive — showing an anxious Laura checking in, then a man entering her room and leaving hours later carrying a heavy bag identical to the one her body was later found in. Zoomed and enhanced, his face turned out to be someone investigators recognized instantly.

A Familiar Face

Before police made this connection, Laura's best friend — with prior experience as an online investigator — had already traced her digital footprint to a site called CollarMe, a community built around BDSM and dominance-submission dynamics. Laura had been in extended contact there with a user calling himself "Mr. Handcuffs," whose profile sought a "24/7 slave to own absolutely." Cross-referencing the ID across platforms, she identified him: 55-year-old Steven Zelich, a former police officer.

When she brought his name to police, they brushed it off — a fellow officer, surely not. Questioned anyway, Zelich freely admitted chatting with Laura on CollarMe but denied ever meeting her in person, consented to a search and a DNA sample, and was cleared for lack of evidence. Then the recovered hotel footage placed his face at the scene, exposing the lie — and around the same time, the composite sketch led adoptive parents to identify the second victim: 19-year-old college student Jenny Gamez, also a CollarMe user, whose last conversation on the site had been with Zelich. His DNA, already on file from the earlier interview, matched the rope perfectly.

A Career of Warning Signs

Zelich was arrested for murder and concealing a corpse, and the truth about him began to surface. A promising officer early in his career, he unraveled at his second posting — racing patrol cars for thrills and causing an accident he tried to hide, botching a domestic violence call so badly the victim later died by suicide, and illegally pulling women's personal information from police databases to stalk them, in one case tracking a victim through ten relocations before she fled the state entirely. When a woman he'd choked and tried to handcuff at his home escaped and reported him, he told responding officers she was a prostitute who'd broken in to rob him — and, being a fellow officer, was believed.

As internal suspicion finally grew, Zelich resigned before any formal discipline could be recorded, erasing the pattern from his official file. An inheritance from his father let him leave police work for real estate — until his investments failed and he was broke within five years, pushed into security work and, with no career left to meet women through, into online communities built around control. On CollarMe, he found and quickly lost 25-year-old Jamie Bates, who fled his basement dungeon the moment he let his guard down after boasting about supposedly keeping a woman caged for seven years. He simply moved on to his next target.

Final Thoughts

That target was Jenny — bounced through foster care since age five, a teenage mother who'd given up custody of her own child at seventeen and sunk into isolation and depression. After six months of conversation, the two met at a hotel in August 2012; mid-encounter, Zelich tightened a rope around her neck until she stopped breathing, then stored her body in his freezer for two years, unreported because she'd already cut every tie she had. A year and a half later, he found Laura in the same emotional state and used the identical script — encouraging her to sell her home, delete her accounts, and disappear before he killed her too, this time keeping the body in his car trunk for seven months until the smell became unbearable and he dumped both bags in the bushes, assuming decomposition would make them unidentifiable.

Tried separately under different jurisdictions, Zelich claimed manslaughter both times — accidents during consensual BDSM. Courts in both trials rejected it, pointing to the near-identical methods and his choice to keep each victim's body for months rather than dispose of it immediately, evidence the court read as trophy-taking rather than panic. Convicted of murder in both cases, he received 35 years and 25 years, upheld on appeal at a combined 60 — effectively life for a man already past fifty. Both victims were mothers who'd lost their footing after losing a child, searching for someone to lean on. Zelich found them exactly there, and made sure that even in death, he kept them.