A convicted criminal died in a Michigan jail while serving a life sentence for killing a teenager and being involved in at least five other murders.
Arthur Ream died on August 15 at the age of 75. He was in the Jackson, Michigan prison hospital at the time of his death, which was caused by cancer. News of his passing was announced on Thursday September 12 by the state’s Corrections Department.
The case that landed him in jail for the rest of his life was the murder of Cindy Zarzycki. She was 13 years old when she disappeared. April 20, 1986, was the last time the girl was seen. At the time, she was thought to be a runaway teen as she vanished after going to a Dairy Queen in the Detroit suburb of Eastpointe.
The murder case was already deemed cold by 1995, when the lead investigator who solved the mystery—Derek McLaughlin—was given the file. Then labeled a missing person’s case, the newly recruited agent at the Youth Bureau Detective Division accepted the offer of an intern at an interrogation company, Jennifer Leibow.
22 years after the murder took place, the two cracked the case, and Ream was arrested and charged. The since deceased suspect led investigators to where Zarzycki was buried—in Macomb Township—back in 2008. Ream maintained his innocence by claiming that the girl had been with his son the day she died, which he alleged was caused by a fall from an open elevator in a carpet warehouse.
A filmed interrogation from the same year they found her body featured Ream telling police that he was “into teenage girls” and that Zarzycki’s death made him “crazy for 22 years.” Even though he expressed sorrow for not being able to “make up” for his mistake with the young girl, he later changed narratives and said he “didn’t kill” her.
Ream was found guilty of first-degree premeditated murder, which was one in a line of convictions related to inappropriate relationships and involvement with minors. During his life sentence, the killer also bragged to other inmates about murdering up to six other girls.
