Latest / The Mind of a Man / She Entered His Apartment_But Was Never Seen Leaving _ The Kelly Dwyer Case

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She Entered His Apartment_But Was Never Seen Leaving _ The Kelly Dwyer Case · The Mind of a Man

0:15
Speaker 1: A security camera catches a 27-year-old woman walking into an
0:19
Speaker 1: apartment building at 2.37 in the morning. She is laughing.
0:25
Speaker 1: She has no idea that this single grainy frame will
0:29
Speaker 1: become the last confirmed image of her alive. Nineteen months later,
0:36
Speaker 1: a man walking his property looking for deer antlers will
0:39
Speaker 1: see something white catching the sunlight in a patch of
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Speaker 1: buckthorn brush, and he will realize with a jolt that
0:48
Speaker 1: he is looking at a human skull. This is the
0:53
Speaker 1: story of Kelly Dwyer. A young woman who finally found
0:58
Speaker 1: the life she wanted in Milwaukee, and the man who
1:01
Speaker 1: took it from her, then spent the next two years
1:05
Speaker 1: pretending he had no idea where she went. Unreal True
1:46
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1:53
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1:57
Speaker 1: it now on Amazon. Kelly Elizabeth Dwyer was born and
2:06
Speaker 1: raised in Long Grove, an affluent suburb northwest of Chicago,
2:13
Speaker 1: the daughter of Tony and Maureen Dwyer. She had a
2:17
Speaker 1: younger sister and, by most accounts, an ordinary suburban childhood,
2:23
Speaker 1: until 2002 when her parents sat her down and told
2:27
Speaker 1: her they were divorcing. The split was finalized the following year.
2:31
Speaker 1: about 16 months before Kelly graduated high school, and according
2:36
Speaker 1: to her father, it left a mark on her adolescence
2:40
Speaker 1: that never fully faded. Kelly attended Adlai E. Stevenson High
2:46
Speaker 1: School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, where she played tennis, wrote for
2:51
Speaker 1: the school newspaper, and worked on the yearbook committee. She was,
2:56
Speaker 1: by every account, a social and warm-hearted kid, But after graduation,
3:02
Speaker 1: she drifted for a few years, unsure of what she
3:06
Speaker 1: wanted out of adulthood. Sometime around 2007 or 2008, she
3:13
Speaker 1: made the decision that would define the rest of her
3:16
Speaker 1: short life. She moved to Milwaukee. It was in Milwaukee
3:21
Speaker 1: that Kelly seemed to finally find herself. By early 2012,
3:25
Speaker 1: she was working as an educator at the Lululemon store
3:31
Speaker 1: in the city's third ward, a sales- and community-facing role
3:35
Speaker 1: she reportedly loved, and one she was working her way
3:39
Speaker 1: up in. She taught yoga on the side at Core
3:43
Speaker 1: Essence on Brady Street, and she picked up part-time work
3:47
Speaker 1: as a nanny for the children of a well-known Milwaukee
3:51
Speaker 1: chef and restaurateur. She lived near East Brady Street and
3:56
Speaker 1: North Humboldt Avenue. surrounded by a tight circle of co-workers,
4:00
Speaker 1: yoga students, and friends who worked out together, went out together, and,
4:06
Speaker 1: as it would turn out, looked out for one another.
4:09
Speaker 1: Everyone who knew Kelly during this period described her the
4:13
Speaker 1: same way, outgoing, warm, trusting, adventurous, endlessly optimistic. Her yoga
4:21
Speaker 1: instructor remembered that she greeted him with a hug almost
4:25
Speaker 1: every time she walked into class. A close friend, Chanel Royston,
4:30
Speaker 1: remembered her as someone who was quick to see the
4:32
Speaker 1: good in people. In the weeks before her disappearance, Kelly
4:37
Speaker 1: had told people she had a feeling that something big
4:40
Speaker 1: was coming in her life. Nobody who knew her believed
4:44
Speaker 1: she was suicidal, depressed, or dealing with any health issue
4:49
Speaker 1: that could explain a sudden death. That's not to say
4:53
Speaker 1: her life was without risk. Kelly sometimes used cocaine and
4:57
Speaker 1: drank heavily, something her father was generally aware of. She
5:02
Speaker 1: dated more than one man at a time and used
5:05
Speaker 1: online dating apps. And shortly before she disappeared, she'd reportedly
5:11
Speaker 1: been sent home from her job at Lululemon after showing
5:14
Speaker 1: up visibly intoxicated. Friends had occasionally noticed bruising on her
5:20
Speaker 1: wrists or around her neck. When they asked about it,
5:24
Speaker 1: Kelly would laugh it off as the result of a
5:27
Speaker 1: crazy night and change the subject. One of the men
5:31
Speaker 1: in Kelly's life was 38-year-old Chris Zacco, a high-ranking IT
5:37
Speaker 1: executive at a Milwaukee corporate relocation company. On paper, Zacco
5:43
Speaker 1: looked like a catch. He held a degree in international
5:47
Speaker 1: business from Boston University, had once worked on the New
5:51
Speaker 1: York Yankees IT staff at Yankee Stadium, drove a high-performance
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Speaker 1: Audi S4, and lived in an expensive 18th-floor apartment at
6:01
Speaker 1: Park Lafayette Towers. He'd grown up mostly in Connecticut with
6:06
Speaker 1: a Christian upbringing, was athletic, sociable, and, according to nearly
6:12
Speaker 1: everyone in his orbit, genuinely charming. Kelly and Zocco had
6:17
Speaker 1: met about a year before her disappearance, through a mutual acquaintance.
6:23
Speaker 1: Zocco would later describe the relationship as friends with benefits.
6:28
Speaker 1: Kelly's friends believed it was more than that on her end,
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Speaker 1: that she had real feelings for him and may have
6:35
Speaker 1: been falling in love. What Kelly did not know was
6:39
Speaker 1: that Zocco already had a serious girlfriend of three and
6:42
Speaker 1: a half years, a woman named Megan Pollack, who believed
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Speaker 1: their relationship was monogamous and who had recently begun discussing
6:53
Speaker 1: marriage with him. Megan had no idea Kelly existed. She
6:59
Speaker 1: also had no idea about a woman we'll refer to
7:02
Speaker 1: by her court identity, Miss C, a former partner who
7:06
Speaker 1: had engaged in a consensual, dominant, submissive relationship with Zocco
7:12
Speaker 1: that included an agreed-upon physical safety signal. According to her
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Speaker 1: later testimony, Zocco began ignoring that signal She said he
7:22
Speaker 1: restrained her wrists and ankles with neckties, obstructed her breathing
7:27
Speaker 1: during oral sex, pinched her nose while she tried to
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Speaker 1: pull away, and continued even as she panicked and fought
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Speaker 1: for air. About three weeks before Kelly disappeared, on September 22, 2013,
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Speaker 1: Zocco recorded a sexual encounter with her on his phone.
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Speaker 1: The footage and accompanying photographs were showed Kelly restrained at
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Speaker 1: the wrists and ankles with neckties, face down, and in
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Speaker 1: some frames, appearing unconscious or unresponsive. A forensic nurse who
8:03
Speaker 1: later reviewed the material testified that Kelly's gagging and physical
8:07
Speaker 1: state indicated she was struggling to breathe and showed possible
8:12
Speaker 1: signs of asphyxiation. Whatever this encounter was, it demonstrated one
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Speaker 1: important fact prosecutors would use much later, Zocco understood exactly
8:24
Speaker 1: what it looked like when a woman he was with
8:27
Speaker 1: couldn't breathe. Now, we arrive at the night that changed everything.
8:33
Speaker 1: On October 10, 2013, surveillance cameras recorded Kelly entering Zocco's
8:39
Speaker 1: apartment building lobby alone at 9.22 p.m. About 20 minutes later,
8:45
Speaker 1: she and Zocco left together. They came back after 10 p.m.,
8:51
Speaker 1: left again around midnight, and returned once more just after 2.30
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Speaker 1: in the morning, this time from a bar called Allium,
9:01
Speaker 1: where they'd spent part of the evening, along with a
9:05
Speaker 1: stop at Ian's for pizza that they shared with people
9:09
Speaker 1: outside the bar. At 2.37 a.m. on October 11th, the
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Speaker 1: two of them walked back into Zocco's building. It is
9:20
Speaker 1: the last time any camera, anywhere, would ever capture Kelly
9:25
Speaker 1: Dwyer alive. Earlier that evening, Kelly had told her friend,
9:30
Speaker 1: Chanel Royston, that she planned to spend the next day
9:33
Speaker 1: doing yoga, laundry, and relaxing, the ordinary plans of someone
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Speaker 1: with no intention of vanishing. According to Zocco, the two
9:44
Speaker 1: of them drank, He told police they woke up around
9:47
Speaker 1: 9 a.m. and that Kelly announced she was leaving. had sex,
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Speaker 1: and eventually passed out. He told police they woke up
9:55
Speaker 1: around 9 a.m. and that Kelly announced she was leaving.
10:00
Speaker 1: He said he heard the apartment door click sometime after,
10:04
Speaker 1: but his story about her departure time kept shifting. Kelly's
10:08
Speaker 1: boss recalled him saying, seven-ish, then nine-ish, then admitting he
10:14
Speaker 1: wasn't sure at all. and no surveillance footage anywhere in
10:18
Speaker 1: the building ever showed her walking out. What the cameras
10:23
Speaker 1: did show was Zocco. Around 10 a.m. on October 11th,
10:29
Speaker 1: he drove out of the garage alone. He returned 20
10:32
Speaker 1: minutes later and opened his trunk, where a gray object,
10:37
Speaker 1: possibly a large object, was visible above the trunk line.
10:42
Speaker 1: He left again at 10.37, came back at 10.52. and
10:47
Speaker 1: was seen near his car again shortly after noon. At 1.43pm,
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Speaker 1: he reappeared in different, darker clothing. At 3.34, he loaded
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Speaker 1: a rolling baseball equipment bag into the trunk. At 5.06,
11:03
Speaker 1: he carried a smaller golf bag out to the vehicle.
11:07
Speaker 1: Around 6.15 that evening, his car left the garage for
11:11
Speaker 1: the night. That same night, Zocco showed up late to
11:16
Speaker 1: have dinner with Megan Pollock, appearing nervous and unsettled, claiming
11:21
Speaker 1: his phone was malfunctioning and needed a new SIM card.
11:26
Speaker 1: Megan would later testify that he was drenched in sweat
11:29
Speaker 1: that night, enough to soak through the sheets, and that
11:33
Speaker 1: it happened again the following night. He told her he'd
11:37
Speaker 1: dropped off baseball equipment and golf clubs at his mother's
11:40
Speaker 1: house because his apartment was getting crowded. Around this time,
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Speaker 1: 17 calls to Zocco's phone from Kelly's increasingly worried co-workers
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Speaker 1: went straight to voicemail. And Kelly's own digital footprint told
11:57
Speaker 1: its own story. Her mother shared a phone plan with her,
12:01
Speaker 1: and records showed her normal activity simply stopped after October 10th.
12:07
Speaker 1: A text arrived the next morning at 7.29 a.m. She
12:09
Speaker 1: never responded. Her phone synced with Apple's servers one last
12:18
Speaker 1: time at approximately 10.08 a.m. on October 11th. While it
12:23
Speaker 1: was still near Zacco's apartment, at almost the exact moment
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Speaker 1: surveillance recorded him driving out of the garage. After that, nothing.
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Speaker 1: No calls, no social media, no debit card activity, no
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Speaker 1: contact with family, friends, or her job ever again. Kelly
12:44
Speaker 1: was due at Lululemon on Saturday, October 12th. When she
12:49
Speaker 1: didn't show up, her co-workers didn't wait around. They called
12:52
Speaker 1: her repeatedly, checked her social media, went to her apartment,
12:57
Speaker 1: and eventually called Zocco directly. According to Kelly's boss, it
13:02
Speaker 1: took him three or four hours to call back, and
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Speaker 1: when he finally did, he claimed he'd been out Christmas shopping,
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Speaker 1: a bizarre explanation in early October. and suggested Kelly might
13:15
Speaker 1: be off with other men or people connected to drug use.
13:19
Speaker 1: Kelly's mother, a nurse named Maureen, filed a missing person report.
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Speaker 1: Detective Tammy Trammell McClain picked up the case on October 14th.
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Speaker 1: Zocco was initially cooperative, even pleasant in early interviews, but
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Speaker 1: he readily admitted that he and Kelly had used illegal
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Speaker 1: drugs inside his apartments. which gave police the grounds they
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Speaker 1: needed for a search warrant. As the questioning continued, detectives
13:50
Speaker 1: began to notice that Zacco seemed far more interested in
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Speaker 1: steering them toward Kelly's other relationships than in helping find her. Eventually,
14:00
Speaker 1: he invoked his right to an attorney. Around October 16th,
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Speaker 1: investigators searched Zacco's apartment, and what they found was alarming.
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Speaker 1: The place had clearly been cleaned extensively and recently. A
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Speaker 1: bathroom reeked of bleach. The shower curtain was gone entirely
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Speaker 1: with torn scraps still clinging to bent hooks. The bath
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Speaker 1: mats and decorative towels were missing. And a large padded
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Speaker 1: travel golf bag, one Megan Pollack remembered tripping over near
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Speaker 1: the television for weeks, had also disappeared. Zocco's regular cleaning
14:40
Speaker 1: service hadn't been in for two or three weeks, and
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Speaker 1: by all accounts, he wasn't a man known for scrubbing
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Speaker 1: his own bathroom. A trained cadaver dog named Molly was
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Speaker 1: brought in. Handled by Detective Karen Corcoran, Molly alerted at
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Speaker 1: an extraordinary number of locations. A trash chute on Zocco's floor,
15:03
Speaker 1: a shovel in the trash room near a dumpster, An
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Speaker 1: empty parking stall. The seam of his front door, clothing
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Speaker 1: near the washer and dryer. Several spots in the guest bathroom.
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Speaker 1: His own bed, a black t-shirt, a Swiffer mop, and
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Speaker 1: multiple points on and inside his Audi. The exterior, the
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Speaker 1: driver's door, the trunk, a pouch, a garage door opener,
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Speaker 1: and a toolbox. Investigators also seized 109 items from the
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Speaker 1: apartment altogether. including neckties, scarves, handcuffs, cameras, hard drives, women's underwear,
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Speaker 1: a handgun, ammunition, and various drugs. Search warrant records later
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Speaker 1: revealed police also found three unidentified hairs in the Audi's
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Speaker 1: trunk area and an air freshener, though no public record
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Speaker 1: ever confirmed those hairs were matched to Kelly. While digging
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Speaker 1: through Zacco's phone computers, and an external hard drive, forensic
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Speaker 1: examiners uncovered something else entirely, child sexual abuse material. That
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Speaker 1: discovery launched a separate criminal case. In November 2014, a
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Speaker 1: jury convicted Zacco on 16 counts of possessing child pornography,
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Speaker 1: and he later pleaded guilty to drug charges, including maintaining
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Speaker 1: a drug trafficking place. In January 2015, a judge sentenced
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Speaker 1: him to 19 years, explicitly for the pornography and drug
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Speaker 1: convictions alone, since prosecutors had not yet charged him in
16:50
Speaker 1: connection with Kelly, whose case, by that point, had gone cold.
16:57
Speaker 1: Kelly's father, Tony Dwyer, refused to let it stay that way.
17:02
Speaker 1: He went to the media. hired a private investigator named
17:06
Speaker 1: Pablo Velasquez and organized independent searches. On April 29, 2015,
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Speaker 1: he held a press conference publicly stating that he no
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Speaker 1: longer believed his daughter was alive and demanding her body
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Speaker 1: be found. Two days later, on May 1, 2015, a
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Speaker 1: man named Christopher Fountain was walking his property near a
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Speaker 1: secluded dead-end road outside Sullivan, Wisconsin, looking for shed deer antlers,
17:40
Speaker 1: when sunlight caught something white in the underbrush. It was
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Speaker 1: a human skull. Kelly's skeletal remains lay in dense buckthorn
17:50
Speaker 1: about 20 feet off the road, roughly 40 miles west
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Speaker 1: of Milwaukee. Her right arm was trapped beneath her torso.
17:59
Speaker 1: Her left arm was bent unnaturally behind her back. One
18:03
Speaker 1: leg was extended while the other was bent backward, a
18:07
Speaker 1: position investigators believed indicated her body had decomposed after being
18:12
Speaker 1: tightly compressed somewhere. There was no clothing, no shoes, no phone,
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Speaker 1: no bag, nothing. Identification took time. Old Illinois dental records
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Speaker 1: weren't a match for comparison. and Maureen couldn't recall the
18:29
Speaker 1: name of the more recent Milwaukee dentist Kelly had used.
18:34
Speaker 1: Working from fragments of memory, a freeway, a shopping mall,
18:38
Speaker 1: a coffee shop nearby, investigator Pablo Velasquez managed to track
18:44
Speaker 1: down the correct dental office. Forensic dentist Dr. Donald Simley
18:50
Speaker 1: confirmed the identification on May 7, 2015. Soil analysis suggested
18:57
Speaker 1: Kelly's body had been at that location for roughly a
19:01
Speaker 1: year and a half, consistent with having been placed there
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Speaker 1: shortly after she vanished in October 2013. But 19 months
19:11
Speaker 1: in the elements had erased almost everything a medical examiner needed.
19:16
Speaker 1: Jefferson County's nickel tesh could not determine a cause of death,
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Speaker 1: a manner of death, whether Kelly had been strangled, whether
19:25
Speaker 1: she'd asphyxiated during oral sex, whether drugs played a role,
19:31
Speaker 1: or even a precise time of death. Strangulation and suffocation
19:35
Speaker 1: typically leave marks on soft tissue, and after a year
19:40
Speaker 1: and a half outdoors, there was no soft tissue left
19:43
Speaker 1: to examine. It took two more years for prosecutors to act.
19:48
Speaker 1: During that time, investigators re-interviewed witnesses, reconstructed Zacco's movements down
19:55
Speaker 1: to the minute, and dug deeper into his history, including
20:00
Speaker 1: reports from other women describing controlling or dangerous behavior and
20:05
Speaker 1: one woman who had reportedly obtained a restraining order against
20:10
Speaker 1: him back in 2005. On May 8, 2017, prosecutors finally
20:17
Speaker 1: charged Chris Zocco with first-degree reckless homicide, hiding a corpse
20:23
Speaker 1: in strangulation slash suffocation. The state's theory was not that
20:28
Speaker 1: Zocco planned to kill Kelly. It was that a sexual
20:32
Speaker 1: encounter turned dangerously violent, either through manual strangulation or through
20:39
Speaker 1: obstruction of her airway during oral sex, and that when
20:43
Speaker 1: Kelly stopped breathing, Zocco did not call for help. Instead,
20:50
Speaker 1: prosecutors argued, he cleaned his apartment, disposed of the bathroom materials,
20:56
Speaker 1: concealed her body, powered down his phone, and eventually drove
21:00
Speaker 1: her out to rural Jefferson County in his car. quite
21:04
Speaker 1: possibly zipped inside that missing golf travel bag. There was
21:09
Speaker 1: a strange detour in the middle of this. While Zocco
21:13
Speaker 1: sat in jail on unrelated charges, a former cellmate came
21:18
Speaker 1: forward claiming Zocco had confessed and wanted a former partner
21:22
Speaker 1: silenced through violence to prevent her testimony. Prosecutors filed a
21:28
Speaker 1: witness intimidation charge, but serious credibility problems with the informant
21:34
Speaker 1: surfaced before trial and the charge was dropped, Zocco was
21:38
Speaker 1: never convicted of anything related to that allegation, and it
21:42
Speaker 1: played no role in the eventual homicide verdict. The trial
21:47
Speaker 1: began September 24, 2018, in front of Milwaukee County Circuit
21:53
Speaker 1: Judge Jeffrey Wagner, with Assistant District Attorney Sarah Hill leading
21:59
Speaker 1: the prosecution against defense attorneys Craig Mastantuono and Rebecca Coffey.
22:05
Speaker 1: Zocco did not testify in his own defense. Prosecutors built
22:10
Speaker 1: their case entirely out of circumstance, stacked piece by piece.
22:16
Speaker 1: Kelly's last confirmed sighting entering Zocco's building, his shifting story
22:22
Speaker 1: about when she left, her phone dying near his apartment
22:26
Speaker 1: at nearly the same moment he drove out of the garage,
22:30
Speaker 1: his own phone going dark for the critical stretch. the
22:33
Speaker 1: freshly bleached apartment, the missing bathroom items and golf bag,
22:38
Speaker 1: the cadaver dog's alerts throughout his apartment and car, his
22:43
Speaker 1: unexplained lateness and night sweats at Megan's, his request for
22:47
Speaker 1: help finding someone to detail his Audi. And, on Saturday,
22:52
Speaker 1: October 12th, a strange 160-mile round trip toward Madison, a
22:59
Speaker 1: stop for specialty cheese at the Mouse House Cheese House
23:02
Speaker 1: in Windsor, At 9.55 a.m., then more than two hours later,
23:08
Speaker 1: a stop for new shoes and lemonade at a sports
23:12
Speaker 1: authority in Delafield, a store sitting roughly 13 miles from
23:17
Speaker 1: where Kelly's remains would eventually be found. Investigators suspected the
23:22
Speaker 1: cheese purchase was meant to explain his presence in the
23:26
Speaker 1: area and that the new shoes replaced a pair he
23:29
Speaker 1: no longer wanted anyone to see. The defense pushed back
23:34
Speaker 1: hard on every front. No eyewitness, no confession, no murder weapon,
23:40
Speaker 1: no DNA placing Kelly's body in the apartment or the car,
23:45
Speaker 1: no definitive cause of death, no recovered shower curtain or
23:49
Speaker 1: golf bag, no footage of a body being carried anywhere.
23:54
Speaker 1: They called a witness, Fort Hewn Hassan, who believed he'd
23:58
Speaker 1: briefly seen Kelly riding in someone else's car after she
24:02
Speaker 1: was reported missing, a sighting prosecutors argued was sincere but mistaken,
24:08
Speaker 1: made in a matter of seconds at a stoplight. The
24:11
Speaker 1: defense also argued the September 22nd recording showed consensual adult activity,
24:18
Speaker 1: not a crime, and questioned whether a dog alerting at
24:22
Speaker 1: a door proved anything definitive at all. After roughly three
24:27
Speaker 1: and a half hours of deliberation, The jury returned its
24:31
Speaker 1: verdict on October 5, 2018, guilty on all three counts.
24:38
Speaker 1: In December 2018, Judge Wagner sentenced Zocco to 31 years
24:43
Speaker 1: of initial confinement and 19 years of extended supervision, 26
24:49
Speaker 1: years and 14 years for the homicide, 5 and 5
24:53
Speaker 1: for hiding the corpse, stacked on top of his existing
24:57
Speaker 1: 19-year sentence for the pornography and drug convictions. When the
25:02
Speaker 1: judge described the jury's findings, Zacco shook his head and
25:07
Speaker 1: said they were wrong. He has never accepted responsibility. Technical
25:16
Speaker 1: Analysis of the Case Now, let's step back and look
25:22
Speaker 1: at how this case actually worked because as a piece
25:25
Speaker 1: of criminal investigation, it's genuinely unusual. Prosecutors want a homicide
25:32
Speaker 1: conviction with no scientifically determined cause of death, no eyewitness,
25:37
Speaker 1: no confession, and no DNA physically placing Kelly's body inside
25:44
Speaker 1: Zocco's apartment or car. What they had instead was an
25:49
Speaker 1: enormous web of interlocking circumstantial evidence. timeline gaps, a scrubbed
25:56
Speaker 1: crime scene, missing objects that matched a body's dimensions, and
26:01
Speaker 1: behavior that made sense only if something had gone catastrophically
26:05
Speaker 1: wrong that morning. The cadaver dog, Molly, became a critical
26:10
Speaker 1: piece of that puzzle. Over roughly eight years of work,
26:14
Speaker 1: she'd correctly located human remains 204 times out of 224
26:18
Speaker 1: with only one false alert, That reliability record was enough
26:26
Speaker 1: for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals to uphold her alerts
26:30
Speaker 1: as admissible corroborating evidence in 2023, not proof on its own,
26:36
Speaker 1: but one more thread in a very tightly woven net.
26:42
Speaker 1: And notably, this case is still not fully closed. In
26:46
Speaker 1: October 2025, Zocco filed a federal habeas corpus petition. raising
26:53
Speaker 1: new claims about his appellate counsel, currently stayed while he
26:57
Speaker 1: exhausts those claims in state court. Psychological Analysis Psychologically, this
27:08
Speaker 1: case sits at an uncomfortable intersection. Investigators and former partners
27:15
Speaker 1: described a man capable of real charm, someone his mother,
27:19
Speaker 1: his stepfather, and a former girlfriend all insisted was fundamentally kind,
27:25
Speaker 1: operating alongside a documented pattern of escalating disregard for consent
27:31
Speaker 1: and safety, including a prior partner who said he ignored
27:35
Speaker 1: an agreed-upon stop signal during intimacy and a restraining order
27:40
Speaker 1: from years earlier. Detective Catherine Spano offered her own read
27:46
Speaker 1: that Zocco derived satisfaction from pushing women, to the edge
27:51
Speaker 1: of their ability to breathe. That's an investigator's opinion, not
27:55
Speaker 1: a clinical diagnosis. But the pattern it describes, charm, layered
28:01
Speaker 1: over a willingness to override another person's clear distress, is
28:07
Speaker 1: one investigators see again and again in cases where intimacy
28:11
Speaker 1: turns fatal. What makes it especially chilling here is the
28:15
Speaker 1: September 22nd video, Proof that three weeks before Kelly died,
28:22
Speaker 1: Zocco had already watched a woman struggle to breathe in
28:25
Speaker 1: front of him, and did it again anyway. The Family,
28:32
Speaker 1: Life After And then there's the human cost that outlasted
28:38
Speaker 1: the trial entirely. For 19 months, Kelly's parents lived without
28:44
Speaker 1: any answer at all. not knowing whether their daughter was
28:47
Speaker 1: alive somewhere, hiding, hurt, or already gone. At sentencing, Maureen
28:54
Speaker 1: described the particular torture of a mind that never stops
28:59
Speaker 1: inventing possibilities. Tony called his family broken. He told reporters, plainly,
29:06
Speaker 1: that he no longer believed his daughter was alive months
29:10
Speaker 1: before anyone found her. a father forcing himself to say
29:15
Speaker 1: the thing no parent wants to say, because he thought
29:19
Speaker 1: it might finally move investigators to keep looking. Maureen, for
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Speaker 1: her part, reportedly withdrew from much of her life afterward,
29:29
Speaker 1: struggling with depression and finding parts of the legal process
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Speaker 1: too painful to sit through. After Kelly's remains were finally identified,
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Speaker 1: the family channeled their grief into something lasting. The Kelly
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Speaker 1: Dwyer Memorial Peace Project, created with Milwaukee's Sojourner Family Peace Center,
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Speaker 1: an organization supporting survivors of domestic violence. Tony said his
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Speaker 1: daughter loved helping people and loved this city. and that
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Speaker 1: he wanted her remembered for that, not just for how
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Speaker 1: she died. If this case pulled you in, make sure
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Speaker 1: you're subscribed, because we cover cases like this every single week,
30:13
Speaker 1: and if you have thoughts on what really happened inside
30:16
Speaker 1: that apartment, drop them in the comments below.