commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Former West Allis, Wisconsin police officer (1989 to 2001), Steven Zelich, 52, does not inspire confidence. Or rather, if the charges against him bear any semblance to reality, he should not inspire confidence. The first sign that something was wrong occurred toward the end of his 12 years on the force when accusations arose that he had the bad habit of stalking women while on the job and used his position in law enforcement to get access to their personal information. An internal investigation revealed that he had stalked women while on duty. He was allowed to resign his post while avoiding any kind of discipline, criminal or otherwise. This in turn enabled him to pass state background checks for a private security officer’s license.
He then apparently worked as a licensed private security officer right up until June 25 of this year when he was arrested on the same day detectives wearing hazmat suits removed large, brown bags of evidence and an allegedly smelly refrigerator from his apartment.
No one likes a smelly refrigerator but it is an occupational hazard of storing the dead bodies of hapless strangled women in said cooling device.
M.L. Johnson of the AP writes:
A former Wisconsin police officer killed a 19-year-old college student from Oregon during a choking game that went too far, hid her body in a suitcase she brought to their sex date and then kept her body in his refrigerator for months, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday.
Steven Zelich, 52, of West Allis, was charged with first-degree intentional homicide — the Wisconsin equivalent of murder — in the 2012 death of Jenny Gamez from Cottage Grove, Oregon. Zelich also is a suspect in the death of a Farmington, Minnesota, woman.
One of the dangers of the internet age is the possibility that a lonely citizen will throw caution to the wind and hook up with a stone killer when he or she least expects it. This appears to be what happened to poor Jenny Gamez, who after meeting Zelich online, had the bad judgment to fly to Wisconsin for fun and games that would end up costing her her life. Why Jenny, who was cute, blonde, and liked to dress up wearing angel’s wings, wanted to “get naked” for violent sex with a 52-year-old twisto is beyond me, but as they say, there’s no accounting for taste. Furthermore, Jenny may have been unaware of the fact that Wisconsin is the home of the Original Wisconsin Death Trip and not only produced Darkness Personified, Jeffrey Dahmer, but also generated “Mama” Ed Gein, the inspiration for Hitchcock’s Norman Bates.
According to a criminal complaint, Zelich picked Jenny up at the airport in Milwaukee. They then drove to a hotel in Kenosha, south of Milwaukee where they spent several days together. The blonde child allegedly spent several days with Mr. Security. According to the complaint, Zelich told investigators that the two of them played a sexual game in which he would choke her. It was just a little too exciting for the old man, and according to his story, on the last day of their rendezvous, he “went on tilt” and strangled and killed Gamez.
After killing Jenny, Zelich then displayed the sort of sagacity that we have come to sometimes expect from sex killers. He craftily put her body in her suitcase and transported it back to his apartment in West Allis, a suburb of Milwaukee. Then he popped her corpse into his refrigerator where he says he kept it until he brought the body of alleged victim #2 Laura Simonson, 37, home in November. It’s possible that both bodies wouldn’t fit in the refrigerator, or perhaps he feared the girls would get jealous of each other and start a “dead cat” fight. In any event, Zelich reports that he put both bodies in suitcases and stashed them in the trunk of his car until the weather got too hot and a nasty odor arose.
According to court documents, Zelich also met Simonson online (my 6th grade teacher in Wisconsin, a very devout man, was named Mr. Simonson) and set up a sex date at a Rochester, Minnesota hotel. Zelich reports that he killed her there while playing the same choking game that led to Gamez’s death. Some people never learn.
Kenosha County District Attorney Robert Zapf reports that Simonson’s death proved crucial to breaking the case. Police were able to identify Zelich as a suspect in the Minnesota woman’s disappearance. Surveillance video from the hotel showed the two had checked into hotel together, but only he left. And then, when investigators interviewed Zelich in March, they took a DNA sample that later matched DNA taken from ropes used to bind Gamez. Ah, the tie that binds!
The West Allis police had searched Zelich’s apartment in January but did not find the bodies. D.A. Zapf stated on Tuesday that the bodies were in the trunk of Zelich’s car in March, so we’re not quite sure where they were in January.
As the ladies’ corpses deteriorated, Zelich must have realized that he had to dispense with them. Their bodies were found in June in suitcases left along a rural highway about an hour southwest of Milwaukee. Zelich’s explanation in a nutshell is that he met the women online, killed them accidentally during rough sex, and hid their bodies until they began to smell. Only then did he dump them on the roadside, where they were found by highway workers.
Displaying a pleasing logic, Zapf said he chose to charge Zelich with the most severe crime possible because he didn’t believe the deaths were accidents:
“Killing two women over the span of 15 months under the circumstances in which the defendant acknowledged, by gagging them with a ball gag in the mouth, ropes around the neck, hands tied behind their back, blindfold over their face. He may call that accidental. I call it murder.”
This time around, you won’t hear me arguing with the prosecutor. Zelich’s attorney, Jonathan Smith, however, is not buying it. He insists that to gain a conviction for first-degree intentional homicide, the D.A. would have to prove that his client meant to kill the women, and that might be impossible if they died during consensual sex. Smith also noted that at present, no homicide charges have been filed in Simonson death:
“The fact of the matter is, he’s charged with the death of one individual in Kenosha County, at this point, and that’s the death that we’re going to focus on.”
If convicted of first-degree intentional homicide, Zelich will almost certainly serve life in prison, which hardly seems unreasonable, assuming he is guilty of the charges. The fact that Zelich lost his law enforcement job for allegedly stalking women more than a decade ago suggests that he has been “a bad penny” for a long time now.