Two suitcases dumped along a rural Wisconsin road held the bound bodies of women who never made it home. The case pulled investigators from Minnesota to Oregon and ended with lengthy prison terms for a former police officer who confessed to killing both.
ABC News reported that the suitcases were found in June 2014 in the Town of Geneva area of Walworth County. One held a woman’s decomposing body, naked, bound with rope, and curled in a fetal position. The second held a black plastic bag with a woman’s hand protruding, pink fingernails visible, the body bound and appearing mummified.
What began as a roadside discovery became a multistate hunt for answers, identities, and a killer. Families already searching for missing loved ones soon learned the worst. Courts later locked in guilty pleas and long sentences for Steven Zelich, a former West Allis officer from the Milwaukee area.
Former Town of Geneva patrol officer Eric Anderson opened one of the suitcases. He later described a moment that still cuts through official language.
"Nothing can prepare you for what you can see upon opening a suitcase and finding a corpse inside of it."
Retired Walworth County Sheriff’s Office detective Jeff Recknagel arrived and opened the second suitcase. He found the plastic bag and the protruding hand. Recknagel said investigators faced a massive task: identify the victims, determine how they died, and find who was responsible.
The FBI and Wisconsin State Police joined the effort. Wisconsin investigators, already aware of a Minnesota missing-person case, matched one victim through an ankle tattoo. The heart design carried the name of a teenage daughter. DNA recovered from rope around the second victim matched Zelich.
Laura Simonson was 37 and lived in Farmington, Minnesota. Earlier in 2013, her 13-year-old daughter Alyssa died. Friends said Simonson struggled with mental health afterward. She still had six other children.
In November 2013, Simonson left her van in her mother’s driveway. Inside were her cell phone, purse, medication, and a note. She was reported missing. Farmington Police Department detective sergeant Lee Hollatz helped drive the search and issued a statewide crime alert.
Childhood friend Kristin Scouton rejected any idea that Simonson walked away from her family on her own.
"Her kids were her life. She would've never just voluntarily left her children."
Hotel records and video soon mattered. Several weeks before the desk agent’s recognition of the missing-person alert, Simonson had stayed at a hotel about an hour from the Farmington area with a man. The registration card carried her signature. Checkout surveillance showed the man leaving alone.
Front desk agent Kristi Bodunov said the man left a lasting impression of unease.
"There's certain people you meet where the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. He was one of those."
A friend learned Simonson had been active on an online BDSM dating site and had been communicating with a user named “Mrhandcuffs.” That account traced to Steven Zelich. Hollatz learned Zelich was a former Milwaukee-area officer and asked West Allis police to check his home. Officers found no sign of Simonson there.
In March 2014, the FBI and Wisconsin State Police interviewed Zelich. He voluntarily gave a DNA sample and denied ever meeting Simonson. At that stage, authorities said they lacked evidence of a crime that would let them move against him. The case stalled.
Hollatz later recalled the jolt when the Wisconsin suitcase case connected back to the Minnesota investigation.
"I go, 'You will not believe this,'" Hollatz said. "I'm going, 'Now what am I getting myself into?'"
Zelich had resigned from the West Allis Police Department in 2001 after multiple allegations that he abused his authority to intimidate and harass women. He denied wrongdoing. The badge was already gone. The suitcase case would put him back under a harsher kind of scrutiny.
After the June 2014 discovery and the DNA match from the rope, investigators brought Zelich in. He was arrested and confessed to killing both women. He identified the second victim as Jenny Gamez, a 19-year-old from Cottage Grove, Oregon. He said he had met both women on the same dating site.
Zelich claimed the deaths were accidental strangulations during “breath play.” He said he killed Gamez first and stored her body in a refrigerator for more than a year. He said he later killed Simonson in Rochester, Minnesota, in a similar way. He placed the bodies in a car trunk, then into suitcases. When a co-worker commented on a strong odor near his car as the weather warmed, he said he panicked and dumped the suitcases.
Those claims belong to Zelich. Autopsy findings beyond his account and the later plea labels were not laid out in the reporting package. What the justice system did record were charges, guilty pleas, and prison time.
Prosecutors charged Zelich with multiple counts of murder and hiding a corpse. He first pled not guilty to all counts. In 2016, he pled guilty to first-degree reckless homicide in Gamez’s death and to one count of hiding a corpse. A court sentenced him to 35 years in prison plus 10 years of extended supervision.
The following year, he pled guilty to second-degree murder in Simonson’s death and received 25 years. He also took an additional 10 years on two hiding-a-corpse counts in Walworth County, Wisconsin. The pleas closed the core criminal case without a full trial fight over his accident narrative.
First-degree reckless homicide, in plain terms, covers a death caused by criminally reckless conduct that shows utter disregard for human life. Second-degree murder covers an intentional killing without the extra elements required for a higher murder tier under the charging choices reflected in the pleas. Hiding a corpse targets efforts to conceal a death and obstruct the truth.
Amanda Duron, Gamez’s foster sister, described a loss that does not close cleanly.
"Anytime you lose somebody that's so close to you, like your sister, your life's never going to be the same. There's always going to be that puzzle where there's always that one missing piece."
Niki Carlson, Simonson’s sister, said the absence stays daily and constant.
"Not a day goes by that I don't think about her. I love her, and I miss her every day."
Carlson also said she believes loved ones still watch over the family. Simonson’s ankle tattoo, bearing Alyssa’s name, helped give investigators the break that turned two unknown bodies into named victims with homes, children, and people still waiting for them.
Public reporting identifies the victims, the disposal site in Walworth County, the Minnesota missing-person track, the Oregon tie through Gamez, the DNA match, the confession, the pleas, and the sentences. It also records Zelich’s former police employment and the 2001 resignation after harassment and intimidation allegations he denied.
Authorities have not, in the material provided, released a full public autopsy cause-of-death file separate from Zelich’s “breath play” story. Investigators have not published every calendar date for each killing beyond the relative sequence he described and the Rochester claim for Simonson. Full docket numbers and complete charging instruments were not included in the source package.
ABC’s “20/20” framed the case in an episode titled “The Suitcase Murders,” airing Friday, Oct. 16 at 9 p.m. ET, with streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu. Correspondent John Quiñones walked evidence with Recknagel for that broadcast. The television package sits on top of a completed prosecution, not an open manhunt.
The institutional thread runs from a small-town roadside response to county detectives, a Minnesota missing-person unit, state police, the FBI, and finally to courtrooms that entered guilty pleas. A man who once carried a badge ended as a convicted killer who hid corpses until the smell forced a dump on a rural road.
When someone trusted with police power later kills and conceals the dead, the public is right to demand hard time, clean facts, and no soft focus on excuses dressed up as accidents.
