Suspected Serial Killer Arthur Ream Dies in Prison

Michigan man 'was not a likable guy'
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Sep 13, 2024 11:30 AM CDT
Suspected Serial Killer Dies in Michigan Prison
Authorities look for the bodies of seven girls who have been missing for decades in a rural wooded area in Macomb Township, Michigan, on May 8, 2018.   (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

A man sentenced to life for killing a 13-year-old girl while being a suspect in the deaths of about a half-dozen others has died in a Michigan prison. Arthur Ream, 75, died Aug. 15 of cancer at a prison hospital in Jackson, Michigan, the state Corrections Department said Thursday. Cindy Zarzycki was last seen on April 20, 1986, and believed to be a runaway after going to a Dairy Queen in Eastpointe, a mostly blue-collar suburb north of Detroit, the AP reports. The case went cold, but Ream eventually was charged. In 2008, he led investigators to Cindy's remains in a wooded area about 30 miles northeast of Detroit.

Still, he denied killing her. Ream told a police detective that Cindy was with his son the day she died and claimed she fell from an open elevator at his carpet warehouse in Warren. In a 2008 videotaped interrogation, Ream told police, "I'm into, was into, teenage girls. OK?"

  • In the video, he said Cindy's death had been driving him "crazy for 22 years." "I can't make up for the wrong I've done," he said. "The next day ... I knew what I did was wrong. But ... you can't take it back. So you just try to hide it."
  • His apparent confession didn't last. "I didn't kill Cindy, and I'm not going to ... say I did," Ream said in the same interrogation. He was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder in her killing.
  • Ream was no stranger to crimes involving juveniles. He was sentenced in 1998 to four to 15 years in prison for criminal sexual conduct involving a person between 13 and 15 years old. He was released from prison in 1980 after serving five years for taking indecent liberties with a child.

  • While serving his life sentence for Zarzycki's murder, Ream would boast to fellow prisoners about killing four to six other people, leading police in 2018 to excavate the same wooded area in a search for up to seven other girls. He later demanded an apology from police.
  • Other possible victims include 12-year-old Kimberly King, who disappeared in 1979; Kim Larrow, who was 15 when she was last seen in 1981; and Kellie Brownlee, who was 17 when she vanished in 1982.
  • Attorney R. Timothy Kohler, who was appointed by a judge to represent Ream, has said his former client was "not a likable guy." "I didn't want to particularly hear his story, other than my sense that he was denying any allegation of intentionally murdering Cindy," Kohler said in 2018.
(More serial killer stories.)

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