arabia. demonstrators damaged the saudi embassy in tehran and the iranian foreign ministry summoned the saudi envoy to signal their anger with the executions. and a saddened to a search in eastern pennsylvania, the body of a 5-year-old boy with autism found in a canal. jayliel vega batista dis appeared from a party barefoot and without a coat. now back to our msnbc special. he had to keep on coming. there were years of frustrations, but detective derek mclaughlin had finally taken down cindy zarzycki s killer. how did you take the verdict? i was real happy. was it a high five moment? more than high five. mac and i gave each other a big hug after that. but to jen and mac, this odd couple interrogation team, the conviction was only half the battle.
mac, the father of three daughters and a son, asked the couple to understand his situation. i said, listen, i said, i m going to do everything i can, but i m kind of limited to what i can do, because of my workload now. linda was great. she even said i ll do anything. i ve got secretarial skills, i can help you file, type up things, do this and do that, just so i could spend more time dealing with her family s case. linda zarzycki, the stepmother, would go to the eastpointe police station on her lunch hour to pore through the case files. she d suggest theorys to mac. and he d say, yep, he thought of that too but kept running into brick walls. he couldn t seem to make progress. but in 2004, the brick wall was about to start crumbling because a new player, a completely unlikely partner for the veteran detective, had talked herself on to the case. she wasn t even a cop, she was a 23-year-old college intern with a law enforcement consulting
dairy queen and lived, cindy zarzycki would have been 35 years old. but she didn t. and now art ream, the father of her long-ago teenage boyfriend was about to stand trial for her murder. even if he wouldn t admit it to his persistent interrogators. cindy s sister connie was prepared to testify. it was very stressful on our family. i mean, we ve already wondered what happened for 22 years and we have to relive it on the stand. we know he did it. we just need the jury to know he did it too. remarkably, cindy s dad was still holding out for a miracle. i was still hoping. still hoping that she s alive? yes. this family and this case is exactly why we started this cold case unit. the police on the case had gotten some extra investigative oomph from the county prosecutor s office. chief prosecutor eric smith has made it a signature of his term in office to go after the hard-to-solve cases like cindy s. from the first meeting you have with the victim s family and you tell the
art, that s the problem here. that s the whole problem of this whole investigation. the initial strategy was to deal with him as though it were a gift, that everyone in that interview room knew ream had something to do with cindy s disappearance and now was the time to explain it all. if you could put closure to this thing right now today. and help a family out. you think about it right now, you need some paper, i ll get you some paper you can write it down. i m not going to write it down. why not? my spelling s not that good. in that first interview, ream controlled the game, just as the psychological detectives had feared. mac suggested he could do himself some good by giving up the location of cindy s body. i can t make any promises, but the prosecutors, do the judges listen to me? of course they do. then the accusations took a harder edge. you ve got information that will tell me where this girl is, and you re not saying nothing. and i just think that s bull [ ble
after all, he d promised the family he d bring cindy home. well, from the time i got this case, i had a daughter that was 13. the same aged daughter that cindy was when she disappeared. now it was up to prosecutor smith. it was a lot of heated discussions about this. and you ve got this delicate situation of trying to broker the people s interests versus the family s passionate desire. and you can t say no. they ve lived this for more than 20 years. so with myself and the father and the family came to sort of a middle ground, and i agreed to reduce it from first-degree murder to second-degree murder. smith was also willing to downsize the sentence from mandatory life to 22 years. so would it be deal or no deal? it fell apart because he wanted a better deal. we couldn t get the number. it fell apart because we couldn t get the number. no deal. ream had insisted only a ten-year prison sentence. the d.a. wasn t going there. and when he said no, it was taken off the tab