# 3 Disappearances So Disturbing… They Still Don’t Make Sense | 216

An episode of [Lazy Chill True Crime](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1815534472), 28 Apr 2026, 34 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO6431678236.mp3

Don't forget to hit follow button, rate the podcast and turn on the notification bell :) Also leave a comment saying whether you're watching or listening, or where you're watching from. Episode 216 of the true crime podcast btw. 👇 Youtube links: Lazy Chill History Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillHistory Lazy Chill Zone Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LazyChillZone 👇 Support My Work: 🛍️ Merch: https://lazy-chill-zone-shop.fourthwall.com ❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lazychillzone 👇Social Media Links: https://www.instagram.com/lazychillzone/ (lots of pics of my dog. dog pic central.) 👇 Podcast links: ⚡History Video Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/7km5pLWpYWEj1mrPpEfRUr?si=0FHYnZf-Qs2FY1GyLevfig ⚡True Crime Podcast on Spotify⚡: https://open.spotify.com/show/0klIz08pAr7wR4we0Ia4sk?si=68qZxCeAQkysXzMZrHE0Iw 🍏 True Crime Podcast on Apple 🍎: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lazy-chill-true-crime/id1815534472 mysterious disappearance, missing person, unsolved mystery, true crime, cold case, vanished without a trace, unexplained disappearance, missing persons case, real mystery, disappearance story, unsolved case, chilling mystery, disturbing disappearance, missing woman, missing man, last seen alive, strange disappearance, creepy true crime, baffling case, missing person investigation, real life mystery, unsolved disappearance, eerie mystery, mysterious case, true crime podcast, unsolved mystery

## Transcript

[0:00] A young woman in a small Missouri town picked up a pay
[0:02] phone late on a Thursday night to call her fiance.
[0:06] They've been talking for a few minutes when she mentioned a
[0:08] strange truck circling the parking lot and the driver got
[0:11] out and walked toward her with a flashlight.
[0:14] Just then she screamed into the receiver and her fiance jumped
[0:18] into his car and raced toward her location.
[0:22] He'd get close enough to see the trucks tail lights before
[0:25] everything went completely wrong.
[0:27] That was in 1991, and nobody has seen Angela Hammond since.
[0:33] Clinton, MO, sits about 70 miles southeast of Kansas City in
[0:37] Henry County. In 1991, the population hovered
[0:42] around 8 or 9000, and it was still small enough that people
[0:46] knew each other and knew each other's vehicles.
[0:50] The town had one main square, a handful of stores, and a slow
[0:55] rhythm that didn't lend itself to high profile criminal cases.
[1:00] Angela Hammond had grown up nearby.
[1:03] She'd recently graduated from Montrose High School, a tiny
[1:07] rural school just outside Clinton, and was 20 years old.
[1:11] In the spring of 1991 she was engaged to a man named Rob
[1:16] Schaefer and the couple was four months pregnant and by all
[1:20] accounts excited about their new family.
[1:24] The evening of Thursday, April 4th, 1991 had been an ordinary
[1:29] one. Angela had spent part of the day
[1:32] with Rob and dropped him off at his parents house earlier so he
[1:36] could watch his younger brother. Around 11:15 that night she
[1:41] stopped at a pay phone at the corner of 2nd and Jefferson
[1:44] streets near a local food barn store.
[1:47] She wanted to call Rob and let him know she was heading home
[1:50] for the night. This was 1991, so a late night
[1:55] stop at a payphone for a quick check in was something young
[1:59] couples did all the time without thinking twice about it.
[2:03] Rob picked up and they talked easily for a while before Angela
[2:07] mentioned the truck, but when she did she said that it was an
[2:11] older green pickup that had been doing slow loops through the
[2:14] lot. She described the driver as a
[2:17] white male in coveralls and a dark baseball cap, with glasses,
[2:22] a beard and a mustache. According to Rob's account, she
[2:26] wasn't panicked at first, but she sounded uncomfortable with
[2:29] what exactly he was doing. The man eventually got out of
[2:33] his vehicle and started walking toward her with a flashlight,
[2:37] and it first appeared as if he were searching for something.
[2:39] He dropped, but then he kept coming.
[2:43] What happened next, by Rob's own account, given to investigators
[2:48] and later to interviewers over the years, was the kind of thing
[2:51] a person doesn't move past. The line picked up the sounds of
[2:56] a struggle, Angela screamed, and then the receiver came loose,
[3:01] and then everything just faded to nothing in an instant.
[3:05] Rob got in his car and pushed it as fast as it would go across
[3:08] town. As he closed in on the lot, an
[3:12] older green pickup blew past him going the other direction.
[3:15] He recognized it instantly from Angela's description, and he
[3:19] whipped his car around and chased the truck down a back Rd.
[3:22] He was getting close enough to be reasonably certain what he
[3:25] was looking at, including what he believed was a second figure
[3:29] inside. Then his transmission gave out
[3:33] and he coasted to a stop as the pickup pulled away.
[3:36] He was alone on a country Rd. watching the man who'd just
[3:40] taken his fiance disappear into the dark.
[3:44] Police arrived at the payphone within minutes of Rob's call for
[3:47] help and Angela's car was still in the lot.
[3:51] Her belongings were inside, the receiver was hanging off the
[3:55] hook, and as expected, there was no sign of her.
[3:59] Within hours, a full scale search was under way, The
[4:04] Clinton Police Department, the Henry County Sheriff's Office
[4:07] and the Missouri State Highway Patrol moved in.
[4:11] Helicopters and dogs were brought in to sweep the
[4:13] surrounding fields and back roads.
[4:16] Reporters from Kansas City and beyond picked up the story
[4:19] within days, raising significant awareness about this disturbing
[4:23] crime. The truck became the centerpiece
[4:26] of the case. Witnesses around Clinton
[4:29] confirmed they'd seen a green pickup circling for hours that
[4:32] evening, and reportedly earlier in the day as well.
[4:37] The vehicle eventually got a more specific description, an
[4:41] older Ford pickup likely from the 1970s and painted green.
[4:46] Witnesses also said there was a picture of a fish painted on the
[4:50] back window. And keep this in mind because I
[4:54] think this detail is more significant than it's been made
[4:57] out to be. The Missouri State Highway
[5:01] Patrol reportedly examined hundreds of trucks across the
[5:04] state that fit the description, and none of them produced a
[5:07] match. The driver's description was
[5:10] also largely consistent, with most describing a white man in
[5:14] coveralls, a dark baseball cap, glasses, and facial hair.
[5:20] Most of the witnesses also emphasized that the man looked
[5:23] incredibly dirty, as if he had been doing hard physical labor
[5:27] all day and had skipped out on the requisite shower.
[5:31] However, some accounts suggest the man was clean shaven, and
[5:35] the only forensic sketch I've been able to find for the case
[5:39] shows him without a beard. Notably, despite this being a
[5:43] small town where everyone seems to know everyone, no one
[5:47] recognized this mysterious man. Rob, for his part, was initially
[5:52] treated with significant suspicion by the police, given
[5:55] the almost cinematic telling of what happened to Angela.
[5:59] He was given a polygraph within days, which he passed, and
[6:03] investigators cleared him within roughly a week.
[6:06] By fall, when Angela's baby would have been born, the
[6:10] investigation was effectively cold.
[6:15] For more than three decades, the case has been picked through
[6:17] repeatedly, and several theories have surfaced over the years.
[6:22] The most striking new development came in 2021, on the
[6:26] 30th anniversary of Angela's disappearance.
[6:29] A confidential informant, someone who'd helped law
[6:32] enforcement years earlier with a narcotics operation, received an
[6:37] anonymous letter. The letter was a cut and paste
[6:40] affair, the kind put together from clipped pieces of New
[6:44] Sprint, the kind of things that serial predators send to the
[6:48] cops. What made it remarkable was the
[6:51] contents it correctly listed the informants court issued
[6:55] cooperation number, named his estranged wife, and had been
[6:59] postmarked April 4th, 1991, the same day Angela was taken, then
[7:05] mailed decades later. Investigators have publicly said
[7:09] the letter has reshaped how they're thinking about the case.
[7:13] The informant, it turned out, had a daughter named Angela, who
[7:18] was living in Clinton at the time.
[7:21] To make matters more bizarre, she and Angela Hammond
[7:24] reportedly looked somewhat alike, though of course, given
[7:28] the circumstances, that fact can't be independently
[7:30] confirmed. The working theory law
[7:34] enforcement has floated is that Angela Hammond's abduction may
[7:38] have been a case of mistaken identity.
[7:41] Someone tied to a criminal organization may have been sent
[7:44] to Clinton to take the informant's daughter as
[7:46] retaliation and grabbed the wrong young woman with the same
[7:50] first name instead. It's a theory, not a conclusion,
[7:55] and there's no public evidence pointing to the people who
[7:58] allegedly sent the letter. There's no confirmed suspect for
[8:02] the abduction itself, and the pickup truck has never been
[8:06] found. The driver, whether he was
[8:09] operating on his own or for someone else, has never been
[8:12] publicly identified. Now here's where I have to come
[8:16] back to the jumping fish decal on the back of the pickup truck
[8:20] that Angela was taken in. I find it somewhat unlikely that
[8:24] someone engaging in an abduction, witness tampering,
[8:28] and even worse, would have been in such a truck.
[8:32] If the theory is accurate, it suggests that the individual who
[8:36] pulled off the abduction was retained specifically for this
[8:39] purpose. It seems somewhat unlikely to me
[8:43] that such a person would be driving around a small town all
[8:46] day while driving an extremely distinctive vehicle with a fish
[8:50] on the back. It's not impossible, of course,
[8:53] but just somewhat less likely than if the vehicle had been
[8:56] completely nondescript. That said, maybe I'm giving far
[9:00] too much credit to what may have been a 2 bit small town criminal
[9:04] enterprise. Other theories have come and
[9:08] gone over the decades. Some have argued the abduction
[9:11] was opportunistic, with the driver simply hunting that night
[9:15] and Angela being in the wrong place.
[9:18] Others have wondered whether someone had been watching her
[9:20] earlier in the day, since witnesses placed a similar truck
[9:25] in town hours before the phone call.
[9:28] If that was the case, she may have been spotted at some point
[9:31] earlier in the day and then stalked, which would explain the
[9:35] sightings of the vehicle. However, if the suspect was
[9:39] looking for the confidential informant's daughter, this
[9:42] theory may still hold. In this scenario as well, the
[9:46] Clinton Police Department has kept the case open, and state
[9:49] and federal investigators have looked at it more than once.
[9:53] The 2021 letter has prompted a fresh round of attention, and
[9:58] law enforcement has reportedly been working through what came
[10:01] in the letter ever since. Whether that effort eventually
[10:04] produces a name remains, like the case itself, an open
[10:09] question. When Shelly Filipoff landed in
[10:15] Victoria on the morning of November 29th, 2012, the
[10:20] daughter she'd flown across the country to collect was already
[10:23] gone. The night before, in front of
[10:26] the Fairmont Empress H2, Victoria Police officers had
[10:30] spent 45 minutes speaking with a barefoot, visibly distressed 26
[10:35] year old. They judged her not detainable
[10:38] under British Columbia's mental health law, said good night, and
[10:42] walked away. Within minutes of that
[10:45] conversation ending, Emma Filipov stepped off the curb and
[10:48] has never been seen again. Emma Filipov was born in 1986
[10:53] and grew up in Perth, a small community in eastern Ontario in
[10:57] Canada. She had a sister, 2 parents
[11:01] who'd later speak openly about how much they loved her, and a
[11:05] circle of close friends. After she finished high school,
[11:09] Emma didn't take the well trodden path of immediate
[11:12] university applications and four year degrees.
[11:16] She wanted to see things first and she worked, saved her wages
[11:20] and started moving. Emma first moved across Canada
[11:25] and then briefly down into the United States.
[11:28] By her early 20s, she'd ended up on Vancouver Island, pulled in
[11:33] by the rainforests, the Pacific Coast and the loose, drifting
[11:37] culture that follows people out to the western edge of the
[11:40] country. She held various jobs and cafes,
[11:43] bakeries, B and BS, and pubs. Employers and Co workers later
[11:48] told reporters she was reliable, gentle with customers and easy
[11:52] to have in a room. This description would matter,
[11:55] given the direction her case would go in and how her
[11:58] personality would change. By 2012, Emma had been quietly
[12:05] settled in Victoria for a few years, working away and enjoying
[12:09] life. Friends and family later told
[12:12] the press her phone calls and letters had been changing in
[12:15] tone over the previous several months.
[12:18] There were long stretches of silence, then bursts of
[12:22] communication that seemed scattered or anxious.
[12:25] She'd begun mentioning a sense of being watched, and she'd talk
[12:29] about strangers she suspected we're following her.
[12:33] She mentioned that she felt that random people were pulling her
[12:36] into conversations she didn't want to be part of, not in any
[12:40] sort of illicit way, just that random people would come up to
[12:43] her and make small talk. To the family back in Ontario,
[12:48] that didn't sound like the Emma they knew and loved, since she
[12:51] was generally upbeat and trusting.
[12:54] Whether she was experiencing the early stages of a mental health
[12:57] crisis, processing some traumatic experience she'd never
[13:01] disclosed, or some combination of the two, no one knew.
[13:07] Whatever the case is you're about to see, it's very clear
[13:11] that something had gone quite wrong in her life.
[13:15] What's documented in the public record is that beginning in
[13:18] February of that year, she'd been staying off and on at Sandy
[13:22] Merriman House, a women's shelter in downtown Vic.
[13:28] The staff there knew her by name, and they'd later describe
[13:30] her as polite and considerate, but visibly under strain.
[13:34] They suspected mental illness, but privacy rules kept them from
[13:39] contacting her parents directly, so they reached out to police
[13:43] about her behaviour instead. The response that came back was
[13:47] that they should call again if things kept escalating.
[13:51] In the days leading up to her disappearance, Emma had phoned
[13:54] her mother more than once, and each call followed the same
[13:58] painful rhythm. She'd ask if she could come home
[14:01] to Ontario and then her tone would shift almost mid sentence
[14:06] and she'd ask her mom not to come W to pick her up.
[14:10] On the final call, Shelly pieced together that her daughter had
[14:14] been staying in a women's shelter and despite Emma's
[14:17] protests, she booked a flight to Victoria for the following
[14:21] morning. She intended to find her, talk
[14:24] to her, and bring her home in person, suspecting that she
[14:28] needed the people closest to her in that moment more than ever.
[14:32] Earlier on November 28th, 2012, Emma walked into a 711 on
[14:37] Government Street in downtown Victoria, and security cameras
[14:41] captured the visit. She bought a burner phone,
[14:45] paying in cash, and a short time later she returned and bought a
[14:49] $200 prepaid credit card. The phone, by the time it was
[14:54] eventually traced, had never been activated, and the card
[14:58] would later turn up in stranger circumstances.
[15:00] Still, in the surveillance footage, many have interpreted
[15:04] her behavior as odd, or, at the very least, that she looks quite
[15:08] concerned. That said, there's nothing in
[15:12] those few seconds of grainy video that would announce to a
[15:15] viewer who didn't already know that she had only hours left in
[15:19] her documented life. By the early evening, Emma had
[15:24] left Sandy Merriman House for the last time somewhere around
[15:28] 6:00. Shortly afterwards, she flagged
[15:31] down a taxi and asked the driver to take her to Victoria
[15:34] International Airport. Part way through the trip,
[15:38] however, she got out of the cab, and reports suggest she felt she
[15:42] didn't have enough money for the fare, even though the freshly
[15:45] purchased prepaid card was on her.
[15:48] The driver let her out and continued on while Emma made her
[15:52] way back into the city core on foot.
[15:55] By around 7 that night, she'd ended up in front of the
[15:58] Fairmont Empress, the imposing turn of the century hotel that
[16:02] anchors Victoria's Inner Harbor. She was barefoot, and she was,
[16:07] by witness accounts, in obvious emotional distress.
[16:12] An acquaintance recognized her on the sidewalk and called 911,
[16:16] alarmed by her condition. Two officers from the Victoria
[16:20] Police Department responded within minutes, and this part
[16:24] would unfortunately be a fateful twist in the case.
[16:28] They spoke with her for about 3/4 of an hour, taking down her
[16:32] name and asking the kinds of questions trained officers ask
[16:36] on a mental health related call by their professional judgement.
[16:41] Despite her being visibly distressed and not wearing
[16:44] shoes, she didn't meet the legal threshold under British
[16:47] Columbia's mental health legislation.
[16:51] While this may sound unusual, she allegedly wasn't an imminent
[16:54] danger to herself or to anyone else in the way the statute
[16:59] defined those terms, so they had to let her go.
[17:03] This doesn't mean, of course, that she wasn't having a mental
[17:06] health crisis, but that for whatever reason, she wasn't
[17:09] actively considered to be a threat to herself or others.
[17:14] By morning, Shelly was on the ground in Victoria, suitcase in
[17:18] hand, expecting a difficult reunion.
[17:21] But instead she walked into a city full of unanswered
[17:25] questions. Some pieces of Emma's life were
[17:28] quickly accounted for. Her red 1993 Mazda was located
[17:33] in the parking lot of the Chateau Victoria, with nearly
[17:36] all her belongings still inside it.
[17:39] The unactivated cell phone she just bought sat dormant there as
[17:43] well. Then, more strangely, her
[17:46] prepaid credit card turned up on the side of a road near the Juan
[17:49] de Fuca Community Center, well to the north of the city.
[17:54] A stranger picked it up and used it to buy a few things, but
[17:58] police were able to trace the transactions.
[18:01] The individual claimed to have no knowledge of Emma whatsoever,
[18:05] and it appears that detectives believed him, though it's
[18:08] unclear how much investigation was done into the matter.
[18:12] The Victoria Police Department initially treated the case as a
[18:16] missing persons file rather than a criminal one, since there was
[18:20] no immediate evidence of foul play.
[18:23] They searched the harbor and the surrounding shoreline, conducted
[18:27] interviews with shelter staff, hotel employees, the cab driver,
[18:32] and various other people. They circulated her image
[18:35] nationally throughout Canada, given that she was known to
[18:39] travel, Volunteer ground searches followed across
[18:43] southern Vancouver Island, and tips began arriving from across
[18:46] Canada and the United States. People initially reported
[18:51] sightings on ferries between Vancouver Island and the
[18:53] mainland, on Vancouver streets, and in remote interior British
[18:58] Columbia, but none were confirmed. 2 unusual events
[19:03] happened after her disappearance that have both investigators and
[19:06] online sleuths intrigued, and I'll start with the more
[19:10] straightforward one first. The first was the account of a
[19:13] man named William, which surfaced years later and became
[19:17] one of the strangest possible post disappearance sightings in
[19:20] the case. William came forward in 2018 and
[19:25] said he believed he had seen a woman matching Emma's
[19:27] description on the morning of November 29th, 2012.
[19:32] This was the day after she was last confirmed near the Empress
[19:35] Hotel, and the woman he said seemed distressed, vulnerable
[19:41] and out of place. His account placed her in the
[19:45] View Royal area northwest of downtown Victoria, and it was
[19:49] considered significant enough that a search was later
[19:52] organized in that area. The December 2018 search didn't
[19:57] turn up remains or physical evidence tying Emma to the
[20:00] location. This somewhat unusual lead from
[20:04] the man only known as William matters.
[20:06] Because it opens a narrow but important possibility.
[20:10] If the sighting was Emma, then the police encounter outside the
[20:14] Empress wasn't necessarily the final moment anyone saw her
[20:17] alive. It would mean she may have
[20:20] survived the night, crossed or been taken across part of the
[20:23] city and ended up miles from the place where the official
[20:27] timeline goes dark. But the crucial word is if, and
[20:31] it remains unclear if investigators considered William
[20:34] a reliable individual or not. The sighting has never been
[20:38] confirmed and without video, forensic evidence or a second
[20:42] witness, it remains a possible lead rather than a proven
[20:47] extension of her movements. Unfortunately, in high profile
[20:51] cases, there are always situations where people like to
[20:55] insert themselves into the case to feel important.
[20:59] I'm not saying that this is what the William tip was, but it's
[21:03] important to keep in mind. Then there's the man who has
[21:07] come to be known as the Green Shirt Guy, one of the most
[21:11] unsettling unresolved figures in the entire case.
[21:15] On May 27th, 2014, about a year and a half after Emma
[21:20] disappeared, a man walked into a clothing boutique in Gastown,
[21:23] Vancouver, carrying a crumpled missing person poster of Emma.
[21:28] According to Emma's family's website and later public
[21:31] appeals, he was agitated, wearing a green shirt, had
[21:36] tattooed arms and walked with a pronounced limp.
[21:40] He allegedly claimed Emma wasn't missing, referred to her as his
[21:44] girlfriend, and left before police arrived.
[21:48] Surveillance footage captured him, but despite public
[21:52] attention, he has not been identified.
[21:55] In 2024, the Green Shirt Guy lead received renewed attention
[22:01] when a forensic artist created a new composite based on the old
[22:04] surveillance footage as part of an effort to generate fresh
[22:08] tips. Neither police nor Emma's family
[22:11] have said this man is responsible for Emma's
[22:13] disappearance, and police have stressed that they just want to
[22:17] question him. Personally, I find it a bit odd
[22:20] that this person has never come forward, though there's always
[22:23] the possibility that he was suffering from some sort of
[22:26] mental break given his behavior anyway.
[22:30] There's a million theories out there online on what actually
[22:33] happened to Emma, but they're all extremely speculative.
[22:37] I think the honest answer is that we have no idea, and the
[22:41] evidence as it stands doesn't add up to an answer in any
[22:44] meaningful way. I can only hope that Emma's case
[22:47] continues to attract attention and police resources so that one
[22:51] day her family may have some semblance of closure.
[22:57] Hey everyone, it's Jimmy here with a reminder to hit the
[23:00] subscribe button and the notification bell.
[23:03] Also, remember to hit that share button and send this video to
[23:06] any of your friends and family members that enjoy true crime
[23:09] content and unsolved Mysteries. On the last day of August 2006,
[23:18] an aging Chicago Outfit veteran named Anthony Zizzo climbed into
[23:23] his Jeep Grand Cherokee and drove off to keep an
[23:26] appointment. It was with someone he hadn't
[23:29] told his family about, his real family, not his Mafia family,
[23:34] and he never came home from that trip.
[23:37] Two days later, his Jeep turned up in a restaurant parking lot
[23:40] in Melrose Park, locked, undamaged and entirely empty.
[23:45] He was 71 years old, the suspected underboss of the
[23:49] Chicago Outfit, and he vanished in broad daylight without a
[23:53] trace anyone has been willing to share.
[23:57] Anthony Zizzo was born in Chicago's Little Italy in August
[24:01] 1935, the son of an Italian American family in a city where
[24:05] organized crime was woven into working class life.
[24:09] He caught on as a truck driver for the Outfit, dropped out of
[24:12] high school, and started moving up through the ranks.
[24:15] During the 1960s, he went by Little Tony, a name that wasn't
[24:21] intended to be taken ironically since he was about 5 foot 3.
[24:25] By the 1980s and into the early 1990s, he was a senior figure in
[24:30] the Cicero crew, working under Samuel Carlisi and later James
[24:35] Marcelo. He oversaw the crew's gambling
[24:38] operations and supervised men who handled loans and
[24:41] bookmaking, making him a major asset to the crew.
[24:46] In 1992, federal prosecutors indicted Zizzo and a number of
[24:50] his associates in a sprawling racketeering case that gutted
[24:54] the Carlisi crew. He pleaded out and went away to
[24:57] federal prison for several years, returning home in the
[25:01] late 1990s to a quieter Chicago underworld, but one in which his
[25:05] reputation was intact. He settled into a house in
[25:09] Westmont and resumed his quiet place inside the Outfit, keeping
[25:14] his head down and avoiding the kind of publicity that had
[25:18] buried so many of his peers. By the summer of 2006, federal
[25:24] investigators believed he was the second or third man in the
[25:28] organization. In April 2005, federal
[25:33] prosecutors had unsealed a Chicago indictment that the
[25:36] press would soon be calling family secrets.
[25:39] This was anchored to the cooperation of Nicholas
[25:42] Calabresi, a long time Outfit soldier who had flipped after
[25:45] his own brother helped put him away.
[25:48] Calabresi sat down with the feds and started talking about old,
[25:53] unsolved Outfit slayings going back decades.
[25:57] His testimony reached upward into some of the most senior
[26:00] ranks of the criminal organization.
[26:02] Joey Lombardo, a top member of the outfit, was named in the
[26:06] indictment. So were James Marcelo, Frank
[26:10] Calabresi Senior and several other men whose names had been
[26:14] on FBI charts for years. Lombardo, then in his mid 70s,
[26:19] decided to vanish rather than face arrest, and he spent
[26:23] roughly nine months as a federal fugitive before agents tracked
[26:27] him down in January 2006. With Lombardo headed for trial
[26:33] and several other senior figures awaiting prosecution, the
[26:36] question of who would run things on the street became urgent.
[26:40] Federal investigators believe that role, or something close to
[26:44] it, was being handed to Zizo. He was old enough to command
[26:49] respect, and he hadn't been swept up in the family secrets
[26:52] Dragnet himself. He'd somehow avoided being
[26:56] charged, which made him both useful inside the organization
[27:01] and conspicuous from the outside.
[27:04] The trouble with being elevated in that environment is that it
[27:07] puts a target on your back from 2 directions at once.
[27:12] Federal agents start watching more closely, hoping you'll trip
[27:15] up and make a mistake. The men around you start
[27:18] watching too, looking for any sign you might be tempted to
[27:21] talk. And then, of course, there's the
[27:25] problem that always comes with rising in any organization.
[27:29] Other people may want your spot. On the morning of August 31st,
[27:34] 2006, Zizo left his home in Westmont and headed out for what
[27:39] investigators have since described as a sit down meeting
[27:43] Mob watchers and investigators believe he was going to see Big
[27:47] Mike Sarno, a powerful Cicero St. figure with whom Zizzo had
[27:51] been locked in a slow, grinding feud for months.
[27:55] And Big Mike was also another guy with a nickname that isn't
[27:59] to be taken, ironically, since he was and is a true top tier B
[28:04] fortress. The dispute, according to
[28:07] information later filed in federal court, came down to
[28:11] money. Specifically, it allegedly
[28:14] concerned who controlled video poker machines and who got the
[28:18] cut from those machines that lined bars and clubs across Cook
[28:22] County. The video poker racket was, by
[28:25] the mid 2000s, one of the most reliable income streams the
[28:30] outfit had. Machines and private clubs,
[28:33] Taverns and backrooms generated steady cash that was guaranteed
[28:38] to pay out in favor of the house.
[28:41] Whoever controlled the roots controlled the flow of that
[28:44] money, and whoever controlled the flow had a real claim on the
[28:48] rest of the organization's resources.
[28:51] A feud over video poker winnings was, in essence, a fight over
[28:56] the bones of the operation. Zizzo's last confirmed
[29:01] transaction was a credit card purchase for gasoline that
[29:04] morning, and after that, the trail goes quiet.
[29:08] His cell phone stopped registering calls, his credit
[29:11] cards were never used again, and he didn't return home that
[29:15] night. His wife, Susan, eventually
[29:18] contacted authorities and reported him missing.
[29:22] Two days later. On September 2nd, his 2005 Jeep
[29:26] Grand Cherokee was spotted in the parking lot of Abruzzo's
[29:30] restaurant in Melrose Park, several miles from his home.
[29:35] The vehicle was undamaged and locked, with no sign of a
[29:38] struggle inside. But the keys were missing, his
[29:42] cell phone was missing, and so was Zizzo.
[29:47] The position of the Jeep suggested it had been parked
[29:49] there deliberately by someone who'd had time and was making a
[29:52] statement. In the world of organized crime,
[29:56] a neatly parked, empty vehicle reads as a particular sort of
[29:59] message. It tells you that whoever did
[30:01] this had time and confidence, and that they weren't worried
[30:05] about leaving a trail because nobody who could talk was ever
[30:09] going to talk. The body, by implication, was
[30:13] already somewhere it wouldn't surface.
[30:16] The pattern was old and familiar in Chicago, and federal agents
[30:20] recognized at the moment they pulled into the lot.
[30:25] The investigation that followed was extensive on paper and
[30:28] frustrating in practice. The FBI's Chicago Organized
[30:32] Crime Squad treated the case as a priority immediately, and
[30:36] local agencies in the surrounding suburbs worked
[30:39] alongside federal agents to chase down leads.
[30:43] Investigators interviewed family members and known Outfit
[30:46] figures. They dug into phone records and
[30:48] pulled every surveillance video they could find from the
[30:51] restaurant and from intersections along routes
[30:54] between Zezo's home and Abruzzo's parking lot.
[30:57] What they didn't find is what ended up mattering most to the
[31:00] investigation. There was no usable surveillance
[31:04] footage of his final hours, no witness came forward with
[31:08] anything actionable, and his cell phone went dark after a
[31:11] certain point that morning. Sniffer dogs were brought to
[31:15] known Outfit body disposal sites over the months that followed,
[31:20] but none of those searches produced anything.
[31:23] Federal prosecutors made it clear during and after the
[31:26] Family Secrets trial in 2007 that they believed Zizo's
[31:30] disappearance was an Outfit job. They also made it clear they
[31:34] didn't have the evidence to charge anyone with it.
[31:37] Nicholas Calabrezi, the cooperator at the heart of
[31:41] Family Secrets, didn't have direct knowledge of what
[31:44] happened to Zizzo, as he was already working with the feds
[31:47] when it happened. Whatever took place on the
[31:49] afternoon of August 31st, 2006 took place inside a circle small
[31:55] enough and tight enough that the federal government has never
[31:58] managed to break into it. In 2016, on the 10th anniversary
[32:04] of the disappearance, the FBI publicly offered a $10,000
[32:08] reward for information leading to a resolution of the case.
[32:13] Now, I'm not going to shock you here, but as of this recording,
[32:17] that reward has gone unclaimed. The family secrets trial itself,
[32:22] when it concluded in the late summer of 2007, ended with
[32:26] convictions for Lombardo, Marcello and Frank Calabresi
[32:31] senior on the racketeering charges.
[32:34] The jury found that several of the named men had been
[32:37] responsible for specific historic outfit slayings, but
[32:41] none of those slayings included Zizo's.
[32:44] The case against the men in the dock had been built without him
[32:47] in mind, and his disappearance sat in a separate file with its
[32:51] own number and went cold. Several explanations have
[32:55] circulated over the years, some inside the FB is working
[32:59] theories and some in the corners of organized crime journalism
[33:03] that follow the Chicago Outfit closely.
[33:06] The most commonly cited theory is that someone within the
[33:09] Outfit put a hit out on him, potentially over the video poker
[33:13] earnings. However, despite suspicions by
[33:17] the federal authorities, no arrests have ever been made in
[33:21] connection with this theory. Another possibility, raised
[33:25] early but now considered unlikely, is that Zizzo had
[33:29] agreed to cooperate with the federal government and had been
[33:32] placed into protective custody. The reason most observers no
[33:37] longer take this seriously is that there's been no indication
[33:41] in any subsequent prosecution that Zizzo provided information.
[33:46] However, some do still believe that this is a possibility, with
[33:51] the award offered for information into his
[33:53] disappearance being a smokescreen.
[33:56] Notably, everything indicates he loved his wife dearly, and it
[34:00] seems unlikely that he would have made any deal that didn't
[34:03] involve her coming along as well.
[34:07] Decades out from the disappearance, there doesn't
[34:10] seem to be much hope that this case will ever be cracked in any
[34:13] meaningful way. What's left is a parking lot at
[34:16] Abruzzo's, a locked Jeep that nobody ever came back for, and a
[34:21] missing persons file that will likely sit on a cold case shelf
[34:24] forever.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.