(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- There’s hope of a potential breakthrough in the investigation of the 1992 murder of Tammy Zywicki, the college student who disappeared on I-80 in LaSalle County and was found stabbed to death in rural Missouri.
Investigators speculated from the beginning that a truck driver could have been the one who killed 21-year-old Zywicki.
She was on her way to Grinnell College in Iowa in August 1992. She was last seen with her car on the side of I-80 near LaSalle.
Nine days later, her body was found 500 miles away in Missouri, near I-44.
Now, a 58-year-old truck driver — Clark Perry Baldwin — has been arrested in Waterloo, Iowa.
Authorities say he’s been linked to the deaths of three women whose bodies were dumped in Wyoming and Tennessee
The former lead Illinois State Police investigator in the Zywicki case isn’t as optimistic as some that a resolution could be looming.
Jeffrey Padilla, now a security consultant, says there seems to be some differences in the circumstances.
“We have very different case in which we have somebody who would not willingly get into a car or a truck on her own,” he says, referring to Zywicki.
“And just in the preliminary reading of the Iowa DCI (Division of Criminal Investigation), it seems like this truck driver was involved with the murder of people who willingly got into his truck.”