Ex-cop pleads guilty to second choking death
Steven Zelich, the former West Allis police officer who left the bodies of two women in suitcases along a Walworth County highway in 2014, has been convicted in Minnesota for one of the deaths.
On Friday, Zelich, 55, pleaded guilty in Olmsted County to second-degree murder, with intent, for killing 37-year-old Laura Simonson of Farmington, Minn., at a Rochester hotel in 2013. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, to be served after he completes a 35-year sentence in Wisconsin for killing an Oregon woman in Kenosha in 2012.
Zelich said he met both women online and that each died during what Zelich said was dangerous sex play in hotel rooms. He took both victims’ bodies back to his West Allis apartment and for months stored the bodies in a refrigerator and later in his car trunk, before leaving them both in suitcases discovered by a Walworth County highway crew in June 2014.
In the Kenosha case, Zelich agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of first-degree reckless homicide with use of a dangerous weapon — a rope used to choke the victim for erotic purposes — and prosecutors agreed to dismiss the original charge of firstdegree intentional homicide, which carries a mandatory life sentence upon conviction.
Zelich killed 19-yearold Jenny Gamez of Cottage Grove, Ore., in August 2012.
According to court records and testimony, Zelich met Gamez online and invited her to Wisconsin. She had told friends she was moving to Milwaukee to study welding. He picked her up at the Milwaukee airport and they drove to a Kenosha hotel, where they spent several days.
Zelich told investigators they played a sexual game in which he would choke Gamez. On the last day, he lost control and choked Gamez until she died, according to the criminal complaint.
After his arrest in June 2014, information emerged about at least two other women who had discomforting encounters with Zelich, who went by the name “Mr. Handcuffs” on a website where people look for sexual partners interested in submission and domination.
No other unsolved murders have been linked to Zelich, but Mark Ostrem, the Olmsted County attorney, said he personally believes there are some.
“He’s been just way too cool and collected about these two cases to not have experienced all this before,” Ostrem said Friday.