Daily Record from Morristown, New Jersey • 3

New Itoev PAGE More New Jersey news Go to dallyrecord.com for more news from around New Jersey. Click on STATE in the left side Web menu. NEWS EDITOR: Bill Demarest (973) 428-6642 bdemaresgannett.com SUNDAY www.dailyrecord.com AUGUST 5, 2007, College student killer remam on the loose despite mew effort Somerset probe sets off e-mail campaign Freeholders flooded with messages to keep park commission intact GANNETT NEW JERSEY Justice for Tammy A look at the unsolved Tammy Zywicki slaying: Aug. 23 marks the 15th anniversary of the disappearance of Tammy Zywicki, whose slaying remains unsolved. Here are a few facts about the case: THE VICTIM: Zywicki, 21, was living at the time in Marlton.

THE CRIME: On Aug. 23, 1992, Zywicki had dropped off a brother at Northwestern University in Evanston, and was headed for her senior year at Iowa's Grinnell College when her 1985 Pontiac car broke down along the freeway near LaSalle, III. Her stabbed body was found nine days later wrapped in a blanket near Route 44 in southwest Missouri, between Springfield and Joplin. WITNESS ACCOUNTS: Zywicki was last seen with her car at Route 80's mile marker 83, between 3:10 p.m. and 4 p.m.

the day she disappeared. A tractor-trailer was seen parked behind her vehicle. The truck's driver was described as a white man between 35 and 40 years old, over 6 feet tall, with dark, bushy hair. THE LATEST: Investigators are scrutinizing whether there's any link between the Zywicki case and Bruce Mendenhall, a man from Albion, who police say has confessed to six killings in several states, Zywicki's not among them. Mendenhall was arrested last month at a truck stop in Nashville, Tenn.

1 ASSOCIATED PRESS A photo provided by the Zywicki family shows Tammy Zywicki with her cat in 1989. Tammy's mother, JoAnn, Is bracing for the 15th anniversary of her daughter's unsolved slaying. Mom longs for resolution for daughter killed on her way to school in Iowa BY JIM SUHR ASSOCIATED PRESS Fifteen years after her drive back to college took a violent and deadly turn in Illinois, Tammy Zywicki is seldom far from her mother's thoughts. Subtle items throughout the family's Florida home make it so. A clock featuring Tammy's beloved cartoon cat Garfield on a nightstand in a spare bedroom.

Seashells the beach lover collected some tucked in a grandfather clock, others in a jar on a bathroom sink. A soccer-themed souvenir she got in Spain. Photos of the green-eyed blonde here and there, always smiling. As another milestone anniversary of her daughter's stabbing death looms, the mother turns to the steely persever-has carried her Bruce Mendenhall ance that through the onslaught of birthdays, holidays and special occasions that often tor ment families of the murdered. Yet the 65-year-old woman wonders: Having weathered the highs and lows of seeing promising leads in her daughter's death fizzle out, will she ever see anyone pinned with the crime? JoAnn Zywicki grapples with that anew as investigators work to unravel the past of trucker Bruce Mendenhall, who police say has confessed to six killings in several states, Tammy Zywicki's not among them.

Since Mendenhall's arrest last month at a truck stop in Nashville, police there have fielded dozens of inquiries from law enforcement agencies and families across the country, hoping the 56-year-old man from tiny Albion in southern Illinois can provide clues to unsolved Bergen, United Water plant shuts down after lightning strike cuts power during storm ASSOCIATED PRESS HARRINGTON PARK -Repairs restored partial electrical service on Saturday to a water plant that serves more than 800,000 people after lightning damage shut it down and left people with little or no running water, authorities said. United Water New Jersey told residents to boil water before consuming it and ordered them not to use any water for nonessential purposes. "No water use outdoors today. And we understand that's a little bit of a hardship because it's going to be another 90-degree, smoldering day. But no lawn watering.

No car wash her mother's mind: Long blonde hair and glasses, always looking tan. Nice, pretty teeth in a family where good choppers aren't the norm. Never a fan of makeup, "she had a good, clean scrubbed look," JoAnn Zywicki recalls. "She was just natural; that's a good word. For lack of a better term, she was an ail-American girl," the mother said recently in a telephone interview from her home in central Florida.

"She was not a really girly girl. She was more comfortable in T-shirts and shorts than anything. She just had a well-rounded attitude." The kind of young woman, one of her coaches once remarked, who would be com fortable eating cheeseburgers for breakfast. The 5-foot-2, 120-pound woman loved naps, cats, photography and soccer. She played halfback at Iowa's Grinnell College, the small school where she was to be a senior in the fall of 1992.

Tammy, then from Marlton, was mulling graduate school, aspiring to perhaps teach Spanish some day. It wasn't meant to be. Tammy had just dropped off her younger brother at Northwestern University in suburban Chicago and had turned her 1985 Pontiac T1000 toward Grinnell on Aug. 23, 1992, when the car broke down along Route 80 near LaSalle, 111. A passer-by caught the last glimpses of her alive there at mile marker 83, hunched over her car's raised hood with a trucker who had stopped, ostensibly to help.

A tractor-trailer was seen parked behind her car. Tammy's body turned up nine days later hundreds of miles away along an Interstate highway in southwest Missouri, shrouded in a red blanket sealed with duct tape. The young woman, who once wrote in a high school journal Residents still were being asked not to use any water for nonessential purposes such as watering lawns or washing cars. Remain in effect The orders to boil and conserve water were to remain in effect until further notice. They covered much of Bergen County and the Hudson County SOMERVILLE With big decisions looming on the future of the Somerset County Park Commission, interested parties are jumping into a stormy sea of public opinion to impact the outcome.

Their efforts include a e-mail campaign trying to drive up calls and e-mails to freeholders to keep the commission intact and a Web site sponsored by Democrats who see the commission and its relationship to the GOP-controlled county government as an issue that could help end a solid streak of Republican election wins. Following a critical report by the law firm of Wolff Samson, the commission is under investigation by the state Attorney General's Office and has agreed to a county takeover of its engineering, construction, finance and procurement operations. But several issues remain unresolved. The freeholders must decide by Aug. 23 whether to place a question on the ballot to dissolve the $20 million agency created by a referendum in 1956 and partially funded by the county At 6 p.m.

Tuesday, the freeholders will meet to discuss and possibly name replacements for four commissioners who offered on July 26 to resign, as well as for individuals to fill two vacant seats. Those appointments would create a new majority on the governing board of the commission, nearly half of which had served for two decades or more. At least one commissioner, Doyle Hunsinger, has said he would reconsider his offer if the county moves to dismantle the commission. E-mail blasts As freeholders mull dissolving the commission in charge of 10,000 acres of parkland and open space an e-mail-based campaign is trying to stir support for maintaining the commission. An e-mail dated July 31 from the address of Rich Reitman of the Somerville-based Reitman Group, urges recipients to call or e-mail the freeholders' office and "let them know that without our park commission, Somerset County would be a very different kind of place to live and work." Reitman who performs public relations work for the commission declined to confirm or deny that he sent the e-mail during a separate interview on Thursday The e-mail argues that many problems highlighted in the Wolff Samson report and covered by newspapers have been corrected, and noted that commissioners have agreed to the report's recommendations and additional demands by freeholders.

"I have set a lofty goal of the number of calls by the end of the week," the e-mail states. "This is a crucial time for the park commission and the county." Reitman's firm has received $55,906 from the commission from June 1, 2006, to Aug. 1, 2006. iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiMiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimiiiiiiiiiiiiii inifc BEST 1 PROPANE I I PRICING I PAST I DELIVERY I i Heating, Pools, Fireplaces, 1 i BBQ Tanks, more vaVam lit iiVi ai 3 New Jerseysidinc 1248 Sussex BlrJg. Randolph slayings going back two decades.

JoAnn Zywicki is guarded about getting overconfident about whether Mendenhall holds the key to what happened to her daughter. This mother knows better, having been frustrated too many times before. "There's always hope," she says, ardent in pushing aside notions that perhaps her daughter's killer is dead and, therefore, forever unknown. "Yes, I do recognize we may never solve it. But I know Tammy would say, 'Don't dwell on it.

Hope for something to happen, but don't let it take over your life and go Tammy Zywicki would have turned 36 last spring, but tragedy forever keeps her 21 in Hudson ing," United Water spokesman Rich Henning said. One lightning bolt struck just outside the plant on Friday night, followed by a direct hit around midnight that cut power to the plant, in Haworth and even hobbled its backup generators, according to the Harrington Park-based utility. Although power was partially restored on Saturday after- rtci water restrictions that she didn't want to suffer when she died, had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest. She bled to death. The horror of the story grabbed headlines: A college co-ed, in distress after her car fails her along a freeway, is snatched up, possibly by a predator trucker prowling the nation's highways posing as a good Samaritan.

JoAnn Zywicki doesn't allow herself to think about what her daughter went through. "I kind of put it in the past," the mother says, content clinging to one thing survivors of the slain can't always cling to as solace: "At least we have a body." Finding the killer is another matter. After Tammy's body was found, Illinois State Police joined forces with the FBI and other agencies in a task force, but it disbanded the next year. The investigation since, the FBI's Ross Rice laments, has been nothing short of "very frustrating." "There haven't been any fruitful leads," punctuated by the lack of arrests or charges, Rice says from the FBI's Chicago office. "Nothing has panned out.

in effect towns of Guttenberg, North Bergen, Secaucus, Union City, Weehawken and West New York. Customers were advised to boil their water for one minute before drinking it, using it in cooking or ice cubes, brushing teeth or feeding pets. It wasn't necessary to boil water before showering or washing dishes or clothes, the utility said. DENV1LIX PRIMIGI UQ3 crocs 1 1 Broadway Denville, NJ 973.627.2330 A A noon, the utility didn't expect to have full water pressure until late in the day. Boiling water might be necessary as late as Monday, Henning said.

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