A man sentenced to life for killing a 13-year-old girl while being a suspect in the deaths of about a half-dozen others has died in a Michigan prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arthur Ream, 75, died Aug. 15 of cancer at a prison hospital in Jackson, Michigan, the state Corrections Department said Thursday. The Detroit News first reported his death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cindy Zarzycki was last seen on April 20, 1986, and believed to be a runaway after going to a Dairy Queen in Eastpointe, a mostly blue-collar suburb north of Detroit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The case went cold, but Ream eventually was arrested and charged. In 2008, he led investigators to Zarzycki’s remains buried in a wooded area in Macomb Township, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northeast of Detroit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, he denied killing her. Ream told a police detective that Cindy was with his son the day she died and claimed she fell from an open elevator at his carpet warehouse in Warren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a 2008 videotaped interrogation<\/a>, Ream told police, \u201cI\u2019m into, was into, teenage girls. OK?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the video, he said Cindy’s death had been driving him \u201ccrazy for 22 years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI can\u2019t make up for the wrong I\u2019ve done,\u201d he said during the interrogation. \u201cThat\u2019s the only thing … that I\u2019d really ever want to do. That\u2019s just like with Cindy. The next day … I knew what I did was wrong. But how do you take it back? You can\u2019t take it back. So you just try to hide it. The more you hide it, the worst it gets.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n His apparent admission of guilt didn’t last long. \u201cI didn\u2019t kill Cindy, and I\u2019m not going to get up there and say I did,\u201d Ream said during the same interrogation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He later was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder in her killing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ream was no stranger to Michigan prisons or crimes involving juveniles. He was sentenced in 1998 to four to 15 years in prison for criminal sexual conduct involving a person between 13 and 15 years old. He was released from prison in 1980 after serving five years of taking indecent liberties with a child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While serving his life sentence for Zarzycki\u2019s murder, Ream would boast to fellow prisoners about killing four to six other people, leading police in 2018 to excavate in the same Macomb Township wooded area<\/a> in a search for as many as seven other girls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other possible victims include 12-year-old Kimberly King, who disappeared in 1979 while visiting her grandmother in Warren; Kim Larrow, who was 15 when she was last seen in 1981 in Canton Township, west of Detroit; and Kellie Brownlee, who was 17 when she vanished in 1982 from suburban Novi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attorney R. Timothy Kohler, who was appointed by a judge to represent Ream in his 2008 murder trial, has said his former client was \u201cnot a likable guy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI didn\u2019t want to particularly hear his story, other than my sense that he was denying any allegation of intentionally murdering Cindy,\u201d Kohler said in 2018. \u201cHe claimed his innocence. He never told me that he did anything. Frankly, I don\u2019t think I was interested in knowing that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n