The Red Flag Romance - Kelly Dwyer

June 23, 2025

In this episode, Payton and Garrett examine the mysterious disappearance of Kelly Dwyer. When Kelly fails to show up for work, her friends and family begin retracing her final known movements leading to the man she was last seen with. What unfolds is a chilling story of secrets, red flags, and a shocking twist that would take years to uncover.

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

You're listening to an Oh No Media podcast.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Payton Moreland.

And I'm Garrett Moreland.

And he's the husband.

I'm the husband.

You know, you just like—it's just... okay, should we just give up? Sorry, no episode today. We're not recording. Everyone have a great day.

Sometimes it's just something that I don't think about—it just comes out. I just let it naturally come out. You have those moments where you're like—it's like when you say a word a little too much and then you're like, "Does that sound right? Is that how you actually say it?"

I get that, 'cause it's not something I really think about. It just happens.

Yeah. Hope everyone is having a great Monday. It's really hot outside right now where we are. Those who live in Arizona and other places are probably like, "Oh, poor you." Well, I didn't move to Arizona for that reason—because I don't want it to be that hot. But it's currently 103 degrees outside. Hot day. But I think it's just a heat wave. It's supposed to cool down tomorrow.

Even Daisy goes outside and she's like, "Where in the world are we right now?"

How do you feel about the heat, babe?

Not a fan. I would like some rain. Here's the problem: I grew up in California, so I am unfortunately very spoiled when it comes to weather. Year-round, it was usually pretty good. But honestly, I don't mind the weather in Utah. I like the seasons. I like a little bit of cold sometimes. I like the heat in the summer.

People used to complain about Arizona and they'd be like, "Oh, it's just unbearable in the summer." And I was like, "Can't be that bad. It's hot." I don't know how you guys do it. I will say—I went, and I will never go back in the summertime, because it feels genuinely like the gates of hell. It's so hot.

I don't know—it is. It feels like, you know when you're standing next to a fire and you can feel the heat on your face? It feels like that.

Yeah, I know. Like you're just outside. You step out—you walk from your car ten steps into a restaurant and you're like, "Oh my god." And it is unbearable.

Yeah, it's kind of impressive that you guys do it. But I mean, I guess it's just like... yeah, I don't know honestly. About the cold—I don't know how the air conditioners survive in the summer. I feel bad for the cars and the roofs. I'm like, that's so sad. Like, they're just so hot.

Daisy, what do you want? One second, hold on. Daisy's barking at us 'cause she needs to go outside.

This has been long, so I will—that can kind of be my 10 seconds, and we will skip to something important. Because my 10 seconds is a merch drop item. It is a hat. It is amazing. It's a Strange Dainty hat. Every single one of you need it.

It's honestly—tell me the design isn't amazing.

Well, I think I need to preface here that when Garrett does something—this little hat has been his little thing—and when he does something, he goes all out. So he tested 800 different hats before he found the one that he wanted to print on.

I just—I wanted a good blank. I don't like bad blanks. I will say that this isn't a blank you can go and jump in the water with. It's not like one of those Melin waterproof hats. But the blank is amazing.

It's cool enough to wear in the heat—just saying. And it is a cute hat. It's extremely... it's super cool. You might be thinking, "Oh, a merch hat." It's not really like a merch hat. They're like—it’s a custom blank. They're not just merch hats that you get. It's a custom blank. It's a high-quality hat.

Go check it out. I'll have some pictures of me wearing it. There are some other pictures on there. It's live now. We don't have a ton of them, so I don't know if they're going to sell out. Maybe no one buys it. If no one buys it, then I'll buy all of them so it looks like everyone bought them. And that's what I got. So go check it out. The links are going to be everywhere—our normal merch site.

We love you guys, and let's hop into today's episode.

All right, our sources for this episode are:

tmj4.com,

wihomicide.com,

chilling.com,

milwauke.com,

medium.com,

cbs58.com,

fox6now.com,

wisn.com,

and cbsnews.com.

So oftentimes when we find ourselves in a new relationship with someone, we only look for the good in that person—reasons why we should keep moving forward with them, why they might be the one we spend forever with. That's part of romance, a part of lust or love—visualizing the perfect future together.

But sometimes, in a brand-new relationship, that means ignoring the red flags too. We tend to bury the parts that maybe should be warnings—warnings that should tell us to turn, run, and get out of this before we find ourselves in too deep.

Maybe they're not over their ex. Maybe they have anger issues or violent tendencies.

Okay, sorry. You said “in too deep,” and I was thinking—

'Cause I'm in too...

Okay, anyways.

I just saw you headbanging over there.

I know, that was—yeah, anyways. Keep going.

Maybe there's some dark secret on their computer you stumble upon one afternoon. But when we're in the state of love—or lust, whatever you want to call it—it’s easy to ignore the circumstantial evidence and just follow your feelings instead.

Which is why today's story is not just a cautionary tale. It's proof that when we ignore red flags, they could lead to something far more deadly than heartbreak.

So for today’s case, we are headed to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And Milwaukee is where 27-year-old Kelly Dwyer calls home in the year 2013.

But Kelly isn't a Wisconsin native. She actually grew up in a suburb of Chicago. And while her high school years were difficult in Chicago—as her parents worked through a challenging divorce—Kelly managed to keep her head above water, focusing on tennis, the high school newspaper, and yearbook clubs.

But in the trauma of her parents’ divorce, Kelly kind of seemed to lose a sense of herself too. Instead of going right to college after graduation, Kelly did her own thing for the next few years—working odd jobs, just kind of finding her place in the world.

But four years later, she was ready to get the heck out of Illinois and start fresh somewhere new. She wanted to create a new identity for herself and finally put her past behind her.

And this is why she decided to move to Milwaukee.

The city suited Kelly. She made new friends, found a community of yogis, and began teaching yoga classes herself. She also got a job at Lululemon while nannying part-time. So Kelly moved here and was definitely hustling—but she also loved letting loose.

Kelly loved the nightlife scene in Milwaukee and was always spotted out with her friends and co-workers at all the trendy new spots. But Kelly also wanted a lot more for herself. She wanted a bright future. She wanted love. She wanted happiness.

And when she finally celebrated her 27th birthday in September of 2013, she believed that this future she envisioned for herself was right around the corner. She told her friend Ryan on this birthday:

"Something big is going to happen. I can feel it. It feels really important to me."

Ryan, her friend, was excited for her, because Kelly was really coming into herself. This was something her father, Tony, had noticed too when he visited her in Milwaukee shortly after.

Tony—her dad—was relieved to see how happy Kelly was and how much she was thriving in this new environment. And Kelly seemed to attribute a lot of that happiness to a guy she had been seeing for about a year now—someone she met through a mutual friend. His name was Chris Zocco.

Now, Chris was 11 years older than Kelly. So at 38, he had already built quite a life for himself. He was a successful IT executive who had graduated from Boston University with a degree in international business. He was now making pretty decent money by 38—the kind of guy who got up early to golf on the weekends, even if he was out late partying the night before.

He also traveled a lot for work, which meant he and Kelly didn’t get to see each other as much as she may have liked. But to her, him leaving town a lot was worth it because it paid for his beautiful condo in a nice Milwaukee neighborhood and fancy sports cars that he could pick Kelly up in for dates.

Okay, um—random question. Not for you, babe. This is for our listeners.

If you had all the money in the world, would you choose city—or would you choose suburb?

Like… I guess suburbs, but not suburbs like country. Like, okay—so extremes on both sides.

Yes, extremes on both sides. What would that be like—rural kind? But not really rural. Like, you can still find farm towns where it's still close to everything. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah. What would you choose? All the money.

That's not for me. That’s just for our listeners.

You don’t think they want to know what you feel?

I can tell them next week. This is for them.

Oh, okay. Okay. You're—

You always be making promises, bro.

I mean, I don't know what I would choose. That’s why. I don’t know the answer to that.

I don't know either.

I know I kind of interrupted the case. I think there's—if you had all the money in the world, there are amazing things you could get on both ends of the spectrum.

Yeah, but think—if you had all the money in a city... I mean, shows every night. Five-star everything.

If you had all the money and, like, you had a huge ranch somewhere...

That's true too.

You could have cows.

Well—yes, but a lot more than that. You could have a boat. You could have any horse you want.

Honestly—a bunch of horses.

If you have all the money in the world, you could have both.

Yeah, but you gotta pick one.

Okay. Anyway—sorry. Interruption.

Let's continue. Okay, so he has money, and their relationship kind of worked because Kelly and Chris had a few things in common. Despite their 11-year age gap, both came from divorced households and could understand each other’s pain there. They also both liked to indulge in recreational drugs. They both loved to party.

That detail wasn’t something Kelly shared with her dad when he came to visit, though—for obvious reasons. Instead, she just glowed about her new relationship, thinking it would only be a matter of time before she actually got to introduce Chris to her father in person.

But what neither Tony—her dad—nor Kelly knew when he came to visit was that day would never come.

Just a few weeks later, on October 10th, 2013, Kelly and Chris had a little date night planned. Kelly went over to Chris’s apartment and hung out there for a bit before the two went out for some drinks at one of their favorite spots in town. It was a place right across the street from Chris’s apartment called Aliam.

There, Kelly ran into her friend Chanel. They had a good conversation and were just hanging out for the night. In the year 2013, Chanel says that Kelly seemed to be in a good mood that night. Kelly told her she had the day off tomorrow. She was looking forward to just getting up, going to yoga, doing a little laundry—just kind of having an easy day the next day.

Then, after a few drinks, Kelly and Chris closed their tab and went to this pizza spot that was a few blocks away called Ian’s.

I love pizza.

At Ian’s, they grabbed some slices and then actually went back to Chris’s apartment around 2:37 a.m. on what is now the morning of October 11th.

But the day after that, October 12th, Kelly was supposed to work a shift at Lululemon. So remember—they are out partying on October 10th. The entire day of October 11th goes by, and then the morning of October 12th, Kelly no-shows to her job.

Her co-workers, who are also her good friends, start calling her. They're like, "Hey, you have a shift. Are you coming in?" But there’s no answer.

So they figure, it’s 2013—let’s check her social media. Kelly was the kind of person who posts and updates her followers pretty consistently. So when they notice that she also hasn’t posted on social media since two days prior—the night she went out with Chris—things start to get more alarming.

And so that’s when her friends actually get the police involved, because they’re like, "She hasn’t posted, she’s not answering her phone, she would never not show up to work—we’re going to call the police."

Knowing that they have a missing person’s case on their hands, investigators start with the basics. They begin investigating and realize that Kelly’s debit cards also haven’t been used since.

Later that day, on October 12th, it seems like her phone is either dead or turned off, because it’s going straight to voicemail. And between the time her friends realize she hasn’t posted and alert authorities—and then the authorities go on to check her social media—her social media account seemingly gets deleted as well.

So she’s missing, she hasn’t been heard from, but in the middle of all this, her social media gets deleted. Huge red flag. Huge red flag. That’s crazy.

They also find that Kelly has profiles on a few different dating apps and has been talking to a few different people on them. Though nothing stands out as much as one particular tip they receive from her friend—the one who saw her two nights ago at Aliam. If you remember, that’s the friend who said Kelly was in good spirits and didn’t have work the next day.

This friend talks to police and says the last person she was with, that they know of, was Chris—her boyfriend.

So on Monday the 14th, detectives go knocking on Chris’s door, because they’ve now realized Kelly has no family here. She only has friends—and then Chris, who’s basically the closest person to her.

Now remember, this is the same place Kelly was presumably last seen in the early morning hours of Friday, October 11th—three days earlier—when they returned to his apartment.

When detectives show up and say, “Hey, your girlfriend’s missing,” Chris is pretty welcoming. He lets them into his apartment, sits down with them, and has no problem telling them what he and Kelly got into the night he last saw her.

He admits, yes, he knows Kelly, but he doesn’t say that she’s his girlfriend. He says Kelly is just someone he parties with—someone he hangs out with.

He claims that earlier that night, the night she went missing, before going out to the bar, the two of them had actually driven around trying to get cocaine. Then, after the bar, they came back to his apartment, did some lines, had a couple more drinks, had sex on his couch, and then both passed out there.

He says the next morning, Kelly left around 9:00 a.m. and he hasn’t seen or heard from her since.

Now, Chris is leaning pretty hard into this narrative that Kelly is a wild party girl who did a lot of drugs. This is who he’s portraying to the cops. He also insists that they weren’t exclusive, that she was sleeping with other people she met online.

But as police are having this conversation with Chris, one of the detectives gets a text message. It’s from a colleague who is downstairs sitting with security, going over the footage from the apartment building the night Kelly went missing.

And he says, “Hey, I see Kelly on security going into the apartment around 2:30 a.m., just like Chris described.”

She never comes out.

He says, “Yes, they seem to be chatting totally fine.” But as we’re combing through this security footage, we cannot find Kelly ever leaving the apartment building.

So the police are like, “Okay, we’re sitting here in front of him, getting texts from our colleagues that her leaving at 9:00 a.m.—like Chris said—isn’t actually caught on camera.” They know they need to keep looking into this guy.

Right now, this is obviously not enough to arrest him on, but they do have something they can now use to get a search warrant. That video, and the fact that Chris said he had cocaine in the apartment, basically means detectives leave to go get all of this sorted out. In the meantime, they keep digging into Chris.

It’s kind of hard because, as a detective, once you leave, he already knows he’s under suspicion and is probably trying to figure things out. You confront him and say, “Hey, we just checked the cameras and she didn’t leave.” Like—what do you do?

I don’t know which option is better. You’re playing with fire. Because if you confront him, you’re kind of hoping he cracks and confesses, since you’ve just hit him with big news. Or… he lawyers up, and then you don’t ever get to interview him again without a ton of legal pressure.

But also, if he already knows he’s on the radar, it’s almost like you might as well just go for it. But here’s the thing: they bring him in, and this still isn’t enough to arrest him. So then you have to let him go if he doesn’t confess.

Yeah, I don’t know what you do. I mean, I think either way, he knows he’s under suspicion, so I feel like you just try to get him. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way—it’s just interesting, because I was thinking about it.

I mean, they have to leave. They don’t have a search warrant. They have to go get all that sorted out. And now he just has time to do whatever he wants, right? Because police have come in—so now he’s going to double-check that everything’s good, clean up… whatever it may be.

Yep. I mean, they are actively working this investigation. They are digging into Chris, trying to get this warrant. And they discover that Chris had removed the SIM card from his cell phone, making it impossible to track its movements from October 11th at 7:43 p.m. until 2:41 p.m. on October 12th.

Bro.

Come on, man.

His SIM card is out of his phone. So they have no idea—no way to track what his phone did during that time.

Well, police are back at Chris’s house just later that day. They leave, get the warrant, and come back. And they find a lot more than a little cocaine in his apartment.

They find canisters of marijuana in the fridge. They find painkillers, unidentified pills. So Chris is actually arrested on the spot for drug possession—which is good for them, because now they can hold him.

While they have him under arrest, they also get a warrant to search his cell phone. And what they find on this phone is pretty disturbing.

It’s a video of Kelly and Chris, taken about three weeks before she went missing. And in this video, they are engaged in a sex act—but Kelly looks to be in a lot of distress.

In this video, whatever is happening, she is struggling to breathe. Like, really struggling with what’s going on.

And this isn’t the end of it.

They also find pictures on this phone of Kelly, and she appears to be unconscious on Chris's bed—and he's taking pictures of her.

Okay, so he's taking pictures of her unconscious body. Got it. On the bed. Not legal, by the way.

So none of this looks good for Chris, especially because police don't stop searching his apartment once they find drugs. They're also looking for any signs of Kelly, and they notice one very suspicious detail: the shower curtain in Chris's guest bathroom has been torn down. The hooks still have pieces of fabric on them, but someone has just ripped it right off.

They also bring in a police cadaver dog named Molly, and she picks up a scent in a lot of places: the hallway outside of Chris's door, the parking garage on the same level where Chris parks his car, a dumpster on the 18th floor where Chris lives, the trash chute on his floor—and this is all just outside of his apartment.

Inside, she hits on the hallway, the guest bedroom, and the guest bathroom. And she finishes her search on top of Chris's bed. In fact, that’s where she seems to be triggering the most—like she goes crazy on this bed.

So police are pretty confident that Kelly most likely died in the apartment, on Chris’s bed, which is why the dog is alerting. And then he eventually tried to get rid of her body.

Yet despite all of this, police still don't feel like this is enough to press charges on Chris for murder. I mean, it’s an obvious suspect—it’s pretty strong—but it's just not enough to take him to trial.

So right now they do have enough to hold him on drug charges, which is definitely helpful, but they feel confident that if they can just find Kelly—or Kelly’s body—this will be a sealed deal.

So they don't want to pounce too soon. Instead, they keep digging into Chris to build their case. And honestly, the more they learn about Chris—the more they investigate him—the worse things get.

Because also in his apartment, they find a bunch of old hard drives. And there is a bunch of child pornography on these drives.

Now, that's insane to me. Insane. Child pornography, to me, blows my mind—that people actually watch child pornography. I can't. Like, I can't. I don't even like talking about it. Because—children. Like... children. Like, come on.

I don't know if there's a bigger sign to yourself that there's clearly something wrong. It's crazy.

The police confront him with this. They're like, "Hey, we found these hard drives. There's child pornography on these." And he says, "Oh, that was a hard drive from an old job I worked at. It’s not actually mine." Like, "I didn’t put that on there—I just collected them from an old job and had them in my house."

But police aren't buying it. In fact, they think this is just more evidence that Chris Zako is capable of some pretty unimaginable things.

Still, for now, they are only able to charge him with drug possession and child pornography. And by early November 2013, they shockingly let him out on bail—even though he's also the number one suspect in a murder investigation.

But still, the DA hasn't filed murder charges yet because they think there's a lot more on this guy that they'll uncover in due time. And the more witnesses they speak to, the more incriminating evidence they find.

Some of Kelly’s friends told the police that when Kelly started dating Chris, it wasn’t unusual for her to show up to work with pretty big bruises on her wrists or her neck—places that looked pretty alarming.

But whenever she was asked about it, Kelly would kind of shrug it off, saying it was nothing.

Now, between that and the violent sex videos they found on Chris’s phone, police started to form a theory about what they think happened to Kelly the night she went missing.

They believe that Kelly might have been killed during a pretty violent sex act. Based on surveillance videos they found, they think Chris found a way to move Kelly’s body out to his car. At some point, while his SIM card was removed from his cell phone, he likely drove somewhere to get rid of her remains.

But they don’t have any concrete details or evidence at this point. They are finding more things that validate this theory, like five other women who come forward—women who dated Chris in the past and basically testify to police that he exhibited violent sexual behaviors towards them as well.

One said she was even sexually assaulted by Chris. Another said she got a restraining order from him after she broke up with him in 2005.

What really took detectives by surprise was the reason that, when they initially talked to Chris, he wasn’t calling Kelly his girlfriend. He was like, “No, no, no, this is just someone I party with.”

That’s because police uncovered that Chris already had a girlfriend at this time—a woman named Megan Pac, who he had been in a very serious relationship with for four years.

Apparently, not that serious.

A woman that he was talking about marrying, and who Kelly apparently had no idea even existed. Though the same seemed to be true for Megan also—she had no idea about Kelly until news broke that Chris was the number one suspect in Kelly’s disappearance.

Could you imagine dating someone and then finding out that not only are they dating other people, but that they probably murdered somebody? Like, a girl’s missing that they were dating?

Well, and then also there were hard drives of child pornography in his house, which is another reason he’s looking suspicious.

That would just hurt. That would be unbelievable at first—like, what?

Well, as you’re saying, when she discovers all this, she is more than happy to come in and talk to police about it.

So Megan, the girlfriend of four years, said that on the night of October 11th—hours after Kelly was last seen—she and Chris had dinner plans for 7:30 p.m., so this is the next day.

According to her, Chris showed up an hour late to dinner, and over the course of the night, he was acting very weird and nervous.

Then he came back to her house, and he was actually sweating so much that she had to change her sheets the next morning because he was so sweaty.

In the days that followed, she just noticed a few odd things around Chris's apartment—like the fact that the shower curtain, a small rug, and a few decorative hand towels were all missing from his guest bathroom. This is the same guest bathroom that the cadaver dog, Molly, would hit on a few days later.

She also realized that Chris's travel golf bag, which was always annoyingly sitting in the living room, was now gone. This is something she remembered very clearly since that stupid bag was something she had to basically climb over anytime she wanted to go to the guest bathroom. It was an annoyance to her and their relationship—and now it’s gone.

But there was another strange detail she told police. She said that she and Chris had been having problems and had been arguing about a job opportunity she wanted to take back in Denver, Colorado. But Chris was very adamant that there was nothing she could do to convince him to move west. So basically, he said it’s me or the job.

So inevitably, Megan turned down the job and chose to stay with Chris instead. And then he ends up being a murderer. And that’s crazy—but that sucks.

On the morning of October 12th, when the two went to brunch, Chris told her something strange. Again, this is literally days after Kelly went missing. He asks her, “Hey, is that job in Colorado still on the table? Maybe we should just move there. Maybe we should just move there together. I’ll go with you. You can take the job. I’ll sacrifice for you. We can move there.”

So once Megan learns about all of this, she’s like, “Oh, he wasn’t being nice—he killed someone.”

Even more suspicious—and since detectives had been wondering how Chris got Kelly out of the apartment after he killed her—once they talk to Megan, they’re like, “We think it was the missing golf bag.”

So investigators go back through all the footage from the apartment complex to see if they can catch Chris moving that bag in the hours after her disappearance. But they can’t. And that’s because apparently there are not a lot of cameras in this apartment complex. There are none in Chris’s hallway, none in the elevators going down to the parking garage. There are cameras inside the garage, but none of them caught Chris on film with this golf bag.

Now whether Chris knew this, or he just got lucky, is unclear. But detectives start to piece together a timeline through all of their witnesses and the evidence gathered so far.

On Friday morning, October 11th, at 10:06 a.m., they see Chris standing by the driver’s side door of his vehicle. Again, no golf bag. But he then leaves the building at 10:08 a.m., and it’s around that exact time that Kelly’s phone goes dead—likely turned off.

Just 16 minutes after that, Chris is back in the parking garage. His car is parked, and he’s standing behind his trunk, which is open. Detectives think they can spot a gray or silver object lying inside the trunk—one that looks like the golf bag.

The videos go on to show Chris coming and going a bunch of other times that day. Remember, these are not perfect surveillance videos—they’re having to piece it together with different images.

They can basically just tell that he’s loading things into his car and leaving, loading things in and leaving. Then at 6:16 p.m., he leaves and doesn’t come back for the night. As we know, two hours later he shows up an hour late to dinner with Megan, his girlfriend.

The reason police think he was so nervous and sweaty that night was because they believe he still hadn’t found a place to dump Kelly’s body. They think it was sitting in the trunk of his car outside Megan’s apartment.

He’s with his girlfriend because he needs an alibi. He can’t just no-show, and he has a body in the car. He’s so nervous because he needs to go get rid of this body.

When he wakes up the next day, he’s got to do something about it. That’s when he tells Megan a story. He says there’s this little cheese shop that he loves called the Mouse House, and it’s 80 miles away from Milwaukee. He says, “I have to go pick up this specific cheese before your parents come into town, because I want them to try it.”

Mind you, this place is a bit of a tourist trap. There’s way better cheese in Milwaukee that sells the same kind of cheese he’s looking for. So this doesn’t really make sense to detectives. They’re like, if he wanted this specific cheese, there was no reason to drive 80 miles. This is more of a tourist thing, not like someone who lives here type of thing.

So they think this was Chris’s excuse to get out of town and find a place to dump the body. And while he does get half a pound of cheese, Chris makes another stop along that drive too—to a Sports Authority, where he buys some new sneakers.

Police are able to map all of this out because Chris used his credit card that day, which told them exactly where he was and at what time. And they realize all those timestamps add up to the time he was gone, aside from about 90 minutes where they don’t know where he was.

Which is plenty of time to get rid of a body, and then go buy some cheese for your alibi, get some new sneakers because your old ones are probably covered in evidence.

So now they have an area to at least search for Kelly’s body. They’re like, however far you can drive in 90 minutes, this is where we’re searching. Which—that’s a large area. It’s going to take some time.

Meanwhile, Chris stands trial for those other charges—the child pornography and the drug possession—in November 2014.

So time is moving on. It’s very obvious that police and prosecutors are waiting for a body. They don’t want to charge Chris until they find Kelly’s body. So they’re waiting, which is taking years.

So 2014 goes by. He’s sentenced to 19 years in jail for the drug and child pornography charges. But they still haven’t charged him for murder.

Then in May 2015, everything changes.

He got 19 years for the drugs, or is it mainly the child pornography? I’m going to assume they’re hoping they can put him in jail and find the body in 19 years and hopefully charge him for murder.

So yes—does he deserve 19 years for having child pornography? In my opinion, 100%. But is that normal?

No, I don’t think so, because I don’t think that’s the usual. Usually, unfortunately, there’s many cases where it’s like 1 to 3 years for child pornography.

Yeah, I'm guessing the judge was like, "Oh, well, we think he killed someone with the DA. Let's go maximum sentence — we'll go max until we see if we can find anything."

Right, so in May 2015, their— I mean, I'm assuming—alleged plan changes. I mean, if you're the number one suspect in a murder case, I don't think it's that crazy that they're like, "Well, we're going to give you the maximum on another sentence." I wish they actually did that for everyone who is a suspect in a murder case.

Yeah, because oftentimes we see killers who only serve one to two years for a crime and then kill again because they're let out.

So, on May 1st, a man named Christopher Fountain is out for a walk in an area about 45 miles west of Milwaukee. He's strolling along an embankment on this dead-end road when he spots something he thinks looks like a deer’s leg bone. So he's like—he’s just a curious little adventurer—he goes over to see this bone. And when he gets closer, he realizes that there's actually a human skull.

Oh my god.

Lying next to this bone.

That's crazy to stumble upon. If I saw a human skull, honestly, I think that the first thought would be, "This is fake." Like, no way. Like, "This is a Halloween skull." I wouldn't think it was real.

Well, here's the thing: most of the skeletal remains are intact. It's basically a human skeletal body.

Oh my gosh.

There's no clothing around these bones. Now, of course, this guy calls local authorities, who rush out. They collect the remains, and six days later they run them against a set of dental records because, obviously, they know that this is in the area where Kelly could have been dumped.

I just—unfortunately, I don't like saying that. That's a horrible word. But I mean, she's a real person, and like, how horrible that her body was just dumped somewhere.

I know. It's gross. But they know that this is within the area they’ve been looking. So they run Kelly's dental records — and it's a match.

Now, unfortunately, it has been over a year and a half since Kelly was last seen. So you're not going to get a whole lot out of an autopsy. They aren't able to conclusively say how Kelly died.

And unfortunately as well, there's no physical evidence found at the scene either. There’s no golf bag, no shower curtain, no hand towels — like, nothing from the apartment is found with the remains.

But there is one clue they are able to work off of, and that is the position in which Kelly's body was found. Her right leg was sort of rotated inward, and her left arm, strangely, was kind of tangled around her back — which, to detectives, tells them something. It looks like Kelly’s body was stuffed into some kind of container and then got stiff like that.

Yeah, the golf bag.

Like a golf bag.

The biggest kicker? Kelly was found near the area that Chris went shopping for shoes and cheese that day — which means their theory that Chris had used this trip as an excuse to get rid of Kelly’s body… meaning that Kelly’s body actually did probably sit in his car in an apartment complex — that theory was likely correct.

Now that there is a body to add to the list of evidence against Chris, the district attorney feels ready to move forward with the case. But remember, Chris is behind bars already, serving time for those child pornography and drug possession charges, so there's not really a huge rush to get him off the streets because, at the moment, he's not really a danger to society.

Which is why, instead of charging him immediately, the DA actually takes their time putting this case together against him, trying to make it airtight. They're like, "We are going to take time to investigate, find as much evidence as possible, make sure our case is airtight, charge him, and prosecute him."

So they re-interview all the witnesses, take a second, third, fourth look at all of the evidence, and speak to all of the women they can from Chris's past. That process takes them another two years before they officially charge Chris Zako with first-degree reckless homicide, hiding a body, and they also seem to have found a likely cause of death because they charge him with strangulation and suffocation.

So there's evidence the public doesn't know about at this point, but it won't be another year and a half after this before he goes to trial.

Meanwhile, Chris is having a hard time staying out of trouble even behind bars. As he's awaiting trial, one of Chris's cellmates speaks up saying Chris came to him and asked for help with getting rid of another ex-girlfriend on the outside.

So, question: do you think that cellmate spoke up because they get something from it?

Yes. This is actually like a huge problem. I feel like I would only speak up if it was like, "You'll get out of jail today."

Well, people think that they actually need to stop doing this—letting informants get things—because then informants just lie to get things. They’re like, "Oh, you're on trial for murder? Let me go over here."

Oh, that's a good point. And say, "Oh, he actually said this to me. I'll testify to it as long as I get moved up to a better prison, or I get this, or I get that."

Yeah, because how do you know if they're lying or not? And they're all in prison.

So, no offense, but the informant system is actually a big issue in getting false convictions because someone said he did it, and that person is actually innocent.

So it’s not something we should kind of get rid of in my personal opinion. I never thought about it that way.

Uh, trials, but um... or just as long as they're not promised anything. Like, if they just come forward and aren't given anything for it, then that's great—you’re just another eyewitness at that point.

Yeah, but then they won't come forward, because why come forward for the goodness of their heart?

Oh yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

So his inmate’s like, "Yeah, he's trying to hire a hitman to murder an ex-girlfriend on the outside."

And they think it’s Megan because Megan’s actually planning on testifying. So the girlfriend of four years is going to testify against him.

So the inmate’s like, "I'm pretty sure that’s who he’s trying to get rid of."

He even goes as far as to talk prices with this guy, says, "I’ll pay you $2,500 to $5,000."

So Chris gets another charge added to his already long list: felony intimidation of a witness.

But that’s not the only thing this former cellmate had to tell police. Apparently, Chris had told him exactly why he was behind bars. The inmate said, “He told me exactly what happened to Kelly — like the murder, every detail, everything.”

So here’s what this inmate tells police: Chris claimed that before Kelly died, the two of them were having rough sex in his apartment. Eventually, he took things too far and ended up killing Kelly by accident. He panicked when he realized Kelly was no longer breathing, so he carried her to the bathroom and tried to resuscitate her. But when he realized Kelly was already dead, he tried to do something with her body. He wrapped her in the guest bathroom shower curtain and used the garbage chute to get her body to the first level unnoticed.

You heard that correctly, which makes sense because the cadaver dog did catch a scent at the garbage chute. It could explain why Chris was never seen carrying the golf bag out of the building.

Now, we should take this with a grain of salt for obvious reasons, but I do think this is maybe the closest to the truth we’ll ever get when it comes to how Kelly died.

I will say, though, those charges of felony intimidation are later dropped because of lack of evidence. So this informant—I don’t know—they don’t trust him enough to come forward and testify.

But I think it is important to include that Chris is not only allegedly trying to buy a hitman from prison, he’s also caught trying to buy pornographic materials, which are off-limits in prison. And he was specifically asking for choking pornography and younger ones.

Okay, so he’s asking for the same thing he was caught with on those hard drives that weren’t his. He’s asking for those again.

This guy deserves to—so even behind bars, Chris has not been able to control his issues or his urges. And he definitely has something with choking.

And I do think—even the state thinks it’s possible that she was killed accidentally during choking because of the videos they have—it’s definitely possible.

Well, what’s interesting, too, is if he would have just called the cops, he probably would have just gotten manslaughter, which is like five to ten years. He could have... I mean, not saying that’s what should have happened because he obviously sounds like a horrible person—well, he killed her. I mean, he took it too far. This isn’t supposed to happen.

But it’s just interesting that if it didn’t go through this, and he called the cops, he might have been able to get lesser charges for sure.

Probably would have.

Yeah, I’m still glad they caught him for the child porn out of—

Yeah, no, for sure.

So the trial comes, and while there is no smoking gun in this case—like, they didn’t find anything with the body—there are a lot of little things that obviously point in his direction. And the defense tries to call a lot of these little things into question. They’re like, “Listen, there’s no solid evidence here.”

They question the cadaver dog. They also point to the fact that Kelly was said to have had other partners while she was with Chris. And why didn’t police look into any of them?

Now, in the end, the jury didn’t buy it. On October 5th, 2018, they find Chris guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to an additional 31 years behind bars with no credit for time served.

So to this day, Chris denies having anything to do with Kelly’s death. While he does plan to appeal his conviction, as it stands, he won’t be eligible for release until 2065, when he is 90 years old.

So if there is anything we can learn from a man like Chris, it is to always trust those red flags—whether that’s a new relationship or even one you have been in for years. When you see a warning sign, go with your gut.

And I am not blaming Kelly; I am saying that people do tend to show their true selves eventually because sometimes it is hard to know the real person you’re sleeping next to.

If Kelly’s story has moved you, you can actually make a donation to the Sjouraer Family Peace Center, where her family previously set up a fundraiser for women impacted by violence, which we will be donating to. I want to include it for you guys as well. You can visit the site at www.familycenter.org to help women impacted by violence.

Her family has kind of advocated around this. I do think it’s amazing—I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again—when there are little pieces of light that come out of such a dark thing that happens in the world.

But yeah, that is the case of Kelly Dwire. You know, I’m sick of people dying. I know I’m sick of people getting killed. It’s just... it’s so... I don’t even... yeah, frustrating. It’s just like—

Because here’s the thing: I will never not be an “eye for an eye” type of person. I want to be like—I mean, I don’t even want to do this—but I think if I’m playing devil’s advocate, it’s like, oh, it could have been an accident.

But I’m like, I don’t know, bro. Like, you had child pornography on hard drives in your house—not just like on dark websites—but you had it on hard drives in your house.

I lowkey just think you’re a dangerous person. Like, I don’t—I don’t know. I think you’re just a dangerous person. I don’t think it’s that shocking that you ended up hurting someone.

I don’t know. I agree.

All right, you guys, that is our episode for this week and we will see you next time with another one.

I love it.

I hate it.

Goodbye.

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