Arthur Ream

Investigation of 22-year-old cold case finally comes to an end

By Erin McClary
C & G Staff Writer

MOUNT CLEMENS — Convicted killer Arthur Ream was sentenced to life in prison without parole for the death of a 13-year-old Eastpointe girl who went missing 22 years ago.

Cindy Zarzycki’s body was exhumed on July 9 behind a rural residential property in Macomb Township. Ream, 59, told investigators before leading them to the site that he’d dug a shallow grave near a bank of the Clinton River, behind a friend’s property where he used to keep bees in the spring of 1986.

Before that, however, and without a body, a jury found Ream guilty of Zarzycki’s murder. He was convicted of first-degree murder on June 18, just more than six months after Eastpointe police reopened the decades-old case.

As the case unfolded, investigators found out that Zarzycki actually planned to meet Ream, the father of a boy she had just begun seeing, at a Dairy Queen on Nine Mile Road April 20, 1986. He was supposed to drive her to a party for his son. But unbeknown to her, there was no party.

Instead, Ream allegedly raped, killed and eventually buried Zarzycki more than 20 miles from her home — and kept his secret safe for more than two decades.

But at an Aug. 7 sentencing in Judge Mary Chrzanowski’s Macomb County Circuit courtroom, he told Zarzycki’s family that he would share the details of his secret with the victim’s father through a letter he wrote before the sentencing.

Ream told the courtroom that “not everything is the way it seems.”

“I think it was unfair for prosecutors to accuse me of raping Cindy,” he said. “I’m willing to take any test … to let them know I did not rape Cindy; I did not touch her in any sexual way.”

Despite Chrzanowski’s denial to the defense for any motions to appeal at the time, Ream still asked to share the details of that day in April 22 years ago with Zarzycki’s parents.

“Cindy’s father and mother deserve to know everything I know,” Ream said. “I had a lot of things I wanted to say, but I’m not good at public speaking.”

He said the media doesn’t have a right to know, and asked Chrzanowski not to read the letter aloud.

Chrzanowski thanked Ream for showing her and investigators where he hid Zarzycki’s body, as well as for writing the detailed letter to her father.

“It took a big man to do that,” she said. “Because you didn’t have to.”

But Zarzycki’s family and friends will never let up.

“My family has lost a daughter, a sister, a cousin and a friend,” said Cindy’s brother, Edward Zarzycki, who was 12 years old when she went missing.

He spoke of all the things his sister could’ve amounted to: a doctor, a teacher, a mother.

“Because of this selfish man, we’ll never get to know.”

Edward Zarzycki told the courtroom that for years, his family didn’t move in hopes that Cindy might come home; that they never changed their phone number in case she might call. He’ll never forget the many nights he spent waiting by the phone, thinking those prank callers might have been his sister.

He accused Ream of taking advantage of an innocent girl who trusted him.

“You, Ream, are not a man,” he continued. “You are the opposite.”

Zarzycki’s sister, Connie Johnson, said the family was appalled to see Ream show no regret or remorse for what he did, and asked Chrzanowski to sentence him to life behind bars “without a chance of parole — ever.”

“Thank you for everyone that did not give up on my baby sister,” Johnson said. “Now our family knows the truth.”

Ream will spend the rest of his life incarcerated by the Michigan Department of Corrections. He had been in and out of jail serving time for other convictions of criminal sexual conduct before Eastpointe police reopened the case.