Molly Zelko: My Thoughts On Joliet's True-Crime Podcast

JOLIET, IL — Have you had the chance to listen to all eight episodes of the Molly Zelko true-crime podcast yet? If not, you should. You really should.

Joliet Area Historical Museum executive director Greg Peerbolte, along with former Joliet Herald-News reporter Lonny Cain, deserve major props for doing a fantastic job of bringing Joliet's most enduring mystery back to life.

They spent three years producing and fine-tuning this podcast and the quality shows.

Who's Molly Zelko?

Older Jolietans know the story basics, but I'm guessing many people who have moved into the area in recent decades have no idea that one of the nation's biggest true-crime mysteries happened here in Joliet.

On Sept. 25, 1957, Joliet residents in the area of Buell Avenue heard a loud late-night scream and they shrugged it off, thinking it was a bunch of teenagers just up to mischief.

What really happened remains a source of mystery to this day.

Zelko, the 47-year-old bull-headed editor of The Spectator, Joliet's weekly print newspaper, disappeared from her driveway moments after returning home after a late night at the newspaper. She was never seen alive again. Her body was never found.

One of the most intriguing parts of the mystery is that Zelko eerily predicted her own demise.

She feared the underworld powers of Joliet might take her out as she and her newspaper continued to expose more political corruption in Joliet, particularly tied to, of all things, pinball machines.

She warned others that she would leave her high-heeled black shoes behind, as a sign, if something bad ever happened to her.

What will you learn if you listen to The Spectator podcast?

At the bottom of this column, I've included all the links to the podcast. I highly encourage you to make the time to listen, digest the podcast and then ask yourself: did powerful underworld forces tied to the likes of Chicago mobster boss Sam Giancana have something to do with her demise?

Now, here's my CliffsNotes version of each episode:

Episode 1: We learn about Molly Zelko, the weekly newspaper known as The Spectator and how Joliet was a seedy community in the 1940s and 1950s where dirty business practices and political corruption involving bid rigging were intertwined. The local police were also in on the bribes and corruption.

Episode 2: The introduction of Bill McCabe, Molly Zelko's boss, who was publisher of Joliet's anti-corruption weekly newspaper The Spectator. McCabe was like a father figure to Zelko at work and the podcast suggests the two may have been lovers. In 1948, at age 64, McCabe was beaten by four men using clubs with big spikes. He was left for dead on the side of a road. He was bleeding, battered and never the same. By then, McCabe's newspaper had been involved in a vocal anti-gambling crusade and there was a strong belief by McCabe and others that mafia characters from Detroit came to Joliet to send McCabe a message: he better back off his newspaper crusading.

Episode 3: The introduction of Francis "The Thin Man" Curry, Joliet's reputed mobster boss during the 1940s and 1950s. Curry, who lived on Western Avenue, had close ties to Al Capone and his brother Ralph. Curry oversaw Joliet's gambling rackets from La Porte, Indiana to Aurora. Curry also had a reputation of being a "camera smasher," meaning he did not like being photographed by the newspapers.

Episode 4: Future presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy visits Joliet to participate in an unsuccessful dig for Molly Zelko on a farm property near Stateville Correctional Center. Career criminal Jimmy "The Green Hornet" Rini, a low-level syndicate bank robber, gave a confession implicating himself in Zelko's kidnapping and killing. However, the effort to find Zelko's body was a complete failure, and Rini later recanted the confession, claiming he made up the whole story about burying her body and having doused it with acid. Episode 4 is a must-listen!

Episode 5: This episode gets into the more personal, human side of Molly Zelko, who never married, never had children and was married to her job at the newspaper, according to her family. Zelko was also flashy. She wore mink coats and a giant 17-carat diamond ring on her hand. Later in the episode, you learn there was mixed sentiment in Joliet after Zelko disappeared. According to the podcast, some members of the police department lamented, "I wouldn't spend five minutes looking for that bitch."

Episode 6: This is a really compelling episode. It's about how Herald-News reporters Cain and John Whiteside came to be involved in producing what turned into a two-week expose on the Molly Zelko story, in 1978, some 21 years after she vanished. Episode 6 includes raw footage of a woman under hypnosis, telling Dr. George Honiotes about the four well-dressed men she saw pull up "in a big, black car" late at night across from her house. The men opened the trunk and removed a body wrapped in a rug or tarp and put the body into a drainage ditch being excavated on Stryker Avenue and left.

Episode 7: This podcast goes into more in-depth about the underworld in the late 1950s under Sam Giancana and how Ted Link, an investigative reporter at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, actually had produced some of the best national exposes on Molly Zelko over the years. Link had close connections with mafia types. He reported that his sources told him through the grapevine that "she was murdered ... and her body was disposed of in an abandoned mine near Coal City, Illinois. There are a number of water-filled mines in that area."

Episode 8: This podcast touches on why Molly Zelko's case was never solved and what were some of the undercurrents going on around Joliet in 1957 that may have motivated someone to harm Zelko. The episode leaves listeners asking themselves the following questions: why did Zelko disappear? 2) Who had the power to make it happen? 3) Who had the power to cover it up?

So you haven't listened to any of the Molly Zelko podcast episodes?

That's OK. Here's the link to get started. And when you finish, feel free to let me know whether you believe Molly Zelko is still buried on Stryker Avenue or whether you're open to the possibility she's buried in concrete boots in an open sandpit down by Coal City.

I'm curious what you think happened.