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Dateline NBC

Disappearance at the Dairy Queen

Dateline NBC

NBC News

True Crime, Culture, Social, Society & Culture, News

4.438K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2022

⏱️ 80 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this Dateline classic, Dennis Murphy reports on the mysterious cold case of 13-Year-Old Cindy Zarzycki who disappeared one day in 1986 after telling friends she was meeting someone at the local Dairy Queen. Originally aired on NBC on April 17, 2009.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

She is meeting a friend and they're meeting at the dairy queen and they're going to go to church.

0:14.0

She's your daughter, she's your sister, she's 13 years old and she disappears.

0:23.0

I had a birthday cake and nobody would hold the candles. My chief, through this box on my desk, he says this is an old file, I want you to solve it.

0:33.0

He promised me he says I will not give up, do we find Sydney?

0:38.0

I took that file home with me almost every single night and just kept rereading it. There was more to it, you could see that.

0:45.0

There's the seeker card, he says you must be the seeker. The person of interest at this time was Art Reem.

0:52.0

I'm not going to lie to you but I'm not going to tell you what you want to know.

0:56.0

When he wouldn't answer, when he wouldn't elaborate, we knew we were on to something.

1:02.0

We weren't supposed to find her that day but I'll tell you she was calling to us.

1:14.0

Do you remember making mixtape cassettes for your friends? All these years later that's something a best friend recalls about Cindy.

1:21.0

Dance music, she loved the dance.

1:24.0

Maybe the soundtrack to your life in the middle 80s was like Cindy's Arzicis.

1:29.0

Cindy Lopper, Motley Crew, and especially hometown favorite Madonna.

1:34.0

The older sister she swapped clothes with still laughs about it.

1:38.0

We had a song, I still remember every move to this day. Madonna's borderline. And Cindy and I would dance that song over and over upstairs.

1:47.0

In the middle 80s a kid like Cindy didn't live in a big universe.

1:52.0

Herse was a blue collar Detroit suburb known back then as East Detroit.

1:56.0

Neighbors mostly assembled cars or stamped out the parts for them.

2:02.0

The borders of this teenage girl were home, school, church, and the mall for movies, meeting boys and messing around.

2:10.0

In the warm months there were rundown ball fields for softball games, a family passion.

2:15.0

And of course there was the friendly dairy queen down the street after softball.

2:20.0

Eddie juniors the kid brother.

...

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