Thirty-five years ago, on September 26, 1957, a man walking down Buell Avenue in Joliet found a woman’s shoe. It was just after midnight, and it is possible that at that moment the inner sole was still warm. The man put the shoe, a stylish black patent-leather pump, on the trunk of a 1955 Chrysler and continued on his way. The following morning, the shoe’s partner was found on a nearby lawn by two printers from the Spectator, a thriving Joliet weekly. They were looking for a 47-year-old journalist named Molly Zelko, the woman who had been wearing those high heels the night before.
The nature of the relationship between Zelko and McCabe is now difficult to spell out precisely. In a series of articles filed in 1978, Joliet Herald-News reporters John Whiteside and Lonny Cain portrayed Zelko as fiercely loyal. They quoted one subject who had known both Zelko and McCabe: “You’ve heard of a one-man dog? Well, Molly was a one-man woman. She would bite anyone McCabe didn’t like. You couldn’t separate the two.”
Zelko trusted only a handful of policemen, chief among them William Daggett, who had once worked for the Spectator as a newsboy. After joining the force he was decorated for bravery on several occasions; he attained the rank of captain by the time he was 31. Daggett often visited Zelko at the Spectator and was suspected of providing her with information about the local syndicate.
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A great flurry of activity followed. There was an air-and-ground search of a five-county area. The civil defense searched water-filled quarries. The Road Runners, an organization of motorcycle and hot rod drivers, drove the back roads. The city manager offered to provide workers from the water and street departments to help in the search.
