WARNING: Don’t Watch Before Bed!! DON’T GOOGLE HIS Name! True Crime Documentary
Breaking news now at noon. Nearly 4 years after Kelly Dwyer went missing, her body was discovered in 2015. Charges now filed in her murder. Tom Durian is going over the criminal complaint. He’s live in the newsroom right now. Tom, what have you discovered so far? Well, Vincent and Lisa, Chris Sacco was in a relationship with Kelly Dwyer at the time of her disappearance.
He was arrested and convicted on unrelated child pornography charges and sent to prison. Now, in 2017, he has been charged with her murder. The lengthy criminal complaint within the last hour charges Sacco with first-degree reckless homicide, hiding a corpse, and strangulation and suffocation. I’m Detective Tammy Tramell McClain, and I work for the Milwaukee Police Department as a detective.
So, way back in October of 2013, you do the first interview of Chris Sacco. Was he concerned about his girlfriend, Kelly? No, he showed no emotion, did not ask any questions about her, really didn’t seem concerned about where she was. While I’m speaking with him, I get a text message from one of the other investigators who had been watching video downstairs with the manager.
The security camera video, the surveillance video of of the whole complex. Yes. And he simply just says in the text, she doesn’t come out. Before we get started, please take a moment to support the channel. Hit subscribe, drop a like, and tell me in the comments where you’re watching from and what the weather’s like there.
It honestly helps more than you might think. Your support allows us to keep telling these stories the way they truly deserve to be told. 27-year-old Kelly Dwy had been living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for the past 5 years. She was always busy and incredibly social, and while working three jobs at the same time, she still made plenty of time for friends, soaking up the nightlife and the vibe of local bars and restaurants.
Her father, Tony, said that Milwaukee was where she truly seemed settled and happy. And even with her nonstop schedule, she always tried to stay in touch with him and talk whenever she could. I love you so much, and I’m so thankful for you and all the things. And I don’t want you to be sad cuz we’re not talking.
You can always pick up and call me. I’ll call you right back if I can’t pick up. But, yeah, I love you. I hope to hear from you in the Kelly’s aunt said she always saw the best in people. Her optimism was honestly contagious, and that’s a big reason she had so many friends. At 27, she loved traveling, and she was always super athletic.
When she was younger, she showed real promise in tennis, but later on, Kelly traded tennis for yoga and took a job as an educator at the athleisure brand Lululemon. At the same time, she taught yoga at a local studio and baby-sat a few days a week on the side. Like a lot of people, Kelly was very active on social media and dating apps.
She dated casually and enjoyed being single, but for about a year, she was regularly seeing a 38-year-old man named Chris Sacco. Kelly told her father, Tony, that she was crazy about this successful IT executive, a guy who had even worked in IT for the Yankees at one point. Then, for reasons nobody really knew, Chris left that job and moved to Milwaukee looking for something new.
Chris, like Kelly, was always on the go. He worked a lot, loved sports and travel, and just like her, he enjoyed Milwaukee’s nightlife. And on October 10th, 2013, Chris and Kelly went out for a night of bar-hopping, running into friends here and there as the night went on. Two days later, on October 12th, 2013, something happened that was totally out of character for Kelly.
She didn’t post anything on any of her social media. Usually, she posted every day, sometimes multiple times a day, so the complete silence felt weird. When people tried calling her, there was nothing. The calls went straight to voicemail. Later that day, Karen, Kelly’s manager at Lululemon, expected her to show up for her shift, but she never arrived.
Karen found Chris’s number, but he didn’t answer, so she left him a message. After a while, he called back and left a voicemail. He said he also hadn’t heard from Kelly in a few days, which was strange, but he guessed maybe she was mad at him, like maybe they had argued the night they were together.
Some of Kelly’s friends wondered the same thing, but beyond the total lack of social media activity, there were no bank card transactions and no activity from her phone. So, an investigation began. Kelly Dwy was officially considered missing. Chris said that Kelly came to his apartment on the 18th floor of Lafayette Tower, and a little before 8:00 p.m.
, they left together trying to get cocaine, but they didn’t end up finding any. After that, they went for drinks at a bar called Alium, just a few minutes’ walk from his place. Over the next few hours, they met up with different friends, people coming and going, alcohol flowing, everybody having a great time.
Kelly talked to one friend and said that the next day, October 11th, she had the day off. She wanted to work out and do laundry, but overall, she planned to keep it low-key. A little after 2:30 a.m., Chris and Kelly left and went back to Chris’s apartment. Surveillance cameras captured them entering the building, laughing and talking.
It looked like a high-energy conversation. Chris said they used drugs and had sex, and then fell asleep in his living room. Chris said that later, in the living room, Kelly left his apartment at 9:00 a.m. He said he knew the exact time because he heard the door close and checked the clock. After that, he claimed he never heard from her again.
He didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day, but he said he was distracted moving sports equipment to his mother’s house. Karen told police that for a few months before Kelly disappeared, she seemed not like herself. She had lost a lot of weight, and her usually flawless work started slipping. One time, Karen even sent her home because Kelly had this glassy stare and seemed out of it.
Kelly explained it by saying she’d taken allergy medication on an empty stomach, but police and friends both said that still didn’t explain how she could just vanish. Her parents, friends, and co-workers went out every day putting up flyers anywhere they could. Karen kept communicating with Chris trying to get answers.
She said that on the phone, he sounded willing to help, but when she met him in person at the store a few days later, it felt totally different. A few of Kelly’s co-workers gathered to hand out missing person flyers, and Karen said she had this strong physical reaction just being around Chris. He put his hand on her shoulder and told her, “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through.
” And sure, those words sound right, but this was the man Kelly had been seeing for almost a year, someone who should have been one of the closest people in her life. Karen expected those words to come from him, obviously. At the same time, Chris didn’t seem especially worried, and he didn’t seem like someone who needed comfort from others, either.
Pretty quickly, people started talking about Chris’s apartment. Tony, Kelly’s father, said Kelly was obsessed with Chris, but he personally never felt sure about him. From what he’d heard, they had been seeing each other for about a year, but Chris always felt hard to pin down, kind of elusive, like he was hiding parts of his life.
And later, it came out that Chris had secretly been in a relationship for 3 and 1/2 years with a woman named Megan. Megan believed they weren’t just exclusive, she thought they were headed toward marriage. Investigators spoke with Chris’s mother, Joyce, who confirmed that he had brought some belongings to her house, but she also said she had never even heard of Kelly. Chris had never mentioned her.
At this point, Chris was clearly on police radar. By all accounts, he was the last known person to have seen Kelly. The building had 28 security cameras, and it would have been basically impossible to leave without being captured on at least one of them. The cameras showed the pair entering the building just before 3:00 a.m.
And if Kelly truly left at 9:00 a.m., the way Chris claimed, then somewhere on that footage, she should have appeared. So, it was time to pull every video recording and go through it carefully. WISN 12 News Tima Fontenot is live on Milwaukee’s East Side with the details just in overnight. Tima? Well, we have just learned in the last hour that Kelly Dwyer’s mother plans to come to Milwaukee today and meet with the police between 10:30 and 11:00, and they do plan to speak to the media.
We will keep you covered on what happened. This is one of the many posters hanging up in numerous businesses here on the East Side of Milwaukee as the search for Dwyer continues. Now, this is the apartment building here at the intersection of Windsor and Prospect where Dwyer was last seen. Now, authorities have been searching for Kelly Dwyer.
This is the most awful, incredibly horrible thing anyone could ever go through. I don’t know where my baby is. Just over a week had passed since Kelly was officially reported missing, and police returned to Chris’s apartment once again, searching for any new clues. He still didn’t appear particularly worried, continuing to claim that their relationship had been far more casual than people were making it out to be.
Chris said that Kelly told others they were seeing each other several times a week, but he described the relationship as informal. At the same time, Kelly had referred to him as her boyfriend. He also told investigators that Kelly had been talking to other people and hadn’t deleted her dating app profiles. Chris even gave detectives several names of individuals he believed could be connected to her disappearance.
One of Kelly’s friends said it was clear she was far more emotionally invested in the relationship than Chris was. Kelly wanted something more serious, and realizing he didn’t feel the same way, she kept other options open and continued using dating apps from time to time. Chris admitted that they had used illegal substances together that morning, but he insisted nothing else criminal had happened.
According to him, Kelly left in the morning, and that was all he knew. While Chris was speaking with detectives, one of them received a message from an officer reviewing the building surveillance footage. The message was short and chilling. She didn’t leave. Not a single camera had captured Kelly exiting Chris’s building. The footage showed her entering, and that was it. Nothing after.
That discovery immediately raised serious alarm. After spotting illegal substances inside the apartment, police brought Chris to the station hoping to get more answers, but the interview ended quickly once he invoked his right to an attorney. investigators then obtained a search warrant and continued their work.
What they found went far beyond what they expected. In addition to a large amount of illegal drugs and related paraphernalia, they discovered electronic devices containing material that pointed to serious crimes. Law enforcement later said what they saw was deeply disturbing and extremely difficult to process.
They also found a video recorded without any clear consent from Kelly, raising serious questions about her condition and the circumstances under which it was filmed. Other devices contained images that suggested she was completely incapacitated. In the apartment’s bathroom, investigators found signs of extensive cleaning.
And inside Chris’s car, they recovered an item containing Kelly’s biological evidence. Investigators concluded that Chris was directly connected to Kelly’s disappearance. By that point, they already had enough grounds to arrest him on other charges, buying time as they continued building the case surrounding what had happened to Kelly.
child porn charges against Kelly Dwyer’s friend. He is not charged in her disappearance, but Chris Zacco is facing 17 new counts of having child pornography on his computer. Dwyer Eventually, new and serious charges against Chris Zacco came to light. He was not formally charged with Kelly’s disappearance itself, but he did face court on a number of other criminal counts.
He maintained that he was innocent. A month had passed since Kelly vanished. Her parents went to the media, announcing a reward for any information that could help bring answers. Mother has been in agony since her daughter vanished more than a month ago. It honestly gets harder every day to be hopeful. The longer it goes. Uh yes, it’s it’s very hard to remain hopeful.
It sounds like like cliche, but there are no words to say how horrible it is. I can’t believe that I’m still that I’ve survived a month without my daughter. Maureen Dwyer stood in front of a podium in the shadows of Chris Zacco’s condo. Surveillance video captured her daughter Kelly walking into the building last month, but sources tell us it doesn’t show her walking out.
It is frustrating, but we continue to hold out hope that we will locate her. Um and we’re not giving up. We’re still considering this a missing person’s investigation. Police believe Zacco may have been the last person to see her alive. Kelly’s mom talked about their relationship. Do you know that she talked about him? I mean, they had been seeing each other for almost a year.
So again, a $10,000 reward is now offered in the case. No conviction necessary. This family says that that money will go to whoever can provide information that lets them know what happened to Kelly. We’re live on the East Side tonight. Michelle Fiori, Today’s TMJ4. hope this helps. Thank you, Michelle. Megan, Chris’s long-term girlfriend, saw the news about his arrest and the fact that he’d been named a person of interest.
And that’s when she realized she had to come forward. Megan said she had seen Chris in the days after Kelly disappeared, and his behavior was, honestly, strange, to say the least. On October 11th, the very same day Chris and Kelly returned to his apartment, Megan was supposed to meet him for dinner at 7:30 p.m., but he showed up more than an hour late.
There was no real explanation, just vague comments about phone issues and missed calls. He seemed tense, nervous, constantly fiddling with his phone, barely talking at all. Police later examined his phone activity during that period and discovered that he had removed his SIM card for a total of about 17 hours, an unusually long time to deliberately stay off the grid.
After that odd dinner, Chris stayed the night at Megan’s place. She said he immediately changed the bedding and she had to remake the bed. At first, she thought maybe he wasn’t feeling well, like he had a fever or something. But then, just a few hours later, around 7:00 in the morning the same day Kelly was officially reported missing, Chris took a sudden trip, driving roughly 160 miles round trip.
He told Megan he wanted to buy cheese as a gift for her family. She was confused, like genuinely baffled. He came back later that evening and once again acted strangely, changing the bedding yet again. The following day, Chris and Megan went out for brunch. Megan said their relationship was already in a rough place, and she wasn’t even sure it had a future.
Chris had been dealing with health issues, and the intimacy between them had almost completely disappeared. Megan had family in Denver and had wanted to move there for a long time, but Chris had always been firmly against it. She had even taken a new job just to stay closer to him. But during that brunch, he suddenly changed his tune.
The move was now on the table, and he said he was ready for change. For Megan, that sudden shift was incredibly confusing. Investigators showed Megan photos from Chris’s apartment. She knew the place well, she’d been there many times. Megan confirmed that the shower curtain, towels, and bathroom rug were missing.
She also noticed something else. A large golf travel bag was gone. She said it had always been in the same spot before and was constantly in the way. She literally had to step over it to get to the bathroom. Now, it was nowhere to be seen. The investigation took another sharp turn when a specially trained dog was brought in. The dog alerted strongly to the apartment, especially Chris’s bed, the bathroom, the area near the trash chute in the hallway, the space near his parking spot, and the trunk of his car.
At that point, the worst fears were starting to feel very real. Investigators concluded that Kelly was likely no longer alive and that she may have been removed from the building in Chris’s vehicle. But where she was now, that part remained completely unknown. It’s been six long weeks since Kelly Dwyer disappeared.
Finally, her dad’s facing his greatest fear. Do you not think Kelly’s alive? [snorts] I don’t think she’s alive. I don’t think she’s alive. It’s getting harder every day. They’re frustrated with the investigation. I think the Milwaukee Police Department has some wonderful people working there, and I think their hearts are in the right place.
But for some particular reason, this case has not gotten the priority that it should. Kelly’s boyfriend has not been arrested in her disappearance. However, Chris Zacco has been charged with keeping a drug house and 17 counts of possessing child porn. Prosecutors asked for a quarter of a million dollars in bail, calling him a probable homicide suspect.
Everything points to the fact that he did do something. In my heart of hearts, I believe it’s he did something. Given the dog’s alert near the trash chute, investigators had to seriously consider the possibility that either Kelly or items connected to her may have ended up there that night. That realization led to a multi-day search at a landfill as detectives worked through the grim possibility piece by piece.
Milwaukee detectives will resume their search of a Menomonee Falls landfill for a fifth day today. They are still searching for any evidence in connection with the disappearance behind Kelly Dwyer. Authorities grew concerned that Chris might try to disappear, so his bond was increased.
Well, right now at 10:00, a judge more than tripled Chris Zacco’s bail today. Despite that, he was able to post bail and was released while awaiting trial. During his brief time in custody, another inmate later claimed that Chris made a confession during a private conversation. That inmate, Dontrell, said Chris tried to pull him into a discussion about violent acts involving a former partner, and that’s when he allegedly talked about Kelly.
However, those statements were never allowed into court and couldn’t be used by the prosecution. In the end, Chris pleaded guilty to the charges related to illegal substances, but he continued to deny the accusations involving possession of prohibited materials. Frayed in court documents as a wild guy using drugs and bondage during sex acts, Chris Zacco was rather subdued in the courtroom.
At the hearing, the defense gained something, time. They want more time for their experts to study Chris Zacco’s hard drive. Because of the nature of the alleged offenses, that analysis will require the expert to be I guess at the police department or at some facility the police department controls.
Judge Borowski agreed to give the defense a few extra days. In April 2014, with still no answers about Kelly’s whereabouts, her case was officially classified as a cold case. For her family and friends, that was absolutely devastating. Just the thought that her disappearance might never be solved brought an entirely new level of pain.
Today, a trial date has now been set for Chris Zacco. Maureen Dwyer got up at dawn to make sure she was at this court hearing for Chris Zacco. During the hearing, a June trial date was set. Although the charges don’t relate to Dwyer, Dwyer’s family is hopeful there’ll be some resolution soon. He did something to Kelly and we know we we want him to tell us about it.
He’s guilty as sin. And slow-moving process and he’s walking free while you know, Kelly’s body’s decomposing. A few months later, Chris was found guilty on 16 of the 17 counts related to possession of prohibited materials. During that trial, Kelly’s disappearance could not be mentioned at all. But once it came time for sentencing, prosecutor Sarah Hill made sure the court understood the broader context.
This was a factor that I believe matters when evaluating his character, she told the judge. Chris Zacco was sentenced to 19 years in prison. His mother, Joyce, continued to insist on his innocence. She claimed there was nothing unusual about what had been found on the devices, arguing that for someone who worked in IT, owning that kind of equipment wasn’t uncommon.
According to her, some of the technology had simply been taken from a previous job, and she said Chris couldn’t have known what was actually stored on those devices. Dwyer vanished from her boyfriend’s luxury high-rise 1 year ago this week. With the case now officially labeled a cold case and police resources shifting to other investigations, Kelly’s family hired a private investigator.
He immediately began searching in three major areas around Milwaukee. Former partners of Chris came forward and shared deeply disturbing accounts of their relationships with him. They described situations that began consensually, but escalated quickly into something dangerous. According to them, Chris repeatedly engaged in behavior that could have caused serious harm.
One woman said she nearly lost her life, and this happened just months before he began seeing Kelly. One former partner explained that she tried many times to get away, but couldn’t. At times, she said, he would deliberately restrict her breathing. She stayed, she admitted, because afterward he would praise her, tell her she had done everything right, and give her a sense of worth and validation, something she was desperately searching for at the time.
She also said he did things without her consent, and at one point she genuinely feared for her life, believing that any resistance could make things far worse. She described the experience as extremely traumatic and was so shaken by what happened that she asked for her name to be kept out of official records.
Investigators learned that Kelly had occasionally talked with friends and co-workers about enjoying a more unconventional personal life, but even taking that into account, what was found on Chris’s phone videos and photographs raised serious concerns and appeared to go far beyond anything consensual. Another former partner, known only as Miss C, told investigators she had met Chris through Craigslist.
She was looking for something casual with clearly defined roles and boundaries, but according to her, Chris very quickly began violating the rules they had agreed on. He ignored warning signs and the safe words they had established. It felt like he wanted to see how far he could push it, she said. She described one night when he physically restrained her, and that moment became a turning point.
After that, she never saw him again. Police and prosecutors ultimately concluded that the most logical explanation was that something very similar had happened to Kelly, and that this was how she likely died. If investigators assumed that her body had been moved on October 12th, the same day Chris claimed he drove to Madison, they were faced with searching a route spanning roughly 160 miles.
It was an enormous area. His bank records showed he purchased a pair of shoes on the drive back from Madison. It wasn’t much to go on, but it suggested she could be somewhere nearby. Before any large-scale search even began, a local resident made a call. He reported seeing what looked like a human skull tangled in thick brush along an embankment beside a remote rural road.
When authorities arrived, they discovered a full human skeleton almost completely intact, except for a few missing finger bones. The right leg was twisted inward, and the left arm was bent back behind the ribs and spine. Now, Dwyer says he’s not jumping to conclusions. 10 years of this entire thing has been so painful so long and impacted so many people that to have a gut reaction on any part of it is at best premature.
And uh I we do our best not to speculate. It’s been a year and a half. It’s a very, very long time. Now, Dwyer is waiting for a forensic odontologist to review old dental records to determine if the female skeleton with good teeth may be his firstborn. Certainly, it would be closure. The one goal that we’ve had since the beginning is to bring Kelly back to give her a respectful burial, funeral, an opportunity for her mother and her sister closure.
There was no clothing and no personal belongings found nearby. So, identification took several days, but on May 1st, 2015, dental records confirmed what everyone had feared. The remains were officially identified as Kelly Dwy. Their assumption about where she might be turned out to be right.
Kelly was found just a little over 10 miles from the location where Chris had purchased the shoes. was missing for a year and a half. And now her family has to suffer through a big waiting period until forensic analysis can determine how Kelly Dwyer died. 19 months had passed since Kelly disappeared, and after that much time, determining an exact cause of death was simply impossible.
Soil analysis showed that her body had remained in the same location for the entire duration. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and investigators from both Milwaukee and Jefferson Counties met to discuss evidence and where the investigation goes from here. There’s a lot of work to be done still, and we don’t have a lot of answers.
As investigators continue their work, friends and family remember Kelly. I’m sure it’s such a relief to her family to at least have some closure, so they can start their healing process. The investigation could now be reclassified as an active case involving a violent death. Over the next 2 years, investigators continued building evidence statements from former partners, phone data, and other materials, and eventually, they pieced together what they believed happened.
Sometime during the night of October 11th, between 3:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m., Kelly died. After that, her body was wrapped in items from the bathroom and placed inside a golf travel bag. That bag was taken down to the underground parking garage and loaded into a vehicle. At that exact moment, a large fan partially blocked the view of the surveillance camera pointed at the parking space.
At 10:06 in the morning, Chris drove out of the building. Two minutes later, Kelly’s phone, which has never been recovered, last connected to a cell tower near his apartment. If she had truly left earlier at 9:00 a.m., her phone could not have registered a signal at 10:22. Chris then returned to the building, and investigators believe that during those few minutes, he disposed of her phone.
Around 6:15 that evening, he left again, this time claiming he was taking sports equipment to his mother’s house. At 6:47, he removed the SIM card from his phone, cutting off communication for the next 17 hours. At 8:45 that night, more than an hour later, Chris met Megan and friends for dinner and stayed overnight at her place.
His car remained parked nearby, and according to investigators, Kelly’s body was still inside. At 7:30 the next morning, October 12th, Chris began a drive of roughly 160 miles to Madison, saying he was buying a gift for Megan’s parents. On the way back, he stopped in a wooded area and left her body behind using a black glove.
The golf bag, the bathroom items, and Kelly’s clothing were never found. By noon, with her body no longer in the car, Chris reinserted the SIM card into his phone and drove another 13 miles to a store where he purchased a pair of shoes. After that, he began receiving calls and messages, including from Karen, Kelly’s manager.
He even sent a few messages to Kelly’s phone, asking if she was okay. He then returned to Megan’s place, stayed the night again, and the following day they went out for brunch. That was when he brought up the idea of moving together. On May 8th, 2017, almost exactly 2 years after Kelly’s body was found, breaking news finally came in.
Nearly 4 years after Kelly Dwyer went missing, her body was discovered in 2015. Charges now filed in her murder. Chris Sacco was charged with first-degree reckless homicide, strangulation, and hiding a corpse. As I’ve briefly read through the criminal complaint, the Milwaukee County DA’s office has spent time gathering at least five other women that Sacco had previous relationships with and laying out a pattern of sexual deviance.
Now, I’m continuing to dig deeper into this criminal complaint here. It is long, 16 pages. a bit of a jigsaw It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and there were a lot of pieces that were always available to us. It was just uh ultimately learning how each piece fit with the others, and I think there’s an overwhelming amount of information in the complaint that uh indicates essentially that we eliminated about every other conceivable suspect, um and uh that this individual clearly uh had the opportunity and uh by all accounts the uh you know, committed this uh this act.
In terms of what actual evidence will get in front of a jury, I would say that that’s going to be a pretty good fight, and I would think a number of a number of things listed I could be wrong, but I would think a number of these things listed uh are not going to find their way in front of that jury panel, which arguably makes uh already circumstantial case more suspect.
Chris maintained that he was completely innocent on all charges, and both sides eventually agreed on a trial date. One detective openly acknowledged that the case would be challenging to present in court, but still believed it was a strong one. This is a very unusual case. he said. It’s built entirely on circumstantial evidence.
It’s the kind of case where you have to read between the lines. Chris’s father, like his mother Joyce, continued to defend him. His father argued, if you assume my son has above-average intelligence, then considering what investigators claim he supposedly did to Miss Dwy, wouldn’t he have gotten rid of anything illegal or incriminating long before trial even began? Still, Chris ran into trouble once again when prohibited materials were discovered in his jail cell and confiscated.
Details shared by people who take the stand are painful to hear for Kelly Dwyer’s family. Today, friends of Dwyer took the stand, as well as more MPD investigators. Karen Horton was Kelly Dwyer’s boss at Lululemon, who eventually found Chris Sacco’s number and called him after Dwyer didn’t show up for work.
Karen says Sacco came to Lululemon shortly before a group was meeting to post flyers with Kelly’s photo. Sacco didn’t stay to help. And said, “I’m so sorry for what you’re going through.” And at that point, I just again got a very strong body sensation and thought like, “I don’t trust him.” At least twice he had asked um if police looked at the videos, the surveillance tapes from the apartment.
MPD Detective Eric Gulbranson shared some of the surveillance video from Sacco’s apartment building garage. Opens the trunk and then he will grab the bag that he is pushing this in. Objection. Attorneys for Zacco argue that the cameras don’t show everything. Speculation is not enough and evidence does not directly link Zacco to Dwyer’s death.
Chris did not testify at trial. At the same time, his defense team seemed to have a response ready for nearly every argument the prosecution put forward and they projected just as much confidence in their position. The defense acknowledged that Chris’s phone had been off with the SIM card removed for 17 hours but argued that it was nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence.
During that same window of time, Chris used his credit card to purchase shoes and the defense raised a pointed question. If he was tech-savvy enough to avoid being tracked through his by using a credit card? It was undisputed that Kelly was never captured on camera leaving the building.
Every exit was monitored as were all parking areas. There was no footage of her walking out anywhere. That meant the only way her body could have been removed was inside the golf travel bag that later disappeared. The defense emphasized that Chris himself was never caught on camera loading that bag either.
On the surveillance footage, he’s only seen driving, entering, and exiting the building. A truck blocked the camera’s view of his parking space at the exact moment the bag could have been loaded and to complicate things further, there were no cameras near the elevator that would have been used to access the lower level. Prosecutors argued that Chris’s departure at 10:06 in the morning was most likely connected to disposing of Kelly’s phone.
When he returned less than 15 minutes later, he briefly opened the trunk and a white or grayish object could be seen inside. According to the prosecution, that object matched the description of the missing golf travel bag. They also pointed out that a specially trained dog alerted precisely in that area of the garage and inside Chris’s vehicle.
Prosecutors stressed that even if the exact moment the bag was placed into the car wasn’t caught on video, there was still ample evidence that it happened. Megan had seen the bag. Investigators concluded that Kelly was inside it and that it had been in the trunk of Chris’s car.
Testimony came from Megan, detectives, and others who had known and interacted with Kelly. After 9 days, both sides rested their cases and after just 2 hours of deliberation, the jury returned with a verdict. On three, we the jury find the defendant Chris Zacco guilty of strangulation and suffocation. Today on Live at 4, a jury found Chris Zacco guilty in the death of Kelly Dwyer.
Almost 5 years after she was last seen, he was found guilty on all charges. During sentencing, the defense continued to argue that everything that happened between them had been consensual and that Kelly had returned to his apartment willingly that morning. The defense asked for a sentence of 22 years in prison but the judge firmly disagreed.
The judge said that the way Chris conducted himself from the very beginning to the very end told him everything he needed to know about his character. Taking into account the crimes Chris was already serving time for, the judge stated that a sentence of 22 years posed far too great a risk to the public.
In fact, he even considered imposing a harsher sentence than what the prosecution had requested. He deserves to live a long, long life in jail. Hopefully tortured by the choices he’s made. Along with her father and sister, Kelly Dwyer’s mother asked the judge for the maximum sentence. When your daughter goes missing for a year and a half with no clue as to where she is, that is torture beyond belief.
The most aggravating factor is not only taking the life of that child but also of trying to hide it. In a demonic way. The judge also made a point to emphasize that even if Kelly or Chris’s former partners shared certain personal preferences, that in no way excused how they were treated. Safety, mutual respect, clear boundaries, and consent had to come first and according to the judge, Chris repeatedly failed on all of those fronts.
The court noted that he could have stopped. He could have sought help. At the very least, he had options and he chose none of them. Instead, he continued what he was doing, then tried to cover it up afterward and returned to his normal life as if nothing had happened. Prosecutors argued that taken together, the testimony from former partners, the evidence found in his apartment, and his actions before and after the crime, all of it pointed to an individual who was extremely dangerous, someone driven primarily by his own needs with little
regard for the safety or well-being of others. After years of going unsolved, the man found responsible for the death of Kelly Dwyer will spend 31 years in prison. In 2018, 43-year-old Chris Zacco was sentenced to 31 years in prison followed by 19 years of extended supervision. Given the 19 years he was already serving for other crimes, the likelihood that he will ever be released is extremely slim.
He appealed his earlier convictions but that appeal was denied in 2019. His sentence remained in place. He also appealed all convictions connected to Kelly’s case arguing that errors had been made during the trial and that he deserved a new one. But in 2023, that appeal was denied as well. For Kelly’s friends and family, this was a long and incredibly painful road.
For years, they lived with the fear that her case might never be solved and even with Chris’s conviction, it didn’t bring real peace. But at the very least, they were finally able to give Kelly a proper burial and say goodbye. Kelly’s mother, Maureen, said that over time she became more and more isolated from the world.
Going to work has become harder because she can’t bring herself to be around people and she’s gradually pulled away from friends who, as she admits, simply don’t know how to help her through something this devastating. “There’s no it gets better.” she said. “There’s no moving on. There’s only a new reality and it’s unbearably painful.
” This was a long and incredibly heavy story and I’m truly grateful who stayed with it until the end. I wish you all good health and a good mood. Please take care and I’ll see you next time.
