Steven Zelich, former cop, admits murdering second woman, ditching body in suitcase

A former police officer already serving a lengthy murder sentence admitted Friday to killing a second woman and leaving her body in a suitcase on the side of a Wisconsin highway.

Steven Zelich, 55, was immediately sentenced to an additional 25 years in prison Friday upon pleading guilty to second-degree murder with respect to the November 2013 death of Laura Simonson, a 37-year-old divorced mother from Farmington, Minnesota.

Zelich was arrested in June 2014 several weeks after police discovered the remains of Simonson and another woman, 19-year-old Jenny Gamez of Oregon, in separate suitcases found along the same highway in Geneva, Wis.

He pleaded guilty last year to charges related to Gamez’s death and was sentenced in March to 35-years in prison by Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder.

On Friday, Olmsted County District Court Judge Pamela King ordered Zelich to serve another quarter-century behind bars in a Minnesota prison if and when he finishes his current stint in Wisconsin.

“Mr. Zelich, a human life is not something to be played with,” she said at Friday’s hearing in Rochester, Minn. “Laura Simonson was loved and valued by those who called her mom, sister, daughter and friend.”

Zelich said he met both women online, and that they died months apart as a result of separate sexual encounters that unfolded in local hotel rooms, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Friday. He claimed both deaths were accidental.

“He takes responsibility and has cooperated throughout the process,” his attorney, public defender William Wright, told the AP.

After killing Gamez in August 2012, Zelich allegedly stored her body in a refrigerator at his apartment in West Allis, Wis. He kept Simonson’s corpse in the trunk of his car after killing her 15 months later, but eventually ditched both of their bodies in June 2014 in suitcases scattered along a local highway.

Zelich was employed full-time by Securitas, a private security company, at the time of his arrest in 2014, after spending 12 years as an officer of the West Allis Police Department.