Murder of Kelly Dwyer

Kelly Dwyer was a 27-year-old Milwaukee, Wisconsin, woman who worked at an athletic-apparel store and took on side jobs as a nanny and yoga instructor. In October 2013 she was seeing Kris Zocco, a Milwaukee information-technology executive, in what both later described as a casual relationship. Surveillance video showed the two entering Zocco's apartment building on Milwaukee's east side at about 2:37 a.m. on October 11, 2013. No camera ever recorded Dwyer leaving the building. Zocco told police she left around 9 a.m. that morning, but investigators found no footage supporting the claim. When Dwyer failed to show up for her shift, coworkers reported her missing on October 12, 2013, and Milwaukee police soon opened a missing-person investigation.

During the search, police obtained a warrant to search Zocco's apartment and arrested him on drug-possession charges on October 17, 2013. A search of his electronics also turned up child sexual abuse material. In November 2014, Zocco was convicted on most of the child-pornography counts, and the following month he pleaded guilty to the drug charges, receiving a combined 19-year sentence unrelated to Dwyer's disappearance.

Dwyer's case remained unresolved until May 1, 2015, when a passerby found a human skull along a rural road in Jefferson County, roughly 45 miles west of Milwaukee. Dental records soon confirmed the remains were Dwyer's, though the level of decomposition meant medical examiners could not determine an exact cause of death.

Milwaukee County prosecutors charged Zocco in 2017 with first-degree reckless homicide, hiding a corpse, and strangulation and suffocation. The criminal complaint alleged that Zocco either strangled Dwyer or caused her to asphyxiate during a sex act at his apartment, then removed her body in a golf travel bag, kept it in his car trunk for several hours while he visited another woman, and left it in Jefferson County the next day. Investigators cited cadaver-dog alerts in Zocco's apartment, garage, and car, along with statements from several of his former partners describing similar rough encounters.

A ten-day jury trial in Milwaukee County Circuit Court ended on October 5, 2018, when jurors convicted Zocco on all three counts after roughly two hours of deliberation. On December 14, 2018, Judge Jeffrey Wagner sentenced Zocco to 31 years in prison followed by 19 years of extended supervision, to run consecutively to the sentence he was already serving. Zocco appealed, challenging the sufficiency of the evidence and the admission of cadaver-dog testimony among other issues; the Wisconsin Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction in an unpublished decision on October 31, 2023.