Why a Police Captain’s Son Brutally Executed This Officer

During a Missouri winter, that’s bone-cracking cold, the wind and ice can’t slow the flow of crime.

Every parent’s nightmare is that knock at the door in the middle of the night.

This nightmare became a reality: a cold-blooded attack by an especially dangerous killer.

“You’re willing to take on an armed, trained officer, what chance do the rest of us have?”

You could see it on their faces: these officers had lost a friend.

“The pressure was on. We had to find this guy.”

And a stunning twist reveals the killer is closer to home than anyone suspected.

“What do I call you?”

“They call me Death.”

In St. Louis County, Missouri, winter shows no mercy.

When it gets cold, it gets cold and just goes right through you.

Single-digit temperatures for weeks at a time.

You could have ice and snow on the roads for days or weeks.

It’s a very dangerous time of year.

Despite the dangers, most residents love it here, like 38-year-old Joanne Liskum.

“Joanne, you grew up in the northern part of the city of St. Louis. Just your typical St. Louis family, lived in the city, went to church every Sunday, went to a Catholic school. She was very outgoing, very friendly, always had a smile or could make a joke out of anything.”

“Basically, we were two months apart. I was born in April, she was born in June. We grew up together and the family was very, very close.”

“The Christmas holidays, the New Year’s holiday, there was always Italian food, homemade meatballs from scratch, homemade sauce and everything. It was great.”

Joanne follows in several family members’ footsteps when she becomes a police officer.

“Our Uncle Skip was a police officer. He was basically the inspiration behind all of us later becoming police officers. My two brothers were police officers; Joanne was a police officer.”

She was assigned to the first precinct in North St. Louis County, and she thoroughly enjoyed it.

She enjoyed being a patrol officer and she made a lot of friends.

January 11th, 1991.

Joanne works alone on the midnight patrol. It was a slow shift and she stopped at a convenience store to get a cup of coffee and check on the business.

“Hello, how are you?”

“I’m pretty good. How’s everything going?”

“Great, thank you. You all right?”

Tonight will not be business as usual.

“A lady came in and approached her and told her that there was an individual walking northbound on Halls Ferry Road and he was acting funny.”

“It just struck her as this guy being odd, the way he was moving around and stopping and looking and not going anywhere, seemed to have no directions.”

It’s 1:00 in the morning. It’s a terrible night, very cold out for a person to be out walking.

Either your car broke down and you’re looking for help, or there’s something else wrong.

Joanne said that she would drive down that way and check into it and see if it was a person that had broken down, needed a ride somewhere, if they were okay.

She advised the radio dispatcher she was going to be out—basically that means out of service—at Patricia Ridge and Old Halls Ferry on a suspicious person.

And that was the last we heard from her.

Ten minutes go by and she couldn’t be reached on the radio.

So the dispatcher sent an officer to check on her—welfare check.

But before backup arrives, a passerby discovers an unusually long flashlight on the icy roadside.

“A person looking at this would know that it would be a law enforcement or a police flashlight. It’s not something that a normal, John Q. Citizen is going to carry around just because of its weight, because of its size, its length.”

And then a body laying in the snow.

“It’s a police officer. She’s obviously wounded, bleeding.”

When the backup officer arrives, he recognizes her. It’s Joanne Liskum.

“Attention, all! Patricia Ridge!”

“She’s unresponsive. She is still breathing. There’s blood in the snow all around her. She’s incapacitated, can’t move. There’s an obvious gunshot wound to her left hand and her head area on the snow is surrounded by blood.”

The officer notices an immediate threat.

“On the officer. The suspect apparently does have her police car. Also her weapon, missing weapon, is missing.”

That meant immediately that you’ve got a guy out there with the officer’s weapon and a police car.

So he, he could be anywhere at that point.

With her gun and her car being missing, it was very disconcerting.

I mean, if this person would pull up in a marked police car, turn on its lights, and a civilian would pull over thinking it was a legitimate police officer, who knows what would happen at that point?

Who knows what this person’s mindset was?

I mean, it basically would have him put the jump on anybody that he wanted to, thinking, especially at nighttime, in the dark hours, where you just see the lights illuminate, you’re getting stopped for a reason, and who knows what could happen after that?

A police agency’s worst nightmare. It’s like everything just went in slow motion and nothing could happen fast enough.

Simultaneously, they must save Joanne, find her vehicle, and lock down the area to stop the shooter.

“Two cars are on a scene. All of their cars to get to remain out in the area looking for the vehicle and the suspect.”

Joanne was transported to the hospital.

“Took her in and they did surgery on her.”

Word quickly spreads.

“I was working in the homicide division with the city police department, and we got a call from the county, and they wanted to know if we could send some detectives out to help them.”

“I couldn’t process it. I was like, ‘Not Joanne Liskum. It’s not Joanne.’”

As emotions run high, officers get to work.

“Crime scene unit was there, taking photographs, doing our measurements, and seizing evidence.”

“Our detectives were working hard, trying to find some evidence that would help us determine what happened.”

With the snow on the ground and with the ice covering it, it did inhibit what would typically be evidence collection, typical tangible evidence that would be left at a normal crime scene, say during the summertime.

This put a camouflage over it.

There was blood, blood on the ice and snow.

“You know, there was uh obviously signs of a struggle that had occurred there, but little else.”

“The problem we had was that everything was frozen uh you know, there’s that ice layer on top and you would not break through that ice layer. So there were no footprints left um in the ice. That’s how hard it was. You didn’t know what if anything would have been under that snow.”

Based on Joanne’s injuries, investigators try to piece together what happened.

She had suffered two gunshot wounds to the head.

There was another injury to the back of her head from being struck by that flashlight that was found at the scene.

And now police must race to catch an assailant who could appear to be one of them, could be impersonating an officer.

“There’s a radio in the car, and so anything they’re saying, he may be hearing. They don’t know if this is a guy who’s driving around now acting like the police.”

On an icy night in St. Louis County, Missouri, Officer Joanne Liskum clings to life after being shot multiple times.

Police believe the shooter fled with her weapon and her vehicle.

All available officers from several jurisdictions scramble to find the gunman before he vanishes or attacks anyone else.

“This person that assaulted Joanne is obviously a violent person.”

And…

“For a bit, because that was the only way to get across the river.”

He says:

“I come home and I find Christine dead in the closet. I put her in the car, I drive the car to Minneapolis.”

He expects cops to believe this; it’s ludicrous.

“Zach, you don’t find people dead in your closet, okay? Okay? It just doesn’t happen like that, okay?”

Investigators piece together their own scenario of what happened that fateful day.

“I think Christine running late when she dropped Marcella off, and Zachary sitting in his apartment—he’s thinking that she doesn’t love me, she doesn’t care about me. So when she gets there, he begins to argue with her about that: ‘You’re always with your boyfriend, you’re never here, you’re always…’”

“And my guess is she told him, ‘Forget it, give me the baby, I’m out of here.’”

“’You’re not.’”

And he wasn’t going to have it.

“He lost his temper.”

“Get off!”

“He starts to hit her and then chokes her to death.”

Once he returns, it’s dark, so he takes her out to her car, comes back in, grabs a couple of phone books to use as kindling to start the fire, and drives her to Minneapolis.

Most killers, you know, they don’t plan anything after the murder. They plan everything up to the murder and nothing afterwards. And sure enough, we got a guy who, in a fit of rage, kills his ex-girlfriend, and then he doesn’t know what to do with the body, so he decides, ‘I’ll burn it.’”

Despite Zachary’s failure to take full responsibility, police know they have enough evidence to arrest and charge him with first-degree murder.

“I always kind of felt like Zach had something to do with it. I know he wanted her back, and I know that she wasn’t going back, and I think that he probably felt like, ‘If I can’t have her, nobody can.’”

“It made me furious that after all that we did to include him in our family, to accept him even after, uh, Christine became pregnant, it was sickening that he could do that to her and to us.”

Zachary Otus Matthews is charged with first-degree premeditated murder, first-degree domestic abuse murder, second-degree intentional murder, and interference with a dead body.

In October 2008, Zachary Matthews is convicted on all charges and sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Christine’s parents assume responsibility for raising her child.

“When you think about the definition of what a friend is and what a friend should be like, that was Christine. Kind, always there if you ever needed her for anything.”

“I just miss her smiling face. Her smile lit up the room.”

“I always think what would have happened, um, you know, where could we have been now?”

“For a while, it ate me up inside knowing that I got to meet an angel for 11 days and then they’re gone.”

“I miss having my baby sister. I miss the conversations.”

“I miss that she was our light. She was, no matter what, she was the one that held our family together.”

“I think the biggest thing I miss is her personality and just her heart.”

“Christmas was the holiday for me. I mean, we would deck the whole house out. Now it’s more a forced celebration for me, and I do it so that her son can understand that this is important, and these are traditions that his mother would have liked him to continue with. But yeah, Christmas is difficult, um.”

“This year was the first year I made the Christmas mice all on my own, and they turned out really cute, and everybody loved them.”

For months, the unmade cookies sat on Deborah’s kitchen counter as a reminder of the night Christine died.

“I think it was right around March, and I said, ‘You know, I’m either going to make them or I’m just going to put them away.’ So in March, I put those cookie ingredients away.”