Mike Emery

mwemery@pal-item.com

More than 37 years ago, Nicholas Peter Zizzamia disappeared from Cherry Hill, N.J.

Detectives from New Jersey and Indiana thought his remains would be found Monday in a pauper's grave at King Cemetery in Richmond, but despite their best efforts, Zizzamia remains missing.

"He said he never wanted to be found, and it looks like he's going to get his wish," said Detective Paul Hafner of the Cherry Hill Police Department.

Hafner and Detective Erin Micciulla of the New Jersey State Police thought a John Doe buried in King Cemetery would turn out to be Zizzamia. Hafner said the timeline — Zizzamia's disappearance on May 12, 1979, and John Doe's arrival in Richmond on May 15, 1979 — and physical similarities (such as nearing 300 pounds) were a good match.

Zizzamia also had talked of suicide, and Richmond's John Doe committed suicide in a hotel, taking extreme precautions to make sure he could not be identified, such as cutting the tags off his clothing and removing mailing tags from magazines.

Using ground-penetrating radar images from a portion of the cemetery and photographs taken by the Palladium-Item during John Doe's 1979 pauper funeral, Hafner, Micciulla, Indiana State Police Detective Scott Jarvis and Wayne Township Trustee Susan Isaacs attempted to discern where John Doe was buried in King Cemetery, a small cemetery off North West N Street maintained by the trustee's office. The cemetery's incomplete record-keeping did not provide a location of the grave.

After a full day's work executing search warrants to exhume John Doe's body, the group exhausted all the presumed possibilities and ended the search unsuccessfully.

"I'm extremely disappointed, frustrated," Hafner said after a final dig failed to locate John Doe. "We still believe he's in this cemetery somewhere."

A June 2014 Philadelphia Inquirer column by Kevin Riordan, who observed Monday's search, highlighted Zizzamia 35 years after he disappeared. Hafner said he received an email just days later from the Doe Network alerting him to Richmond's John Doe. Hafner discovered a Steve Truitt Palladium-Item article about John Doe's death and pauper funeral.

"Two years later, here we are," Hafner said. "The physical descriptions of both males and the timeline really fits."

Although Zizzamia's missing persons case won't close, the search in King Cemetery has finished.

"I don't know what further could be provided to us other than for someone to say, 'This is where we buried him,'" Jarvis said.

Also participating in the search Monday were the University of Indianapolis forensics team, excavators KAF Enterprises and Dr. Craig Nelson, who is a forensic odontologist and the Allen County coroner. About 25 people, in all, were present. Male remains were exhumed by the U of I students from one dig site Monday, but Nelson examined the jaw and determined it was not the sought-for John Doe.

Late in 2014, Jarvis exhumed remains from Earlham Cemetery, thinking they were a missing Laurel woman. It turned out, they were not, but he later found the woman alive in Texas.

"I think we're all going toward the same goal," he said of the effort expended, especially by the New Jersey detectives, to try and identify Zizzamia's final resting place. "I've done the same thing. You expect they've done everything they can for this family. It just hasn't worked out yet."

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