383: The Mysterious Disappearance of Molly Zelko w/ Rod Kackley

Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

Erik Rivenes

True Crime, History, Education

4.7 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Molly Zelko was the crusading editor and publisher of the Spectator, a newspaper devoted to battling local gangsters operating slot machines and other rackets in Joliet, Illinois. In the late night hours of September 25, 1957 she vanished, with only her shoes and signs of a struggle left as evidence that something sinister had likely happened to her. My guest is reporter and author Rod Kackley, whose book "Murder! Molly And The Mob: A (1950s) Shocking True Crime Story" is the focus of today's episode of Most Notorious. The author's website: https://www.rodkackley.com/ The author's Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Rod-Kackley/author/B0090N097W Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:31.1	Apply with £100,000 annual income or £100,000 savings or investments with HSBC UK or Premier status abroad. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Most Notorious Podcast. I'm Eric Rivenis.
1:37.2	Great, as always, to have you with me. Well, I am very excited to have prolific author Rod Cackley on the show with me once again. He was my guest three years ago to talk about his book called
1:42.8	The Murder of Thora Chamberlain, a shocking
1:45.7	true story. And he is back this time to talk about one of his latest, a book called Murder,
1:52.1	Molly and the Mob, a 1950s shocking true crime story. So great to have you back. Welcome.
1:59.8	Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it, Eric.
2:02.6	Absolutely. So do you remember when the name Molly Zelko first appeared on your radar and what made you want to write a book about her?
2:13.2	I was surfing. There's a website called The Charlie Project, and they document, they list every single, well, I mean, not say every single, but they have tens of thousands of missing people listed there.
2:28.6	And just the barest information. And Molly just seemed like an interesting person because I'm a former
2:35.7	reporter. That's what I did before I retired. And so I just began looking up things about Molly
2:42.6	and went to another website, Newspapers.com. And really then began researching all of the news
	...

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