Chapter 1/Portrayed in a CBS-TV Movie

You have bragging rights when portrayed in a CBS-TV Movie. And I was bragging until I actually saw the movie: The Disappearance of Vonnie, a true story about a murder in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

I am the hotshot On-Your-Side TV reporter who people in trouble turn to for help. Unfortunately, the movie was accurate when it shows me trying to give the brush off to the heroine of the movie.

She comes to my TV station and interrupts me in an editing room where I'm putting a story together and trying to eat my lunch. I try to tell her it would be better if she came back later. But Corrine Kaczmarek, played by Ann Jillian, is persistent and gets the help she so desperately needs.

Her sister, Vonnie Rickman, had disappeared. "We live across the street from each other," Corrine told me. "I used to speak to her every single day of my life. I know Vonnie better than anyone else and she would never have left us voluntarily."

Vonnie's new husband, Ron Rickman, played by Joe Penny, claimed she left him in a huff outside a Kmart store in Appleton and never came back, not only abandoning him but also her daughter.

"The thing that she loves most is that six-year-old girl," Corrine told me. "Vonnie had her late in life and she's her whole life."

Corrine had also gone to the police who at first rejected her suspicion that Rickman had done something to Vonnie. The police were friendly with Rickman because of a youth group he mentored. Ron Rickman was respected around town. I met him one time when he was taking the teenagers on a tour of my TV station.

But Corrine kept up her campaign against Rickman, which included writing me long letters. "Vonnie is like another part of me," she wrote. "I feel lost."

I came to believe there was something to what she said. When I called the police, they had become suspicious, too.

Then they made a horrific discovery. Before coming to Green Bay and marrying Vonnie, Rickman had been in a mental institution for the criminally insane. He had murdered two people with a gun! Corrine disclosed this confidential information to me but said the police couldn't arrest Rickman. Killing two people 20 years ago didn't give them a case against him now.

Helping Corrine document her brother-in-law's secret past with old newspaper clippings of the murders, I persuaded the management of my TV station to go with the story even though there were no charges against Rickman.

After I laid the groundwork, another reporter at my station made invaluable contributions. Patrick Doris discovered that state parole officers had lost track of Rickman after he was released from confinement.

"The detectives told me my reports played a key role in nailing Rickman," says Doris, now a reporter at KGW-TV in Portland, Oregon. "They generated news tips from people who never put two and two together until they saw stories on the air and then remembering some interaction with Richman, a comment about his wife, or asking them to hold on to a gun, for example."

Rickman was arrested for parole violations and made an incriminating admission to a fellow inmate. This led District Attorney John Zakowski to charge Rickman with first degree murder and then successfully prosecute him.

It was the first case in Wisconsin of a murder conviction without a body or murder weapon being found.

Rickman was sentenced to life in prison. While Corrine was victorious, a part of her was lost forever.