cindy zarzycki

TODAYShow.com contributorupdated 1:12 p.m. ET, Fri., April 17, 2009They seem like a pair straight out of central casting for a TV cop show — a baby boomer gumshoe who prefers pounding pavement to accessing technology, and a pretty Generation X investigator who can make an Internet search engine hum.

But Derek “Mac” McLaughlin and Jennifer Leibow are quite real, and they are now being hailed for their impressive work in bringing a 22-year-old murder mystery to its conclusion — and bringing a blessed sense of closure to a long-grieving suburban Detroit family.McLaughlin and Leibow appeared with Meredith Vieira live on TODAY Friday to tell how they unraveled the case of 13-year-old Cindy Zarzycki, whose disappearance on April 19, 1986 was first treated as a runaway — but, the pair discovered, was actually a case of murder that echoed “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Case closed — at lastMcLaughlin told Vieira that cracking the case, and putting Cindy’s killer behind bars for the rest of his life, was personally satisfying after he dedicated some 13 years to it. But more importantly, it closed a painful book for Cindy’s family.

“Mr. Zarzycki, the pain I saw on his face through 13 years, I couldn’t even imagine what he went through,” McLaughlin told Vieira. “My daughter was the same age when I took this case on, so being able to give back to the family was just unbelievable.”The remarkable story, profiled in a special two-hour “Dateline” on NBC Friday, begins with McLaughlin, who took on the case when he was promoted to the Youth Bureau Detective Division in Eastpointe, Mich. By the time he came on board in 1995, the Zarzycki missing person’s case was already nine years old.“My chief came down and he threw a box on my desk and he says, `This is an old case …

I want you to solve it,” McLaughlin told NBC.McLaughlin learned that young Cindy was heading to a nearby Dairy Queen to be picked up and driven to the birthday party of her schoolgirl crush, classmate Scott Ream. Cindy had been grounded, so she didn’t tell her parents where she was going.