She Thought Her Husband Was A Worthless Loser & Cheated On Him, She Was De*d Wrong| True Crime | HO

PART 1 – “Room 18”

The maid had cleaned enough cheap rooms to know the difference between a mess and a problem.

At 8:20 a.m. on April 23, 2024, 45-year-old housekeeper Maria Contreras pushed her cart down the dim first-floor hallway of the Sunset Motel on South Halsted Street in Chicago. Thursdays were usually quiet. Wednesdays brought truckers, cash couples, and the kind of guests who wanted a door that locked and an office that didn’t ask questions. By Thursday morning, Maria’s job was to erase the evidence.

Room 18 was just another door in a tired two-story strip motel — faded paint, buzzing lights, carpets that never quite smelled clean again. According to the register, it had been paid in cash the day before by a man who signed in as “John Smith.” Eighty dollars. One night. No ID.

Routine.

Maria knocked three times, as policy required.

No answer.

She knocked again, louder. Still nothing. In this part of South Halsted, people didn’t always welcome staff bursting into rooms uninvited. But checkout time had already passed, and management wanted turnover.

She slid the service key into the lock, pushed the door slowly, and took one step inside.

The smell hit her first.

Not the usual combination of stale air, sweat, and cheap disinfectant. This was heavier — metallic, sour, clinging to the back of her throat. The room was unnaturally silent. No TV, no shower, no murmured voices.

She reached instinctively for the light switch.

The scene that snapped into view would replay in her mind for the rest of her life.

A chair overturned. A nightstand flipped on its side. Clothes scattered across the stained carpet. A woman lying near the bed, partially undressed, a dark bloom spreading through the fabric at her chest. A man face-down near the bathroom doorway, in underwear and an unbuttoned shirt, his skin already beginning to gray.

Maria didn’t touch anything.

She froze for a heartbeat, then bolted, slamming the door behind her. Heart racing, hands shaking, she sprinted to the office, grabbed the manager’s phone, and dialed 911.

“There’s blood,” she said. “Two people. They’re not moving.”

She didn’t need to say anything else.

The Motel on South Halsted

South Halsted Street, in that stretch of Chicago, is not where people go to fall in love. It’s where they go to hide.

The Sunset Motel sat in a tired pocket of the South Side — gas station across the street, auto shops and strip malls nearby, a constant low hum of traffic and occasional sirens. Its clientele was predictable: truck drivers timing their routes, cash-paying couples looking for privacy, and people who needed one night under a fake name.

Owner Abdul Rashid knew what his business was and what it wasn’t. His front desk took cash without many questions. His rooms were basic: thin mattresses, bolted TVs, worn curtains. He’d seen overdoses, fights, screaming matches. But nothing like what the police were about to find in Room 18.

The first patrol unit arrived at 8:41 a.m. Officers Michael Johnston and Sarah Coulter stepped into the room Maria had fled minutes earlier and immediately taped off the door. The male victim showed no signs of life. The woman’s chest was still; there was no pulse, no breath, no hope.

This was not a medical emergency.

This was a double homicide.

By 9:17 a.m., homicide detective Carlos Rodriguez, a veteran of the South Chicago precinct, was on scene with a forensic team led by crime scene specialist Jennifer Lee. They photographed everything — the bodies, the overturned furniture, the scattered purse contents, the pulled-out pockets of men’s pants, the untouched jewelry, the expensive watch still on the male victim’s wrist.

This, Rodriguez thought, was a problem.

Someone wanted it to look like a robbery.

They had done a terrible job.

Two Bodies, Two Stories

The male victim was quickly identified through a driver’s license found in his discarded pants.

Name: Zachary “Zack” London
Age: 31
Address: North Clark Street, Chicago
Occupation: IT administrator for a mid-size tech company downtown.

He’d taken a bullet straight to the heart.

Forensic pathologist David Chen would later explain that the trajectory told its own story: the bullet entered at a slightly downward angle, suggesting the shooter fired while standing over Zack, who was either kneeling or bent forward. There were no defensive wounds, no bruises consistent with a struggle, no cuts on his hands.

He never saw it coming.

The woman beside the bed carried a wallet with an Illinois driver’s license.

Name: Tabitha Schmidt
Age: 29
Address: West Fullerton Avenue, Chicago
Occupation: Human resources specialist at the same tech company as Zack.

She had two gunshot wounds: one to the chest, one to the head.

The first shot, Dr. Chen later testified, wounded but did not kill her instantly. The second shot — delivered while she was already on the floor — ensured she never got back up.

This wasn’t a wild shootout gone wrong. It was deliberate, controlled, and close. Both shots were fired from a 9mm handgun at a distance of no more than two meters. The pattern of gunpowder stippling around the wounds and the absence of random bullet damage told the story: the shooter knew exactly where they were aiming.

Yet in the middle of all that violence, valuables were left untouched.

Tabitha’s gold jewelry remained on the nightstand. Zack’s watch — worth serious money — was still on his wrist. His wallet contained $230 in cash and several credit cards. None of it had been taken.

On the floor, Tabitha’s purse had been dumped out, the contents spread around as if someone wanted police to think a desperate thief had torn through it.

Rodriguez took one look and wrote two words in his notebook:

“Staged robbery.”

The Locked Room

What bothered investigators most wasn’t what they saw in Room 18.

It was how the room was left.

The main door was locked from the inside with the security chain engaged, a mechanism that could not be fastened from the hallway once the door closed. The only window opened toward a busy parking lot that faced South Halsted. Climbing in or out that way in broad daylight would have been risky, highly visible, and almost certainly noticed.

So how did the killer get out?

There were two possibilities:

The killer was still inside when someone with a key opened the door.
The killer had access to motel service areas and a key card that allowed entry and exit in ways regular guests couldn’t use.

When motel administrator Robert Pence produced the registration log for Room 18, the name written in shaky block letters on the line for April 22 was almost insultingly generic:

“John Smith.”

Paid in cash at 4:45 p.m.
No ID.
No credit card.

Pence described the man who rented the room as Black, mid-30s, athletic build, about 5’11”, dark clothing. No facial hair he could clearly recall. Nothing distinctive enough to build a composite.

For a place like the Sunset Motel, that description barely narrowed it down.

But the motel had something better than a memory.

It had cameras.

The Cameras Don’t Forget

The Sunset Motel’s security system was basic but functional: four exterior cameras covering the parking lot and perimeter, and one in the lobby. The resolution wasn’t great. Faces blurred with distance, and details smudged into pixels. But timelines — and vehicles — don’t lie.

Technical examiner Michael Torres pulled footage from April 22 and 23.

On April 22 at 4:37 p.m., an exterior camera captured a dark Honda Accord sedan pulling into the lot. A man and a woman got out — later identified as Zack and Tabitha. They walked side by side toward the rooms, heads slightly lowered, like people who hoped no one was paying attention.

They weren’t the ones who signed the room in under “John Smith.”

Pence’s records showed the booking had already been made in that name shortly before they arrived. Someone had reserved Room 18 for them, with cash, a fake name, and a quiet request for “no interruptions.”

They checked in.

They did not check out.

The next day — April 23 at 2:12 p.m. — another vehicle appeared on camera that didn’t fit.

A brown UPS delivery truck pulled into the lot.

That alone wasn’t impossible. But deliveries like that usually rolled right up to the office, dropped off a package, and drove away in under five minutes. This truck didn’t go near the front door.

It parked in the far corner of the lot — away from the lobby camera, partially shielded from the street.

It stayed exactly 17 minutes.

No recognizable parcel runs. No dolly. No uniformed courier walking in with boxes. Just a truck arriving, sitting, and leaving.

Torres zoomed in as far as the grainy footage would allow. The driver was clearly wearing a brown UPS-style uniform. But the face blurred into nothing more than a dark smudge.

The license plate, however, was clear.

A quick run through the Department of Transportation database confirmed it: the truck was a real UPS vehicle assigned to a delivery route on the south side of Chicago that day.

The driver’s name: Weiss (Vice) Schmidt.

Tabitha’s husband.

The same “worthless loser” she complained about in private messages — the man she believed was too clueless to suspect anything at all.

Fingerprints and Ghosts

Forensic techs dusted Room 18 inch by inch.

Most of the prints they lifted were exactly what you’d expect in a small motel room used repeatedly by the same two people. Partial and full prints matching Tabitha and Zack appeared on the nightstand, on the TV remote, on the bathroom fixtures, even on the door handle.

But not all of them.

Several clear prints on the bathroom door handle and the nightstand surface did not match either victim. One partial palm print showed callused ridges consistent with someone who did physical labor — delivery, warehouse, construction.

Those prints were rushed into AFIS, the automated fingerprint identification system, for comparison against state and federal databases.

They would come back with a name.

But while the lab processed the prints and ballistics tested bullet fragments, Rodriguez and his partner, Detective Angela Thompson, began the other side of the job:

Figuring out who these two dead professionals were — and why their secret Wednesday routine ended in execution.

From Office Floors to Motel Carpets

The first stop was Dynamic Systems, a gleaming 30-story tech tower on West Monroe Street, a world away from the Sunset Motel’s flickering neon.

Inside, glass walls and open workspaces replaced motel drapes and bolted doors. Employees worked under soft LED lights instead of buzzing fluorescents. It was the kind of place where people talked about product roadmaps, not room rates.

CEO Richard Stanley, 57, looked shell-shocked when detectives walked into his office on the 27th floor.

“Yes, we heard the news,” he said quietly. “We still can’t believe it.”

He described Tabitha Schmidt as a reliable, detail-oriented HR specialist who had been with the company for three years.

“She handled recruiting for our technical roles,” he explained. “Engineers, analysts, admin staff. Everybody liked her. No drama, no complaints.”

Zack London had joined six months earlier as an IT administrator.

“Very sharp,” Stanley said. “Strong background. Detroit, Milwaukee, some big companies on his résumé. We thought we were lucky to get him.”

He paused.

“I never imagined… this.”

Head of HR Patricia Williams, 44, filled in the details.

Tabitha had recruited Zack personally, conducting his initial interviews.
She’d recommended him strongly — “smart, easy communicator, good culture fit.”
In the last few months, though, Williams had noticed small changes.

“She was still good at her job,” Williams said. “But she was… different. More distracted. Longer lunches. More time downstairs in IT. Especially on Wednesdays.”

Normally, HR had no special reason to visit IT beyond routine technical issues. Yet several employees noticed that Tabitha suddenly had a lot of questions about HR software glitches that just happened to require face-to-face conversations with an IT administrator named Zack.

On the IT floor, downstairs on 25, manager Kevin Bout described Zack as competent, social, and dependable.

“If I had a tough technical problem, I’d send it to him,” Bout said. “But around February, he started leaving more often during lunch, especially Wednesdays. Said he wasn’t feeling well or needed to run quick errands.”

System analyst Brandon Walker, who shared a wall with Zack’s cubicle, noticed something else.

“He kept checking his phone,” Walker said. “Zack used to be locked in when he worked. Lately, he’d be staring at his screen, zoning out. Like his mind was somewhere else.”

That somewhere else turned out to be a cheap motel on South Halsted.

And a marriage on West Fullerton that was about to detonate.

A Husband in Brown

While one team of detectives mapped out the office affair, another team went to knock on a front door.

On April 24 at 4:30 p.m., Rodriguez and Thompson pulled up in front of a small, neatly kept brick house on West Fullerton Avenue. Rose bushes out front. An aging Ford Focus in the driveway. Wind chimes swaying in the chill.

The door opened to a man in a brown UPS uniform, still wearing his work ID badge.

Name: Weiss “Vice” Schmidt
Age: 32
Occupation: UPS courier, seven years on the job.

He looked like he’d just walked in from a long route: tired, a little dusty, keys still in hand.

When the detectives introduced themselves and asked to come in, his expression shifted from confusion to dread.

They sat him on a worn but clean couch in a small living room. Family pictures on the wall. A simple life carefully maintained.

Then they told him.

Your wife is dead.

She was found in a motel.

She wasn’t alone.

For a few minutes, he said nothing. He just covered his face with both hands and stayed that way, shoulders shaking, breathing shallow, the weight of the words settling in.

When he finally spoke, his voice broke.

“What happened?” he asked. “Where was she? Who was she with?”

It was the right question.

Detectives already knew the answer.

What they needed now was his.

PART 2 – Wednesdays at the Sunset

Detectives Rodriguez and Thompson didn’t start with the motel.

They started with the phones.

On April 25, 2024, Chicago PD digital forensics specialist Daniel Morgan sat down in the lab at Central Command with two devices in front of him:

A 12th-generation iPhone recovered from Tabitha’s purse in Room 18.
An Android device pulled from the belongings of the deceased IT admin, Zack London.

His job was simple in theory: answer one question.

How long had these two been living a double life?

The Messages

The first thing Morgan noticed when he unlocked Tabitha’s phone was a contact saved under a single letter:

“Z.”

Message metadata showed the thread went back to late November 2023—just a few weeks after Zack started at Dynamic Systems.

At first, the conversation looked like any other HR–IT interaction:

“Can you check why the applicant tracking system keeps crashing?”
“Sure, probably a permissions issue. I’ll swing by HR after lunch.”

Polite, efficient, forgettable.

By mid-December, the tone shifted.

The compliments slipped in first. A joke about a holiday sweater. A comment about how “you’re the only HR person who actually understands how this software works.” Then came longer messages, sent after hours, about work stress, annoying coworkers, favorite music.

On December 9, Tabitha crossed a line.

In one message, she thanked Zack for “being the only one who really sees me,” adding a line that would later be read aloud in a courtroom:

“With you, I feel like more than someone’s wife and someone’s HR rep. I feel like myself again.”

Zack replied within minutes:

“You deserve to feel that way every day. You’re incredible, Tabs.”

From that point, the messages began to read less like colleagues and more like a couple testing the boundaries of an affair.

By late December, they were trading selfies from their desks. By early January, they were talking about “coffee outside the office” and “somewhere we can actually breathe.”

The first explicit reference to cheating appeared in January 2024, in a short, blunt line from Tabitha:

“He has no idea. He never will.”

“He,” of course, was Weiss “Vice” Schmidt.

The “worthless loser” she mocked to friends. The man she thought was too dull and too trusting to ever put the pieces together.

The Motel Pattern

Zack’s phone confirmed what Morgan suspected.

Tabitha’s contact was saved as “Tabs 💫”. Their thread mirrored hers: double-texts, late-night confessions, and a steady escalation from flirty to intimate.

On January 17, Zack sent a question that would eventually become central to the case:

“We can’t keep doing this in conference rooms. Let me get a place. Somewhere out of the way.”

Tabitha hesitated in the next messages. She referenced her marriage, her reputation, her fear of being seen. But by the end of the thread that night, she relented:

“Okay. Wednesdays. That’s my ‘late at the office’ day. Just… somewhere no one we know would ever go.”

The place Zack chose said everything.

Geolocation data from both phones showed a recurring weekly pattern beginning mid-January:

Wednesdays, between 4:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m.
Both phones traveling, separately, to the stretch of South Halsted Street where the Sunset Motel sat.
Phones remaining in the same small cluster of GPS coordinates for several hours.
Both devices leaving the area and returning home or to the office.

In the registration book, Room 18 appeared over and over, reserved on Wednesdays under different throwaway names, but always paid in cash by a man who matched Zack’s description.

The motel staff knew the pattern even if they didn’t know the names.

The maid, Maria Contreras, described Room 18 as a “regular couple’s room” on Wednesdays:

Two coffee cups. Two sets of toiletries. Food containers for two.

No violence. No yelling. No threats.

Until April 23.

“Girl, He Worships Me”

The texts weren’t just logistics.

They were a window into how Tabitha saw the men in her life.

In several messages to Zack, she vented about Weiss:

“Girl, Zach is incredible with me and looks at me like a goddess. I love how he sees me. Good thing my husband has such a wonderful friend because my husband is nothing. He’s so clueless. He suspects nothing.”

She complained about Weiss’s long UPS shifts, his exhaustion, his lack of “ambition,” his predictable routines.

“He comes home, eats, falls asleep in front of the TV. That’s my life. That’s my ‘partner.’”

To Zack, she painted herself as trapped: underappreciated, unseen, bored. She framed the affair as a reward for surviving a dull marriage:

“With you, I remember I’m still alive. With him, I’m just… wallpaper.”

For Zack, the romance was not just physical.

His messages revealed hope.

He talked about a future where Tabitha left her husband, moved out, and started over with him in another city. He floated cities—Denver, Nashville, Austin. Anywhere they could disappear.

“You and me, no more lying. Just us. Tell me you see that too.”

Tabitha always kept the fantasy one step away.

“Maybe one day,” she wrote. “Let me get my head straight first.”

She wanted the passion without the fallout. The attention without the upheaval. The thrill of being worshiped by one man while anchored by another.

What she badly misjudged was how the “worthless loser” would react when he finally realized what his goddess had done.

A Marriage in Slow Collapse

Detective Thompson’s interviews at Dynamic Systems painted the same picture from a different angle.

HR colleagues noticed Tabitha’s wardrobe upgrades, new lipstick, changed hairstyle.
She started staying late on Wednesdays, even when the workload didn’t demand it.
She stopped talking about Weiss as much. The husband she once described as “solid” and “steady” almost vanished from conversation.

One accountant remembered her asking about internal transfers and unpaid leave policies, not as HR giving advice, but as a woman quietly studying her own escape routes.

In the IT department, coworkers saw more of Zack’s transformation.

He stopped joining after-work drinks. Took longer lunches. Left midday “for client work” that his manager couldn’t quite match to any real assignments.

Database administrator Terresa Rogers recalled one birthday celebration in March where she saw Tabitha and Zack in a corner of the cafeteria, heads close, laughing at something no one else heard.

“They weren’t just coworkers blowing off steam,” she told detectives. “It looked like a couple.”

Security guard Tommy Roberts noticed something else: Tabitha’s access card logged out of the building late on Wednesdays — long after HR’s usual closing time — and many of those nights, camera footage showed her taking the elevator down from the IT floor, not her own.

Everyone had a piece of the puzzle. No one saw the whole picture until it was blood on motel carpet.

The Husband’s Version

Back on West Fullerton, in his small living room, Weiss “Vice” Schmidt gave detectives his story.

He said he last saw Tabitha on the morning of April 22.

They had breakfast together. She told him she needed to stay late at the office to finish a quarterly HR report. That, he said, was nothing new.

“She stayed late at the end of the month all the time,” he told them. “I didn’t think anything of it.”

He said he came home around 7:30 p.m., made himself dinner, watched TV, and went to bed alone. When he woke up the next morning and saw her side of the bed untouched, he grew anxious. He called her phone. No answer. Called her office. Secretary said she hadn’t come in.

But he did not call 911.

Detective Thompson noted that detail.

Most spouses, faced with an unexplained overnight disappearance from a partner who’d never done that before, at least call someone. A friend. A hospital. The police.

Weiss didn’t.

He told detectives he assumed Tabitha had stayed with a friend or relative after a late night, even though he admitted that was “unusual for her.”

It wasn’t enough to arrest him. But it was enough to keep digging.

UPS records showed that on April 22–23, Weiss was on his usual south side route. His dispatcher confirmed he had no reported issues, no emergency calls, no route changes their system would automatically flag.

Still, when detectives overlaid his GPS-logged delivery route with the security footage from the Sunset Motel, one thing became impossible to ignore:

On April 23 at 2:12 p.m., a UPS truck assigned to Weiss Schmidt was parked in the Sunset Motel lot.

Weiss insisted he’d never been there.

The camera said otherwise.

The 40-Minute Gap

UPS supervisor Melvin Jackson handed over a complete scan history and GPS log of Weiss’s route for April 23.

From 8:15 a.m. into early afternoon, everything looked normal:

Scan at Address 1: 8:32 a.m.
Address 2: 8:51 a.m.
…
By 1:00 p.m., 21 of 32 scheduled stops completed.

Then there was a gap.

Between 1:30 p.m. and 2:10 p.m., no scans. No recorded deliveries. The truck’s GPS tracker still pinged periodically, but the specific stops were missing.

At 2:12 p.m., a recorded delivery popped up four blocks from the Sunset Motel, at an auto repair shop on West 35th Street.

The mechanic, Robert Hill, initially claimed he saw a UPS truck at the motel lot around 2:20 p.m. But under re-interview, with his own alcohol use that day exposed, his testimony collapsed.

A more reliable witness stepped in.

Bus driver Daryl Watson, who drove a regular route past South Halsted, told detectives he saw a UPS truck in the Sunset Motel lot around 2:15 p.m. on April 23. He thought it was odd. There were no businesses in that strip that used parcel services regularly.

“I remember thinking, ‘What’s a UPS truck doing over there?’” he said. “And it was parked way back, not near the office.”

When Joseph Clark, the gas station cashier, turned over his surveillance footage from across the street, the pieces aligned.

At 2:12 p.m., the UPS truck rolled into the far corner of the motel lot.
At 2:17 p.m., the lobby camera caught a man in a UPS uniform entering the building, holding a key card.
He walked directly toward the staircase that led to Room 18.

The card had been programmed the day before for “John Smith.”

Fingerprint analysis on that plastic access card came back with prints that did not belong to Tabitha or Zack.

They matched a new set of prints now sitting in the system:

Weiss Schmidt.

The House on West Fullerton

With circumstantial evidence mounting — the truck, the key card, the prints in the room — detectives moved to secure a search warrant for the Schmidt home.

On April 28, they returned to West Fullerton with uniformed officers and forensic techs.

Weiss signed a consent form to provide his fingerprints and did not physically resist the search. He watched silently as strangers moved through his bedroom, his kitchen, his basement.

The search team focused on three areas:

The master bedroom
The garage
The basement and backyard

In the bedroom, they found a box of 9mm ammunition in a dresser drawer on Weiss’s side. No firearm.

Weiss claimed he’d bought the ammo years ago, intending to purchase a legal gun for self-defense, but “never got around to it.”

In the garage, the concrete floor had been recently scrubbed with heavy cleaning agents. In one corner, they collected rags stained with a dark residue. Lab tests later confirmed gunshot residue and traces of human blood on the fabric.

The most damning evidence, however, was downstairs.

Behind an old water heater in the basement, wrapped in oiled cloth, they found a 9mm Glock 17 with its serial number removed.

Ballistics test-fired the gun.

The test bullets were compared against the projectiles recovered from the bodies of Tabitha Schmidt and Zack London.

The match was conclusive.

In the backyard, where neighbor Glattis Williams had seen Weiss digging one evening by lantern light, forensic techs found a shallow, freshly filled hole.

Inside were:

Burned fragments of men’s trousers
Shredded shirt remnants
Melted plastic and metal consistent with buttons and a belt buckle

Chemical analysis detected:

Human blood of Type A, matching Tabitha’s blood type
Gunpowder residue embedded in the fabric fibers

On the Glock, clear fingerprints were recovered from the grip and trigger.

They were compared to Weiss’s freshly inked samples.

The lab report estimated a 99.8% probability that the prints were his.

At that point, the moral question — whether he’d “snapped” or not — was separate from the legal one.

Legally, the picture was very clear:

The man Tabitha thought of as “nothing” had:

Parked his UPS truck behind a motel where his wife was cheating on him.
Used a key card to enter Room 18 where his wife and her lover were together.
Left both of them dead with two precise 9mm shots.
Returned home, burned clothes, washed his garage, and hid the gun behind his water heater.

On April 30, 2024, at 8:07 a.m., officers walked into the UPS distribution center on South Wabash, where Weiss was preparing to start his shift.

He didn’t run.
He didn’t argue.
He listened as Detective Rodriguez read him his Miranda rights and then said he wanted to talk.

He still insisted he hadn’t killed anyone.

That would change before the day was over.

PART 3 – Ten Seconds in Room 18

By the time Weiss “Vice” Schmidt sat down in the interview room at Chicago PD headquarters on April 30, 2024, detectives already had a nearly complete story.

What they didn’t have yet was his version of it.

The small gray room was designed for truth. No windows. One camera in the corner. A metal table. Three chairs. A pitcher of water that few suspects ever touched.

Detectives Carlos Rodriguez and Angela Thompson came in together. They read Weiss his rights again. He signed the acknowledgment calmly. His hands were clasped. His jaw tight. A man trying not to fall apart.

At first, Weiss denied everything.

He said he had never been to the Sunset Motel.
He said he had no idea why his fingerprints would be in Room 18.
He said he had never seen the Glock 17 found in his basement.

And he said he had no idea his wife was having an affair.

Rodriguez didn’t argue.

He simply showed him the footage.

The UPS truck in the motel lot.
The uniformed driver walking into the lobby at 2:17 p.m.
The key card in his hand.

Then he slid the fingerprint comparison across the table.

Palm print on the motel nightstand.
Fingerprints on the Glock trigger.
Fingerprint match probability: 99.8%.

Weiss stared down at the page for a long time.

Then Detective Thompson spoke, not as an interrogator, but as a woman acknowledging the emotional nuclear bomb that had gone off in his life.

“She was cheating on you,” she said. “We know you found out. We know what you walked in on. You need to tell us what happened in that room.”

Something broke.

Weiss sagged forward, covered his face, and for the first time, he trembled.

Then he started talking.

“I Just Wanted to Talk to Her”

According to Weiss’s recorded confession — a statement that would later be replayed in court — the discovery of his wife’s infidelity was not planned.

On April 23, he was halfway through his route when he passed the stretch of South Halsted where the motel sat.

He recognized the car first.

Tabitha’s white Toyota Camry.

She had told him she was at work.

Instead, her car was parked outside a cheap motel they had never visited together.

He drove past once. Then again. The second time, he pulled in.

He told detectives he initially thought Tabitha might have come to help a friend. Or maybe she’d gotten a room to nap if she wasn’t feeling well. He said he didn’t jump straight to the worst possibility.

But then he saw Zack’s Honda Accord parked two spaces down.

And everything crystallized.

He walked into the motel office and — still wearing his UPS uniform, still on the clock — politely asked the clerk if his wife “Tabitha Schmidt” was registered there.

The clerk refused to answer.

Weiss insisted. He begged. He said his wife might be in danger.

Eventually, the clerk handed him the number:

Room 18.

The Sounds Behind the Door

Weiss told detectives that before he even used the key card, the truth hit him like a physical blow.

He could hear them inside.

He heard movement, voices, muffled sounds that erased every excuse he’d been trying to cling to.

He stood still for a moment, he said. Heart pounding. Mind blank. Just breathing in the realization that his life wasn’t what he thought it was.

He walked back to his truck.

And that’s where the story darkened into something irreversible.

Inside the glove compartment was a 9mm Glock 17 — an illegal purchase, he admitted, made months earlier from an acquaintance. He said he’d bought it for protection after hearing stories of robberies on delivery routes.

He took the gun.

Put it in his waistband.

Walked back to Room 18.

He did not knock.

He swiped the key card.

Opened the door.

And stepped into the one scene every betrayed spouse fears.

Ten Seconds

Those who later studied the case say the violence probably lasted ten to twelve seconds.

Inside the room:

Zack was near the bathroom, scrambling up from the bed.
Tabitha was closer to the bed, partially undressed.
Both froze when they saw Weiss standing in the doorway with a gun.

Weiss said he did not remember consciously deciding to pull the trigger. He described it as a “red blur” of rage, humiliation, betrayal, grief — and complete emotional collapse.

Forensic evidence later confirmed that the first shot hit Zack in the chest. The downward bullet angle suggested Zack had either stumbled or dropped to one knee when Weiss fired.

He never got close to Weiss.
He never touched him.
He died near the bathroom threshold.

Then Weiss turned the gun on his wife.

The first bullet struck Tabitha in the chest. She fell.

According to medical testimony, she was still alive — bleeding, terrified, likely gasping.

The second bullet went into her head while she lay on the floor.

Weiss later claimed he fired the second shot because he could not stand to watch her suffer.

The prosecution would characterize that as a cold, intentional execution.

Both things could be true.

The Staged Robbery

After the gunshots, silence returned to the room.

Weiss said he stood there staring at their bodies, the enormity of what he’d done still only dimly registering.

Then his survival instinct kicked in.

He dumped Tabitha’s purse onto the floor.
He pulled the pockets out of Zack’s pants.
He scattered things to make the scene look like a robbery.

But he didn’t take the cash.
Didn’t take the jewelry.
Didn’t hide the bodies.

He locked the door, engaged the inside chain, and left the way he came.

That one mistake — locking the chain — would later prove that only someone with a key could have entered and exited.

He climbed back into his UPS truck.

And finished his shift.

The Night After

Weiss told detectives that the shock finally began to wear off when he went home that night. Panic replaced fury. He realized what police would find. He realized what prison looked like. He realized that his entire life — the job, the house, the future he thought he’d have — had ended in that motel room.

He cleaned the garage floor.
He burned his clothes in the backyard.
He hid the gun in the basement.

He never called the police.

He never called Tabitha’s family.

He simply waited to be found.

And he was.

Was It Insanity — or Intent?

Because Weiss claimed he “lost control”, the court ordered a psychiatric evaluation by Dr. Gerald Stone, a forensic psychiatrist with decades of experience.

Stone spent eight hours interviewing Weiss, reviewing his background, personality traits, childhood history, and the psychological effects of discovering marital infidelity.

His conclusion was nuanced — and devastating for the defense:

Weiss was not insane.
He did understand that killing was wrong.
He did experience acute emotional distress — but he remained reality-based and aware.

In other words:

He snapped.

But not so much that he didn’t know what he was doing.

Stone noted that Weiss had poor anger-management capacity, unresolved trauma from a childhood with an alcoholic father, and a deep emotional dependence on his marriage as a symbol of stability.

But he also emphasized one thing:

Nothing about his past forced his hand.

He still chose the gun.

A Trial Everyone Watched

On August 12, 2024, the case of State of Illinois vs. Weiss Schmidt opened in Cook County Circuit Court before Judge Harold Washington.

The charge:
Two counts of homicide — with the state seeking first-degree murder.

Prosecutor Marcus Johnson argued that Weiss’s actions were not a brief emotional outburst but an intentional double killing:

He retrieved a gun from his truck.
He brought it into the room.
He fired controlled shots at close range.
He executed a second headshot.
He tried to stage a fake robbery afterward.

That, Johnson said, was intent.

Defense attorney Patrick O’Conor countered that Weiss acted under extreme emotional disturbance — what many still colloquially call a “crime of passion.” He pointed to the sudden discovery, the shock, the collapse of identity.

He did not deny Weiss pulled the trigger.

He argued why.

And the jury would have to decide whether that “why” changed anything.

The Evidence Walks In

Witness after witness took the stand.

The maid who found the bodies.

The forensic tech who showed the fingerprint match.

The ballistics expert who confirmed the Glock was the murder weapon.

The UPS supervisor who testified about delivery route gaps and GPS logs.

The bus driver who saw the truck.

The motel owner who confirmed the regular Wednesday visits.

Then came Daniel Morgan, the digital forensics specialist, and with him, the texts.

The jury listened to Tabitha’s messages — the ones where she dismissed her husband as “nothing,” where she reveled in being adored by Zack.

They read Zack’s hopes for a future — and the subtle panic when Tabitha hesitated to commit.

And they heard how those messages stopped abruptly on April 23, replaced by police evidence logs.

Finally, the courtroom listened to Weiss’s own confession — his voice calm, broken, and hollow as he described pulling the trigger.

Even Tabitha’s sister, and Zack’s mother, testified — offering heartbreaking portraits of the lives lost.

Twelve strangers now had to weigh grief, betrayal, rage, law, and accountability in the balance.

When the verdict finally came — after two days of deliberation — it reflected the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the case:

Yes, Weiss had snapped.

But he still killed two unarmed people at close range.

The jury rejected first-degree murder.

They found him guilty of two counts of second-degree murder — acknowledging the emotional shock, but not excusing the act.

Judge Washington sentenced him to 25 years in prison, to be served concurrently, with possible parole after 18 years.

Weiss showed little outward reaction.

Maybe there was nothing left inside to react.

PART 4 – After the Verdict

The courtroom was full when Judge Harold Washington read the sentence aloud:

25 years. Concurrent. Eligible for parole after 18.

For a moment, no one moved.

Then the sounds came.

A sob from the back row.
A sharp exhale from someone who’d been holding breath too long.
A quiet murmur, half-relief, half-anger, spiraling through the gallery.

And in the middle of it all sat Weiss “Vice” Schmidt — the man who once woke before dawn to load a brown truck and deliver packages across Chicago — now shackled, escorted out a side door to begin a life measured in counts, hearings, and parole reviews instead of delivery stops and Wednesdays.

Two families had just watched a judge quantify the value of a lifetime of consequences.

There was no cheering.

There was no victory.

There was only the dull understanding that nothing about this sentence could ever make anyone whole.

A Mother Without a Son

Dolores London, Zack’s mother, had sat through every minute of the trial. Every photograph. Every clinical autopsy detail. Every replay of the final movements of her son’s life.

She told reporters quietly afterward:

“No number changes what happened. I would give anything just to hear him laugh again in my kitchen. I just hope people see what happens when pride turns into violence.”

Zack had planned to start a family, friends said. He had talked about buying a house. He had saved for the down payment. He had been hopeful, not reckless. Flawed, like anyone — but not dangerous.

He did not get a second chance.

He did not get a sentence to serve and walk away from years later.

His life ended on a motel carpet because he loved the wrong woman at the wrong time — and underestimated how far a betrayed husband would go when humiliation mixed with a gun.

A Sister Without a Sister

On the other side of the aisle sat Monica Henderson, Tabitha’s older sister.

She had defended Tabitha in life — through small mistakes, relationship arguments, and quiet disappointments. But during the trial, she had to face who her sister had become in those last six months.

Monica said something almost no one expects to hear from a murder victim’s family:

“Two things can be true. My sister should still be alive. And what she did destroyed the man she married.”

Tabitha had been loyal once. Loving. Protective. She had sent Monica long text messages about wanting to be a mother one day. She had loved holidays, birthdays, and family gatherings.

But somewhere along the way — under fluorescent office lights and the hum of corporate life — she began to feel invisible. She found excitement where she shouldn’t have. She convinced herself that secrecy insulated her from consequence.

It didn’t.

And the shockwave rippled outward: through her family, through Weiss’s, through Zack’s, through every coworker who thought they knew them.

Tabitha wasn’t defined solely by her affair.

But it was the fuse.

The Husband Who Snapped

Psychiatrist Dr. Gerald Stone testified that Weiss was not insane — just deeply emotionally destabilized in the moment.

But the law draws a hard line:

You do not get to execute people because they hurt you.

You do not get to rewrite betrayal in gunfire.

Yet that’s what happened.

Weiss’s childhood — alcoholic father, unstable home, lack of modeled conflict resolution — mattered. The shock of discovering marital infidelity mattered. His feeling that his life had collapsed in one instant mattered.

But none of it erased the two funerals that followed.

And that’s what jurors wrestled with.

Some leaned toward first-degree murder — pointing to the fact that Weiss retrieved a gun from his truck, returned, aimed, and fired twice at close range, then staged a robbery.

Others focused on emotional collapse — the sheer psychological rupture of hearing his wife behind a motel door with another man, the humiliation, the rage.

They compromised only where the law allowed.

Which left Weiss with a second-degree murder conviction, a prison ID number, and nearly two decades to live with a decision made in seconds.

The Myth of “Crime of Passion”

Cases like this force a community to ask uncomfortable questions:

Where is the line between emotional devastation and criminal responsibility?

What do we do with the cultural script that says it’s somehow “understandable” when a spouse kills in response to infidelity?

The courtroom made the answer clear:

Understandable is not excusable.

Empathy is not absolution.

And disappointment — humiliation — betrayal — none of it gives anyone the right to end a life.

The judge said as much during sentencing — stating that while he believed Weiss truly “snapped,” the brutality of the killings and the staging attempt required a substantial sentence.

He also spoke directly to the families:

“There are no winners in this case. Only people left behind.”

The Quiet Fallout

Dynamic Systems held grief counseling for employees. HR memos were sent. Awareness training seminars followed. But the shadows lingered.

Coworkers admitted they replayed every conversation, looking for missed clues.

Did they laugh at something that wasn’t funny?
Did they look too long into each other’s eyes?
Did anyone try to warn them?

The truth was simpler, and harder:

People often hide what they most want to keep.

And sometimes, secrets stay buried until the day they explode.

Inside the Cell

At Stateville Correctional in Illinois, Weiss now lives on a regimented clock:

Roll call.
Mess hall.
Work assignments.
Lights out.

There is no UPS truck.
No neighborhood yard to mow.
No small, quiet house on West Fullerton.

He is described by staff as quiet, compliant, withdrawn. He reads. He rarely causes trouble. Some inmates know his story. Others don’t care.

He will be nearly 50 when eligible for parole.

His mother visits when she can. She still calls him her boy. She still brings family photos. She still wonders what could have changed the course of that day.

She never has an answer.

Neither does he.

Two Gravestones, One Story

In two separate cemeteries, two families visit graves holding different names — connected only by one motel room, one gun, and one catastrophic choice.

Flowers fade. Grass grows over the earth. Voices soften over time.

But anniversaries still hurt.

April 23 is not just a date anymore.

It is the day:

A 31-year-old IT professional with dreams of a future died on a motel floor.
A 29-year-old HR specialist who wanted to feel seen lost her life in the space between fantasy and reality.
A 32-year-old husband let rage outrun reason and destroyed his own future.

And three families were changed forever.

What Remains

True crime stories often tempt us to assign neat moral labels:

Villain. Victim. Hero. Monster.

But life is rarely that simple.

Tabitha wasn’t evil.

Zack wasn’t predatory.

Weiss wasn’t born violent.

They were ordinary people — who made private decisions that collided disastrously with insecurity, secrecy, ego, and a loaded gun.

What shocked the community wasn’t just the murders.

It was the realization that something so extreme grew quietly, invisibly, inside an ordinary marriage — inside office hallways — inside Wednesday routines — until ten seconds in Room 18 rewrote every life connected to it.

Final Reflection

“She Thought Her Husband Was A Worthless Loser & Cheated On Him — She Was De*d Wrong” became a tabloid headline.

But behind that lurid simplification lies the real truth:

You never fully know how fragile someone is until you break them.

And even then…

They are still responsible for what they do next.

That is why the court sentenced Weiss not for feeling betrayal —

—but for pulling a trigger. Twice.