The 1994 Fox Road Murder Mystery, Part 4: The Evil That Men Do

There is an old saying among criminologists: “Familiarity breeds contempt.” The expression has been around for thousands of years. Indeed, most victims and their murderers are at least passingly familiar with one another.

In the early days of the Tammy Lynds murder investigation in 1994, police focused on Tammy’s friends and acquaintances—and for good reason. They questioned people she had mentioned in her diary because she went out one summer night presumably to see someone she knew, and was found in the autumn as a skeleton in the woods.

 

One or more of her guy pals, lovers, or girlfriends, they reasoned, must know something. But then the trail went cold.

  

Looking back, nearly 30 years later, there is also the very real possibility that she was killed by some local dirtbag who happened upon her walking on a quiet street in the wee hours. After all, she was found 10 feet from the side of a road, not in the middle of the deep woods. Thursday was payday and a big bar night, and some creep might have found this opportunity too hard to pass up.

 

Let’s be frank: perverts abound in the area around Fox Road, where she was found. In the neighborhoods off Grayson Drive, North Branch Parkway, and North Brook Road, there have been numerous incidents of sex crimes there over the years.

 

A Hell’s Acres reader from Lamont Street—Tammy’s street—informed me that his parents told him “that at least three child molesters lived on our street and that we could only ride our bikes back and forth to our neighbors mailboxes so our parents could always see us.”

 

Another reader from Gilbert Avenue told me that a father on Lamont Street had molested two of his stepchildren over a period of time and his wife’s solution to the problem was simply to send them to summer camp. The reader also recalls that the word on the street for years was that two fathers who lived on Gilbert Avenue were molesting their children—one at the Boston Road end of Gilbert and the other near the intersection of Gilbert and Stevenson Avenue. The latter had such a seedy reputation that a neighbor who lived near one of them used to watch the neighborhood children like a hawk when they played near his house. The fact that Tammy was friends with the children of the Lamont Street father, as well as one of the Gilbert Street molester’s kids, is not lost on this Hell’s Acres reader, because Tammy was over their houses often.

 

Yes, I know the addresses of these men. No, I’m not going to include them in this post, especially because they have never been convicted of anything. However, there are others in the area that are well-acquainted with our justice system:

• On Sparrow Drive, there were two brothers convicted of sex crimes—one in 2004 for aggravated rape and armed kidnapping (and gun charges a year earlier), and his brother in 2013 for possession of child pornography.

• In 1977, a 17-year-old youth who lived at the intersection of Jennings and Methuen Street, a corner on Grayson Drive right opposite Fox Road, surprised two boys in the North Branch Tributary Park—woods across Grayson Drive from the Fox Road woods—and raped a five-year-old child. (I knew the brother of the kid who was able to get away.) In 1994, this guy—by then a middle-aged man—would have had a clear view from his house of Tammy walking down Fox Road and could have swiftly walked or jogged up to her.

• In 1992, a 33-year-old man who lived on Lloyd Avenue sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl, but he got probation and was ordered to undergo counseling after he contritely explained that he had “a drinking problem.”

• A Fargo Street man was convicted of assault with intent to commit rape in 1981 after he grabbed a woman and pulled her into an alley in downtown Springfield. He has since lived in the Springfield area and has been arrested for a multitude of crimes as recently as 2022.

• Moss Road, on the other side of Mary Lynch School from the Fox Road woods, has been home to several predators. One was imprisoned for kidnapping and raping his daughter repeatedly in the early 1980s and impregnating her. (He claimed that since his daughter was promiscuous, the fetus probably wasn’t his.) 

• Those who have read the memoir by a woman who grew up on Moss Road knows the harrowing sexual abuse she endured from her stepfather starting at age seven through 17.

These men are in addition to the accounts of sexual deviants, flashers, and public masturbators in the reader comments after my first post on Tammy’s murder, including the Lucerne Road guy who was convicted of several sex crimes, such as trying to rape a jogger in 1980 at the corner of North Branch and Sunrise Terrace. As we learned from the victim’s disturbing story she wrote to Hell’s Acres, he was unsuccessful in his attempt to drag her into the Putnam's Puddle Woods. But this man was likely locked up at the time of Tammy’s murder—he had been sentenced to 20 years in state prison for that attempted rape and another rape.

However, another notorious rapist made headlines and terrorized the neighborhood in 1982, prompting women and girls to walk only in groups, and young men to cruise around the neighborhood with baseball bats in their cars, looking for “the underwear on the head” guy, which was said to be his M.O. in order to hide his identity when he attacked teen girls and young women in the woods at the end of Moss Road and Finch Road.

 

“I remember driving around the streets near my house, with a carload of guys, just trying to see if we could catch the perp ourselves,” said a guy from Pidgeon Drive. “Little did we know he lived right down the street. I had a police scanner and a shopping carriage handle—very heavy by the way—and my friends and I all had sisters, so we were both scared and motivated to help find the rapist.”

 

At first, he said, it was whispered that the “underwear” rapist was one of the aforementioned brothers from Sparrow Drive, or possibly someone from Starling Drive, but his face was always obscured, making an identification impossible.

 

The “underwear” rapist hit the area hard in the fall of 1982. In September of that year, a 26-year-old woman was pulled into the Fox Road woods, raped, and robbed by a man wearing what was described as possibly a white ski mask. In October, a 13-year-old girl was dragged into the woods off Riverton Road, across the street from Breckwood Pond, and raped. Residents were worried because Halloween was coming up, when trick-or-treaters would be out at night, so a community meeting was held at the Mary Lynch School. There were concerns that neighborhood youths might suspect the wrong person of being the rapist and would injure him. In fact, in one incident, a teen had been bothering two young girls near the Mary Lynch School, and by the time police showed up, he was surrounded by 20 guys—one with a shotgun. “The kid deserved to be arrested, but he wasn’t the one we were looking for,” said a detective at the scene.

 

Then, on October 29, 1982, a 19-year-old man from Pidgeon Drive was arrested for the rapes and assaults shortly after he raped and robbed a 17-year-old woman in the woods off Finch Road. It turned out that the “underwear” or “ski mask” covering his face was a large white hockey sock with eye holes cut out—he was on the Putnam High School hockey team. He pleaded guilty to two counts of forcible rape of a child, three counts of aggravated rape, and single counts of rape, assault and battery, assault with a dangerous weapon, and threat to murder. In 1983 he was sentenced to 8-10 years in prison.

 

In his case, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree: his father was also convicted of statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl, along with molesting an eight-year-old girl (his granddaughter) in the early 1992. He was sentenced to 12-14 years, so he wasn’t out on the streets in 1994.

Again, the possibility that Tammy was attacked by a stranger, or a middle-aged neighbor, is a departure from investigators’ first suspicions. For years, the theory persisted that one of the teen boys in her life was probably responsible. After all, she went out to meet someone at night, and it was soon discovered that Tammy and her friends were playing a bawdy variation of the old schoolgirl “chatterbox” or fortune-telling folded paper game in which a handful of boys’ names were written on the origami paper creation, and each player had to fool around with whoever’s name came up. Maybe, because of this game, Tammy was put in a situation she didn’t want to be in.

 

So this poses a scenario in which possibly one of the boys Tammy was “seeing” had found out about other “boyfriends” or “the game,” and exploded in a jealous rage. That’s not too farfetched. Or maybe he found out about her pregnancy—since my last post I’ve talked with yet another person who told me Tammy revealed to a friend that she was pregnant. But 15-year-olds typically aren’t homicidal. It is unknown if Tammy was acquainted with any older guys. As for the boys in Tammy’s circle and their behavior as they became adults, these fellows went on to lives that are similar to their working class contemporaries in Pine Point and Sixteen Acres—many married and are raising families, and some experienced homelessness and addiction, and some got into trouble with the law (including serious trouble), or died too young from “hard living.”

 

Unfortunately, this was a blog post more about neighborhood freaks than about Tammy. I’d rather write a more victim-centered account, but, as Shakespeare wrote, “the evil that men do lives after them”—and because Tammy didn’t get to live her full life, all possibilities of potential suspects have to be considered. Most of these guys have paid their debt to society, however, a girl has been dead for 29 years, and no one has been held accountable for this monstrous crime.

This is usually the part in my blog posts when I ask anyone with any information to text an anonymous tip or call the Springfield Police, but now it’s getting rather repetitive.

 

So where does this leave us? Unfortunately, we seem to be no closer to solving this case than we were almost three decades ago. Was it one of Tammy’s friends, an acquaintance, or a stranger? Each day I check my inbox and hope someone writes, “Look, here’s what happened…” Or that the DA will hold a press conference—to announce an arrest, new developments, or new information.

But I guess it’s not going to be that simple, is it?

 

Read Part 1

Read Part 2

Read Part 3

Read Part 4

Read Part 5

Read Part 6

Read Part 7

Read Part 8

Read Part 9

Read Part 10

Read Part 11

Read Part 12

Read Part 13

Read Part 14

Read Part 15

Read Part 16

Read Part 17

Read Part 18

Read Part 19

Read Part 20

Read Part 21

Read Part 22

Read Part 23