Hell's Acres

"You can't go home again," wrote Thomas Wolfe. Well, I was born and raised in the Sixteen Acres neighborhood of Springfield, MA. Then, after college, I got out of Dodge and lived in Boston for 21 years, only to return to the 413 in 2007, when my career brought me back. Although this blog isn’t exclusively about growing up—and returning to—the Springfield area, I can’t seem to escape it. Or can I? MOBILE USERS: TO VIEW A TABLE OF CONTENTS, CLICK "VIEW WEB VERSION" ON THE BOTTOM.

Saturday, July 22, 2023

The 1994 Fox Road Murder Mystery, Part 5: A Father's Frustrations

Richard Lynds has a three-ring binder that is three inches thick, filled of keepsakes no father should have to collect: information on his daughter’s murder. It contains such content as statements from Tammy’s friends, the final pages from her diary, her autopsy report, her death certificate, and lists of people she knew.

He and his daughter Allison, frustrated at the lack of progress on the cold case—from the very start, actually—have pretty much conducted their own investigation over years. And he points out, with much chagrin, that evidence collected on the murder is missing—disappearing as inexplicably as her daughter vanishing into the night on June 21, 1994.

“The DA’s Office has told me that everything that was collected off Tammy, and the entire diaries of Tammy, are missing,” he said. “This all has been missing since just before December of 1994.” Tammy’s skeletal remains were found in the woods on the side of Fox Road on November 4, 1994.

If this is true—and there is no reason for me to believe that Richard is lying about this—the case has officially become beyond bizarre. It seems to rival the Kennedy assassination in the number of unusual scenarios posed. The deeper you dig, the weirder it gets, and the darker the rabbit holes become—from the possibilities of an overreaction to news that she was pregnant—to a slaying to prevent her from testifying in an assault case—to a satanic ritual killing. And everything in between. Richard has gathered various recollections from people who knew his daughter, and there are suspicious fingers pointing everywhere, but no one has provided any firsthand accounts or any answers to why she ended up dead.

The police shenanigans began, according to Richard, when they didn’t take Tammy’s missing person case seriously. Then, in January of 1995, when his now ex-wife Susan went with Tammy’s cousin to the police headquarters so the latter could answer some questions, it was apparent that the file was extremely disorganized, and they treated Susan with something between indifference and rudeness.

Then, on February 7, 1995, Richard and Susan were asked to go to the police station, and they brought a folder with all their research on the case. Instead of going over the couple’s file, however, police interrogated them, and Richard was asked to take a polygraph exam. He later agreed to do so—three tests—and the results were inconclusive.

This was seven months into the strange saga of the Tammy Lynds case. Nearly 30 years later, people who knew Tammy pose their own theories about what happened to her, but no one has come forward to fill in the blanks. So all the Lynds family has now are the same unanswered questions they had in 1994. There seems to be no progress in the investigation.

Was Tammy pregnant?

What we had up to this point were third-hand accounts of Tammy telling friends she was pregnant, and a rumor that a fetus was found in her skeleton. However, according to her anthropological examination (below), there was no fetus, but her bones had premature epiphyseal closure (or growth plate fusion) may have been a result of her scoliosis condition, although this “premature suture closure can also accompany early teen pregnancy.”

Tammy’s diary around the time of her disappearance reveal a 15-year-old girl looking for love. “One of these days I’m going to find that person,” she wrote on August 9, 1993. She reported twice that she might be pregnant, and her reaction vacillated between happiness and trepidation. On June 14, 1994, a little more than a month before she vanished, she discovered she was going to have a baby.

Blunt Force Trauma?

The cause of Tammy’s death was undetermined, with no injuries detected, but the autopsy report revealed that “a number of teeth were not present in the socket and were uncovered at the scene.” Richard insists that because some of Tammy’s teeth were found under her skeleton, an assault must have taken place. “Teeth do not fall out of the skull after death on their own,” he said. “Blunt force trauma is how they would have been removed.”

Adding to the Lynds’ aggravation was the long wait for the autopsy report—more than a year after her death, and after several requests for it.

On the night she went missing, her 10-year-old sister Allison said Tammy left at midnight and said she would be back at 3:00 a.m. Richard thought Tammy was planning on meeting her boyfriend named Ricky, but after the murder it became apparent she was dating others as well. “From the various notes of Tammy, a boy named David was the one she was dating, having sex with, and was planning to sneak out of the house to go see late at night,” said Richard. Tammy was close with a couple of Davids, but Richard said he knew which David she was seeing—she went to a high school dance and an ROTC prom with him—and Richard once gave him a ride home from the Lynds house. “Tammy was with me on that trip,” he said.

Mysterious Figures

When Tammy left her home on July 21, Allison looked out the window and said she saw “two males, wearing baseball caps, who were behind a large storage crate that was located in a neighbor’s yard near the fence gate that Tammy had exited through,” said Richard. “As Tammy walked to the street and headed south, these two guys came out from hiding and stood in the street, watching Tammy go down the street.” Allison did not know how old these two individuals were. She didn’t determine if they proceeded to follow her sister—she had quit watching when Tammy was out of view. One of the baseball caps was white, and one was black. That’s all she remembers.

Richard and Allison’s research, based on contact with Tammy’s friends and acquaintances, reveals some astounding claims about Tammy’s fate. But as far as we know, they are not witness statements, so their veracity is unknown. Here are some of the assertions:

One of Tammy’s friends reported that Tammy allegedly was heading to a party on Lamont Street on the night she went missing and stayed there until Monday, July 25. Allison had said Tammy apparently didn’t bring anything with her, but five days is a long time to wear the same clothes. Did Tammy grab a backpack with necessities? Or did one of her friends supply her with backup clothes? Did she buy clothes? The evidence does suggest a change of wardrobe: “Allison told me that Tammy was wearing all black that night,” said Richard. “In the autopsy report, it is written that Tammy was wearing blue jeans, with a manufacturer name tag on it.” According to the same report, a black shirt was found, but it was unclear if Tammy was wearing it.

In fact, on Saturday, July 23, 1994, Richard walked over to what he thought was the party house and started shouting for Tammy to come out. “I was yelling at the wrong house,” said Richard. “An older woman came out of the house, telling me that there was no one there named Tammy. She told me to get lost or she would call the police.”

In the missing person report, Tammy indeed wore all black that night:

If she wore all black when she left the house, this does indicate a change of clothes because she was found wearing jeans.

Other Potential Evidence

On June 21, 1995, nearly a year after the murder, Tammy’s mother Susan, Tammy’s brother Josh, and Michael, the brother of Tammy’s old boyfriend, found a blouse in the Fox Road woods. When they showed it to Allison, she “turned pale and said, ‘that’s the one Tammy was wearing.’” The Lynds tried to submit it to police for testing, but it was rejected because the possible evidence was contaminated. She said the police also refused to meet them in the area where they found the blouse, and told her they would only accept any such evidence if it were handed over through a lawyer, which they couldn’t afford.

In 2018, the DA’s Office informed Richard Lynds that “an object that was found was with Tammy but not from her,” said Richard. That object turned out to be a human fingernail, and tests were conducted in 2013, but no human DNA could be extracted from it:

It has been well-established that a knife—something like a carpet cutting-style tool—was found under Tammy’s skeleton. There was an insistence that one of Tammy’s friends—and perhaps someone she was intimate with—had given her this instrument to protect herself shortly before the night she died.

And then there’s a friend’s declaration, according to notes from Susan, that a conversation took place about Tammy being the victim of a satanic sacrifice performed by friends of hers who dabbled in witchcraft. It was mentioned that Tammy was also into witchcraft, a dead cat was discovered hanging from a tree near the scene, and that a pentagram was found (drawn?) under (or around?) Tammy’s skeleton. Susan also noted that this individual, in relating this and other information to her on several occasions, acted strangely and avoided eye contact with her. This is one of two mentions among Susan’s notes of multiple people killing Tammy.

There is also an account from a friend of Tammy that when he was 14, another friend—who knew Tammy—stole a small amount of heroin from his a drug-dealing relative. “He wanted me to try it,” he said. “Me being the dumb kid who wanted to fit in so badly, I did it and go so sick I ended up in the hospital.” So I guess there is always the possibility that Tammy died of an overdose, if drug use was more prevalent in this neighborhood than previously thought. Richard insisted that Tammy didn’t drink or take drugs: consistent drug use tends to give a father telltale signs, unless an overdose was the result of a onetime experimentation. Adding to the rumors are comments published at the bottom of my last blog post that indicated Tammy knew too much about a neighborhood drug operation and someone might have wanted to silence her.

Prior Attacks

What is NOT hearsay in this case is the fact that Tammy was a victim of ongoing assaults from Central High School students. She was beaten up at school and on her bus by several teens, along with an incident in which Tammy and her boyfriend were threatened with a knife—and that there was a court date of October 14, 1994 for the assault complaint. The student who pulled the knife went on to have an extensive criminal history, including charges of armed robbery with a gun, rape, larceny, and cocaine possession. To be sure, legal action could have provided a motive for an aggravated assault—or murder—to stop her from further testifying against others. The following is the Tammy’s description of one of the incidents:

Richard said police told him he himself had been eliminated as the prime suspect when he showed the contents of his binder to them in 2013, but that hasn’t prevented him from being a thorn in the side of law enforcement as he advocates for justice for his daughter. He has also alienated some people from the old neighborhood by contacting them through Facebook to glean information.

Among Richard’s most controversial claims is that evidence in the case was buried alongside his daughter. “I have requested to have Tammy exhumed, because I think everything is in her casket to prevent anyone in the future to have the opportunity to examine and test these things again,” he said.

This might seem a bit farfetched, because the best way to destroy evidence is to burn it or make it disappear another way—where there is no way it could resurface with an exhumation— but a grieving father is insistent that important evidence lies in Tammy’s coffin, and that the case file Susan saw in January of 1995 was just a bunch of paperwork quickly and haphazardly thrown together. At the very least, he pointed out, more sophisticated testing could be done on Tammy’s remains. Richard has been in touch with the DA’s Office victim/witness assistance program, but he said he was told that they would not put in an order to exhume Tammy.

With all this wild speculation by people about what could have happened to Tammy, it is important to remember that investigators want to look at the murder from the point of view of not what is possible, but what is probable. Everything under the sun is possible, but only some scenarios are probable. And, as Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

As far as we know, this extraordinary evidence remains to be seen. That’s why Richard was told by investigators that that the case will remain at a standstill until people start to talk. So he’s depending on one or more heroes to come forward. He’s been waiting for this for 29 years, and that’s why he’s been rattling cages. At 66 years old, he doesn’t want to wait any longer, and who can blame him?

Saturday, July 1, 2023

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?