When people talk about dreamers, the often-used cliché is that they have their head in the clouds. However, Tammy Lynds had her head in the stars: she was fascinated with outer space. “She wanted to be an astronaut,” said her father, Richard. “I think her goal was to be on one of the space shuttle missions. When we went on a trip to Florida, in April of 1994, we went to Cape Canaveral, and she was very excited. In high school, she was in the Air Force Junior ROTC, which she was very interested in. I felt that was her future direction.”
Indeed, she loved the Air Force Junior ROTC, especially because some Air Force pilots go on to become astronauts. In her freshman year at Central High School she attended her first ROTC Ball with her boyfriend, David. It was also her last. Her dreams and her future ended on the night of July 21, 1994, when she was murdered.
Tammy’s friend Sindy Pabon remembers attending the ROTC Ball the following year, and it began on a somber note. “Some of us who knew her started crying without a word being said when we saw each other, because we all knew we were all thinking the same thing—that we were still very much missing and grieving our friend,” she said. “Tammy's death truly did affect a lot of people.”
In this blog series on Tammy’s murder, information about the type of person she was—her goals, feelings, and desires—and some of the facts and rumors surrounding her slaying, have come to me in bits and pieces. The police case file has been lost, so everything has to be put together in a piecemeal fashion instead of a linear story line. The Lynds had been investigating Tammy’s murder this way as well—since 1994 they have gotten details in dribs and drabs over the years, much of the information documented in Richard’s three-ring binder containing what he has learned about the homicide. Indeed, in this binder collection, there are partial diaries from Tammy, and the handwritten notes of Tammy’s mother Susan covered miscellaneous conversations she had with her daughter’s friends and acquaintances over the years. Some of Susan’s discussions were interesting and informative, others led to blind alleys. What’s particularly frustrating is that 29 years after the murder, few people seem to be talking about the murder anymore.
Nonetheless, I press on, 11 years after writing my first post on the Tammy Lynds murder, because lately some people have cared enough to contact me about the case. But with a missing police case file, and little physical evidence—because Tammy was found as a skeleton nearly three months after she vanished into the night—and with even the lack of an official cause of death, looking into this crime is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without being able to look at the picture on top of the box. It also has many missing pieces, including all the border pieces. I have no idea how it’s going to turn out.
“Do you think you have enough left in the tank to write a Part 10?” a friend of mine asked. Of course I do—there are still plenty of bits and pieces of information on the homicide to include. And you never know—one piece might lead to another missing piece, and maybe, eventually when you look at the puzzle, you have enough of the pieces put together to be able to see the big picture. Maybe, one day, we’ll figure out exactly what happened to Tammy Lynds.
In my previous nine posts on the murder, each post had a particular theme. This one is decidedly unaimed. But from what we know of other cold cases, small bits and pieces of information can sometimes end up creating large movement in an investigation.
So here they are: some bits and pieces.
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As illustrated in Part 8, one of life’s biggest frustrations for Tammy’s friend and sometime lover Ricky (last name withheld) has been the longstanding rumor that he murdered her, partly because Tammy had told her sister Allison that she was meeting him the night she went missing, and a person named Ricky was mentioned in her diary as someone she was intimate with. She wrote that she had snuck out exactly a week earlier and had sex with an unnamed boy who many thought had to be Ricky, even though he insists it wasn’t him, and in his one-story house, there’s no upstairs bedroom, even though she wrote that they “went upstairs” to his room.
Indeed, she wrote on her computer about having foreplay with a “Ricky” on March 7, 1994 in an account that ends in mid-sentence just as the encounter gets incredibly intense—as if someone walked in the room when she was writing it (or maybe it was deleted by Tammy or someone else?). Ricky said this diary entry was written months before he and Tammy first had sex. “I didn’t fool around with Tammy until after school was out, and there wasn’t much, if any foreplay,” he said. “I don’t recall calling Tammy and waking her up on my day off. Why would I have the day off and she didn’t?”
Now it turns out there might be another “Ricky.” There was a “Richy” in the address section of her diary with a 737 number, while Ricky’s—and everyone else’s in that neighborhood—began with 783):
And a look at Tammy’s phone ledger revealed a Richy with the same phone number and a Carew Street address (Tammy spells it “Crew”). Some research reveals that he did, in fact, live at that address.
During the 1993-94 school year, ninth-graders at Central High School, which Tammy attended as a freshman, went to classes at Central Academy in the Van Sickle Middle School building on Carew Street in East Springfield, a 12-minute walk from Rich’s house, which had an upstairs. So there is a possibility that Tammy went over there. It doesn’t explain her calling him at 9:00 a.m. in an era when few people had cell phones, unless he skipped school. A little more research uncovers that Richy’s parents were separated, and one of them lived at a Grayson Drive address that is 300 feet from where they found Tammy. Also, “Richy” was called “Ricky” by many of his friends as a kid.
And here’s the kicker: a friend of Tammy recently claimed that she planned to run away the night she went missing because of constant fighting with her mother. When asked where she would go, she allegedly replied, “Ricky’s house.” Is there a possibility she was heading to Carew Street or Grayson Drive? Is this account even accurate?
It’s also possible that Tammy was using the name Ricky to cover up the identity of another person.
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There is also the rumor that neighborhood youths, including Tammy, practiced witchcraft in the woods at the southern end of Gilbert Avenue. (These woods have been pretty much been eliminated in the last 30 years because of housing and a senior living facility.) Not only that, but Tammy was rumored to have been killed in a sacrifice in a satanic ritual. Tammy was wearing all black when she left her house her final time—was she dared out in the middle of the night to take part in an occult “ceremony” in which she was killed?
One of Tammy’s friends said that everyone knew teenagers “did so-called witchcraft in any of the woods in our neighborhood.” But she downplays the seriousness of this practice, and it wasn’t done in any of the groups she hung out with. She had heard things, but said she’s “pretty sure it was just a bunch of kids dabbling in what they thought they could call witchcraft, and I don’t think that had anything to do with Tammy’s death.”
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In her frustration over the lack of movement on the case, Susan had mentioned in her notes that the original officers assigned to the case lost valuable time investigating by being suspended for misconduct “due to their involvement in another crime.” The reality was that homicide detectives Dennis O’Connor and Noberto Garcia were originally supposed to be suspended for a total of two days because their names were listed as directors in a corporation that owned Razzl’s bar in Springfield’s North End. It is a violation of police department rules to be involved in a liquor establishment.
However, the officers’ listing on the document was a mistake, and their suspension was rescinded on May 31, 1995 after they appealed the penalty to the Police Commission. The fact of the matter is that they were never suspended, and that they had never been a target of previous departmental charges.
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To be sure, the lost Tammy Lynds murder case file and lost evidence contributed to the rumor that there was law enforcement involvement in Tammy’s murder. In her notes, Susan also mentioned a friend of Tammy talking about his former brother-in-law, an ex-cop, who allegedly claimed that police officers were paid off to ignore and “shelve” the case.
That former officer, however, definitely had an ax to grind with the Springfield Police Department after he was charged in 1989 with raping two girls, aged 14 and 4. The girls ended up recanting their testimony and the officer then resumed his relationship with the younger girl’s mother—the woman who first told police about the alleged rapes—and she was pregnant with his child. The charges were dismissed, but he resigned from the police force in 1990 “for personal reasons related to the way people in the (Police) Department handled the (rape) investigation,” according to his lawyer. The officer, said his lawyer “questioned whether he could work effectively within the Police Department,” even after the dismissal of criminal charges.
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Suspicious call: Susan noted that the Lynds family had a tape of someone threatening Tammy over the phone. It was enough for the family to ask Nynex’s Annoyance Call Bureau to trace their calls:
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In the inventory of items found on Tammy’s body, there was no bra reported. Tammy had grown up a bit of a tomboy, her father noted, but she surely would have worn a bra if she were meeting someone or several people the night she went missing.
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Unfortunately, Tammy’s mysterious “other” lock-and-key diary, the one Richard and police had never seen (and Richard insists Susan took from Tammy) might never surface: Susan had many of her belongings in a self-storage facility in Indian Orchard, and one night Richard saw on the news that the storage building was on fire. “I saw on TV Sue and her mother standing there with their hands on their heads screaming,” said Richard. “All was lost.”
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Richard has always wanted to create some kind of memorial to Tammy on or near the spot she was discovered—something with her name, date of birth, date of death, and a short message. “In 1995, I asked the Mayor’s Office, and I was told no, because where she was found was Springfield Park Department property,” said Richard. However, he recently contacted the Mayor’s Office to see if he would be receptive to the proposal. His latest idea is a cast iron bench he would supply and inscribe the text himself. He is hoping this could be created by November 4, the date his daughter’s body was found.
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Speaking of dates and benches, about 10 years ago, Richard had a vision in which he was sitting next to a man in a white gown. “No words were said,” said Richard. “He just took his hand and pointed out forward. I could see someone coming toward me. I got up and moved toward this person. It was Tammy. I stood there, looking at her. I put my hands on her shoulders, and she said nothing, except a date was given to me. I had no idea what the date means. I have just put it off as a deep dream. But now, thinking about it, I may have an idea of what it meant. The date was 8/16/24. I feel that date represents the 30th anniversary of when Tammy died.”
Then he wondered aloud: “Am I just overthinking on this or what?”
I answered that it could be the date the case is solved, or when someone is convicted of the murder. Perhaps it’s the date her memorial bench is dedicated. Or maybe it was just a dream.
“Time will tell,” he said.
