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.

Sunday, October 29, 2023

The 1994 Fox Road Murder Mystery, Part 13: Yet Even More Questions

One of Tammy’s friends, we’ll call him “Owen,” has come under some scrutiny, especially since police in 1994 were familiar with him because he had been arrested in the past, and over the years he has been in custody for such crimes as assault and a weapons violation—and he comes from a family with a history of brushes with the law.

The Lynds family cast a suspicious eye on Owen because after the murder a teenager who talked to Tammy’s mother Susan said that Owen hated Tammy. That same friend, according to Susan’s notes, also said that during the original investigation, Owen and another teen close to him told police they believed that Tammy had been molested and killed by her father. They tried to get her Tammy’s friend to go along with this story, but he replied, “No way,” stick his middle finger up at them, and walked away:

He said that at first, Owen just wanted to have sex with Tammy. “You know—fuck her,” he said. “Lay her. Sorry Sue, I didn’t mean to use that word.” But Tammy’s parents didn’t want her to go anywhere with Owen after he visited their home once, when he had illegally “borrowed” the family car, and drove down Lamont street hanging out of the car window with a beer can in his hand:

The youth also said that neighborhood kids used to party at Owen’s house, smoking weed and drinking with his mother:

Bizarrely, on December 5, 1994, Sue wrote that according to a friend of Tammy, Owen claimed his best friend killed Tammy, and he had evidence that this person had committed the murder. But he asserted that if anyone found out, he would destroy the evidence:

According to Susan, Owen let it be known that he would not only get rid of the evidence, but also he would “get” the unknown person who ratted on him once he found out who it was. If accurate, it means Owen knew that police might have suspected him.

It is really strange that Owen announced he would destroy this “evidence.” This makes no sense. The only kind of physical evidence that could implicate a friend in this scenario would be a photo or a phone answering machine message—right? I can’t think of anything else. I guess he could have had an article of clothing from the guy that had Tammy’s blood on it, but I sincerely doubt that. So what are we to make of this?

Anyway, prior to the murder, the Lynds parents forbidding Tammy to see Owen supposedly angered him. After the murder, when the Lynds family went roller skating at Interskate 91 in Wilbraham, Owen tried to skate with Tammy’s sister Allison, and according to Sue’s notes, he attempted to intimidate the girl because the family thought he might have committed the murder:

On December 19, 1994, Susan, Allison, and Tammy’s cousin April went down to the Springfield Police headquarters on Pearl Street with all this information, but they didn’t have an appointment, and Susan claimed they were treated cavalierly. When they presented police with a photo Susan took of Owen speaking to Allison at the skating rink, the officer responded, “Since when is it a crime to talk to someone?”

Owen is the youth described in Part 6 as being visibly nervous when questioned by Detective Burt Garcia. “What’s wrong?” the detective asked. “Are you nervous? Why is your leg shaking?”

“I always do that with my leg,” Owen replied.

★★★★★★★★

Especially confusing about Susan’s notes is a claim from a friend of Tammy that a person he knew named “Rick” admitted that he was supposed to meet Tammy the night she went missing. Tammy had been intimate with two Ricks—one from near her neighborhood and one who lived in East Springfield. The Rick from Pine Point said there were no arrangement for them to meet that night, but we don’t know about the Rick from Carew Street. Regarding the latter, how would Tammy and Rick meet that night when they both lived so far apart and weren’t old enough to drive?

This is the second reference that we know of in which Tammy was planning to meet a “Rick” that night—one of her friends recently revealed that she planned to run away on the evening of July 21, 1994 and that she intended to go to “Ricky’s house.” The thing is, Rick from Carew Street was away from this area much of the month of July that year—his family was in the process of moving across the country and they were gone to prepare their new home thousands of miles away.

★★★★★★★★

Here is a letter from “Kim” AKA “Kay” from May 18, 1994 to Tammy and David, her boyfriend. She asks David is “everything better now?” We don’t know what this was in reference to—what was wrong? Kim, by the way, is not in Tammy’s phone directory and wasn’t referenced in the parts of her diary we have.

We know that David had been picked on by Tammy’s neighborhood friends (but apparently not by his Central High School classmates). Is that what this was in reference to? Or was there a problem between Tammy and David? There is a long gap in her diary entries—from March 22 to June 14, 1994—so we don’t know what had transpired. One of Tammy’s friends said that the two “broke up and got back together a few times during the school year.” So was their relationship a stormy one? One would assume so. She did write in her diary on June 14 that she had met David, loved him, wanted to have his baby, and that she was indeed pregnant. Did they break up and reunite? There is no mention of a reconciliation with David in her diary—just that she had met a new boy named David, but doesn’t “know how long it will last.”

★★★★★★★★

One of Tammy’s friends, who we’ll call “Jack,” described her as very quiet and shy when he first met her, and at the beginning of the 1993-1994 school year, kids on the bus were picking on her and throwing things in her hair. “By the second day on the bus, I had enough,” he said. “I yelled at the one doing it, and told them if they fucked with her they are fucking with me. After that I sat down next to her and introduced myself, and from that point on we were inseparable. In between classes we always found each other. We hung out during lunch and after school. Everybody thought we were dating, but we never did.”

Jack looked out for Tammy, and when he began skipping school, she wanted to as well. “She tried to go with me a few times, and I wouldn’t let her skip,” he said. “I didn’t want her to go down that path.”

After Tammy was brutally attacked by a classmate and by the assailant's friends at school, Jack “was not happy about it. I had some words with people and ended up being suspended from school for a while.”

Needless to say, he was profoundly distressed when she went missing and was devastated when she was found dead nearly three months later.

“Tammy was the first female I opened up to about everything,” he said. “She was truly my best friend.”

By all accounts, Tammy had overcome her shyness and was well liked—except, of course, by her attacker at Central High School. By the way, this woman is Facebook friends with a Pine Point person who was heard to say on the Putnam High School bus after the murder, “She got what she deserved.”

★★★★★★★★

In publishing the entirety of what we have of Tammy’s diary in the last post, a reader pointed out that I had left out two pages of her thoughts, but I assumed it was a school assignment because the document name was “Tammy School Notes” and they were written on lined paper instead of diary pages. But maybe they were mislabeled and they really were private musings, because who would detail a pregnancy scare for a teacher?

The second page of “Tammy’s School Notes’ contains her admission that she, her brother, and her sister “keep secrets between each other and from our parents.” This is especially poignant when you consider that she was apparently keeping a whopper of a secret from everyone: an abusive boyfriend at the time she went missing. This revelation was detailed in the last post.

★★★★★★★★

Tammy evidently didn’t share with Allison anything about a boyfriend who used to hit her, but Susan did write that the last night she snuck out she had told her sister that the boy she was meeting “that he would be angry if she was late,” which corresponds to what Tammy’s 12-year-old friend had said Tammy was worried about if she wasn’t on time. As mentioned in my last post, Tammy told the 12-year-old that if she were late, he would “act out.”

After 29 years, the question remains: who was Tammy supposed to meet on the night of July 21, 1994? Is he the one who killed her? If he didn’t, who did?

Saturday, October 21, 2023

The 1994 Fox Road Murder Mystery, Part 12: An Abusive Boyfriend?

The night Tammy Lynds disappeared, her family assumed she was sneaking out to meet her friend and sometimes lover Ricky, who lived nearby. There was another Ricky who she was intimate with, but he lived all the way in East Springfield.

And then there was David B., who she invited to the Central High School JROTC Military Ball in the spring of 1994. Both of them also attended the CHS picnic together at High Meadows in North Granby, CT. They were supposedly hot and heavy on the summer of 1994.

It’s difficult to figure out David, according to reports. One of Tammy’s friends described him as the ultimate loser. “All the kids in the neighborhood called him shit-face, butt-face, pimple-faced peewee, and puss-boy,” he said. They insisted that he smelled and never showered. “The poor guy had the worst ache out of all of the kids around here. His face was always red with white-heads, his lips would look swollen at times, and his hair and face were greasy. Looking at recent photos of him, he said, “I feel like you can still see the pain and insecurity in his eyes. Tammy talked about how David was so desperate for people to like him, that he would do whatever people told him to do, and how he had no confidence. I can’t recall what he got caught doing, but some had asked him to shoplift or something like that.”

Tammy’s friend didn’t see David around much, but when he was in the neighborhood, he was a persona non grata. “Everyone talked tons of shit about him when he was around,” said, confessing that he didn’t know where he lived or who he normally hung around with, and he didn’t care.

“I also had bad acne and greasy skin back in 1994, so I wasn’t one to pick on someone about terrible skin,” he said. “But others weren’t as understanding. So he was never welcomed into the group of kids I hung out with. You could say he was shunned.”

Incredibly, however, David was able to get it together and make a quick transformation—a least among his peers at Central High School. Sindy Pabon, one of Tammy’s Central friends, described him as “friendly, jokey, and popular with the ladies.” Another friend said Tammy and David would get together for the occasional quickie in the closed and darkened school auditorium. She was head-over-heels for David. “I’m going to have his baby,” wrote Tammy in her diary on June 14, 1994, after she insisted in a previous entry that another boy used her just for sex. “It sounds crazy, but I truly love him, or am I making another mistake?”

In 2019, Tammy’s father, Richard, revealed that it was his understanding that Tammy was “playing a game” between two boys named Ricky and David at the time of her disappearance. Richard was acquainted with both, having one of the two “Rickys” she was seeing over for dinner, and driving David back to his home on a side street off Parker Street once.

But what no one knew, except a 12-year-old girlfriend of Tammy's, was that Tammy claimed one of her “boyfriends” used to beat her. The girl is the daughter of a former co-worker of Tammy’s mother Susan, and their family every so often went over to the Lynds to socialize, and the kids played hide-and-seek. The girl looked up to Tammy as an older-sister figure, and had slept over the Lynds house in the past.

On July 21, 1994, the night Tammy went missing, the 12-year-old girl (who we’ll call Jill), her two brothers, and her mother visited the Lynds. The kids played hide-and-seek and Richard ordered pizza from Tony’s Pizza on Boston Road. Jill’s oldest brother, a year older than Tammy, insists that Richard and Susan were extremely drunk that evening—a claim that Richard disputes.

Regardless, Jill’s oldest brother reports that his sister said that Tammy that night told her that “she was abused by her boyfriend. When Tammy would be late, he would hit her.” Tammy also feared that night that things would not go well if she didn’t meet him on time. “The last thing Tammy said to my sister was that she would be late, and her boyfriend was going to act out,” he said. Tammy was wearing an all-black outfit that day. “Tammy always wore black when we played hide-and-seek,” he said. “It was easier to hide in all black.”

When Tammy was found as a skeleton on November 4, 1994, she was wearing jeans, not black pants. Susan reported to police that her daughter was wearing all black, but maybe she didn’t notice if Tammy had changed.

Jill didn’t know the boyfriend’s name, but “it was someone she started seeing at school in the ROTC program,” said her brother.

In 1994, Jill gave police all this information. But, as readers of this blog know, the case file was lost.

David was not in the ROTC, but he did attend the ROTC ball with her—maybe this is what a 12-year-old’s understanding (and a hazy 29-year-old memory) of what Tammy had said, especially if she was upset and crying. It’s hard to tell. It’s also difficult to determine who Tammy’s “boyfriend” was in July of 1994, because she was supposedly seeing several guys that year.

According to the Jill’s oldest brother, Tammy wanted to spend the night with his family, but this was not possible because they were staying with his aunt while their house was getting readied for them to move in, and the aunt did not allow guests. His mother called, and the aunt said no way. He said Tammy and her mother were fighting that night and Tammy stormed off the Lynds’ property around 5:30 p.m., right when the visitors left, heading south on Lamont Street, which is toward the old woods where teens gathered, but also in the direction where a couple of friends lived on Lamont. She eventually did come home, before venturing out at midnight to a meeting with someone her sister Allison said she was dreading. Who was she meeting? One of Tammy’s friends said she would always talk about a David or a Ricky. Nearly three decades later, in looking at Tammy’s lovers, I guess it helps to look at the diary pages available—I’ve been criticized for not publishing ALL of them, so here we go, all 32 pages:

The first entries from 1992 are about problems with her mother, which she updates in 1994:

A couple of entries from 1992 reveal her interest in a boy at her bus stop, and the second one shows Tammy’s habit of revisiting entries to update them. In the October 20, 1992 entry below, she apparently updated it on March 3, 1994 to opine that “he was a bastard, and nothing else.”

Susan puzzled over what T.E.E.L. meant below, but it likely stands for a well-known paragraph structure method from an essay-writing guide she learned in school: Topic sentence, Explain, Evidence, Link:

Then she believes she’s pregnant with J’s child:

In the August 9, 1993 entry she described a guy who asked her out, but she had a boyfriend. The second half of the page, along with the next page, is written in larger writing, as if she revisited the page later:

Some people have commented that the two similar—yet slightly different styles of handwriting—in the diary suggest that it’s a forgery. I’m no handwriting expert: what do YOU think?

In the following entry, from March 3 1994, she wants to ask someone to the ROTC dance. Is it David, who was eventually her date for this event? Or is it Rick?

On March 3, 1994, she wonders at the prospect of having sex with a boy named Rick, but apparently revisits the page and writes that it was special for her “but a boy thing for him.”

On March 7, 1994, in a computer printout, she gets pretty graphic about fooling around with someone—is it the same guy?

On March 22 she seems satisfied with a lover, but then there is a months-long gap, after which on June 14, 1994, she writes that the boy never cared about her. However, she met David, with whom she is smitten. She loves him but doesn’t “know if it will last, he (will) probably get mad at me so much that he won’t want me around him no more.”

On June 14 again she believes she’s pregnant:

In another departure, she writes a diary entry in a spiral notebook on July 15, 1994—her last one, a week before she disappeared—in which she snuck out, went over her “boyfriend’s” house, and was “making love.” Was this David or someone else? At one point that summer she did tell David she was pregnant, but according to one of David’s relatives, she didn’t say (and probably didn’t know) how who the father was.

The diary entries lack description of the physical battles Tammy and her mother used to get into—fights that others recall—and there is no mention of physical abuse suffered at the hands of a boyfriend. Maybe she didn’t share EVERYTHING in her diary, knowing that her mother snooped in it, and there is also talk of another lock-and-key diary that hasn’t been accounted for. Was the “lost diary” more graphic?

Tammy’s choice in lovers and boyfriends has long been the subject of scrutiny within the family since her death. At the time, like any parent, they didn’t want to get in her way, unless there were some obvious red flags. In retrospect, Richard wishes he had taken more notice of them.

To wit, one night in early 1994, Richard was asked by a neighborhood father to retrieve his mentally-challenged daughter from the house of one of Tammy’s ex-boyfriends, fearing she was intoxicated and being taken advantage of. Why the father didn’t do this himself is unknown, but when Richard went to the house, he looked in the basement window and saw the ex-boyfriend and his brother having sex with the girl on a mattress. Well, actually, it was the ex-boyfriend’s brother banging away at her, with the ex-boyfriend standing there, watching and naked, ready for his turn—if he hadn’t had it already.

Richard knocked on the door. “When I called her name, she came to the door naked and not walking straight,” he said. “I told her to go find her clothes, and that I’m bringing her home. I told the two boys to stay right there at the door with me. They did. I never entered their house. She came out, and I walked her home. She kept saying, ‘Please don't tell anyone what you saw.’ All she could do was laugh and say she was sorry. She was very drunk.”

Tammy's boyfriends and other casual sex partners: did any of them play a role in her death? “I didn’t really get to know these boys,” said Richard. Even when they came over to visit, how much can you learn from someone who is obviously on his best behavior? But as we’re learning from Tammy’s diary entries and personal accounts, one (or more) of them used her just for sex, one was a rapist, and one was possibly a batterer.

Was one of them a murderer?