The 1994 Fox Road Murder Mystery, Part 11: The Pit and the Grave—and the World Beyond

What happened to the missing case file and evidence in the 1994 Tammy Lynds murder? In 2013, the DA’s office told Richard Lynds that it all had been lost. 

To be sure, the mishandling of evidence has long been a sore point for the Springfield Police. The department hasn’t exactly been plagued by the scandals about lost evidence in homicide investigations that other local agencies have suffered from, including the missing weapon in West Springfield’s 1982 Joanne Welch murder (a belt) and the 1972 bludgeoning death of Danny Croteau in Chicopee (a rock).

 

Still, the 2016 arrest of Springfield Police narcotics evidence officer Kevin Burnham sent shock waves through the community when he was accused of stealing nearly $400,000 from the evidence room at the Pearl Street headquarters over the years. The department’s sloppy record keeping came into the spotlight with this embarrassing case (he ended up killing himself because of it), but the chaos of its evidence storage conditions had been long documented before that, including a 2009 story in the Springfield Republican newspaper mentioning that the evidence room being so cramped and overflowing that some evidence had to be kept in holding cells.

 

Moreover, a newspaper story in 2000 about the outgrown and outdated station pointed out that overflow evidence was being stored in a trailer truck behind the building.

 

Were the Tammy Lynds file and evidence in her case mislabeled or lost during one of those hasty storage transfers, or was it simply thrown away because the murder wasn’t labeled an unsolved homicide publicly until it was listed as such on the DA’s website in 2012?

 

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Richard has long argued that Tammy’s lost case file and evidence were somehow buried with her in 1994, a theory that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, because there are easier ways to destroy files and evidence than putting it in her casket, where it could be exhumed and see the light of day. However, at present, Richard is trying to reach out to the Sampson Funeral Home to get an itemized list of what exactly was in her casket. As far as he knows, all that was placed in there was Tammy’s body, her photo, and her dress. But maybe there’s more—rumor has it that multiple people had put cards and letters in the coffin.

What if Tammy’s missing lock-and-key diary, the diary seen by no-one but her mother Susan, were somehow slipped into the casket? It could hold vital information—yes, possibly also embarrassing revelations about her fights with her mother and other family secrets—but also possible details about the days leading up to her disappearance. Does the possibility about a stashed diary and its potential revelations, along with other messages, make the case for exhuming Tammy’s body?

 

Richard thinks so, pointing out that there also have been advances in forensic technology in the past three decades. However, the victim/witness advocate in the DA’s Office told him that an exhumation is not warranted in this case—a judge would have to sign a court order to get this done. And after all, what could they glean from a skeleton that has now been underground for that long? Well, it can be argued that things have changed since 1994—anthropologists have taken a progressively larger role in medical examiner’s offices over the years, and there have been increased—and more accurate—bone trauma analyses of skeletal remains in the past few decades. These improvements include the improved analysis of sharp force trauma, and since a knife was found under Tammy’s skeleton, her remains might be worth another look.

 

Could a new analysis allow for the events surrounding her death to be reconstructed, and possibly affect the manner-of-death classification? Richard pointed out that in 1994, the handling of the crime scene was rushed— there was no evidence van when police scoured the area behind the logs where Tammy was found. He submitted a photo taken of the television screen of the news report:

 

“Two officers picked up the bag, walked over to one of the police cars and dumped the bag in the trunk of the car and left,” said Richard. A newspaper story reported that Fox Road was closed for more than three hours during the crime scene investigation. We don’t know how long investigators were there, but at the risk of sounding like armchair detectives, it’s widely known that crime scene investigations typically take days, not hours. 

 

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The notion of a teenage gathering spot in the woods called The Pit has come up as a possibility of where Tammy was heading the night she went missing. There’s was a sand pit in the woods at the southern end of Lamont Street—woods that have long been replaced with housing.

 

You can see The Pit as the white speck in the 1997 Google Earth photo below:

 

In fact, my friends and I spent the night partying and sleeping in this opening in the woods, which were nicknamed Strawberry Fields by locals, on July 4, 1980–an evening detailed in another blog post.

 

The sand pit still existed in 2001 in this historicaerials.com photo.

 

That pit was right where Pearson Drive is now. I had screen grabbed a Google Maps aerial photo years ago before they built houses there, right in the middle:

 

There is also a pit in the woods across the street from where Tammy was discovered—off the southwestern side of Fox Road. Here is its location, at the head of the arrow to the right:

These woods have long been the domain of squatters, especially in the east end of North Branch Park, where there has been a homeless encampment behind the Walmart building for decades. In fact, a homeless person from the neighborhood lives near the Fox Road pit right now.

 

In 2019, paranormal investigator Lou Rock and his team investigated the area and documented it on video. They dug a little bit in the pit, and found a pair of women’s underwear:

 

However, according to an inventory of items found with Tammy’s remains, Tammy was wearing a pair of underwear when she was killed, so the undergarment on the video were likely not hers, unless she had brought a change of clothes. Her sister, Allison, said Tammy had brought nothing with her, but she also said Tammy was dressed in all black the night she vanished and she was found inexplicably wearing jeans. Furthermore, a year later, relatives and friends 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,’” wrote their mother, Susan, in the many notes she took after the murder.

 

The police refused to accept the blouse as evidence, saying it had been contaminated, and they would certainly say the same thing about underwear found by civilians decades later.

 

Did a change of clothes take place for Tammy in the night of July 21, 1994 or later? If so, it raises the possibility that Tammy could have spent the night somewhere (she did allegedly tell a friend she was running away to a lover’s house hours before) and was killed afterward.

 

In any case, I may be making an overassumption here, but it’s unlikely Tammy was killed in the area of the Fox Road pit. Who would risk dragging her across the road and getting caught? If anything, he or they would have pulled her deeper into the woods, away from a path. It’s true the murderer could potentially stand at the edge of the woods and around 3:00 a.m., and if he heard nothing and saw no headlights on Grayson Drive or North Branch Parkway, he could go for it—haul a 115-pound girl across the road and then using all his might to pick her up and throw her over a log. This would leave her much, much closer to discovery and leave the perp all sorts of ways to leave evidence, including DNA.

 

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Lou Rock’s paranormal investigations of the Tammy Lynds murder include more than 15 videos that include attempted communications with her using a “spirit box” that rapidly scans radio frequencies to contact the dead. In my second post on the Tammy Lynds murder, I disparaged the spirit box, despite the fact that his interviews with Richard and Allison were not only heartfelt, but also revealing, disclosing for the first time that a knife was discovered under Tammy, and divulging the names of two people she was “dating”—Ricky and David.

 

His first videos on Tammy Lynds in 2019, taken when the murder was long off the public’s radar, reinvigorated the case’s tired blood and got people interested in the murder again.

So last May I took out the part in my blog post in which I questioned the validity of using the spirit box. Just because I don’t believe in it doesn’t give me the right to put it down. For all I know, there may be something to it—I certainly don’t discount the existence of paranormal phenomena. These spirit box sessions began after Lou Rock swore he had been contacted by Tammy from beyond, but this isn’t the only spectral event associated with the murder: there was Richard’s “vision” of Tammy detailed at the end of the last post.

And, according to notes taken by Tammy’s mother Susan, two years after Tammy’s death, a couple of the girl’s old friends were walking in the woods close to where she was found when one of them heard light footsteps following them and “Find my killer” was whispered into his ear:

I’ll have to admit these aren’t the first supernatural occurrences in a murder case that I’ve heard of. On April 14,1989, in the Apremont Triangle area of downtown Springfield, Springfield College student Eric Palmer was stabbed to death after leaving the Boardwalk Pub on Chestnut Street. His girlfriend, who was clubbed to the sidewalk in the attack, was getting ready to testify against the assailant nearly a year later in the trial when weird things started happening in her off-campus apartment. They were the kind of occurrences usually attributed to a poltergeist: rearranged furniture overnight, disappearing objects from closets, sink faucets inexplicably turned on, and doors slamming.

The events ratcheted up in the final days of the trial, and Palmer’s girlfriend and her roommates really did attribute all this weirdness to his restless soul seeking justice—the mysterious incidents all stopped when Charles Fryar Jr. was convicted of first degree murder.

So far be it from me to give no credence to this stuff. Allison, in her interview with Lou Rock, said she believes that until Tammy gets justice, her spirit still wanders the earth. “I know she’s not at peace,” said Allison. “I know she goes between where she was found on Fox Road to the house we grew up in on Lamont Street to where she’s buried. And she’s in limbo. Until she’s able to get closure, she’s never going to be at peace.”

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

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Read Part 17

Read Part 18

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Read Part 21

Read Part 22

Read Part 23