A commenter suggested after my last post that the smart phone belonging to Tammy’s “friend,” Jason “Lumpy” Francis, should be checked by police. Does it still exist? He overdosed two years ago, so it could still be laying around, and he might have been sending and receiving messages and calls right to the very end.
He’s got a point: it’s obvious Francis was hiding something—possibly his or a friend’s involvement in the murder of Tammy Lynds in 1994. After Francis died, someone asked Lumpy’s friend if he thought he killed Tammy. With a wide smirk, he answered, “Yeah, he could have.” However, when another person confronted him soon afterward, saying “I think you killed that girl—you and your friends,” this time he was singing a different tune. His response: “Nobody was there!”
That same smirker also approached a good friend of Tammy’s back in 1994, a month after Tammy was found. “He told me he knew who killed Tammy and would never tell anyone who it was,” he said. “It ended up being a violent night.” Indeed, they got into a vicious fistfight.
An anonymous commenter in the last post asked, “When you talk about these guys destroying the evidence, are you talking about Tammy’s earrings?” I had heard a rumor that jewelry was taken from Tammy, but never heard anything specific. The commenter would not elaborate. So I asked the person who got in the fight with the smirker, and he said that the guy had also “mentioned Tammy’s missing jewelry to me, but would not tell what type of jewelry.” He said he told the police multiple times about his suspicions about the smirker. When asked if he had heard from anyone else about the jewelry, he said, “There were numerous people that talked about it.” What does he think of this dude’s potential involvement in Tammy’s murder? “To this day, I think he knows who did it or had something to do with it,” he said.
In the autopsy report, jewelry was mentioned among the items found on Tammy, including two necklaces (below). Ricky, her friend, had told Hell’s Acres that when questioned by police, they showed him Tammy’s rings when they questioned him, but Richard, her father, doesn’t recall being shown rings by the police. The “identification” below includes a dental match and “jewelry, personal effects ID by family father,” but Richard has said he didn’t pay that much attention to Tammy’s jewelry, so his identification was largely made by recognizing Tammy’s purple and white sneakers.
The
idea of missing earrings, if accurate, is puzzling. That’s what is so
frustrating about a hit-and-run anonymous post without any explanation. Is it
legit? Did someone, like her sister, see her with earrings that night, but they
weren’t found with her body? Here’s a possibility (or a wild guess): was she
found with only one earring, and the other wasn’t recovered at the scene, so
the attacker potentially took it as a gruesome souvenir?
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Here’s something from the paranormal department: a former boyfriend of Tammy’s (and rumored to be her boyfriend when she went missing), had his home’s front door camera capture on video something curious in his living room when he opened his door: a figure that looks alarmingly like the Grim Reaper on the couch next to his wife!
How weird is it that a skeletal figure in a robe appears in the house of an old lover a girl who was found as a skeleton? (Or is it just a bunched up blanket?)
Here is the reaper in question accentuated when converted to grayscale:
His wife never saw robed skeleton with her naked eye, although she sensed it: she felt cold and pain on the side of her body close to where the bony figure sat.
And
how freaked out was the guy over this footage? Creeped enough for he and his
family to move because of it.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Speaking
of paranormal, ghost hunter and videographer Lou Rock and Tammy’s sister
Allison visited the house on the corner of
Jennings Street and Grayson Drive—a home that has a view down the length of Fox
Road, where Tammy was killed:
If you can picture less tree overgrowth obstructing a second-floor bedroom window, someone had the ability to see that night (if they had looked) how Tammy ended up behind a log next to the road if she were dumped from a car:
Or, if she were attacked on Fox Road, on a quiet summer evening, sounds of the struggle would have been audible if there were screams.
Or, alternatively, the viewer could have seen Tammy walking down the road and then jogged up to her, because, you see, there was a sex offender living in the house for decades. When he was 17, he raped a five-year-old boy in the woods across from the end of Jennings, in the North Branch Tributary Park behind Slater Avenue.
Lou Rock knew the people who were renovating the house, which prior to the extensive work on the place, was decrepit, filled with junk, and reeked of cat urine. Apparently, the guy was a hoarder—there were reportedly several shacks on the property, built apparently when he ran out of room to store his possessions. There was also an underground bunker in the backyard that is reminiscent of the pit across the street from where Tammy was murdered.
He sold the dump for $40,000 in 2020 and now lives with relatives down the street. “I’m single with no kids, never married, still looking,” he declares on his Facebook profile. I’m shocked: he’s such a catch. Apparently none of the lovely Asian “models” that he’s Facebook friends with think he’s marriage material. He’s trying, though. Here’s one of his posts, under a photo he took through his windshield of the empty Raymour & Flanagan parking lot on Boston Road at the end of Arnold Avenue: “[name redacted] hey baby I’m having a hard time getting you reaching you if you can put up a site that I can get in to talk to you would be nice I can’t get you for some reason I don’t know why I’m trying my hardest to figure this one out.”
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
On
the subject of creeps, Tammy’s mother Susan, in her notes, had floated the
possibility of Springfield serial killer Alfred Gaynor’s involvement in Tammy’s slaying:
Gaynor, who killed nine women, took his first victim in April of 1995, nine months after Tammy went missing. But what if he had gotten started earlier? His relationship with the women he murdered was always based on mutual cocaine consumption, but what if he happened upon Tammy walking on Fox Road or somewhere else that night? He was from nearby Indian Orchard, so he might have known about the Fox Road shortcut from Pine Point to Sixteen Acres, especially since one of his victims, Joyce Dickerson-Peay, lived in Colonial Estates—extremely close to Fox Road. Incidentally, Gaynor lived in the Moxon Street projects, where Pine Pointers occasionally bought weed and other drugs.
He “posed” two of his victims, which some serial killers do: staging the body in positions for attention and shock value. Gaynor propped Yvette Torres up against the bathroom door of her apartment, and Dickerson-Peay was found in some bushes next to an abandoned restaurant on East Columbus Avenue—her left hand had been positioned on her abdomen, and her arm was propped up on branches.
Tammy, as far as we know, wasn’t posed—although her feet were touching a log that served as a guard rail on Fox Road. However, she was found when a boy had spotted a discarded hubcap in the brush and investigated. Since wheel covers can be expensive, a Hell’s Acres reader pondered about the possibility that the object was left as a marker so someone would discover Tammy.
But here’s the kicker: two of Gaynor’s victims were robbed of jewelry, including his first victim, Vera Hallums. As for his fourth victim, Robin Atkins, he took her earrings. They weren’t a trophy, though. He pawned them for $12, which he promptly spent on crack.
There
was no connection found between Gaynor and several other unsolved homicides of
Springfield women found dead between 1990 and his arrest on April 8, 1998. They
were Shana Price (1990), Lisa DiSilva (1991), Corine Lee (1992), Tammy Lynds
(1994), and Celestina Perez (1995). Two of them were teenagers: Price, 17, and
Lynds, 15. Three of them were found on parkland: Price (Blunt Park), Lynds
(North Branch Park), and Perez (Gurdon Bill Park).
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Regarding the lost case files and missing evidence in the Tammy Lynds murder investigation, there are some who simply can’t believe the description in Part 11 of the poor condition of the evidence room in the Pearl Street headquarters not too long ago, and the haphazard ways of storing evidence when they ran out of room for it—including evidence kept in holding cells and in a trailer truck behind the building.
Well, pictures are worth a million words. Stolen bikes stored in the police garage:
Confiscated computers kept in a holding cell:
Words of warning below on the wall of another holding cell in which evidence was kept. Yes, if you look closely, that says “Beware of possums and rodents.” The “dog ate my homework” trope takes on a whole new meaning: “the rats ate our evidence.”
Missing jewelry. Missing case files. Missing evidence. What is going on here?
I'm sure Alfred Gaynor had nothing to do with Tammy's case. He killed women of the night and druggies. Not innocent young women
ReplyDeleteAlfred Gaynor has opened up about his past, now that his mother has passed away. It’s possible he was too drunk to recall. If he had any memories about killing her, there’s a good chance he would’ve spoken about it already.
ReplyDeleteOnly way to know for sure would be to write him and ask. He’s still alive in a maximum security prison in Lancaster. He likes to paint and then sells his artwork to pass his days.
Reaching out to him sounds like a great idea! Let us all know what he has to say when you hear back.
DeleteThat picture with the skeletal figure is the most important piece here in my honest sensitive opinion .
ReplyDeleteI also feel like that video is important. They claim their package arrived damaged, but you can clearly see the package is totally fine and no one acts like anything is going on, the wife doesn’t even turn towards her arm to check or move away from any pain. If you’re gonna make wild claims, you gotta step up your game
DeleteI wonder what Tammy would say right now if she was reading these posts, seeing her old friends are sharing videos of being haunted by the Grim Reaper. 👻
ReplyDelete