One person who keeps being brought up in Tammy Lynds cold case, let’s call him “Evan,” had been charged with raping two girls in Springfield at one point. The older girl was a close friend of Tammy’s, as was the girl’s brother, so Tammy spent a lot of time over their house. So did the Evan, who was married to the younger girl's mother.
The charges were eventually dismissed, but a man who knows the Lynds family—and also knows the older girl who Evan allegedly raped— thinks that Evan might be tied to another crime: the unsolved murder in 2000 of 16-year-old Molly Bish, whose remains were found in woods in the town of Palmer. He has his suspicions about the guy partly because his car was eerily similar to the one authorities were looking for. Evan had a white car “that suddenly caught fire for no reason and was towed away and hauled off to the junkyard,” he said. Molly’s mother Magi Bish, who dropped her daughter off to her lifeguard job at Comins Pond in Warren the day she disappeared, happened to notice the day before a man smoking a cigarette in a white car. The same car was also allegedly seen in the area the day of Bish’s disappearance. Police created a sketch of him based on Magi’s description, and he does look a bit like Evan—especially with his mustache (above and below):
The car, according to Magi, was an older sedan, and looked like this, only there was rust on the side:
“The girls told me how [Evan] used to pick up young girls in that white car,” said the friend of the Lynds family.
A dump truck driver taking sand to the Comins Pond beach also recalled seeing a white sedan moments before Molly and her mother arrived. A worker in St. Paul’s cemetery remembered a white sedan parked in the cemetery later that morning, and a path happens to lead from the pond to the cemetery.
And get this—Tammy had met Molly Bish a few times because the younger girl was good friends with Molly when she got older. “Tammy met Molly through the younger girl,” he said. “The girl is the one who actually told me about her suspicions that [Evan] might have killed Molly—how he was in that area that day.” And when the sketch of the suspect was publicized, “His own kids asked why Daddy’s picture was in the paper,” he said.
The man who points out these weird coincidences—and they are eerie, with Evan being tied to the two teenage girl murder victims—said he did report all this “to the proper authorities.” To him, the timing of the burning of his white car, along with Evan’s resemblance to the sketch, means that Evan should certainly be looked into, even though his rape charges “went away.”
In recent years, there was a focus on another white car. In 2017, a tipster alerted investigators that a white car possibly linked to the case, a 1986 Buick LeSabre, was buried in the now-defunct campground in West Brookfield where a person-of-interest had been staying. A criminologist from the University of New Haven brought ground-penetrating radar to the site and found an underground “anomaly,” but the search yielded nothing.
The owner of the car that they were looking for was reportedly not at the campground on the day of Bish’s disappearance, but showed up the next morning, appearing drunk. A witness said that the unidentified man had told him that "something bad happened" and that he was “in the woods all night.” He also allegedly had bloody scratch marks on his face, and that he resembled the composite sketch of the suspect. The man denied any involvement in the murder.
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Some people I knew were familiar with Evan because he grew up in Sixteen Acres, and they always found him strange. As a junior in high school, he was overly friendly on the bus to freshmen—at a time when no upperclassman would talk to a ninth-grader on the bus. The following year, when they were at our neighborhood hangout called The Gully on Fairlawn Street, a couple of times he volunteered to take them down to Enfield to buy beer when the drinking age was only 18 in Connecticut. They thought it was a better idea for him to go to the package store alone with their money and bring the beer back to The Gully, since the police might nab him for procuring alcohol for minors if they pulled him over with 16-year-olds in the car. But he insisted both times that they come with him.
A few years prior, some of the older kids who hung out at The Gully before we did lured an openly gay teen into The Gully woods and beat him up. Then they let it be known that Evan was next because he was close to the kid, and he was a bit too chummy with younger guys in the neighborhood, but they never carried through with the threat.
My friends also thought Evan was gay, but if he was willing to go on beer runs, they reasoned, who cares?
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In 2018, a Hell’s Acres reader posted a link to my first post on the Tammy Lynds murder (below), and a person responded to the post: Melissa Antoinette Garza, who claimed Tammy had been to her house when she was younger, and she had her suspicions about her father, the late Eugene McGahee, “who may have been involved.” She wrote that her father was a “sociopathic child molester who raped 70-plus kids,” and that “some of my family (myself included) always thought my father killed Molly Bish. There's a lot of parallels and coincidences between the Bish case and my dad's whereabouts.”
Garza, after talking it over with her husband and brother, texted police at 274637 with the information. “When I spoke with my brother, he was like, 'You're not being crazy. It's very possible.' I thought I had to reach out,” she wrote. “I hope one way or another the police do find who is responsible for Tammy's death so that her family can have some peace. If it does happen to be my father, I will reach out personally to Tammy's family and see if there's anything they need me to do.”
McGahee, a former Milton Bradley employee, died in 2014. “It just sucks that he died before going to prison,” wrote Garza. “In the last five years before he died, it seemed like there was going to be some crackdown, because he escaped to Florida and both the police and private investigators started contacting me and Geno (my brother) for info but we didn't have much because we wrote him off. I had little to do with him after 1997. I know he burned down a woman's house that wouldn't leave it to him, and he burned down my mom's first house and the family suspected him in killing one foster kid who ran away (Maggie) and ended up dead that night, and we have our suspicions about Molly Bish. If there's any DNA that they want to test, I'll be happy to offer mine because Gene was my bio father and if he did do it and left DNA, maybe they can tell by my DNA.”
Garza’s mother, Wanda, started taking in foster children in 1987 and sometimes had as many as 10 foster kids in her home at 9 Letendre Avenue in Ludlow—only a three minute drive from Tammy Lynds’ grandparents’ house. A newspaper archive search didn’t reveal an unsolved murder or a suspicious death of anyone named “Maggie” or Margaret, but in February of 1977 there was a fire in a cottage owned by Eugene McGahee in the Pine Point neighborhood, and it was determined to be arson, but there was nothing in the newspaper that determined who set the blaze.
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Some readers may think I’m jumping the shark on the Tammy Lynds case in considering long shots like serial killer Alfred Gaynor in my last post, or her tenuous connection to the Molly Bish murder. In response, I’d say that in cases like Tammy’s, sometimes you have to think outside the box without diving too deep into rabbit holes. I didn’t bring up these “way out there” possibilities—others did, so they’re worth at least a mention, especially because Tammy is a common thread in two Molly Bish scenarios.
Also, in the Tammy Lynds investigation, facts have been coming my way haphazardly, unlike the Danny Croteau case, where there was an established timeline and extensive case files and witness statements to comb through. In Tammy’s case, the files have been lost, only several of Tammy’s friends have come forward, and I’m getting information out of only one cooperating Lynds family member out of four.
Nonetheless, you undoubtedly feel that by this point the suspect list should be shortening, not widening, but here we are. Your reasoning is similar to what Lieutenant Joe Kenda, from the show American Detective says: “Don’t tell me what you think. Don’t tell me what you believe. Just tell me what you can prove. If you can’t prove it, I don’t care what you think or what you believe.”
I still THINK Tammy Lynds was killed by a friend or friends, but I’m not ruling out ANYTHING.
18 comments:
Whatever keeps the conversation going. However, I believe the same as you .
As I remember there were alot of missing girls around the time of Molly Bish in and around Vernon, Ct. and most of the girls were never found. I lived in 16 acres along with my sister who remembers the Tammy Lind murder.
Why this? Why that? Why isn’t anyone else coming forward? You already know the answers. You people are so spineless.
I’m glad you have this all figured out. Please feel free to fill us in.
Why don’t you guys ever say anything nice about this girls friends or family?
That facebook stuff did shut the dad right down. What’s up with that? Why make up stuff if you really don’t know? Just to keep the conversation going?
I’ve heard this said about a couple people involved- I know he’s hiding something, but I don’t think he killed her.
What kind of backwards logic is that?
WTF The father was drunk the night Tammy went missing????? WTF He’s the only one talking???? WTF This is gonna go sideways when other people pop up to speak out against the father…. Oh man I wish I was a fly on the wall when this goes down.
Who is this fake “Evan” person and have you tried contacting the registry to match up this persons name with a vehicle that matches these descriptions? Even if this vehicle was never reported stolen or destroyed, they’ll still have a record of “Evan” owning and registering it.
How crazy would it be if the same guy killed both girls?
I think her dad did it or he is hiding something else sinister
This hAs turned into a shitshow and apparently Joseph Stalin is the new prime suspect?
No one said he is the prime suspect. All leads are looked into. I guess you’d call the Bish investigation a shit show as well, with several people of interest and all sorts of theories. Why ignore the possibilities?
They’re building a new marijuana dispensary at the old Russel’s location. That spot would better suit Lumpy and his paranormal pothead pals now.
Any who thinks this is a shitshow, is obviously a complete idiot. Cockroaches scatter when the lights are turned on. Who has gone missing?
I think people describe these cases as "shitshows" because after 29 and 22 years, law enforcement seems no closer to resolving these cases than they were when they first occurred. In Tammy's case, there has supposedly been evidence lost by the police...that's just not acceptable. What evidence that was collected at the scene seemed haphazard. Feelings about Tammy's family aside, its hard not to see this investigation as a shitshow- I mean why can't her remains be exhumed for newer testing? What is stopping it?
Good luck getting them to agree on anything other than they hate each other. Another family with secrets they would prefer to keep. Cause of the pain and all
Instead of assuming, why doesn’t anyone ask the family if they even knew this was possible to exhume a body without court approval.
Talking to the district attorneys office about a case that want nothing to do with is a waste of time and energy. If you want something done right, unfortunately you have to do it yourself.
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