One of the more curious occurrences in the Tammy Lynds case took place even before it was even a murder investigation. When the 15-year-old was still regarded as a missing person, two police officers showed up at the house of Tammy’s friend Ricky and asked to come in. “They told my mom someone from our house called the Lynds and then hung up.” Ricky denied it, “but they used this opportunity to ask to check our basement,” he said. “My room was down there, and my mom let them.”
Tammy’s disappearance was being treated as a possible runaway case, and police believed she might have been staying with one or more of her friends. In fact, the day after Tammy went missing, her father Richard asked to check Ricky’s basement, and his parents allowed it, and Richard also went over to Ricky’s uncle’s house on Moss Road, where he was allowed to check the house to verify that his daughter wasn’t staying there.
Ricky thought at the time the cops might have been lying about the hang-up phone call as an excuse to interview him. “That accusation was the reason my parents let those officers question me unsupervised,” he said. And after all, Ricky said the police were used to playing loosely with the truth, coercing him to say—falsely—that Tammy snuck out one night and knocked on his bedroom window, to fit the narrative in her diary that she went over a boyfriend’s house from time to time after both their parents went to bed.
But Ricky also entertained the possibility that maybe his mother might have called the Lynds’ number to ask about any news about Tammy, and then had changed her mind just as someone picked up the phone—thereby it being treated as a hang-up call. “When I recently asked my mom about it, she said she didn’t call,” he commented. “I was hoping she would say yes—then it might hinted at the police actually having a copy of the everyone’s phone records at one point, or at the very least the Lynds’ records.”
If the police did have phone records, they would have shown that her friend Sindy Pabon called Tammy around 1:00 p.m. or 2:00 p.m. on July 21, 1994—the day she went missing. They also would have an idea of who phoned in the answering machine-recorded threat to Tammy and other annoyance calls—including an anonymous person who claimed she was in Florida—that prompted them to reach out to the phone company. In addition, they might have revealed that Tammy could have talked to another Ricky the day she disappeared—a Ricky who lived on Carew Street and had been intimate with Tammy. According to the investigative notes of Tammy’s mother Susan, a friend of Tammy told Susan that she was meeting a “Ricky” that night:
However, that friend recently told me that he does not remember talking to Ricky from Carew Street about Tammy back in 1994. “And I have a great memory,” he added. Did they, in fact, communicate over the phone that day? We don’t know.
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Tammy’s desire to get pregnant was evident in her diary, but I didn’t think she had shared this with any of her friends. But I found out that she did tell one of them: Jack (not his real name). “I told her she shouldn’t do it at that point—that she should concentrate on school,” he said. He explained to Tammy that she had her entire life in front of her.
After Richard read her diary, and assessed Tammy’s home life—including her vicious fights with her mother—he concluded that Tammy’s motivation to get pregnant was to get out of the house. What she didn’t account for was the fact some teen moms, looking for both unconditional love and some independence in a new phase of life, go out on their own, only to move back home when financial and other pressures become too much.
There is some evidence in the autopsy that Tammy was indeed pregnant. If so, she nonetheless was deprived of the chance to chase her dreams—which ultimately came down to being a mother.
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If you are a praying person, Richard needs your prayers now more than ever.
In 2018, his cardiologist told him his heart had a leaky valve, and that they’d keep a close eye on it. Then, in late 2022, he was having some difficulty breathing and congestion. This past summer, when I met Richard, it was evident this congestion was still bothering him—he kept coughing and clearing his throat. So he decided to have surgery.
Richard went into the UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester on November 8 to have open heart surgery—undergoing bypass surgery on one plugged main artery in the front of his heart, and replacing his leaky mitral valve with a cow’s valve, which is supposed to last 20 years. Cardiac bypass surgery is no small thing: they stop the heart, do the necessary repairs, restart the heart, and sew him up.
Initially, the operation went well—at one point during his recovery he woke up and he thought he had been at home sleeping, not in the hospital. He even went for a couple of short walks, and had a “mascot”: Walker, a cute cow stuffed animal, in honor of his new body part. The initial plan was to be in the ICU for three to four days, and then a recovery time at home of about six weeks. But then there were complications. Many complications.
After Richard suffered severe abdominal pain, it was discovered that part of his large colon was necrotic (dead) due to lack of blood flow, so he had emergency surgery to remove five centimeters of dead colon and reattach his large and small bowels. Since then he has had four additional bowel surgeries, and during the last few weeks he and has suffered fevers, high white blood counts, and irregularities in his heart rate and blood pressure. He also had a blood transfusion. Richard has been mostly sedated, intubated and on a ventilator, though there has been moments of consciousness. He had a tracheotomy to assist with breathing, but he has also been on a CPAP machine to try to wean him off the ventilator so he can eventually breathe on his own.
Of late, Richard has taken baby steps in the right direction to get better, but the truth is he is facing months and even a year of recovery time instead of the originally planned six weeks. This is not what he signed up for—a life-threatening condition after the first surgery—but Richard has faced other devastating setbacks in the past and managed to stay positive. It is well-known that Richard is a fighter, and this is what fighters do when presented with the biggest health challenge of their lives—they go to battle, and this mentality certainly helps, day by day, hour by hour, and breath by breath. At present, he is stable, and doctors are cautiously optimistic, but this has been quite the roller coaster ride since he checked into the hospital, and as his family and friends have painfully found out, this condition could change at any moment.
This past June, because of his health issues, Richard posted on his Facebook profile that after 29 years he had decided to stop trying to find out what happened to his daughter. “I feel now that I will never get any answers to any of my questions,” he wrote. “I will leave this earth not knowing why Tammy was taken before myself.”
But then as the cold case started heating up over the summer, he decided to give it one last try, entrusting me with his binder of information his family collected on his daughter’s murder.
Richard also pursued with the City of Springfield’s Parks Department the possibility of a memorial to Tammy—specifically, a bench in her honor. One of the potential options was putting it in a small park the city would create on the former site of Russell’s restaurant. However, since he has been hospitalized, the mayor has announced that along with the “pocket park,” the EMBR cannabis dispensary would be located there. They even had a groundbreaking ceremony. I am looking forward to seeing Richard’s reaction to the news of a pot shop being put on the site, next to a possible Tammy memorial, but part of me thinks that Richard, as the former president of the Pine Point Community Council, would actually welcome a $2 million business investment in a longtime vacant lot and eyesore. I really would love to be able to have a conversation with Richard at some point on the way to a successful, 100 percent recovery—but I know that will take time.
Along the way to recuperation, do you know what would really get Richard’s spirits up? I think you know the answer. Last June, in the same post that he announced his health problems, he provided an update on Tammy’s murder investigation: “Recently, I talked to the D.A., and they have informed me that there is nothing that can be done unless someone breaks down and talks about what did happen.”
Unfortunately, the case has had the same “prognosis” for nearly three decades.
2 comments:
That picture at the top got me thinking. We all wore watches back in 94, I still love wearing a watch. Hell, I feel naked without one.
Which begs the question, what happened to Tammy’s watch?
She’s wearing one in that picture, along with earrings and a necklace.
We didn’t have cellphones back in the day and no one ever mentioned Tammy having a beeper. She would’ve needed a way to make sure she got home on time.
Would she really risk losing track of time doing something so risky?
Did Tammy have her own house key?
Would she have really risked getting locked out? I know you said the front door was left slightly open, but I can’t help but wonder.
Wishing Mr Lynds the best. It’s very fortunate he shared his file with you when he did. As frustrating as people appear in these comments, there are those who truly appreciate everything you guys are doing to spread Tammy’s story., no one deserves to be forgotten. Sure there is gonna be bumps in the road, you guys just have to weather the storm.
Thank you Richard Lynds for your help with this case. I hope you’re able to enjoy the holidays with your loved ones and that you regain your strength soon.
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