Hell's Acres: 2024

Monday, December 16, 2024

The 1994 Fox Road Murder Mystery, Part 24: Discrepancies

I prepared myself for a possible letdown after Greta Jochem’s excellent and probing front page story last August in The Republican on Tammy’s murder, even though I certainly couldn’t complain about the story’s placement: the entire top half of the front page and two whole pages inside in the Sunday paper!

Alas, apparently there have been no recent developments in the case—at least I’m not aware of any. At heart, I’m an optimist—maybe someone will come forward, I thought. But I’m also a realist. I had written 23 blog posts with very few volunteering their thoughts since April of 2023, aside from the usual people—especially Tammy’s friend and sometimes lover Ricky Stebbins.

It was surprising that Tammy’s sister Allison told Jochem that to this day Stebbins remains a possible suspect in her opinion, and that police had good reason to question him at the time. “In my book, he’s still on the suspect list,” she said. Yet, according to her mother Susan’s notes, police told her they eliminated him as a suspect less than a month into the investigation—not to mention the fact that Stebbins has lately been on a crusade, of sorts, to solve this mystery.

Nonetheless, Allison recalled, Tammy said she was meeting a “Ricky” the last night she was seen—although it was revealed that Tammy had also been dating another boy named Ricky.

Allison pointed out that Tammy’s diary revealed that exactly a week before, she snuck out of the house on a dare to go over a boy’s house, and passed two bars. “When I was going past the first bar, I had a man start following me,” Tammy wrote. “I booked.” Then, after “making love” in the boy’s bedroom, when she was walking home, she had to pass by “both bars. When I was going by the second bar coming from my house, a guy started calling me and following me, but I booked.”

Bars along Boston Road near the Lynds’ home, heading east, included John Joe’s, Mattie’s and the Sports Page. Allison noted that Tammy’s most direct route to Stebbins’ house, near Boston Road, would have taken her past these bars, according to her father’s marked map. Allison said it would have been unlikely for Tammy to take a short cut through the woods next to North Branch Tributary Park to get to his house in the middle of the night. Walking along well-lit Boston Road was an easier and safer option, albeit drunk patrons were exiting bars.

However, Stebbins said he didn’t meet Tammy on that night, July 14, 1994, or the night she disappeared exactly a week later. Stebbins also reiterated the fact that in 2023 he was the only one of Tammy’s old friends who was willing to engage in a dialogue about the murder with her father, Richard, when others wouldn’t.

Allison notes that Stebbins is obsessed with the case. He doesn’t dispute this, but he says he desperately wants to clear his name and once and for all find out what happened to his friend. Besides, he said, it was Allison who had first reached out to HIM with questions about Tammy in 2016 via Facebook messenger.

Regardless. let’s take another look at Tammy’s likely route, according to her diary. On July 14, 1994, was Tammy seeing someone else whose address would have taken her past two bars—presumably on Boston Road? Tammy also could have walked by a couple of bars if she were traveling in THE OTHER direction, heading southwest, on Boston Road: the Country Inn (formerly the Ranch House) and the Pine Point Café on the corner of Boston Road and Preston Street. The latter bar would have been a mile away from her Lamont Street home—roughly the same distance as the walk from her house to the Sports Page.

Where did this mystery lover live? Tammy’s diary didn’t say.

* * * * * * * * * *

How did Jochem happen upon this cold case? Let’s just say a little bird, whose initials are H.A., emailed her boss, informing him that it was the 30th anniversary of the slaying, that there was, ahem, a lengthy blog series about it, and that Allison was available for an interview.

That same little bird told her that Stebbins was willing to talk to her—no big surprise there, lol. I guess the real shock was that Tammy’s mother Susan consented to a brief interview with Jochem. Susan hasn’t publicly commented on the case in decades, presumably putting it all behind her and moving on with her life. “She was on the fence about this,” said Allison regarding the prospect of her mother contacting Jochem.

Susan waited three weeks, as the story was well on the way to being written, before she decided to do the right thing. “No one’s forcing you,” Allison told her. Susan complained to her about the Hell’s Acres blog—that there were so many untruths, though she didn't say what was inaccurate, whether it was in the blog posts or the comments. Probably both, in her eyes.

The weeks dragged on without a response from Susan. “You know what?” Allison told her mother. “This is the kind of thing why I don’t have a relationship with you.” She couldn’t believe that her mother had simply written the past off. Allison reminded her that this wasn’t simply an annoying blogger—it was the investigations editor for a newspaper, and the first time mainstream media was interested in covering this in 10 years.

The interview with Susan apparently wasn’t extensive. She had a few sentences in the story—which is better than nothing. Allison has many, many more questions to ask her mother, such as, why did she tell police she didn’t know where her husband was that night? Shortly after the murder, that claim had prompted police to immediately suspect Richard enough to request him to take a polygraph. The results were inconclusive.

“Why didn’t SHE have to take a lie detector test?” asked Allison. “She hated Tammy. My sister and I were daddy’s girls, and she used to get in fights with Tammy, and I saw her drag Tammy around by her hair on our living room and kitchen floor. My dad didn’t do any of this. He never beat us.”

These skirmishes with Tammy are well-documented in the blog. Perhaps that’s why Susan doesn’t like this blog series, especially the part about her having an extramarital affair at the time. “She didn’t want all the dirty laundry to come out,” said Allison.

According to Allison, the night Tammy went missing, Richard fell asleep in the living room chair and Tammy nudged him to go to bed, which he did. Strangely, Susan told police she didn’t know of Richard’s whereabouts around the time Tammy snuck out of the house at midnight. “My mother threw my father under the bus,” said Allison. “She told the cops she didn’t know where he was, and said she thought that maybe he had followed Tammy.”

However, when Tammy left that night, Allison watched her sister go out to the street from several windows in the house, and it was SUSAN who was missing from the house—not Richard.

“My mother had a ritual—she would read her romance novels in the bathroom for about three hours every night,” said Allison. “It was her ‘me’ time, her alone time when no one could bother her. It was her way of decompressing from the day. We used to call it her ‘office.’ Except she wasn’t in the bathroom that night. I was walking all over the entire house, pacing from window to window. I knew where my dad was. He was in bed. I could hear him snoring. I don’t know where my mother was.”

“Where do you think she was?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “If anything, she might have followed my sister. I don’t know. What she did that night—and what she said to police—just didn’t add up. She didn’t know where my father was?” She answered her own question: “They slept in a waterbed, so when you sleep in a waterbed, you can tell when someone is on the other side,” because of the water displacement in the mattress.

Allison also repeated her father’s assertion that Susan, the next morning, instead of wearing her usual nightgown, was fully dressed when her father left for work. Why did she break from her normal routines the night before and that morning?

* * * * * * * * * *

There are also huge discrepancies between Richard and Allison’s same version of the early evening of July 21, 1994 and the account of Steve (not his real name), who said he, his sister, his brother, and mother visited the Lynds to have dinner, and then the plan was for the kids to play hide-and-seek, but the agenda was scuttled when Richard was supposedly falling-down drunk and Tammy was fighting with Susan.

Steve said he and his family left in disgust around 5:30, at the same time an upset Tammy ran from an argument with her mother and headed south on Lamont Street. Allison remembers it differently: that 5:30 was the time Steve’s family ARRIVED, and they left between 9:30 and 10:00.

Allison said her father wasn’t intoxicated—that he had stopped drinking in 1982 because alcoholism ran in his family, and he only had an occasional beer or glass of champagne at celebrations. “I have videos of family gatherings, and my father isn’t drinking in any of them,” said Allison.

Steve also claimed his 12-year-old sister (who we’ll call Jill), said that Tammy that day told her that “she was abused by her boyfriend. When Tammy would be late, he would hit her. The last thing Tammy said to my sister was that she would be late, and her boyfriend was going to act out,” he said.

Jill didn’t know the boyfriend’s name. “It was someone she started seeing at school in the ROTC program,” said her brother. In the spring and possibly the summer, Tammy had been dating a David B., who was not in the ROTC, but he did attend the ROTC ball with her, and maybe that’s what she meant. She gave police all this information, yet apparently police never interviewed David B., according to David’s younger brother, who I talked to in November.

“The police never spoke to him in 1994,” said David’s brother, who hasn’t been in touch with David in a few years, and he isn’t the only one who found it odd that police didn't interview his brother. “My mother and I always thought it was weird,” he said. “I mean, why wouldn’t they?”

This is not simply a matter of police lacking attention to detail in the initial investigation—merely failing to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. It’s obviously a major omission. A blown opportunity. After all, she told him she was pregnant, according to another relative. She wrote in her diary that she was going to have his baby. To say that he was worth talking to is quite the understatement.

Even so, he sincerely doubts that David would have had anything to do with the murder. “I’m just not seeing it,’ he said, “He was always a calm guy. A regular guy. He just doesn’t have it in him.”

Then there is Tammy’s friend Will’s claim that she was over his house between 5:30 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. and that he gave her a knife to protect herself that night. Is this true? That contradicts the timeline, unless Tammy took off from her house for more than an hour.

* * * * * * * * * *

So here we are. Allison likens it to being “square one” again, despite the newspaper and blog coverage. What have we learned? Through this blog (using, at times, pseudonyms), we know who the main players are in this drama: Ricky, Jason, Will, Owen, David B., and David D. OK, I’ve finally given the last initial of the “other David”! (Will and Owen are pseudonyms.) We also know that Jason and Owen had talked about hurting Tammy, according to Will.

In addition, we’ve learned that Tammy was supposed to meet a “boyfriend” the night she went missing.

Who was it?

Saturday, August 10, 2024

The 1994 Fox Road Murder Mystery, Part 23: Tammy's Last Kiss

Photo: Allison and Tammy

Any good friend of Tammy’s will tell you how much she loved anything to do with space travel, astronomy, and science fiction. She wanted to become an astronaut one day, but she also had another dream that blended her extraterrestrial interests: to invent a flux capacitor. She talked about it with her friend, Will (not his real name), the last night she was seen alive, when they were doing homework together at his house.

Fans of “Back to the Future” know that the device she mentioned is a theoretical time machine. Will, recalling his last conversation with Tammy during a 2021 interview, revealed that he had strong feelings for Tammy, and he told her so that evening. Just think, if Will had a flux capacitor, he could plug a date into a keypad, and set it for July 21, 1994, so he could re-experience his only kiss from Tammy.

That’s right: on the last night of her life, they kissed after he told her he wanted to be her boyfriend. But apparently she wasn’t ready to date him because it was just one kiss—it didn’t go any further.

Come to think of it, if Will had a flux capacitor, he could even go back to the past and warn Tammy not to go out that night, thus preventing her murder. Yes, he insisted that he did what he could to protect her, giving her a knife, but if he could turn back the clock, my guess is that he would have also chosen to accompany Tammy to stop her from meeting her gruesome fate. Which begs the question: if he cared about her so much, and she was in such imminent danger, why didn’t he go with her, or at least meet her around midnight, when she went out?

“Over my dead body,” he said he told Jason Francis and Owen (not his real name) when they talked about hurting Tammy that evening. “Better not fuck with her,” he claimed he warned them. And yet, he didn’t take that next step and actually see for himself what would happen to her later. Will certainly was no tough guy. One of his friends said, “He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag.” But to just give her a weapon, and then leave her on her own to deal with her situation—even though she was so attracted to her—it really defies logic, doesn’t it?

Will was asked in the interview if he had an affair with Tammy. “No,” he said. She was not ready for a relationship with him.

“And that was hurtful, right?” he was asked.

“A little bit,” he said. “But she also gave me a kiss that night.” So there was presumably a chance for a relationship in the future, especially because they didn’t know that her hours on this earth were numbered—she was only threatened enough for him to arm her, and nothing more.

Give me a break. Why wasn’t Will invited to go to this “party” that Jason and Owen and others were attending when they left at 11:30 p.m.? They were all friends. It doesn’t add up.

“I did give her that knife,” he said. He pulled out his phone and offered to show a drawing of it, but the interview continued without him finding the photo, and he proceeded to go on about a number of other things: his suicide attempts, his breakup with his son’s mother, and how his sister felt that she should have looked out for Tammy more—but her drug abuse made her oblivious of her friend’s needs and felt “she let her down.”

* * * * * * * *

“We feel that he was there when it happened,” wrote Richard, Tammy’s father, in an email to Valley Advocate reporter Tom Vannah on August 14, 2000, shortly after Will had talked to Tammy's mother Susan in the Stop and Shop parking lot.

Well, here’s a way to find out: having a detective interview Will as soon as possible to have him elaborate on his recollection. I told police as much last February.

Readers, please tell me I’m not losing my mind when I insist on this next step. Send me a comment. Is it realistic, in a 30-year-old cold case, to ask—or even compel—Will to answer questions from police, given his comments about what could have been the murder weapon and friends’ hatred for Tammy?

* * * * * * * *

I talked to Tammy’s sister Allison for about an hour last week, and she said she just doesn’t know what to think about Will’s 2021 knife story. “Will stalked my mother at work for a long time, and he told her many things in the Stop and Shop parking lot that night” in 2000, she said. His claims to Susan included Jason and Owen’s hatred for Tammy. “But he didn’t mention to her giving Tammy a knife,” said Allison. “I was the last person to see my sister before she went out, and all she brought with her was a keychain to unlock the gate in our yard. I didn’t see her with a knife, and she didn’t mention it.”

A knife was found under Tammy’s skeleton, and by several accounts it looked similar to the carpet-cutting-type tool that Will had described handing to Tammy. “Was there blood on that knife?” asked Allison. “We don’t know, and the evidence was lost.”

Did Tammy have a knife? And if she did, was it used against her? I’d guess that if her blood was on the blade, then she must have been stabbed with it. Did they find anyone’s DNA on the knife? Again, we don’t know—if the knife was discovered directly under her, then genetic material on it might have been somewhat protected from the elements, since Tammy, although reduced to a skeleton, was still wearing clothing.

A skeptic might point out that Will’s story could be a convenient way for him to explain why his own DNA could have been found on that knife—that is, if any evidence had been preserved.

“I think if he were comfortable, with someone asking him in a relaxed setting, saying, ‘Hey, I’m not interrogating you. I just want to ask you some questions and get your side of it. Tell me what you remember—we want to hear you out—and I’m just going to take some notes,’” said Allison. “That’s the way to approach him.”

Therein lies the difference between Allison’s philosophy and mine—I would lean on Will a little more, because him describing what could have been the murder weapon, in my humble opinion, is a significant development. It’s no secret that Allison didn’t like the fact that I have put so much information out there in the past year—especially the autopsy report. Indeed, police always say that in a cold case, some information needs to be held back, just in case anyone give police details that haven’t been revealed. Still, it has been three decades: it is time to lift the fog. How often is it that you have an opportunity to view a victim’s diary and autopsy report?

Photo: Tammy holds Allison the day she came home from the hospital.

* * * * * * * *

In 2012-2013 the Tammy Lynds murder case was reinvestigated. People were re-interviewed, and in 2012, DA Mark Mastroianni listed the murder on his unsolved homicides web page, prompting Allison to believe that new information must had surfaced. “Something changed to make it a homicide,” she said. She has no clue what the development might be. She thinks one or more of Tammy’s friends must have said something, but not enough to make an arrest.

“I think Jason and Owen were planning on tag-teaming her,” said Allison, and if Tammy resisted an attempted rape, a confrontation might have escalated to violence. It’s a plausible scenario, given what they were saying about Tammy, according to Will. Jason, however, had claimed he wanted nothing to do with Tammy sexually because she had too many issues—due to his claims that Richard molested her—but Owen was a “horn dog,” and was determined to have sex with her regardless, he said in a recorded interview.

Francis, shortly after that 2021 interview, died of an overdose, and Allison thinks that is very suspicious. “I think somebody made him overdose,” she said. “He died less than two months later,” she said. “He had been clean for three or four years, was getting his life on track, and he had just gotten a new job. It doesn’t make sense.” Allison thinks someone might have given him a “hot shot” of potent or fentanyl-laced heroin because he was talking too much.

* * * * * * * *

My conversation with Allison was wide-ranging, but it kept coming back to her wanting Tammy’s story to be told without revealing too much about the investigation. “I don’t want it to backfire,” she said. She recalled her father contacting Tammy’s friends over the years, and the conversations didn’t go well. “I told him, ‘You’re coming off as very hostile. We know you’re her father and you’re pissed off. We get it. But you need to step back,’” she said.

And Richard did back off—until he entrusted a random blogger named Hell’s Acres with his views, theories, observations, and a binder full of notes and documents. The police case file and evidence was lost, so this was all he had. But it was a lot.

So here we are, 30 years after the murder. I wish I could say that an answer is right around the corner. However, I can’t. Does Will hold a key piece to the puzzle? He has been leaking more and more details over the years, and if he’s reading this, he knows very well that we have been trying to turn up the heat on this case, especially since we now know he was rebuffed at the prospect of being her boyfriend. I think it’s obvious he has even more to say.

Police need to question him—but that’s not for me to demand. It’s just a friendly suggestion: an interview by a detective about a case he has intimate knowledge about, especially Tammy’s last hours. “If it’s done correctly,” said Allison, “I believe we’ll see that Will knows even more than what we think he knows.”

Saturday, July 6, 2024

The 1994 Fox Road Murder Mystery, Part 22: Timelines

On July 21, 2024 we will mark the 30th anniversary of the murder of Tammy Lynds, so I thought it would be an opportune moment to develop a timeline of that date exactly three decades ago, as well as developments that took place shortly thereafter.

Needless to say, timelines are important—essential, actually. In cold cases, as years go by, different interpretations can mold facts in different ways. Everyone has their own versions of events, but verifying timelines can disentangle myth from fact.

By reconstructing the last night Tammy was seen, July 21, 1994, we know that she snuck out shortly after midnight, according to her sister, Allison, and planned to return about 3:00 a.m. She didn’t come back. No disputing that.

Fortunately, we have an account from her friend, Will (not his real name), of her whereabouts a few hours before she left her home. We have recently discovered that she was at his house, down Tammy’s street, Lamont Street, earlier in the evening. Will said Tammy was there until about 7:00 p.m., when he walked her back home. “She was grounded, but she was only allowed here [his house] because she was like family,” said Will. “I guess she was grounded HERE. We were having a little get-together.”

“How did you feel about Tammy?” he was asked. “Were you in love with her?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I cared about her a lot.”

“Have you ever told anybody about this?”

“No.”

“Had you ever told her?”

“Yes.”

Indeed, Will let Tammy know that night that he was romantically interested in her. “I also knew that she had other guys, and I told her if were to work on a relationship, she needs to break it off with the other guys and be serious with me.”

However, this was left unresolved. The talk turned to the subject of their friends, Jay Francis and Owen (not his real name). “They were both planning to have sex with her, but Jay also had another plan because—there were times I hung out with them where I overheard them talking, especially with [name redacted], how they wanted to hurt Tammy.”

To help Tammy protect herself that night, Will gave her a knife with “a wooden handle,” he said. “It’s an old cutting tool. I guess it can be used for cutting carpet.”

This is basically the description of the knife police found under Tammy’s skeleton off Fox Road. At the police station, detectives showed it to members of the Lynds family, as well as Tammy’s friend Ricky Stebbins, and these are their drawings of it, as detailed in Part 6 of this series:

This is Richard’s drawing of the knife he was shown:

Ricky Stebbins did an internet image search and pulled the following likeness:

Later on that night, after Will walked Tammy home, “I bumped into none other than Owen, Lumpy (Jason Francis’ nickname) and Pete (not his real name ),” said Will. “They were just walking around, and we walked back to Owen’s house down the street. Then [name redacted] showed up later, before they were leaving around 11:30 p.m. to go to a 'party.'”

Will used his fingers to provide air quotes when he said “party,” indicating possibly nefarious intentions.

By the way, every word Will said above can be verified, and Will himself had agreed to the interview.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Let’s press the rewind button and go back even further.

Again, we know that later Tammy left her own house, heading south on Lamont Street, shortly after midnight, but it certainly helps to even revisit the hours before she went to Will’s house, when Susan’s co-worker and her three children visited the Lynds, with plans of dinner (pizza from Tony’s Pizza) and a game of hide-and-seek among the kids. The co-worker’s son, Steve (not his real name), did not look forward to these visits, in which he said Tammy’s parents, Richard and Susan, always drank heavily. Sometimes, to avoid dealing with the Lynds family, he would ask his mother to drop him off at Colonial Estates down the road, where he lived until the summer of 1993 and still had lots of friends at those apartments.

It was better than dealing with the dramas on Lamont Street. “Sue was always yelling,” he said. “Josh and Allison would cry, and Tammy would slam doors. I never liked going there. I didn’t like what I saw. I would usually walk to Colonial Estates with my younger brother, while my sister and baby brother would play with Tammy, Josh, and Allison. Sometimes we would stay because they would beg us to play hide-and-seek.” Every so often he would comply, but he was very reluctant. “Tammy and Sue fought constantly,” he said.

Sure enough, in the late afternoon of July 21, Steve said mother and daughter were battling again, and Richard was intoxicated. Steve and his brother helped pick Richard up after he drunkenly fell, and practically carried him to his living room recliner. “He was out of it,” said Steve. “Drunk as a skunk.”

Richard, before he died, denied this, saying he gave up alcohol in 1982. “I don’t know why Richard disputes the drinking, unless he just doesn’t want people to think they were alcoholics,” said Steve. “I can understand that.”

Tammy asked Steve’s family if she could sleep over their house in Connecticut. “My mom said no,” said Steve. “We had moved to Connecticut on July first, so we were staying with my uncle and aunt until November while our new house was getting ready, and my aunt never allowed us to have company. Sue was yelling at Tammy as we were getting in the car. Then we saw Tammy run in the opposite direction of where we were headed.”

Because they were driving toward Fargo Street to Boston Road, Tammy would have been running south on Lamont Street in the direction of both Will’s house and the woods where neighborhood kids gathered. Steve said this was around 5:30 p.m., which makes sense in the timeline, because that would have meant Tammy was later at Will’s for roughly an hour-and-a-half. “My mom was tired of the atmosphere, and we left,” he said. She had warned Susan in the past that this drinking and bickering act was wearing thin on her, and she had meant it.

And as we know from an earlier blog post, that night Tammy told Steve’s 12-year-old sister Jill (not her real name) that she was abused by her boyfriend, who she said she would be meeting that night, and when Tammy was ever late to their get-togethers, he would hit her. “The last thing Tammy said to my sister was that she would be late, and her boyfriend was going to act out,” he said. It was painful for Jill, who was interviewed by police in 1994, to recall this memory. “She choked up over the phone.”

What did Tammy do between the hours 7:00 p.m. and midnight? This is not so clear. Did she resume fighting with her mother? Susan later found a summer school assignment Tammy had completed that night for the next day—one of the reasons the family believes she didn’t have the intention of running away. So she must have been doing homework. According to one report, Susan saw her in her room at 11:30, but we don't know how accurate this account is.

Richard always maintained that his guests stayed later—until at least nightfall, because he said it was dark out when they left. At some point he fell asleep in his chair, he said, until Tammy nudged him—apparently just after midnight—and told him to go to bed. Then, unbeknownst to him, she went out the front door, never to return.

“I would drive back to Connecticut sometimes because my mom would have a few drinks, but nothing like Richard and Sue,” said Steve, recalling that it was still very much light out when he drove his family away. “It was sunny,” he said. “I wore sunglasses on 91.”

After Tammy went missing, Steve and his family came all the way up from Connecticut and helped Susan search for Tammy, with him and his brother facing the potentially dangerous task of looking by city parkland where the homeless camped. “My brother and I would search the woods on North Branch across from Colonial Estates,” he said. “Lots of people lived in those woods down by the marsh, closer to Grayson Drive where it would cut off by Lucerne Road. Susan had my mom go down to Moss Road and hand out fliers with Tammy's picture. Susan said she would walk down Fox Road. Richard was never there. Never helped. Susan claimed it was too hard for him. I never respected him after that.”

However, according to Richard’s detailed timeline below, he had searched for Tammy both alone and with Allison.

Steve said he and his family helped Susan search for two weeks, and “then she didn’t want our help anymore. Did she totally give up after all these years?”

Last year, Richard reached out to Steve in an effort to get ahold of his mother and her recollections of the last night Tammy was seen alive, but Steve didn’t want to stress her because of her serious illness, and he remembered that Richard and Susan had lashed out at his mother the day of Tammy’s funeral:

“The last time I saw the Lynds family was at her funeral,” said Steve. “Her parents verbally attacked us and blamed us for Tammy's death.”

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Yes, it also helps to have Richard’s timeline of events, which is listed below. Interestingly, someone called the Lynds home on November 6 identifying himself as a police officer and seeking information, such as what Tammy was wearing, “to update their computers.” However, on November 7, 1994, the police’s Youth Aid Bureau told Richard the Springfield Police didn’t call them the previous day, and chalked it up to a “prank phone call.”

Also, Richard’s timeline detailed his reaction to being an initial suspect in the murder and asked to take a polygraph. The results were inconclusive.

Police told Richard in 2013 that he was no longer considered a suspect, and no one has been publicly identified as one for 30 years. Do they have any three decades later? Good question. No answer. Yet. As I wrote in the last post, stay tuned.