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.”
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“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?
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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.
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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.
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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.”