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 determined 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 shortcut 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 Allison 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 written off the past as too painful to deal with. 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 David 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 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?
