Nine years after Tammy Lynds’ skeleton was found a young man had to get something off his chest.
But was his story legit?
After the 15-year-old’s murder, from time to time her friend Ann (not her real name) would relay new information that she had heard about the slaying to Tammy’s parents Susan and Richard. For example, in 1997 a person told her he had seen Tammy three hours before she disappeared.
That’s how cold cases come
to be solved—people’s attitudes change over the years and they end up offering
what they know. But the sighting was never verified.
On May 27, 2003, however,
Ann listened to a much more startling claim from someone else.
That night, Ann’s friend
Anthony suggested that they drop in on a guy who we’ll call “Greg,” so they
rode their bikes to his house around midnight. During their visit, Ann asked
Greg if he knew Tammy. “That’s when he all of a sudden spilled all sorts of
information about what really happened to our daughter Tammy,” according to
Susan’s notes on the murder. “At first he hesitated to tell her. Then once he
started (talking about) the episode that transpired he couldn’t stop because he
couldn’t hold it all in anymore.”
Greg said his friend Doug
(not his real name) had apparently called him the day after Tammy’s slaying.
Then Greg dropped the bombshell: “Greg told Ann and Anthony that four to five
people were involved with her death: Doug and Rick (or Rich) plus others,”
wrote Susan.
Susan put “Rich” in
parentheses because there were two persons named Richard in Tammy’s address
book. Both had dated Tammy, and Ann was unclear which one Greg meant. Susan thought it was Ricky Stebbins.
So three days after this
conversation, Ann told Tammy's parents what Greg had said.
It’s unknown if anything came of it.
* * * * * * *
There is an odd story behind
Greg: Susan’s notes indicated that he confided, possibly to Ann, that Tammy’s
ghost contacted him. I’m not shitting you. “Two years after Tammy was murdered,
Mike and (a) friend were walking in the woods,” wrote Susan “He asked his
friend if someone was following us. He hears ‘find my killer’ (in a) softly
spoken voice and he heard small footprints.”
Maybe that’s why six years
later he allegedly spilled the beans? He couldn’t hold it all in anymore because he
was literally haunted? This is where the case becomes…like…a movie??
OK, I’m not going to dismiss
a paranormal aspect of this cold case because not only has it been there since
Greg’s experience in 1996, but also due to the fact that videographer and ghost
hunter Lou Rock used a “spirit box” to contact Tammy, which hasn’t solved the
mystery but at least has drawn attention to it. Tammy’s sister Allison believes
that Tammy is able to be contacted through the spirit box because her soul is
restless. “I know she’s not at peace,” said Allison during an interview with
Lou Rock. “I know she goes between where she was found on Fox Road to the house
we grew up in on Lamont Street to where she’s buried. And she’s in limbo. Until
she’s able to get closure, she’s never going to be at peace.”
And Ann is motivated to find
answers as well, because she considered Tammy her best friend. “The thing that
really hurt was that Tammy was buried the day before my birthday,” she said.
“She was buried in November 18 and my birthday is the 19th.”
When asked if she thought
the case would ever be cracked, Ann said Tammy sent her opinion on this
scenario through a spirit box session. “Tammy told me I might be the one who
can solve it,” she said.
A victim’s best friend
blowing a case wide open? A pessimist would say this would be completely
abnormal—especially factoring in the PARAnormal part. Then again, nothing about
this case is normal. Absolutely nothing.
* * * * * * *
After reading Susan’s case
notes countless times I can tell when she was excited as she wrote them,
because she tended to veer from her usual cursive writing into printing with
ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, sometimes leaving words out in a rush to get it all down
on paper. And boy was she riled up after hearing about Greg’s assertion. She
seemed to write herself a script of sorts for a call to the State Police, scribbling that Ann and her mother were “en route” to the Lynds home in
Florence, MA—presumably to repeat Greg’s story to investigators. “We need
police assistance on this,” was her plea on paper. “I have a lot of paperwork
that relates to this investigation,” she wrote of her nine years of notes about
the case.
Susan then listed
Springfield Police Lieutenant William Noonan, Mayor Mike Albano, and the chief
of police (Paula Meara) and a meeting at City Hall, as well as a “Nancy” from
the Northampton Police. “I called her back many times because my hands were
shaking,” wrote Susan—it’s hard to tell if the “her” she was writing about was Ann
or Nancy.
It’s also difficult to
discern whether the meeting at City Hall was something she was going to demand—or
maybe it was in reference to a past meeting the family had with Noonan, Albano,
and Meara on August 29, 2000, according to notes jotted down by both Richard and Susan:
So, did Susan get the
police’s attention on May 30, 2003? Again, we don’t know.
Historically, the Lynds
family did not have successful results giving tips they had heard to law
enforcement. For example, on December 5, 1994, a month after Tammy’s body was
found, her cousin April had heard “vital” information from classmates, so the
police did send three officers to the Lynds home to hear April out. The
officers said they’d get back to April, but they didn’t, so three weeks later
Allison, Susan, her sister Sharon, and April went down to the station to make a
statement.
On December 19, 1994, Susan
asked to speak to a homicide detective in person and was directed to a lobby
phone, which she was extremely uncomfortable using because there were people
around. “So he finally agreed to come down to talk,” according to Susan’s
notes. “He came down and led us outside the station into the cold to tell what
we knew, and kept telling us, ‘I’m not familiar with that case and I’m not a
homicide detective. I’m just a detective. You’ll have to take this up with
Officer [Dennis] O’Connor in the morning between 8 and 8:30, but l’ll take any
information and pass it along to Officer O’Connor.’” Susan responded that her
husband tried to contact Officer O’Connor on many occasions, but he never got
back with him. He informed her that she came at an inopportune time—detectives
only work in the morning and are out on the road in the afternoon.
“We felt like he didn’t
really care one bit, and he didn’t take any notes while we were outside in the
cold,” wrote Susan.
Back on December 5, Susan had
shown the three cops a photo she took of Owen (not his real
name)—who was a suspect in the family's eyes and who had been questioned by
police—while he talked to Allison as they were skating together at the
Interskate 91 roller rink the previous night. Susan had insisted that he was
trying to intimidate her daughter. It doesn’t say what those officers thought of the photo, but
this particular cop was unimpressed by it, feeling that evidence-wise,
it meant nothing. “Since when is it a crime to talk to someone?” he asked.
Nonetheless, he said he
would relay the information to Officer O’Connor. “We felt he didn’t care in the
least,” wrote Susan. “This is very distressful to think I need an appointment
to give information concerning my own daughter in her grave.”
Susan whipped out another photo—a framed picture of Tammy that had accompanied her casket during her wake. “Do you want see my Christmas present?” asked Susan. “This is it.” She added, “The reason we went to the Police Department in the first place is because every time we contact them they would not get back to us.”
She pointed out that the
time they DID respond, when the three officers came to their house on December
5, 1994, “they knew Owen because they knew Owen has a record.” But Susan didn’t
write anything more about that police visit.
Meanwhile, Susan was getting
more and more frustrated at the police headquarters. “He said we weren’t able
to come upstairs because it was crazy up there due to another murder they were
investigating today,” Susan continued. She then asked the detective why Tammy
was put on the back burner. “She was murdered too! And we just buried her and
nothing’s being done.”
“Sometimes nothing can be
done,” replied the detective.
That’s when Susan’s sister
Sharon chimed in: “That’s because the police took their sweet time from day
one!”
Susan noted that the
paperwork on the investigation had been sitting on a police desk for five weeks. “If
it had been their daughter maybe they’d work a little harder!” she opined. At times, Susan referred to herself in the third person in her notes, as if her experience with police would possibly be typed up into a narrative or affidavit, but these are the only notes that exist, as far as we know.
* * * * * * *
The family had about the
same luck with police more than six months later, on June 21, 1995. “My son
Joshua, friend Michael Theriot, and myself found a piece of clothing (a blouse)
up the hill in the woods buried under the leaves around trees dried (and)
bunched together, and very stiff,” she wrote.
“The detectives wouldn’t
even send an officer to where the blouse was found at the woods on Fox Road,”
she wrote. “I was told by Detective O’Connor that anything we want the police
to have we have to hand over to our lawyer and have him bring it in.”
Apparently he mentioned possible evidence contamination. “We don’t have the
funds get a lawyer,” she added. “They cost $2,000 plus $100 per hour. We also
need a private investigator.”
Susan noted that she had
talked to a girl in a mall who had been taking a forensics class at UMass. She
told Susan that if she wanted to have the blouse tested herself it would cost
her a few grand if the State didn’t request its testing for evidence. “The
reason we think it’s Tammy’s,” wrote Susan, “is because when Allison finally
saw the blouse, she turned pale and said, ‘That’s Tammy’s blouse—the one she
was wearing.’”
* * * * * * *
The point of recounting the
Lynds family being rebuffed by police in the 1990s is because I believe this
influenced their attitude toward going to law enforcement their new discoveries
in the 2000s. They might have thought it was futile to speak out.
When Richard met with the assistant district attorney in 2013, the Springfield Police detective heading the reinvestigation was cc’d on the email prior to the get-together. I don’t know if he attended the session or whether Richard mentioned what Ann had discovered about Brian seeing Tammy there hours before she went missing—and about Greg naming people he thought were involved in the murder. Richard died in 2023 and I had neglected to ask him. During that meeting at the DA's Office, when he was told that the police files on the case were lost, he offered to let them scan his family's investigative notes, so presumably police have them. Yes, at times Susan's handwriting is difficult to read, and that is why I'm spelling it all out in the blog. Now it's out there for police to look into—in case they haven't.
I’m still mulling the
possibility of contacting Greg and asking him myself, but that puts me in
danger of violating Massachusetts General Law Chapter 286, Section 13B, which
prohibits intimidation or harassment of witnesses and persons furnishing
information in connection with criminal proceedings—anything that would impede
or interfere with an investigation. Ricky Stebbins was warned about this law in
2019 after he contacted people about the case, but so far no one has told me to
cease and desist, so the beat goes on.
It bears repeating that some cold cases get solved when people eventually come forward with information because “they couldn’t hold it all in anymore.” But it also depends on these claims being investigated by police. After all, how many victims of unsolved murders finally get justice without the cooperation of law enforcement?
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