Roach (his nickname) is a shadowy figure in the Tammy Lynds murder case. Until recently he didn’t have much of a public presence at all, aside from a police record. Among his addresses was a homeless shelter in Northampton at one point.
He was tight with two other youths who had talked about their desire to
hurt Tammy, according to Will (not his real name), one of their friends. The
others were Jason Francis and Owen (not his real name) and all three were allegedly
out and about together the night Tammy went missing.
In 1994, Roach was a foster child in the neighborhood who some
classmates at Putnam High School, including a girl he dated for a week, found
“creepy.” That opinion was shared by the children in his foster family, who
discussed among themselves the possibility that he could have been involved in
Tammy’s murder. They didn’t say he definitely did the deed, but they always had
this feeling about it.
They also took into account that Tammy was together with Roach a
lot, that he was questioned by the police several times, that he bounced around
from foster home to foster home, and that they thought he was a troubled teen.
A few years ago, when Roach contacted a member of that foster
family, what followed was an “awkward” conversation—they hadn’t talked since he
lived with them. Roach said that back then he was a “bad kid.” The family
member didn’t know how to respond.
And Roach certainly wasn’t an angel as an adult, getting busted for such crimes as assault and battery, assault and battery on a family member, larceny over $250, providing alcohol to a minor, vandalism, and “tagging property”—utilizing his artistic spray painting skills, I guess.
He was in and out of legal trouble, but then came the biggie:
child rape charges. The police started investigating him a month after his wife
filed for divorce, and now he’s serving hard time—undoubtedly made even harder
because of what fellow prisoners think of child molesters, of course.
“He was a stoner,” recalled his late friend Jason Francis
(pictured below), who died of an overdose. An individual looking into the case
had a phone conversation with Francis in 2021 and he claimed Roach was his best
buddy when they were teenagers, although his memory is hazy at times.
Indeed, anything Francis said about anything—or anyone—wasn’t necessarily
accurate because he got a lot of his facts wrong in the talk. Possibly his inaccuracies
were a smokescreen to distance himself from the details about the murder to avoid
suspicion, or perhaps it was because he was as high as a kite on the phone.
“Roach listened to a lot of ska music and he used to be a skateboarder,”
said Francis. “He also did roller blading and he liked playing hacky sack. He
ended up getting married, he has a couple of kids, and he installs driveways.
He ended up real big, which is funny because he was always a skinny kid in our
neighborhood. He was my best friend. We were together like every day.”
Francis remembered Roach having a two brothers in his foster
family, but drew a blank when asked about any sisters. He indeed had a sister,
so one has to wonder how close he and Roach actually were. Then again, it bears
repeating that Francis’s mind was pretty fried during the conversation. It
sounded like he had just woken up.
However, he was right about Roach having two kids. One of them is
intellectually disabled and his mother got guardianship of him when Roach was
“homeless with no permanent address,” according to the Probate and Family Court
document.
A woman who grew up in the neighborhood “didn’t like [Roach] at
all,” she said. “I didn’t like anything about him. I still don’t know why.” She
worked with his two brothers in his foster family at K-Mart. “They were good
guys, but I didn’t like [Roach] so I didn’t pay him any mind,” she said.
Another woman who knew him better was kinder in her assessment.
When asked how he integrated with his peers, she said, “He was just a kid
trying to fit in. It was hard for him being an outsider, but every group of kids
interacted with him.”
There aren’t many references to Roach in the extensive notes Tammy’s mother Susan took about the murder: she wrote that he is a friend of Owen (not his real name), a person of interest in the
case.
On April 18, 1995, a friend of Tammy wrote a short memo to Susan
listing Roach as one of “the kids you should be looking out for.” He wrote down
the names of nine neighborhood youths, including Jason Francis.
To complicate matters, Roach had the same first name as two other guys
Tammy had dated, so it was unclear which one she might have been seeing when
she disappeared, since she often used just first names in her diary and when she talked to her family members.
Being a child rapist doesn’t make someone a murderer, but I’d love
to find out what people found so creepy about him. Something like that is a
visceral feeling, but often based on a disturbing truth about an individual.
They were clearly correct that there was something not quite right about Roach.
* * * * * *
* * * *
Vanishing into the Night
It may be a wild goose chase to try to retrace Tammy Lynds’
footsteps the night she disappeared more than 30 years later with little
evidence to go on, but here goes nothing.
But first it’s important to note that not long after Tammy’s
skeleton was found on November 4, 1994, the Lynds family focused on her friend
Ricky Stebbins.
But in Part 4 of this blog I speculate about the possibility that
Tammy might have been killed by a stranger who happened upon her on Fox Road or
somewhere else. I wonder if this scenario was considered by Tammy’s mother
Susan after police told her that Stebbins, who the Lynds family had believed
Tammy was supposed to meet that night, was no longer a suspect.
In her notes about the murder, on November 28, 1994, Susan
mentioned Ricky being ruled out by police. In the months and years that
followed, she named other people of interest in the case. But did she still
think in the back of her mind that Stebbins might have been the culprit? Or did
she also entertain the possibility that her daughter was randomly attacked
while walking home alone? It is unknown—she made no determinations in her notes,
except that the investigation was moving too slowly and wasn’t thorough enough.
Before Ricky was cleared by detectives, Tammy’s family was firmly
convinced that he was the boy Tammy met at his house when she slipped out of
her house unnoticed nearly a week earlier—a rendezvous Tammy wrote about in her
diary:
On October 9, 1995, Susan, in her handwritten notes, pointed out
that Tammy, six days before she went missing, snuck out to meet “a friend she
had known all her life.” These were Susan’s words, not Tammy’s—Susan thought it
was surely Stebbins, who she believed didn’t have the decency to walk her back
home in the wee hours. “Tammy walked all the way to his home by herself this
particular night, he never met her either going or walked her back home,” she
wrote. “This gave him an alibi that he had never even seen her that night.”
“She did let a friend know of the excursion she was to undertake,”
wrote Susan. But we don’t know who that friend was. It would be awesome if this
friend could step up three decades later and expand on what Tammy told her
about that night!
Susan wrote that Tammy had squeezed through her lover’s basement
bedroom window, even though Tammy didn’t mention this in her diary. However,
Ricky’s bedroom was in his cellar, so Susan assumed that’s how she got in his
house, despite the difficulty of this logistically. That window was tiny!
“What really turns me angry is the fact he didn’t even care enough
for our daughter’s safety to walk her home,” wrote Susan. “He had her climb
into his bedroom window (basement)! It’s no wonder his parents didn’t know she
was there.”
Susan thought that because Tammy had been harassed by bar patrons
(according to her diary) when she went to the mystery boy’s house on July 15,
2024, she was instead to meet him a week later in front of the woods at the end
of Gilbert Avenue, supposedly on a “dare,” by 1:00 a.m. Susan wrote that Tammy
did this “believing she was going back to his house the back way”—down side
streets—to what her mother was convinced was Ricky Stebbins’ home because Tammy
told her sister she was going to see “Ricky,” who lived in that area on the
south side of the Boston Road corridor. “No roads with bars on them so no
harassment,” wrote Susan.
That walk, cutting through streets off Grayson Drive if they had
avoided going through really dark woods, would have taken Tammy and the boy by
the corner of Grayson Drive and Fox Road, the road she was found on.
Stebbins, however, insists to this day he didn’t meet Tammy on
either of those nights, and they didn’t have plans to meet. Tammy was also
dating another Ricky, so it’s possible she could have thrown his first name out
there because her family knew Stebbins and liked him—they didn’t know she was
seeing the other Ricky, and they didn’t approve of another youth, Owen (not his
real name), who wanted to take her roller skating on July 22, but Tammy’s
parents forbade this “date,” which reportedly angered that teen.
Did Susan think Stebbins walked Tammy over to his house on July 21
and then later let her walk back to home all alone? Maybe. She gave whoever
Tammy was supposed to connect with the benefit of the doubt by giving him
credit for meeting Tammy, but he was still the kind of guy who had no problem
letting her walk all the way home in the dark, according to Tammy’s diary.
Tammy had always insisted that she’d never sneak out at night,
wrote Susan. “No way would I do something so stupid,” she told her mother.
“You’d have to be crazy to leave at night. You could get killed if not raped or
shot or something.” (below) On July 15 Tammy evidently thought that being out
in the open on Boston Road offered her some protection, until she was hassled
by drunks.
Maybe Tammy told the boy she was afraid to walk along Boston Road
after that—or was fearful of walking on deserted side streets for that matter.
She had told her sister that night that this person would be angry if she were
late, suggesting that he might have regarded it as a pain in the ass to sneak out of his
house and wait for her by the woods.
In her notes, Susan wondered whether or not Tammy ever made it to
the woods at the end of Gilbert Avenue, a known teen hangout. “We are getting
to the point where we don’t feel she even got a chance to go thru the woods
there, but probably more where she was found,” she wrote. “She could have
believed that’s the way [they] were to go, but in fact he took her another way,
which would bring her out almost in front of the road where she was found, by
route of Methuen Street, straight across from Fox Road.”
Indeed, Tammy could have walked from her Lamont Street
neighborhood’s grid of streets down to either Grayson Drive—or through side
streets to Jennings Street, which leads to the end of Methuen Street. From
there, she could have walked north on Methuen, which strangely turns into a
wooded dirt path before being paved again, and then continues toward Boston
Road.
This would have involved cutting across the dark trail on Methuen,
but that way would have taken her to the side streets off Boston Road without
having to walk past the Mattie’s and John Joe’s bars.
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Did Tammy eventually get together with whoever she was supposed to
meet? And if she did, was he her killer? If they met, the fact that he hasn’t
come forward suggests he might have been the murderer, unless he didn’t do it,
but kept quiet because he was afraid he might be implicated—if he was the last
known person to have seen her, his parents might have advised him to clam up.
I’d love to hear Susan’s theories on the murder, but I doubt we’ll ever get them. So all we have are her notes, which are meticulous and at times eye-opening, but are ultimately inconclusive.
