“So, why did you kill Tammy?”
“You guys would know,” he
answered. “You were there when I did it.”
The party went silent.
“What the hell?” someone said. “Did you hear that? That dude just…”
“Ssshhhh! He’s admitting
it!”
“Go on, tell them what we
did,” continued Ricky. “Come on, you were there.”
No, YOU tell US, Ricky,”
said his cousin with a smile.
There was some more
back-and-forth until Ricky’s cousins realized it was getting out of hand and
they stopped. One girl was getting angry and another was practically in
tears.
Jesus, you’re wasted,”
said his other cousin. “OK, that’s enough.”
A couple of big guys got
in Ricky’s face. “Can we talk to you outside?” said one of them. “No” was not
an option as they pulled him past his cousins and out the door.
“What the fuck is wrong
with you?” asked one of them as he tightened his grip on Ricky’s sleeve. The
other chimed in: “What are you thinking with that shit?”
Ricky, who was 20, had
become painfully accustomed to his cousins constantly joking about him
supposedly killing Tammy Lynds when he was 15, but now he looks back on that party as time he had
finally fought back by giving them a taste of their own medicine. “This was the
first time I got drunk and first—and last—time I drank peppermint Schnapps,” he
recalled. “I started crying like baby and told the two guys about my cousins
picking on me about Tammy’s murder for years—saying that I got her pregnant and
killed her.”
The big dudes forgave him
and they shared a three-way bro-hug. “Never being drunk before or having the
courage to talk shit back to my cousins was a new experience,” said Ricky. ”We
walked back to the house and these guys went off on my cousins. They kept my
cousins away from me for the rest of the party and wouldn’t let us drive home.
We ended up sleeping there. It was an awkward ride home.”
Ricky’s way of sticking up
for himself did have some consequences: a family meeting held shortly afterward
that was nothing short of a shit storm. “That is when my cousins stopped joking
about this—they stopped saying that I killed Tammy, who was my best friend,” he
said. On one hand, the ribbing stopped—on the other, the incident caused a
permanent rift in the family. To this day, he’s not on speaking terms with
those cousins. And anyone within earshot of Ricky’s drunken backtalk no doubt
told their friends what they had heard him say, so the murder myth continued.
Part of what made Ricky a
prime suspect shortly after Tammy’s death was the Lynds family’s belief that he
was her main boyfriend, so the police focused on her last diary entry, a week
before her death, in which she snuck out of house at midnight, just like the
night she vanished, but on this evening/early morning she went to her “boyfriend’s” house, where
they fooled around on his bed:
Ricky thinks that the
police narrative was that he had gotten together with Tammy by sneaking out at
night, even though every time he was intimate with her it was during the
daytime, when her parents weren't home.
“The detectives made me
say that she snuck out one night and knocked on my window,” said Ricky. “I
think the detectives had to come up with a way for Tammy to get my
attention—she couldn’t call that late, and I didn’t have a beeper.”
Ricky’s bedroom was in his
basement and he insisted that what the detectives coaxed him into saying was
implausible. “The cellar windows were those old-style, single-pane, metal frame
type, with metal flaps on each side to lock and unlock them,” he said. “They
were hard to open and close, and they were loud when you did. So when police
pushed me to agree that she woke me up by knocking on the window and inviting
me out into the middle of the night—I thought it was totally absurd, especially
considering my parents’ room was right above mine. There were no finished
ceilings or sound barrier—it was a regular basement ceiling.”
Ricky had told police that he and Tammy had sex a few times in the spring and summer of 1994, “but they forced me
to change my story,” he said. “They coerced me to say she knocked on my window,
and they wanted me to say that she asked me to come out with her or she wanted
me to invite her inside, but I didn’t agree to either in this fake story.”
In fact, Tammy had another
boyfriend, named David, and she had been intimate with several boys. Police
ruled out Ricky as a suspect in late November of 1994, but neighborhood rumors
of his involvement persist to this day. “As much as it bothers me to hear it,
I’d be stupid to think I’m not going to hear it a lot more, especially now that
I have started talking about her case,” he said.
To be sure, Tammy’s murder had a profound ripple effect on all her family and friends. It
is unfortunate, however, that much of what is lacking in the usual media coverage
on an unsolved killing is the aftereffects of the homicide—how the tragedy
ravages other lives.
Sindy Pabon was one of the
last friends to speak with Tammy—they talked on the phone around 1:00 p.m. or
2:00 p.m. on July 21, 1994, the last day she was seen alive, and Tammy “sounded
sad.” After she went missing, “her mom mentioned about her possibly being
pregnant when she asked me if I knew where she was. My heart was breaking
seeing her family in pain, worried, and afraid.” And then, on November 11,
1994, the skeletal remains that were found off Fox Road in Springfield a week
earlier were identified as Tammy’s. “I was devastated,” said Pabon. “My mom
came into the room when she heard me scream after I saw the news on TV. My
boyfriend at the time was also very upset—they were in the Air Force ROTC
together.”
Pabon remembers Tammy as “really
smart, super sweet, and caring. She had a great sense of humor and loved to
laugh and wasn’t afraid to be silly. I always thought of her as a very genuine
person and a peacemaker. She was a sweetheart. I truly hope this mystery will
get solved so her family can finally have much-needed closure and peace.”
Jennifer Eger, in her 1997
Central High School yearbook, wrote that Tammy “was always there for me. She
recalled that Tammy loved music and “loved dance. It was her favorite thing to
do. When I was around Tammy, if I was in a bad mood or not, she had something
nice to say to me to put a smile on my face. She would always let people live
their lives the way they wanted to, but she would always help someone through
things if they were bad…Do you know how people say you never realize what you
have until it is gone? That is so true. After the funeral, many people were
questioned. I was also. When I talked to police, they told me how they found a
lot of notes written by me sent to her, or copies of letters she had written to
me. During all the time I knew Tammy I never realized how much we had talked to
one another. Every day now, I wish for her to come back because she was one of
a kind, and I don’t have anyone else like her.”
For the Lynds family, the
murder was like an atomic bomb, and the fallout continues. Richard and Susan’s
marriage had been rocky in the years before the slaying, but the grief and stress opened fissures in those rocks, things got worse,
and when their children, Allison and Josh, became adults and moved out on their
own, the couple divorced in 2006. Richard has cardiac problems that he attributes to
aging, but it’s obvious his daughter’s murder has taken a toll on his heart—and
his family. At present, the surviving members do not discuss the murder with
one another.
Richard, who had been
looking for answers since his daughter’s murder, approached a District Court
judge in 1995 to ask if anything could be done, “and I was told not to do
anything—do not do anything to upset the police, because I would not like the
outcome,” he said. “That was the main reason why for years I was afraid to do
anything. But in 2013, I finally decided to contact the DA’s Office.”
For a while, Richard had
also been considered a prime suspect because three polygraphs he took were
inconclusive, and his wife didn’t provide an alibi for him the night Tammy went
missing because she didn’t verify that he was home. He said that he was
watching TV and had fallen asleep in a living room chair, only to be nudged by
Tammy and told to go to bed.
Richard said the DA’s
office told him in 2013 he was no longer a suspect, so for the next decade, he has
refused to keep quiet about the cold case. It is ironic that he and Ricky, once
the prime suspects, are now the most vocal advocates in trying to solve Tammy’s
murder.
Tammy’s sister Allison, in an interview with
videographer Lou Rock, discussed the torment she’s had to endure
because she assured her sister that she wouldn’t tell anyone she was sneaking
out of the house at midnight. “I was the last person who saw her, and for years
I blamed myself for her death,” she said. “It eats away at me.” Asked by Rock
what message she would have for whoever is responsible for her death, she
replied, “You didn’t just take her life. You took mine.”
