“Don’t you dare!” said Tammy’s mother, Susan, when the officer from the Springfield Police Youth Aid Bureau wanted to list Tammy as a runaway in an incident report on July 22, 1994. “She is MISSING!” she insisted.
So the officer listed her as a missing person. However, when Richard called four days later, the cop who answered the phone said, “Because of her age, being 15, we consider that she has run away. If she was younger, around 10, we would consider her a missing person.”
Richard tried to explain that before Tammy left, she had assured her sister Allison that she would return in the wee hours, and she had finished her summer school math homework that was due the next day. Also, she had taken nothing with her, and had left the door open to sneak back in—indications that she intended to come home that night.
But the Springfield Police were overworked, undermanned, and not interested in pursuing a teen they thought was likely to return. In Springfield, there were around 1,300 missing youth in 1994, and in the summer, the police were fielding up to 20 missing youth reports every weekend. At the time, police admitted that with resources stretched so thin, days would pass in which the Youth Aid Bureau didn’t have time to have officers investigate missing person reports at all.
“She will come back!” her family prayed. Richard called Tammy’s friends and popped in on a few to see if she was indeed staying with them, with no luck. He didn’t think she had fled the family, but then again, because teens are sometimes unpredictable, he didn’t even want to consider foul play or murder at that point—to think the unthinkable was not an option.
When considering whether or not a teen has run away, a parent or police officer will never be able to truly delve into the adolescent’s mind, but they do try to turn back the clock and look for changes in behavior, mood swings, and relationships with family members—especially in the month and days leading up to when the youth goes missing. In Tammy’s case, they had a diary, which indicated the usual teenage challenges, but also a desire to have a baby, which is not your average 15-year-old’s dream. It was puzzling.
Tammy’s Final Night
In the early evening of July 21, 1994, a family friend named Pam and several of her children were over the Lynds house for dinner and the kids played hide and seek. Tammy, according to Richard, had wanted to spend the weekend at Pam’s—which she did on occasion—but Pam’s family was going to be busy moving on Saturday, and Tammy was extremely disappointed at this, and threw a mini-fit, storming to her room.
At midnight, Allison said Tammy told her she was going to meet her friend and sometimes lover Ricky and she would be back at 3:00 a.m., but according to Susan’s statement (below), the family eventually came to believe that Tammy told Allison this story to shift attention away from the direction she was really heading in—south toward the other end of Lamont Street, instead of northeast, toward Ricky’s house—in case Allison told anyone.
Tammy had taken the wind chimes off the door so they wouldn’t make any noise, left the door ajar, unlocked the side gate (pictured below), and slipped out to avoid setting off the main motion detector-lights. Richard said he forgot to check the next day if she had left the gate unlocked to more easily sneak back home.
Without packing clothes and other necessities, the notion of Tammy running away in the middle of the night would have been an incredibly spontaneous act.
“You’re telling me a teenager who’s planning to run away sits down and finishes her homework first?” asked Susan in a story in the Valley Advocate from 2000. “No way,” she answered her own question. “She was planning to come that night. I’m sure of it.”
The Youth Aid Bureau told Richard they believed she would return to the house within a few days—to stay home for good, or to pick up some clothes and take off again. So, on the advice of Officer C. Robert Taylor, Richard didn’t go to work on Monday, parked at the nearby Our Lady of the Sacred Heart school lot to make it look like he wasn’t home, and stayed in the kitchen, leaving the kitchen door unlocked. But Tammy didn’t return.
At one point, someone called the Lynds house and told Susan that Tammy was in Florida, but he did not say his name and quickly hung up. “Why would someone say this?” they wondered. Then Richard had an idea—it was a longshot. “When we were on a vacation trip to Florida and the Bahamas, in April of 1994, Tammy met a boy on the trip, and she had communication with him once we got back home,” said Richard. “I called him to ask if he knew Tammy was missing. He didn’t know.”
Richard decided to call the State Police, hoping they would help, but they told him that since Tammy hadn’t disappeared from a state highway, the Springfield Police would remain in charge. This is what he didn’t want to hear, because the Springfield cops didn’t seem to care. In Susan’s statement, she said, “This family was treated very poorly by those who should have been helping to find the answers to what happened to Tammy.”
In determining Tammy’s state of mind before her disappearance, a look at Tammy’s diary pages that were available reveal that she did have some problems with her mother—like all teenagers—but it was getting “out of hand,” in Tammy’s opinion:
She also wrote of difficulties with both her parents, but she was extremely vague:
In a school assignment, she wrote about a negative pregnancy test, and refers to conflicts with her brother and sister, but the complaints about her siblings are trivial:
To be sure, teen girls argue with their parents, but Richard said later he found out that Tammy and Susan had extremely physical fights in which Susan dragged Tammy on the floor by her hair. The result was Tammy cutting off her ponytail (forever preserved in the frame below) to avoid this.
Richard also said that he found out later that Susan had taken Tammy to a doctor in downtown Springfield once to get an abortion—something that might have caused friction between the two, especially if Tammy wanted to have a baby.
According to Richard, who said he supplied Hell’s Acres with all the diary notes that he had from Tammy, his daughter kept another diary, which was under lock and key—a book that her mother took from her, and no one has seen this diary, other than Susan—as far as we know. Still, there must be some confusion about what was preserved, because there are diary pages in a spiral notebook, but also notations in a nicer book, with filigree designs in the margins and what seems to be a lock hinge on the left:
A Party?
On September 25, 2019, Tammy’s old friend Jason Francis described to Allison (related by her in the statement below) a party on Lamont Street around July 25, 1994—four days after Tammy disappeared—in which Richard, searching for Tammy, supposedly peeped in a window and saw his daughter having sex with the teen who lived there. According to Francis, his mother called the police on Richard, and they showed up at the house. Tammy “was horrified, got dressed in a hurry, and went out the window.”
The notations in this statement point out the implausibility of several of his claims, including the police visiting on a complaint about Richard (there would have been a record of this), and Tammy climbing out the window—she would have been unlikely to do this while Richard was alleged to have been waiting outside the very same window.
Most notably, Richard would have notified police of Tammy’s whereabouts, and even if Tammy had escaped that situation, the sighting would obviously have been reported. For the record, Richard did say he intended to go to this house to look for his daughter, and he started shouting from the curb for Tammy to come out, but he was in front of the wrong house, even though it looked like there was a party going on. “An older woman came out and told me there was no Tammy there, and to get lost or she would call the police,” said. “It turned out the house I was looking for was next door.” The house he intended to visit seemed quiet.
If Tammy were at this supposed party four days after she left home, it would mean that she indeed was a runaway before she was killed. However, Jason Francis (pictured below) was a troubled young man who was in the throes of addiction as he got older and died of a drug overdose in 2021, taking God knows what secrets to his grave. Maybe he knew something about Tammy’s fate (and possibly told someone), but the veracity of his statement is somewhat suspect because of its inconsistencies.
