Tammy Terrell

All witnesses, purchas of interest, and suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail as well as talk of sexual assault. It may be sensitive for some listeners. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now in true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome to this week's episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We are going to make it a short and sweet right now in true crime because we had a snowstorm this week, and if you don't know, I live in Texas and that is extremely rare for us. So it's been a little bit of a long week at least personally. I love a good snow moment. But the problem with snow and Texas is that people can't drive in it, and they don't want you to drive in it. But I work in healthcare, so there really is an option. So I have been staying pretty much up really close to my job for the last two days and there's just something about it that makes me so so tired. And also not sleeping in your own bed also makes you just extremely tired. I don't know what it is, but anyways, I am pretty much spent from that, but I made it home all as well. The last time we had snow here was in twenty twenty one, and it was like four days of prolonged super cold weather and the roads were super unsafe and a bunch of people had issues with their pipes bursting, the power was out, it was a whole thing. Luckily this one was not like that. But I did see in some areas they were using the term blizzard like conditions, and I never thought in life that I would see blizzard and Texas in the same sentence, but yet here we are. It was just a wild storm. So anyways, I am trying to get my life back in order. But I did want to do a little intro right now. In true crime, there's not a ton to talk about, but they did go ahead and push back the Menanda's Brothers hearing. It was originally planned for January thirtieth and thirty first, but it has now been pushed to March twentieth and twenty first, and the reason they deleted it was because of the wildfires. So we have yet another delay in this hearing that could potentially let the brothers out. So that is kind of where things stand as of right now. The District Attorney, Nathan Hoffman did meet with the relatives of the Menanda's brothers earlier this month, and I guess he is taking everything into consideration, going through all of the necessary paperwork that he needs to go through. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens in March once Nathan officially makes his decision, makes his recommendation. But I will be sure to keep you guys updated on that one. Okay, last thing I want to talk about is there is was a hearing today in the Brian Coburger case that is set to take place over today and tomorrow. The contents of this hearing is mostly going to be sealed, mostly because it's going to be about some of the DNA evidence that was found, and I know there was talks about how Brian Coberger's team wanted that evidence not to be able to be brought in because of the way that they originally attained Brian Coberger's DNA in order to compare it to the DNA that was found at the crime scene, similar to they did in the Long Island serial killer case where they kind of knew Rex Huerman was their guy. They were able to get some DNA that was on I think it was left over piazzacross from him, and then they were able to tie it back and say this is our guy. So Brian Coberger's team is arguing that because of the way they obtained Brian Coberger DNA, they should be able to bring that in. So it's a whole thing. Most of it is probably going to be sealed, but I do know that the families of the victims are there in Boise for this hearing that went on today and tomorrow, So if I do hear anything about it, I will keep you guys updated. Like I said, mostly everything is going to be sealed, but there are portions that are being live streamed. There's no public allowed in, so they're really trying to keep whatever goes on in there, whatever is said, pretty quiet. But if there is anything that comes out, I will be sure to keep you guys updated. So that is our right now in True Crime, Short and sweet, and we are going to go ahead and get into today's episode. All right, guys, Today we are going to dive into a brand new unsolved case, and I'm going to be telling you about another case where the victim remain unidentified for decades and thanks to amazing detectives who are willing to go the extra mile and not give up, this woman who was a Jane Doe for a long time now has her identity back, but the next step is finding out who her killer or killers are. So I am going to be telling you about a woman named Tammy Terrell who was known for a long time as Jane Arroyo Grande Do from nineteen eighty to twenty twenty one, when she finally, like I said, got her identity back forty one whole year's without knowing who this person was. So we're going to talk about her murder, the crime scene, and how the authorities finally identified her all those years later. So it was a Sunday evening around nine pm on October fifth of nineteen eighty when a man named John Williams, who was a young homicide detective who was only thirty years old. He was working for the Henderson, Nevada Police Department, and a call ended up coming in that there were two brothers that had lived in Henderson and they had basically stopped along Route one forty six. They needed to go to the bathroom and nature is men's bathroom, so they stopped and when they stopped, they found a body and they were obviously very alarmed by this. They got back into their vehicle and they drove straight to the police station. So once this call came in, John went ahead and went to the station. He questioned them, and then he drove out to the scene where the Jane Doe was Now. He said the area that she was found in at the time was not a major road, It was kind of a dirt road turn off, but he said when he arrived he saw her. She was naked, She was lying in a prone position on her belly, and she had seven puncture wounds to her back that almost made it seem like it was from a two prong device or instrument, and there was also injuries to the back of her head that appeared to be from a hammer. She also had injuries to her face, suggesting that she had been hit or beat. They estimated that her age was between sixteen and twenty. She was five three, about one hundred and six pounds, and she had blondish brown colored hair. She also had a letter S tattooed on her inner right forearm, and they did think that this tattoo might have been done recently. It wasn't a professional tattoo by any means, but they thought that this might be a clue as to who this woman was. She had pierced ears and her nails were painted silver. Now they ended up saying that the cause of death was in fact blood force trauma. So whoever had done this to this girl was obviously vile and threw this girl away on the side of the road like trash, without a care that she would likely be found. He I say, wasn't trying to hide her. She was found along a street at the time, which was the only way out of Henderson to Interstate fifteen. Now, at the time, the population of Henderson was just over twenty four thousand people, so it was a relatively small town. So who could have done this? And who was this girl whose life had come to an end so horribly? Was this somebody just passing through? Was it somebody that lived in Henderson? Was the person that did this a Henderson resident or was it somebody just passing through on their way out of town? There was so many questions. So John Williams, who, like I said, was a younger homicide detective, but he had been in the field for almost ten years and at this point, once this happened with this Jane Doe, he had no idea that this case would end up haunting him for forty entire years. John knew from the position of the Doe's body that she had definitely been killed elsewhere and then was dumped there. She was laid out perfectly on her stomach with her hands at her side. Now due to her injuries, they knew that it was likely a pretty messy crime scene, but she was relatively clean overall. Her face was bloody, but the rest of her body was clean. There wasn't any dirt on her, her feet were clean. She was very well kept up and clean, almost like they thought that whoever did this to her cleaned up the body and possibly wrapped it in something before they dumped her body there. Now there was some evidence to this because they did find a piece of a plastic what ended up being a shower curtain which was colored yellow or orange, or her body. They also discovered that this girl had been sexually assaulted. Now Here is where we get into John Williams, and what angel of a man he was. So John and his wife and a few of the other officers that were involved in this case, because they didn't know who this woman was, they took it upon themselves to purchase a headstone for this girl and once the autopsy was complete, they buried her with the headstone with her Jane Done name on it. Now, John Williams paid for this completely on his own. He wanted to do this. He pretty much took her in like his daughter. Even though he had no idea who this woman was. He decided that this was going to be his case, that he was going to find out who this person was before he died. So the investigation begins. But it is nineteen eighty and the age of DNA technology isn't booming and would it for about another twenty years. So John ended up going through with hiring a sketch artist to sketch what the girl may have looked like. John and his team went around and they distributed flyers with the girl's pictures on it, and he honestly thought that this was going to be easy to figure out who this girl was because she was young and obviously her family had to be missing her. They did pretty much immediately. They were able to rule out that she wasn't from Henderson because there was no missing girls in Henderson that matched her description, so they likely knew that she was not from Henderson, which very much broadened the search even more. He thought that she could potentially be a runaway, possibly from California. Maybe she had been picked up by a hitchhiker, and this was just a crime of opportunity, so there wasn't really a lot that John had to go off of. And again, it was nineteen eighty so things were a heck of a lot different than they are today. So there was little to no movement in this case, and John retired in two thousand and six, still with Jane Arroyo Grande dou at the forefront of his mind. So a man named Joe Ebert officially takes over the case in twenty fourteen. Now, he was young when the murder occurred, but he was very familiar with the case. His dad was also a police officer, so when he decided to take over the case, he knew John Williams and he wanted him to still be involved despite his retirement. He said that John almost looked at Jane Arroyo Grande Dau as his daughter after all of these years. Solving her case and giving her her identity back was at the top of his list. It was basically his white whale case, and it became that for Joe as well. So Joe's first step in the investigation of the case is to bring it back into the public's attention. He ends up getting involved with the National Center for Missing un Exploited Children. They come up with a facial reconstruction of what the victim may have looked like, and they do such amazing work. Once I show you the pictures, it is absolutely mind blowing how they were able to do this and have it be so accurate. So Joe was hoping that with this facial reconstruction that getting this out there and getting the story out there nationally, not just locally in Henderson, would get more eyes on it and maybe they could identify who this person was. Maybe her family would see it and they would realize, oh, my gosh, this is my sister, this is my daughter, whatever the case may be. He also ended up going back into the evidence room and he dug deep into the evidence they had now DNA technology was advancing rapidly by twenty sixteen, so they had a lot of new things to go through and a lot of new things to look at. They did have some hair from the crime scene that they cut from the Jane Do They had some vaginal swabs because she had been sexually assaulted, and all the stuff that they had could be crosschecked and possibly give them what they needed to identify who this victim was now. They also had dental records from the victim, but they quickly discovered that the old dental negatives had essentially turned black, so they were unable to use those for identification purposes. They also had pulled a sperm sample from the victim back in nineteen eighty, but the manner in which they did things back then essentially ended up in such a way that it ended up destroying the sample. They weren't able to use it. They didn't have anything viable from it now. Like I said, they all so had some hair from the victim, but it was hair that was cut versus being pulled at the root. And back in twenty sixteen, DNA technology wasn't what it is now, and they needed the route in order to be able to make any type of identifications or enter it into any databases. So they basically were at a dead end again, even with all of the DNA that they had collected. Now, of course, this was through no faulter of their own, because everything they had was no good. It was procedure to complete things a certain way in nineteen eighty because they didn't realize that one day it would be what it is now. And unfortunately, they had all of this evidence and then realized that they didn't have anything at all because of the way that it was collected and the way that it was completed through no fault of their own, of course, so they made the decision to exhume her body and try to see what else they could get. So when they did the exhumation, they realized that at one point in time her grave had leaked and had filled with water, so the water had degraded a lot of the Jane Doe's bones for DNA. But in the exhumation they did discover something very interesting was that she had had dental work done recently before she was killed, and the evidence was still in her mouth. She had what they called an eyehook ligature in her jaw, which is essentially kind of like braces, but it's used to just straighten a single tooth and it's placed and then taken out after a year. It's not left in long term, So the fact that she had it means that she was killed essentially before it was taken out, So that means that she was well cared for. She had seen a dentist or an orthodonis before her death, meaning that she had family, She had people that cared for her and loved her and took her to the dentist. She also had some other feelings in her mouth, so again that means that she had been receiving dental care. She wasn't living on the streets homeless. She still could have had a runaway, but it didn't look like she had been. If she was a runaway, that she had been in that state for a long time. So they ended up digging pretty deep into the American Dental Association and they tried to find out if there was any dentist or orthodonists out there that remember placing an eyehook and then never removing it because the patient never showed back up. They were hoping that a dentist out there might have maybe had a memory job when that was brought up, but they never had any luck with anyone coming forward, and that could very well be because the dentist or arthadonist that placed it was no longer living at this point in time, because again this is a long time later, or they just didn't remember these specifics enough to come forward. So at this point, between the dead end with the DNA and the dead end with the dental work, Joe has exhausted everything to try and figure out who this girl is. It wasn't until twenty nineteen while Joe was consulting with Nick Mech Joe learned of a woman named Barbara ray Venter who was a genealogist and she had helped solve some cold cases in the most recent years and was even involved in helping capture the Golden State killer and eventually identify him. So Barbara's job as a genealogist essentially is what we talked about in the episode I did on Mary Catherine Edwards. She takes the DNA profile and is able to build a family tree from this profile. Now, she also said that she knew of a lab that had the ability to test a hair sample and analyze the DNA without a route, and in the years past, last several years, there are more labs that are popping up and that are able to do this, so you don't need the root of the hair anymore because of the advancing in the DNA technology. So through the DNA data base research and genetic genealogy and with the helper Barbara, they were able to identify a family tree in which the victim belonged. Are Jane Doe matched to a DNA family tree for a man named Jerry Terrell who lived in Arkansas and his wife had been building a family tree online, which is how they came across it. One of the branches of the tree shows four sisters from New Mexico. So those four sisters were named Nancy, Sonia, Tammy, and Carla Terrell. Nancy was listed as deceased, the other two are listed as still living, but Tammy is listed as an known. So Joe ended up reaching out and he left the two sisters who were living messages. Now, one of those sisters lives in New Mexico, and he basically left her message and just said, hey, call me when you get a chance. So Carla was the youngest of the four tarrell sisters. She ended up receiving a call from Joe. Wasn't going to call him back, thought that it was a scam, but when she told her aunt about it, she encouraged her to call him back, saying, what if this has something to do with Tammy. She just had a gut feeling, So Carla ended up calling Joe back and Joe started asking her different questions. Do you have anyone missing in your family? And she talked about Tammy. Now, at this point, Joe was pretty certain that Tammy was the identity of the dough because they have the DANNA, but of course they have to be sure, so they end up taking the DNA samples that were taken from the body at the time, and these had recently been reanalyzed, and then they matched them through the genetic genealogy and compared them with the DNA from two of the victim's sisters. Now, Joe also said, I have a photo of who we think is Tammy, but it is a crime scene photo, and do you want to see it to see if you can identify that that is her? And he warned that they were you know, autopsy crime scene photos, and that they are going to be difficult to look at, but Carla agreed, and as soon as she saw the pictures, she knew immediately that it was her sister Tammy. They officially got the DNA back and they made the match, and we now had an identity to our victim, Tammy Corinne Tarrell. So on December second of twenty twenty one, investigators announced the official identity of our Jane Doe. After all of these years, we finally learned the identity of a woman who was found on the highway in Henderson, Nevada. And we learn a little bit more about Tammy, because I really want this episode to be focused on who Tammy was as a person, not the way that her life was tragically taken from her, but who she was and how she ended up on the side of a highway in Henderson, Nevada. So, Tammy had a family who never gave up hope that they would find her. They had been searching for her for forty years. Tammy and Carla's mom essentially lost custody of her four children, and the kids ended up being split up and put into foster care. Tammy and Carla were lucky enough that they were able to stay together and they were raised in the same foster home. Now, although they were five years away, they were all that one another had. Tammy was essentially Carla's only family. Carla said that Tammy was a very happy child and she was care free. But as Tammy went into her teenage years, her personality began to change and she started to act out. She would cut class, she started drinking, and she would often run away. One time, she even ended up in Arizona and had to be randomly picked up by her foster brother after someone reached out to her foster family about her being in Arizona. At the age of sixteen, she was sent away to Roswell, New Mexico, to an assurance home to basically get her life back on track. So once Tammy was sent to this home, Carla didn't reach out. It took her about a year after Tammy was sent away for Carla to reach out, and the only reason she reached out was because one of their aunts had passed away. So it was at this point in time when Carla reached out to the insurance home to try to talk to Tammy that she found out that Tammy was missing. Now, at this point, she had already been gone for seven months. The Assurance Home had filed a missing person's report with the Roswell Police Department, but nobody alerted the family, and because Tammy was in foster care, she pretty much just essentially slipped through the cracks, which is horrible and so sad when you think about it. Tammy was only seventeen, by the way, I don't think I have said that up to this point, but she was a child. So here's kind of what happened leading up to Tammy's disappearance. So on the night of September twenty eighth of nineteen eighty, this was the day that Tammy disappeared. The Assurance Home had dropped off Tammy at the state Fair at the New Mexico Fairgrounds in Roswell with another girl. The Assurance Home staff came back around nine pm to pick up the girls, but Tam wasn't there. They didn't end up going around to try to find her, but they had no luck. And unfortunately, they said, it really wasn't uncommon that the kids run away. They don't want to be at the assurance home, so they're gonna run away. They're troubled teenagers, they're gonna run away. So that was that. They ended up filing a missing persons report and that was pretty much the end of it. So Tammy was last seen by her aunt Janice and uncle Jerry at an old Denny's with a man and a woman who had plans to go to California. Now, Jana saw her at this Denny's and talked with her and basically said, don't go with these people. They don't look like they're on the up and up. But Tammy went anyways. But this tip that Tammy's aunt and uncle were pretty much the last people to see her with this man and woman didn't come in until long after the fact. So who was this mysterious couple? Could they have been involved in Tammy's death? So Roswell Police Department are still actively seeking leads from anyone who might have seen Tammy on that night in nineteen eighty or knows anything about her disappearance. Obviously, as I say, with all of these cases, somebody knows something about who Tammy is with, the Knight that she died, who she was with of the Dennies, somebody knows who these people are. Now at this time, they are still seeking out information on Tammy's death, like I said, and trying to find the person or persons responsible. Carla always very much held out hope that her sister was okay and alive somewhere. She said that she would always randomly look in ditches, she would watch news reports, and she always thought that hopefully one day she could find out what happened to her sister. So this case does have a little bit of resolution, except there is a missing piece of the puzzle, which was who killed Tammy and took away her identity for forty years. So I'm now going to discuss a few theories, just kind of to put them out there. These are things that have been published in the media. But again, this case is now forty five years old, so while the killer could still be alive, they could also very well be deceased themselves, and the time is running out to properly identify who this horrific person is. So they do believe that Tammy was killed in a hotel room, basically due to her being cleaned up and having the piece of shower curtain that was found by her remains. So between nineteen seventy eight and nineteen eighty one, there was a stringer of murders in the area of Henderson and a suspect that was tied to at least twelve cases in the area, which was a man named Stephen Peter Moran. Now he was a serial killer and is linked to as many as forty eight spanning from California to New York. At the time of Tammy's death, he was living in Henderson under the alias Robert Generoso, and he had a young son and was married, so he was living a secret double life. In September of nineteen seventy six, he abducted and raped and tortured a young fourteen year old girl. Her body was later found in Utah in December of nineteen seventy six. Police realize it's him and target him for the death of this girl. He ends up fleeing and is on the FBI's most wanted list for a total of six years until us capture in nineteen eighty two. He ended up being executed and cremated in nineteen eighty five. There are two other victims that were found in Henderson and all died from blunt force trauma very similar to Tammy, but Tammy was the only one whose body had been scrub clean, so this was definitely a differing fact in how the girls were found. So there isn't any necessarily major evidence that tie him to Tammy. However, he is obviously a horrible human and he's definitely worth mentioning. Despite living there under this alternate identity with the wife and son, he also had been in and out of Henderson in his life. He would sell drugs and he was just all around not a good person. So in the interview, Carla said that Tammy was always very much searching for the perfect family and the perfect love. She obviously grew up in not a great situation. She was in foster care, and she was always searching for a family. And Carla said that when she found out that John Williams and Joe Ebert had pretty much done everything that they had done, and that John and his wife had even gone as far as to by a tombstone and pay for the burial expenses, Carlin knew at that point that Tammy had found her loving family, even though it was in death, and she said that very much brought her peace. John Williams, Oh my god, I just think that this man is a rare breed of a human. He would visit her grave every year on the anniversary of her body being found. He really really cared. There's a photo of him standing at her grave and it's just the best, Like it's so sad and tragic, but this man didn't know who this girl was. He didn't know who she was for such a long time, but he went and visited her every single year. They ended up reburying Tammy in the same location in Henderson that she was originally buried in by John and his wife. Her tombstone now bears her full name, Tammy Kerring Tarrell. Tammy's family said they very much wanted her to be close to the people who helped her so much and essentially helped figure out who she is. And these were the people that really cared to find out who she was. They put everything into it, and they were her family too. Joe Eber is actively seeking information about the couple who Tammy was last seen with. They are described as a white male with dark brown hair a white female with light brown hair. Both of them have average builds. They appeared to be in their mid forties in nineteen eighty and they could have been carnival workers at the New Mexico State Fair in Roswell, New Mexico. Joe will not give up until this case is solved once and for all. It has become of the utmost important to him, as same as it was to John Williams. John Williams sadly passed away November seventeenth of twenty twenty three at seventy three years old, and he spent pretty much his whole life and career searching for the identity of this Jane Doe. And luckily he was able to learn of her identity before he passed away. When Joe first showed him a picture of Taromy Terrell, he knew right away. He said, Yeah, that's her, that's Jane. That's what he would call her, Jane Doe Jane, So he knew that that was her. And I bet that that brought him the biggest amount of peace ever. And it just goes to show you these cases need people like these two. John Williams retired, but this case was always the one that he wanted to solve, his white whale case, as I like to call them. That's actually a saying in the true crime world. This is my white whale case, the one that I want to solve. That I've never been able to solve and it wasn't until Joe came in that he was able to help John because things had advanced so much. Nineteen eighty to two thousand and six. Teat is a huge chunk of time, all the DNA advances in technology and coming across the genealogist Barbara Venter. That was a huge part of solving this case. So that is my favorite thing about true crime is that even though these cases can remain unsolved, there can be a woman who we don't know her identity for forty years and then all of a sudden, now we know her identity and now it's just about finding her killer who did this to her? And that is why I do this podcast because there is always answers, we just have to find them, and if we don't look into these cases, we don't find them. If John had retired and nobody picked this case up, this person still would be unidentified. And that's really sad to think about, because without the one person that is devoted to solving a case, if they retire or they pass away, whatever the case may be, the case goes in a file cabinet and nobody thinks about it again. So Joe coming in and really taking the reins on this and propelling the case to where he was able to figure out who this Jane Doe was was amazing and just what needed to happen, and he got the closure that John Williams needed, that was who was this person that he spent so many years looking for trying to figure out who this person was. So now all that they have left to do is solve her murder. You got to identify the person first, and then you've got to solve the murder. So that is where we're at right now. In Tammy's case. Solving her murder is so important because the person that did this probably has done it before. I will say there were a few things that kind of struck me as similar to some other cases I've covered. The fact that she was at the state fair. There was another case I covered where two girls disappeared from their state fair. Again, it could just be coincidental, but there was a couple of crossover things that just struck me as kind of similar. There was also another case I did on a little girl who went missing. Her body ended up being found and they found some shower curtain near where she was dumped again, it's another similar thing, another crossover. Does it necessarily mean that any of these things are connected, But so many of these cold cases have such similar details in them, and I think that it's so important to look at these details because the details could give us the identity of who this person was. You just never know. If they think that Tammy was killed in a hotel room, where was the hotel? Was the hotel in Henderson? Does anyone that worked at a hotel in Henderson have any thoughts from back in nineteen eighty when they worked in a hotel in Henderson and there was this really creepy guy and woman who were floating around the hotel and they were acting weird and they checked in with the girl, but when they checked out, they didn't have the girl with them. These are all of the things that run through my brain as I'm going through these cases as to why I say that there's more than one person out there that knows something and they might not even realize that they know it. And that is why we do these cases and why these cases are super solvable, But we have to talk about them for them to get solved. So that is the case of Tammy Tarrell. I thank you guys so much for listening. I really hope that there is movement this year in Tammy's case because she deserves it, her family deserves it, and whoever this horrific person is that took her life needs to be off of the streets if they are not already to see and passed away. So thank you guys as always for listening, and I will see you next week for a brand new unsolved case. Have a great weekend and stay safe. Bye.