Posted 26 May 2007 - 04:05 PM
Originally posted on 04/10/04
by Kelly
No Reason to Run
Family, friends and advocates of missing Tabitha Tuders say police should let go of the runaway theory that may be getting in the way of finding her
By John Spragens & Matt Pulle, photography by Eric England
On Tuesday, April 29, Tabitha Tuders didn't make it to her bus stop at the bottom of a long, wide hill on Boscobel Street in East Nashville, an easy walk from her home on nearby Lillian Street. The 13-year-old with sandy blond hair, blue eyes and a shy, sweet smile didn't make it to class at Bailey Middle School either. Nor did the straight A student who almost never got into trouble board the bus for home that afternoon. In fact, no known eyewitness saw Tabitha after 8 a.m. that day.
That night, dozens of police officers and detectives showed up at the Tuders' home to search for the missing child. Early in the investigation, many of the patrol officers who canvased the neighborhood thought that Tabitha Tuders was another troubled teen who simply took off from home, perhaps hopping a Greyhound or taking a long car ride with an older boyfriend. It's not that they discovered information about the girl that would lead them to a runaway theory, but that's how they say most of these cases end up.
"The first thing everybody thinks of when it's a child of this age is that it's a runaway," says one of the officers who arrived at the scene shortly after Tabitha was reported missing. "We treat it as if it's not, but in the back of our minds we want to think the best as opposed to it being some kid who was raped and strangled."
But as the investigation dragged on for days and then weeks without a break, it became more and more clear that Tabitha didn't fit the profile of a runaway. Scene interviews with Tabitha's parents, teacher and friends paint a portrait of a warm, shy, unassuming child who sang in the Eastland Baptist Church choir. By all accounts, Tabitha was anything but a troubled teen. Her grades, at one point quite average, were soaring; she was remarkably close and comfortable with her parents, and everyone who knew her says that she didn't behave any differently in the days leading up to her disappearance. Perhaps most importantly, Tabitha left her money and just about all her possessions behind, leaving no evidence of a planned escape. Witnesses even spotted her that Tuesday morning walking to her bus stop, as she normally did every weekday morning.
And yet the police continue to maintain that Tabitha could be a runaway, repeating to any reporter with a notebook the tired mantra that investigators have no evidence of foul play. This police qualifier is included in every news story about the disappearance, and has arguably swayed public opinion about who Tabitha Tuders is and why she's missing. Police have given the same impression to the family, local volunteers, even out-of-town missing children's organizations, many of whom seem baffled at the police department's stubborn party line.
While it's true that there's no airtight report of a shadowy kidnapper snatching Tabitha and forcing her into an old pickup truck, there's also not one iota of evidence--not even a passing suggestion--that the girl had a reason to leave home. Or that her parents and family, who have cooperated with the police from that very first night and eagerly took lie detector tests in the weeks following, have a thing to hide.
An effective police investigation would have quickly publicized two scenarios: Either a stranger forcibly abducted Tabitha as she walked to school that morning, or she willingly left town with an older adult, perhaps a friend of the family or older boyfriend she secretly dated. Instead, police have gone out of their way to say that there's no evidence of abduction, cautioning against the notion of foul play as though there's a risk to considering it.
"We don't have any evidence that she ran away; we don't have any evidence that she was abducted," says police spokesman Don Aaron, when asked why the police don't stress the abduction scenario.
Among those who believe Tabitha was abducted is John Walsh, the missing child advocate and self-promotional host of America's Most Wanted and The John Walsh Show. On June 3, Walsh featured the Tabitha Tuders case on his namesake show. The Tuders family was flown to New York, where they made tearful on-air pleas for the safe return of their daughter. "I've studied the case, I know the case, and I know that this little girl didn't run away. She never made it to the bus stop," Walsh said on camera at the end of the segment, which aired locally on News Channel 5+.
Friends and family seem genuinely grateful to a police department that has been sensitive and responsive. But they believe that holding on to the runaway theory has hindered the investigation and dampened public and media interest in the case. In reality, they say, Tabitha is just a 13-year-old girl who had never so much as been on an airplane. They don't believe she would have--or could have--run away from home, staying hidden for more than two months.
"People don't look for runaways," says Tabitha's frustrated father Bo. "They think that they ran away because they had problems at home."
"All of her stuff is still in her room," says her mother, Debra. "Her money, her clothes, her makeup. The police told me they normally consider 13-year-olds runaways, and I told them you don't know Tabitha."
On Tuesday afternoon, April 29, Debra, a soft-spoken, adoring mother of three, had no inkling her youngest child was missing. That morning, Debra had woken up as usual at 6 a.m., while Bo lay sleeping. Tabitha was still asleep too, lying on the floor at the foot of the bed as she sometimes did, even though her parents had given her her own room several months earlier. Much like any other weekday morning, Debra headed to Tom Joy Elementary School, where she works as a cook at the school cafeteria.
On Tuesday afternoon at around 4:05, Tabitha didn't come home from school like she normally does. Buses often run late. Kids fool around at the playground when they should be boarding the bus. Traffic congestion causes delays. Things happen. Debra waited 20 minutes for her daughter before she drove to Bailey Middle School on Greenwood Avenue.
When Debra arrived at the school, the doors were locked. She grew nervous and went home to meet her husband, Bo. By then, it was 4:45. Bo and Debra went back to Bailey Middle, banged loudly on one of the doors and rang a bell. A custodian finally let them in. The Tuders walked around the 84-year-old building and found a teacher, who told them that their daughter, who had become a straight A student, wasn't in class that day. Bo and Debra quickly rushed home and called the police.
The Tuders live in a tiny, one-story home on 1312 Lillian St. in a working-class part of East Nashville not yet touched by gentrification. Nearby are trendier neighborhoods, newly populated with academics and architects who have renovated older Victorian homes. The Tuders have lived there for nearly 16 years; it's the only home Tabitha has ever known.
Unlike many 13-year-olds who view their parents as hopelessly out-of-touch, Tabitha is said to be very close to her mom and dad. She isn't a boy-crazy teen with posters of young movie stars tacked on her bedroom walls; she likes to stay at home with her parents and older sister, Jamie, or go with them to catch the race cars loop around the quarter-mile asphalt track at Highland Rim, 20 miles north of the city. When she spends the night at a friend's house, she always calls home before bedtime to tell her parents that she loves them. Her room is full of stuffed animals and G-rated movies like The Little Mermaid and Pooh's Grand Adventure.
"She was 13 years old," says her father, who, like many parents of missing children, moves back and forth between the past and present tenses when talking about his child. "But there were times when she acted like she was 7 or 8."
Many teenage girls fall into two categories: those who try to act and talk like adults and those who still have a childlike view of the world. Tabitha falls into the latter group. She's always been a smart kid--on her last report card, her lowest grade was a 95--but she hasn't been one to watch Sex and the City, mouth off to her parents or dress to look older.
When Bo woke up that Tuesday, Tabitha was sound asleep. He woke her up and headed off to his short-haul trucking job. Every school day at around 8 a.m., Tabitha would board the bus on Boscobel Street, a short walk from her home. The bus stopped at least twice on Boscobel, once at the top of the hill where it intersects with 14th Street, and again at the bottom of the hill. Tabitha boarded at the bottom, because most of the kids there were closer to her age.
Tabitha didn't board the bus for school that day, but several witnesses saw her (or someone resembling her) walking toward her stop. The first witness was driving his children to school down 14th Street at around 7:55 when he saw Tabitha on the corner of 14th and Lillian, still in sight of her home. Other witnesses spotted her on 14th walking toward Boscobel. The young girl was then spotted at the top of the Boscobel hill, which looks down toward her preferred stop. A man on Boscobel saw her cross the street, glance toward the bottom of the hill, perhaps looking to see if any of her friends were already there. By then, Tabitha would have been 120 yards from where she usually waited for the bus. But it seems she never made it down the hill.
When the search began, bloodhounds and other search dogs, all on loan from various missing children's organizations, tracked Tabitha's scent. According to Johnny White, a family friend and the Tuders' spokesperson, the dogs followed nearly the same route that the young girl took every day to the bus stop. But 30 or so yards from her bus stop, the dogs reversed course and headed back up the hill. It's at roughly that same spot that another eyewitness spotted Tabitha get into a red car that also reversed course and headed up the hill toward Boscobel. Police investigators doubt the accuracy of this eyewitness, whom they say has credibility problems, and they also doubt the route the search dogs tracked. But the volunteers searching for the girl think police are ignoring what may be the key to the case.
Johnny White speculates Tabitha was coerced into the red vehicle. Capt. Karl Roller of the Metro Police Youth Services Division tells the Scene that his department is currently looking into the tip about the red car. But it's not new information. The tip surfaced the day after Tabitha disappeared, nine weeks ago.
It took the police 45 minutes to respond to the Tuders' call about their missing daughter, but when they arrived, they didn't come meekly. The Tuders say that nearly 30 officers responded to the call. A police officer who visited the house that evening gauged that number at closer to 100--or nearly a third of the officers on duty in Nashville that night. No matter what disagreement there may be about police theories or even practice in this case, one thing's clear: Metro Police didn't take her disappearance lightly.
The police questioned the family and quickly set up a command post. A detective spread paperwork, maps and a grid on a patrol car. Patrol officers conducted yard searches through area homes and went door to door asking neighbors whether they knew Tabitha or had seen her. If they didn't, police gave them a physical description and told them to be on the lookout. Police say that the neighbors were very cooperative. Generally, they say, even people who aren't normally eager to help law enforcement become far more willing to provide assistance when there's a child involved.
The officers searched along a five-mile radius, touching near the Coliseum and Shelby Park. At midnight, the new shift relieved some of the patrol officers. No one can remember what time the police stopped their search. All that Bo and Debra Tuders can recall is that they didn't sleep that first night. They walked through East Nashville, looking for Tabitha, searching abandoned homes. There was no sign of her. In any disappearance, the most important time to crack the case is the first night. Yet, neither the police nor the family learned anything about what might have happened to Tabitha.
Nine weeks later, the police are no closer to cracking the case than they were the day Tabitha disappeared. Police have classified her as a "missing person," not a runaway or an abducted child. This is as ambiguous a classification as there is.
"We still don't have enough answers to rule it one way or another," says acting Police Chief Deborah Faulkner. "We just want to find her."
But there's a disturbing sense of police flat-footedness in this case. Faulkner, for example, describes herself as "very involved" in the Tuders case--indeed, she was briefed for two hours on it last Monday--but she's "not sure" which detective is in charge of the investigation. Four officers work full-time on the disappearance case, but routine polygraph tests were given to Tabitha's immediate family members weeks--not hours or days--after the girl went missing. And Tabitha's 24-year-old brother Kevin, who was arrested two years ago for his involvement with a money laundering and prostitution ring, has never been asked to take a polygraph test.
"The polygraph test is an investigative tool--the timing of it was when investigators felt like they had enough information to do the polygraph," Faulkner says. "We were still trying to determine what it was we were dealing with."
The most baffling aspect of the investigation is the police department's insistence that Tabitha may be a runaway, even though they admit there's no evidence to support that theory. When she left for school that Tuesday morning, the seventh grader was wearing Mudd jeans, a light-blue shirt and white Reeboks. She didn't bring a change of clothes, a teddy bear from her collection or the $20 bill she had been given the previous Sunday at church for memorizing the Ten Commandments. The adolescent girl owned two bras; she wore one that day and left the other in her dresser drawer.
And there's nothing to suggest Tabitha wanted to leave home, either. Investigators have found no signs of a troubled family life--Bo can't recall ever spanking his daughter--nor do they have any suspicion that Tabitha had an older boyfriend or shady Internet pal.
"A lot of kids who are having trouble at home with their parents, they'll be a discipline problem at school," says Bailey Middle School teacher and librarian Diane Jarrell. "Tabitha wasn't like that. I didn't have any reason to believe she had trouble at home."
Jarrell--like everyone else who knows Tabitha--scoffs at the idea that the girl had a boyfriend, although a volunteer-led search of Tabitha's room did turn up a love note from an 11-year-old suitor. (Police failed to find it in their search of the room, according to family friend Johnny White.) The middle school teacher notes that Tabitha "wasn't one that would come to the library, get on computers and check e-mail." She rarely used the Internet.
Seventh-grade girls aren't known for their ability to keep secrets, so Jarrell says that if Tabitha ran away, she would have mentioned her plan to one of her two best friends. But Chelsea Crague and Veronica "Ronnie" Villescaz (both of whom Jarrell describes as "sweet," "really nice," "very smart" and "a good influence") have said that Tabitha never said a word that made them think she'd leave home voluntarily. Other schoolmates have said the same, and the two girls--and their families--are as worried as anyone.
For their part, Metro police concede that they've got no reason to suspect Tabitha's a runaway. But rather than regard the absence of motives or preparations to leave as circumstantial evidence that she didn't mean to vanish that Tuesday, detectives officially regard the clues as no information at all.
"It's certainly something we're well aware of--that she wasn't planning on leaving," says Capt. Roller, "but there's no information that she was grabbed or snatched either." The fear among Tabitha's family, and others trying to find her, is that this kind of suspended judgment, which works well in courtrooms and classrooms, could have life-or-death consequences in the real world of police sleuthing.
These are modest people who don't know much about investigatory work, and they seem genuinely appreciative of the police effort so far. But they are frustrated, and don't understand why police don't err on the side of caution, listing Tabitha as a potentially abducted child. Had the department not downplayed from the beginning the possibility of foul play, more public attention--perhaps nationally--might be focused on this case today or the case might have been solved already.
Interestingly, family friend Johnny White says that police even discouraged America's Most Wanted from televising a segment about Tabitha's disappearance. Police spokesman Don Aaron says that, initially, police officials talked with the show about "them showing her photo and speaking for a few seconds before a commercial break." That discussion has since advanced, Aaron explains, because, "As time has gone by, our frustration level has risen as we haven't been able to confirm what the circumstances were surrounding her disappearance." Discussion is now focused on a longer segment, he says.
In yet another questionable call, the police department chose not to issue an Amber Alert in the aftermath of Tabitha's disappearance. Modeled after the nationwide Amber Plan, Tennessee's Amber Alert allows for law enforcement to work with media across the state to broadcast news about a missing child. To make sure that Amber Alerts don't hit the airwaves so often that the public ignores them, the state requires that each missing case meet certain criteria before an alert can be broadcast. Tabitha's case was a judgment call. Police didn't have a description of a suspect or a car in which she might have fled, as they did earlier this year when they issued an Amber Alert for Mariana Cisneros. But for a girl like Tabitha to have vanished without a trace, she almost certainly would have had to be in danger--or as the criteria specifies "out of the zone of safety for his or her development age." In any case, considering that Amber Alerts have thwarted abductions in other states, the downside is hard to identify. It would have only been the second such alert all year.
Police spokesman Don Aaron says that the police could have issued an Amber Alert but didn't because so many hours had elapsed between the time she was last seen and when she was reported missing.
Even more curiously, the day after Tuders' disappearance, at about noon, police called the local Office of Emergency Management (OEM) to assist with the search, only to call it off after a few hours. "We mustered our volunteers, and we took our volunteers and were searching Shelby Park," says OEM assistant director Richard Byrd. He says his team was prepared to do a search of the Cumberland River bank, but that the police called that off without explanation.
So who is Tabitha Tuders? Chances are, if she lived in Green Hills, more people would know the answer to that question. That's not so much a condemnation of the police or a lazy news media. It's a recognition of the fact that access to justice is sometimes influenced, if not determined, by social networks. It's doubtful that Bo Tuders, for example, has called his college frat brother, who's now a local judge, and asked him to call the police chief to ask her to publicize what a good kid Tabitha is. Bo doesn't have a college frat brother, or a college education for that matter.
Contrast Tabitha's case with that of Salt Lake City's Elizabeth Smart. One difference, of course, is that Elizabeth's sister witnessed her abduction. But it's also worth noting that the Smarts have lots of money and video of their angelic daughter playing the harp in a white dress. The reward in the Smart case--thanks to donations that poured in from around the country--was $295,000. For Tabitha's safe return, the foundation-funded reward stands at $10,000. The Smarts had 1,500 volunteers looking for Elizabeth; the Tuders had 100, and that number has since dwindled to just a handful.
It's a sad contrast that hasn't escaped at least one member of the news media in Salt Lake City. Writing this month in the Salt Lake Tribune, Brooke Adams used the Tuders case as a foil to the Smart case. Perhaps, she writes, folks were so willing to hunt for Elizabeth because of the humanizing video footage and her "powerful family and well-connected friends." The "uglier possibility," however, "is we may be only capable of such a response when religion, class, ethnicity and geography fall within certain criteria, when the 'what happened?' matches an archetypal fear."
Tabitha's story may not be as sensational as the Smart story--there's no midnight abductor on the loose in a tranquil upper-class neighborhood--but she's no less missing. And the Tuders are desperate to have her back. For the last two months, they've comforted themselves and each other with stories about the daughter they love and pray is safe. Her dad talks with moist eyes about the arthritis charity walk she was supposed to take part in with a group of her friends the week after she disappeared. Event organizers gave Bo her T-shirt in a size big enough for him.
The Tuders like to talk about Tabitha's decision to start going to Eastland Baptist Church with a friend's family. "She made her own decision to go to church," her dad says. "I never told her to go." They describe the spaghetti supper for the elderly that she helped with. They note with pride that she got promoted to the eighth grade, despite missing the last few weeks of school, and they beam over a report card on which Tabitha's grades show dramatic improvement. The Tuders, like most parents, want Tabitha to get a good education and go further in life than they have.
"I told her, 'I didn't finish school, your mamma didn't finish school, and I drive a truck and your mamma works at a cafeteria.' I told her to make sure she gets a good education," says Bo Tuders, who often helped Tabitha with her math homework.
But mostly these days, they just want Tabitha to come home. "Grandma is really taking it hard," says Debra, referring to the 82-year-old next-door neighbor who's not really Tabitha's grandma. "Boo"--the family's nickname for Tabitha--"used to go to Grandma's house and read to her. I'm telling you, Tabitha's a homebody," Debra says. "Elderly ladies were her best friends."
The house at 1312 Lillian St. is mercifully busy with visitors who take the family's mind off the absence in their lives. Every night, volunteers bring the Tuders home-cooked food. Family members say they're "overwhelmed" by the support they've received.
"Things get rough sometimes," says Tabitha's barrel-chested father, "but you can't give up hope. You have your good days and your bad days. You just have to have faith that she's gonna come home."
Dan Cohen
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