WHEN MOM MOVES IN A SERIAL KILLER, LIFE GETS HARD FOR ONE MISSOURI TEEN.
The 14-year-old went missing that morning before school after getting into a car with two males in a blue car, telling her buddy Theresa that she would be back. . .
WHERE IS TAMMY ROTHGANGER?
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DISAPPEARANCE
On May 16, 1984, 14-year-old
Tammy Rothganger left for school as she did every morning. This is where she was last seen, in front of Eldon High School, getting into a blue Plymouth vehicle at about 7:45 am.
The school was across the street from where she lived in Eldon, with her mother and her mother's live in boyfriend. Later that same day, when
Tammy, a high school sophomore at Eldon High School at the time, didn't return from school, her family discovered she never made it to any of her classes. They informed the Eldon Police Department that same day and officers launched an investigation. Initially the Eldon Police Department thought she might have skipped school and gone to a park to hang out with friends.
INVESTIGATION AND AFTERMATH
When an investigation was finally conducted, detectives were informed that Tammy’s mother was dating a man named Martin Dean "Marty" Priest who was living with her and Tammy for a few months when
Tammy disappeared in 1984. The night before she went missing, Tammy wrecked Marty's car. The morning of her disappearance Marty borrowed Tammy’s brother — Donald Rothganger's. Donald claimed Priest borrowed the car saying he needed it to get to work.
A friend of Tammy's, Theresa Hicks Baughman, said she and Tammy went to the Bass Pro Shop convenience store located at the intersection of highways 54 and 52 in Eldon that morning, and that as they walked away from the store, she saw Priest drive up and yell for Tammy. She saw her get into the back seat of the car with Priest and another male. She said that the car turned left down the street and that was the last time the witness would see her friend.
At first Priest denied having anything to do with it, Tammy's mother Sandra said that Priest initially even offered to help put up posters to find Tammy, telling Sandra he believed Tammy had run away. But later Marty told investigators that when he saw
Tammy did not go into the high school doors, he pulled his car up along the sidewalk to see where she was going. Tammy supposedly told him she was going to skip school and meet friends at Rock Island Park, and Priest said he offered to take her there.
"He told us he was going to take her to Rock Island Park, that that's where she was going," says Eldon Chief of Police Bob Hurtubise.
When asked if police can confirm if she ever made it to the park?
"Never," says Hurtubise.
None of Tammy's friends had planned to meet her there either.
SERIAL KILLER PRIEST IS BELIEVED TO HAVE PREYED ON THE DAUGHTERS OF WOMEN HE DATED.
Then it was revealed that just a few years before Tammy disappeared, in 1980 when Priest was 22, he had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for the second-degree murder of 12-year-old
Tonya Lewis of Nevada, Missouri. He was painting the apartment in which Tonya Lewis resided with her mother, Shirley Lewis. Priest took his step-daughter to meet Tonya Lewis and her friend Kelly Schumacher at the municipal pool sometime during the afternoon hours, then he allegedly made arrangements with Lewis to play basketball later in the day.
During the basketball game, Lewis was injured and left to go home. That was the last time she was seen alive.
Three days later, Lewis' badly decomposed body was located floating in a farm pond, south of Nevada.
A jury said he was guilty of killing the girl whose mother he was dating, but he was released three years later when the verdict was overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court on appeal in 1983 because there was too little evidence.
ON SEPT. 20, 1983, PRIEST WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON, NINE MONTHS LATER TAMMY ROTHGANGER WENT MISSING FROM ELDON, ON MAY 16, 1984.
SOMETIME BETWEEN MAY 16, 1984 AND NOVEMBER 16, 1984, PRIEST TRAVELED TO WICHITA, KAN. WHERE HE IS BELIEVED TO HAVE MURDERED 15-YEAR-OLD KATRINA CHEELY.
Just seven months after Tammy's disappearance he was implicated in a Christmas 1984 double homicide in Kansas. The victims were 25-year-old
William Mayhugh and his girlfriend 33-year-old
Freida Bayliff. Mayhugh died of exposure after he was shot in the head with a .32-caliber pistol following a robbery. Bayliff was found dead, lying face-down on a broken waterbed in her home on Dec. 28, 1984, the day after Mayhugh’s body was found in the Big Ditch about a mile from her home. Priest was acquitted in Bayliff's death but convicted of Mayhugh's murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In 1987, while he was in custody, he was charged with murder and aggravated robbery in connection with the shooting death of 15-year-old girl, Katrina Cheely, in 1984.
Martin Priest was a friend of the Cheely family, and had befriended her mother in Wichita, Kansas. He offered to give Katrina a ride to school. Her body was found four months later in a culvert. A jury acquitted Priest at his trial in that case.
In fact, in the early to mid-1980s, authorities in Missouri and Kansas linked Priest to five deaths, but prosecutors gained only one conviction that was upheld.
Priest was considered a suspect in the murder of a 15-year-old girl whose mother he had similarly befriended, and is also suspected of several other murders.
In 2010 Baughman identified David Nicholas, Priest’s nephew, in a lineup of potential male passengers from the car she saw Tammy enter. Authorities tracked him down. He initially refused to talk to law enforcement.
WITHOUT A BODY, THE BREAK IN THE CASE CAME WHEN THE PASSENGER, WHO WAS ALSO JUVENILE AT THE TIME OF THE MURDER, CAME FORWARD WITH KEY INFORMATION THAT LED TO THE CHARGE.
It's been a very long time. We were surprised to hear of the charges after this long, but what we really want is Tammy. She deserves to be laid to rest with her grandparents. She deserves that after all of this time.
-Sharon Leonard, Tammy's aunt
In January 2016,
Martin Priest was charged with the murder of
Tammy Rothganger, 32 years after her disappearance.
Priest was
charged with capital murder for willfully, knowingly and with premeditation, deliberately killing the young girl from Eldon. Priest was
granted a change of venue from Miller County to Laclede County to stand trial for the
charges.
THE PROSECUTION ARGUED THAT PRIOR SEXUAL RELATIONS BETWEEN TAMMY AND DAVID NICHOLAS OR MARTIN PRIEST ENDED IN A PREGNANCY AND THAT TAMMY HAD TOLD THEM THAT FATEFUL DAY, AND THAT WAS THEIR MOTIVE FOR MURDER.
Thirteen-years-old at the time, the witness Priest's nephew David Nicholas, testified in court that “Marty” took him by the school the morning of May 16, 1984 and talked Tammy into skipping school to hang out with them. Traveling to a remote location south of Eldon, he said Tammy got scared and tried to run but David talked her back, believing everything was okay. Martin Priest made the two teenagers have sex in the backseat, then when she got back in the front seat David Nicholas alleges Priest struck Rothganger in the back of the head with a wrench, knocking her unconscious. Priest then allegedly raped
Tammy Rothganger before strangling her in the back seat of the car.
This allegedly occurred in the Rocky Mount area, off of Route Z.
With Tammy’s body in the car, they took a back road from the Bagnell Dam area, getting lost a couple of times, and ended up at David’s mother’s house, the family’s trailer home in Osage Beach. His brother, mother and grandmother came into the house during the incident and, according to David, helped cover up Tammy’s death by not saying anything to anyone.
David said he lied about the incident for years, scared that he, his brother and his mother would get in trouble and go to jail.
Brothers David and Michael Nicholas testified that Tammy’s body was hidden there before it was moved again later that night and buried in an unmarked location. It is unclear if charges are pending for his role in the murder and subsequent cover up. David Nicholas said he came forward because it was the right thing to do now that he knew his mother and older brother wouldn’t be hurt by it. Despite later leading police to the the general area where he believed they had been, her body was not found there.
While the prosecution said no deals had been made with David Nicholas, according to the defense, Nicholas was facing firearm trafficking charges between state lines. The defense stated that both David and his brother Michael Nicholas had started the lies after David was picked up on federal weapons charges, hoping to make a deal. In fact, in the years since Tammy’s disappearance, they have both had multiple convictions, robbery, aggravated robbery for David and a federal firearms charge he won on appeal. Michael has convictions for stealing, assault, escape, aggravated battery, fleeing law enforcement and possession of opioids, the last being in 2015.
Both said they were in court of their own free will, under no deal or benefits to testify. They were not currently incarcerated.
The prosecutor cited a records search conducted through the Social Security Administration and Department of Revenue which show Rothganger did not get a motor vehicle operator's license, receive benefits or use her social security number and has never been employed since May 16, 1984. The defense also raised a red flag over the inability of law enforcement to recover Tammy’s body despite Nicholas’ testimony that he was present where Martin Priest disposed of her body the night of May 16, 1984.
Martin Priest took the stand in his own defense, and remained calm, seemingly emotionless throughout.
To individual questions from his attorney about whether he killed Tammy, raped her, choked her, dumped her body, Priest replied firmly, “No, sir, I did not.”
Priest said he had come to Eldon in February 1984 and met Sandy at the Southside Bar where she bartended. They dated on and off over the next few months, often fighting, but not knowing Tammy well. He said the only time they were ever alone was a time he drove her to the hospital to see her mom when she had an issue.
The night before Tammy’s disappearance, all parties seem to agree Tammy was driving Priest’s car and wrecked it.
He stated that having spent the night with Tammy's mother Sandy’s Eldon home but arguing with her, Priest said he was considering breaking things off and leaving Eldon. He went out to fish and think about things.
The morning of May 16, 1984, he said he saw Tammy and gave her a ride to the park where she said she was meeting friends, but she told him she would be going back to school.
Going to his brother and sister-in-law’s farm in the Rocky Mount area, he got some worms and left, according to Martin’s version of events.
According to his now former sister-in-law, Trobey Priest, however, Martin was acting strangely that morning, arriving around 9 or 9:30 a.m. She testified earlier in the day on Wednesday, called by the State.
He took a shovel to dig worms, but left the worm can behind. Gone 15 to 20 minutes, he returned, allegedly saying the ground was too hard to dig for worms. Martin claimed he had his own plastic container. He got the worms in 10 minutes and left.
That afternoon, he said he returned to Eldon and saw Tammy in the park on the main road of town. She was supposedly with a few other kids there. He stopped and asked what she was doing because she had said she was going back to school. She replied that she had gone but had left again.
Under cross examination, he said she was in the park plainly visible to others on the road and to the kids there.
No one else though appears to have made any reports that they saw Tammy at the park that afternoon.
The day of May 16, 1984, Martin said he left Eldon for Wichita, Kansas to brother’s place there. His car broke down on the way there and he sold it. There for a few days, he heard Tammy was missing and returned to Eldon.
Though he realized he was a suspect, he continued an on and off relationship with Sandy for awhile before a final split.
Moving to Kansas, he was convicted of murder in 1985 for which he is serving life in imprison as well as served time for stealing a motor vehicle.
Priest's
three-day trial concluded on October 11 with the 12-person jury finding him guilty of first-degree murder. Judge Kenneth Hayden sentenced Martin Priest to life in prison.
Because the
serial killer Priest is already serving a life-in-prison sentence in Kansas for a different murder conviction, meaning he will have to finish out that prison sentence before returning to Missouri. He has refused to cooperate in the recovery of Tammy Rothganger.
Tammy's body was never found.
Last Known Location
Map
LITTLE ELSE IS KNOWN AT THIS TIME.
Height: 5' 7" (67 Inches)
Hair Color:Brown
Eye Color: Brown
Distinguishing Characteristics: Caucasian female. Sandy blonde to brown hair, brown eyes. Rothganger has a tattoo of the letter "R" on her left arm, and also a scar on her left arm. She has several moles on her cheeks and chin.
Clothing/Jewelry Description: Uncertain, but Rothganger was last seen wearing a sweatshirt, with a chain necklace, with an arrowhead pendant, with a leather wristband, and Nike shoes.
- DNA: Available
- Dentals: Available
NCMEC Number: 601885
NCIC Number: M-973906317
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Finding Tammy
If you have any information please contact:
City of Eldon Police Department
Phone: (573) 392-9111
Agency Case Number: 120986599
make an anonymous report to the NCMEC
or
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here.
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