If Louise Tucker were alive, she'd still be asking, 'How could this have happened?'
Tucker's desperate search for answers began when her 19-year-old daughter, Barbara, was bludgeoned to death.
It intensified when she learned that witnesses actually had seen a young man grab Barbara off a busy Gresham street and drag her into the bushes and witnesses who had not stopped to help her.
It continued when a former boyfriend of Barbara, whom Louise Tucker considered to be the No. 1 suspect and whom police called 'uncooperative,' successfully and legally avoided providing physical evidence that could have been used against him.
And it persisted to the end of her life, as she tried to keep the Gresham Police Department and the Multnomah County district attorney's office from letting the case slip through the cracks.
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more:
Old case, new technology: Will the killer be found?
^ this is a very long longread, well worth the time. Who dunnit? It's always the former boyfriend, the boyfriend, or the boyfriend-to-be, right? Read it and see what you think, in a case that has echoes of the Kitty Genovese murder in NYC, when witnesses also did nothing.
This is a good article that provides a lot of background information about Barbara, her family and friends and the investigation. It's a good thing they didn't pursue charges against her former boyfriend as her killer turned out to be someone else, most likely a total stranger.
In 1978, Barbara graduated from Cleveland High and enrolled at Mt. Hood. In fall 1979, after commuting from home during her freshman year, she moved to an apartment complex almost directly across from campus.
'Mom was depressed when Barby moved out,' says Barbara's sister Susan Pater of Portland. 'But Barby wanted her independence, and to be closer to school.'
Shortly before Barbara's death, her sister Alice Juan observed a change in her. 'Barby just shined,' she says. 'I teased her about whether she had a new boyfriend. She said, 'Well, maybe.' '
Evening plans
It snowed on Jan. 8 and 9, 1980, and while the snow was mostly gone by the 15th, it had been raining for several days. It would rain a half-inch that day; the overnight low dipped to 35 degrees.
Barbara and a friend from her apartment complex, Lori Thomas Stomps, played hooky that afternoon and went to a Gresham gym, then back to Barbara's apartment. Barbara drove.
'She had an old beater,' Stomps says. 'She always drove. I don't recall her walking.' That was an observation that Tucker's family would make repeatedly in the coming weeks and years: She never walked, especially to night classes; she always drove.
Stomps, who says no one called or came by Barbara's apartment while she was there, left sometime after it got dark. The weather, she recalls, was 'still clear, but just really cold. Windy, really nasty.'
Barbara also talked to her mother by telephone late that day, telling her that she was going to stop by Stomps' apartment for ice cream if her 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. class got out early.
But Barbara neither showed up for class nor visited Stomps.
While listening to the radio the next day, Louise Tucker heard about the slaying of a Mt. Hood student. She called her now-deceased sister, Ruth Klohk, to fret. 'There are thousands of girls at Mt. Hood. Don't be worried,' Klohk told her.
Just then, two men came to the Tuckers' door and rang the bell. Albert Tucker talked to them briefly and walked into the kitchen. The look on his face, Louise Tucker said later, was all she needed to see. 'Ruth!' she screamed. 'Ruth, it's my Barby!' She hung up the phone.
Barbara's body had been found by a fellow student at 7 o'clock that morning in a snow-fringed grove of trees adjacent to Northeast Kane Drive, which forms the college's western boundary. Her books and purse were scattered around her. Her car was found at her apartment.
Although police thought she had been attacked while walking to class, Louise Tucker always suspected that she got a ride with someone she knew. 'It was terribly cold Ñ it was a horrible night,' she told a reporter years later.
According to the medical examiner's office, Barbara 'definitely appeared to have been sexually assaulted' and had died of head injuries. Juan, who knew Dr. William Brady, the county's medical examiner at the time, recalls his telling her that the head wounds could have been caused by something like a tire iron.
Juan says Brady also told her that Barbara had defensive wounds, incurred in her attempt to fight off her attacker, and had some of his skin under her fingernails. She had, Brady said, 'fought like hell.'
Nobody stopped
Louise Tucker wasn't the only one to hear of the murder through the media. A woman quickly came forward to say that she had been traveling on Kane Drive shortly before 7 p.m. Jan 15 and had seen both Barbara and a young man close to where Barbara's body was found some 12 hours later.
The name of this woman, and those of other witnesses who apparently also saw Barbara and/or the young man, are being withheld by Gresham police. But Louise Tucker told reporters that she understood that the female witness saw Barbara trying to flag down cars on the heavily traveled thoroughfare; several cars had to brake to keep from hitting her, and one car nearly hit her.
The driver of that car, apparently the female witness, later described seeing blood and mud on Barbara's face and a man grab one of her arms and pull her off the road. Another witness saw a man, looking 'wide-eyed and apparently shocked,' emerge from the bushes in the same area of Kane Drive, according to a statement made by Gresham police in 1990.
Nobody stopped to help Barbara. The female witness, who came to Barbara's funeral, told the victim's family that until she heard about the murder, she thought she had been observing a college prank or students dodging traffic.
Louise Tucker was haunted that there were witnesses who had not stopped.
'It's unreal that people care so little about another human being,' she said in 1981.
