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Missing woman mis-ID'd
By Leslie Slape
Aug 26, 2005 - 08:17:28 am PDT
Detectives were hoping they finally had a break in a nine-year missing-persons case, but instead they found a remarkable look-alike.
"We're confident that this is not Phylis Lewellen," Charlie Rosenzweig, chief criminal deputy of the Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office, said Thursday.
The woman resembling Lewellen, who disappeared from her home in the Lexington area of Kelso on Dec. 27, 1996, is Tammy Dickie, 43, of Lakeville, Minn.
"It is a big break in the sense that what we didn't know yesterday, we know today, and that's a big help," Rosenzweig said. "But it's disappointing that we still don't have any information about Phylis, which ultimately was our goal."
After a story ran Thursday morning in the Rapid City (S.D.) Journal speculating that a woman in a photo could be Lewellen, Sheriff's Detective Ron Broyles' phone began to ring.
A Journal photographer shot the photo Aug. 10 at a Wyoming motorcycle rally and included it in a special publication for the motorcycle rally in Sturgis. Friends of Lewellen who were at the rally saw the picture and alerted her former husband, Bill, who said the image came as a shock to him and his two children, 15 and 11.
" 'Yes, that is Phylis.' That was my first reaction," Lewellen, who still lives in Lexington, told the Journal.
The shape of the woman's nose and mouth are the same, Lewellen said, right down to a bump on her lip. The way the woman is holding her arms matched a typical posture of his wife, he said.
The woman in the photo also is holding a Coors Light, Phylis Lewellen's favorite beer, and her nails appear to be long and well kept, just like Phylis Lewellen's nails, he said.
But people who know Tammy Dickie and her husband, Joe, called the sheriff's office to set the record straight.
"Now I know why they call it Rapid City -- we got a rapid response from that story they ran," Rosenzweig said.
Joe Dickie said that when Broyles left a message on his phone Thursday, he initially thought something awful happened to his wife, a flight attendant.
"I got a call from the Rapid City Journal, then I got a call from a detective who said, 'Call me, it's urgent, it's about a missing person,' " he said. "My wife left on a trip, so I'm thinking my wife's disappeared. You can imagine what goes on your head."
He said his heart goes out to the Lewellen family, because he knows what they are going through. His aunt disappeared when he was a child and she has never been found.
Thursday, the Lewellen family referred all calls to the sheriff's office.
After talking to Broyles, Dickie looked at the photo, which shows his wife in profile.
"Looking at the profile, I can tell why they think that," he said.
Tammy, 43, is only two years younger than Lewellen would be today. At 5-foot-5, she's only an inch shorter.
"You start thinking, I married my wife in '96," he said. "You start thinking, maybe my wife isn't who I think she is."
Then he compared the images from the front. There's no doubt they're different women, he said.
Joe and Tammy Dickie met July 28, 1996, in the Mall of America parking lot in Minneapolis.
"She was on a layover from one of her flights, and I was pulling into the parking lot in my Harley," he recalled. "She pulled over and asked me out."
They were married Dec. 20, 1996, seven days before Lewellen vanished.
Lewellen has blue-green eyes, long strawberry-blond hair and an Alabama accent. She was wearing jeans, a white sweatshirt and a Western-style coat when she was last seen.
Deputies made an extensive search but have been unable to locate Lewellen, her 1981 Peugeot, or her Rottweiler.
"It's remarkable that the vehicle has never shown up," Rosenzweig said. "It's entered into the national crime data bases. So if it does surface, in a legal sense, the system will notify us."
He said the sheriff's office has gotten a lot of calls since the story broke and he hopes that the national attention will help solve the mystery.
Anyone with information is encouraged to call Broyles at 577-3092, extension 2349. Anonymous tips may be called to Crime Stoppers of Cowlitz County, 577-1206.
© 2005 The Daily News
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