Post by Joanna on Oct 23, 2015 15:51:17 GMT -5
Unsolved Murder in Fauquier County
October is always a sad month for Lorraine Thorpe. Every October 23, she goes to her daughter’s resting place in a small family cemetery to change the wreath and water the flowers at the grave of her murdered daughter.
Even after 27 years, she can still remember being awakened on a Sunday morning by deputies and her family doctor knocking on her front door. “I just knew before I even opened the door that it wasn’t going to be good news,” Thorpe said. “I just can’t understand why anybody would do something like that.” Lorriane’s daughter, Tammy Thorpe, was discovered shot to death October 23, 1988, just after 7 a.m. off a gravel road, less than a mile outside Warrenton, Va., on the northbound side of US 17. “I just keep holding out hope that something will happen,” Thorpe said of the nearly 30-year-old investigation. The unsolved murder is older than her daughter was when she was killed. But Thorpe won’t give up, she has to keep hoping and praying that justice will be brought to her daughter's killer.
Tammy was only 20-years-old when she was killed and had graduated Fauquier High School two years earlier. She was last seen around 3 a.m. driving her 1986 gold two-door Pontiac Grand Am with the vanity license plate 86-TAMMY. According to the medical examiner, she died from multiple gunshot wounds from a small caliber handgun. At the time of her death, she was working as a secretary in Marshall.
According to Thorpe, her daughter was forgiving, kind and happy-go-lucky and she loved school. Tammy graduated in the top 20 of her class with many years of perfect attendance. “What she set out to do, she accomplished,” Thorpe related. “And I just miss her so, I think about her all the time.”
An FBI evaluation of the evidence concluded Tammy’s killer was likely a white male who lived in Fauquier County. Experts are convinced she was killed by somebody she knew, not a stranger, according to the sheriff’s office. “We haven’t let go of the case at all,” Fauquier County Sheriff Charlie Ray Fox, Jr., said. “We’re not going to give up on it, there needs to be some closure,” Fox explained investigators have been going through the evidence, witness reports and case files with the FBI.
Technology has changed tremendously since Tammy’s death and a lot of older evidence has been resubmitted for forensic evaluation and exams. “At the time of the killing in 1988, the perpetrator was most likely exhibiting signs of great psychological stress and had to internalize his anger and frustration over this senseless crime,” according to the sheriff’s office. “He is still likely to be thinking about it today and haunted by dreams of what happened.”
Fox said his office has a suspect in the case, but needs to make sure all the pieces are in place before bringing charges. But he doesn’t want to give any false hope or a timeline, because the case is still a work in progress.
For Lorraine Thorpe, justice would bring relief and closure after almost three long, painful decades. “And I don’t only feel for myself. I’m not the only one that this kind of thing has happened to,” Lorraine Thorpe added. She prays for all the parents and family with murdered children, especially the family of victims of other unsolved murders in Fauquier County. But her heart goes out to everyone in her situation. Every time you turn on the television there is another story like hers, she said. “But you don’t give up. You just keep hoping and praying that someday, something will be uncovered that will bring closure.”
Thorpe recalled her daughter had been too quiet for a few weeks before she was killed, until one day she came home with flowers and a note. “Mom, just a little something to show you how much I love you and how much I care for what all you do for me,” the note read. And then shortly after that she was gone. “It’s a heartbreaking thing for anyone to go through,” Thorpe said of the memory of her daughter. “Over the years, the pain gets easier to deal with, but you never, never forget.”
Detectives are confident someone in Fauquier County knows the person responsible for Tammy’s death and has the ability to bring closure to this tragedy. Anyone with information is asked to call the Sheriff’s Office at 540-347-3300, or the Criminal Investigation Division at 540-422-8650.
Sources: Michael Melkonian, The Fauquier Times, October 23, 2015, and A Helping Hand.
