On the evening of Thursday, March 12th, 1981, twelve-year-old Tammy Leakey had gone with her mother Betty and younger sister Donna to the home of a friend named Bonnie Tapp in the Pointe Saint Charles neighborhood of Montreal, Canada. At around eight-forty-five p.m., Betty sent Tammy to a store about a block away to buy some milk for coffee; she had also given her daughter some money to purchase chocolate bars for herself and for her younger sister.
At twenty minutes past nine, Betty became worried when Tammy failed to return from her errand. She went to the store herself and asked the proprietor if he had seen Tammy; he told her that Tammy had indeed come into the shop and bought her items around five minutes past nine and then left. Betty and Bonnie began walking back toward Bonnie’s apartment, at which point they spotted a bag containing milk and one chocolate bar lying in the gutter, along with Tammy’s broken glasses.
Betty and Bonnie began to canvass the neighborhood, and one resident told them that she had seen a man in a beige trenchcoat get out of a small red car and pull a screaming child into the vehicle. Betty called the police and reported her daughter missing.
At a quarter to eleven on the same night, a seventy-three-year-old man named Ewing Tait noticed what he thought was a bundle of rags lying alongside the road about a twenty-minute drive from where Tammy was last seen. When he stopped to look, he found to his horror that it was actually the still-warm body of a young girl, lying on her stomach with her arms stretched out on either side of her. She was found partially nude. All of her clothing was recovered from the scene, with the exception of one shoe, which was never found. The other candy bar was in the pocket of her jeans.
Tammy was taken to the nearest hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival. Medical personnel determined that the child had been strangled with a length of rope or electrical cord. Additionally, she may have been beaten in the head and on the back, and possibly stabbed.
Although Tammy was not sexually assaulted, there was semen found on her clothing, indicating the crime had a sexual component. Though there has been speculation that a serial killer may have been the culprit, the crime remains unsolved more than forty years after it occurred.
Crime Immemorial 