Tabitha Tuders

The Rev. Sam Jones, a family acquaintance and minister, steps into the center of the room overflowing with relatives, friends, neighbors and police officers. He begins by explaining that Tabitha means “gazelle,” an appropriate name given her limitless energy. After reading a few verses from the Bible, the white-haired minister ends with the statement: “If she’s not alive on Earth, she’s alive in the arms of the Lord.”

Nothing was out of the ordinary at 1312 Lillian St. on the morning of April 29, 2003.

Debra Tuders awoke at 6 a.m. to find Tabitha sleeping soundly at the foot of their bed, as she often did. Although Tabitha had her own bedroom, she sometimes crept into her parents’ room in the middle of the night, curling up on a pallet of pillows and blankets on the floor. Unable to explain exactly why she came into their room at night, the couple simply say it made their little girl feel secure, and that’s all that mattered.

As her husband still lay sleeping, Debra got dressed and ready for her job as a cafeteria cook at nearby Tom Joy Elementary. “I stepped over Tabitha, I got ready for work and I left,” Debra explains during a recent interview. “I didn’t know that was going to be my last time looking at her.”

A short time later, Bo awoke and embarked on a similarly unremarkable morning ritual before heading to his job as a short-haul truck driver. Just before he was about to leave at 7 a.m., Bo gently shook Tabitha, who lay in her nightgown on the floor. In detail, he recounts their last, brief conversation, during which he told his groggy daughter to get up and get ready for school, that he loved her, and that he would see her later that evening. “She just said, ‘Alright daddy, I’m getting up. I love you, too.’ And that was it.”

Once Bo departed, Tabitha was left to get ready for school as usual, but she wasn’t home alone. Also at the house that morning was Tabitha’s older sister, Jamie, and her two young children, who at the time were temporarily residing in the small two-bedroom house. Still asleep with her kids when Tabitha left for school, Jamie said she never spoke to her sister that morning.

At or about 7:50 a.m., the young teen walked out the front door of her weathered white house wearing Mudd jeans, a light-blue shirt and Reebok sneakers, and set out on her quick journey to the bus stop. Despite the short distance, Tabitha’s path passed through a poor swath of East Nashville filled with sex offenders, ex-cons and odd, troubled souls, whose names would later end up in a police file downtown.

One man told detectives he saw Tabitha turning the corner from Lillian onto 14th Street, still within sight of her home. Other witnesses spotted her walking uphill along 14th toward Boscobel Street, where she caught the bus each morning at the foot of a steep slope.

A television repairman living near the top of Boscobel glanced out the open front door of his dark wood-sided house and noticed Tabitha casually strolling down the hill while reading a half-sheet of paper, which some think was the glowing, straight-A report card she received the day before. “She was walking real slow, reading some papers. It didn’t look like she was in a hurry,” says the neighbor, adding that it didn’t appear she was looking for anyone either. “Then I just closed the door, and that’s it.”

Possibly the last person to see Tabitha on her normal route was a young boy waiting for the school bus at the bottom of the hill at Boscobel and 15th Street. And although his account seemed to reveal the most specific and potentially crucial detail about her disappearance, police have questioned his credibility from the beginning.

The boy claimed Tabitha was walking down the hill as a red car pulled up beside her about halfway down the hill. The young witness said Tabitha got into the car, at which point the driver—a black male wearing a ball cap—turned around and headed back up the hill.

It’s been five years since their little girl vanished without a trace, and Bo and Debra Tuders still talk about her every day. The sadness is constant, but talking about Tabitha eases the pain.

“Out of the whole five years that kid has been gone not a day has gone by that her name is not mentioned,” Debra says, sitting on a blue overstuffed couch in her dimly lit living room on a rainy April afternoon. Picking up a small, framed photo of a young, laughing Tabitha, Debra says, “I have her picture sitting here on this table, right next to where I sit, and I talk to that picture.”