In October 2003, six months after Tabitha Tuders vanished without a trace from her East Nashville neighborhood, her older sister, Jamie, shared her grief in a heart-wrenching note on an Internet message board.
"I know that we may have fought sometimes, but I love you very much," she wrote in an MSN board dedicated to her sister's disappearance. "One day I will be able to give you a big hug and tell you that I love you. (I really do!) The words have not come out of my mouth a lot, but I really do."
Now, though, as the two-year anniversary of the young girl's disappearance nears, Metro police detectives are turning their attention to the older sister, whose note seemed so real and heartfelt. By her own admission, Jamie says that she's failed three out of four lie detector and stress tests, but she blames it on the pressure detectives have exerted during their interrogations.
"One detective told me, 'If you don't pass this lie detector test, we're going to come over tomorrow and get your kids and everyone will see on the news what you did,' " Jamie recalls. "The police ask me why I don't stop the pain for my parents, and I explain to them I'm hurting as much as they are."
Faye Okert, the lead detective on the case, did not return repeated calls for comment, although police sources tell the Scene "there are some unresolved issues with Jamie." Her parents, however, solidly stand by their daughter. They view the detectives' interest in her as yet another shortcoming of a police department that failed to issue an Amber Alert the day she was first reported missing from her East Nashville home, April 29, 2003. Since then, the police have been slow to track obvious leads and suspects and don't keep in touch with Tabitha's grieving parents. In the meantime, as the Tuders struggle each day over the mysterious loss of their youngest daughter, they're faced with the additional burden of trying to console their oldest.
"The last time I was talking to Jamie, she was crying and crying," says Debra Tuders, who has helped Jamie raise her two children. "She said, 'Deep down in your heart, you think I had something to do with it,' and I said, 'No, not at all.' "
On April 29, 2003, Debra woke up at 6 a.m. and headed to her job at Tom Joy Elementary School, where she works as a cook in the cafeteria. Tabitha was asleep soundly at the foot of her parent's bed. Her father Bo, who works as a short haul truck driver, woke Tabitha before he headed to his job. Tabitha probably left at close to 8 a.m. to walk to her Boscobel Street bus stop, just a short distance from her Lillian Street home. She never made it there, although eyewitnesses say they saw her that morning headed down 14th Street toward Boscobel. Another eyewitness, a young kid whose credibility the police doubt, says that he saw Tabitha get in a red car, on Boscobel, up a steep hill from her stop.
If the child's account is accurate, however, it would be a significant clue. Tabitha's parents and friends say she would not have gotten in a stranger's car, nor is it likely that someone would have tried to abduct her on a weekday morning in the middle of a well-traveled road. That would leave only one scenario: Tabitha was picked up by someone she thought she could trust. Of course, that could apply to many people, from a substitute teacher to a friend of a friend to one of the many criminal residents in her neighborhood.
Jamie Tuders understands that the police have questioned her, in part, because she was the only other person in the house when Tabitha left for school. She says, though, that she wasn't awake and that she didn't talk to Tabitha that morning, although she was sleeping in Tabitha's room.
Jamie's relationship with Tabitha has drawn suspicion from the police. Although Jamie was nearly eight years older, the two did squabble. Tabitha's friends say that she didn't always enjoy babysitting Jamie's two young boys. Initially, Jamie says, she might have failed questions about how she and her sister got along, in part because she misunderstood what was being asked. Still, Debra says that the police are wrong if they think her daughters had a bitter relationship. "All siblings have arguments, but they loved each other," Debra says of Jamie, Tabitha and their brother Kevin.
Jamie says the police gave her a lie detector test just three days after Tabitha disappeared. She failed. It didn't help, she says, that a detective threatened to take her children. (A police source says this could not have happened.) Not long after that, she passed a second test. Recently, though, the police have asked Jamie to take two more lie detector tests, and she admits failing both. (At least one of those was a voice-stress test.)
Some experts say that lie detector tests are up to 90 percent accurate, although they are not admissible in court. Some police detectives view the tests as valuable tools; others don't put much stock in them unless a possible suspect refuses to take one. That wasn't the case here, however. People close to the investigation say that Jamie has cooperated fully with the police and has not once refused to take a lie detector test. Nor was she unwilling to talk to the Scene. She hasn't hired a lawyer, and there isn't anything publicly known besides the tests that casts doubt on her innocence.
Jamie says that the police don't seem to have a consistent theory about what happened to her sister. "They've told me all kinds of things. They think I've covered for someone, that I've talked to her since she's been missing. They think I knew about a boyfriend she had and that I called someone to pick her up from the bus stop."
Jamie also says that the police won't tell her what questions she failed. It would make a difference whether her inconsistency came over the issue of Tabitha's boyfriend or whether it came over the question of whether she herself had anything to do with her sister's disappearance.
"They told me you don't fail questions. You fail the test," Jamie says.
The police department's attention on Jamie has further alienated the Tuders family, who think that detectives have been slow to track more plausible leads. Since Tabitha's disappearance, dark secrets of her East Nashville neighborhood have emerged, revealing a cast of shady characters who could have done harm to a young girl. A few houses down from Tuders lived a man named Timothy Oldham, who was arrested after his own son allegedly caught him raping a minor. Oldham's wife, Kim, was charged with playing a role in the crime, allegedly pressuring the young girl to remove her clothing. The police have reportedly talked to the couple, although by many accounts, they never looked at them seriously.
Millard Earl Smith is a 53-year-old convicted rapist who landed in jail two months after Tabitha's disappearance for yet another sexual assault—raping and kidnapping a 17-year-old girl. In May 2003, he allegedly lured a young boy onto his motorcycle and took him to an abandoned trailer off Fesslers Lane before the boy escaped. The boy lived just two blocks from Tabitha's bus stop. And according to one source, Smith tried to entice girls onto his motorcycle at Shelby Park, less than a mile from Tabitha's East Nashville home. Yet, months after Smith's arrest, police detectives still hadn't gotten around to showing his mug shot to the Tuders to see if the shady sex offender looked familiar.
The list of criminal elements in her neighborhood goes on and on.
Since Tabitha disappeared, Bo and Debra Tuders have cooperated with police, taken lie detector tests and put aside their own doubts about how their daughter's case was being handled. But to them, the attention on Jamie comes at the expense of solving what happened to Tabitha. Already, they are frustrated that many of the detectives they had come to trust, particularly E.J. Bernard, have resigned. They're also baffled by the department's lack of communication. The police can't seem to give them so much as a weekly briefing call and, recently, when Bo phoned the department to ask about a dead body discovered in Goodlettsville, it took police nearly a week to call back. As it turns out, the body belonged to a man from Springfield.
The Tuders also have lost faith in Chief Ronal Serpas, who said within weeks of taking the job in Nashville that Tabitha's case would be his department's "first priority." They say they haven't heard anything from the chief since April 2004, when he gave a moving speech at a memorial marking the anniversary of her disappearance.
"The chief hasn't kept his word," Bo says. "He said he was going to make Tabitha's case a high priority, but we're still at the same place that we were back then."
The Tuders are quick to acknowledge the hard work of detectives, especially Faye Okert, who has bravely battled cancer throughout the investigation. But the police department's focus on their oldest daughter has deepened the family's grief and turned them against the very people they need to solve the case.
"We're cooperating with them, but they're not cooperating with us," Bo says. "They want to be our friends, but then they stab us in the back."
Meanwhile, Jamie endures her own nightmare as she confronts both the loss of her sister and the continued scrutiny of the police. "I just want everyone to know that we loved my sister dearly. No one would ever do anything to her," she says. "I'd give anything to have her back. I'd give my arms, my legs, anything."
