Since Tabitha Tuders vanished from her East Nashville home one year ago this week, Metro police have bungled nearly all aspects of her case and, worse, show no signs that they learned any lessons from the tragic ordeal.
It's difficult to identify any aspect of the investigation that the department has handled well. Detectives have been slow to interview suspects, track leads, keep the family informed and interview people who best knew the missing girl, whose 14th birthday came and went in February. There's no clear sense among the family and media about who's in charge of the case. It's almost as if the department wishes that people would stop caring about the fate of the young teen who woke up on a Tuesday morning, walked toward her bus stop and vanished.
Initially, police lost critical time and even available resources in the case when they persisted in treating Tabitha as a possible runaway, despite the absence of any evidence to support the idea. When the media finally kicked up enough dust to render such a working theory outrageous on its face, the police began to focus more on the less optimistic, more plausible scenario.
But throughout it all, it's frankly been disturbing just how many rocks the police failed to turn over, either in a timely fashion or at all. For example, within days after Tabitha disappeared, people close to her family told police about a suspicious neighborhood character who they thought might have been involved. This man talked badly about her to other children in the neighborhood. He told the Scene that she wasn't as innocent as people believed, as he crudely cupped his hands over his chest to indicate her developing body. He befriended other neighborhood children, including some of Tabitha's neighbors. And, finally, he claimed to have seen her the morning she disappeared, placing himself at the scene. His family was the subject of a Department of Children's Services investigation. There's even more damning information about this guy. But the police didn't get around to seriously questioning him until several months after she disappeared.
Then there's the case of Millard Earl Smith, a 52-year-old convicted rapist, who landed in jail again last June in a separate case after he was arrested for raping and kidnapping a 17-year-old girl. A month before that, he allegedly lured a young boy onto his motorcycle, took him to an abandoned trailer and told him, "I want you to come in here so I can masturbate you." Fortunately, the boy escaped. Before the kidnapping, he'd apparently stalked the boy and his mother for weeks. Incidentally, Smith kidnapped the teenager just two blocks from Tabitha's bus stop. And according to one source, he also tried to entice girls onto his motorcycle at Shelby Park, less than a mile from Tabitha's East Nashville home. He also lived just a few miles away. It would seem that Metro detectives would want to know everything they possibly could about this guy, right? Wrong.
There's still more. A few weeks after Tabitha disappeared, a prostitute trying to clean up her life confessed to a volunteer in the case that she and a client of hers from Kingsport, Tenn., drove through East Nashville, including Lillian Street, where Tabitha lived. She says the john had a computer in his car and told her he was looking to pick up a young girl named Tabby. The prostitute says this occurred around the time Tabitha went missing. The volunteer gave this tip to the police immediately and even told them where the prostitute was staying, but to the best of his knowledge, no detective has ever contacted her.
Shortly before she disappeared, Tabitha spent the evening with one of her best friends. The friend's father later took Tabitha home and was the last adult, not including her parents, to have seen her. When did the police interview him to check on Tabitha's state of mind or any other possible clues? Months later.
Tabitha's father, Bo, is a truck driver and her mother, Debra, works in a school cafeteria. A few months before their daughter disappeared, they impressed upon her the importance of an education, as both of them were high school dropouts. At the time an average student, Tabitha took their lecture to heart. Shortly before she disappeared, she brought home a report card with all A's. If the city were grading the police officers who worked on her case, none of them would receive anything close to Tabitha's marks.
We don't blame the police for not finding Tabitha. Her case is particularly tricky, as its left investigators with no credible eyewitnesses or forensic evidence. But Tabitha's family and friends and all of Nashville should have the comfort of knowing that their police department did everything it could to find the young teen.
Unfortunately, there is no such comfort.
