Teenage Runaway Descends Into Seattle's Seedy Underbelly

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The crime scene where Tammy Vincent's remains were discovered.

Sick and tired of living with her parents, 16-year-old Tammy Vincent ran away from home in Washington state in the fall of 1978.  Sadly, the pretty teenager never returned but found work the following year at a Seattle dive called "Tease and Rip", a venue that was part peep show, part strip joint.

In 1979, police raided the club where Tammy worked, and she was offered a deal to turn state's evidence against the club owners, who owned multiple sex industry properties.  Police say some of these owners were members of an outlaw biker gang called the "Gypsy Jokers," as well as a shadowy figures only described as businessmen.

Tammy was moved to a safe house in August of that year for her protection, but being a minor, she was transferred to a group home five hours outside of Seattle.  She should have been safe there, but a lawyer working for the club owners tracked her down and convinced the group home to release Tammy to his care.  Tragically, Tammy soon discovered that she was about to be handed over to the club owners that she was asked to testify against. 

A short time later, authorities were called to a Marin County, Calif. beach, Blackie's Pasture, in the ritzy town of Tiburon. There, they found a girl's body that had been stabbed 44 times with an ice pick; the attack was so vicious that the pick had broken off in the victim's body.  Investigators surmised that the girl was still alive when she was doused with accelerant before being set on fire.  Cops believed that the Jane Doe had been shot in the back of the head as she tried to crawl away.  For almost 30 years, authorities would be stumped as to the identities of this teenage girl and the people responsible for her gruesome death.

A Murder Mystery Begins To Unravel

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The Vincent family

In 2001, Marin County Sheriff's detective Steve Nash inherited the then-called, San Francisco Jane Doe case.  Over the course of the next year, Detective Nash made inroads into identifying the teenage girl.  He took a photo of half of the Jane Doe's face that was not burned and asked the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to help create a fuller image of what the girl may have looked like.  The photo was placed on NCMEC's website, but no one recognized her.

Nash's next attempt was having the girl's body exhumed to collect a femur bone so that the California Department of Justice DNA crime lab can extract a sample.  The lab was only able to recover 9 of the necessary 13 markers needed for a complete DNA profile. 

The next year, authorities working on the Green River Killer murder case begin a search on all missing females who disappeared during the Green River killing spree.  The search takes them to Tammy Vincent's family who agreed to give detectives DNA samples The samples were then sent to Texas to be entered into the Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS).  CODIS allows DNA samples taken from families to be cross-referenced with DNA from unidentified human remains.  Unfortunately, there are no matches, but that would all change years later when AMW got involved.

In December of 2006, AMW began working with Detective Nash on his San Francisco Jane Doe case.  While filming the story at the California Department of Justice's crime lab, AMW producer Margaret Parker, asked the question that would blow the case wide open.  She asked the DOJ lab technicians if having evidence, including clothing and underwear, just filmed for the AMW segment would help to complete the DNA profile.  They affirmed that it would and Det. Nash gathered the evidence but also remembered that included in the 1979 evidence list was a sexual assault kit.  Inside the kit were swabs, nail clippings, and pubic hairs, a few of which had the follicles still intact.  

These hairs would complete the vital DNA.   While there were no DNA matches in the Calif. DOJ database, there would be a hit in the CODIS system.  The new DNA profile matched the DNA sample given by the Vincent family in 2003 who had a missing teenage girl named Tammy. 

Finally, Detective Nash had identified his Jane Doe.

The Hunt For Tammy's Killers

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A forensic sketch of the San Francisco Jane Doe, later discovered to be Tammy Vincent.

Now that Detective Nash had Tammy's identity, he could retrace her steps all those years ago.  Currently, there's a case pending against her former employers, the club owners, but authorities are asking for the public's assistance in identifying Tammy's killers, particularly a shadowy figure known only as "The Man In The White Suit."  Police say he's the one who purchased an ice pick, acetate, and black paint at a Woolworth's store on Market Street in San Francisco in the days just before Tammy's remains were found. 

Police believe "The Man In The White Suit" probably had at least two other men helping him to torture and kill Tammy in the days prior to her murder.  Cops say that the men transported Tammy in a blue van, and they were likely armed with handguns.

If you have any information about "The Man In The White Suit", Tammy Vincent, or her possible killers, please call our hotline at 1-800-CRIME-TV. 

-By Robert Brown, AMW Staff