The letters, with their penmanship fluctuating between flowery cursive and tidy print, are leavened with the hopes and sorrows of teenage years: talk of a supposed singular love who, if all goes well, will become a spouse; the occasional friction between best pals who, despite their longtime friendship, are heading in different directions; the recollections of youthful frolicking and fun.
"I hate these kind of letters," the teen wrote in a letter to her best friend. "They're so damn sad. Especially when you have to say goodbye to the person who means the most to you."
There are multiple notes penned throughout the margins of the four-page letter, as well as drawings of tiny flowers and hearts. There are personal jokes that only the writer and receiver will understand, such as the word "upduck" — created as a personal joke between the two of them.
And there is the assurance that they will stay friends — and stay connected — wherever life takes them.
"I know we'll never loose (sic) track of each other," the letter said. "Just keep the mail com(E)ing."
Tammy Jo Alexander wrote this particular letter, one of several kept by her high school friend Laurel Nowell, on May 26, 1979 — at 11:35 p.m. to be exact, according to a margin notation. Alexander was then 15 years old.
"I'm ... leaving next year, about next September," wrote Alexander, whose gregarious spirit somehow survived a troubled and tempestuous household. "I gotta get married."
Six months later, Tammy Jo Alexander would be found dead in a rain-drenched cornfield in Caledonia, New York — 1,200 miles and a significant climate change from her home in Brooksville, Florida.
Shot in the head and back, she was left without any identification. She would remain a nameless Jane Doe for more than 35 years, her life a void, her journeys a mystery, her reasons for traveling to western New York a secret.
In January 2015, the Livingston County Sheriff's Office announced that the girl found slain in the cornfield had, after decades, been given an identity. The investigation, which before the identification had generated thousands of leads and even confessions — likely false — from serial killers, shifted into a new phase: Finding the killer of Tammy Jo Alexander.
But that phase could not progress without trying to answer another question: Just who was Tammy Jo Alexander?
In January 2014, Livingston County Sheriff's Office Investigator Brad Schneider inherited the case of Jane Doe — also known as Cali Doe because of where her corpse was found. The investigation continued to be stymied by the absence of an identification.
Without the identity, Cali Doe — her friends, her family, her likes and dislikes — was a blank slate.
"When you don't know who the victim is, how do you focus on who the killer is?" Schneider said.
Still, there were enough tips and interviews to fill file cabinets, and the evidence from the crime scene was preserved.
There was the cherry red windbreaker worn by Alexander, oversized for her and swallowing up her small frame. Black stripes ran along the arms; a label identified the manufacturer as Auto Sports Products Inc. She also wore brown corduroy pants and a multi-colored, long-sleeved plaid shirt.
Petite with brown locks that showed the signs of a recent hair dye, Cali Doe was an enigma. She remained that way for three decades, as investigators past and present kept trying to find someone who knew who she was.
The road to her identification began when Nowell, who had not seen her friend since high school, tried to locate her. She found out from Alexander's sister, Pamela Dyson, that Alexander had not been seen in her hometown of Brooksville, Florida, since 1979. Dyson had long assumed that Alexander had been reported missing.
Dyson had left the troubled home as a teenager, living with other relatives. She assumed for years that Tammy Jo had done the same, escaping the volatility and finding a new life elsewhere.
"My mom was a prescription pill addict," said Dyson, who remembers her mother several times trying to take her life by cutting her wrists. "... All we wanted to do was escape."
Dyson kept an idealistic image of Tammy Jo alive, believing her to be somewhere under a different name, her home imbued with the warmth of a happy marriage and children. When Dyson and Nowell connected, she at first did not abandon that vision, but agreed to put together information about Tammy Jo that could be distributed online via the U.S. Department of Justice's National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NAMUS.
Once the information was posted on NAMUS in 2014, a California resident, Carl Koppelman, believed he recognized her as Cali Doe. Part of a group of online citizen sleuths, Koppelman often surveyed online records of missing persons and deceased people found but unidentified. An amateur artist, he would take the publicly available photos of the unidentified dead and draw them in a way he believed to be more like their actual appearance.
Koppelman notified the police of his suspicion, and authorities, after matching a DNA sample from Dyson, determined that Cali Doe was Tammy Jo. The Livingston County Sheriff's Office made the announcement in January 2015, allowing retired Sheriff John York to play a key role at the news conference. Throughout his 24 years as sheriff, York tirelessly tried to find out just who Cali Doe was. It was he who traveled to prisons in Florida and Texas to interview serial killers who'd claimed they'd killed Cali Doe, but who were also known to confess to murders they did not commit.
All the case required was a single break, York said.
"All we ever needed was somebody to report her missing," York said. "That’s all we ever needed."
The photos of a cherubic Tammy Jo Alexander show her youthfulness and innocence, but do not reveal her longing for, as Dyson said, an "escape." The photos do not capture her contradictions: adolescent yet worldly; exuberant yet enigmatic; an open book to close friends, yet one whose life would end as an impenetrable mystery.
Since January 2015, Schneider and other investigators, including some from the FBI, have tried to reconstruct her life. The exercise has been frustrating. Alexander's parents are deceased, as are some other relatives who may have known the teenager.
"That's the unfortunate reality of this situation," Schneider said. "It is 36 years later and people have passed."
Nowell and Dyson "have been a tremendous help," Schneider said. "Pam's the only person I can rely on at this point who knew who Tammy Jo was."
Investigators have been able to collect some puzzle pieces about Alexander's last year, but they do not slip into a neat picture of her life. She and Nowell hitchhiked across the country when Alexander was 15. Once they contacted their parents from California, Nowell's distraught parents paid for them to fly back from the west. Alexander's parents did not seem to care, Nowell said.
The letters Alexander wrote to Nowell detail some of the journey, including some names and recollections of several people they rode with. Investigators have chased those threads, but found yet no link to Alexander's trip to New York, other than her apparent unabashed willingness to travel with strangers.
In the year before her death, Alexander spent some time at a "prison ministry" in northern Georgia, where a family provided a temporary home for parolees transitioning back to society. The owners of the ministry are now deceased, and records unavailable. How Alexander ended up there is still unknown, though there is no suspicion she was there because of a crime. Instead, it's possible she went there in some youthful volunteer capacity.
A boyfriend of Alexander's — the man the teenager one day imagined she would marry — has given investigators a postcard he received from Alexander while she was at the ministry, though it provides no clarity about why she was there. The former boyfriend also remembers receiving a call from Alexander when she was once in St. Petersburg, about 70 miles from her home.
He said he met her there for lunch, then dropped her off at a building where she may have been staying, though she provided no explanation why. He has been unable to recall details about the location.
Investigators have taken DNA samples from three men, including the former boyfriend, to compare it with male DNA found on Alexander's clothes. However, the DNA on the clothing could also be that of investigators or technicians who handled the evidence in 1979, before police commonly practiced precautions to secure genetic proof. Schneider said he is waiting for the FBI to complete the DNA matches.
While the investigation abounds with dead ends and unanswered questions, Schneider and other of his law enforcement colleagues, while acknowledging the frustration, do not see the work as fruitless. For more than 35 years Cali Doe was a mystery, then, with a series of events from one coast to another, she was given an identity.
"There's always hope for anything, but, realistically, after 36 years it's hard to know," York said. "But I always have hope. I never, ever give up hope."
For now, investigators have the recollections of Nowell, Dyson and others, as well as the few tidbits — Alexander's letters and postcards — to offer some insight into Tammy Jo Alexander. And, from there, they learned enough to recognize that Alexander was quite capable of disappearing, and escaping.
"I'm very glad we went to Los Angeles," she wrote to Nowell, fondly recalling the hitchhiking expedition.
"I think we should do it again."
