Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 15, 1993 TAG: 9308150032
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It had been nearly 15 years since Tammy Akers skipped William Ruffner Junior High School with her girlfriend, Angela Rader, and disappeared.
Not a trace of either girl has been found since.
Patrick Akers sat down in the tiny office of Lt. J.E. Dean and asked the hard-jawed detective if the case file was gathering dust in some basement.
Dean reached into the file drawer on the right side of his desk and lifted out a folder marked Akers/Rader.
"This is an active, ongoing case," Dean told Akers. "Every new detective who comes in here gets this case to review."
The youth bureau handles 600 runaway reports a year. Most of the kids come back in a day or so, go to a friend's home or are spotted by police on the streets. Tammy and Angela's disappearance is different.
"It's the only missing-person case the youth bureau's got that we don't have an answer to," Dean says.
Every year Dean and his detectives follow another lead that goes nowhere. "I've sent Tammy's dental charts all over the country," Dean says. Police don't have any charts for Angela.
Last year Dean's office traced a young woman arrested in Oxnard, Calif., who gave her name as Tammy Lynn Akers. It wasn't the Tammy Lynn for whom he was hunting, and there was no other connection.
The only real clue is more than a decade old. Two young women told a detective that they had been to a party a couple of years earlier at a Bedford County house where a man drunkenly shot a gun and sobbed that "he loved Tammy dearly and wished she were still there. . . . He wished he hadn't hurt Tammy."
Police questioned the man, who was known to party with young girls, but learned nothing. Police kept a close watch on him for a few years. At one point, he was charged with molesting a girl younger than 13, but was acquitted. Police have since lost contact with the man; efforts to find him have been unsuccessful.
Patrick Akers is almost certain that the man murdered Tammy and Angela. He doesn't know why or how, but suspects that Tammy attempted to blackmail the man.
He says the man had a thing for girls and that Tammy may have threatened to expose him if he didn't give her more money.
His sister never said anything bad about the man. But Akers says he now realizes the man was always giving money to Tammy and other girls. And, he says, he's certain Tammy gave him something in return.
"Tammy was a hellion. She didn't have any sense. There weren't any repercussions in her mind."
Last year, the Akers family became more certain that the man had something to do with Tammy's disappearance. One of Patrick's older sisters, Linda Pate, stunned family members by revealing a secret she had kept since she was a teen-ager: She told them the man had sexually molested her and forced her to have sex starting when she was 13.
Pate says she stopped going near the man when she was 15, three years before Tammy disappeared. She says she kept the relationship a secret because she was embarrassed and afraid and didn't know what to do.
Pate, now 35, says she's willing to press charges if police and prosecutors will work with her. Police say all she has to do is come in, give a statement and they'll investigate.
About the time Pate revealed her secret, Patrick Akers decided to do his own detective work - he went to the Bedford house where the parties had been held.
Akers had been to the house when he was young and used to hang around with the man, as other kids did. He says he's not certain why he didn't suspect the man until recently. "I did work for him. Maybe it was because I looked up to him."
The house has been sold a couple of times since the man owned it, but the current owners let Akers look around. He says they showed him an area in the basement that had been blocked off as if to hide a secret room. The couple now is trying to sell the house and wouldn't let a reporter see the room. Police, however, say they checked the room and don't believe anything sinister is involved.
Dean hasn't given up hope that the girls are alive, mature women somewhere. But he confesses it's more likely that they are dead. What else could anyone believe about two teen-agers who disappeared on the same day with no money and no clothes and were never heard from again for 16 years?
Despite his suspicion that he knows who killed Tammy and Angela, Patrick Akers concedes he has no proof - just suspicions.
He's tried to find the man and talk with him, but has had no luck.
Patrick's suspicions have convinced his mother, Helen Akers, that her youngest daughter was killed by a man she considered a family friend.
In a letter to the Roanoke Times & World-News that she wrote on June 28, Tammy's 31st birthday, Helen Akers pleaded for help. "How could two girls disappear off the face of the earth and not be found in 16 years. . . . There has to be someone out there who knows something that would help end this terrible waiting."
Dorothy Rader, Angela's mother, is almost 73 now. Angela was her baby, a late child who came after her other five were grown. She was like an only child, and Dorothy Rader lavished affection on her. Angela also became the focus of a bitter custody battle between Rader and her ex-husband, who is now dead.
Unlike Tammy Akers, who was a cocky street kid with a record of runaway and incorrigible charges, Angela was a follower. When she rebelled during the custody battle, she latched on to Tammy.
When the girls disappeared, Dorothy Rader says, she and Helen Akers "sort of tried to blame each other's girl for what happened."
That bitterness is gone, and Dorothy Rader spends much of her time on the wide front porch of her white frame home in Roanoke's Old Southwest section. She still waits for Angela, and refuses to accept Helen Akers' certainty that the girls are dead. "I can't stand that part," she says.
She holds on to "beautiful dreams, in which Angela is home." But the dreams don't make up for the hard reality of the calendar - July 30, Angela's birthday; Thanksgiving; Christmas; Feb. 8, the day the girls disappeared.
Dorothy Rader's tired eyes fill with tears as she confesses she may have to accept that Angela is dead.
"Maybe that would be easier than wondering why she hasn't called. Maybe my life would be happier. I could stop worrying and waiting. I'm just a dead person walking around."
Lt. Jerry Dean thumbs through the two files that hold all the information police have about Tammy, Angela and the only suspect. The files were passed on to him more than a decade ago by his predecessor, Sgt. R.W. "Tye" Garnett. Garnett was so bothered by the disappearance that after he retired in 1981, he continued trying to solve the case until he died four years later.
Dean, who is nearing retirement after 30 years in the department, prides himself on solving cases.
"I think whatever happened, happened within the area. . . . Somebody's conscience just hasn't been jogged enough," Dean says. Every lead has been checked out for 16 years. "It's all dead ends."
"If I could solve this one, I'd leave here satisfied."
This is Douglas Pardue's last story for this newspaper. Pardue, a 17-year veteran reporter and senior story editor for the Roanoke Times & World-News, is going to work at The State in Columbia, S.C., where he will create and lead a four-person investigative reporting team.
Pardue has won numerous Virginia Press Association awards. He received a Robert F. Kennedy Citation for his three-part series on slum housing in 1985. He also was part of the team that covered the 1989-1990 Pittston coal strike, for which this newspaper was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
by CNB