u/Kodeforbunnywudwuds

You really need to read this article, which goes into minute-by-minute detail of this strange case that perplexed a nation and has still left many people unsatisfied with the answer (including me). It was talked about here on UM when it became (in)famous, but it doesn't look like anyone has mentioned the second investigation from 2021, which came to the same conclusion as the first: died from a fall.

On November 4th Tamla was found dead in a friend's backyard, having sustained a broken neck, compound fracture to a wrist, several hemorrhages in the brain, cuts to face, hands, lower legs, and a lacerated heart that caused internal bleeding. (I wonder what didn't kill her.)

It's been assumed by police since the start that she fell off the 14 foot balcony onto the grassy lawn-just tipped over the side in a drunken stupor...yeah, that would explain the broken neck, but how does one get a lacerated heart?

Naturally, the security cameras in the backyard weren't working that night, so we'll never know.

The friend was hosting a party of twelve people, drinking all night long, so most of them slept over, but nobody heard nothin'. There is definitely some funky monkey in the timeline:

1:15 AM Tamla wanted to leave, but instead of calling a taxi or her husband to pick up the intoxicated woman, they insisted she spend the night, and was left alone on the ground floor.

Tamla was a smoker who frequently went to the second floor balcony for a drag, the door sensor revealing it was opened at 1:49 AM, closed at 1:50 AM, reopened at 1:57 AM and would remain open from then on (and no one noticed).

At 7:30 AM Tamla's body is discovered, but it didn't occur to anyone to call the police until 8:59 AM. (Not like she was going anywhere, and there was a poptart burning.)

Another weird thing is that Tamla had unmetabolized Xanax in her, meaning it was taken just before she died. One of the partygoers had such a medication for an anxiety disorder, but conveniently left at 1:47 AM, saying she was too anxious (isn't that what the meds are for?), and denies giving Tamla a pill...so where did it come from?

And a lot of other weird things happened in and around this case-perhaps too much weirdness. In 2023, Michelle Graves (Tamla's best friend) wrote a tell-all book, I guess it could be called, "Search for the Truth: Black Woman Failed by the State of Georgia." Her theories have led to a falling out with the other partygoers, with accusations of harassment and cease and desist orders flying back and forth. I haven't read the book so I don't know if it's conspiratorial rabbitholing.

It's all just too...weird.

After reading the post on the Brubach murder and my recent one on the missing woman from South Carolina, I was reminded of this cold case I read five years ago, from Bowmore, North Carolina. It's one of those cases that just sticks to you:

Bowmore is a tiny community that, at the time, had a little over a hundred people, mostly Black and Native American. On January 7th, like every school day, five-year-old Brittany, of the Lumbee Nation, was dressed for school and walked to the end of her home's long dirt driveway by her mother, Connie, who had an urgent need to use the bathroom and stepped back inside for a couple minutes.

When she popped her head back outside to check on Brittany, she noticed she had vanished. Hoping against hope that the bus had come and she was safely at school, she called West Hoke Elementary only to learn she had never gotten off the bus.

Police were instantly alerted and a search began, Connie's neighbors revealing that the second she had stepped back into the house, a pickup truck of an indescribable color had zoomed down the road, the driver dragged Brittany inside, and zoomed off.

Two hours and two miles later Brittany's clothes were found on a dirt road.

On January 8th, at 2 p.m....well, a mile away from where her clothes had been found, Brittany's sexually violated body had been drowned in a drainage ditch and left to rot. Though the police have a nearly complete genetic profile of the killer, no matches have been found. Zilch. The abduction happened so fast the neighbors never got a good look at the driver or the license plates.

In October 1990 the body of Lisa Marie McBride, 27, was found in the Delaware Water Gap national recreation area four months after she mysteriously disappeared from her Sussex County, New Jersey home. Though it was clearly a homicide, the case went cold quickly, with genetic samples being preserved in hopes of one day finding her killer.

The road to justice was a very winding one: in 2012, 36-year-old Gayle McCaffrey of South Carolina mysteriously disappeared from her home as well, leaving two young children. Her husband, Bob McCaffrey, would be convicted of obstruction of justice after forging a letter, claiming to be from Gayle, saying she had run off with another man.

Gayle has since been declared dead, and everyone including his granny knows He Did It, but there was not enough evidence to convict him of Gayle's presumed murder.

Though released from prison in 2023, it wasn't until 2026 that McBride's DNA samples were rechecked and matched with McCaffrey's, who, weird coincidence, had also been living in Sussex County in the 1990's. He's been arrested and extradited to New Jersey. Gayle's family also hopes he'll come clean on what happened to his wife.