One missing, One murdered
Mysteries surrounding the fate of two former roommates who went missing within days of each other decades ago continue to confound investigators
It was a terrifying era for young women in Santa Fe.
For much of the 1980s, local headlines were consumed by the slayings and disappearances of a dozen or so single women, most in their 20s, some in their teens. A few of the killings involved rape. In several cases, authorities suspected involvement in the illegal drug trade.
It was a frustrating time for local police, as well. Some of the killings went unsolved for decades. And some of those cases still haven’t been cracked — mysteries that with each passing year become more shrouded in suspicion and frustration.
That’s particularly true in the sad story of Teal Pittington, who disappeared in the summer of 1984. Her body was found in a culvert south of Santa Fe months later. She’d been raped and strangled.
Police also never solved the disappearance of a woman who went by the name Tamara Britton — though officers later discovered it was a false identity. She disappeared just nine days before Pittington went missing and was never seen again.
What binds these two stories is that Pittington and the woman known as Britton had been roommates. And both had lived — at separate times in the summer of 1984 — with the same young man; he had been living with Pittington when the women disappeared.
Santa Fe police Detective Tony Trujillo, 55, has worked the Pittington case since 1988, when he became a violentcrimes detective. He has possible suspects he’d like to question. But the odds of solving Pittington’s death aren’t good, he said in a recent interview. “There just isn’t any evidence.”
Asked whether Britton may have been involved in Pittington’s death, Trujillo said he didn’t know. The missing woman has never been named as a suspect. Nor has Marion Owen Jent, the man who dated both women, though police did question Jent about their disappearances when he was arrested on suspicion of embezzlement a couple of weeks after they vanished.
Like the stories of the other Santa Fe women who fell prey to killers in the ’80s, Pittington’s was one of tragic loss and horrifying violence. Britton’s story … well, after 33 years, no one really knows. Pittington’s car was found in a parking lot about a block from the house she had been renting in Santa Fe.
Britton’s car was discovered near Santa Rosa several days after she was last seen here.
Deepening the mystery of Britton’s disappearance, police learned she was not who she had said she was — her identity was taken from an infant who had died in Wisconsin nearly 25 years earlier.
The cases are still considered active, Trujillo said. There is no statute of limitations for first-degree murder or first-degree criminal sexual penetration, he added. And, like other cold-case crimes, from time to time, he’ll work on the Pittington case — despite the fact that there is very little physical evidence.
Trujillo named two men he suspects could have been involved. One is currently doing time for the murders of two other Santa Fe women in the mid-1980s.
A woman called Tammy
It was Monday morning, Aug. 6, 1984, when Britton — the “office gal” at West Coast Sound, a stereo shop on Cerrillos Road — last came into work. Known to co-workers as Tammy, she picked up the store’s bank deposit and delivered it to the bank. That was part of her job. And for three or four months, she’d been doing her job well, her boss, Joseph Schlick, recalled in a recent interview.
The money — thousands of dollars, according to news reports at the time — made it to the bank just fine that morning. But Britton never returned to work. Four days later, her car, a 1977 Plymouth station wagon, was found at a truck stop off Interstate 40 near Santa Rosa. The car was locked. Inside was a bank bag containing the car keys and deposit slips.
There also was a handwritten note: “Return to West Coast Sound, 3387 Cerrillos Road.” There was no evidence of foul play. Police found no sign of any struggle or forced entry at her home on West Alameda Street. What they did find were diapers, both in her home and in her station wagon.
Detectives would go down an investigative detour, looking into the possibility that Britton might have been pregnant and that her disappearance was linked to the body of a baby recently discovered in a south-side Santa Fe dumpster. But no one who knew Britton said she appeared to have been pregnant at any time she was living in the city.
Police learned very little about the missing woman.
She’d been in Santa Fe only about eight months. She liked to exercise at the old Tom Young’s Health Spa on St. Michael’s Drive. Before working at the stereo shop, she had been a waitress at what was then Carrows restaurant on St. Michael’s. A former co-worker there said Britton had mentioned a sister in Texas.
She had spent money on clothes the weekend before her disappearance. Her bank account was overdrawn, and she never picked up her final paycheck from West Coast Sound.
Police never found any medical records for Britton, and there were no photographs of her. Some people who knew her just remembered her as short and blond. As one cop told a reporter in the late ’80s, “Even if she were found today, we couldn’t identify her.”
Making the investigation even more difficult: Virtually all the information on her employment applications and other documents turned out to be false.
A few days after her disappearance, police called a man in Foxboro, Wis., who Britton had listed as her father on a car loan application. The man was upset, but for unexpected reasons.
He told the detective that his daughter, Tamara Britton, had died as an infant. Records show the baby was born July 27, 1959, and died Oct. 20, 1959, in Douglas County, Wis.
The Santa Fe woman was using the child’s name and birthdate and, as it turned out, had obtained a Social Security card with that information.
“That was one of the weirdest deals,” Schlick said in a recent telephone interview. “I remember it blowing my mind.” He described the former employee he knew as Tammy as a cheerful and intelligent young woman, but said he didn’t really know her outside of work.
About a year after her disappearance, police said they learned a woman using the name Tamara Britton had applied for a Social Security card in Minnesota. A police spokesman in 1985 said the department didn’t have the funds to investigate that lead.
Teal Pittington
Just a little over a week after Britton disappeared, Pittington, 18, a beauty college student and restaurant employee who was Britton’s former roommate, went missing. She was last seen alive Aug. 15, 1984. That same day, she had called a female friend and arranged to meet with her around 11:30 at night. But Pittington never showed.
Her 1977 Honda CVCC was found in the College Plaza parking lot a few days later near what is now the Hobby Lobby store. That’s just a couple of blocks from the house on Declovina Street that she had been renting with Jent, who turned 20 shortly after Pittington disappeared.
Pittington’s body was found about nine months later, May 11, 1985, in a culvert just south of the New Mexico Girls Ranch on U.S. 285 near Lamy. Police said she had been strangled with her own bra. Pittington’s mother, Julie Cobo, told
in 1984 that her daughter had dated Jent “on and off ” for about a year. They had moved into the house at 1224 Declovina St. for only about a month before Pittington disappeared, her mother said.
Several days after the woman went missing, police said, Jent had been seen driving her car.
Jent also had dated Britton, police said, and had lived with her briefly that summer in a house on Calle Cuesta, about a mile and a half from the Declovina Street residence.
In late August 1984, just a couple of weeks after Pittington disappeared, Jent was arrested by Santa Fe police on embezzlement charges.
Police gave Jent a polygraph test in which he was asked about the two women. But Trujillo said the polygraph did not reveal any deception.
“He didn’t have any useful information about Teal,” Trujillo said.
Jent told police that Britton had said she was going to New Orleans, though investigators never were able to verify that.
Jent left Santa Fe years ago, but it’s not clear when. He has racked up a lengthy criminal history since then, with arrests in several states. But there are no violent crimes on his record.
Jent served a little more than six months in a minimum security facility in Florida in 1998 for drug possession, trafficking stolen property and other criminal counts.
Most recently, he served time in Idaho for a burglary charge. Idaho prison records indicate that Jent, now 53, was released on probation in August. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful. His parole officer, Carmen Dyas, last week said she wasn’t able to give any contact information for him.
A detective’s suspicions
Trujillo told The New Mexican that he’d like to question Jent again about Pittington.
But the detective said he has come to believe that another suspect might be responsible for her death — or at least might know who was involved.
“I suspect David Morton,” he said, referring to a man who in 2004 pleaded guilty to the murders of two other women in Santa Fe — Janet Benoit, 22, a Colorado woman who was raped and stabbed to death in a Cerrillos Road motel in 1983, and Teri Mulvaney, 25, a next-door neighbor of Morton’s who was raped and strangled in her apartment.
Morton subsequently moved to Texas, where he was convicted of raping and killing a young woman in Amarillo, who, like Mulvaney, lived next door. Morton had been in prison in Texas since the early 1990s when Trujillo interviewed him there in 2003 about the Santa Fe killings.
“I asked him about Teal Pittington,” Trujillo said. “He stared off to the side, and he said, ‘I remember her. She was a cute little thing.’ ”
Trujillo said this made the hairs on his neck stand up.
Morton told the detective he had a friend back in those days who might know something about Pittington’s killing.
Morton also told Trujillo that he had a friend who used to date Pittington. He and his friend used to go to her workplace — a pizza joint on Cerrillos Road — to buy marijuana, Morton said.
Trujillo said Morton told him that he and this friend used to spend Friday nights in the College Plaza Shopping Center parking lot — the lot where Pittington’s Honda was found — looking at cruisers who gathered there.
Morton’s friend, whom The New Mexican is not naming because he has not been identified as a suspect in the case, has a criminal record in New Mexico, including convictions for breaking and entering, burglary and drunken driving. According to a police report published in The New Mexican, he also was arrested in 1988 on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and false imprisonment.
But there is no record of the man being tried or convicted on those charges.
The man apparently left New Mexico in the early ’90s, Trujillo said. He’s done some time in prison in Texas, but not for violent felonies. He has never been questioned about Pittington’s death.
Despite Morton’s statement that his friend might know something about Pittington, the detective says there is no hard evidence tying him to her slaying.
Even if there were enough evidence to demand DNA tests from either Jent, Morton or Morton’s friend, there would be no evidence with which to compare the samples. Somehow the bra found around Pittington’s neck has gone missing, Trujillo said.
“It hasn’t been destroyed, but it’s missing,” he said. “I’m hoping it shows up in some box.”
State police processed the scene where Pittington’s body was found. A spokesman with the agency said last week that it is still looking into what became of the bra.
And as far as Britton, aside from the fact that she and Pittington had been roommates, had lived with the same man and had disappeared within days of each other, there is no physical evidence linking Britton’s disappearance with Pittington’s death.
The unknown true identity of Britton also poses challenges for investigators. It’s possible that the mystery woman might have been in a witness protection program, Trujillo said.
“She might have been on the lam for another murder,” he added. “We don’t know.”
Contact Steve Terrell at 505-986-3037 or sterrell@sfnewmexican.com. Read his blog at www.santafenewmexican. com/roundhouse_roundup.