Tessie Temores (10 of Diamonds, Mississippi)

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Restrictions apply. Our card this week is Tessie Tamoris, the 10 of diamonds from Mississippi.
When 37-year-old Tessie went more than a month without contacting any of her six children, her mom had this sinking feeling that something was wrong. Her loved ones never thought over five years would go by without hearing from her.

But here they are, still in the same stagnant spot,

still wondering what really happened,

and still waiting for Tessie to come home.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. It was winter 2020 in Moss Point, Mississippi, and Carolyn Pardon was at her wit's end.

Some of her daughter's children had been staying with her kind of on and off, but she usually wasn't their sole caregiver. Their mom Tessie would normally swing by every so often to see them.
I mean, at the very least, she would call to catch up. But days were turning into weeks without so much as a phone call.
When she would go off for a week or two, she always came back. She was never gone over a week or two, maybe not even two weeks.
I waited, you know, but I said, well, she's going to come back, you know, because she always came back to her kids. That was Carolyn you just heard.
And by the time a little more than a month had passed without hearing from her daughter, Carolyn knew that she had to call the police. And now you'll hear from Lieutenant Shane Bozeman with the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, who was involved in the case from the very beginning.
January the 29th, 2020, is when she actually filed the missing persons report and said that nobody had spoke to her, which it wasn't unusual for Tessie to disappear for a few weeks at a time or something like that with the circles that she ran in. She was known to have a drug problem and to live that type of lifestyle.
So she ran with a pretty rough crowd. You know, it wasn't unusual for her to kind of bounce around from hotels or couch to couch, things like that.
But whenever it had gone this long and she hadn't even spoken to her kids, that's whenever mom came concerned. Because even whenever Tessie was just running the roads and stuff, she usually always had contact with her mother.
She'd call her, just say hello, check in on her. And also with her kids, she always stayed in contact with her kids.
The last time Carolyn saw Tessie wasn't super memorable. but thankfully she could somehow pinpoint the exact date,

December 27th, 2019.

There hadn't been any drama, no blow-up fight,

nothing even out of the ordinary.

She had been at Carolyn's just visiting,

I guess, after Christmas, and then she left.

And that was the last time we can completely say

that she was actually seen.

She said that she left with a couple of friends of Tessie's. She left in a pickup truck, and she wasn't quite sure where she was headed to, you know, and didn't seem like nothing was wrong.
Told her bye, see you later. Carolyn wasn't familiar with the friends, and it sounds like she didn't get a close enough look to be able to describe them either.
We've had people that they've said that it was this person, and then we go interview them, and no, I've heard it was this person, this, that, and the other. And that's why this case has been so difficult, because there's just been so many names brought up and so many different stories and things like that.
So we've never had anything that I would say was an actual legitimate lead that would lead us in the right direction. The thing that you have to understand about Tessie was the circles that she hung out with.
It was honestly just kind of whoever could get her some drugs. I've dealt with Tessie since I was on patrol, since I started here in 2010.
So I was very familiar with her. I've known her to use pills, to smoke marijuana, to use methamphetamine.
And from all accounts we have, she would use just about anything she could get her hands on. When she was first reported missing, she actually had an at-large indictment for possession of a controlled substance as a habitual offender.
So a lot of people thought that she just ran off because she was looking to serve quite a few years in prison on this charge. So that was the first assumption by a lot of people, that she just took off to avoid going to prison.
And, you know, that was one of the thoughts even with us, that we thought that could be the case. But as we dug further and further into it, that doesn't seem to be what happened.
So there were several things working against the investigation right out of the gate. The delayed reporting, the difficulty determining who she was with and the places she was going around the time she went missing, and the assumption that she might have skipped town to avoid going to prison.
It took a few more months for the general consensus to shift from her possibly being on the run to her case likely involving foul play. The biggest red flag was that she hadn't reached out to any of her kids by this point, and there had been no activity on any of her social media.
Normally, in a missing persons case, one of the first things police look to is cell phone and bank records to try and pin down a person's last movements. But in Tessie's case, that wasn't even an option.
If I remember correctly, we didn't get anything back from the phone company because most of the time they use these disposable phones and change phone numbers and stuff like that. You know, if you and I were to disappear or something like that,

we have a routine lifestyle that we go by,

and it's very easy to follow and track that pattern.

But when you're dealing with somebody that uses burner phones

and may change phone numbers three or four times a month

because, hey, I can't pay the bill on this one this month,

well, my friend over here is going to give me their phone. So we weren't able to track anything like that.
Through your normal investigative means, we weren't able to get anything to show who she talked to or anything like that. Bank records, nothing like that, because there again, they don't use your normal, I have an ATM, I'm going to pay for everything, you know? So they just, I guess an easy way to say it is it's kind of off the grid without being off the grid.
It made it very difficult for us. She didn't really have a steady job to check with.
She didn't really have any close friends that she was always with. She was just basically a person that jumped from couch to couch, jumped from hotel to hotel, made it very difficult for us.

But we started checking some of the people that we knew that she hung out with, some of the, I guess you would say, drug crowd.

We'd start talking to them and asking them questions.

And, of course, at first, nobody knows anything.

No, I haven't seen her in months.

I haven't seen her in weeks, whatever the case may be.

And it just kind of went from there. We never did really have anything solid, even from the beginning, to try and locate where she may have went.
But there was something, or rather someone, who kept coming up. Tessie's on-again, off-again partner and the father of her children.
And Carolyn was familiar with him. John, Tamaris, Tessie would come to the house.
She'd say, Mama, I can't stand it no more. And when he goes to bed at night, he takes some kind of club with him.
She's scared of him. And she'd stay with me, and then she'd go back over there.
She'd stay with me, and she'd go back over there. But it was the kid's daddy, you know.
But he was just violent. He was just mean.
He beat on her all the time. He sent her to the hospital with a black eye, with her eye hanging out.
Lieutenant Bozeman was familiar with John, too. He'd been out to the couple's place in the Hurley community in the past for domestic calls.
It was a very estranged relationship. It was a very physical relationship.
Both of them had been arrested for domestic violence. I know at one point she took a vehicle and rammed John's truck one time.
They'd both been physically assaulted from the other one. And it was just a very violent relationship.
So they were kind of, especially over the last couple of years, even though they were still married, they had kind of gone their separate ways and were estranged. I think there was still feelings for each other and somewhat of an attachment.
But I think both of them had kind of gone their separate ways. Around the time Tessie disappeared, Lieutenant Bozeman said that she seemed to be out there doing her own thing and John was dating someone else.
It'd be one thing if tensions had been brewing to the point of a boiling over, but it didn't appear to have been a particularly volatile period in their relationship. At the same time, though, John himself admitted that the last time he saw her was December 26th, just one day before she was last seen by anyone.
Apparently, he'd just gotten out of jail on December 23rd, and he'd spent both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Tessie and her family and their kids. So at least to me, it sounds like that estrangement had maybe been wearing off.
But according to our sources, John wasn't out and about helping look for Tessie

after she went missing.

He did cooperate with police, though,

even volunteered to come in and talk,

but he definitely didn't seem devastated by her disappearance.

He's not hostile.

He's just very diplomatic in the way that he will answer a question.

I mean, he's been through it before. He's spent the majority of his life in prison.
He's what we call institutionalized. So he is very, very diplomatic about the way that he answers his question as to not reveal any information.
So he kind of thinks, well, if you're going to ask me a question, I'm going to turn around and ask you a question. He states that at first he just thought she had ran off to avoid going to prison, but now he believes that something's happened to her and he really hopes that we find her.
And if somebody did something to her, that we prosecute them and things like that. So, I mean, what you have to know from John is John is one of these very narcissistic type people.
He thinks he's smarter than everybody. And on one of the interviews, we gave him a CVSA, which is a computer voice stress analysis test.
We didn't expect John to tell us anything to begin with. A lot of it was getting a feel of John and how he was going to react to it.
I can tell you this, if my wife had been missing this long, I would be

knocking trees down. Now, I understand that they were estranged, but she's also the mother to his

children, you know. So, although I don't live in that circle, I know how I would react, and I know

how normal people would react. Lieutenant Bozeman wouldn't divulge any details about the results

of the test or what exact questions were asked to John, since this is still an ongoing investigation. But, according to Carolyn, John was dropping not-so-subtle hints to her, insinuating that he knew something bad had happened to Tessie.
He told me, standing out in my backyard, he says, he used to call me mama, but he quit calling me mama. He says, Carolyn, I was standing at the back door and this is just what he told me.
He says, you won't never see Tessie again. If you do, it will be a long time.
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That's GoodRx.com slash deck. The most straightforward speculation was this.

John's relationship with Tessie was tumultuous. He'd been violent before, and maybe in a fit of rage, he finally snapped.
Carolyn had witnessed his need for control firsthand. Maybe he was jealous that Tessie seemed to have finally moved on.
But that simple explanation was far from the only possibility that was emerging. One of the things that we were told was that Tessie was at a hotel having sex with two men at one time.
And John found out about it. John came in, started beating her, and beat her against a sink, killing her.
John then made the two individuals help dispose of her body. We were told that he cut her up, and they were made to haul her out.
We were told that he didn't cut her up, that he wrapped her up in plastic and made to haul her out. But those names have changed.
Now, there is a couple that have been brought up more so than other ones, but those names have changed as to who it was that she was having sex with at the time. That's one of the stories.
We had another murder that was a gang-related murder here a couple of years ago involving Dustin Suttles. We arrested four individuals for that, and they've been convicted and sent to prison.
We were told that she came across a video of two of the Simon City Royals, which is a local prominent gang down here, that she came across a video of two of the men in there having homosexual relations, and that is against their bylaws and will get you killed. So we were told that that that was the reason that she was killed, because her and Dustin Suttles actually had information about this video.
I don't know what to believe. My personal opinion, I don't think it had anything to do with the Dustin Suttles thing.
But like I said, those are some of the stories that we've heard. There were plenty of other accounts like this.
Wild, but not wild enough to simply shrug off. Detectives did their best to verify every story, and they were even able to track down and talk to most of the men associated with that first story.
But they all said, no way. They found the idea absolutely ridiculous.
But if the people popping up had any connection to John, whether they just heard something through the grapevine or had knowledge about what had happened to Tessie, they would likely be too afraid to actually admit it. John's been to prison several times.
John was, at one point in time, a very active AB, Aryan Brotherhood. We were told he was an enforcer for the ABs.
So he has

connections with different gangs and things like that. And being of that rank and being in prison,

it builds what's called a lot of street cred. A lot of people are afraid of him.
So I think that

is why a lot of people are afraid to talk on this whole matter. They're afraid of what the

repercussions may be. John's name has come up several times.
We've interviewed John. He's been

Thank you. a lot of people are afraid to talk on this whole matter.
They're afraid of what the repercussions may be. John's name has come up several times.
We've interviewed John. He's been interviewed by several of us.
Can I say that he did anything? No, I can't. Is he a very viable suspect? Absolutely.
The other problem with verifying some of the stories that they heard is that by the time they got to police these stories, they had been cycled through a drug-fueled game of telephone. Well, you know, these people will be at a dope house and you'll have 10 or 15 people sitting in there smoking meth and getting high, and they are basically telling these stories or whatever.
Then one or two will leave that dope house and go to this dope house and get high. And then the story somewhat changes.
It's kind of like telling a story in a circle. By the time you start here, it's one story.
By the time it gets here, it's changed, you know, and the names have changed and stuff like that. So that's how a lot of these rumors are.
There's bits and pieces of it that match, but all of it doesn't match. Names change, places changed, and that's what makes it so difficult.
This has been the biggest spider web in 25 years of law enforcement that I've ever dealt with. That spider web Bozeman referred to right there is what made searching for Tessie nearly impossible.
And as if things couldn't get any more twisted, not only were detectives being bombarded with a bunch of rumors about what may have happened to Tessie and who could have been responsible, now they were also getting tons of tips about where they might be able to locate her remains. We were told that she may be buried behind her mother's house.
These were actually given to us by Carolyn.

Carolyn called us and said that she had heard that Tessie had been killed by John

and that she was buried between Carolyn's house

and there's an old dentist office back there

in a wooded area back there.

So on two different occasions,

we went out there and looked and didn't find anything.

Cadaver dogs didn't find anything.

And Lieutenant Bozeman's search for Tessie has gone well beyond her mom's backyard. A young lady that was down here that was a drug addict was in rehab.
And she reached out to the FBI office up there and said, hey, I've got some possible information. So they reached out to us and we went up there and met with the FBI and with her and talked to her.

And she gave us some information about it possibly being involved in sex trafficking.

Possibly Tessie had been kidnapped and was being sex trafficked and then she got killed.

The tip seemed credible enough to follow up with a physical search of a property on Manchester Road in Moss Point,

where they were told she had been held, tortured, and eventually killed. We found some unusual things on the property.
Like in the backyard, there was an area that had pipe, four corners of pipe, and it had tape around it, like crime scene tape. And it looked like somebody could have been buried there or something.
So we searched it. We started digging down.
But after you started digging, you could tell that that area had not been dug up. I don't know why it was there.
Police ran down another tip involving an ex-boyfriend of Tessie's, who we'll call Robert. He had a pretty notable criminal history that included shooting and killing a guy and killing a police canine when they tried to arrest him.
The tips around him were pretty vague, just that he had killed Tessie and buried her on his property. But as you probably guessed, that didn't end up checking out either.
But it still goes to show just how many tall tales were running rampant in this case and how many leads police had to run down in search of Tessie, near and far. One of the most recent tips that's come in led Bozeman to search another Moss Point property off Highway 613.
This is one that, oddly enough, was owned by a bondsman who'd been trying to track down Tessie too, since there was an indictment out on her. And of all places, this tip actually came from a jail inmate who had seen Tessie's picture on the Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers deck of cold case cards.
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He said that he was playing cards in the jail and saw her picture, and he recalled a conversation with this other individual to where this individual stated that he was there and he was part of what took place and part of the killing of Tessie and the dismembering of Tessie and helping dispose of her body. And that we started getting close and that they had to dig her up and move her.
So whenever I found this out, I was like, you know, is that plausible? Yeah. So I contacted this individual because I really didn't have enough probable cause to get a search warrant to go over there and do it.

But I knew this individual that owned the property and I knew that he had reached out several times that he had heard information from people he had bonded out and called me. And he was ultimately on the hook for her bond whenever she didn't show up for court and stuff.
And he has a reward out to try and locate her. So he brought his tractor over there and busted up the concrete,

dug it up himself while we stood there and watched to see if there was anything there. And unfortunately it wasn't.
There was another search done on Highway 613. We were told that there was a shrine basically set up with crosses and flowers behind a dope house over there.
We went and there was a shrine set up with flowers and crosses and things like that. And we searched it, searched that area with cadaver dogs and investigating that.
We found out that this guy, his sister had died in an automobile accident a year prior to that. And he just set this up in his backyard kind of to go back there and spend time with his sister.
At some point, it has to feel like you're chasing your own tail a little. You run down the tip, chase down the tipster, only to find out they don't have any firsthand knowledge.
And then you're back to that bad game of telephone. They're adamant, hey, look, I know where Tessie is, this, that, and other.
But when you start questioning them, you find out, you start, as we say, peeling back the onion, you realize that, oh, no, they heard this from little Timmy over here whenever they were down here smoking meth last weekend. And so they think that, hey, yeah, I'm going to be the one that finds Tessie.
Tessie's husband, John Tamoris, is still a viable suspect to this day. But Bozeman said they never had enough probable cause to search his place or even to get records for his phone.
But they were able to talk to someone very close to him to try and get

more information. We have gone and spoken to the girl that was his girlfriend at the time.

He's apparently made statements that, you know, you'll end up right beside Tessie and things like

that. But do we know that he even knows where Tessie is? You got to understand John's mentality.
John likes to rule people by fear, not only his relationships, but people on the streets and stuff like that. Anything that John can use for John's benefit, John's going to.
So, you know, John could be saying that just to say it. It could be true.
I don't know. That's why I desperately need somebody to come forward.
I would just be ecstatic for somebody to come forward to point me in the right direction so that I could prove who did what. John Tamoris is currently in prison serving time for residential burglary.
We wrote him a letter hoping he might talk to us about Tessie, but as of the recording of this episode, we have yet to hear back. The greatest challenge detectives face is all the talk surrounding this case.
Are they all just stories? Or could there be even a tidbit of truth buried among all that buzz? I would say what we need is some firsthand information. Everything that we've gotten to this point has been hearsay, that this person has heard it from this person who has heard it from this person who has heard it from this person.
And we followed up on those the best that we can. We've had people tell us that there was maps drawn of her bodies on walls and houses.
We've done search warrants there. We've had people tell us that, you know, she's been here, she's been there, she's been everywhere.
I don't care what lifestyle Tessie led or what she did. If she was murdered, then she still deserves for us to catch whoever murdered her and make them pay for it.
Carolyn and her kids have nowhere to go to feel like it's a place that they're spending time with their mom or their daughter. Tessie's mom, Carolyn, is still raising some of Tessie's children.
And from what we've seen, she's doing an incredible job. Our reporters got to spend some time with Tessie's daughter, who is the spitting image of her mom.
She is excelling in middle school, on the honor roll, and volunteers to help kids with special needs. Even though she's young, she is already planning out her life, where she wants to go to college, what she wants to do for a career.
But it'll likely be a future full of milestones that her mom won't get to witness. Although Tessie was struggling at the time she went missing, she never missed out on a chance to love on her children.
A sweet, loving mother and daughter. She was real smart.
She took a little college when she finished high school, but, you know, she had these kids and she just loved them to death. We just wonder, you know, what happened.
We don't know. Well, I don't have no reward to give them, but I know one thing.
I'd hug their neck, I would do anything, anything, to get to see my baby again. I mean, really, it makes me want to cry, I'm sorry.
I don't know what I'd do if I was to see her walk to that door. I probably wouldn't be able to see her, but I'd just hide me out.
I love her. She's always my baby girl.
That's what I always called her, baby girl. Carolyn gave a DNA sample to NamUs, so if Tessie's remains are ever found, detectives will be able to link them to her.
If you know anything about her disappearance around December 27th, 2019 in Jackson County, Mississippi, we urge you to contact the Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers. You can remain completely anonymous by calling them at 877-787-5898.
Or if you don't mind speaking to Lieutenant Bozeman directly, we'll have his office line and his email in the show notes. At the time she went missing, Tessie Tamoris was described as having brown hair and blue eyes.
She was around 5'6 to 5'7 and weighed about 150 to 165 pounds. The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.
To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Hi, everyone.
Ashley Flowers here. If you're like me, diving into true crime is about more than just the details of a case.
It is also about giving a voice to the victims and understanding the lives behind the headlines. And this is what host Kylie Lowe does each week on her podcast, Dark Down East.
Every Thursday, Kylie dives into New England's most gripping mysteries, uncovering stories in a way you won't hear anywhere else.

And she digs through archives, connects with families, and shines a light on the voices that deserve to be heard.

From cold cases to moments of long-awaited justice, Dark Down East is the perfect blend of investigations and honoring the stories behind them.

You can find Dark Down East now, wherever you're listening.