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Tamm returned to Houston on January 3, 1982, at 7:00
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Her tough exterior gave her an air of confidence. It also may have gotten her into trouble. Peggy Oehmig claimed that Tamm was not concerned with crime in the least. Oehmig admired Tamm’s tenacity.
“Ellen Tamm is a survivor. Don’t worry about her.” On Monday morning, January 4, 1982, at 7:45
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however, there was reason to worry. A passerby discovered the body of Ellen Tamm.
Ellen usually started each morning off with a three-mile jog around the Rice University campus with Hill. This particular morning, a fellow jogger, Donna Morris, spotted Tamm out running by herself on Sunset Boulevard and Main Street at approximately six-fifteen.
Tamm’s death scene was a grotesque vision. She had been hung with her own brown tube top from a low-slung branch of a ten-foot-tall bush off the 1600 block of Bissonnet Street. The branch was just under four feet off the ground. The five-foot-ten-inch, 160-pound Tamm wore white shorts, brown tights, white socks and tennis shoes, gray sweatshirt and gray jogging jacket. She was found sitting in the lotus position, as if in the midst of heavy meditation. The only problem was that her body was sus-pended two inches off the ground. Her feet were on the sidewalk. Her behind hung below the bush from which she hung.
Tamm was fully clothed. Her body was not bruised or cut in any way. Also, her clothes did not have any tears or stains on them.
Police were not quite sure what to make of Ellen Tamm’s death. There were no signs of struggle, either on Tamm’s body or at the scene. No drag marks, no disturbed grass, no broken tree limbs.
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Indeed, the medical examiner Joseph Jachimczyk, who had previously worked on Houston’s most notorious case—the serial killing trio Dean Corll, Elmer Wayne Henley, and David Brooks, who sexually assaulted and murdered at least twenty-seven young men and buried many of the bodies in a Houston boat shed—ruled her death a suicide.
No one in Ellen’s family believed she would have com-mitted suicide. Attorney Melton Picard, Tamm’s uncle, even flew in from Tennessee. Picard worked with Dr. Jachimczyk to reconsider the mode of death. The medical examiner’s office spent more than one hundred hours on Tamm’s case. Jachimczyk subsequently changed his ruling in the cause of death.
“The available evidence indicates her death was either a freak accident or a clever, cunning, opportunistic homicide,” the medical examiner reported.
Margaret “Meg” Fossi was born Margaret Everson to Marjory and Leonard Everson. As a child Meg suffered from scoliosis, but she never let it drag her down. Her loving parents watched out for her and showered her with love and affection. She also learned the value of hard work through her father, who was a corporate attorney for the National Can Company. Meg learned well. She excelled in all her academic endeavors and had big plans for her future.
In 1975, Meg Everson enrolled in Rice University, located in Houston, Texas. Rice is historically ranked in the top twenty best colleges in
U.S. News & World Report
’s annual college roundup and is considered the most prestigious institution in Texas. One of Meg’s good friends, Mary Beth Herlihy, described Everson as “bril-liant” and “wild.” She mentioned that Meg liked to smoke marijuana.
Rice associate architecture professor John Casbarian sang Everson’s academic praises. “Meg was a good student who had remarkable potential,” he stated, “and she was a sweet, warm person.” Casbarian believed Everson would succeed in her chosen profession. “It is one thing for a
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student to do well in school, but often they do not, initially, have the technical skill required in the workplace.” He believed Everson did.
Meg spent her summers working for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, a prestigious architectural firm located in Chicago, with offices in Houston. During the school year, Everson would work part-time in the company’s Houston offices. Craig Hartman, associate partner with the firm, described her as “a meticulous worker who did excellent work.”
Meg graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in architecture in 1979. That same year, she met fellow student Larry Fossi.
The following year after graduation, Meg and Larry married on March 1, 1980. Meg’s gold wedding band was inscribed “LJF to ME 3-1-80.” They celebrated with a belated summer-long honeymoon trip to Italy, where they subsisted on $2 a day. “It was wonderful,” Larry recalled.
The following year the newlyweds agreed to focus their attention on completing their education to further their careers. Meg reenrolled at Rice to attend graduate courses in architecture, while Larry was accepted to Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. The intention was for Larry to graduate from law school and move back to Houston. The couple believed that Houston was rife with opportunity. Meg’s father said that the couple believed Houston to be the “city of the future for architecture and law.” It was where the couple planned to thrive in the working world and to raise a family together.
Meg moved in with Larry’s sister Kathy and her husband, Wayne Gregory, into a cozy brown wooden home on the 4600 block of Kinglet Street in the southwestern side of town while Larry attended Yale. Larry noted that Meg was
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coming into her own as an architect. He described her work at the time as “gorgeous” and “incredible.”
“She was at the peak of her powers,” he later described his wife’s abilities.
On Saturday night, January 16, 1982, Meg went out to dinner with a study group of fourteen friends to the Athens Bar & Grill on the 8000 block of Clinton Drive. The purpose of the gathering was for the students to get to know one another.
After dinner one of the study group members went home, while the remaining thirteen students went to the nearby town of Pasadena and the infamous Gilley’s. The country-and-western bar, owned by country music super-star Mickey Gilley, was made internationally famous less than two years earlier in the movie
Urban Cowboy
. Fossi and her twelve classmates stayed until closing time, at 2:00
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Afterward, Fossi rode back to the campus of Rice University with classmates Roberto Roca, Roca’s girlfriend, Janie Harrison, Kim Doty, and Bill Gilliland. Meg fell asleep in the back of Roca’s car. She had knocked back quite a few beers while at Gilley’s. Roca pulled up to the school parking lot and woke her up. The time was somewhere between 2:30 and 2:40
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Roca first dropped Doty off at her car. He then dropped off Fossi and Gilliland at the architectural building, where Fossi had parked her brother-in-law’s 1973 green Mercury Caprice. Doty got into her car and drove off while Fossi and Gilliland went inside the class-room building to retrieve a roll of drawings and a pen-cil box. They then returned to the parking lot, said “good night” to one another, and got into their separate vehicles.
Fossi sat down inside the car, which had a broken
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driver’s seat that could neither move forward nor back-ward. She grabbed a small pillow, which she placed behind the small of her back. It helped prop her up and made it easier for her to see. She began to drive home.
She did not notice the brown Grand Prix that followed her.
As she got closer to home, the Grand Prix closed in on her. Fossi noticed headlights glaring in her rearview mirror and was temporarily blinded. She overcorrected and drove into the concrete curb; in the process she punctured both tires on her car’s left side. The man who forced her into the curb stopped his car behind her. He got out of his vehicle and quietly approached her car. He walked up to Fossi’s window, which she rolled down, stuck his fist through, and punched her in the throat.
He killed her instantly.
The strong man pulled Meg Fossi’s five-foot-four-inch, 118-pound limp body out of the front seat of the car. He grabbed her car keys, carried her to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and tossed her body inside. He then closed the trunk with an audible click. He turned around and walked back to his car. The silent killer started his Grand Prix, kicked it into gear, and drove away.
Later that same Sunday morning, Wayne Gregory and his son stopped by Gregory’s office to pick up some space heaters. They also picked up some breakfast at Shipley Do-Nuts. As they returned home, Gregory spotted his Caprice just one block away on the 4500 block of Kinglet Street. He spotted the two flat tires and noted that Meg was nowhere to be seen. Gregory returned home and called the police.
Kathy Gregory gave the officers permission to open the trunk of the car to search for any clues to her sister-in- law’s disappearance, but, inexplicably, they did not look
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inside. Upon the direction of Homicide police detective
B. E. Frank, police instead towed the Caprice to the central police station to search for evidence into the whereabouts of Meg Fossi.
On the following day, Monday, January 18, 1982, after having no luck locating Fossi, and receiving permission from Larry Fossi to open the trunk forcibly if necessary, police decided to open the trunk of her car.
Officer C. O. Flowers managed to remove the trunk lock from the vehicle.
Inside he found the body of Meg Fossi. She was lying facedown. Her legs were bent back at the knees with her feet pointing toward the back of her head. She had on all of her clothes, except for her pair of purple socks. She wore pink painter’s-type pants and a purple long-sleeved sweatshirt over a multicolored blouse. She also wore a cranberry-shaded scarf, which had been carefully knot-ted. Interestingly, she wore silver razor blade–style ear-rings. She also had on a beige bra and panties. Upon even closer inspection it was evident that Fossi had died from a crushed larynx. Her windpipe had closed, which caused her to suffocate to death.
Upon hearing the news of his wife’s death, Larry Fossi immediately flew to Houston. He was quickly ushered into the Houston Police Department and was not impressed. “I remember an office in utter disarray,” he told the
Houston Chronicle
, “stuffed with files and worn-out furni-ture and broken equipment, and I wondered, ‘How can they function here?’”
Fossi’s opinion changed once he actually met the man who would work his wife’s murder. He described Detective Tom Ladd as a “tough, hardened, yet caring, human being.” He felt as if his wife’s last moments would now be in the hands of a competent individual.
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The man who attacked Meg Fossi was not done that morning. After he killed the graduate student and stuffed her body into the trunk of her car, he continued to look for more victims. He found his next one on the South Loop West Freeway, also known as Loop 610, at the Stella Link exit, near the Astrodome and Astroworld, pulled over to the shoulder of the highway. The woman was fixing a flat tire on her car. The time was 6:45
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The man was not driving his car, however; he was walking on the freeway. He walked up behind her, grabbed her head, pulled it back, and slit her throat twice. The woman managed to escape, ran into traffic, and was picked up by a man in a car.
The man who had slit her throat calmly continued walking on the freeway and headed out of sight.
He assumed he had his second kill for the evening.
On January 21, 1982, three days after the discovery of Meg Fossi’s body, Kathy Whitmire arrived at her inaugu-ration ceremony in downtown Houston. When the soon-to-be-inducted mayor drove up, she was embarrassed to discover that there was no police presence there for her protection. The mayor-to-be immediately returned to her vehicle and demanded that security be put into place before she continued. The police officers claimed it was a misunderstanding and that Whitmire showed up too early.
As young women were being slaughtered, Houston’s authority figures were engaged in petty games of one-upmanship.
Just over one week later, on January 29, 1982, nineteen-year-old Seabrook resident Alice Martell drove up to her Seaway Apartments trapezoid-shaped residence on the 700 block of Gale Street in Seabrook, Texas, right off Galveston Bay, and into a living nightmare. As she got out of her white car and walked toward her apartment, she
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was attacked without warning. She remembered nothing of her attacker. Indeed, she woke up in a hospital bed. “I didn’t even know I was stabbed until I woke up in a hospital.” She had been stabbed two times in the upper left chest area and once on the chin with what appeared to be an ice pick. “He grabbed me by the neck from behind and
choked me. That’s why I didn’t know he stabbed me.” Apparently, Martell’s attacker also stole her purse. Martell was unable to identify her attacker.
The following night, on January 30, 1982, in near-by Galveston, Texas, nineteen-year-old bartender Patty Johnson was coming home from her job in the early-morning hours. She was attacked by a black man as she got out of her car to head into her residence located at Fourteenth Street and Avenue M. The man tackled her to the ground, straddled her chest, and slashed her throat with a knife. Another man, in a second-floor apartment, heard the commotion, stepped out onto his balcony, and saw the melee before him. The man from the apartment yelled at the attacker to get off the woman. The attacker stopped what he was doing, looked up, and casually strolled away, leaving the young woman for dead.
Patty Johnson, however, survived.
She described her attacker as a black man, about five feet eleven inches, and weighing between 160 to 170 pounds. She was eventually presented a photographic lineup of several suspects. After much consideration, she picked the man she believed to be her assailant: Howard Mosley.