These two Santa Fe cold cases are quite likely related. They seem too intertwined to be mere coincidence. Tamara Britton first disappeared in August, 1984. But when her former roommate Teal Pittington vanished just days later only to eventually be found dead, the case got even weirder. Unexpected twists and turns in the case leave more questions than answers, 40 years later.
On August 6, 1984, Tamara Britton vanished from Santa Fe, where she had only been living for eight months. She left her job at West Coast Sound to make a bank deposit. The thousands of dollars in the bank bag were properly deposited at the bank. But Tamara Britton never returned to work. She has never been seen or heard from since.
Her 1977 Plymouth was eventually located at a truck stop in Santa Rosa. The empty bank bag sat on her seat, containing her car keys and a handwritten note: “Return to West Coast Sound, 3387 Cerrillos Road.” Oddly, there were diapers for an infant in the backseat. Tamara was not known to have been pregnant or to have had a baby, yet even more diapers were found in her trailer. Santa Rosa is a good 109 miles from Santa Fe and it is a popular place for truckers to stop off I40. It is a good place to go if you want to hitch a ride and disappear into the ether.
Not much was known about the quiet, cheerful blonde who went by “Tammy.” The description people gave of her was incredibly vague – short with blonde hair was all people could say. She didn’t have any photographs lying around and she didn’t divulge many details about her life. One co-worker at her former job at Carrows Restaurant thought that Britton had mentioned a sister in Texas.
This made identifying her body and putting out information for her nearly impossible. So police did their due diligence and reached out to the man she had listed as her father on a car loan application. This man lived in Foxboro, Wisconsin. It was at this point that the most troubling thing about her case emerged. The father they called became upset and said that his daughter, Tamara Britton, had died in 1959 at only four months of age. Vital records confirmed this. This man had no idea who the missing Santa Fe woman was. It turns out that the woman we know as “Tamara Britton” had actually stolen the identity of the baby girl after her death and used that info to get a social security card. This was a common identity theft tactic – visit a graveyard, find someone who died and is about the same age as you, and appropriate their identity. This woman’s real identity has never been unearthed and no one knows where she came from.
Police think that Britton may have been in witness protection, perhaps in relation to a murder case. I think that if that were true, she would not have been using the identity of a dead baby that could be easily exposed with some digging. The government’s federal witness protection program will provide someone with an entirely new identity and documents, without needing to steal it from a dead infant. Instead, it seems more likely to me that Britton was an identity thief who was running from something or someone.
Police also found that Britton had purchased a ton of clothes in Santa Fe before going missing and that had overdrawn her checking account. Were those clothes found in her trailer? If not, then it could indicate she packed and left town of her own accord. If she left the clothes behind, it could indicate she left in a hurry without prior planning, which would jibe with the way she fled after the bank drop. Or also it could indicate she was taken against her will.
A dead baby was found in a dumpster in Santa Fe and police considered that it might be Britton’s child, since she had the baby diapers, but that lead apparently led nowhere. I think the diapers could have been for soaking up blood or else she got them for a friend.
Someone alerted police that a Tamara Britton applied for a social security card in Minnesota, but the police “did not have the funds to check the tip.” Wow. It is not clear when this happened. I think that may be a good lead that Britton ended up in Minnesota. Given that she had stolen the identity of the baby in Wisconsin, it could be that she was from that area, or at least had been there prior to moving to Santa Fe.
Some skeletal remains were unearthed by a construction crew in 1990. They were thought to belong to Britton. But it is thought that they were ancient bones, washed up by rain. To date, Britton hasn’t been found, and I can’t help but wonder if she wants it that way. Police theorize that she staged her own disappearance and is living under an assumed identity elsewhere.
Things get even weirder, though. Tamara Britton had been roommates with a girl named Teal Pittington. Pittington vanished a few days after Britton – on August 19, 1984, to be exact. The two were no longer living together at the time and instead Pittington was living with a man named Marion Owen Jent, with whom she had had an on-again-off-again relationship. They also had a slew of roomates that came and went, and many of them had criminal records. Pittington dabbled in drugs and was suspected to be selling marijuana from the pizza place where she was a waitress. She was attending cosmetology school. The night she vanished, she made plans to meet a friend at 11:30 but never showed up, which wasn’t like her.
Nine months later, her severely decomposed body was found in a culvert near the New Mexico Girls’ Ranch near Lamy. She had to be identified by dental records. She had been raped and strangled with her own bra. Interestingly, that bra is now missing from evidence, preventing any DNA testing from nabbing her killer.
One chilling detail is that Tamara Britton had also lived with Jent for some time before and had briefly dated him. Jent was also spotted driving Teal Pittington’s car around after she went missing, which he then abandoned at the College Plaza Shopping Center on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe. He told police that Pittington had gone to New Orleans and lent him her car, a story that investigators could never verify. But Jent passed polygraphs and was let go. He subsequently moved out of state and racked up a slew of arrests in Florida and Idaho. He never was convicted for any violent crimes, though.
I have no idea if Jent was guilty, but I do know that polygraphs are notoriously unreliable and slick people know how to beat them. Moving out of state and abandoning the car both make Jent look pretty guilty. Detective Tony Trujillo states he thinks he is guilty or at least he knows more than he is letting on. Unfortunately, he can’t be re-interviewed because he passed away in 2020.
There’s also another possible suspect: David Morton. Morton raped and stabbed Janet Benoit to death at a Santa Fe motel in 1983, leaving her with her hands bound behind her back. He then raped and strangled his next door neighbor, Teri Mulvaney, in 1984. Later he moved to Amarillo, where he raped and strangled his neighbor. He was convicted of these three rapes and murders in 2004 after confessing.
Morton was in Santa Fe at the time Britton and Pittington went missing. When asked about Pittington, he looked off to the side and said, “Yeah, she was a cute little thing.” He admitted that he and a friend would buy marijuana at the pizza place where she worked. He also frequently hung out at the College Plaza Shopping Center, where her Honda had been discovered, abandoned. But he denied any involvement and instead implicated his friend, who had apparently dated Pittington at one time. He said that if cops wanted to know what had happened to Pittington, they should investigate that friend. Cops were unable to track this friend down.
This case seems quite possibly connected. These two women, who knew each other and who had dated the same guy, vanished within days of each other. Jent seemed suspicious in Pittington’s death; did he have something to do with Britton’s disappearance too? Did he snap and go on a spree, hurting both women? Or was someone else involved?
The original detective on the case, Tony Trujillo, suspects that Morton was involved or knows something in Pittington’s case. He also speculates that Britton may have been on the lam for another murder and may have played a role in the murder of Teal Pittington. While this is possible, she just seems too conscientious to me. Why didn’t she just take off with all the money if she meant to disappear that day? Why would she leave the store keys and bank bag with a note to return to the store if she didn’t care about her job? Why would she vanish a whole nine days before Pittington if she was later involved in Pittington’s murder? It seems like she cared about her job and not inconveniencing others.
Trujillo mentions other persons of interest, none of whom are active suspects. This is interesting. There may be someone else involved that we aren’t even considering in this article. Someone on the periphery who knew both girls. Someone who has even had a low profile for years. The DNA on the bra would sure be useful in narrowing down the suspect pool. And yet, police lost it. Trujillo says he hopes it’s found in a box somewhere. How can you lose something so critical to a murder case?
My theory is that Britton was on the run from somebody really scary. That person found her, and maybe came by West Coast Sound the day she disappeared, terrifying her into running. Then, while trying to locate Britton, the person did some digging, learned about her association with Teal Pittington, and then raped and strangled Pittington when she didn’t provide any useful information. He may have also targeted Pittington out of fear that Britton had told her something.
I do think that Britton left of her own accord. If someone did something to her, why would they bother to leave the bank bag with a note to return to the store? That seems like a thoughtful detail for someone to focus on while trying to avoid getting caught for a murder. Britton may have chosen Santa Rosa as a spot to abandon her car because she knew she could easily hitch a ride from a trucker. The woman who applied for a social security card in Minnesota under Tamara Britton seems like one of the most solid leads in the case. Is it too late to investigate that? A lot of years have passed but sometimes records are remarkably well kept or people have amazing memories! How much would it really cost?
There is also the possibility the cases weren’t related at all. The 1980s were a scary time for women in Santa Fe. So many women went missing or turned up murdered. Britton may have fled due to needing to escape her past or as the result of a criminal double life she led. Pittington was an unfortunate victim of someone, quite possibly the serial killer David Morton or one of his creepy friends. Or both women met horrible fates at the hands of the same, or separate, killers. Who knows? The likelihood of solving these cases is quite dim, but something may still blow one or both cases open.
The cold case unit has started a new round of interviews to try to identify Pittington’s killer. I hope they find something out. I think some of the key people in this case are now dead, such as Marion Own Jent. But this girl deserves justice after having her future ripped away from her. I don’t know who Tamara Britton is, or where she is, but I hope one day that is solved as well. This is one of those bizarre cases that just gets under your skin and drives you crazy if you think about it too long.
Some more reading on this weird cold case: