On July 6, 1983, 18-year-old Tammy Lynn Leppert vanished from Cocoa Beach, Florida, after months of erratic behavior and intense paranoia that someone was out to get her.
IMDbA Florida beauty queen, actress, and model, Tammy Lynn Leppert hasn’t been seen in over four decades.
The young and beautiful Tammy Lynn Leppert was at the start of a promising modeling and acting career in the early 1980s.
Blonde and hazel-eyed, she had first begun modeling in beauty contests and pageants at age four and later started making appearances in movies.
She is probably most recognizable for a small role in the iconic 1983 movie Scarface, in which she played a bikini-clad girl who distracted a lookout car.
At only 18 years old, Leppert had dreams of making it big in Hollywood. Despite her promising start, she purportedly witnessed something disturbing at a party that caused her to develop intense paranoia.
Her mental health rapidly declined, she began behaving erratically, and she soon became convinced that someone was trying to kill her. Then, on July 6, 1983, Tammy Lynn Leppert vanished from Cocoa Beach, Florida, marking the start of a decades-long mystery that has baffled investigators ever since.
Tammy Lynn Leppert’s Early Life In Florida
IMDbTammy Lynn Leppert, pictured during a beauty pageant.
Tammy Lynn Leppert was born on February 5, 1965, in Rockledge, Florida. At the age of four, Leppert began participating in beauty contests.
Her run as a beauty queen was wildly successful, and she eventually won a total of 280 crowns in various pageants throughout the years.
Unsurprisingly, Leppert easily found work as a model. She even appeared on the cover of Covergirl in 1978. This early career was undoubtedly supported by her theatrical and modeling agent mother, Linda Curtis.
Personal PhotoA beauty pageant that Tammy Leppert participated in.
“I was constantly busy running her around to where she had to go and what she had to do. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed watching her excel because she always went for the best that she could go for, the highest level,” Curtis said.
Eventually, Tammy Lynn Leppert started to appear in Hollywood films.
Tammy Lynn Leppert’s Promising Start In Hollywood — And A Troubling Party
By 1980, Tammy Lynn Leppert had scored a small, uncredited role in Little Darlings. She soon earned another uncredited role in the 1983 teen movie Spring Break. Filming for Spring Break went smoothly, but Leppert’s experience at a party held for the cast seemed to leave a negative impact on her. Her loved ones said that she became paranoid and withdrawn.
“Sometimes I’d ask her, what was on her mind, if anything was bothering her. And she’d usually change the subject or she’d say, ‘Oh, nothing,’ you know, and then try to laugh it off,” Wing Flannagan, a close friend of Leppert’s, said.
Curtis also noticed her daughter’s concerning behavior.
“Then she said, ‘Mom, what would you say if I told you somebody was trying to kill me?'” Curtis recalled. “I just took a deep breath, and I said, ‘Do you think somebody’s trying to kill you, Tammy?’ She said, ‘Yes.'”
Despite Leppert’s paranoid state, she continued her work in Hollywood. In 1983, she even appeared in a small role in the famous film Scarface. However, she returned home only four days into filming.
Universal PicturesTammy Lynn Leppert in Scarface (1983).
“I received a call from the casting director to tell me that Tammy had a breakdown on the set,” her family friend Walter Liebowitz, who she stayed with during the filming of Scarface, said. “They said that it was a scene where someone was supposed to be shot and had artificial blood spurt out. And they said when Tammy was watching the scene, she started crying hysterically and it got so bad that they had to take her to a trailer.”
In the following days, Leppert’s anxiety only worsened.
The Lead Up To Tammy Lynn Leppert’s Disappearance From A Florida Parking Lot
In the weeks following her departure from Scarface, Tammy Lynn Leppert continued to experience increasingly severe paranoia, sometimes refusing to eat or drink out of fear that she would be poisoned.
Then, on July 1, 1983, Leppert smashed the windows of her house with a baseball bat — and even attacked her friend Wing Flannagan. In response, Curtis took her daughter to doctors for a professional evaluation.
Leppert was kept under the doctors’ care for three days before she was released. The report showed no evidence of drug or alcohol abuse or visible ailments. But according to her mother, Leppert still seemed nervous, insisting that she’d “seen something awful, that she was not supposed to see” at the Spring Break cast party. She refused to divulge exactly what she saw — and kept insisting that “they” would come after her.
Notably, on the day she disappeared, she had not combed her hair before leaving the house, which her mother said was out of character for her. She then went out with a male friend, who was the last person to see her alive (some sources have said that this friend was named Keith).
Creative Studio 79/Alamy Stock PhotoAn aerial view of Cocoa Beach, Florida, where Tammy Lynn Leppert went missing on July 6, 1983.
He reported that the two of them had gotten into an argument, and he dropped her off alone near the old Glass Bank building in Cocoa Beach, Florida after she allegedly asked to be left there. This building was about five miles away from Leppert’s home. Surveillance footage later captured her standing by herself in a nearby parking lot. From there, she walked to a nearby public phone, likely at a gas station, where she attempted to call her aunt and a friend numerous times. Unable to reach them, she left multiple “urgent” messages before disappearing without a trace.
Tammy Lynn Leppert was last seen wearing a blue denim skirt and a blue shirt with flower appliqués, carrying a gray purse and sandals. Some accounts have stated that she was barefoot just before her disappearance. Surprisingly, there was also speculation that she was three months pregnant at the time of her disappearance, but that was never confirmed.
Disturbingly, Leppert’s mother claimed her daughter was “afraid” of the male friend who had picked her up that day and dropped her off, leading many people to raise questions about him. However, he was never officially considered a suspect by police, and no charges were ever filed against him.
Chilling Theories About The Unsolved Case
National Center for Missing & Exploited ChildrenAn age progression of what Tammy Lynn Leppert might look like as an adult.
The police investigation eventually brought them to a man named Christopher Wilder, known as the “Beauty Queen Killer,” who was responsible for the murders of numerous young women in 1984 (some of which occurred in Florida). He was known to lure female victims into his car or home under the guise that they were auditioning for modeling gigs, a ruse that might have convinced Tammy Lynn Leppert, a known model, to follow him.
Wilder was ultimately killed in New Hampshire in April 1984 during a shootout with the police, and the authorities were never able to find any hard evidence to link him to Leppert’s disappearance.
John Brennan Crutchley, known as the Vampire Rapist, was also active in Florida around the time of Leppert’s disappearance, so he was also a potential suspect, but police also struggled to link him to Leppert.
As time went on, Leppert’s mother theorized that her daughter “knew too much” about local drug trafficking and was targeted by a gang to keep their operation under wraps. Leppert purportedly mentioned “money laundering” during a breakdown, perhaps hinting that she either got mixed up with a criminal organization or was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.
However, these theories were also never confirmed. Her mother died in 1995, and, decades later, the mystery of Tammy Lynn Leppert’s disappearance has never been solved. It’s unclear whether her loved ones will ever get answers.
After reading about Tammy Lynn Leppert’s disappearance, go inside the disturbing story of Amy Lynn Bradley, the woman who vanished from a cruise ship. Then, learn about other infamous unsolved disappearances.
