Our card this week is Tessie Temores, the 10 if Diamonds from Mississippi. When 37-year-old Tessie went more than a month without contacting any of her six children, her mom had a 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... still waiting for Tessie to come home.If you know anything about the disappearance of Tessie Temores around December 27th, 2019, in Jackson County, Mississippi, we urge you to contact Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers. You can remain anonymous by calling them at (877) 787-5898. If you don’t mind speaking to Lt. Shane Bozeman directly, you can call his office at the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department at (228) 875-6823 or email him at [email protected] source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/tessie-temoresLet us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!
Chapter 1: What is the story of Tessie Temores' disappearance?
Our card this week is Tessie Tamores, 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.
Well, she would go off for a week or two, but 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.
Chapter 2: Why did Carolyn Pardon call the police about Tessie's disappearance?
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did investigators face in Tessie's case?
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.
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Chapter 4: Who was Tessie's partner and what role did he play in the investigation?
John, to Morris. Tessie would come to the house. She said, 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.
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Chapter 5: What are the theories surrounding Tessie's disappearance?
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.
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. You know, 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 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.
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