Deborah Lee Tomlinson was born on October 15, 1957 in Bitburg, Germany to Arthur and Sandra (nee Roup) Tomlinson. Arthur Vernon Tomlinson was born on September 22, 1937 in Modesto, California, and Sandra Lee Roup was born on December 31, 1939 in Livingston, Montana. According to the Tomlinson family tree, the couple had three daughters together: Deborah and her twin sisters, Jean and Joyce (b. 1958). At some point they divorced, and Mr. Tomlinson was briefly married again in 1968 (they quickly parted ways; he went on to have a relationship with Sally Morphis and in 1969 they had a son together named Daniel. He got married to Shelley Williams on August 30, 1975 in Orange, CA but their union also didn’t last long, and they split up in February of the following year. Mr. Tomlinson was married for a fourth time, and the couple had a son together. Sandra got remarried to Henry Nelson on May 10, 1963 in Billings, Montana.

After their parents parted ways Deborah, Jean, and Joyce went to live with their father and stepmother in California, and Sandra relocated to Oregon.  Because of their parents’ divorce the girls were separated from their mother at a very young age, which Joyce felt prevented them from forming a strong bond because she wasn’t given a chance to raise her own babies.

According to most reports online, Deborah Lee Tomlinson disappeared from Creswell, Oregon** on her sixteenth birthday on October 15, 1973. Creswell is an incredibly small town with only one high school, and according to the 1970 census the reported population was made up of a mere 1,199 people (it went up to 5,031 in 2010). Referred to as ‘Debbie’ by family and friends (per Joyce, she hated being called ‘Deb’), Tomlinson had brown eyes, stood at 5’5” tall, and weighed 140 pounds (Joyce felt she may have been slightly heavier); she wore her golden-brown hair at her shoulders and had a ring of moles around her neck. In the initial days following her disappearance investigators strongly believed that she was a runaway, which most likely explains why I couldn’t find any newspaper reports or media coverage on her. One of the only other real takeaways I could find regarding her case was that she disappeared with an ‘unidentified teenage friend.’

** After I initially wrote the article on Deborah in April 2024 I was contacted by her sister Jean, and more recently Joyce. Both sisters were kind enough to help fill in some of the gaps in their family background and were able to provide me with some of their thoughts regarding her disappearance. According to Jean, their Aunt Helen told them in more recent years that Deborah had ran away from Eugene, not Creswell, and at one point the family had been contacted by a friend that claimed they had seen her in Santa Rosa, CA with ‘a black guy,’ which was a big deal as their father didn’t approve of people of color (Joyce also said she was there visiting a friend named Lyn). The family member also volunteered that they thought she may have been pregnant at the time as well, but nothing ever came out of that. About this alleged sighting, Joyce doesn’t feel it’s true, as that’s where their grandmother lived and Deborah would never have left the area without paying her a visit, especially if she had been pregnant (the two were especially close). 

According to Jean, after their parents split up the girls were raised by their father in California, but because Deborah’s didn’t get along very well with their stepmother she had moved to Oregon to live with their mother (who she also clashed with). She also said that at the time her sister disappeared she seemed mostly happy but had been in a bit of a transition period in her life and may have been under the impression that moving out of state may have resulted in more lenient rules, but that wasn’t the case.

According to Joyce, Debbie was simply acting like any other teenager, doing things like sneaking out at night and smoking: one evening in a quick moment of anger their dad announced that he was pulling a ‘Pontious Pilot’ and was ‘washing his hands of her.’ When she left home Joyce said somehow she knew it would be the last time that she ever saw her, and to this day she struggles with her feelings towards her father about that event. Additionally, she strongly suspects that a missing person’s report was never filed in the days after she was last seen, as she never came across one after contacting local Oregon law enforcement. Because of this, I strongly feel that Debbie didn’t disappear exactly on October 15, 1973, and most likely vanished sometime around it.

Jean shared with me that in the years following her sister’s disappearance neither one of their parents wanted to talk much about her, as it brough up too many painful memories. Because of this she told me that she doesn’t know as much about her as she would like to, but she does know that Debbie loved rock n ’roll music and had gotten caught sneaking out at night several times while she still lived with them in California.

Shortly after Deborah disappeared Joyce told me that their stepbrother had reached out to let her know about a formerly missing woman had been found murdered that happened to have some moles around her neck in a pattern similar to Debbie’s (which she said appeared to be ‘almost like a spaced apart, like a necklace’); it obviously turned out not to be her.

When I asked if perhaps Debbie had run off with a guy, Jean shared with me that was what most likely happened, despite the fact the sisters weren’t allowed to date until they were sixteen. Regarding her feelings on the recent ‘genetic genealogy’ craze and if she thought it could help solve the mystery of what happened to her sister, she said that she has never been contacted by LE about it, however at one point she was told by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children that any records possibly related to Deborah were destroyed in a fire.

In 1984 Joyce and her husband took a road trip with their grandkids to visit their great-grandmother and Hank, and while there her stepfather shared that he caught Debbie sneaking out one night and she had been smoking marijuana. He told them that this freaked him out and he tried to do a ‘scared straight’ type intervention and had reached out to the local county sheriff (who had happened to be a friend of his), who had come to the house and had a conversation with his teenage stepdaughter; Debbie disappeared shortly after that.

At the time Tomlinson disappeared in October 1973, Ted Bundy was living at the Rogers Rooming House on 12th Avenue Northeast in Seattle, and where it was a five-hour drive (one way) from his residence to Eugene/Creswell, we know he had no problem with traveling long distances to look for prey. Despite being in a long term, (supposedly) monogamous relationship with Liz Kendall, while on a business trip with the Republican Party to California in the summer of 1973 he rekindled his romance with one time girlfriend Diane Edwards. Ted’s former flame visited him in Seattle on multiple occasions in the latter part of the year, and the couple at one point were even briefly engaged… but the happy times didn’t last long, and in January 1974 he abruptly and without reason cut off all contact with her.

On top of juggling two women, in September 1973 Ted enrolled in law school at the University of Puget Sound, and according to the ‘TB MultiAgency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ on Monday, October 15, 1973 when Tomlinson disappeared, he was in class. Additionally, at the time he was in between employment: in September 1973 he was the Assistant to the Washington state Republican chairman and remained unemployed until May 3 of the following year when he got a position with the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia.

In addition to Ted Bundy multiple other serial killers roamed the Pacific Northwest in the early to middle 1970’s: the first one (aside from Ted) that popped in my head was Warren Leslie Forrest, a double murderer that has been sentenced to two life terms in prison for the murders of Krysta Blake and Martha Morrison in 1974; he is also considered the prime suspect in at least five additional murders and disappearances going back as far as 1971. He has been in police custody since 1974 and on February 4, 2023 he was convicted on another murder count after DNA linked him to the murder of Martha Morrison. 

On June 8, 1961, Portland police received a call from a housewife whose dog had returned home with a human foot in a paper bag, and when detectives went to her home the animal came back with a hand. Upon investigating, LE found several additional body parts around the woman’s neighborhood, and all of the appendages were deemed to be fresh and were completely drained of blood. Police went through local missing people’s reports and came across the file of twenty-three year old Joan Caudle, a housewife and mother of two that had recently been reported missing by her husband (who of course was an immediate suspect). 

Joan’s husband told detectives that where she wasn’t normally a big drinker she had been a bit depressed recently because her mother had been sick, therefore there was a chance she had been at a bar having a few. Police then tracked down a barfly that had a string of arrests for public drunkenness and she told them she had been in a bar on the night of June 7 and met a man going by the name Marquette. The pair had seemingly hit it off when a woman approached them and stole his attention away, and when detectives showed the eyewitness a photograph of Joan Caudle, she said that was definitely the same woman from the bar.

Upon his arrest Marquette admitted that he raped and murdered the Portland housewife then he drained her blood, dismembered her body, and left her head to rot in the woods. Despite being found guilty of first degree murder the jury recommended leniency, and Marquette was sentenced to life in prison.After serving only eleven years of his sentence (during which he was described as a model prisoner), he was released on parole in 1973.

Not even two and a half years after Marquette was released on parole in April 1975, a fisherman discovered a mutilated corpse floating in a Willamette River slough in Marion County, Oregon; it had been bled dry and had been dismembered. Detectives determined the remains were those of thirty-seven-year-old Betty Lucille Wilson (one report said she was thirty-five), a North Carolina native who led a life of extreme poverty and had seven children since marrying her abusive husband at the age of 16.  At the time she was killed she was living in an abandoned school bus.

While he was confessing to Wilson’s murder, Marquette also shared with detectives that he killed a second woman in a similar fashion sometime in 1974, and he led them to two shallow graves where he had disposed of the bulk of the remains. Unfortunately because the head was never found, there was no way the victim could be identified, and Marquette admitted that he didn’t know who she was. Her identity remains unknown.

Within a five-month period in the latter part of 1973 five young women went missing in Oregon, and three more were found murdered: first was Rita Lorraine Jolly, who disappeared on June 29 while taking a nightly walk in her West Linn neighborhood; her remains have never been found. On July 9, 1973 the body of Laurie Lee Canaday was recovered in the middle of the road at the intersection of Southeast Scott Street and McLoughlin Boulevard in Milwaukee, OR. Next was seventeen-year-old Susan Wickersham from Bend on July 11; her body was discovered in January 1976, only five miles south of her hometown; she had suffered a gunshot wound to the head. Additionally, sometime in July 1973 fifteen-year-old Allison Lynn Caufman of Portland died as a result of head injuries after she was shoved from a car moving at a high rate of speed.

On August 20, 1973 twenty-four-year-old Illinois transplant Vicki Lynn Hollar was last seen getting in her black 1965 Volkswagen Beetle (with the running boards removed) after she left her place of employment at the Bon Marché in Eugene, where she had been working as a seamstress for about two weeks. It’s thought that she was headed home to her apartment, as she had plans of meeting up with a friend to attend a party in her neighborhood later that evening (she never showed up). Friends shared with police that she had a habit of picking up hitchhikers; her VW and personal belongings have also never been recovered. Just three days later on August 23, 1973, Gayle LeClair was found stabbed in her apartment in Eugene, OR. The twenty-two year old had recently moved to the area after she got a job at the Eugene City Library.

Just six days after Deborah Tomlinson was reportedly last seen, thirty-two-year-old Virginia Erickson disappeared from Sweet Home on October 21, 1973; although it’s never been proven, evidence points towards her husband being her killer and that it most likely took place while the two were ‘out on a hunting trip.’ Lastly, we have twenty-three-year-old divorcee Suzanne Justis, who went missing on November 5, 1973. From Eugene, Justis had hitchhiked to Portland (despite owning her own car), and had called her mom from a payphone outside of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum to let her know that she would be home the next day to pick up her son from school; she never showed up. Not one case has been solved.

Strangely enough, there was another young woman with the same first and last name as Deborah that had been brutally killed a little over two years after she was last seen in Colorado: nineteen-year-old Deborah Kathleen Tomlinson was murdered in her apartment complex on Belford Ave in Grand Junction on December 27, 1975. In the days that followed her murder, detectives quickly exhausted all leads and the investigation quickly went cold. Forty-five long years went by. In an article published on December 3, 2020 by the website ‘WesternSlopeNow,’ the Grand Junction PD announced a break in the case: they had partnered with a DNA Technology Company called Parabon to analyze the unknown semen and blood that had been found with the victim at the original 1975 crime scene.

About the process, Parabon’s Chief Genetic Genealogist CeCe Moore said that they analyze ‘the DNA, so we can look at 850,000 genetic markers that will allow us to predict relationships that are distant.’ Also, just as a side note, Moore is the scientist that helped solve the 1971 murder of Roman Catholic schoolteacher Rita Curran out of Vermont (who up until recently was also an unconfirmed Bundy victim). After the samples that were collected from the original 1975 crime scene were processed, Parabon built a family tree using public records in an attempt to identify the unknown person-of-interest, and it was concluded that a man named Jimmy Dean Duncan killed Deborah K. Tomlinson. As of April 2024, law enforcement has found no connection between Duncan and Tomlinson, but found that he had a family member that lived close to the college she was attending at the time of her death. Detective Sean Crocker from the Grand Junction Police Department commented that ‘we believe Mr. Duncan visited this relative, and that’s how possibly he could’ve encountered Ms. Tomlinson.’ Jimmy Dean Duncan passed away in 1987.

Arthur Tomlinson died at the age of sixty-four on January 29, 2001 in Las Vegas, NV. Deborah’s mother Sandra Lee Nelson passed away from lung cancer at the age of sixty-three on February 2, 2003, and according to her death certificate, she had been the owner/operator of a café. Sandy’s husband Henry died on March 16, 1994 at the age of 54, most likely in a medical facility in Spokane, WA. Deborah’s brother Daniel Sean Tomlinson died in 2022 at the age of fifty-three in California.

Deborah’s sister Jean retired after almost twenty years in the RV Business in November 2023, and she currently lives in Henderson, Nevada with her husband of almost twenty years, Dave. In 2019 Joyce retired from the Bureau for Child Support Enforcement with the State of West Virginia, and was married to the love of her life until he passed away on May 26, 2003. She currently resides in St Thomas, Pennsylvania. If Deborah was anything like her sisters, she was a kind, compassionate person that would have done a lot of good in this world.

In the years following Deborah’s disappearance the twins remain close, although Jean admitted her disappearance has been incredibly hard on their family. She also confessed that a small part of her always thought her big sister would reach out to one of them when they were adults, after everyone had grown up. More than anything they want closure, and at the very least wish they had a body to properly lay to rest so their sister could be with the rest of their family. Debbie would have been an aunt and great aunt multiple times over, and it’s heartbreaking to think of her never getting to meet either of her brother-in-laws, or nieces and nephews. As of October 2025, Deborah Lee Tomlinson’s case remains open and she would be 68 years old. Joyce said that the family’s DNA is on file with the NCMEC website.

* In October 2025 I finally came across the Tomlinson family’s Ancestry page, which helped give me a lot of background into Deborah’s family life and background. I also updated the article with information from an interview that I did with her sister Jean in February 2025 as well.

Works Cited:
Namus. Retrieved April 3, 2024 from namus.nij.ojp.gov/case/MP11096
Websleuths. ‘OR – Deborah Tomlinson, 16, Creswell, 16 Oct 1973.’ Retrieved April 3, 2024 from https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/or-deborah-tomlinson-16-creswell-16-oct-1973.319290/
Westernslopenow. December 3, 2020. ‘Cold case murder of Deborah Tomlinson solved after 45 years.’ Retrieved April 3, 2024 from https://www.westernslopenow.com/news/local-news/cold-case-murder-of-deborah-tomlinson-solved-after-45-years/