Talk:Murder of Tammy Alexander

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"Venjiont"[edit]

Various sources state that Caledonia Jane Doe was wearing brown ripple-sole shoes, which a telephone caller who spoke with investigators claimed were popular in the "Venjiont" area in the 1970s. "Venjiont" is not an identifiable town, settlement, or geographical region. The actual word may have been "Vermont," misspelled due to optical character recognition (OCR) failure. It may also have been some other regional term recorded in phonetic spelling by investigators who were unfamiliar with the place named by the caller. fat man rolling (talk) 19:37, 27 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Move back to Caledonia Jane Doe[edit]

The article title really ought to be Caledonia Jane Doe because of WP:COMMONNAME, where the individual has been known simply by that title for over 30 years. The recent title change seems to favor a bias towards recentism.--Prisencolin (talk) 00:48, 26 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. All other articles on identified subjects have since been retitled. Alexander herself was not notable - only the event that took place. --GouramiWatcher(?) 01:28, 26 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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Requested move 22 January 2016[edit]

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. Consensus that this was a murder. Jenks24 (talk) 09:42, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]


Murder of Tammy Alexander → Disappearance of Tammy Alexander – I'm not too versed on the crime victim MOS but it seems like most of the article talks more about her dissappearance and efforts to find her rather than the actual murder, most details about which are currently unknown Prisencolin (talk) 22:52, 22 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose: Disappearance of... titles are for people who have disappeared and their bodies were never found and their status as a victim of homicide is uncertain. Tammy's body *was* found and she *was* a victim of homicide. Paul Benjamin Austin (talk) 01:00, 23 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose: Little is known about the circumstances of the victim's disappearance. The case began as a murder, as the body was found before Alexander's disappearance was even being investigated. Little is known about how she disappeared, only that she hitchhiked from Florida to New York and her disappearance was not taken seriously by investigators until 2014 because of her history of running away. More is known about her death and the investigation toward identifying her than the events prior to her murder.--GouramiWatcherTalk 03:52, 23 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed, Strong Oppose.  InsertCleverPhraseHere InsertTalkHere  09:20, 23 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

GA Review[edit]

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Murder of Tammy Alexander/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Zaostao (talk · contribs) 19:12, 27 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]


I am going to review this article soon, but just from a brief reading, I believe WebSleuths.com could be de-linked as I have doubts as to whether it will have its own wikipedia article anytime soon and the red link is unattractive. I also noticed a few typos, one that stuck out was in the 'Identification' section; "Such ceremony" makes little grammatical sense in the context, with possibly 'Said ceremony', or 'Such a ceremony', being more appropriate.

  • In the lead, "the confession was never considered credible", 'never' is needlessly contentious, it would have been very dismissive of investigators to have 'never' considered Lucas' confession as credible. 'Not' would be preferable.
  • "Alexander was buried in a cemetery in Dansville a village in the southern part of the county" has some issues, she was not Alexander, she was buried as Jane Doe. The sentence is also lacking a comma. 'Alexander's unidentified remains were buried in a cemetery in Dansville, a village in the southern part of Livingston county.' or 'Alexander was buried as Jane Doe in a cemete...' would be superior.
  • "The body, later named "Caledonia Jane Doe" or "Cali Doe" by investigators, was fully clothed. It showed no signs of sexual assault". These two sentences could merged to improve the flow of the passage considering the fact she was fully clothed is relevant to the absence of any sings of a sexual assault.
  • "died from severe hemorrhage" is a typo, 'a severe hemorrhage' or 'severe hemorrhaging' is correct.
  • "In 2006, after the 2005 exhumation of the body, Paul Chambers, a recently hired investigator in the Monroe County, New York medical examiner's office, which handled that aspect of the case since Livingston County, where Caledonia is located, lacked the resources, asked for and received permission to send her clothing to the Palynology Laboratory at Texas A&M University, where it was checked for plant pollen trace evidence." needs re-writing, 9 commas in a 3-line sentence makes said sentence difficult to read.
  • Headings 'Pollen evidence' and 'Other details' have chronological order errors, ideally things regarding the case which happened in the 2000s should appear after such events as the description of the murder weapon and the primary suspect, as well as Henry Lee Lucas' confession which occurred well before the 2000s. Possibly headings 'Other details', which would include description of the murder weapon and possible suspects, and then 'Exhumation' with a subheading under Exhumation for 'Pollen evidence' would create a better chronological structure to the article.
  • "The Dougherty Funeral Home, in Livonia". Livonia needs to be disambiguated. Zaostao (talk) 20:31, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Zaostao: Just made the recommended changes to the article. Hope it's what you're looking for! --GouramiWatcherTalk 16:54, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Gourami Watcher: Feel free to challenge my reasoning for these suggestions, I am not a professional or expert reviewer nor do I have much knowledge of this article's subject, I am just trying to help clear the backlog of GA nominations. Zaostao (talk) 20:31, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • From re-reading, "which continued to investigate the case, processing thousands of leads and tips from the public" could be merged to make "her case was well publicized by the Livingston County Sheriff's Office, which continued to investigate the case and processed thousands of leads and tips from the public" as the current "her case was well publicized by the Livingston County Sheriff's Office ... processing thousands of leads and tips from the public" does not make sense.
  • "Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas at one point confessed to the crime, but like many other such high-profile crimes he claimed to be responsible for, the confession was not considered credible" should be "...but, like many..., the confession was not considered credible.". Again, it's just an issue of the the sentence not reading correctly.
  • "a village in the southern part of the county." should be changed to '...southern part of Livingston County'. There is no harm in reiterating what county the crime took place in.
  • CPA needs to disambiguated in "a CPA and artist". I assume you mean certified public accountant but certainty is better than assumption.
  • The numbers in "Cali was believed to have been between the ages of 13 and 19 (born sometime between 1958 and 1967)" seem to be off, if the crime occurred in November, 1979, born in '58 would make her 20/21, and '67 would make her 11/12. I imagine it's just a typo and you meant 1959 and 1966.
  • "5 feet 3 inches" and "five feet eight and five feet nine inches tall" could benefit from hyphens, 5-feet-3-inches, 5-feet-8 and 5-feet-9-inches or five-feet-three-inches etc. You should also add metric conversions to the suspect's height.
  • " in the Monroe County, New York" could be shortened to "in the Monroe County" to give a better flow to the sentence.
  • " including those of unidentified corpses", after the description of websleuths.com, could be removed. It is superfluous and makes the sentence rather clunky. Possibly the description of websleuths.com could be removed too, but that is discretionary.
  • " "I'm truly glad for the closure," she said. "But it hurts to know she died that way. It's terrible, nobody should have to be shot and dragged out into the woods." " has punctuation errors, the comma after closure should be moved to replace the full stop after 'she said'.
  • I haven't checked all of them, but some of the references seem to link to non-existent articles. You'll have to find alternative sources or replace the current sources with archive.org/web/ links of them.

Zaostao (talk) 20:31, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'll work on these changes and get them adjusted into the page within the next few weeks, as I'm busy with college. Thanks!--GouramiWatcherTalk 02:39, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Gourami Watcher: I removed some suggested changes as I don't think they're helpful in retrospect, sorry for not being active on this for the past while, forgot I started the review. Zaostao (talk) 22:08, 7 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Zaostao: It's my fault for not jumping on the changes. I've had some writer's block lately and haven't gotten to making the changes yet. Hopefully by next week, I'll get everything finished.--GouramiWatcherTalk 19:18, 8 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Non-reviewer comments[edit]

This review has been open for over three months now, and Gourami Watcher hasn't edited the article since April 3, nearly three months ago. My suggestion, Zaostao, is that you close the nomination as unsuccessful. Once Gourami Watcher has been able to make the fixes you've requested, the article can be nominated again at GAN. BlueMoonset (talk) 22:43, 1 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

new image by Wikipedian[edit]

Gourami Watcher (talk · contribs) created the image File:Tammy Alexander POI final.jpg and added it to the article. On its Wikimedia Commons file description page it says only, "Composite of a person of interest in the Tammy Jo Alexander murder case, based on a previous FBI sketch." There is no explanation as to what other sources the image is a composite of, possibly complicating the copyright status of the resulting image if it literally contains other, copyrighted material. More salient however, is how Gourami Watcher's personal, interpretive composition is relevant to the article; using this file is essentially original research, effectively adding text to the article that says, "Here is what an unconnected, anonymous person thinks the person-of-interest looked like based on unknown constituent images."

I removed the new image based on these concerns, but was reverted by Gourami Watcher 81 minutes later. — fourthords | =Λ= | 22:07, 2 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fair point. From what I gathered from the edit summary, it sounded as if it was removed based on the reasoning that it did not come from a professional or government source. As I am unsure of the copyright status of the images used to create this, I have removed it from the page and will follow up on a deletion request on the commons. Sorry for the misunderstanding.--GouramiWatcherTalk 00:26, 3 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Speculation[edit]

The article contains significant forensic speculation about who "Caledonia Jane Doe" might have been (for instance, she was between the ages of 13 and 19)... which has all become moot now that she's finally been identified as Tammy Alexander. Should we remove the speculation? DS (talk) 21:35, 25 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have similar concerns. I have now read several articles about victims of homicide or suicide who are notable for being identified after great lengths of time. Even if the killing has not been solved, many elements of such articles seem overly devoted to the breaking news about the murder, description of clothing, etc., none of which matter much any more. I think the structure of these articles should be reconsidered. The lead could quickly discuss the death, efforts at ID, and final ID, but I think the articles should provide more of a standard bio, based on known information, and less focus on the medical examination or early speculation about cases. In more than one case, the victim left home because of a troubled life there, or was otherwise estranged from family - a circumstance that contributed to the delay in identification. In addition, the changing technologies and use of DNA available to police depts, as well as the rise in internet sites, both public and private, with access to large databases about missing and unidentified persons, together with contributions of amateur sleuths, has contributed to resolution of IDs in these cases.Parkwells (talk) 02:09, 3 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Flinching[edit]

The artIcle states: "The wound to the head indicated she had apparently not turned or flinched, as is common when one is shot in the head. Instead, the entry wound suggested complete, if horrified, surprise." For one, this is lifted word for word from the source. I'm new, can someone summarize if this is considered plagiarism here or not?Secondly, does anyone have any insight into what this means? The source doesn't explain why they believe this information is true and I've never heard any speculation like this regarding a shot to the head before. I strongly doubt its accuracy. TheDoormouse (talk) 15:16, 11 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I agree this should be toned down and made more neutral. If it was quoted verbatim and you want to keep it that way, it should be put in quotes and cited inline and in full to the source. I still think it's inappropriate, especially as the article should now be focused on her identification, rather than purple prose about the homicide.Parkwells (talk) 02:11, 3 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified (February 2018)[edit]

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"Tammy Jo" listed at Redirects for discussion[edit]

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Tammy Jo and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 February 12#Tammy Jo until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. ~~~~
User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 01:46, 12 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn84031482/1980-01-19/ed-1/seq-12/ has a scan of the Palladium-Times article from 1980-Jan-19 that is currently a dead link. 2601:441:457F:80D5:784A:E59B:BAE7:8CF (talk) 21:12, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

External links[edit]

@Sundayclose: You are edit-warring to restore a link that copies from an external source without evidence of permission. Do you have any such evidence? If no, why are you ignoring copyright policy, on top of ignoring of WP:ELBURDEN? Nikkimaria (talk) 18:06, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What website was copied? Thanks. Sundayclose (talk) 18:11, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Her obituary, which is viewable here. This is a common problem with this site. Nikkimaria (talk) 18:13, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Her relatives didn't miss her for over 30 years!?[edit]

I am speechless. I cannot imagine such an incident. 2A0A:A541:8642:0:256D:9CEF:8C15:2F33 (talk) 01:01, 28 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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