We always knew that Ron Tammen’s case was a little different, right? The total runaround I’ve been getting from various parties tells you that there must be something inherently special about it, right? Plus, there was the whole Missing Person File Room thing that no one at the FBI seemed to know anything about. There was also the removal of his missing person documents from “Ident” in May 1973 for no explicable reason. Then there was the purging of Ron’s fingerprints 30 years too soon, and the FBI’s withholding of the reason why they purged them. (I had to go to the National Archives for that info.) All very, very…special.
You know what would help me out tremendously? It would help a lot if someone who had in-depth knowledge about FBI scribblings were to look at his documents and say to me (off the record, natch), “Oh, wow. That’s something. I can’t believe that’s there.” And to date, no one has done that. I’ve run Ron’s FBI documents by several people in the know, and not one has looked at them and said, “Well, I’ll be darned. That right there? That’s significant.”
I think one or two of my people-in-the-know have been holding out on me.
What’s gotten me to this point is my recent discovery concerning two Miami graduates whose mother had worked for years as a cashier at the Oxford National Bank, including the year Ron disappeared. Both men became FBI special agents after their graduation, and in 1953, one of them was working at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. To be clear, I don’t think either of these men had anything to do with Ron’s disappearance. But it occurs to me that they might have been somewhat interested in the case because A) they’d grown up in Oxford, B) they were Miami grads, and C) there might have been something they could have done to help in the search. Plus, I’m sure their mother as well as their father, who happened to be Oxford’s village clerk, would have brought up the Tammen case whenever they talked on the phone. Heck, the younger brother had worked for Champion Paper right before his stint with the FBI. He might have even known Dorothy Craig.
I’ve been concentrating on the older brother lately, since he stayed with the FBI for his entire career, and he made his way up the ladder. Let’s just say that he would have been on speaking terms with J. Edgar Hoover and a few other recognizable names, including “Deep Throat” himself, Mark Felt. I was especially interested in knowing if he’d been in the loop in 1973 when the Cincinnati field office had sent in the guy’s fingerprints from Welco Industries to see if it might be Ron. That also happened to be the time when Ron’s missing person file was “Removed from Ident files” for whatever reason. Nothing was made public at that time, so it might be telling if an FBI official from Oxford, Ohio, had access to all of that inside info but didn’t say anything to anyone back home about that rather huge development.
So what I’ve been up to these days is poring over a ton of FBI memos, and comparing all of the marks, numbers, and initials to the ones on Ron’s documents. In short, I’ve been trying to find a direct link between Ron’s documents and our FBI guy from Oxford. I don’t know if one exists, but I’ll keep looking.
That said, I can report something that I believe is big news: You know the stamp that’s on quite a few of Ron’s FBI documents, the one that says ST-102? That stamp is not on ANY OTHER missing person documents that I’m currently in possession of, including the hundreds of documents for Richard Cox. Bear in mind that I’ve been attempting to review even more FBI missing person documents, for which I’ve been told that it will take 39 months before I can see them. (I was given this estimate in December 2022, so we’ve shaved off about 16 of those months.) We’ll all be a couple years older by the time that happens. But as of this date and this time, I know of NO OTHER missing person document with the stamp ST-102 other than those of Ron Tammen, and he has it on 8 out of 22 pages.
Do you know which documents do have the ST-102 stamp on them? Some documents having to do with the JFK assassination and Watergate and a few other hot-button issues.
I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking, “well, that’s probably because those are the the kinds of documents that people are actually requesting. They’re not requesting the boring stuff.”
OK, point taken. But still, I think it’s worth noting that a stamp that I originally took to be pretty basic and probably something that could be found on all incoming missing person documents and whatnot was NOT for all incoming missing person documents (and whatnot).
Also, if you type in “ST-102” AND FBI into Google, you’re not going to get a lot of FBI documents, since few organizations have transcribed that number onto their websites. But the documents you do get tend to have something to do with JFK or Watergate or Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, or someone named Ron Tammen.
Oh, there’s this one too. Although it’s missing a letterhead, an agency name has been stamped prominently at the top that you’ll recognize.
OK, I’ll end here. I told you this would be short.
