After just over 21 years a cold case of the killing of a mom-of-seven has been closed.
Tamara Mattson, known to friends and family as Tammy, was murdered at Camano Island State Park, in the state of Washington, back in December 2003.
It wasn’t until the ninth of that month that the 39-year-old’s body was found dumped in vegetation on Camano Island, located an hour’s drive north of Seattle, with Tammy herself known for staying in the Lynnwood area of Snohomish County.
Drugs and the cigarette
According to her mom Sharon Chism, she was involved with drugs.
“No matter how many times I told her that she had to take a different path, she’d give her hair a flip and say, ‘No. I’m doing it my way, mom’,” Chism told Fox 13.
“’I’m going to do it my way’, she told me she could live on the street and she told me she could survive.”
A statement issued by the Island County Sheriff’s Office explained: “For nearly six years, Sheriff’s detectives pursued leads and interviewed ever-widening circles of acquaintances but they kept running into dead ends.”
All they knew was that Tammy’s ‘was very violent’, and that ‘whoever did this to her was very determined to make sure she was not alive when they left her’, Det. Ed Wallace, an officer investigating Tammy’s death, told Fox 13.
Following advances in DNA technology in the summer of 2009, it allowed the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab to develop DNA profiles from minute amounts of human biological material.
In this case, that was DNA left behind on a cigarette butt that was discarded close to Tammy’s body and when they ran it through the system there was a match – Carl D. Schlobom, whose DNA was registered following a 2005 murder conviction in Arizona.
The ‘confession’ during a ‘free talk’
It took until June 2021 for prosecutor Gregg Banks managed to secure an interview with Schlobom alongside Wallace and other personnel.
Wallace stated: “He knew things that only the killer and detectives knew.”
The statement also explained that his motive was discovered, and that was that Schlobom, who would have been around 48 years old at the time, killed her over a dispute about a drug deal.
However, he never signed a sworn and verified confession that covered everything from their ‘free talk’ they’d had, as he waited for guarantee that he could serve his time in Washington.
It took three years before the states of Washington and Arizona were able to come to an agreement over extradition, but in that time Schlobom ‘had suffered a series of debilitating strokes and had advanced dementia’, Island County Sheriff’s Office explained.
It meant that Schlobom, who is now aged 69, could not be charged for Tammy’s murder as his mental condition renders him incapable of being prosecuted.
The delay
So why did it take 12 years before an interview was struck with Schlobom after he was identified as a person of interest in the case?
The issue for cops was how could they pin him to the murder; they knew that the cigarette was discarded around the same time as the murder, but without a witness, there was no way to prove that he wasn’t just a bystander.
After Banks reached out to Schlobom, it became apparent that he knew what had happened – but there was a catch.
In order for him to confess, he wanted to be extradited to Washington to serve the remainder of his life sentence, but laws meant that he would have to serve his time in Arizona before doing so.
Banks explained: “Without his confession, we were stuck. This allowed him to speak candidly and allowed us to verify that he was the killer before we would negotiate any kind of deal.”
