He Spit Out His Gum and Was Found Guilty of Murder

Barbara Mae Tucker was a 19-year-old student at Oregon's Mt. Hood Community College when she was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and beaten to death a stone's throw from campus, just beyond a school parking lot. It was the evening of Jan. 15, 1980. As it turns out, her killer was a 16-year-old high school student, per the Oregonian. Now 60, Robert Plympton is likely to serve the remainder of his life behind bars. Convicted of first-degree murder Friday, he wasn't connected to the case until 2021, per NBC News. Two decades earlier, a DNA profile was created from vaginal swabs taken during Tucker's autopsy. A genetic genealogist ultimately found a likely match for that profile while perusing family trees.

Gresham Police began to surveil the suspect, who was living in the Portland suburb of Troutdale, and soon collected a piece of gum he'd spit onto the ground, NBC reports. A crime lab found "the DNA profile developed from the chewing gum matched the DNA profile developed" from the swabs, according to the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office. Plympton, who was convicted of second-degree kidnapping in 1985 and accused of attempted sodomy and assault on a woman in 1997, was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder in June 2021. In announcing his conviction following a bench trial, Judge Amy Baggio noted he wasn't convicted of rape because prosecutors didn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Tucker was sexually assaulted while alive, per the AP.

There was no indication Tucker knew Plympton. She'd been expected at a night class on the evening she died. Witnesses saw her running out of a wooded area on campus and apparently trying to get people's attention, but no one stopped to help, per the Oregonian. One witness said a man then emerged from the same wooded area and led Tucker back toward campus. Plympton argued he didn't match the description of the man seen with Tucker, but Baggio rejected that argument, per the Oregonian. In addition to the count of first-degree murder, Plympton was convicted of "four counts of different theories of murder in the second degree," the district attorney's office said. He's to be sentenced June 21. (More murder stories.)