Louise Tucker opened the faded yellow cover of the baby book — her seventh — flipped past the milestone memories to a blank page and put down the words no mother should write.
Her daughter, 19-year-old Barbara Tucker, had been killed a month earlier, her body brutalized and left in the grove of trees just a few steps from Mt. Hood Community College where she attended night classes as a business major.
“Barbie, your mommie loves you and misses you so very much,” she wrote in a cursive slant. “I just pray that they will get him soon.”
It was Feb. 25, 1980. The grieving mother died 15 years later, without ever seeing justice.
But on Thursday — 44 years after the slaying of Barbara Tucker and six months since Robert Plympton was convicted of rape, murder and kidnapping in her death — a judge handed down a lifetime sentence.
The 61-year-old killer will be eligible for parole in 40 years, Circuit Judge Kelly Skye ruled, doubling the mandatory minimum required under the 1979 sentencing guideline that applied to this case.
Tucker’s two surviving older sisters wept in the gallery. When another relative stood up and called for Plympton to face them, the jail-tunic-clad man only took off his glasses and rubbed his brow. He didn’t speak during the hearing.
“I don’t think he’s had any remorse, any regret, any conscience,” older sister Alice Juan said outside the courtroom. “I never thought we’d see this day.”
Brother-in-law Robert Pater said simply that Plympton’s crime was “sadistic.”
Plympton was 16 and lived just a half mile from campus when he attacked Tucker around 7 p.m. on Jan. 15, 1980. During a March trial, multiple witnesses testified they saw a man and woman on Northeast Kane Drive that night but assumed they were hitchhikers or a couple in the midst of a quarrel.
Tucker’s body was discovered on the edge of campus the next morning, and despite a massive public outcry, the killing went unsolved until DNA testing advanced and geneticists identified Plympton as the only match. In 2021, investigators covertly followed Plympton, an out-of-work river guide, until he spat out some gum while biking along the Sandy River. The sample confirmed his DNA, and led to his arrest that June.
His wife, a former high school sweetheart dating back to the time of the attack, attended part of the trial but was not present during sentencing.
Plympton racked up a string of DUIIs, assault charges and restraining orders in the years following the slaying. In February 1985, a woman walking home from the grocery store on Southwest Powell Boulevard accepted a ride in Plympton’s truck, where he slammed her into the footwell and tried to bind her arms with duct tape before she escaped.
Plympton was sentenced to 2½ years in prison for the botched kidnapping, and his victim, Patricia Spangler, testified Thursday that she wonders what else Plympton did in those intervening five years.
“I could have easily been his next murder victim,” she said.
Defense attorneys Stephen and Jacob Houze foreshadowed that Plympton will appeal his conviction and asked the judge to allow for parole after just 20 years, saying Plympton hadn’t been in trouble with the law since the 1990s and citing the “transience of youth.”
Prosecutors said the stronger punishment was warranted, with Multnomah County Senior Deputy District Attorney Kirsten Snowden acknowledged the emotion in her voice as she described the final message in Barbie’s baby book.
Another prosecutor, Todd Jackson, said the case had not just destroyed a family, but riven the peace of Gresham, then a small town surrounded by farms and fields.
“The depravity, the viciousness, the extreme violence,” Jackson said, “you can’t describe in words the level of violence that this crime involved, you have to see it.”
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