A Woman’s Quest to Solve Her Grandma’s 40-Year-Old Motel Murder

One of Jennifer Tybo’s earliest memories is of being lifted over her grandmother’s open casket during her funeral service, and trying to wake her up.

It was 1983, and the 71-year-old’s neck was wrapped in a silk scarf to cover bruising. Her fingernails were also still dirty from what family members described as a desperate fight for her life days earlier.

But Jennifer Tybo said she simply remembers thinking her beloved grandmother, Agnes Tybo, was peacefully at rest. She reached out, hoping to get her to open her eyes.

“I was only three, but I remember her face just being so hard, and so cold,” Tybo, now 41, told The Daily Beast, beginning to cry.

She would later learn that Agnes Tybo, a member of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation who used to bring her small gifts when they were together, had been strangled to death and—according to family members, robbed—inside a motel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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Now, after nearly four decades of roadblocks and plenty of unanswered questions, Jennifer Tybo is determined to get some answers about the horrific crime that upended her entire family.

Spurred in part by the growing movement surrounding missing and murdered Native American women in the U.S.—as well as concern from some family members that the case had not been treated as a priority by law enforcement—Tybo has spent almost two years reaching out to family members, calling law enforcement, and conducting research online as she doubles down on an effort for closure.

Within the last few weeks, her pleas for help were finally heard when a civilian cold-case investigator with the Albuquerque Police Department, Liz Thomson, started reviewing the investigation. Although it’s still early in the process and she’s already faced some hurdles, including learning that the original autopsy documents and photos were destroyed in a 2010 fire, Thomson said, it appeared the case could be solvable.

Tybo said she hopes that “if it just gets out there, maybe it will, I don’t know, somebody’s conscience will kick in and they’ll say something.”

It was around 3 p.m. on a Thursday in November 1983 when Agnes Tybo and her brother, Arthur Manning, made it to the Sundowner Motel in Albuquerque, according to Thomson. They had driven the 14 hours from their homes on the Duck Valley reservation in Owyhee, Nevada, as Tybo was planning to attend a North American Indian Women’s Association meeting, Jennifer Tybo added.

She wasn’t a frequent traveler, so this would have been a big trip that she had to save up for, according to Noni Manning, 74, Arthur’s surviving daughter, who spoke to him about the tragedy.

Jennifer Tybo said that based on her research and conversations with family members, her grandmother brought along about $1,500 in cash in a beaded coin purse. She also may have carried brooches she had made out of buckskin and beads, and baby moccasins, which Manning said she likely planned to give out and sell that weekend.

The idea was that Agnes Tybo would meet their now-deceased sister, Cecelia Thomas, who had traveled with her family in a separate vehicle, at the motel. In a hand-drawn sketch of the motel provided to The Daily Beast along with other notes made by members of the family in the days after the trip, the motel—which has since been transformed into an apartment complex—was organized in an L shape, with rooms opening out onto the street.

When the pair checked in, Manning said—citing conversations with her father and other family members who were in the city that day—there were plenty of people in the lobby, likely because the Indian National Finals Rodeo was also being held that weekend. They were told by a front-desk clerk that Thomas hadn’t arrived, although that appears to have not been true, according to Manning.

Since they didn’t have cellphones or other ways to reach Thomas, Tybo paid for a room in cash, Manning said. Arthur Manning then helped his sister with her luggage to her room, and left for the separate hotel he would be staying in, as, according to Jennifer Tybo, he, too, was planning to attend the rodeo.

Based on Jennifer Tybo’s conversations with family and her own research, in the following evening hours, Agnes Tybo likely took a shower. Then, between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., family members believe, an individual managed to get into her room, strangle her, and steal her money, change purse, and the art pieces.

In Tybo’s death certificate, obtained by The Daily Beast, her death is listed as a homicide. The document states that the cause of death was strangulation inside a motel room by “unknown assailant(s).” Thomson said she was not able to confirm or dispute details about the scene, including any items stolen. A spokesperson for the Albuquerque Police Department did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

“She put up a big fight,” asserted Manning, who described her aunt as about 5-foot-10 and around 180 pounds.

A motel maid entered Tybo’s room the next morning to clean it and found her deceased and her room in “disarray,” according to Thomson, the cold-case investigator. The case was then turned over to the department’s violent crimes detectives, who started a homicide investigation.

A witness reported seeing a Black man enter Tybo’s room and a woman scream, Thomson added. An Albuquerque Journal article from Nov. 13, 1983, reported that law enforcement were “searching for a man seen leaving the scene for questioning,” but didn’t offer any additional details.

Law enforcement distributed a sketch of a man around the rodeo they described as in his mid-twenties, 5-foot-5 to 5-foot-7. The flyer, provided to The Daily Beast by the family, said he was a suspect in the homicide.

Jennifer Tybo said she remembers her father, who has since died, telling her that when he traveled out to retrieve his mother’s body, a detective told him “they had other cases to work, like, you know, she’s not a priority.”

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When asked about this, Thomson said, “I have not seen the interaction you are describing below documented in what I have reviewed.” After examining case documents, Thomson said, it appeared there had been “a very thorough investigation, including working with federal agencies such as FBI and multiple tribal authorities.” A spokesperson for the FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Thomson added: “They just simply didn’t have the resources in regards to technology that we have, and so you can’t judge it through the lens of 2021.”

Manning, who was 36 at the time of the homicide, said in the weeks that followed, she called a detective handling the case and he gave her some names of people who may have heard or seen something related to the homicide. She started calling them herself, but repeatedly found people unwilling to talk.

About two months after Tybo’s death, desperate for answers, the family sent a letter to friends and family they knew had been in Albuquerque that weekend, as well as some tribal offices. “We now are asking for your help in finding the person who committed this terrible crime,” they wrote.

Once again, they came up short.

Thomson said she’s encouraged by what she’s found so far and hopes that maybe this time around the family will finally get some answers.

“I wouldn’t be looking into the case if there was no hope,” she told The Daily Beast.

Over the years, there’s been plenty of theories from friends and family about what happened. Some have speculated that the culprit was someone in the lobby when Tybo checked in who saw how much money she was carrying. Others have said she could have let an intruder in, thinking the person was her sister.

But what is clear is just how large of a hole Tybo left after her death. Family members described her as the one everyone looked up to and leaned on for support. She was also known for always organizing family activities, telling stories, and making delicious pies and breads.

“She was kind of our rock, I guess, that kept our family together,” said Jennifer Tybo. “And after she was gone, things just changed.”