As the 1980s got into full swing and Tammy Lynn Leppert turned 18, the model and actress who starred alongside Al Pacino had the world at her feet. 

But the Florida-born starlet’s rise to fame was abruptly stopped in 1983 when she vanished from Cocoa Beach.

Over forty years have passed, yet there has been no trace of Tammy Lynn. Her family and friends are still troubled by the unsettling events in her life during her last months, which were overshadowed by growing paranoia.

After her disappearance, Tammy Lynn’s friends shared that the actress had become increasingly ‘afraid’ and seemed like ‘someone else’ after witnessing something upsetting at a party held by the cast of the movie Spring Break, a comedy directed by Sean S. Cunningham.

Her anxiety grew so strong that during her significant role in the gangster film Scarface, where she appeared as a bikini-wearing girl meant to distract a lookout, Tammy fled the set in tears after witnessing the actors perform a violent scene.

After the incident, she quit the film altogether and moved back home with her mother.  

While film fans may not remember Tammy Lynn’s fledgling career, they will likely recognise the bikini body used to promote Spring Break, which is thought to be her torso and legs.

Tammy Lynn Leppert began modeling in beauty pageants at the age of four, taking home 280 crowns from the 300 pageants she entered. 

Tammy Lynn Leppert, from Rockledge, Florida, who appeared in the film Scarface, was convinced someone was trying to kill her when she vanished

Throughout her teenage years she worked primarily as a model before dipping her toes into acting shortly before she went missing.   

And her star was rising fast after landing the role of a boxer in the 1983 comedy Spring Break – before a fateful cast party after filming had wrapped changed the course of her life forever.

Tammy Lynn attended the party unaccompanied but, according to her friend Wing Flannagan, she came home ‘a different person’.   

She refused to divulge exactly what she saw on the night of the party, but kept insisting ‘they’ would come after her. She also refused to eat or drink out of fear that she would be poisoned.

In the weeks following her departure from Scarface, Tammy Lynn’s mental health began to decline even further. She reportedly smashed all the windows of her house with a baseball bat when she was locked out, in a frantic panic to get back in. 

Her mother, Linda Curtis, who was a theatrical and modeling agent and guided Tammy’s career, saw the change in her daughter and has since revealed she expressed fears that someone was trying to kill her. 

Linda recalled: ‘Then she said Mom, what would you say if I told you somebody was trying to kill me. I just took a deep breath, and I said, ‘do you think somebody’s trying to kill you, Tammy?’ She said, ‘yes.’ 

Linda checked her daughter into a mental health facility, where an evaluation revealed that Tammy was not abusing drugs or alcohol.

It was also determined Tammy did not suffer from any significant mental illness and she was released after a 72-hour observation.

She insisted that Tammy should report her safety concerns to the police, however even though she did go to the police she did not mention that she felt her life was in danger. 

For two weeks Tammy went into isolation at home, staying in her room and getting people to test her food to see if it had been poisoned. A frightened Linda was unsure if her daughter’s fears were paranoid delusions or real concerns. 

Tammy was a promising model and actress at the start of her career when she disappeared without a trace from Cocoa Beach in 1983, after months of intense paranoia that someone was out to get her

She was most recognisable for the small role she played in the iconic 1983 movie Al Pacino flick Scarface, in which she played a bikini-clad girl who distracted a lookout car

However on the fourth day of filming Tammy became hysterical on set after witnessing a fake murder scene, she broke down in tears and was taken to her trailer

She was adamantly insisting that she had ‘seen something awful, that she was not supposed to see’ at the Spring Break cast party.

However things took an even more bizarre turn when Tammy left her house without brushing her hair, which her mother found to be out of character, to meet a male friend, Keith Roberts.

Tammy and Keith drove to the local beach where, according to Detective Jim Skragg of the Cocoa Beach, Florida Police Department, they started to argue.  

Keith told authorities he left Tammy in the car park at the Glass Bank building in Cocoa Beach, near an Exxon gas station on State Road A1A, which was about five miles from her house.  

According to Detective Skragg, it was the last time she would be seen alive.

When her daughter never returned home, Linda made a missing person report to police on July 11, 1983.

According to the police report, she was wearing a blue shirt with floral appliques, a blue denim skirt, carrying a gray purse and wearing flip-flops. 

In the days after her disappearance, local newspaper Florida Today ran a front page article with the headline Have You Seen Tammy-Lynn?

It’s been reported that Tammy’s body was used for the poster of the 1983 movie Spring Break

The actress’s friend Wing Flannagan claimed Tammy had become ‘fearful and paranoid’ after she attended a cast party for the film Spring Break (pictured) and she reportedly witnessed something disturbing

Keith gave an interview in which he said Tammy Lynn had called him and asked him to pick her up on the day she went missing. 

She asked to borrow $300 and they fought because he would not drive her to a friend’s home in Fort Lauderdale.

He said: ‘At that point, she said, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ So I just said ‘OK, whatever you want’ and that’s the last time I saw her.’ 

After getting out of the car Tammy Lynn walked a short distance to a local petrol station where she made three frantic telephone calls to her aunt Ginger Kolsch, who never answered the phone. 

Tammy Lynn’s sister Suzanne previously said she thought Tammy might have been three months pregnant at the time of her disappearance but this was never confirmed. 

Meanwhile her friends told police that they thought she had run away because she was unhappy with her home life.  

Linda claimed she didn’t believe her daughter ‘ran away,’ as she had made plans to go to Hollywood for three months to shoot films. 

This theory strengthened when shortly after Tammy’s disappeared, the Cocoa Beach police received a call from an anonymous woman claiming to know Tammy, who said she was ‘alive and well’.

She insisted that the actress had chosen to abandon her life and was attending school to become a nurse. 

Some other rumours that circulated suggested that Tammy might have been a victim of a serial killer.  

Vampire rapist John Crutchley, suspected of killing 30 women, moved to Brevard County in 1983. However in 2002, Crutchley committed suicide while in prison. 

A second suspect was Christopher Bernard Wilder, a roaming serial killer who had killed at least 12 women between California and Florida in early 1984. 

Wilder lured his victims by telling them that he was a photographer for a magazine. He was killed by police when he resisted arrest.

Linda passed away on October 4, 1995 at the age of 54, never knowing what had happened to her daughter. 

To this day, 42 years on, Tammy Lynn remains missing and police have no new leads over her disappearance.