January 14–21, 1999

city beat

The Magazine Story

The Tammy Pierce

As large as it is, the world is not a very big place. Last week, in the first part of “The Kimberly Conundrum,” City Paper wrote about an effort to label John Lambert a serial killer. The effort included linking the April 1996 murder of Tammy Pierce, a 28-year-old woman from Fishtown, to Lambert, son of a university doctor and a Center City lawyer.

There is no evidence that Lambert had any involvement in that crime.

But he apparently did know the Pierce family.

Tammy’s sister, Darlene Delange, says she became close friends with John Lambert after the two met in a Roxborough drug rehab center in 1996.

“Oh my god, this is blowing my mind,” Delange said last week after seeing Lambert’s picture in City Paper. “We became very close.”

Delange says that she was in the Salvation Army’s Roxborough drug treatment center for all of 1996. Lambert, according to a source close to the case, was in the rehab center from January to the middle of June 1996 — the same period as four of the alleged serial killings.

Delange says that Lambert, whom she described as “a nice-looking guy who all the girls liked,” spent hours telling stories about his wild life in Center City that included a fancy apartment, rampant sex and drugs, and even a star turn in Philadelphia Magazine.

“He would show me a copy of the magazine and tell me it was him,” says Delange. “He would tell me all these stories, but I thought he was full of shit.”

Delange says Lambert never mentioned Kimberly Ernest and did not seem to be violent.

“He was so freaking skinny, he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag,” says Delange. “I never heard his name in conjunction with my sister’s murder.”

Delange says she and Lambert also spent hours reading and discussing the Bible.“I still have his Bible,” she says. “When he gave it to me, I knew he was never coming back to the rehab center.”

There is one more strange coincidence, says Delange.

“I know Len Wise,” says Delange. “He is from my neighborhood. My brothers used to hang with the Wises. Richie knew my whole family.”

-Howard Altman