Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (4 page)

The group was convinced that Kelly Sellers was dead, but they were not entirely sure of who had killed her or how many people may have been involved in her death. Nevertheless, they decided that the next thing they would do would be to search the mountain for her body. English Mountain is nothing more than thousands of acres of almost impassable land, with pig trails, creek beds, and hunting paths creating virtually the only access. The only clues the investigators had to go on were those given to them by Tommy Humphries, who was at best a questionable source, and who had provided only vague information about Kelly being buried near where a tree had fallen across a path. Probably thousands of places could fit that very description. With scavengers like wild pigs, raccoons, possums, and God only knows what else out on the mountain, plus the fact that the temperature was getting warmer, they needed to find her. The longer a body decomposes, the less physical evidence remains intact. Each hour is critical. Desperate, exhausted, and exasperated, the detectives decided to start the search first thing in the morning.

With the sun just breaking over the ridges of the mountains the next morning, a call came in to the sheriff’s office from an eyewitness stating that Tommy Humphries’s house had been broken into and that guns had been stolen. The eyewitness named John Blair as the culprit. For some unknown reason, Blair had given Humphries his guns and then all of a sudden wanted them back. Come to find out, Blair had also given Humphries his four-wheeler. These gifts had been bestowed at around the same time as Kelly’s disappearance. Why would Blair give Humphries all of that stuff? Was it in exchange for helping to dispose of a dead body?

Detective Mark Turner responded to the breaking-and-entering call at Tommy Humphries’s house. Mark is a grizzled ex-narcotics investigator who, because of a near-death experience with pneumonia after getting lost while hunting in the mountains, now sounds like Larry the Cable Guy. He shares Larry’s sense of humor too: the first day we met Mark, he had brought a mechanical hand that could remotely shoot us the bird, and he yelled Larry’s catchphrase “Git ’er done” every chance he got. Unfortunately, Mark couldn’t accompany us to revisit the scene because of some minor surgery he had undergone just two days before—so we “got ’er done” without him.

John Blair, now officially a wanted man, fled into the mountains—which left the investigators with a dilemma: an armed man, who they believed had already killed someone, was holed up on the very same mountain that they were searching for a dead body. It doesn’t get much worse than that. Because of the dangers involved, no one was allowed to come in and help look for Kelly except the officers. It just wasn’t safe—and the sheriff’s office would be legally responsible if anyone got hurt. Detective Mark Turner, who’d gotten the arrest warrant for Blair, began the manhunt while Matt and Jeff went to gather the four-wheelers for the search.

One of the departments’ four-wheelers was at another officer’s house about twenty miles away from English Mountain. Jeff called to alert the officer that he was coming to get it. The officer, who worked as an SRO (School Resource Officer, a law enforcement officer assigned to a school system within that agency’s jurisdiction) at the local high school, dashed home to have it ready and loaded onto the trailer when Jeff arrived. But when the officer arrived home, he could tell that something was not right. As soon as he rounded into his backyard, he noticed a pile of tools and other small equipment scattered on the ground beneath his back door. “Get over here fast,” the officer yelled into his cell phone to Jeff. “Somebody’s tried to break into my house!”

Jeff arrived within minutes to find, as reported, a slew of tools: chain saws, pressure washers, and more, just lying in the officer’s backyard. There were no signs of an actual burglary, but strangely, none of the scattered tools and equipment belonged to the SRO either. But Jeff had no time at the moment to investigate this bizarre situation; with the rest of the sheriff’s department stretched to the max, the odd case would have to wait. In the meantime, Jeff tossed the items into his truck, hooked up the trailer holding the four-wheeler, and sped back to the department, the missing Kelly Sellers weighing heavily on his mind.

If it hadn’t been for needing to turn in the found items from the SRO’s backyard, Jeff wouldn’t even have gone back to the department; he would have gone straight to English Mountain to continue the search. But instead, he found himself hurriedly unloading all of the tools, mentally cataloging them as he brought them out:
Poulan Farmhand chain saw, Skil circular saw
. . . He stopped dead in his tracks. “Poulan Farmhand chain saw,” he said aloud. That brand of chain saw is uncommon, and Jeff had only ever seen one once before—at John Blair’s house. Unbelievably, it appeared that all of the tools he had logged at Blair’s had somehow made their way to the other officer’s house. Was Blair sending a message to the sheriff’s office? Was he toying with them?

Jeff dumped the tools at the office and rushed back up to Blair’s, where several sheriff’s deputies were already stationed. “You’re not going to believe this,” Jeff yelled to the group as he got out of his truck. “I just collected all of Blair’s tools out from behind the SRO’s house.” As Jeff was unloading the four-wheeler, the deputies scratched their heads, and one of them stepped up to Jeff. “Hey, uh, I wanna show you some footprints over here,” the officer said to Jeff. Jeff and the officer walked behind the trailer, away from everyone else, to look at the prints. But it was a ruse—there were none to be seen. The officer hesitated before admitting, “Uh, I heard another one of the officers talking about coming up here and getting those tools.” Apparently, the other officer had been planning to steal the tools. “I want to know his fuckin’ name!” Jeff yelled, for all of English Mountain to hear. The officer in question turned out to be one of the ones who had been assisting at Blair’s on the night of the interrogation. Later in the day, after the tools had been discovered (but unbeknownst to the thief), the officer called the SRO to claim that he’d been kicked out of his storage unit and had left some tools behind his house for the afternoon. He’d be by later to pick them up. The SRO knew better, though, and angrily told the officer to call Jeff McCarter. The officer realized then that he was in trouble. His only response was, “Oh, shit!”

It was an appropriate response. He was immediately removed from the police force and ultimately pleaded guilty to the charge of aggravated burglary. He was made an example of and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, possibly serving as much as eight years, all for an old pressure washer and a used chain saw.

“I could have killed him,” Jeff told us as we started down one of the dead-end trails he and Matt had taken over the course of a couple of days during the search. It’s hard to imagine that anyone, especially an officer of the law, would be brazen or stupid enough to break into a presumed killer’s house, especially one who was armed and desperate, in order to steal a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of used tools. Not to mention jeopardize his career, let alone a potential capital murder case.

Later, when they finally caught Blair, the Mountain Man told them that he’d watched them, each and every one of them, as they searched over the four days and nights after he fled into the hills. He watched the officers go in and out of his house. At any time, he could have shot them with his rifle. Luckily, he wasn’t that stupid. “What if he had shot and killed the officer when he went back for those tools?” Jeff pondered aloud to us. “We wouldn’t have known what the hell had happened.”

It’s sad that Jeff, Matt, Stephanie, Mark, Michael, and all of the rest of the sheriff’s department are now marked in Sevier County courts because of the actions of one dishonest officer. Regardless of the trial or the evidence that was collected, defense attorneys still take cheap shots at the sheriff’s department whenever one of them is on the stand, calling them “crooked cops.” All of this because one guy stole some used tools. The inflammatory statements cut like knives. All of the officers grew up in Sevier County, born and bred. And everyone in the county knows better than to think these officers would do such a thing. They deserve much better, but a defense attorney’s job is to plant the seed of reasonable doubt, and no trick is too low for them to use to achieve that doubt. It’s a shame, but one bad apple does spoil the whole bunch. When that officer’s name comes up in court, they simply tell the jurors that they arrested him and prosecuted him—just as they would any other petty thief.

“That officer had balls, big uns,” Jeff quipped, while stopping the vehicle and pointing to one of the hundreds of mounds of trash that dot English Mountain. Refrigerators, couches, full-size Tacoma truck beds, and entire Edsels and other miscellaneous cars from the 1950s and 1960s fill the ravines. The mountain adjoins another Tennessee County—Cocke County, notorious nationwide for the ability of some of its inhabitants to “chop” up a car in minutes. English Mountain is one of the locations where chop shops dispose of vehicle remains, tossing them to their final resting place at the bottom of the ravines. But that’s not the only thing disposed of on the mountain. Trash pits dot the vast landscape, filled to the brim with all sorts of interesting items: refrigerators, old toys, couches, cribs, mattresses, box springs—you name it and it’s there. Coincidentally, on the day Matt and Jeff were searching for Kelly, they happened upon the still-smoldering remains of a box spring, completely charred down to the metal springs. They had noted previously that Blair had recently removed the camper shell from his truck, as if to haul something large. Maybe he’d hauled off that bed he claimed to have never had? One year later, we could still see the remains of the box spring farther down in the trash heap.

We all climbed back into our ATVs, moving toward our final destination—the site where Kelly Sellers had been found. By now, more than four hours into our mountain adventure, our asses were beginning to ache. Jeff, an avid four-wheeler enthusiast, told us that he’s raced around trails for eight hours or so, only to go home with his kidneys sore and pissing blood. Matt and Jeff ran all over the mountain for days. It might sound like fun, but it’s not. It will absolutely wear you out.

Co-author Amy Welch looking at the remains of a burned mattress.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

With nothing more tangible to go on, they started their search for Kelly from the visible truck tracks leading away from Blair’s house. Unfortunately, those tracks soon disappeared, mingling with the thousands of other hunting tracks that led in the same direction. At one point, they even brought Humphries on the trail with them, hoping he could show them where he and Blair had gone four-wheeling, thinking it might lead to where Kelly was buried. But after he led them all over the woods on tons of trails—and, for all they knew, on a wild-goose chase—they took him back and continued the search on their own. After hours and hours of searching, the two reluctantly stopped for the night, getting the only real sleep they had had in nearly seventy-two hours.

The next morning, a call came in to the sheriff’s department with a potential lead, claiming that someone had seen Kelly in a Knoxville homeless shelter thirty miles away. Even though they knew it was probably erroneous, Detective Matt Cubberley had to check it out. Ultimately, as expected, a dead end, it made for a late start in the day’s search for Kelly. Once they finally got back to the mountain, Detective Jeff McCarter, who had been all over the mountain hunting and four-wheeling numerous times before, decided to take a trail he was familiar with. By sheer happenstance, while on that trail they ran across another set of tracks that looked similar to those left around Blair’s house. They followed the tracks until they reached a curve in the road that had a big dead tree lying across it, preventing them from going forward. They could tell by the tracks that a truck had stopped and made hesitation marks near the tree, but with nightfall looming and rain beginning to beat down on them, they were forced into another tough decision and had to leave the mountain while they still could. The paths were becoming treacherous as the mountain mud began to slide down the trails. And nighttime on the mountain is completely dark, with no city lights around. Finding Kelly in these conditions would be impossible. They decided that they would pick up the trail again in the morning, beginning their search at this spot.

With each passing day, Kelly’s mother had become more and more frustrated that her little girl had not been found. She demanded to be let out on the mountain to help with the search. But with Blair out there, still running around armed and considered very dangerous, for her own safety they just couldn’t let her. Despite these warnings, however, she and two of Kelly’s uncles threw caution to the wind and decided to take their chances and go out to look for Kelly on their own.

Before Matt and Jeff could reach the search area the next day, a call came in from the water company, stating that two of their workers had seen a man resembling Blair in the woods that morning up on another part of the mountain. They’d tried to lure him into their truck with offers of food, but he’d ended up running off again. The detectives headed to the spot where Blair had been spotted, but he was nowhere to be found.