Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (5 page)

On their way back from the site they received another call—the answer to a prayer that they’d thought might never come: Kelly Sellers’s body had been found. With thousands of acres of grueling terrain to search, Kelly’s family had gone straight to where her body was buried, as if led there by the hand of God. It was on the same trail where Matt and Jeff had stopped the night before, right where they had seen the hesitation tracks by the fallen tree. A total of four days had elapsed since Kelly had last been seen alive.

The fallen tree under which Kelly Sellers’s body was found.
PHOTO BY SERGEANT DAVID ROBERTSON, COURTESY OF
SEVIER COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, TENNESSEE

What the family had spotted on the ground in daylight, just under where the roots of the overturned tree poked out, was freshly disturbed ground, and a small piece of blue tarp sticking out from the dirt. When they saw this disturbance at the base of the fallen tree, they ran to it and pulled back the exposed corner of the tarp. To their horror, an all-too-familiar cat’s-eye tattoo, just above the small of Kelly’s back, was revealed. Kelly’s mother immediately broke down and desperately wanted to claw her daughter from the grave. But the uncles, thinking on their feet, knew not to let her mess with the body until the police arrived, for fear of disturbing the crime scene.

When Jeff and Matt arrived at the base of that now infamous fallen tree, they knew that a new problem had arisen—the family. The mother was not going to leave her little girl’s side, and she made damn sure that Matt and Jeff knew it. Frankly, they didn’t blame her. Nobody would. But they had a crime scene to work; a nut with a gun was still running around on the mountain; and no one, particularly someone who had given life to this girl, should have to see what would be coming next. The uncles knew that as well. But Kelly’s mother plopped herself down on a stump and said that she refused to move until she saw them pull her daughter out of the ground. Luckily, a compromise was reached: if the uncles were allowed to stay with the detectives, the mother would wait at home. This was agreed on, and Kelly’s uncles remained nearby, leaving the experts to the most unenviable of tasks.

The first thing Matt and Jeff did at the scene was call for their crime scene truck. When they went to make the call, though, no one was left at the office to bring up the truck except the sheriff himself. However, Sheriff Bruce Montgomery, a tough old veteran of many different walks of law enforcement life, brought the truck to the mountain without hesitation and left in a squad car, never once trying to get involved with the case. Sheriff Montgomery hires good people, trains them well, and lets them do their jobs. Unfortunately, the crime scene truck couldn’t make it all the way up the dirt trails to the scene, so eventually an army truck had to be brought in to relay supplies to the top of the trail. The supplies were then carried by hand from the trail down to the burial site.

By this time, the media had heard the news of the body being found from the police scanners and had begun doing what they do best—show up on site and annoy the hell out of the police. Kelly’s mother had already seized the opportunity to use the media the day before, to vent the frustration she felt that the sheriff’s department wasn’t doing enough to find her daughter. However, Kelly’s body was found before the piece had aired, taking the wind out of the local reporter’s sails. To deal with the media onslaught, the sheriff’s department sent one of the other investigators (the one who drew the shortest straw, no doubt) down to the bottom of the mountain to keep watch and say nothing—especially because Blair was still on the loose.

Detective Mark Turner, who was still scouring the hills looking for Blair, was called back to the burial scene to help with the recovery. (Detective Stephanie McClure would miss all of the action, basking in the sun on a vacation she had planned months before this case occurred.) Detectives Matt Cubberley and Jeff McCarter worked lead on the burial recovery scene. Matt and Jeff had never worked one of these scenes, but they had the requisite experience, having been trained to unearth bodies at the outdoor anthropological research facility known as the Body Farm. For more than thirty years, this outdoor forensic laboratory has been devoted to the study of human decomposition. Over time, as the popularity of forensic science skyrocketed, the facility evolved and added human remains recovery to its repertoire. Today it is still the only place in the world where crime scene investigators can practice the proper way to identify a clandestine grave and exhume a human body. So the Sevier County CSIs were up to the challenge that this crime scene brought. Mark’s job would be to assist them; at the time of this case, he had yet to attend forensic school, though ironically, he began his training just two weeks later.

“We decided we’d do it just like an archaeological dig, just like we were taught,” Jeff began, as we examined the trowel marks that were still visible, left on the walls of the clandestine grave they had excavated exactly one year earlier. But they didn’t start working the scene by exhuming the grave, as many people might think. Most investigators desperately want to begin with the body, unearthing it from the ground as soon as possible. That’s a natural instinct, but it’s not the proper way to work a burial scene. The first thing they did was to begin their search far from Kelly’s grave. They’d learned that patience pays off, and so they started their work away from the body, working slowly toward where she lay. This was the first buried murder victim that Sevier County had ever had, at least as long as anyone could remember, but the detectives knew exactly what to do from the moment they found the body. If it hadn’t been for the training they had received, they might never have known how to proceed. Too bad for the killer that they were some of the best students we had ever had graduate from the crime scene school.

The group diligently worked toward Kelly’s body, marking evidence along the way, mixing dental stone for casting tire tracks, and photographically documenting every inch of the crime scene. They searched with such painstaking detail that they even discovered drops of blood on leaves on the ground, as well as a blood smear on a rock that was lying near the overturned tree. It took more than six hours to mark and collect all of the evidence before they even reached the spot where Kelly lay in a shallow grave. The sun had begun to set once again and darkness was creeping in fast by that time, and they had not even touched Kelly’s body yet—they knew it was going to be a long night. Generators and lights were brought in so that they could continue to work the scene meticulously, photographing, marking, measuring, scraping, sifting, digging, and collecting, one step at a time. Even Kelly’s uncles commented on how impressed they were with the crime scene team’s diligence.

Finally, at long last, they reached the buried body wrapped in the tarp. As they excavated the grave, the CSIs tried as best as they could to keep her wrapped in the tarp in order to preserve any evidence that might still be in or on it. They even tried to keep the dirt that was on top of the tarp from moving.

Several things were readily visible once they reached the body and removed it from the grave. Kelly was completely nude, bound with duct tape at her wrists and ankles. She had a few strands of hair clutched in one of her hands. The folds of the tarp matched the lividity on Kelly’s body precisely. Lividity, blood settling in the lower areas of a deceased body, sets in within thirty to forty minutes after death. Because the folds of the tarp interrupted the places where the lividity had settled, it signified to the investigators that she’d been wrapped in the tarp either before she died or within an hour after her death. She also had a large, trailing blood clot that had come from her anus. For blood clots to form and be expelled, an individual must be alive, even only just minimally (as when the heart still beats for several minutes after a fatal trauma has occurred). Both of these observations indicated that she had more than likely been buried alive or at the very least, not long after her death. Once the detectives completed working their scene, they placed Kelly’s body in a body bag and, at the request of her uncles, allowed them to assist in transporting her off the mountain.

Sevier County CSIs recovering the body of Kelly Sellers.
PHOTO BY SERGEANT DAVID ROBERTSON, COURTESY OF
SEVIER COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, TENNESSEE

The postmortem examination conducted by the local medical examiner concluded that Kelly had been struck with a baseball bat—an odd finding for an ME, to narrow it down so specifically. Medical examiners are trained to generalize and not specify, especially without photographic certainty as proof of what they are concluding. Most use phrases such as “blunt force trauma” to describe an injury indicating that something robust, such as a bat, was used. Therefore, the ME’s conclusion just did not sit well with Detective Matt Cubberley, particularly because no murder weapon had yet been discovered. Armed with this information, he decided to call in another expert, Dr. James Downs, medical examiner with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, whom he had met through the forensic school. Dr. Downs was eager to lend his expertise and asked to see the autopsy photos. On reviewing the photographs, Dr. Downs concluded that it was definitely blunt force trauma, but in his opinion the wounds appeared to have been created by something with a broader surface area than a baseball bat—if he had to guess, something more akin to a brick or a large rock. (They tested the rock found lying near the grave with a blood smear on it, but it did not match the wounds on Kelly’s body, so it was determined not to be the murder weapon.)

Matt also asked about the lividity that he had observed, and Dr. Downs agreed with what they had surmised all along—that there was a possibility of Kelly’s having been buried alive. He went on to state that in his medical opinion, however, between the amount of blood she had lost and the brutal trauma to her skull, she could not have lived with the injuries she had sustained. The rest of the examination determined that Kelly had also been violently raped vaginally, as well as anally, before her death.

Right after the body had been removed from the grave site, a call came in that Blair had been sighted on the backside of English Mountain, in Cocke County, Tennessee. Detective Derrick Woods, another graduate of the forensic academy, received the call and went to investigate, along with a couple of good ol’ bloodhounds. Detectives Mark Turner and Jeff McCarter also received the call and rushed to the scene. The search team met up at the little mom-and-pop market to get ready to go out into the woods to conduct the manhunt. While they were all standing around, Jeff heard someone stirring in the woods. “Shhh, quiet,” he whispered to the group. It was none other than John Wayne Blair, the man who had eluded them for several days. Blair yelled out to the investigators, telling them he would come out if they would just keep the dogs away from him. It turned out that Blair was terrified of dogs. So they restrained the barking hounds, and a very haggard, very weary Blair exited the woods with his hands above his head. They immediately grabbed and cuffed him, and within seconds he began acting bizarrely, pecking around like a bird, talking crazy, possibly attempting to lay the groundwork for an insanity defense. Blair was arrested, read his rights, and transported to the Sevier County Sheriff’s Office, where they warmed him up and gave him something to eat.