Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (3 page)

“Do not move! Do not fuckin’ move!” Hodges bellowed as he put his knee between Humphries’s legs and removed the weapon from the man’s back pocket. After clearing the weapon and putting it in his car, he told Humphries, “Okay, now we can talk.”

“What I’ve got to say, you won’t believe,” Tommy went on to tell Hodges, “but I ain’t telling you here.” Humphries was worried about his children. “My babies are up the street at a friend’s house. You get ’em off the mountain and then you and I can have a conversation.” Hodges asked him if the conversation would end up in his having to call a mortuary. Humphries replied, “I guarantee it.”

Hodges was now confronted with two people who intimately knew Kelly: one acting very suspicious and the other willing to spill his guts about what was starting to look more and more like a murder. Frankly, he didn’t trust either of them, but he had to play the hand he was dealt. So Hodges assured Humphries that he would make sure his kids were safe and that he would ride with him back to the sheriff’s office, where they would talk. After Hodges accompanied Humphries to the friend’s house to check on the children, they left for the sheriff’s office. Once they were far enough off the mountain for cell phone reception, Sergeant Hodges immediately phoned Detective Matt Cubberley in what was now the middle of the night.

Cubberley recalls, “I knew it was no lark when Hodges called and woke me up; when I arrived, Humphries and Hodges were both already back at the office.” Cubberley is a big fellow (they call him “Box Head”) who never shies away from the limelight. This case would turn out to be the biggest of his career. According to Cubberley, Humphries paced anxiously, not saying a word to anyone, traditionally the motions of a guilty man. He was awaiting news that his children had made it to their destination and were safely off the mountain. Once that call finally came in, Humphries spilled his guts, as if he had been holding back a flood.

“Party. That’s what we do,” he began. “Party, smoke dope, and ride four-wheelers.” According to Humphries, the Friday before Kelly disappeared was supposed to be another day of the same—dope smoking and four-wheeling along with Blair. But Blair never called Humphries to make those plans. After waiting several hours, Tommy finally called John to see what was up. “I’m too tired to party,” Blair told him over the phone. A very strange comment from a guy who was
never
too tired to party. Humphries said that Kelly was supposed to be there too, and he just assumed that Blair was “getting some” from her. So like any good partier, he simply went somewhere else on the mountain to smoke some dope.

The next day, Humphries and Blair had lunch at the local market and then drove back to John’s trailer to hang out. As they stood in the driveway getting ready to go inside, Blair asked Humphries if he could keep a secret—a really big secret. And that’s when he dropped the bomb. “I had to pop her.” Before he could even ask why, Humphries claimed John said that “Kelly came to his house wanting pills and raising mortal hell, threatening to turn the whole fuckin’ mountain in for selling dope if he did not give her some pills.” Blair went on to give some details, saying that he had killed Kelly in his double-wide trailer and had buried her up on the mountain, right where a tree had fallen, using the upturned roots as the cover for her body. Humphries finished his story by telling the investigators he
had
noticed that Blair’s house had smelled very strongly of bleach that morning.

We visited English Mountain on the one-year anniversary of Kelly Sellers’s disappearance. The crime scene investigators who had worked the case had obtained a couple of all-terrain vehicles to transport all of us up the mountain, back to the scene of the crime. We convened with them at the English Mountain grocery store. For the CSIs who worked the case, this spot had been base camp for several days—the one small link between civilization and the English Mountain backcountry. Before heading out, Sergeant Hodges and the rest of the crew told war stories about recent experiences dealing with the criminal element in and around Sevier County. After keeping us in stitches for more than thirty minutes with a tale of a big ol’ girl trying to “crunk” (that’s Sevier Countyan for
crank
) her car with a straightedge screwdriver, we finally rolled our vehicles off the trailers and prepared for our ascent up the mountain.

As Detective Matt Cubberley told us, not knowing if Humphries was for real, he wasn’t sure whether to arrest him. But his gut told him that Tommy was telling the truth, at least in part, and even if they eventually had to go after him as a co-conspirator, as it stood, the only evidence they had at all was what Humphries was telling them. For the moment, it was good enough.

Sevier County Sheriff’s Office, Tennessee, personnel: Jeff McCarter,
Stephanie McClure, Matthew Cubberley, and Michael Hodges
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

“That’s when I called in Stephanie and Jeff to help,” Matt told us, as we stopped in front of Blair’s house, the M16 warning still mocking us from the front door. Detective Jeff McCarter was in charge of processing the scene. He’s the elder statesman of the group and, unlike Matt, avoids the media at all costs by scowling at everyone like a mad dog (though he’s actually a big teddy bear whom his NFA classmates nicknamed “Buttercup”). Detective McCarter and Detective Stephanie McClure convened at the sheriff’s office, where Matt caught them up to speed on what they had so far, ran priors on Blair, and had Humphries retell his story on tape so that Stephanie could write up a thorough and airtight search warrant—her specialty—for John Wayne Blair’s house. Stephanie is the sugar of the CSI unit—the quintessential southern belle who looks and talks like Elly May Clampett. But don’t let her charm fool you; she is as tough as nails and can cuss like a sailor. Once Jeff mapped in the coordinates to his GPS, we continued up one of the paths they thought might have been the one Blair took to dispose of Kelly’s body.

“Blair had a prior conviction as a sex offender,” Matt continued, as we bumped along the rocky terrain. Years earlier, while living in Florida, John Blair had kidnapped a girl, bound her with duct tape, and raped her. Ultimately he let her go and didn’t kill her; she later testified against him at trial, and he served twelve years for his crimes. The detectives looked at each other, astonished, when they read the report. It seemed easy to imagine that Blair would’ve decided that letting the girl go had been a mistake—if he had killed her, she couldn’t have testified against him, and he wouldn’t have gone to prison. All signs indicated that he probably didn’t make the same mistake twice.

With an airtight search warrant hot off the press, the three-person crime scene team gathered their supplies and drove to Blair’s house in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Blair answered the door smug and confident and signed the consent-to-search form regardless of the warrant, giving them total access to the entire premises. The team had already determined that Stephanie and Matt would “good cop/bad cop” Blair while Jeff, the seasoned veteran, would work the crime scene.

Jeff had prepared for the task at hand by gathering equipment from their relatively new crime scene truck. After coming through the forensic studies program and realizing how far behind the Sevier County crime scene unit was in some areas, the investigators had formally requested new and better forensic supplies. They had needed to seriously upgrade their equipment, and happily they’d had the sheriff’s complete support in doing so. They were able to procure the funds to buy and equip a fully stocked crime scene truck.

On his first of many trips to the truck, Jeff was told by one of the patrol officers that there wouldn’t be any evidence to find because it had all burned up in the fire. Jeff, being a sly old dog, simply said, “There’s always evidence, if you know where and how to look for it.” The training that he’d received had taught him how to do just that.

Jeff began working the scene, culling through the bedroom that, oddly enough, didn’t appear to contain a bed or any other kind of sleeping materials in it whatsoever. When Matt and Stephanie confronted Blair about that oddity, Blair simply claimed, “I always sleep on the couch.” Back in the living room, Matt continued to interview John Blair, hoping for a confession. Stephanie went back and forth between the two areas, assisting Jeff in the bedroom and playing “good cop” when talking to Blair in the living room.

After several minutes of conversation, “bad cop” Matt got right to the point and called Blair a rapist to his face, agitating him, trying to do anything to get Blair to confess. At one point during the interview they even persuaded Blair to put his boots on and told him that they should all just go and find Kelly. But just before he seemed ready to get up and go outside with them, Blair became upset and called them sick bastards. “I did not kill her,” he insisted. Up until that point, none of the investigators had said anything about her being dead, just missing—a point they made very clear to Blair.

Because the residence had paper-thin walls, Jeff could hear every word being said while he worked the scene. He would hear John Blair say something ludicrous and he would holler out, egging him on. “Keep talking, you son of a bitch; I’m finding all kinds of shit in here.” But the evidence wasn’t overwhelming. In the overly bleached-out and burned-out residence, the amount of evidence collected was minimal.

Jeff cut the carpet from the bedroom into square sections, methodically removing each one and checking on its underside. On the bottom of one section, he found what appeared to be a very small drop of blood, not much bigger than the end of a cotton swab. It was so small that he did not do a presumptive test to determine if it was blood on the carpet for fear of ruining the tiny sample for future analysis. He simply cut it out and collected it to send to the lab.

Normally in a case such as this, more than one CSI would be working the scene. But because Jeff’s forte was evidence, he handled it by himself, walking from the crime scene truck to the bedroom, each time passing through the living room where Blair was being interrogated. On one of his trips from the truck, he came back into the trailer with a shovel and handed it to Blair. “Here, John, I’ve got another one just like it in the truck, let’s you and me go dig her up.” “You’re a sick motherfucker,” Blair responded. Jeff then said to Blair’s face, “You let the first girl live and she told on you, so you killed this one so she couldn’t.” At that, Blair went berserk, cursing the CSI trio more and calling them all “sick bastards.”

Jeff continued to work, finding blood in two other rooms of the house. A blood smear was found on a mop bucket inside the trailer alongside a ridiculous amount of cleaning supplies, including several empty bottles of a CSI’s worst nightmare and a killer’s best friend—bleach. A pair of Blair’s rubber boots, which were sitting by the door, had tiny blood drops on them, and another small drop of blood was found on the door.

In one of the rooms in the mobile home, Jeff discovered a plethora of both large and small hand tools. Though not obviously connected to the crime scene, the presence of these assorted tools was unusual enough that Jeff took the time to log each and every serial number, in case any of them had been reported stolen. (Later, when he had someone back at the office run the serial numbers, none did turn out to have been reported; but then again, nobody trades a chain saw for pills and then reports it to the police.) With all of the evidence collected, the interior of the scene was complete. Jeff then turned his focus to processing Blair’s truck for potential evidence. He had noticed earlier that Blair had recently pressure-washed the entire truck—so forcefully, in fact, that flecks of red paint were all over the ground where the pressure washer had torn them off. The vehicle had been cleaned from top to bottom, and Blair had clearly spent a lot of time on the truck bed, washing the water out the back with the tailgate down. But Jeff thoroughly worked the truck, and as spotless as the truck looked, he still found a tiny speck of blood on the underside of the tailgate—apparently the only place on the entire truck that Blair had missed.

Despite the blood evidence, it was still not enough to arrest Blair. Without sending the blood to a lab for analysis, they could not prove that the blood was Kelly Sellers’s. Furthermore, it is not against the law to have a clean house, even one that does smell strongly of bleach; or a clean truck, even if it has been pressure-washed to hell; or even a bedroom without a bed. It’s not even necessarily against the law to have a few drops of blood on the floor. Although it was certainly suspicious, all they knew for sure was that they had a missing adult and a few spots of blood in the house of the last person who had presumably seen her. So, without other options, after they had exhausted their search and interrogation, they reluctantly left Blair at his house and drove immediately down the road to Kelly’s house to procure hair samples from a hairbrush in order to begin matching the DNA evidence. While they were there, they witnessed John Blair drive down the mountain in a little beater of a car. (He couldn’t drive his truck because the assisting patrol officer had flattened his tires—an old trick to help slow down a suspect from fleeing the scene.) Frustrated, they couldn’t do anything but watch Blair drive away. “There he goes,” Jeff murmured to the others. “We’ll never see that son of a bitch again.”