Behind the Yellow Tape Page 4
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.
Sevier County’s Detective Mark Turner and Cocke County’s Detective Derrick Woods
escort John Wayne Blair from the woods upon capture.
PHOTO BY SERGEANT DAVID ROBERTSON, COURTESY OF
SEVIER COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, TENNESSEE
When Blair finished eating his food, the investigators interrogated him. He again started with the crazy act, sitting in the corner, looking wild-eyed all around the room, talking to himself. They continued to question him about Kelly Sellers. Blair never asked for an attorney, but he never admitted to killing Kelly either. He repeated the story he’d told Sergeant Hodges days earlier, that he’d been with her that Friday night and then had taken her home. But, as would become a theme, Blair accused Tommy Humphries of being the culprit, claiming that he was the one who had killed Kelly.
Indeed, Tommy did seem to know a lot of details about Kelly’s disappearance, not to mention where she had been buried. Later, after Blair’s arrest and subsequent incarceration, a jailhouse snitch informed the CSIs that Blair had told him that Humphries had killed Kelly, going into great detail, even saying that she had miraculously sat up in the back of Humphries’s truck as he drove her body up the mountain to bury her. Tommy Humphries, however, to the chagrin of the defense, passed a lie detector test with flying colors, scoring as high as one possibly can on the truth scale when questions about Kelly’s death were asked. But killers typically talk about their deeds—they cannot help it—and Blair’s statements to the snitch seemed very truthful. He probably portrayed how the events of Kelly’s death unfolded accurately, with one major omission: He left out the part where he was the culprit, not Tommy.
At one point during Blair’s interrogation, Matt and Jeff went back into a “good cop/bad cop” routine, showing Blair a picture of Kelly as she had been alive. The picture that they used was her driver’s license photo. It had been inexplicably mailed to them, from an anonymous source, while they were hunting for Blair. They asked him if that was Kelly in the picture, and he answered, “Yes, she’s my friend.” Then they showed a picture of her lying dead and bloody in the tarp, and asked him why he had done that to her. He tore up the second picture, threw it down on the floor, and called them all crazy. That’s when he finally decided to ask for an attorney. He paused just enough from his insanity act to realize that he was in trouble.
Once Blair was behind bars, the CSIs got to work on their case for court, submitting the evidence that they had collected to the lab for analysis. The investigators wanted to match the hairs found in Kelly’s hand to John Blair. Unfortunately, there were no roots attached to the shafts of hair she had pulled out. Therefore, the only test the lab could run was a mitochondrial DNA profile and not a full comparison. Although a full DNA profile could have narrowed the sample down to one particular person, the mitochondrial profile can narrow the population down significantly only to a familial DNA type on a mother’s side of the family. The results that came back from the lab could not say that the hairs in Kelly’s hand were specifically John Blair’s, but they did show that the hairs definitely came from someone in John’s immediate family (his mother or brother), which certainly helped whittle down the field of suspects.
Laboratory analysis also confirmed that all of the blood found at Blair’s house—the blood on the bucket, the door, the carpet, and the back of the truck bed—was indeed Kelly Sellers’s blood. The investigators also matched the tire tracks found at the burial scene to the tires on Blair’s truck, but they could only say it was the same tread and not the exact same tire. The tires were too new to have any distinguishing characteristics of wear. With the totality of the physical evidence; the suspect’s having fled, armed, into the mountains; and the previous similar case Blair had been convicted of in Florida, all signs seemed to point to John Wayne Blair as Kelly Sellers’s killer. But it would ultimately be up to a jury to decide.
The prosecution was convinced that the physical evidence, particularly the mitochondrial DNA evidence, would stand on its own in court, proving beyond a reasonable doubt to the jury that John Blair had killed Kelly Sellers. The defense’s main argument for Blair’s innocence was that while incarcerated, John had told a fellow inmate and a jailer what he claimed was the real story of what happened on the night Kelly was murdered. Blair’s story, of course, continued to be that Tommy Humphries was responsible for Kelly’s death, though he now offered many more details, including that he and Humphries had both been high on hallucinogens, and that they had both had sex with Kelly. But he also continued to claim no involvement with her death. And although evidence showed that Kelly had been sexually assaulted, no bodily fluids or fingerprints were found on her body to single out either man. The only evidence implicating another person was the hairs she had clenched in her hand.
The prosecution used the FBI’s mitochondrial laboratory to have the hair evidence analyzed and presented in court. The analysis stretched the protocol of mitochondrial analysis beyond the bounds of the traditional testing. It would be not only the first time that mitochondrial evidence was ever admitted in a Sevier County courtroom, but the first time that this advanced type of analysis had ever been admitted as evidence in any courtroom anywhere.
The totality of the evidence against Blair convinced the twelve-person jury that he was guilty of first-degree murder for the rape, torture, and death of Kelly Sellers. They deliberated for only four hours. If not for the painstaking care the crime scene investigators had taken looking for the evidence at the scene, the case might not have turned out the same. Circumstantial evidence can take a case only so far, and eyewitness testimony would have ended with two English Mountaineers pointing fingers at one another. In the age of the CSI Effect, jurors have come to expect hard evidence and scientific analysis to connect a suspect to a crime scene. The Sevier County investigators gave the jury just that.
After John Blair’s conviction, the jury still had to decide on what sentence he would serve for his horrific crime. Throughout the trial, doctors informed the jury about Blair’s mental condition, placing his IQ at or below seventy—the score of someone considered to have mild retardation. His mother also testified in court about the abuse he had endured when he was a child. Included in her testimony were ta
les of beatings by his father, a Ku Klux Klan member who forbade John to attend church or school. John Wayne Blair had only a third-grade education. The jury was also informed of Blair’s previous conviction in Florida for sexual battery and the fact that he was a registered sex offender. The sentencing testimony ended with Blair’s mother in tears, begging the jury to spare her son’s life.
After just a short time, the jury brought back a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, sparing Blair’s life. In a very unusual act, Blair addressed the jury, thanking them for not giving him the death penalty and further saying “I know I’m not going to hell for killing anybody; I didn’t.” On March 17, 2007, Blair was moved from the Sevier County Jail to the Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex—the same facility where the infamous James Earl Ray, assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., remained until his death. Within four days of being admitted to his new residence, he was assaulted, supposedly for a comment he made about another inmate’s girlfriend—proof yet again that there is at least some honor among thieves.
Today, a small wooden cross marks the place where Kelly Sellers’s body was found. It’s a simple monument, two sticks tied together with a small piece of brown twine, in remembrance of where Kelly was removed from her earthen tomb. A sun-faded soft drink can marks the top of the trailhead leading down to the rudimentary memorial. When we visited the site, with the sun permeating magnificently through the trees, it marked the one-year anniversary of Kelly Sellers’s murder. The experience was sobering, to say the least.