Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators Read Online Free PDF Page A

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,”