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

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