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on their own.
    Before Matt and Jeff could reach the search area the next day, a call came in from the water company, stating that two of their workers had seen a man resembling Blair in the woods that morning up on another part of the mountain. They’d tried to lure him into their truck with offers of food, but he’d ended up running off again. The detectives headed to the spot where Blair had been spotted, but he was nowhere to be found.
    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