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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