Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators by Jarrett Hallcox, Amy Welch Read Free Book Online

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