When a man vanishes on Christmas Day in 2015, his family’s alarm bells go off, and authorities launch an investigation that reveals a web of violence and a grisly scene in Cherokee National Forest. View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-accomplices Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @parkpredators | @audiochuckTwitter: @ParkPredators | @audiochuckFacebook: /ParkPredators | /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck
Chapter 1: What is the obscure case discussed in this episode?
Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Ilya D'Ambra, and the case I'm going to unpack today is one that I imagine very few of you have ever heard of. It's a story about one man's terrible death, but it's also a tale about a group of people's decisions to make a series of bad choices that ultimately led to murder and their own demise.
This case is so obscure that I could not have covered it without access to the police reports. Thanks to some digging and a helpful chat with one of the investigators who worked the case, as well as the victim's closest relatives, I got a hold of all the information I needed, and I think I've crafted what is probably the most comprehensive telling of this story to date.
It happened in 2015 in Tennessee's Cherokee National Forest, which is a roughly 650,000-acre tract of public land divided by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The National Forest butts up to other national forests in neighboring states like Virginia and North Carolina. And if you've ever been there, then you know this is a special and beautiful place.
A stretch of the Appalachian Trail cuts through it and there are some really spectacular wooded areas that lead to panoramic views, quiet creeks, serene rivers, and several waterfalls. You can camp, go rafting in seven whitewater rivers, meander on scenic drives, or stay at one of the many campgrounds.
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Chapter 2: How did the investigation into Christopher West's disappearance begin?
On Wednesday, January 27th, 2016, a detective corporal with the Kingsport Police Department in Tennessee named Martin Taylor was on his desk phone speaking with a woman named Melissa. Melissa told Martin that she was worried. She hadn't heard from her brother, 39-year-old Christopher West, since December 1st, 2015, nearly two months earlier. And it wasn't like he'd only been absent from her life.
To Melissa's knowledge, Christopher hadn't contacted any of his family members or friends since that date, which Melissa indicated to Martin was unusual. Martin told Melissa that he and his colleagues would investigate what was going on and open a missing persons case for Christopher. However, in the back of Martin's mind, he couldn't shake a sinking feeling.
You see, just one day earlier, on January 26th, another detective from his department had shared with him that a confidential informant for KPD had reported a possible murder of a man in Kingsport. That murder had apparently happened in December 2015.
Martin understood this information had come secondhand from a CI who wasn't one of his, so he wasn't sure how legit the story was without doing some further investigating. He also had no way of knowing if the alleged murder victim his colleague claimed the CI was talking about was connected to his missing persons case. But call it a cop's instinct because Martin definitely had his suspicions.
Chapter 3: Who was involved in the murder plot against Christopher West?
According to police reports, between January 26th and January 27th, he started poking around and speaking with some other detectives at KPD. What he learned was that the CI who'd contacted his colleague was a local woman named Andrea Mullins. Andrea's story was that on January 16th, 2016, she'd picked up her 28-year-old daughter, Amanda LaForce, from jail in nearby Sullivan County.
And while they were driving, they'd talked in the car. Amanda confessed to her mom that she, her boyfriend, Tim McEachern, and another one of her friends named Crystal Lane had killed a man on Christmas Day at Crystal's apartment in Kingsport.
According to what Amanda told her mom, sometime in mid-December, Crystal had disclosed to her and Tim that a guy who went by the nickname Smurf had sexually assaulted her. Crystal's claim had upset Amanda and Tim so much that together, the trio had come up with a plan to retaliate against Smurf for the assault.
Amanda told her mom that on Christmas Day, she and Crystal had asked Smurf to come to Crystal's apartment under the guise that the three of them would have sex together as a group. When he arrived, though, the women and Tim ambushed him, tied him up with duct tape, beat him, and killed him. Afterwards, they transported Smurf's body to a national park.
To make sure he wasn't found, they set him on fire and rolled him several hundred feet down an embankment. After that, they drove a little further down the road and discarded Smurf's backpack and set his clothing on fire. Then they spent several days cleaning up Crystal's apartment to remove evidence of what they'd done.
Now, Andrea's story was pretty wild and KPD detectives were initially a bit wary of taking it at face value because when questioned further, she'd indicated she wasn't even sure if the information was true. Plus, she couldn't provide investigators with Smurf's true identity or a specific location of where his body allegedly had been dumped.
But authorities couldn't just sit on this information and do nothing. So despite not having a body and only Andrea's word to go on, Martin and two other detectives decided to dig a bit further into the four people who were supposedly involved in this situation. They uncovered that Smurf was in fact an alias for Christopher West.
And he'd been a confidential informant in a recent KPD homicide investigation. He also had a criminal record in Kingsport dating back to 2012 for everything from drugs to theft to shoplifting. According to a news release issued by KPD, Christopher was described as having short brown buzzed hair, brown eyes, a thin mustache, goatee, and weighed 160 pounds.
At the time, authorities couldn't find a permanent address for him, but they did say a noticeable feature was a blue rose tattoo in the middle of the back of his neck. Amanda LaForse, Andrea's daughter, had a criminal history too, and her boyfriend, 44-year-old Tim McEachern, also had a few run-ins with the law.
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Chapter 4: How did police gather evidence and testimonies regarding the case?
According to police reports, she agreed to chat, but immediately denied any involvement in a murder and said she'd never been sexually assaulted by Smurf, aka Christopher West. When investigators pressed her about what she'd been doing on Christmas Day 2015, she explained that she'd had Christopher, Amanda, Tim, and two other men over at her place.
But at some point that evening, Christopher had left with Amanda and one of the other guys to go buy drugs. Shortly after that, she said Tim left too, and about an hour later, everyone returned to her apartment except Christopher. She told authorities she didn't know where he was or if anything had happened to him.
The best she could do was give them the names of a few people she knew he hung around with. Investigators also asked Crystal if they could search her apartment and she agreed. Then they ended the interview. And I imagine hope that more information would come to light as they kept working.
The next day, January 28th, Detective Martin Taylor spoke with an incarcerated friend of Christopher's named Larry, who told them that he was really worried something bad had happened to Christopher. Larry said that his wife would get a call from Christopher on a daily basis, but she had not heard from him since 10 p.m. on Christmas Day.
There had also been no recent activity on Christopher's Facebook profile, which was also something Larry said was out of the norm. Around the same time police were getting that information from Larry, they'd gone to Crystal's apartment and searched it for forensic evidence that might be related to a homicide.
According to police reports, amongst all the junk and mess laying around, they found a reddish brown stain, which they believed could be blood. That same day, they connected with Melissa, Christopher's sister, and one of his friends who provided them with two phone numbers for him.
Detectives traced those numbers, but unfortunately, the ping data could only show them that the phones associated with those numbers were turned off and had been for a while. Authorities couldn't determine where the devices had last been used or who Christopher had last contacted.
From reading the source material, it seems like the phone numbers he had might have belonged to prepaid phones because one police report stated that one of the numbers was due to expire in January 2016, which makes me think Christopher probably didn't have a standard cell phone situation.
Anyway, investigators also learned from speaking with that friend who'd given them one of Christopher's numbers that he'd sent them a Facebook message at 10.04 p.m. on Christmas night, wishing them a happy holiday. After that, the friend hadn't heard from Christopher again and said that he'd stopped responding to their messages altogether.
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Chapter 5: What gruesome details emerged about Christopher West's murder?
That same day, the police department got a call from a neighboring sheriff's office in Virginia that told them Amanda LaForse's brother was reporting that she'd confessed to killing Christopher. So if you're keeping track, Amanda's brother and her mother, Andrea, are both saying that Amanda had spoken about committing a murder sometime in December 2015.
The one person who KPD investigators hadn't spoke with yet or been contacted about was Tim McEachern. So Detective Martin Taylor decided to run a bit of a ruse to see if he could get Tim to willingly come into the police department for an interview, but just not tell him exactly what it was about.
Martin's pitch to Tim over the phone was that he wanted to talk to him about a report of a stolen vehicle. Tim voluntarily came in to talk with authorities, but after a few minutes, the focus of his interview shifted from a discussion about a stolen car to Christopher West being missing.
According to police reports, Tim told detectives that the last time he'd seen Christopher was on December 25th at Crystal's apartment. He said that Amanda and Crystal had arranged to have group sex with Christopher and Tim, but Christopher apparently hadn't been told that another guy was gonna be involved in the sexual activity.
So Tim said when Christopher arrived, he was a bit surprised and embarrassed. And after about an hour, Tim said Christopher left to go buy drugs with a guy Tim didn't know. Not long after that, Tim said he, Amanda, and Crystal got dinner from a local fast food restaurant and went driving for about two hours before calling it a night.
When detectives pressed him for more details about Christopher, Tim said he didn't know where he was and denied assaulting him or having any involvement in his disappearance. Tim suggested that Crystal's claim that Christopher had sexually assaulted her could be true, but as far as he knew, that story was just a rumor.
Before the interview ended, Tim told police that it was common knowledge that the Aryan Nation gang operated in the area and collected drug debts from people. He seemed to suggest that it may have been one of those folks who was responsible for whatever had happened to Christopher.
The day after authorities interviewed Tim, they visited Amanda LaForse's brother and mother in Virginia because they needed to get even more detail from Andrea about Amanda's so-called confession. They were going to need a lot more ammo to try and crack Tim and Crystal.
According to police reports, Andrea claimed that her daughter claimed to have used a small baseball bat and taken turns with Crystal beating Christopher. Tim had reportedly come over ahead of time and hid inside Crystal's apartment to help the women.
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