When a trio of men enter Cherokee National Forest but only two come out, law enforcement works fast to figure out what exactly happened that left so much bloodshed on the riverbanks.View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-trio Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @parkpredators | @audiochuckTwitter: @ParkPredators | @audiochuckFacebook: /ParkPredators | /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck
Chapter 1: What happened in Cherokee National Forest in 2012?
Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra. And the case I'm going to tell you about today takes place in Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee, a swath of public land that I've mentioned once before on this show in an episode that was released a few weeks back titled The Accomplices.
It's interesting because when I was first researching that case, I had no idea that this one even existed. But call it fate, call it coincidence, call it destiny, whatever, today's story did eventually ping on my radar, and I'm glad that it did. Because it's definitely one of those stories that just seems so appropriate to deep dive into on a show like this.
Cherokee National Forest is a place that's special to a lot of people. Maybe because it's a recreation space they camped in a lot growing up, have a picnic at every year, or tackle whitewater every summer. But whatever people's reasons for exploring this 650,000-acre forest, it's definitely a place that has something for everyone.
One spot that attracts a lot of visitors who might be looking to get off the grid is the Teleco River area, which in certain parts is surrounded by thousands of acres of remote backcountry. According to the Tennessee River Valley's website, the river itself is heralded as a premier waterway to fish for trout.
It flows for nearly 20 miles all the way from North Carolina to the Teleco Plains in Tennessee. Along its many tributaries, you'll find stocked and native species of trout. But in the summer of 2012, it wasn't an abundance of fish coming from the river that made local headlines. It was a murder. A horrific slaying right there on the banks that caused many people to take pause.
To this day, the crime remains a vivid memory for one detective who worked to solve it, and I was fortunate enough to get a chance to speak with him one-on-one. Some of the details he shared with me weren't in the news articles I dug up about this case. They're not in any of the public court files I requested either.
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Chapter 2: Who discovered the crime scene and how?
But they paint an important picture of just how ruthless a person can be, and how far they're willing to go to silence someone in an area teeming with life. This is Park Predators. Around 11 o'clock in the morning on Tuesday, June 26, 2012, a man named Doug, who was visiting Cherokee National Forest from Florida, was in a secluded area next to the Teleco River when he spotted something alarming.
There, about 20 to 30 feet down an embankment next to a gravel road at a pull-off in the forest called River Road, was the body of a young man who appeared to be deceased. Laying on the ground right next to the roadway were several bullets and a pair of glasses. Naturally, Doug put two and two together and realized that something was seriously wrong.
So he immediately left the area and reported what he'd found to a staff member at a nearby ranger station on River Road. Shortly after that, the Park Service radioed for the Monroe County Sheriff's Office to come to the scene and investigate.
The first deputy who responded met up with Doug at the Ranger Station, and together they drove to the pull-off where he'd found those suspicious items and had seen the victim's body. An accompanying sergeant with the Sheriff's Office helped the deputy quickly locate several spent shell casings on the ground, some live bullets that had not been fired, and the pair of eyeglasses.
Chapter 3: What were the initial findings of the investigation?
When the first responding deputies realized they were dealing with something suspicious, they cordoned off the scene and called for detectives to get there as soon as possible. When the detectives arrived, they walked down the embankment to examine the victim's body and started to work the scene.
They found the man face down about 20 or 30 yards from the river with blood on his clothes and what looked like gunshot wounds to his head and one in his hand.
The investigators noticed that he was wet and appeared to have either fallen or been chased down the embankment because there was some blood spattered down the way to his body, as well as areas of disturbed ground and vegetation that indicated something had happened that resulted in him ending up down and away from the roadway.
When detectives searched his clothing, they located an ID that indicated he was 18-year-old Justin Click from the nearby town of Sweetwater, Tennessee. For the next six hours or so, the sheriff's office processed the crime scene, took swabs of the blood spatter on the ground, and photographed the area.
They gathered as much physical evidence as they could, which included bagging the four live rounds of ammunition and four spent casings that were left on the ground. Authorities determined those bullets belonged to a .380 caliber firearm. Along with the ammunition, they also found a discarded Red Bull can and some cigarette butts.
While all that stuff was being collected, a special agent from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation arrived to help local law enforcement and get the evidence ready to send to the TBI's crime lab for analysis. Results from that testing would take some time to come in, though, so in the meantime, authorities turned their attention to learning more about their victim, Justin, and the way he died.
The source material isn't clear on the exact date and time, but a deputy medical examiner for Knox and Anderson counties conducted his autopsy. I'd assume either that day or the next.
I wasn't able to see the autopsy report for myself, but an article by the Monroe County Buzz stated that the pathologist determined Justin had sustained blunt force trauma to his torso and been shot multiple times in his left forearm, back, right arm, and chest. Another shot had been fired into his head at close range, and there was soot on his fingers.
A retired Monroe County Sheriff's detective named Doug Brannon, not to be confused with the Doug who found Justin's body, told me during an interview I had with him that Justin's wounds indicated to him that he'd most likely been beaten and then shot at least once near the roadway, but then chased and subsequently shot a few more times while running down the embankment toward the river.
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Chapter 4: Who was Justin Click and what do we know about his last days?
At the time, Justin didn't have a driver's license because his eyesight was extremely poor and he was unable to pass a driving test. So Ronnie, Dean, or his friends would often give him rides to places. Growing up, Ronnie said her and Dean had divorced and Justin had lived with him because she'd gone in and out of being unhoused.
When she parted ways with her son on Sunday night, she said that he'd given her a hug and told her that he loved her. The next morning, Monday, June 25th, it's believed his stepdad took him to his job at a tubing insulation plant in Sweetwater.
And later that evening, after he'd gotten off work and returned to Dean's house, his cousin by marriage, 31-year-old Stephen Chrisman Jr., and one of Stephen's friends, 51-year-old Charles Kyle, had picked him up to go hang out.
Ronnie said that Dean told her that before Justin left with Stephen and Charles, he'd seemed excited because Stephen said the group would be hanging out, swimming, and having dinner near a body of water in the area. Initially, though, Dean had felt uneasy letting Justin go because he didn't know Charles Kyle very well, but eventually he relented because he did know Stephen.
The next morning, Tuesday the 26th, Ronnie received an unexpected call from Dean asking her if she knew where Justin was. She said that Dean told her that Justin had never come home after his outing with Stephen and Charles. So anxious to get some answers, Ronnie drove down the street from her house to a trailer that Steven and his wife and kids lived in.
When Steven spoke with her, she asked him where Justin was. According to Ronnie, Steven told her that Justin had come back to his trailer on Monday night to crash, but when everyone woke up on Tuesday morning, he was nowhere to be found and Steven's truck was gone, implying that Steven believed Justin had stolen the vehicle and taken off somewhere.
Believing what Steven had told her, Ronnie said she immediately wanted to go out and start looking for Justin, and Steven even pitched in to help. He gave her a cigarette and $20 for gas before she headed out the door. For the next few hours, she and some of Justin's family members drove around Sweetwater looking for him. They went to his job, places he usually hung out, everywhere.
But he wasn't at any of those places. The only other thing Ronnie could think to do was make a post on her Facebook page, encouraging people to keep an eye out for Justin and pray he would come home safely. Ronnie didn't file a missing persons report for him at that time, and I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe it's because she knew Justin was 18 and was probably hoping he'd just turn back up.
But regardless of how exactly all that played out, at some point in the day, while everyone was trying to find Justin, Ronnie got a call from a Sweetwater police detective who asked her to come down to the police station. She agreed because at that point in time, she just thought Justin was in trouble for stealing Stephen's truck.
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Chapter 5: How did investigators find the suspects?
Then, the pair got some flammable liquid from one of Charles' friends, drove the truck to a remote location, and burned it. Retired Monroe County Sheriff's detective Doug Brannon told me that the area where the men dumped the truck was actually owned by a business that might've been a timber company at the time. But it was a place that people would often go to just dump things.
Doug said it was like 10 or 15 miles away from the National Forest into what he described as the community of the town. In Charles's confession, he said that after setting the vehicle on fire, he called a buddy of his to take him and Steven away from where they'd burned the truck. When investigators visited the spot where Charles said he and Stephen had ditched the truck, they found it right away.
Apparently, the arson job that the men had tried to pull off had been unsuccessful. Basically, the way one investigator described it is the fire they'd set just sort of burned itself out and never actually damaged the truck. So it was reportedly in pretty good condition when the detectives got a hold of it.
When they looked inside, they found a red-brown stain they suspected was blood and a bullet hole in the passenger side door. authorities towed the truck to the TBI crime lab in Nashville and processed it. After obtaining Charles' confession, investigators placed him under arrest for a first-degree murder and booked him in the county jail.
With so much circumstantial evidence piling up against Stephen, it was more important than ever for detectives to locate him. So around three or four o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, they stepped up their search and ended up finding him at his father's house in neighboring McMinn County, Tennessee. When the team of investigators arrived, Stephen saw them coming and ran away.
But a few hours later, he eventually turned himself in and detectives arrested him for first-degree murder. Back at the sheriff's office, they read him his rights, then interviewed and confronted him with all of the damning information Charles had provided a few hours earlier.
Stephen agreed to talk with detectives, but his version of the story, particularly why he'd murdered Justin, was not something law enforcement expected to hear. According to what an investigator later recounted in court, Stephen claimed that he'd killed Justin because he, quote, had to take care of business, end quote. What exactly he meant by that is difficult to determine.
It suggested that perhaps Stephen and Justin had beef with one another over something. But what exactly this conflict was, was something that investigators struggled to grasp. According to a transcript from a preliminary hearing where this allegation was first publicly addressed a few weeks after the crime, Stephen claimed that Justin had sexually assaulted his daughter prior to June 25th, 2012.
However, no police report about that alleged crime was filed with the sheriff's office until after Justin's murder and Stephen's arrest. Retired Monroe County Sheriff's Detective Doug Brannon told me during his interview that this allegation against Justin was very muddied and difficult to navigate.
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Chapter 6: What confessions were made during the investigation?
He said it was a rumor that couldn't be substantiated, but it became clear it was a reasonable motive for the crime, at least from Steven's point of view. But Doug clarified that the sheriff's office was never able to find any evidence to support this claim, and detectives could never locate a formal report or any kind of documentation that corroborated a crime had occurred prior to June 25th.
Doug also said investigators checked their own files for child abuse reports or complaints and inquired with Child Protective Services, but they never found any documentation other than the report that Stephen filed after Justin's murder.
When I spoke to Justin's mom, Ronnie, about this allegation, she told me that after the crime, she learned a few more details, which she firmly believes are all false. According to her, the weekend before Justin was killed, he'd babysat Steven and his wife's two daughters, a job he'd done many times before for different people with kids of all ages.
It was actually Steven and his wife's trailer that Ronnie had picked Justin up from on Sunday night, June 24th. According to Ronnie, either that night or the next day, Monday the 25th, Stephen and his wife had gotten into some kind of disagreement. And shortly afterwards, Stephen's wife told him that one of their daughters had been sexually assaulted.
And it wasn't long after that, that Stephen and Charles had come up with a plan to invite Justin to hang out with them. I asked Ronnie directly if Justin had ever faced allegations of sexual assault before his murder. And she told me, no, she had never heard of any.
When authorities interviewed Stephen, they pressed him to tell them more about the murder weapon and what happened to Charles' truck. But he wouldn't go into detail about those two things. When investigators asked him where the gun had come from that was allegedly used to kill Justin, he also wasn't forthcoming.
He told them that he didn't know anything about the weapon and he had no clue how it had gotten into Charles' truck on the day of the crime, which I imagine was probably hard for investigators to believe. So according to retired detective Doug Brannon, within a week or two after the investigation launched, the sheriff's office spent a lot of time and resources trying to find the firearm.
And that's when something kind of amazing happened. Thanks to details Charles revealed in his confession, investigators were able to narrow down the general area of the Teleco River where he said Stephen had reportedly discarded pieces of the gun. When divers searched those locations, they found the magazine, but not the complete firearm itself.
However, Doug Brannon told me during his interview that detectives did eventually end up recovering the frame of the gun, and with help from the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, identified its serial number.
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Chapter 7: What motive did the suspect provide for the murder?
Doug said locating any part of the firearm was kind of a miracle because even though the Teleco River is generally shallow and you can even wade through it in some parts, there are also other areas that are very rugged, steep, and have whitewater whipping through them. Plus, there had reportedly been a big storm that moved through the National Forest after the crime.
so essentially looking for pieces of a dissembled handgun in that kind of waterway with all the factors i just mentioned taken into consideration was truly like trying to find a needle in a haystack but when investigators eventually examined the magazine they discovered it was empty which probably indicated to them that either all of the bullets had been fired during the murder or a few of them had possibly fallen out of the magazine at the crime scene
Which, to me, that last theory kind of makes the most sense, because we know that responding deputies found both shell casings and live rounds at the crime scene. But what's more interesting to me is that Doug Brannon mentioned during his interview the ATF was able to go a step further when it came to figuring out the origin of the murder weapon.
He said that agents determined it had come from a bulk purchase of guns that were all the same type of firearm. That crop of guns had been acquired by individuals who just so happened to be part of what Doug described as a suspected biker gang.
Apparently, all of these motorcycle club folks preferred to own the same type of handgun, so they'd purchased a bunch in bulk, and one of those guns had seemingly ended up in the hands of Steven Chrisman Jr.
It seemed that this wasn't necessarily a huge surprise to law enforcement in 2012, though, because Doug Brannon indicated that it was believed that it was probably Steven who had been associated with the people in the motorcycle club who'd made the bulk gun purchase.
I asked Ronnie, Justin's mom, about this detail, though, because at one point she was pretty close with Steven and his wife, who was actually her niece, but she didn't know anything about it. Who exactly the gun purchasers in the alleged motorcycle club were isn't something that's been publicly reported on, and it doesn't appear that a definitive tie between them and Steven was ever formally made.
But I imagine this potential background knowledge about Stephen was just another thing in law enforcement's eyes that made him look bad. On Thursday, July 5th, a little over a week after the crime, both he and Charles appeared in court for a motions hearing. But what was expected to be a run-of-the-mill legal proceeding turned out to be anything but. It was full of proverbial fireworks.
To kick things off at the motions hearing in early July, Charles' lawyer brought up a big issue that he said concerned him about the case. His client had been charged with first-degree murder, premeditated murder.
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