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Delia D'Ambra (17:39)

On February 9, 2016, almost two weeks after Christopher was first reported missing, Kingsport police detectives interviewed Amanda La Force in person. At the time, she was sitting in the city jail for an unrelated incident involving a stolen vehicle. Around 10:15 in the morning, investigators sat her down and asked her if she knew anything about Christopher West's disappearance. Amanda willingly agreed to chat with detectives and offered up a confession of sorts. She said that a few days before Christmas 2015, her friend Crystal had disclosed to Tim that she'd been sexually assaulted by Christopher. That information reportedly made Tim so enraged that he expressed he wanted to harm Christopher for what he'd allegedly done to Crystal. Amanda said the trio then came up with a ruse to lure Christopher to Crystal's apartment on Christmas Day so that Tim and Crystal could enact retribution. She said as soon as Christopher walked into Crystal's front door, Tim, wearing a ski mask, ambushed him in the kitchen and put him in a chokehold. After that, Amanda said she overheard Tim and Crystal beating him with a small baseball bat. She claimed that she left the room during the assault and went upstairs because she didn't want to be involved. However, a short time later, she overheard Tim and Crystal talking about how if she, Amanda, wasn't going to join them in the crime, then they might need to take care of her, too. Amanda said that statement frightened her, so from that point forward, she'd come downstairs and decided to go along with what Tim and Crystal were doing to seemingly protect herself. She told detectives that when she came back downstairs, she saw Christopher bound with tape, lying motionless on a blanket. Tim then confirmed that he was dead, and he and Crystal dragged his body into her laundry room. Amanda told authorities that she and her friends had all been doing crystal meth prior to Christopher coming over, and she swore she had no idea that Tim and Crystal were actually going to kill him. She just thought they were going to beat him up. When detectives pressed Amanda for more details, like what exactly they'd done with Christopher's body, she revealed that they'd gone to a Walmart and Lowe's home improvement store after the crime and purchased several gallons of bleach, a blacklight, and a big toad. She said Tim planned to use the blacklight at Crystal's apartment to try and find traces of blood. Tim paid for all the purchases and cash, and they then returned to Crystal's place to clean up the crime scene. Part of that process included mopping up Crystal's floor and stripping off all of their clothing and shoes. Tim also cut off Christopher's clothes and put everything in a trash bag. Amanda said she definitely remembered another man other than Tim helping them do all this stuff, but she wasn't 100% sure what the guy's name was. Later, though, she offered up the name Rusty Hyde. She described how Tim and Rusty moved Christopher's body into the tote, put the tote into Rusty's trunk. Then they all drove to Cherokee National Forest. Shortly after pulling down a remote gravel road, they all got out, and Tim and Rusty unloaded Christopher's body and poured gasoline on him. Then they lit him on fire. Afterwards, they rolled him down an embankment and left on a trail about a quarter mile up the road. They burned Christopher's backpack, cell phone, and the trash bag full of everyone's clothing and shoes. Amanda's detailed confession was the break investigators needed. They now had a clearer picture of what had happened to Christopher. And perhaps equally as important, they knew that Tim and Crystal had not been truthful during their initial interviews. As part of her confession, Amanda agreed to take detectives to the location where she and her accomplices had dumped Christopher's. It was a spot inside the national forest near the Tennessee, North Carolina border that happened to be close to where some of Tim's relatives lived. By that point, it was early February, and snow had fallen. Amanda and the investigators searched and searched, but they weren't able to find Christopher's body or the burn pile where the group had discarded the other evidence. Authorities realized their only option was to wait out the weather and come back when things cleared up. While they waited, they started digging into Rusty Hyde, the alleged fourth participant in the crime. They discovered that he had a criminal history in nearby Sullivan county and drove the type of vehicle that Amanda said Christopher's body was transported in. Around the same time detectives were learning about Rusty, they'd also gone to collect surveillance video from the fast food restaurant, the walmart, the lowe's in kingsport, and all the places Amanda said that her group had been. According to police reports, they got lucky and found some footage of Amanda and her friends purchasing the items that they said they'd used to discard Christopher's body. Something I found interesting, though, is that before KPD interviewed Amanda on February 9th and got the surveillance video, they roped in the Tennessee bureau of investigation to help them with the case. KPD asked the TBI agents to examine some of the forensic and physical evidence the police department's crime scene techs had already taken from Crystal's apartment. Once all the paperwork went through, that stuff was sent off to the TBI's crime lab in Knoxville for testing. But police reports also stated that the TBI then processed Crystal's apartment a second time on February 11, a few days after Amanda gave her confession. I have to imagine their reason for doing this Was just to make sure nothing was overlooked. But while the TBI was there, they spoke with a few of Crystal's neighbors, who told them that that they suspected drug activity had been going on at her apartment. But other than that, it doesn't seem like her neighbors saw anything else that was useful to the investigation. The next day, February 12, the police spoke with one of Rusty Hyde's brothers, who informed them that the car Rusty had been driving in December of 2015 was now at a car sales lot he worked at. Rusty's brother said when Rusty had brought it to him, he'd cleaned it out. I imagine that was not what authorities wanted to hear, but still, they took the car as evidence and did their own sweep, Just in case some evidence might have been left behind. The source material doesn't Specify, though, if they ever found anything. Shortly after all of that, detectives got ahold of Rusty, and he agreed to do an interview. He told them straight up that he'd helped Tim, Crystal, and Amanda dispose of Christopher's body a few days after Christmas Day in 2015. Much of his story matched with Amanda's confession. What's wild to me, though, is that Rusty wasn't taken into custody at that time. It appears the police just let him walk. I don't know, maybe it was because they hadn't actually located Christopher's body, and so they didn't really have anything to hold him on. Like I said, it's wild to me. But anyway, five days later, on February 17, the case came to a head when deputies with neighboring Greene County Sheriff's department went back out to the national forest to look for Christopher and made a gruesome discovery.

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Unknown (25:48)

World gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human.

Britt (25:59)

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Delia D'Ambra (26:22)

While searching the location where Amanda had told them to look for Christopher's body, investigators stumbled across a set of badly decomposed human remains in the area that snow had previously kept them from traversing. Only this time, the ground wasn't covered in snow and the remains were clearly visible from about 25 yards off the side of the road. Authorities also found a burn pile with charred remnants of a computer, clothing, smartphone, and blue rubber gloves. The next day, a pathologist at a local medical college conducted an autopsy on the human remains and not long after that, confirmed they belonged to Christopher. With his body officially found, investigators could now set their sights on closing in on all of the alleged killers. It took a few months for the case to come together, but on April 20, 2016, almost four months after Christopher was last seen alive and two months after his remains were discovered, the Kingsport Police Department arrested Tim, Crystal and Amanda for first degree murder and abuse of a corpse. They were each held under $500,000 bond. The arrests came as a result of a grand jury indictment, and Rusty Hyde was never charged. At the time of her arrest, Crystal was in Mount Carmel, Tennessee, and Tim and Amanda were being housed at the Sullivan County Jail for unrelated crimes. In June, the defendants appeared in court for the first time, and their trial was scheduled for February of 2017. A few months later, in August, with a seemingly rock solid case against them, they all ended up pleading guilty to second degree murder and abuse of a corpse. Based on what I read in the police documents, it seems like the prosecutors agreed to downgrade the first degree murder charges to second degree murder. First degree almost certainly would have meant more prison time, and second degree obviously was less. When they were sentenced In August and September 2017, Crystal and Amanda each got 25 years in prison and Tim was given 32 years. During the sentencing hearing, Christopher's brother in law, Robert, spoke in court and expressed that Christopher was like a brother to him and losing him was devastating to his entire family, including his wife Melissa, and Christopher's nieces and nephews, who considered him to be their favorite family member. He explained to all of the defendants that forgiving them was going to be difficult and remarked, quote, the Bible says forgive and we are not to judge. My faith, and more importantly, my wife's faith has carried us to this point. I hope that every day of your sentence is just a preview of your time in hell. I will forgive someday, but I will never forgive what you have taken from me, my family, and this world. You had no right. In his interview with me, Robert said that it took everything in him to get those words out and not explode with anger and cord. He told me he's still angry with the situation and upset with what the defendants took away from his wife and his children. Melissa told me that she agreed with prosecutors to not go to trial against the defendants because in her heart, she just wanted the whole thing to be over. Her perspective then and now is that vengeance isn't hers. And she firmly believes that the defendants will receive their fair punishment either in this life or whatever comes Next. Today, Tim McEachern remains in prison in Tennessee. He's 53 years old and isn't scheduled for release until the year 2040. Amanda is 37 and still incarcerated. She won't get out of prison until 2038. Crystal is 34 and still serving time at a penitentiary in Tennessee. Her sentence is scheduled to end in 2037. Something important I took away from researching this story is just how important every single choice is that we make in this life, from the people we associate ourselves with to the situations we find ourselves in, to the lines we're willing to cross. Everything we do in life comes down to making good or bad choices. It's clear from law enforcement's records that even Christopher himself had made mistakes in his life. His sister Melissa told me that he'd fallen into drug use, and their relationship had good moments and bad moments before his murder. For example, in late October 2015, a few months before he was killed, Christopher had gotten out of jail after spending four years behind bars. He and Melissa had an argument sometime around Thanksgiving, and she told me that the last thing she said to her brother was when he found God, he would find her. Despite Christopher's rough lifestyle, that still doesn't mean he deserved what happened to him. Robert, his brother in law, told me that he and his wife would not have been surprised if Christopher's death had come from some other means related to drugs. But they never thought in a million years that anything like this would happen to him. And something I want to address because it's an important point Melissa and Robert noted in their conversation with me is that during Crystal's interview with police, she retracted her claim that Christopher had sexually assaulted her. Melissa told me that she and her family always believed that accusation was a lie because Christopher was not the type of person to do such a thing. Melissa said that Christopher wasn't an aggressive person even when he was using drugs. And that false accusation that Crystal made about her brother bothered her for a long time until she was finally informed by police that Crystal had admitted to the whole thing being a lie. It would seem from the source material that methamphetamine used by all of the defendants was a contributing factor in their decision making, particularly Tim's. But how much so I don't know. That's a question only he can answer. From everything I was able to gather about Christopher, it seems like he had a rough go in life, but still he was a human being with family members and friends who still love and miss him very much. Melissa says Christmas Day in their household has never been the same. One of her sons has even named his children after Christopher to try and keep his memory alive. The fact that the beauty of Cherokee National Forest was used to try and cover up his grisly murder is a disturbing thought. Had it not been for better weather descending upon his final resting place, who knows, he may have never been found. I guess in a way, he has nature to thank for revealing the one thing that allowed investigators to take his case across the finish line. Park Predators is an audio Chuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website parkpredators.com and you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram arcpredators. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?

Unknown (33:14)

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Britt (33:59)

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Unknown (34:05)

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