← Park Predators
Park Predators
The Kidnapping
00:30:09
When a talented, vibrant young woman is abducted from her apartment in Maryville, Tennessee, time is of the essence to find her. When the worst is revealed, authorities discover that the human predator behind the vicious crime had been lurking far longer than anyone knew.
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Hi park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia d', Ambra, and the case I'm going to share with you today hit me in a profound way. It's more than just revisiting a murder that took place in a national park. It's a uniquely heartbreaking example of just how serious and deadly the crime of stalking is. You'll hear me list some resources and information about stalking towards the end of this episode, because after researching today's case, I'm more convinced than ever that this type of criminal behavior is happening far more often than any of us realize. And in some situations it can and does escalate to murder. The story of what happened to 25 year old university of Tennessee student Sandy Jeffers is unimaginable. And I knew that I couldn't even begin to try and cover her case without the participation of someone who knew her well. Someone who's continued to advocate for her and other victims of violent crime ever since Sandy's life was taken in 2003. A lot of the information you'll hear in this episode is sourced from court documents and news coverage, but you'll also get an inside perspective of the tragedy from Sandy's older sister, Angelia Jeffers Smith. She's been a part of this case every step of the way, and I'm so thankful she did an interview with me to help paint the most complete picture of her sister's life and round out my reporting. The case takes place in Great Smoky Mountains national park, more specifically the lookrock Tower Trail, which is a less than a mile round trip scenic observation area on the western edge of the park, slightly less than an hour south of Knoxville, Tennessee. This is a very popular stopping point for visitors, but back in May 2003, a man who went there had nothing but evil on his mind and the impact of what he did left the Jeffers family and so many others with a hole in their hearts that they've never been able to repair. This is park predators. Early in the Morning on Wednesday, May 7, 2003, Angelia Jeffers Smith was at home in Scott County, Tennessee when she received a startling phone call from her older sister Vicki. Vicki told her that their youngest sibling, 25 year old Sandy Jeffers, had been violently abducted from her apartment about an hour away in the city of Maryville, Tennessee. After getting over the initial shock of the news, Angelia asked her sister for more information. But Vicki couldn't really provide much. You see, the only thing the Jeffers and Marville police knew at that time was that several hours earlier, around 11:30pm the night before, which would have been Tuesday, May 6, some of Sandy's neighbors, including this guy named Herbie Ward, who all lived at Big Oak Apartments, had heard a woman screaming for help. Either Herbie or one of the other residents had gotten up and looked out their window to see what all the fuss was about. And that's when they saw a red colored car quickly backing out of a parking space and speed away. Concerned something untoward might have happened, neighbors went downstairs to the ground level and knocked on Sandy's door, but there was no answer. Within minutes, someone called the Maryville Police Department, which quickly dispatched officers to the scene. When those officers got to Sandy's door, they realized it was unlocked. And after going inside, they saw that Sandy was missing. But a lot of her personal belongings weren't. Her car keys, wallet and credit cards were all still sitting on her table, and several packages were even laying on the floor near her doorway. Just outside her unit, her Honda Civic was parked in a spot and had been left unlocked. Unsure what exactly they were dealing with, police worked quickly to get as much information from her neighbors as well as other people who knew her. They also issued a missing persons bulletin for Sandy, which described her as between 5ft and 5ft 3 inches tall, about 130 pounds, and had green eyes and long dark brown hair. Sandy's neighbors told officers that they believed the red car they'd seen speeding away from their apartment building was a red 1980s Dodge Shadow, and they described the vehicle's color as somewhat faded. They said that it had a primer spot on the passenger side, almost as if it hadn't been painted in that area or needed touch up work. With that information in hand, authorities issued a BOLO for the car and asked the public to report if they spotted it by the following morning. After Angelia and her family members drove to meet with detectives at Maryville PD Everyone was racking their brains trying to figure out who could have wanted to take Sandy. Angelia told me in our interview that because there were so few details to go on, law enforcement had an uphill battle. Making quick headway, investigators interviewed everyone in their family to figure out if Sandy had any known enemies or had complained of any recent problems in her life. But according to Angelia, no one could think of an explanation that made any sense. By all accounts, Sandy's life was pretty simple. She lived by herself at her apartment and was just a few days away from graduating with a degree in forensic anthropology from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She also worked as a bank teller at a TVA credit union in Maryville. And on the 7th, she'd missed her shift at the bank, which was super out of character for her and just another ominous sign that whatever had happened wasn't good. Growing up, Sandy was described as a super sweet child who loved to read and was a great blend of an introverted extrovert. She was also considered a reliable person who, when she put her mind to something, would always follow through. Her sister told me that most of the time, Sandy was shy, but once she got to know her, she was quite funny. As kids, Angelia can't remember their parents ever having to scold her younger sister. And from a young age, Sandy was intellectually gifted, and it showed. When she graduated high school, for example, in 1996, she was valedictorian of her class, which, by the way, was a goal she'd set her sights on as a middle schooler. I know, talk about being ambitious. Unfortunately, though, when Sandy was about 6 years old, their dad, Walter, died, which left her mom, Wanda, to raise her and her five siblings on her own. Angelia told me that because of this, the kids all grew quite close. But hardship struck again in 1998 when their mom died from cancer. Angelia said that loss hit Sandy especially hard. She changed her field of study from pre med to forensic anthropology shortly after and reoriented some things in her life to, as Angelia described it, make sure she made their mother proud. But when Sandy wasn't busy with school or work, she spent time with her family members and boyfriend, James Anderson. The couple had been together for about five years, and things were reportedly getting quite serious between them. So naturally, James was one of the first people investigators pulled in for questioning. He told police that the last time he'd spoken with Sandy was sometime on Tuesday. She'd just finished taking one of her final exams that morning and had returned to her apartment. When they talked, he was in neighboring Scott county and went to work, but didn't get off until around 11pm he told authorities that he loved Sandy very much and didn't have anything to do with her disappearance. And it seems his denials, paired with the fact that he had a sufficient alibi caused authorities to clear him as a suspect. Now, it's not apparent from the source material if this next bit of information came from James or other people police interviewed. But not long into the investigation, authorities determined that in the days leading up to Sandy's disappearance, she'd experienced some odd things around her apartment, things that she'd told people close to her about. For example, Angelia said that on Monday, May 5, which would have been less than 48 hours before Sandy vanished, Sandy realized that a check from her checkbook had been used without her knowledge. Johnson City Press reported that she'd opened her mail and discovered the check had been passed at a local Walmart several days earlier on May 30. She'd not known at the time that it had been stolen because she didn't get a notification right away from her bank and it had taken a week or so for Walmart to physically mail the check back to her. But Angelia told me that the same night her sister discovered the return check, she'd called the police to report the fraud. However, that particular night, it was storming really bad in Maryville, and so police never sent an officer out to her apartment to take a report. Then the following evening, May 6, which was just a few hours before Sandy was abducted, she had returned home and noticed a latch on one of her windows was broken. She tried to report that to her landlord, but according to Angelia, she was unable to get a hold of them. So Sandy just left the latch the way it was. After that, we know she spoke with James on the phone before making another call to one of her good friends named Amanda. Around 9pm following that conversation, Sandy went to bed. And it's a little over two hours later that her neighbor heard her screaming and saw the suspicious red car. On Thursday morning at 8am almost 36 hours into the investigation, law enforcement discovered that Sandy had missed one of her final exams, which again, was another foreboding sign that something bad had happened to her. Otherwise she would have taken that exam. At that point, authorities overwhelming suspicion was that she'd been abducted from her apartment by someone. But who? That was the million dollar question. News of what was going on spread fast to Sandy's relatives, the Maryville community and across campus at the University of Tennessee. Her sister Angelia described this time for her and Sandy's immediate family as extremely draining. Angelia said she wasn't sleeping. Everyone was exhausted from worrying and crafting countless missing persons flyers for Sandy. Meanwhile, investigators dug in and learned from speaking with representatives from the TVA credit union where Sandy worked that in addition to the stolen check that had been passed on April 30, two other checks from Sandy's checkbook had been used at the same Walmart. One had been passed on May 5 and the other on May 7, which was the day after Sandy was abducted. So, curious to find out who was using the checks, authorities went to the Walmart and staff there were able to pull up the transactions. Those records showed that some of the items that had been purchased with Sandy's checks included video games, sunglasses, personal hygiene products, a pen camera, a DVD player, a bike rack, bike tires and camping gear. Surveillance footage for all three of the transactions revealed that the same person had used Sandy's checks each time. It was a young white guy with a slender build who appeared to be in his early 20s. On one occasion, the store's surveillance camera had even captured him exiting the retailer's parking lot and he was driving, you guessed it, a red colored car. So because of all that circumstantial evidence, that guy quickly became the center of investigators focus. Because for him to have used Sandy's checks, that meant he'd had to have gotten close to her or at least close to her personal belongings at some point. So it begged the question, was he the person who'd taken her? If you've been sitting on a business idea, Shopify makes it easy to make it happen. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready from day one. When a customer is ready to buy, the experience is seamless. There's no need to stress over how to securely process payments or build a cart from scratch. Shopify removes that friction entirely. Shopify Checkout is engineered to convert, helping more browsers finish their purchase. And when they return, their details are already saved. One tap and they're done. And this allows more time for you to focus on growing your business and having the tools to do it. Our team is a big fan of Shopify's award winning 24. 7 support. We leverage Shopify's valuable tools to tackle inventory, payments, analytics, shipping, returns and more in one intuitive dashboard. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com parkpredators that's shopify.com parkpredators Start your free trial today shopify.com parkpredators. Once Maryville police had the surveillance footage from the Walmart, they announced that they wanted the public's help in identifying the man who'd used Sandy's checks because naturally they had a lot of questions for him. Unfortunately though, no one in Sandy's immediate circle, like her family or classmates, recognized the guy. So with no luck there, investigators took a different approach. They pulled vehicle registration information for everyone in the area who owned a red Dodge Shadow. Turns out there were exactly 33 people who had that specific color and type of car. From there, investigators narrowed down their potential person of interest pool by comparing DMV photos for those owners to the footage of the young man from the Walmart. And lo and behold, they found someone who appeared to be a match. The guy was a 20 year old Maryville resident named Aaron Lee Skene. Aaron had no prior criminal history except minor traffic infractions. And no one in Sandy's family thought his name sounded familiar. But he did work at a Lowe's home improvement store very close to the Walmart where Sandy's checks had been used, which I imagine was a detail that piqued investigators interest. Armed with what little info they knew about Aaron, police decided to go by his address, which turns out was actually his parents place because he still lived at home. Interestingly, the apartment was less than 2 miles away from the police station. And according to court records, when detectives looked in his driveway, they saw a red Dodge shadow. And on the back of it was a bike rack that was the same kind as the one that had been purchased with Sandy's checks. The following morning, around 9:30, which would have been Friday, May 9, the police began surveilling Aaron. They watched him go to the Lowe's where he worked and then return home. Upon arriving, he immediately spray painted his car, which I'm assuming was the area with the primer spot. He also came and went from his residence multiple times. And apparently that's all authorities needed to convince a judge to sign a search warrant for that residence as well as Aaron's car. Because that same afternoon, police knocked on his door. And according to what a police captain who was the lead investigator on this case told the TV program, you worst nightmare, when Aaron answered the door, he let them inside. This captain said there wasn't anything in terms of Aaron's demeanor or appearance that suggested he was a dangerous person in any way. In fact, she described him as, quote, a normal, average, everyday young man, end quote. When pressed about why he'd used Sandy's checks, Aaron immediately admitted to taking them. But he didn't provide a ton of detail about how he'd Stolen them or why? Those details would come out a short time later, after investigators got him to agree to a formal interview down at the police station. While that was happening, police scoured his car and apartment for evidence. Several suspicious items that were found included torn off emblems for his car that read Dodge and Shadow, which had all been discarded in trash cans behind his family's apartment. And according to neighbors, there were also two red gym bags that were seized. Not too long into Aaron's interrogation, with evidence mounting against him, he ended up confessing to Sandy's abduction. And the details he provided authorities were disturbing, to say the least. The TV program youm Worst Nightmare explained that Aaron's version of events went like this. One day he came upon Sandy's ground floor apartment and noticed one of her windows was partially open. He said that got his attention, and so he decided to go inside and look around. He did that again and again without Sandy's knowledge. He told police that the way he saw it, because she'd left her window open, that obviously meant she'd wanted him to come inside, which wasn't true. But now you see just how warped Aaron's thought process was. Per that same television program, Aaron said that during some of his visits to Sandy's apartments, he'd stolen her checks as well as a handful of personal belongings, including things like underwear and CDs. On the night of May 6, he said that he'd watched Sandy get home, and then when she went to sleep, he snuck into her place and stood over her. He watched her for a bit until she abruptly woke up. And that's when he said he attacked. He used his finger to make it seem as if he had a gun. And after binding her with duct tape and covering her eyes with tape, he sexually assaulted her. After that, he decided to kidnap her and forced her into his car. Then he took her some 15 miles away to the Lookrock observation area. Now, in his initial telling of these events, he claimed that Sandy had either jumped out of his car or that he'd helped her out. But then he'd gotten distracted and she'd run off into the woods somewhere along Foothills Parkway. He admitted that he was the last person to see her, but he claimed that she was still alive when he saw her. However, around 6:30pm when authorities took Aaron out to the area in the national park where he said Sandy had run away from him, he began to get more and more uncomfortable, particularly as investigators moved closer to a steep cliff. And sure enough, when detectives peered over that ledge, some 50 to 60ft down, they saw Sandy laying at the bottom, lifeless. She was partially clothed in her pajamas. A medical examiner would quickly confirm she'd been pushed off the cliff and initially survived the fall before dying from her injuries around midnight. After that discovery, Aaron was quickly arrested, pending future charges. And it's at that point he finally revealed the truth, or at least more of the story. He admitted to sexually assaulting Sandy and said he'd chosen to kidnap and then kill her to cover up that crime. On Friday evening, officials held a press conference where they announced the latest update in the case. Maryville's police chief voiced that his thoughts and prayers were with all of Sandy's family members. Angelia told me that she and her siblings learned their sister was dead shortly before that. While they were all at the police station waiting for an update, she told me that looking back, she realizes now that everything about that day felt odd, starting with a strange sense of peace she'd gotten from the moment she woke up. In hindsight, she said she can't figure out why she felt that way because no one knew at that point in time that Sandy was dead. But she said it had to have been something divine. She told me that while she and her siblings were waiting at the police station, they'd seen a cruiser pull into the parking lot outside and two officers started talking with one another. Angelia obviously didn't know what the officers were discussing, but she told me that there was this short moment where she saw one of them hang his head in a way that communicated to her all she needed to her sister was gone. She said that up until that moment, she'd waffled back and forth about whether she believed Sandy was dead or not. Part of her desperately hoped that Sandy was still alive somewhere. But she'd also resigned herself to accepting that Sandy was no longer alive, which, by the way, is a dilemma that I hear expressed by a lot of people I've interviewed who find themselves in the same kind of terrible situation the Jeffers family was in. It's like, on the one hand, you have to keep having hope because it's what keeps you going. But there's also that awful thought people are forced to face, which is that abductions can and usually do have negative outcomes. A few days after Sandy's body was found, Merrivale PD subsequently charged Aaron with aggravated rape, especially aggravated kidnapping, and several other counts for aggravated burglary and forgery. It seems because of where Sandy's body had been found, Blood county was the jurisdiction that formally charged Aaron with first degree murder on Tuesday, May 13th. Exactly one week after Sandy was abducted and killed, her loved ones held her funeral. All five of her surviving siblings and her boyfriend James attended, along with hundreds of other mourners from the community. She was ultimately laid to rest next to her parents. The bone chilling reality authorities determined in this case based on all the evidence they'd gathered and details from Aaron's own confession, was that for weeks, Sandy had never known he'd been stalking her. The only possible overlap authorities identified between their lives was that Aaron banked at the same TVA credit union where Sandy worked. Investigators speculated that perhaps at some point she'd served him as a teller. And something about their interaction had meant way more to him than it did to her. So from there, police suspected that Aaron had likely researched everything he could about Sandy and began stalking her. But from my interview with her sister Angelia, I would argue that Aaron's behavior prior to the murder went even further than just watching Sandy and breaking into her place. It was way darker than that. Angelia told me that about a month before Sandy was killed, she'd been taking care of an old cantankerous mixed breed dog named Soraya that had once belonged to her. Apparently, this pup was quite the barker, and so Angelia thought it was best that it not be around small children in her life. So Sandy had volunteered to take it in. Well, one day, Saraya suddenly became ill and ended up dying rather quickly. At the time, Sandy and Angelia chalked it up to the dog just dying of natural causes because it was like 16 or 17 years old. But after Sandy was murdered, authorities learned about this dog situation, and investigators actually ended up determining that it had been intentionally poisoned. Yeah, according to what Angelia was told, Erin had gone into Sandy's place with the intention of getting rid of her barking dog so that he wouldn't be detected during future visits. Which is just a horrifying detail to hear and also extremely creepy. But that's not even the half of it, because according to Angelia, she was told that when this all happened with Sandy, authorities discovered that Erin had already started stalking another woman. Oh, and according to at least one source I saw, Maryville's police chief said that when he'd worked for the sheriff's office, he recalled someone previously filing a complaint against Aaron for, quote, inappropriate pictures through the Internet. But that investigation was later dropped and no charges were ever filed. So it would seem that there were red flags upon red flags with this guy before and after his crimes against Sandy. Angelia told me that she knows If Aaron hadn't been caught for what he did to her sister, he would have likely had other victims in early August 2003. So just a few months after the crime, a grand jury voted to formally indict him on all 25 counts he was facing a few months later, on the first day of December that year, Aaron took a plea deal. In exchange for him admitting his guilt, the district attorney agreed to take the death penalty off the table. So the maximum sentence Aaron could receive for the counts related to murder was life in prison without the possibility of parole for the charges of aggravated rape. He was looking at an additional 25 years for each charge. And for all the burglary and forgery stuff, he was going to get even more time behind bars. In the end, his final sentence was life without parole plus 124 years. A judge accepted the deal and approved the terms. Sandy's sister told me that the DA's decision not to pursue the death penalty in this case was something her family had been consulted about. Angelia said that the plea deal made the most sense because it was explained that with death penalty cases, there's always potential risk with a jury trial plus a long journey of mandatory appeals that defendants get in capital cases. At the end of the day. What she was most happy with was that Aaron's lengthy sentence meant he would never be able to get out of prison and hurt anybody else. Aaron appealed his conviction in 2004, but that request was denied about two years later in 2006. To date, he remains incarcerated at a Tennessee prison. The heartbreaking reality of this case to me is that Sandy Jeffers life was stolen by a person who is a total stranger to her. And in many ways, she never stood a chance. This happened in an era where surveillance cameras were not as routine in apartment buildings as they are today. Meaning back then compared to today, very few private residences, let alone an apartment complex, had 24 hour video surveillance. There weren't doorbell cameras on a lot if many homes or buildings. As Angelia put it in her interview with me, what happened to her sister was the perfect storm of bad things occurring all at once. She doesn't blame anyone except Aaron Skeene for what happened to Sandy. But she does feel like a lot of people let Sandy down. For example, Sandy's landlord, who she couldn't get ahold of to fix her broken window latch the very night she was abducted and killed. And the police officers who were unable to get out to Sandy's apartment to take a fraud report about her stolen check. If just one of those things had gone differently, maybe Sandy's life would have been saved. But at the end of the day, I think I always have to take Angelia's posture with this, which is to say that Aaron Skeen, and Aaron Skeen alone, is the person on which all blame has to be laid. To this day, he's never provided an explanation as to why he chose Sandy or. Or why he took her all the way out to look rock. It seems clear to me, though, that he was a through and through stalker. It's been proven that his stalking escalated quickly from curiosity to burglary to kidnapping and eventually rape and murder. Sandy's sister told me that Aaron, in her opinion, is truly evil because he had such a careless disregard for life and seemed to show no emotion when recounting what he'd done to Sandy. He never publicly addressed the Jeffers family, and very little is known about his life and upbringing. Angelia told me she got the impression that Aaron didn't really have much in terms of a healthy family life, but beyond that, she's unaware of his background. J.J. stambaugh reported for the Knoxville News Sentinel that within a year prior to the crime, Aaron had posted an essay titled why I Hate My Life on a website he'd created. In his writings, he lamented about being depressed, frustrated with being seen as average, and claimed he had no one who loved him. He also complained that his life was too hard and expressed he'd had suicidal thoughts. So certainly some red flags there, one could argue, likely played into his stalking behavior. But the scariest part to Angelia is that when it comes to stalkers like Erin, their victims don't even have to recognize that they've met them before or even that they had a momentary interaction with them. Angelia emphasized in her interview how important it is, though, to trust a gut feeling if that feeling is telling you something is up. She said that even if you can't justify it or explain why you're feeling a certain way about a person or situation, just trust yourself and err on the side of caution. There are some amazing resources I want you guys to know about. @stalkingawareness.org they have a dropdown tab with victim handbooks, documentation logs, and more information on how to identify stalkers. If you think you may be a victim of this kind of crime, please contact authorities and utilize resources that are out there. Angelia told me that despite the ever present pain of losing Sandy, she's been able to see what she's described as God's purpose. In what happened, for a long time, she was just surviving and, to be quite honest, angry with God. She had very little joy. And every family gathering just had this huge void because Sandy wasn't there. But over time, some of her wounds began to heal. For example, years after Sandy's murder, a woman teaching a training class Angelina attended approached her and told her that she was aware of a lot of women who'd left abusive partners or bad relationships after hearing Sandy's story. And coincidentally, Sandy's murder also changed the career trajectory of Angelia's life. Before the crime, she'd been working at a manufacturing plant. But in January 2004, with the case solved and Aaron behind bars, she decided on what would have been Sandy's 26th birthday, to enter the Tennessee Highway Patrol Academy. Angelia eventually graduated from that program and became a state trooper. She remains employed by that entity to this day. During our interview, she laughed about how amused Sandy would probably be if she could know that her older sister became a cop. It's not a career field Angelia ever saw herself entering, not by a long shot. But she's enjoyed it and regularly speaks at events that honor and remember survivors of violent crimes and victims of homicide. A scholarship in the Department of Anthropology is still offered in Sandy's memory at the University of Tennessee. I didn't know Sandy when she was alive, but from speaking with her sister, I feel like I do now. The world lost a bright light when she was killed, but maybe after hearing this episode, you'll be reminded of the light Sandy Jeffers was and posthumously still remains. 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 you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram at parkpredators. I think Chuck would approve.