The Accomplices

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I'm your host, Delia 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. In December 2015, though, the three people at the center of this story didn't do any of those things while in the forest.

They came and went, but left nothing but destruction behind.

This is Park Predators. Thank you.
On Wednesday, January 27, 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.
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 they 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 LaForce, 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.
Police reports indicate that he'd been suspected of several area burglaries and was accused of beating up a man. 25-year-old Crystal Lane was the other woman in their friend group, and she'd been picked up for an unrelated drugs and weapons case not long before Christopher was reported missing.
So on the afternoon of January 27th, with all this information in hand, KPD detectives paid Crystal a visit. However, when they got to her apartment, they discovered the front door was ajar and everything inside had seemingly been ransacked.
Crystal wasn't there and the unit was in such a state of disarray that the investigators naturally thought a burglary had occurred. There were some personal items strewn on the floor, dresser drawers tossed open and emptied, and Crystal's couch had also been turned over.
Not long after discovering the messy scene, a detective spoke with one of Crystal's neighbors, who told them that Crystal was at the Hawkins County Jail. Right away, the investigators verified that information and went over to the jail to interview her.
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 hoped 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'd 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.
By February 1st, investigators felt pretty confident that something was amiss. So they went back to speak with Crystal Lane again at the Hawkins County Jail.
She agreed to let authorities take a sample of her DNA to compare to that reddish-brown stain in her apartment, but she refused to do another interview. That same day, the police department got a call from a neighboring sheriff's office in Virginia that told them Amanda LaForce'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 going to 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 LaForce'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. Andrea's statements to police include a lot of other horrific details that I don't think are necessary to go into for the sake of Christopher's loved ones potentially hearing this episode.
But what's important to know is that in the end,

Andrea said Amanda claimed it was Tim

who delivered the final blow that killed Christopher.

And afterwards, the trio stored his body

in Crystal's laundry room and went to a local Walmart

to buy a tote and cleaning supplies.

Two days later, on the morning of December 27th,

they'd placed his body in a tarp, put him in the tote, carried him to the trunk of a car, and transported him to Cherokee National Forest, which was about an hour and a half away from Crystal's apartment. On their way to dispose of him, the trio stopped for breakfast and joked about whether Christopher would want a bite to eat.
When they arrived in the forest, they used gasoline to set him on fire and eventually pushed his body down a steep embankment.

On their way out of the area, they'd burned all of their clothing along with Christopher's at a remote spot about a quarter mile down the road from where they'd left his body.

Unfortunately, investigators still didn't know where this alleged dump site was located.

And just like the first time they'd heard this story, the information was only

coming from Andrea, not directly from Crystal, Tim, or Amanda. But that was about to change, because there was still one member of the group who investigators had not personally spoken with face-to-face.
And what she had to say would bust the case wide open.

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On February 9th, 2016, almost two weeks after Christopher was first reported missing,

Kingsport police detectives interviewed Amanda LaForce 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 in 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 body.
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 text 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 11th, 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 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 12th, 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 in 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 a hold 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 17th, the case came

to a head when deputies with neighboring Green County Sheriff's Department went back out to the

National Forest to look for Christopher and made a gruesome discovery. You work hard.
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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 20th, 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 a $500,000 bond.

The arrests were made 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.

End quote.

In his interview with me, Robert said that it took everything in him to get those words out and not explode with anger in court.

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 McEachurn 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 use 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 AudioChuck 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, Park Predators.
So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? You work hard. Now play harder with the all-new Nissan Armada.
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Whether you're tackling tough roads or exploring new horizons, the all-new Nissan Armada is built to keep up with your adventures. Hi, everyone.
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