"The body is that of a well developed, well nourished, unclothed, uncircumcised white female, consistent with stated age of 18 years. The height is 63 inches above the heel. The weight is 139 pounds. The eyes are brown. The hair is brown. Mustache and beard are absent. Rigor mortis is present. Livor mortis is purple and fixed. Cyanosis is present. There is bloody fluid coming from the mouth and nose. Seven rings are present on the fingers. There is an abrasion of the chin. There is a tomahawk tattoo present on the dorsum of the left wrist. Red contusions are present in the left inguinal area and on the anterior surface of the left thigh. There are scars present on the anterior surface of the left thigh. There are scars present on the anterior surface of the left knee. There is a blue cross tattoo present on the medial aspect of the left ankle. There is a blue heart tattoo present on the medial aspect of the right ankle. There is a peace symbol tattoo present on the right shin."
On Monday, Feb 6, 1995, in the rural Lewis County, Tennessee town of Hohenwald, the beaten, bloody body of 18-year-old Christy Lynn Carroll was discovered by the mail carrier. It had been dumped by two local teenage boys - Daniel Lay and Eric Amacher. The temperature was well below freezing Sunday night.
On the preceding Saturday night, Carroll had been in town, with her friend Kim Burlison, at a bar. She had planned to spend that night at Burlison's house. At 11:20pm Carroll's brother Ted and three of his friends stopped by to talk. Carroll asked them to give her and Burlison a ride to Burlison's house. The driver, John, said that he couldn't because he had to pick up his mother at 11:30pm. Burlison found another ride home. Carroll, thinking she could convince the boys to take her to Burlison's later, stayed with her brother. They drove around for a few minutes and then saw Lay and Amacher, who said they would give her a ride.
At 11:56pm Deputy Lloyd Sherman and another officer saw a car pulled off the highway roughly halfway between the Carroll and Burlison residences and stopped to investigate. In the car were Lay, Amacher and Carroll. Lay told the officers that the car had overheated but refused any offer of help.
The same night, at 2:00am, police responded to a call concerning a man wandering along a road close to the earlier incident. The individual was Eric Amacher. He had wrecked a car and was leaving the scene. The car was yet another vehicle than the one he had been in with Lay and Carroll.
On Monday, Feb 6, Carroll's body was found laying behind the mailbox, beside the driveway of her home. She was barefooted. Her face was covered with blood. Her arms were outstretched. Her blouse was pulled up above her stomach and was ripped in the front and back. Her pants legs were pulled up past her knees. She was, by reasonable observation, a girl who had been raped and beaten to death.
Both Lay and Amacher gave statements to the local police. They said that they had asked Carroll to have
sex with them but that she had refused. Their statements conflicted in essence and in content. First
they said that they had dropped Carroll off at her house between 12:30 and 1:00am on Saturday night.
Amacher said that he walked her to the door and she went inside. Less than two hours later, he gave
another statement, saying that they dropped her off halfway up her driveway and that she was walking
towards the house when they left. Later, both boys said that as they were driving away, they saw Carroll
fall in the driveway.
Amacher later called police and told them he had something that he wanted to tell them. When the police arrived at his house to take his statement, Amacher's mother met them at the door, with phone in hand, saying that she had a lawyer on the line. Amacher was not allowed to speak what was on his mind.
There is a day missing in this chain of events. Sunday, Feb 5, 1995.
Carroll was a beloved child somewhere in that restless age between dependent minor and fully fledged adult. She was, as we all must do, learning to fly from the nest. Her mother, thinking that she was safe at Burlison's house, decided not to press the issue of her whereabouts on Sunday.
The police told the media that Carroll's body was found in a ditch. No such ditch exists on the property of that house. Carroll's mother was in and out of the driveway two times on Sunday. There was no snow on the ground. Visibility was optimal. The official version of events is dependent upon one's belief that a mother never noticed the body of her daughter laying on the ground only feet from where her car passed four times. There were several family friends up and down the driveway that day. No one of them noticed a corpse not too far from the front door.
The autopsy on Carroll was performed in Nashville by Dr Charles Harland. Dr Harland was, at the time, officially barred from performing autopsies due to an ongoing investigation of malfeasance. He did not perform the most basic tests to determine whether or not Carroll had been raped. He did not suggest a time of death. The autopsy records two different blood alcohol levels. One of .01. The other .10. 20cc of "coffee ground fluid" were found in Carroll's stomach. "Coffee ground fluid" is coroner lingo for coagulated blood. Possibly the result of a beating. The autopsy, and the death certificate, are virtually meaningless as evidential documents.
The sheriff's department asked both boys to take lie detector tests. They refused.
The deputy assigned to the case, W C Hamm, told the grand jury that he was unaware that Carroll's blouse was torn. Hamm's memory is faulty. Carroll's mother made audio tapes of various police interviews that recorded, among other blatant discrepancies, Hamm's inconsistent testimony.
In October of 1995, Eric Amacher again tried to confess the truth of his involvement in Carroll's death. He asked for immunity. District Attorney Joe Baugh refused. Daniel Lay is kin to Lewis County Sheriff Dwayne Kilpatrick. Eric Amacher's family is on close terms with former assistant District Attorney Donald W Schwindemann and local TBI agent, Jerry Tenery. Agent Tenery conducted an almost nonexistent investigation into the matter. He told Christy's mother that he knew the Amacher family very well. He said that Eric was a "good boy". There's a street in Hohenwald named Amacher Ave. It's on the right side of the tracks.
The Lewis County Sheriff's Department talked to the investigator for the District Attorney's office. He said that he was willing to investigate. Joe Baugh would not allow that. The Carroll's tried in vain to get the assistant DA to perform some simple diagnostics. For example, Ms Carroll noticed mud on Christy's body that didn't appear to have come from the location where she supposedly fell for the first time. She asked him to have comparative soil tests done to confirm this theory. He told Loyce Carroll that he wouldn't do that. Such attention to detail was just... "TV stuff."
Within a year after the murder, Christy's 17-year-old brother Ted was brought before the 21st Circuit Court regarding his alleged involvement in a fist fight. The sitting judge was Cornelia Clark. In a properly functioning judicial environment, with even the most rudimentary precepts of ethics, Clark would have recused herself from this case in light of her personal relationship with Joe Baugh. She did not.
The testimony against Ted Carroll came largely from a young man and his girlfriend who had a record of using and dealing cocaine. The man is accepted by most to be an informant for the DA's office and maintains his relative freedom by helping that office to get convictions. He said that Carroll had beaten him and threatened his life.
The defense testimony included a statement by a veteran school teacher who is highly respected and trusted in the community. Her version of the events described a situation that made it virtually impossible for Carroll to have been guilty. She was mocked. It was insinuated that she was a liar, and an incompetent.
Cornelia Clark sentenced Ted Carroll to 3 years in jail. He did 4 months. Clearly a warning shot across the bow of the Carroll family. "Be quiet. Let it go. There's plenty more where this came from."
The situation of Clark and Joe Baugh's relationship, and the subsequent invalidation of hundreds - if not thousands - of court trials that they have been mutually involved in, is somewhat of a Pandora's box in the 21st District. It is the unspeakable. It is being attentively ignored. But it will, inevitably, have to be faced.
The District Attorneys General Conference Executive Secretary, Pat McCutchen, was asked by a representative of the Tennessee Crime Victims Coalition why Joe Baugh refused to properly investigate the murder of Christy Carroll. After consulting with him, McCutchen reported back to this person that Baugh indicated the matter was unimportant to him. He told McCutchen that Christy Lynn Carroll was nothing more than, "a whore".
