Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - SOLVED: Carrie Daugherty, Pt. 1

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

In 2008, 24-year-old Knoxville server Carrie Daugherty was ambushed and killed outside her Tennessee home, a sudden act of violence that shattered the people who loved her. Suspicion soon turned to Mi...cah Johnson, the ex-boyfriend of Carrie's best friend, and the search for him escalated into a dramatic standoff on Knoxville's Henley Street Bridge. In Part 1 of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy introduces Carrie, the young woman whose life was cut short in her own driveway, the tangled web of relationships that investigators believe led to her death, and the tense manhunt that ended with a suspect in custody but a motive that raised as many questions as it answered.Follow Murder: True Crime Stories for Part 2 of this episode: https://pod.link/1745145932If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

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Starting point is 00:00:01 Hi, everyone. Before today's episode, there's another show I want to tell you about. It's called What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week, they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Plus, Conner's infectious energy that'll make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on earth. Follow What The Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What The Fact Pod. Think about the person in your life who lights up every room, the one who remembers your birthday, makes the new kid feel welcome, and can turn prepping for a shift into a party. That was Carrie Dorety. She was 24 years old, waiting tables at a beloved pizza joint in Knoxville, Tennessee. She'd been a homecoming queen and a cheerleader, and had grown into the kind of adult who trained for a marathon to raise money in her late niece's name. Her co-workers called themselves a family, and Carrie was the heart of it. Then in the early hours of a March morning in 2008, everything changed. Carrie came home from a shift,
Starting point is 00:01:30 parked on the street, and started to walk to her own front door. She never made it inside. The neighbor who was outside saw what was happening and called 911, but by the time the police got there, Carrie was already gone. Everyone who loved her was left with the same two questions. Who could do this to a woman like Carrie Dorty? And once they knew, would it ever make any kind of sense at all? People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Starting point is 00:02:16 But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too. soon and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is murder, true crime stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crime house community. Please rate review and follow the show and for early add free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content.
Starting point is 00:02:56 To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Stories show page on Apple Podcasts. This is the first of two episodes on the 2008 murder of Carrie Doherty, a young waitress who was attacked outside her home in Knoxville, Tennessee. A quick note before we start along with a murder at its center. This episode deals with serious mental illness, the death of a child, and references abuse, sexual assault, and suicide. So please listen with care. And if you or someone you know is struggling, you can call or text 988, the suicide and crisis
Starting point is 00:03:40 lifeline anytime. Today, I'll introduce you to Carrie. The big Tennessee family she came from, the niece, she's. She lost far too young and the way she turned that grief into something good. By 24, she built a whole life in Knoxville, surrounded by people who loved her. And then on an ordinary night in March, someone took it all away, a few steps from her own front door. Next time, I'll take you inside the investigation in the legal battle that would drag on for 15. years. Because the hardest question here was never who did it. It was why. And whether the person
Starting point is 00:04:28 responsible even understood what they'd done. All that and more coming up. If you knew Carrie Dorothy, you probably had a story about her. The friends who worked with her still tell one about the mornings she'd crank up Fergie and do lunges across the floor while they set up the bar. Oh, That was Carrie. A little goofy, a little theatrical, always turning the volume up on an ordinary day. But the same friends who tell that story will also tell you there was a serious side to her. Carrie cared about her loved ones and her morals just as much as she cared about making everyone laugh. She was born on Mother's Day in 1983 in Chattanooga. It's a mid-sized city that wraps around a bend in the Tennessee River.
Starting point is 00:05:27 surrounded by mountains. Her parents, Carol and Steve Dorotie, raised her in a big Catholic family. She had lots of brothers and sisters. This is the kind of house where somebody was always coming or going, and Carrie learned early how to hold a room. We don't know a lot about her early childhood, but some of it wasn't easy. One of her brothers lived with severe mental illness. When he was really struggling, things could get scary at home. which meant that Carrie grew up understanding something most people never have to. What everyone agrees on is that by high school, Carrie was one of those kids who seemed to be everywhere, doing everything at once.
Starting point is 00:06:11 She went to Notre Dame High School, a Catholic school in Chattanooga, where she was a cheerleader. She threw herself into the youth ministry at her church and eventually served on a Diasisian Youth Advisory Council. And she had a gift for making people feel like they belong. long. Whether you were a freshman she just met or a teammate she'd known for years. Her senior year in the fall of 2000, her classmates crowned her homecoming queen. It was the first homecoming of the new millennium and her family always liked to say Carrie was its first queen. She was the kind of person nobody worried about. Wherever Carrie landed, she'd be loved. The first place she landed was Alabama. After she graduated in 2001, 18-year-old Carrie went off to Spring Hill College,
Starting point is 00:07:05 a small Catholic school down in Mobile, about six hours from home. She gave it two years, then decided it wasn't the right fit. Who knows, maybe it was one particular thing, maybe she just missed her family. Either way, in the fall of 2003, Carrie transferred to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she studied journalism and electronic media. Now she was a couple hours from Chattanooga instead of six, close enough to drive home for a weekend whenever she wanted. Knoxville suited her.
Starting point is 00:07:38 It was a college town built around the University of Tennessee with a downtown that was full of bars and music and people at her own age. She'd end up staying for good. For the next couple of years, Carrie was a pretty ordinary college student, going to class, working, figuring out who she was. She had her friends, her family a couple hours down the road,
Starting point is 00:08:02 and a whole life stretched out in front of her. And then in the fall of 2005, her family got news that stopped all of them cold. Carrie's sister, Wendy, and her husband, Jonathan Ransom, had a little girl named Emily. In October 2005, they took her to the doctor, thinking she had a cold she couldn't shake. Instead, the family got the worst news imaginable. Emily had stage four neuroblastoma, a rare aggressive cancer that mostly strikes very young children.
Starting point is 00:08:43 Oftentimes, it isn't caught until it's already spread through the body. Emily was two years old. Carrie adored her. The family always said she was Emily's favorite aunt, the one who could always get a laugh out of her. So when Emily got sick, it hit Carrie hard. For four months, that little girl fought with everything she had. Her family started calling her the pink power ranger princess. And by every account, she lived up to the name. She was tough and bright, right through the worst of it.
Starting point is 00:09:21 They did everything they could. there were treatments and hospital stays and long drives and the kind of hope families hold on to with both hands. But on February 20, 2006, while Emily was in surgery to remove the tumor, she died. It broke all of them. And Emily's parents did the only thing that made any sense in the middle of that kind of grief, they took it and aimed it straight at the disease that had taken. taken their daughter. Later that year, Wendy and Jonathan started a foundation in Emily's name, Emily's power for a cure. The mission was twofold, raised money for neuroblastoma research,
Starting point is 00:10:07 especially the experimental treatments and clinical trials that struggle to find funding anywhere else. The other aspect was helping other families caught in the same fight. Carrie threw herself into it. She'd found a way to turn her grief into something useful, the same way Emily's parents had, and she didn't pick something small. By early 2008, she'd signed up to run the Nashville Marathon that spring, all 26.2 miles of it, and she was training hard, raising money in Emily's name with every mile. The people who knew her said the cause meant as much to her as anything in her life. The foundation her family built would go on to fund research and help other families for years to come. But in the spring of 2008, for Carrie, it was simpler than that. It was a way to keep her niece close.
Starting point is 00:11:08 Not long after Emily died, Carrie stepped back from school. She left the University of Tennessee in 2006. It's not clear exactly why, and the people who knew her have offered different guesses. maybe it was the grief losing Emily. Maybe she just needed room to breathe for a while. What everyone does agree on is that she always figured she'd go back and finish that degree someday. In the meantime, she picked up a job at Barley's tap room and pizzeria in Knoxville's old city. It was a Knoxville institution, a big, loud, high-ceilinged room with pizza, a huge beer list, and live music on. the weekends. Carrie fit the place like she'd been there for years. She waited tables, sometimes
Starting point is 00:11:57 worked behind the bar, and the regulars loved her. Her manager described her the way a lot of people did. Quote, she just brought life into a room. She loved costumes and dressing up and any excuse for a good time, and she pulled her coworkers into all of it. Halloween was basically her holiday. Before long, that crew had become a tight little family, the kind of co-workers who closed the place down together, then stay in each other's lives long after the job ends. Through Barley's, Carrie got close with a young woman named Amanda Courts, who was around 25 at the time. We don't know a ton about how their friendship started or a lot about Amanda in general.
Starting point is 00:12:44 What we do know is that Amanda lived with real daily pain. She had fibromyalgia, which causes widespread aching and deep fatigue, along with the form of reactive arthritis called Reiter's Syndrome. On bad days, ordinary chores that most of us never think twice about were physically hard for her. But none of that slowed Amanda down, and in early 2007, she met someone new. At first, they seemed like the best thing that had happened to her in years. But before long, he would pull Amanda and Carrie into a nightmare. Neither of them saw coming. Did you know the most feared pirate in the Atlantic,
Starting point is 00:13:40 the man who terrorized an entire ocean for years, may never have actually killed anyone, or that the real golden age of pirates was the most democratic workplace in the Western world? I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum, and history is my thing. And I'm Carter Roy. and this is what the fact.
Starting point is 00:13:59 Every week we take the most unbelievable true things in history and tell you the whole story behind them. Carter sets the scene? Connor brings the facts, the deep cuts, and the genuine belief that this is the most interesting subject in the world. It is, this is the history lesson you actually wished you had in high school. New episodes every Wednesday, follow What the Fact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, music,
Starting point is 00:14:24 or subscribe on YouTube at What The Fact Podcast. You know their names, you know their faces, but you've never heard these stories. On Celebrity Ghost Stories, an A&E original podcast presented by Rewind Studios, you'll hear spooky stories directly from the actors, musicians, and athletes you love in their own words. What do you do when a spirit saves you from the edge of death, when a single night in a strange hotel ends with you running for the door? From angry spirits to haunted houses to unexplainable magic. These are true first-person accounts told by the stars who lived through them.
Starting point is 00:15:09 Follow Celebrity Ghost Stories, available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, Ontario, come on down to BetMGM Casino and see what our newest exclusive the Price is Right Fortune Pick has to offer. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show only at Betmgm. Check out how we've reimagined three of the show's iconic games, like Plinko, Clifhanger, and the Big Wheel into fun casino game features. Don't forget to download the BetmGM Casino app for exclusive access and excitement on the Price's Right Fortune Pick.
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Starting point is 00:16:13 BetMGEM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. In early 2007, 25-year-old Amanda Courts met a University of Tennessee student named Micah Johnson. It seems like there were sparks right away, but things didn't turn romantic immediately. At the time, Amanda was at the tail end of a long-term relationship with a man named Mitch Foke. Then that March, they split up for good, and he moved out of the house they shared. Within a few months, Amanda and Micah were dating. On paper, Micah was a catch. He was 20 years old studying aerospace engineering, one of the harder majors on campus,
Starting point is 00:17:00 And by all the counts, he was brilliant. Later testing would put his IQ at 133 up in the top 2% or so. He was the smart, quiet type, the kind of guy who could talk your ear off about something technical if you got him going. Amanda was crazy about him, and Carrie was glad to see her friend happy. And for a while, that was the whole story. Amanda had a smart new boyfriend. Carrie had a good friend and a job she loved. The three of them ran in the same circle. Everything was fine. What none of them could fully see was that Micah had been quietly struggling for months.
Starting point is 00:17:46 Micah had always been a strong student, sharp enough to get into a demanding engineering program. But in his sophomore year at UT back in the fall of 2006, something had started to go wrong. His grades slipped, he lost his focus, he'd forget simple chores, misplaced things, blank on stuff he used to do without thinking twice. Then it got stranger. He became fixated on things he saw on TV, especially politics. At one point, he turned to his own father and asked in all seriousness whether he was the president of the United States. and it wasn't just the strange ideas. His basic thinking was going to.
Starting point is 00:18:36 This was a young man who'd been studying aerospace engineering, and now he couldn't do simple arithmetic. He lost his scholarship and was barely hanging on at UT. By the following summer, he was more disorganized than ever for getting his keys, losing track of everyday things. whatever was happening to him, it was picking up speed. It seems like Micah hit all this from Amanda at first, that, or he genuinely didn't even understand it was happening.
Starting point is 00:19:08 And by the time Amanda noticed something was really wrong, it was September 2007, and things had been escalating for about a year. That month, Micah more or less stopped eating and sleeping. He started saying things that didn't track, drifting in and out of conversations that only half made sense, and he kept circling back to that same idea that he might be the president. Then that same month, things became violent. Micah was inside Ayers Hall, one of the oldest buildings on the UT campus, when he attacked another student. A young man he had a class with but barely knew. came out of nowhere. Micah hit him in the hallway. A witness said he kept swinging even after the
Starting point is 00:20:01 other student was down on the floor. By the time it was over, that student's jaw was broken badly enough that he apparently needed reconstructive surgery. Then Micah grabbed his backpack and walked away. Later, Micah gave his father a different version. He said a group of guys had been following him around, calling him names. He said the other student had clenched his fist in a way that made Micah think he had a knife, so he swung first. But investigators could find no sign of any of that. As far as they could tell, the attack was completely unprovoked.
Starting point is 00:20:42 U.T. expelled him. He was arrested and charged with aggravated assault, which is a felony. And just like that, the brilliant engineering. student was a young man with a criminal case and no school to go back to. After that, Micah came apart fast. He became convinced the police were watching him. He decided there was a camera hidden inside the cable box recording him, so he started sitting off to the side of the room where it couldn't catch him watching TV. His father would hear him talking out loud to rooms. that were empty. It scared the people who loved him. This was somebody's son, somebody's boyfriend,
Starting point is 00:21:30 a brilliant kid, and he was slipping away somewhere none of them could follow. Amanda called Micah's dad, Gary, for help. Micah's mother met up with him one afternoon at Knoxville Nature Park and came away convinced that something was seriously wrong. About an hour later, Micah called his father saying he hadn't slept in days. Gary drove over to pick him up when he arrived. Micah was standing right there in the front yard, but he didn't react at all. Gary had to honk the horn just to get his son to look up. That night, Micah started hyperventilating, convinced he was having a heart attack. The next morning, Gary took him to the emergency room at Baptist Hospital.
Starting point is 00:22:20 At the hospital, Micah told a nurse he'd been doing, quote, all these drugs. Gary pushed back on that since he'd been up with his son all night and hadn't seen anything like it. But the drug screen came back positive for marijuana and benzodiazepines, a class of sedatives you might know by the brand names like Xanax or Valium. The ER doctor described Micah as paranoid, agitated, and, hallucinating. His thoughts scattered all over the place. He said he was hearing voices. At first, one of the staff wondered whether the drugs alone explained it. The picture was murky enough that they even talked about committing him to a treatment program against his will, but his
Starting point is 00:23:10 condition settled enough that he agreed to check himself involuntarily instead. And the hospital moved him up to its psychiatric unit and started him on antipsychotic medication. The psychiatrist there settled on a working diagnosis of a psychotic disorder. And by the time Michael left, she'd flag the two possibilities underneath it. This could be bipolar illness with psychosis, or it could be the first onset of schizophrenia. Which one it was, nobody could say for. for sure yet. These are serious.
Starting point is 00:23:51 Lifelong conditions, and telling them apart and treating them takes time and careful care. Micah stayed a little over a week. Then he checked himself out against his doctor's advice and went home to his father with instructions to keep taking his medication. Gary wasn't convinced any of it had taken. Micah still seemed delusional to him, still seemed to be hearing things that weren't there, and Carrie suspected he'd already stopped taking his pills. Over the following weeks, they tried a few different places to get him help.
Starting point is 00:24:30 None of it stuck. While Michael was in the hospital, Amanda had ended things with him. She just couldn't take it anymore. And that October, with the two of them broken up, Carrie moved down. in with her. They settled into Amanda's house on Columbia Avenue in the Oakwood area of North Knoxville. They talked about Micah a lot, and it turned out Carrie understood exactly what Amanda was carrying because she'd lived a version of it herself. Carrie told Amanda about the family members she'd grown up with, the brother I mentioned earlier, and how his illness had sometimes turned
Starting point is 00:25:14 frightening. To carry, some of what she was hearing about Micah sounded familiar. She knew what it felt like to love someone and be afraid of them at the same time. But by December, Micah seemed like a different person, better, more like himself. He told Amanda, he'd turned a corner that he was taking his medication, that everything was under control. He left out the part where he'd checked himself out of the hospital against medical advice, and he left out any doubt about whether he was taking his meds at all. Amanda didn't know to ask. She loved him.
Starting point is 00:26:04 She believed him, and they got back together. Carrie went along with it. At the time, both women thought Micah seemed to be. back to his old self, the guy from before the assault, and for a few months, life felt almost normal. Micah took over most of the yard work at the house, the mowing and the raking, since Amanda's health made that kind of thing hard for her. He was hunting for a job and trying to find another school that would take him. He found warehouse work, first at the local newspaper, then at a Coca-Cola warehouse, about 15 minutes away, and he was living,
Starting point is 00:26:44 with his dad and stepmom a mile or so from the women's house, he started staying over at Amanda's some nights. From the outside, it looked like a young man putting himself back together, and Amanda, who saw him day to day, wasn't catching any of the old warning signs. Carrie wasn't so sure. She'd been watching Micah, too, and she couldn't shake the feeling. that she'd seen this somewhere before. At some point that winter, she sat down and wrote out exactly how she felt. It reads like a letter to Amanda addressed to her by name, but it seems like Carrie never gave it to her.
Starting point is 00:27:32 She just kept it, tucked away in her journal. In it, Carrie finally tells the story she'd been carrying since childhood. she writes that her brother Steve was schizophrenic and that during his episodes he'd become convinced that she and two of her siblings were the devil. She writes that one day their mother walked in and found Steve sitting on top of one of those siblings, a little boy who was only three years old until the child had gone unconscious. And then Carrie writes about herself. She says she hadn't seen Steve since the day about 15 years earlier when he'd put a plastic bag over her head. She would have been around nine. That was the fear she'd carried her whole life.
Starting point is 00:28:30 And in that letter, she put it plainly. Micah gave her the same feeling. In her own words, he... terrifies me. She wrote about flashbacks and she signed off with four words that are almost impossible to read now, quote, not ready to die. Carrie never showed Amanda that entry. Maybe she didn't want to come between her friend and the man Amanda had decided to trust. Maybe she was waiting for the right moment. She wouldn't get one. Over the years, I've met people whose lives were changed forever in a single moment.
Starting point is 00:29:22 In my new podcast, Before and After, I explore what happens after that decisive moment. Personal, powerful conversations with Colin Kaepernick, Jeremy Renner, Gabby Giffords, and others. Join me wherever you get your podcasts. Search before and after with Lester Holt to listen completely free or subscribe to Dateline Premium to unlock new episodes early. By the spring of 2008 to almost everyone around him, Micah Johnson looked like a young man who'd pulled his life back together. He had a job, a girlfriend, and a routine. On March 6th, he turned 21. The next weekend, Micah, Amanda, and Carrie went out to Barley's to celebrate.
Starting point is 00:30:11 It was a good night. Nothing about it stood out. That was the calm before everything. Tuesday, March, March, 18th started out like any other day. Micah had spent the night at Amanda's and woke up there that morning. Carrie was home too, but she wasn't feeling well and slept most of the day. The three of them hung around the house for a while until Micah had to leave to get ready for his shift at the Coca-Cola warehouse. A little later, Carrie left for work too, and she had the closing shift at Barley's.
Starting point is 00:30:45 that night at about 11, Amanda took something to help her sleep like she did most nights and started getting ready for bed. Around midnight, her phone rang. It was Micah. He told her about his day and mentioned he was thinking about test driving a car somebody had for sale. It was late and the medication was pulling her under so they made plans to talk the next day and Amanda hung up. Nothing about the call struck her as strange. He sounded completely normal. Around half past midnight, Kerry clocked out of Barley's.
Starting point is 00:31:23 It had been a decent night. She'd made about $80 in tips. She still had on her work clothes, a barley t-shirt and a server apron, and her pink Motorola razor on her. She climbed into her silver Ford Explorer and drove the few minutes back to the house on Columbia Avenue. She parked on the street in front of the house the way she always did. At 1.46 in the morning, a neighbor on the same street was outside and saw it happen. She watched a woman pull up and get out of an SUV,
Starting point is 00:32:02 and she watched a man in dark clothing step up and hit that woman in the head, then drag her across the yard, striking her again and again as he went. The neighbor lost sight of them and called 9-1-1-1. Inside the house, Amanda slept through nearly all of it. The medication had pulled her deep under, but at one point, a noise from the side of the house stirred her. She got up and looked out the window toward the carport and the driveway, but she couldn't see anything out of place. She figured the wind had knocked over a trash can and went back to bed.
Starting point is 00:32:47 The first officer arrived at 157 a.m. 11 minutes after the neighbor called 911. In the front yard, out at the curb, he found a young woman, her body partly underneath an explorer parked on the street. There was nothing anyone could do by then. it was clear. She was dead. It would be a little while before they knew for certain who she was,
Starting point is 00:33:18 but it was Carrie. She was 24 years old. As the sun came up, crime scene technicians slowly worked their way across the yard, marking each piece of evidence and photographing it where it lay, building a record of the whole scene.
Starting point is 00:33:37 What they pieced together told the story of a long, brutal attack. It had started near the side entrance by the carport. There was blood on the driveway and the steps there and a scatter of loose coins on the ground like something had been knocked out of Carrie's hands. From there, a trail of blood ran all the way across the yard to her SUV at the curb,
Starting point is 00:34:05 and whatever it happened, it had moved from the side of the house out toward the street, step by step, along that trail thrown into the grass by the hedges where carries things. Her purse, a bloody jacket, a single shoe. Closer to the vehicle, officers found the other shoe, a set of keys, and two blood-soaked t-shirts. And they found the weapons, a shovel lying next to her body, two broken pieces, of brick in the grass and a length of nylon rope still knotted around Carrie's neck. The most unsettling part was where those weapons had come from. The shovel was Amanda's own, normally kept under the carport with her other yard tools
Starting point is 00:34:57 out of sight from the street. The bricks came from the property too. Whoever killed Carrie hadn't brought much with them. They'd used what was already there in the yard and under the carport. Forensic examiners went over the blood in the yard and read it like a map. They could pick out where something bloody had been dragged, where it touched down, and where the hard blows landed across the driveway and the grass. On the passenger side of the SUV, there was so much blood that it had run downward under its own weight.
Starting point is 00:35:33 All of it's outside, in the dark, in the old. open a few steps from Carrie's own front door. The autopsy fell to the Knox County Medical Examiner. She later laid out what those weapons had done. Perry's skull was fractured at the base. Most of her wounds were to the head and neck, and the doctor could tell the strangling came near the end, and there were wounds on Carrie's hands and forearms.
Starting point is 00:36:04 They were clearly defensive wounds. Carrie had fought back trying to shield herself. It took several minutes for her to die, and the attack itself had gone on for more than 10. There was one more piece of evidence at the scene. Officers lifted a bloody fingerprints off the handle of the passenger door of Carrie's explorer and sent it off to the state crime lab for analysis. They also noticed her phone was. gone. Two investigators that pointed to something chilling. Whoever did this had taken it,
Starting point is 00:36:45 so Carrie couldn't call for help. And the tip money she'd carried home from Barley's, that 80 or so dollars from her shift was gone too. With all the evidence cataloged, and then there was only one thing left to do, wake up the one person who'd been asleep inside the house. The pounding on the door pulled Amanda up out of the dead medicated sleep. She got up, disoriented and still foggy, and opened her front door to find police officers standing on the step. And then they told her the thing no one could ever brace for. Her friend, her roommate, Carrie, was dead just outside in the yard while Amanda slept. They brought Amanda into talk, and as she answered their questions, the shape of a suspect began to come into focus.
Starting point is 00:37:44 She told them about her boyfriend, Micah, and about his history, the assault on campus that had gotten him expelled, the months of paranoia, the weak and the psychiatric ward. Or detectives who just walked that yard, it didn't take long for suspicion to turn to Micah. They quickly put out a description and named Micah a person of interest. They were looking for a man about 6 foot 3 and 170 pounds, driving a red Ford F-150, an older model with one telltale detail, a passenger door that didn't match the rest of the truck. An officer named Scott Coffey drove out to the home of Micah's father. Gary let the police search the whole place, but Michael wasn't there. In his bedroom, the window screen had been pulled out and the blinds were half torn off, so he clearly climbed out the window.
Starting point is 00:38:44 Micah had been on the move in the hours right after the attack. He had gone back to his father's house, showered, and stuffed his bloody clothes into a bag. At 252 that morning, barely an hour after Carrie was found, he pulled $500 out of an ATM. Then he pointed the truck toward Georgia and before eventually turning back into Tennessee. Over the next day, the people who cared about him started getting phone calls. Amanda, badly shaken, had gone to stay with her parents in Loudoun County. She'd handed her cell phone to her father, Norman, so he could deal with anything that came up. Later that day, the phone rang.
Starting point is 00:39:33 It was Micah. Norman told him he was answering Amanda's phone, and when Micah asked to talk to her, Norman refused. Instead, he told Micah to turn himself in over and over for about five minutes. Micah didn't say much back, just, quote, I've screwed up, I've messed up. He was rambling, but he wasn't completely out of it. When Amanda got ready to head back to Knoxville,
Starting point is 00:40:03 she walked out to her car and stopped cold. Someone had arranged gravel on it in the shape of a heart with two words spelled out beside it. I'm dead. Inside, someone had left an unfinished can of beer and a scatter of cigarette butts and it was clear the car had been gone through. It read like a message, a threat even.
Starting point is 00:40:32 A man knew Micah had been. had been to her parents' house before, and now she understood exactly what he was capable of. Late that same night, Officer Coffey was back out looking. Stopped at an intersection about a mile and a half from Carrie and Amanda Street. He spotted a pickup that matched the one they'd been hunting. He pulled in behind it, confirmed it belonged to Micah, and then waited for a second cruiser to catch up. Then they switched on their lights. Now, Micah didn't pull over.
Starting point is 00:41:05 He ran a red light and kept going out into the Knoxville Knights. The cruisers right behind him. They were closing in on the man who killed Kerry. But catching him was almost the easy part because the question that would haunt this case wasn't who. They already knew who. It was why. And whether the man behind the wheel could even know.
Starting point is 00:41:33 begin to tell them. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for Part 2 on the murder of Carrie Dorotie and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House. on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow. Murder True Crime Stories
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Starting point is 00:42:49 Stories page. We'll be back on Thursday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a crimehouse original, powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler,
Starting point is 00:43:06 Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protofsky, Lori Maranelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara Del Mara de la Rosa, Claire Swartlander, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Happy Halloween, Crimehouse listeners. I'm Vanessa Richardson. Join me every Sunday this month on Crime House 24-7 for Crime House of Horrors, where I dive into four stories behind some of our favorite scary movies. If you can't wait and want all four episodes now, add free, join Crimehouse Plus. Join on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or at Crimehouseplus.com.
Starting point is 00:43:55 If you're looking for your next podcast, check out What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum and Carter Roy. Every week they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What The Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What The Fact Pod.

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